Page 12 of The Other Mother
The hospital room comes back to me in fragments, like photographs scattered on a table. I'm lying in a bed that's too narrow, too hard, the plastic mattress crinkling every time I shift position. The fluorescent light above me flickers with a buzz that gets inside my skull and stays there. My body is shivering and sweating at thesame time, caught between fever and chills that make my teeth chatter.
Forty hours of labor. That's what I told the support group, but the details are fuzzy around the edges. Pain has a way of erasing time, turning hours into moments and moments into eternities. I remember the contractions that felt like my body was trying to tear itself apart from the inside. I remember vomiting until nothing came up but bile. I remember clutching the rail of the hospital bed with both hands, my knuckles white and aching.
"Where's your husband?" a voice asks. A nurse, maybe. I can't see her face clearly through the haze of exhaustion and whatever they've given me for the pain.
"He had to leave," another voice replies. "Emergency at work. But he should be back.”
There was some crisis with a foundation that couldn't wait. Or maybe it was a permit issue. It wasn’t going to take long, he had promised. Maybe an hour or so. The details don't matter now, but they mattered then.
I remember whispering to anyone who would listen, "Don't let her die. I can't lose another one."
The words surprise me now.Another one?What did I mean by that? The memory is clear, my voice hoarse and desperate in that fluorescent-lit room.
There was something, years ago. Before Adam, before we were even serious. I was twenty-six, working at another publishing house, living in that tiny studio apartment in Santa Monica where the walls were so thinI could hear my neighbor's television through the bathroom wall.
I was seeing someone then. Marcus. A writer who came into our office trying to pitch a novel about surfers and existential dread. He had sun-bleached hair and calloused hands from spending every morning in the water before most people were awake. We started sleeping together even though I knew it was a bad idea. He was the kind of man who collected women like seashells, beautiful for a moment before being forgotten on some shelf.
I was two weeks late when I finally bought the pregnancy test. Two pink lines appeared immediately, no waiting, no ambiguity. Just the stark reality of cells dividing inside me, creating something I wasn't prepared for.
I told Marcus in a coffee shop near the pier, the kind of place where aging surfers nursed single cups of coffee for hours while staring at the waves. He went very still when I said the words, his tan face going pale around his eyes.
"What do you want to do?" he asked, but I could see the answer he was hoping for written in the way his hands fidgeted with his car keys.
I wanted to keep it. The realization surprised me. I'd never thought of myself as particularly maternal, never cooed over babies or imagined myself pushing a stroller through farmers markets. But something about those two pink lines made me feel protective, fierce. Like I'dbeen waiting my whole life for this moment without knowing it.
Marcus left for Costa Rica the next week. A surf trip, he said, but we both knew he wasn't coming back. I spent three days calling in sick to work, lying on my couch eating ice cream and watching terrible daytime television while trying to imagine raising a child alone on an assistant editor's salary.
The bleeding started on a Thursday morning. Light at first, then heavier. By the time I got to the emergency room, it was over. A miscarriage, the doctor said gently. Very common in early pregnancy. Nothing I did or didn't do. Just one of those things.
I never told anyone about it until Adam. It felt too private, too much like a failure I couldn't explain. By the time Adam and I got serious, it seemed like ancient history. A different life lived by a different version of myself.
But lying in that hospital bed, delirious with pain and exhaustion, my subconscious must have remembered. The fear of losing another baby. The terror that my body would fail again when it mattered most.
Maybe that's why Eva doesn't feel like mine. Maybe I'm so afraid of losing her that I can't let myself fully accept that she's real, that she's here.
I remember a nurse leaning over me, her face sharp and angular in the harsh light. She's older than the others, with gray hair pulled back severely and linesaround her eyes that suggest she's seen too much in too many delivery rooms.
"She doesn't look like you," she says, studying something I can't see.
I try to ask what she means, but my mouth feels stuffed with cotton. The words won't form properly. Everything is distant and underwater, like I'm watching someone else's life through thick glass.
Somewhere outside my room, a woman screams. Not me. The sound is raw and hysterical, cutting through the hospital noise like a knife. She's repeating something over and over, but I can't make out the words. Feet rush past my door, voices calling out urgent instructions.
"Wrong room," someone shouts. "Wrong room."
Then everything fades to black.
When I wake up again, I'm in a different place. The recovery room, they call it, though nothing about it feels particularly healing. The walls are the same institutional green, and the smell of disinfectant burns my nostrils. My throat is raw, my abdomen aches where they cut me open, and there's an IV in my arm that pulls whenever I move.
I look at the clock on the wall. It's two hours later than what I remember. Two hours missing from my life, swallowed by anesthesia and trauma and the strange liminal space between one life and another.
"Where's my baby?" I ask the nurse adjusting my IV. She's younger than the gray-haired one, with kind eyes and a gentle touch.
She smiles and reaches for something beside the bed. "Right here, mama. She's been waiting for you."
She places Eva in my arms, already swaddled in a hospital blanket. The weight of her is startling after forty hours of carrying her inside my body. She's real now, separate from me, her own person with her own needs and demands.
I stare down at her perfect face, waiting for the flood of love everyone talks about. The instant recognition, the overwhelming maternal instinct that's supposed to make everything else fade away.
