“Wasn’t due to see you for another few weeks, was I,” he said pleasantly, giving me a small smile as he leaned over to press the scope to my bare belly. He moved the scope from place to place, listening, and I supposed he was counting my baby’s heartbeat. The tight fist of pain was back, making me cringe. It had started up again as Henry drove me to the hospital, a stony silence between us, and although the pain let up from time to time, it always returned. As soon as we reached the hospital, I’d been placed on a gurney, hooked up to a saline drip, and wheeled away from Henry down a long hallway. My head had been on a pillow and I could see Henry’s face grow smaller and paler until the gurney turned a corner and he disappeared altogether from my view.
Now Dr. Poole listened to my baby’s heartbeat for a few more seconds, then he straightened up, a grimace on his face as though the act of standing straight hurt his back. He covered my belly with the sheet, then left without another word to me. A moment later, two nurses came into the room. I gave them a worried smile and wondered briefly if the younger girl was a student nurse, as I had been. I was an RN now myself, having learned only two days ago that I passed my exam. Suddenly, that seemed very unimportant.
“We need to get you ready to deliver,” the older, gray-haired nurse said as she hung another bottle of liquid from the pole above my bed.
“Deliver?” I thought they had me mixed up with some other patient. “It’s too soon!”
“Sugar,” she said, as she set up a basin of water along with a white towel and a razor on the table near my bed, “your baby has no heartbeat and you’re having contractions.”
I clamped my legs together beneath the sheet. “No heartbeat?” I asked. “Dr. Poole couldn’t hear it?”
“I’m afraid there’s no heartbeat to hear, sugar,” she said.
I looked at the younger nurse, hoping she could give me a different answer, but she avoided my eyes altogether.
“I don’t understand,” I said. I would refuse to understand.
“This happens sometimes,” the gray-haired nurse said. “But there’s no reason you won’t be able to have more babies.”
“I don’t want more babies,” I said. “I want this one.” My voice rose and I covered my belly protectively. “I need this one!”
“Something’s gone wrong with this one,” she said. “It happened to me when I was nearly as far along as you, but now I have four healthy children, so you—”
“No! You don’t understand.” I started to sit up, but she held my shoulders. Pressed me back against the pillow. “I want this baby,” I pleaded. It wasn’t just my child she was talking about taking from me. It was my companion. My ally. The only living soul I had in Hickory. “Where’s Henry?” Everyone knew and liked Henry. They would listen to him.
Another man—another doctor?—wheeled something I couldn’t see into the room. He nodded to the nurses, but ignored me even when he reached the side of my bed and began adjusting the equipment he’d brought with him.
“Your husband’s in the fathers’ waiting room,” the older nurse said as she checked the bottles on the pole above my bed. “He’s not allowed in here, of course, but Dr. Poole will tell him what’s happening.”
Her voice suddenly sounded as though it were a million miles away and when I opened my mouth again to speak, I forgot what I was about to say. Something—a mask?—came toward my face, and I turned my head away, resisting it. Fighting it. But against my will, my eyelids fell shut and I gave up the battle.
*
I awakened alone, cramping and sore, still tied to the IV. I knew all at once my baby was no longer inside me, and the loneliness I felt was overwhelming. I wanted to be home in Little Italy in my little row house. I wanted my mother. My Vincent.
A nurse I hadn’t seen before, brown haired and wearing pale pink-framed glasses, padded into the room on her soft-soled shoes.
“There you are.” She smiled. “It’s all over now, honey,” she said, as she rearranged my covers. “Dr. Poole will keep you here a few days while you heal and—”
“I want to see my baby,” I said.
She reached for my wrist, checking her watch as she took my pulse. “You lost your baby, Mrs. Kraft,” she said, her gaze never leaving her watch. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” I said. “But I want to see it.”
“Oh no, dear, you don’t.” She let go of my wrist and poured a glass of water from the pitcher on my bedside table.
“Was it a boy or a girl?” I asked.
She hesitated. “A boy,” she said.
My Andy. “I want to see him,” I said firmly.
She stood next to the bed, shaking a pill into her hand from a small glass bottle. “He wasn’t full term, you know, and—”
“I want to see him!” I shouted. I felt as though a different woman inhabited my body. One who shouted. One who demanded what was hers.
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “He’s an angel in heaven. That’s how you have to think of him. He’s with Jesus now.”
“Please.” I started to cry. “Please let me see him.”
“We don’t do that,” she said. “If he’d been full term and you really, truly wanted to see him, you could have, but not with a twenty-one-week-old fetus.” She tried to hand me the pill, but I didn’t take it from her. “Now you really must swallow this, honey,” she said. “It will make you feel better.”
“Where is my husband?” Maybe Henry could persuade them. Everyone listened to Henry Kraft. But what would I say to him? What would happen to us now that there was no baby to bind us together?
“He’s gone to his job for a while,” she said, “but he said he’d be back soon. And he’s the one who arranged for you to have this room, away from the maternity ward. He doesn’t want you to be with other mothers who…” Her voice trailed off. “He’s a very thoughtful man, isn’t he,” she added.
I felt grateful to Henry for realizing it would be intolerable for me to be in a ward where I would hear crying babies and joyful women.
“I’m going to leave this pill right here,” the nurse said, setting the pill and glass of water within my reach on the nightstand. Then she squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Kraft,” she said. “You’ll have more babies.”
I wanted to slap her. Why did people keep saying that to me? Didn’t they know how precious this baby was? How irreplaceable?
“I wanted this baby,” I whispered, more to myself than to her, and I doubted she heard me.
“You get some rest now, dear,” she said, and she left me alone with my grief.
*
Henry arrived later that afternoon carrying a vase overflowing with flowers. Silently, he set them on the nightstand next to my bed. I thought he was avoiding looking at me.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. My throat felt dry and tight.
He sat down in the only chair in the room and let out a sigh. “Dr. Poole said it’s nothing you did. That it’s hard to explain why things like this happen. They just do.”
I heard no blame in his voice. “I wanted to see him,” I said. “They wouldn’t let me.”
“It would only make it harder.”
“I don’t think so.”
“He said there’s no reason you can’t have more children.”
I turned my face away. I couldn’t respond to that sentiment one more time.
“Mama and Lucy send their best,” he said.
I nodded, but I found that hard to believe.
I looked at Henry. Really looked at him. Those blue eyes were rimmed with red. It was not my imagination. It gave me courage to try to connect to him in a way we never had before.
“Our Andrew,” I said in a near whisper. “Our precious Andrew.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he got to his feet. He didn’t look at me.
“I need to get back to the factory,” he said, “But I wanted to check on you. Make sure you’re all right.”