by Bella James
Izzy ignored me, and set a stop clock on her phone as we headed to the front of the house where Michael was waiting. I clambered onto the Jeep’s back seat, still in my white linen dressing gown soiled with a pinkish-tinged fluid. My mother and Izzy jumped in either side of me, Lillian already on her mobile to the maternity ward to tell them we were on our way.
I doubled over for a second time, my face twisted in pain, and cried out as another contraction grasped my abdomen with a forceful blow.
‘Four minutes!’ shouted Izzy and I squeezed her hand as hard as I possibly could until she yelled in anguish herself.
Michael turned to face me for a second and our eyes met. He recognised my expression of pure fear and gave me a look of pure love. ‘You will be all right, my darling. I’m not going anywhere; we will get through this together.’
I read between the lines and took a moment’s comfort knowing I was perhaps his darling once more.
***
A small team of medical staff are waiting for me at the ward entrance and I am in too much pain to argue as they whisk me away in a wheelchair. I am changed swiftly into a gown as they let Michael and my mother into the room, who stand by my head as a device is tied around my stomach to measure the baby’s heartbeat. Another unbearable cramp takes hold of me, and does not seem to release for a lifetime. When I open my eyes the nurses look concerned as they study a small monitor. One of them reaches across me and hits a red button.
I am doubled over in pain once more and tell them I need to push, but a midwife I do not recognise is huddled with the other nurses around the monitor. I scream for pain relief but no one listens as I hear Izzy telling the doctor that I last ate less than two hours ago.
Finally, the midwife acknowledges my presence and comes over to the bed while a nurse with a bag of fluids begins to attach an intravenous line to my arm. I am too alarmed to protest and hold more tightly to Michael’s hand as the midwife tells me that my baby’s heart rate is dropping quickly.
Another member of staff is rubbing a cool gel over my stomach and I recognise her from my last ultrasound.
‘Try not to worry, Anna. I’m going to take a look at what’s happening.’ She efficiently carries out her task and the midwife returns to my side a short time later to tell me that the umbilical cord is in front of the baby’s face. With every contraction my stomach is cutting off its air supply.
‘Will I die?’
He looks confused at my question but hastens to tell me that I need to have an emergency C-section and orders the nurses to prepare me for theatre.
I must not be making sense because Michael is the one everyone addresses as I am whisked away in the confusion to be given an epidural. I am asked to lean forward and an incredibly painful injection is administered to my back before I am wheeled into an operating room. My legs begin to feel numb and I panic, asking one of the staff where Michael was.
She turns as though she is surprised to hear from me and smiles reassuringly. ‘He’s on his way. Just getting him prepped for theatre.’
I wondered fleetingly if Michael was having an operation also. I have heard people using the expression that their teeth were ‘chattering with fear’ and this is happening to me now as I realise I can no longer feel my legs. The midwife enters the room with Michael, both dressed in green gowns and masks, and I only recognise my fiancé as he is always the tallest person in any room.
I hold on to his blue eyes and he tells me not to be afraid, that I will not feel any more pain and my legs are supposed to be numb.
‘But I can feel something!’ I tell him desperately, as the midwife hovers by my legs. ‘What if I feel them cut into me? Michael help me, I can’t do this. I can’t!’
He looks afraid as he bends forward to kiss my clammy brow and strokes the feathery hairs from my forehead.
‘Can you feel this, Anna?’
‘Feel what? I can’t feel anything!’ My voice rises in panic but the surgeon soothingly tells me he was pinching my legs and the epidural has worked. ‘We need to deliver your baby, so please try to relax.’
He nods to Michael and as my teeth chatter, he talks to me about how everything is going to be fine, and in a few minutes our baby will be born. We still don’t know the sex of the baby as I had refused the option. I’m not sure why I did, as Michael had wanted to know, but I had grasped every opportunity for control over the last few months, of which there were not many.
I feel uncomfortable pulling and digging in my abdomen but I was happy that the excruciating pain of labour had released its determined grasp over me.
I look up at Michael’s pale face and his eyes widen as the surgeon lifts our baby from my body.
‘A girl,’ he announces, but my heart stops at his concerned tone. My daughter is bundled into a blanket and for the most fleeting moment, held in front of me, before they leave me paralysed and helpless as she is whisked away through the screen doors.
I had no moment to feel anything when I saw her for the first time. She was a strange colour and her eyes had been closed. If she had only opened them for a second to look at me, I may have connected to her, but she was gone from me and Michael can offer me no words of comfort.
***
It feels like hours later that I am waking up in recovery. I do not remember falling apart but Michael tells me that I became very distressed when they took her away, and administered morphine while I was being stitched.
‘You fell asleep,’ he tells me, looking at me with love, reassured that my distress was a good sign that I cared deeply for our little girl.
I’ve no idea how I feel as he tells me that she needed oxygen, which she was responding well to in the special baby unit.
‘Can I see her?’ I ask him.
‘Not yet, darling. Not yet.’
By the time they deem it suitable to let a mother see her own child, I am becoming increasingly cross. Only one person at a time stays with me while the others troop off to see the baby as she regains her strength. I do not feel that enough emphasis and concern have been bestowed upon me, considering the horrific ordeal I have recently endured.
My mother mistakes my disgruntlement for anxiety.
‘Don’t worry, they will bring her soon. In a little while when the epidural has worn off they may let us take you to see her.’
I look at my mother as though she has gone mad. ‘I will not be sitting in that contraption again, ever. They can bring her to me.’
Over the next few hours I complain incessantly of the pain I am suffering, so by the time they finally bring the baby to see me, I am quite doped up.
