Page 109 of Happy After All

My heart feels sore.

Elise reaches across and grabs hold of my wrist, squeezing me tightly. She doesn’t ask me why I didn’t tell her. I don’t know why I thought she would. Instead, she just holds on to me.

“It happened before I came here,” I say. I tell them the story. About how the pregnancy was unexpected but I wanted it more than anything in the world.

About my pink nursery.

“I named her Emma.” My voice breaks. “It’s a beautiful name.” I look at Elise, and I feel something fracture in my chest.

I haven’t said her name like that since I got here. Then after I’d been there a year, I met Elise, and I wanted her to be my best friend. She had the prettiest little girl with the same name as the one I’d lost.

It felt wrong, to make it a sad thing.

I didn’t want to make it a sad thing.

I didn’t want mylifeto be sad.

I feel exhausted and angry. I don’t understand why I have to deal with this. I never do this. I never get angry. About my terrible mother, my fucking awful ex-boyfriend. About the baby I lost that I wanted so much. More than I wanted him.

I feel it, so deep, so real, so hot and destructive.

Anger.

Anger because I have had to deal with so damned much. Anger, because I didn’t know how else to handle it but to lock it away inside me.

I wipe tears away from my cheeks. “It just feels so pointless,” I say. “I wanted to leave it behind. Because I don’t want to carry it with me anymore. If I can’t carry my baby, why ...”

I break then. I didn’t do it when I told Nathan. I do now. As these women, who have been so good to me, who have done things for me that my own mother never did, hold me. They all put their hands on me, and let my sorrow fill the silence.

When the wave subsides, Gladys finally speaks, her sharp brown eyes sparkling. “I lost two pregnancies before I had my son. You feel so alone sometimes when those things happen. Ashamed.”

Alice nods. “Yes. Especially in our time. Women were supposed to be mothers. I failed at that. It made me useless for a long time. I didn’t want to feeldifferent, I didn’t want to be different. What was the point, after all?” She sits in silence for a moment. “But Iam. I’m different, and my life is different than I planned for. Different doesn’t make it wrong, or bad, or failed. When I accepted that, I found a lot more peace.”

I don’t know what to say to that. So I listen. I’m hungry. Hungry for the wisdom of women. I wonder, for the very first time, if maybe that was why Christopher could never really understand.

Because I carried that baby. Because I was the one who had to give birth and come home with empty arms.

The person I would’ve wanted to talk to, my own mother, wouldn’t be there for me. I hadn’t even told her.

So I’m desperate now. For this woman to look at me and tell me I can be okay. She understands. She knows.

To sit with someone else whoknowsis the most healing thing I never knew I needed.

“It changed me,” Alice says. “For a long time I resisted that. I wanted to pretend like none of it happened. I went to the hospital thinking I would come home with a child, and instead I lost my dreams. I wanted to forget. I wanted to go back to being myself.” She lifts her shoulders, as if she’s shrugging off a weight. “I couldn’t. It wasn’t until I realized that I could keep her with me, and I could let it hurt, and I could let it heal, that I actually began to find myself again. I’ve had a beautiful life. That loss ... It wasn’t beautiful. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. I don’t think loss like that ismeant to be. I don’t think terrible things are so easily explained. Her life was real, a momentary thing. It was up to me what I decided to do with that love I had for her. I decided ... slowly, over the course of time, that I could let that love be a gift. That I could remember it well.”

I thought of how she had taken the baby from me. How she could hold her when I couldn’t.

“We never had children,” Alice says. “Not after that. Though, we had such a wonderful marriage, Amelia. Filled with so much love. I don’t dwell on what isn’t. But Iremember.”

Gladys seems to consider Alice’s words before she looks at me again. “A child is a promise of a whole world,” she says. “When you lose a pregnancy, a child, you lose that world. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. It doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.”

That truth settles deep inside me.

My Emma’s life is an unwritten story, but I can still write her into mine. The truth of what loving her means to me will underlie every syllable, every sentence. How can it not?

Itmatters.

Shematters.

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