Page 23 of Maybe in Another Life

I lost a baby.

I close my eyes and let the emotion wash over me. I listen to what my heart and mind are trying to tell me.

I am relieved and devastated. I am scared. I am angry. I am not sure if any of this is going to be OK.

The tears fall down my face with such force that I cannot possibly catch them all. They make their way to my hospital gown. My nose starts to run. I don’t have the physical capacity to wipe it on my sleeve.

My head hurts from the pressure. I roll toward my pillow and bury my face in the sheets. I can feel them getting wet.

I hear the door open, and I don’t bother to look and see who it is. I know who it is.

She sighs and gets into bed next to me. I don’t turn to see her face. I don’t need to hear her voice. Gabby.

I let it erupt. The fear and the anger and the confusion. The grief and the relief and the disgust.

Someone hit me with their car. Someone ran me over. They broke my bones, and they severed my arteries, and they killed the baby I didn’t love yet.

Gabby is the only person on the planet I trust to hear my pain.

I howl into the pillow. She holds me tighter.

“Let it out,” she says. “Let it out.”

I breathe so hard that I exhaust myself. I am dizzy with oxygen and anguish.

And then I turn my head toward her. I can see she’s been crying, too.

It makes me feel better somehow. As if she will bear some of the pain for me, as if she can take some of it off my hands.

“Breathe,” she says. She looks me in the eyes and she breathes in slowly and then breathes out slowly. “Breathe,” she says again. “Like me. Come on.”

I don’t understand why she’s saying this to me until I realize that I am not breathing at all. The air is trapped in my chest. I’m holding it in my lungs. And once I realize that’s what I’m doing, I let it go. It spills out of me, as if the dam has broken.

Air comes back in as a gasp. An audible, painful gasp.

And I feel, for maybe the first time since I woke up, alive. I am alive.

I am alive today.

“I was pregnant,” I say, starting to cry again. “Ten weeks.” It is the first real thing I’ve said since I woke up, and I can feel now how much it was tearing up my insides, like a bullet ricocheting in my gut.

Talking isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I think I can talk just fine. But I don’t need to say anything else.

I don’t need to tell Gabby that I didn’t know. I don’t need to tell Gabby that I wouldn’t have been ready for the baby I don’t have.

She already knows. Gabby always knows. And maybe more to the point, she knows there is nothing to say.

So she holds me and listens as I cry. And every couple of minutes, she reminds me to breathe.

And I do. Because I am alive. I may be broken and scared. But I am alive.

Ethan and I are circling the block around the café he wants to go to. Despite the fact that it is Tuesday morning and you’d think most people would be working, the street is packed with cars.

“When are you going back to work, by the way?” I ask him. He’s called in sick twice now.

“I’ll go back tomorrow,” he says. “I have some vacation days saved up, so it’s not a problem.”

I don’t want him to go back to work tomorrow, even though, you know, clearly, he should. But... I’ve been enjoying this reprieve from the real world. I quite like hiding out in his apartment, living in a cocoon of warm bodies and takeout.

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