‘Here she is, darling.’ Michael lifts her tenderly from the little trolley as a nurse fusses about him. He looks confident and delighted as my mother props a pillow behind me and he places the sleeping baby in my arms. I feel such a surreal feeling of detachment from the entire affair that I wish for a moment they were not all watching me so intently. Under their scrutinising gaze I hold my breath as I look at her and consider that she looks much more appealing now than she did a few hours ago. Her hair is smooth and of the palest blonde, she has a tiny little nose and rosebud lips, which she smacks together a couple of times as I hold her awkwardly in my arms. As she opens her eyes for a flutter we look at each other for the very first time. I look over at Michael, who is smiling at me with expectation so I smile back at him.
I take another peek at my daughter before my head starts swimming and someone takes her from me. As I look at her beautiful little face, I feel nothing.
***
In less than a week we are all inevitably ensconced back at Elm Tree. My old room has been made into a recovery room for mother and baby. I am thankful for my caesarean section now, because despite the pain, it has posed me the advantage of requiring a great deal of help with the baby. I can’t pick her up, and only have to endure moments here and there when Izzy or Michael would pass her to me as I lie in bed. A concerned midwife eventually gave up on demonstrating breastfeeding techniq
ues, telling me I needed to relax, so I was happily now expressing my milk, meaning less contact still. Mother was truly concerned, but I managed to persuade her to give me a little more time to get used to everything and I would smile sweetly to reassure her.
The moment they all left I would cry into a pillow to stifle the sound, my body wracked with sobs. How could I not love her as they did? She was so tiny and beautiful and seemed to have the sweetest disposition; even Freedom was enchanted by her.
Izzy knocks on the door and as she enters I do not try to hide my tears. ‘Michael is upset that you haven’t named her yet.’
It was true, she had been in this world for five days I hadn’t agreed on a name for the girl.
‘What’s wrong with me, Izzy? I can’t do this.’
At this point she wakes up crying and I feel as though I could sleep for a thousand years, even though that is mostly all I done since her birth.
‘Mother wants to see you in the rose garden.’
I begin to shake my head in protest, but Izzy interrupts me, saying she will feed the baby, knowing I would not miss that opportunity.
As she picks her up from her bassinet, cooing and singing to her as though she had borne a thousand children, I make as much fuss as possible slipping on my pyjama bottoms and pulling a long jumper over my head.
I walk slowly downstairs, passing Michael as he goes to her room with a baby monitor in one hand and a bottle in the other.
‘I thought you were sleeping.’
‘I was,’ I tell him, still vexed that I had been persuaded to go and see Mother.
‘Anna, we need to give our daughter a name. Please.’
He looks at me so mournfully that I almost stop and go back to her with him, but something makes me turn around and continue the slow decent down the staircase.
***
Lillian is carefully pruning her favourite roses and has set a folding chair out for me. I sit down thankfully, holding my painful abdomen as Freedom fusses about me.
‘I thought you might need some fresh air,’ she tells me, tenderly snipping away dead leaves from the beautiful deep orange roses.
‘I remember the day you planted that, Mother. Why is it so special to you?’
My mother looks at me with surprise and smiles, ‘It’s special because of the time in my life that I planted it. They’re called Remember Me roses. You can’t possibly recall that day, Anna, you weren’t born until two years later.’
I scrunch my face up against the low setting sun and tell her crossly, ‘I do remember. You were wearing a blue dress with white flowers on it, and your lip was bleeding. You were very sad …’
My confident voice trails away as she searches my face with bewildered eyes, and I sense gentle vibrations gathering in abundance all around me. They ebb over me like strengthening waves, crashing memories that belong to another world.
I leave her alone by the roses and begin to run towards the house, intensifying echoes and whispers resonating from somewhere deep within me.
‘Remember me.’
I’d heard that voice before, a distant memory or dream of another world. A place I learned a little of purpose, where someone spoke to me of progression and promise.
Despite the ache in my troubled heart, and the familiar pang of fear that I was simply not enough, or that I could never be everything anyone expected I should be, the dark cloud above me seemed to lift a little – just enough for me to feel the welcome reprieve of the mid-morning sun, a gentle breeze lifting the newly grown hair from my face. I take the stairs two at once, and push through the door to find Michael looking at me expectantly.
I run to his side and take the contented little girl from his arms. I want to love her as they do, and show her she is part of my world.
‘Hope,’ I say softly, as I look down and her blue eyes meet mine. ‘She’s called Hope.’
THE END
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The Deepest Cut
Natalie Flynn
‘You haven’t said a single word since you’ve been here. Is it on purpose?’ I tried to answer David but I couldn’t … my brain wanted to speak but my throat wouldn’t cooperate…
Adam blames himself for his best friend’s death. After attempting suicide, he is put in the care of a local mental health facility. There, too traumatized to speak, he begins to write notebooks detailing the events leading up to Jake’s murder, trying to understand who is really responsible and cope with how needless it was as a petty argument spiralled out of control and peer pressure took hold.
Eidolon
Sophie Croft
Paul is in trouble – moved from a young offenders’ prison to a hospital for the mentally ill because he sees and talks to his dead sister. He knows she’s real. And she has something important to say.
The doctors’ methods are painful and disturbing. As the treatments build up, Paul is increasingly confused about what is real and who he can trust.
But he is not the only patient – not the only one who hears voices that seem connected to strange and inexplicable powers. When some of his friends are transferred to the mysterious Ty Eidolon, Paul becomes suspicious that they are destined for a sinister fate.
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