Charlie silently worked the tissue in her fingers.
“He had a DNR, but I didn’t give it to the hospital.” Sam tried to take a deep breath. She felt the weight of Anton’s death restricting her chest. “He couldn’t speak for himself. He couldn’t move. He could only see and hear, and what he saw and heard was his wife refusing to let the doctors turn off the machines that were extending his suffering.” Sam felt the shame boiling in her stomach like oil. “The tumors had spread to his brain. There’s only so much volume inside the skull. The pressure was pushing his brain down into his spine. The pain was excruciating. They had him on morphine, then Fentanyl, and I would sit there by his bed and watch the tears roll from his eyes and I could not let him go.”
Charlie kept working the tissue, wrapping it around her finger.
“I would’ve done the same thing here. I could’ve told you that from New York. I was the wrong person to ask. I couldn’t put my own needs, my desperation, aside for the only man I have ever loved. I certainly could not have done the right thing by Dad.”
Charlie started to pull apart the layers of tissue.
The clock kept ticking.
Time kept moving forward.
Charlie said, “I wanted you here because I wanted you here.”
Sam had not meant to stir up Charlie’s guilt. “Please don’t try to make me feel better.”
“I’m not,” Charlie said. “I hate that I made you come here. That I’ve put you through this.”
“You didn’t force me to do anything.”
“I knew that you would come if I asked. I’ve known that for the last twenty years, and I used Dad as an excuse because I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Couldn’t take what?”
Charlie wadded the tissue into a ball. She held it tight in her hands. “I had a miscarriage in college.”
Sam remembered the hostile phone call from all those years ago, Charlie’s angry demand for money.
Charlie said, “I was so relieved when it happened. You don’t realize when you’re that young that you’re going to get older. That there’s going to come a time when you’re not relieved.”
Sam felt her eyes start to water at the piercing undertone of anguish in her sister’s words.
Charlie said, “The second miscarriage was worse. Ben thinks it was the first, but it was the second.” She shrugged off the deception. “I was at the end of my first trimester. I was in court, and I felt this pain, like cramps. I had to wait another hour for the judge to call a recess. I ran to the bathroom, and I sat down, and I had this feeling of blood rushing out of my body.” She stopped to swallow. “I looked in the toilet and it was—it was nothing. It didn’t look like anything. A really bad period, a glob of something. But it didn’t feel right to flush it. I couldn’t leave it. I crawled out from under the stall so I could leave the door locked. I called Ben. I was crying so hard he couldn’t understand what I was saying.”
“Charlie,” Sam whispered.
Charlie shook her head, because there was more. “The third time, which Ben thinks was the second time, was worse. I was at eighteen weeks. We were outside, raking leaves in the yard. We had already started to put together the nursery, you know? Painted the walls. Looked at cribs. I felt the same kind of cramping. I told Ben I was going to get some water, but I barely made it to the bathroom. It just came out of me, like my body couldn’t wait to get rid of it.” She used the tips of her fingers to brush away tears. “I told myself it was never going to happen again, that I wasn’t going to risk it, but then it happened again.”
Sam reached over. She held tight to her sister’s hand.
“This was three years ago. I stopped taking my birth control. It was stupid. I didn’t tell Ben, which made it worse because I was tricking him. I was pregnant in a month. And then another month passed, and then I hit the three-month mark, and then it was six months, seven, and we were so fucking excited. Dad was walking on air. Lenore kept giving hints about names.”
Charlie pressed her fingers to her eyelids. Tears streamed down. “There’s this thing called Dandy-Walker syndrome. It sounds so stupid, like an old timey dance, but basically, it’s a group of congenital brain malformations.”
Sam felt an ache inside her heart.
“They told us late on a Friday. Ben and I spent the whole weekend reading about it on the Internet. There’d be this one great story about a kid who was smiling, living his life, blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, and we’d say, ‘Okay, well, that’s—that’s fantastic, that’s a gift, we can do that,’ and then there’d be another story about a baby who was blind and deaf and had open-heart surgery and brain surgery and died before his first birthday, and we’d just hold each other and cry.”
Sam squeezed Charlie’s hand.
“We decided that we couldn’t give up. It’s our baby, right? So we went to see a specialist at Vanderbilt. He did some scans, and then he took us into this room. There weren’t any pictures on the wall. That’s what I remember. The rest of the place had babies everywhere. Photos of families. But not in this room.”
Charlie stopped to dry her eyes again.
Sam waited.
Charlie said, “The doctor told us that there was nothing we could do. The cerebrospinal fluid was leaking. The baby didn’t have … organs.” She took a shaky breath. “My blood pressure was high. They were worried about sepsis. The doctor gave us five days, maybe a week, before the baby died, or I died, and I just—I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t go to work and eat dinner and watch TV knowing that—” She clasped Sam’s hand. “So we decided to go to Colorado. That’s the only place we could find where it’s legal.”
Sam knew she was talking about abortion.
“It’s twenty-five grand. Plus flights. Plus the hotel room. Plus taking off work. We didn’t have time to take out a loan, and we didn’t want anyone to know what we were using it for. We sold Ben’s car. Dad and Lenore gave us money. We put the rest on credit cards.”
Sam felt a crushing sense of shame. She should have been there. She could have given them the money, flown with Charlie on the plane.
“The night before we were supposed to leave, I took a sleeping pill, because what did it matter, right? But I woke up with this burning pain. It wasn’t like before with the cramps. I felt like I was being ripped apart. I went downstairs so I wouldn’t wake up Ben. I started throwing up. I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. There was so much blood. It looked like a crime scene. There were pieces I could see. Pieces of—” Charlie shook her head, unable to say the rest. “Ben called an ambulance. I’ve got a scar, like a C-section, but no baby to show for it. And when I finally came home, the rug was gone. Ben had cleaned up everything. It was like it had never happened.”
Sam thought about the bare floor in Charlie’s living room. They had not replaced the rug in three years. She asked, “Did you talk to Ben about it?”
“Yeah. We talked about it. We went to therapy. We got past it.”