Page 94 of This Love
They made Tucker leave when the doctor arrived to put another needle in me, this time in my back.
The cool spray and the pricking sensation were nothing compared to everything else. And when they arranged me in the bed again, the feeling of being crushed inside was gone. All the pain was gone.
“Will the pain come back?” I asked the man who had put the needle in.
“Not until we turn it off,” he said.
“Don’t ever turn it off,” I said.
He laughed with a deep, happy sound. I’d never heard anything like it before.
I smiled at him, then touched my face. For the first time since I woke to the dog licking me, I didn’t feel terrified.
Nurse Kenisha told the woman in green that she wasn’t sure about Tucker, and the woman in green said, “I called in the dragon. The board gets snippy because she doesn’t play by the rules, but she’ll suss out if he’s a bad apple.”
I couldn’t follow what she meant. Dragon. Snippy. Suss. Apples. I closed my eyes. Tucker told me he loved me and he was my husband, but those words didn’t make me feel anything.
I wanted to sleep.
But not long after that, the tiny nurse let Tucker back in. Kenisha made him sit in the far corner of the room.
The green outfit nurse left, and the small one spread something thick and cold over my fat belly. “I’m Jennifer,” she said. “This is for the monitor.”
Kenisha came in behind her with a broad strap with a box. “We’re going to put this across your stomach. It will tell us how the baby is doing.”
Right. The baby. In my belly. The two of them attached it and adjusted the straps.
Jennifer rolled a screen onto a metal table close to the bed. It flickered on, and lines bounced along its surface. “This is the baby’s heartbeat,” she said. “Do you have a name picked out?”
Tucker spoke up from the corner. “We’ve named him Tad.”
“That’s an interesting choice,” Jennifer said.
“All right, Dad,” Kenisha said, emphasizing the word like she didn’t want to use it. “Now that we have her settled, can you explain what’s going on here? Why is she in such a state? Why doesn’t she know she’s pregnant?”
Tucker ran his hands through his short sandy hair. It stuck up all over. “Her seizures are a rare kind. They hit her hippocampus, and she loses her memory. I came home, and she was like you see her now. She’s not due for two weeks, but her water broke. Maybe that triggered the seizure.”
I could only follow some of that. Seizures. Losing memory. Tucker found me in his home. My chest felt more and more tight as he talked. How could this story be true?
Kenisha’s voice was still hard. “How often does she have seizures?”
“She hasn’t had one for a year and a half. Before we were married. She won’t remember our wedding anymore.” With that, tears fell from the corners of his eyes. He wiped them away.
I looked back and forth between them. Kenisha watched Tucker, her eyebrows drawn together. “So, Ava doesn’t know who you are, who she is, or what is happening?”
He nodded. “When it happens, she can read and write and walk and talk. She’s been tested a bunch of times. But anything about her past is gone.”
“Good Lord,” Kenisha said, tugging her phone from her pocket. “I’ll page neurology again.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that. A page of paper?
She tapped her phone. “Did your OB have an action plan for this?”
Tucker walked forward and gripped the side rail near my feet. “We were doing a C-section tomorrow to avoid the risk of labor.”
I tried to follow what they were saying. I knew so little. And I was so tired.
I must have fallen asleep. All I knew was that the bed shifted, and when I looked down, Jennifer was taking away the bottom part and bending my knees up high.
