Say What You Will

by Cammie McGovern

  mstheword: I want to see you. I don’t want that unless I can be there and help you.

  For a while she didn’t answer.

  mstheword: Please, Aim.

  aimhigh: I look terrible.

  mstheword: I have to be at work by four. I’ll only stay an hour. I’ll keep my eyes closed the whole time, I promise.

  aimhigh: Fine. I mean, it’s a terrible idea. I really do look bad. But fine.

  She told him where she was.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t a terrible idea. They had a wonderful time.

  Matthew looked great and was kind enough to only mention her few features that had improved with pregnancy. “Your hair has never looked better,” he said. Which was true: gloriously thick and curly in a way that wasn’t too wild. Her chest was also huge now. “You’re full-figured!” he said, a bit breathlessly, which made her laugh.

  After he said these two things he dropped the subject and thankfully said nothing about her swollen face and hands. Nothing about the red eczema patches growing on her legs, or the downy blond hair covering her arms.

  She tried to explain how it felt: “IT’S VERY WEIRD. LIKE MY BODY ISN’T MY OWN.”

  He nodded. “It’s not, I guess, right? You’re growing someone else.”

  This was how Amy thought of it, too. It helped her believe in the idea without getting too attached to the actual baby. A subtle distinction. This isn’t my baby; it’s a person I’m growing who I’ll hopefully meet again someday. Matthew got that.

  “YES,” she said. “THAT’S RIGHT.”

  They kept the visit light. He brought out his work smock to show her how unflattering it was. “I try to keep it clean,” he sighed. “But real-butter product is a tough stain to get out.”

  He smiled as he said this and she passingly thought: I wish he didn’t look so good. Still tan and healthy from riding his bike to work. It made her nervous. “I BET EVERYONE LIKES YOU THERE.”

  “If by ‘likes’ you mean ‘laughs at,’ then yes, you’d be right. I’m sort of the group joke. The guy who cleans too much. Sometimes they stick a roll of paper towels and Windex in my backpack when I’m not looking. Ha-ha.”

  “DO YOU GO OUT WITH THEM? ARE YOU FRIENDS LIKE THAT?”

  She saw him look down nervously, unsure how to answer. “Go out? No. I mean, we’re friends, but no, I don’t go out anywhere with them. I haven’t changed that much.”

  He only stayed forty-five minutes, which was fine, given how tired she was these days. As happy as she was to see him, she could hardly keep her eyes open.

  And then, right before he left, something strange happened with her eyes. The same thing that had happened twice before. Her vision went blurry. Matthew fractured into two images, then four, coming toward her. It didn’t clear when she blinked, but only got foggier, the world a blur of colors. When he leaned in to kiss her cheek, she couldn’t see him at all.

  She didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to wreck the nice time they’d just had. She let him disappear and when he was gone, she felt a stabbing pain that started in the back of her neck roll over her.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  MATTHEW WORKED LATE THAT night with Sue and Carlton, who knew enough of the story to ask what was up with his missing friend.

  “We found her! I saw her—just now, as a matter of fact.” He was sweaty from his bike ride, but so happy he laughed. “She’s fine! Everything’s fine. She just didn’t like school all that much.” He was glad this group knew a little about Amy, but he wasn’t going to tell them all of her secrets.

  Sue looked up from her inventory clipboard. “So, I guess—what? You and Hannah aren’t going to happen?”

  Matthew’s smile faded quickly.

  He remembered Hannah’s email in the middle of Amy’s crisis, which he had pretty much ignored. Everything with Amy happened so quickly he hadn’t thought much about it until now. Fortunately Hannah wasn’t on the schedule, so he didn’t have to worry about seeing her. Instead he worked, more distracted than usual, especially when a couple came in with a newborn baby sleeping in a car seat. “We’ll leave if he cries,” the dad said. “We just had to get out of the house.”

  Instead of cleaning after that, Matthew texted Amy with a new thought:

  Do you have a labor coach? Not saying it should be me, but I’m pretty sure u should have one.

  By ten thirty he was surprised. He still hadn’t heard back from her. He tried again.

  If you want me, I’d do it. No problem. Weirdly, doesn’t make me nervous. Don’t know why.

  It didn’t. He imagined himself in a practical mode. Fetching ice chips and washcloths. Making mixed CDs of Amy’s favorite music, which was mostly not very good. They could laugh about that in between contractions. Of course there would be mess, but he’d prepare himself for that. Rubber gloves wouldn’t be unheard of in a delivery room, he was pretty sure.

  It would be fine. Better than fine. It would bond them more than any of the struggles they’d endured to date. They could forget about prom and the bad way he acted on their last night of summer. All that could fall away now that they had a real challenge to face. It put him in a surprisingly optimistic mood—whistling as he made change from the cash drawer, bumping it shut afterward with his hip.

  I can do this, he thought every time he did something. No problem.

  I can help Amy with whatever she needs. I’ve done it before.

  It was like the voice was back. Only this time it was whispering positive things.

  And then at the end of the night, he checked his phone. No messages. No texts. Nothing.

  Something’s wrong, the voice said. Something’s horribly wrong.

  It turned out the voice was right. Amy had been in the hospital for sixteen hours when Matthew called Mr. Heffernan the next morning and found out what was going on. Amy collapsed yesterday, about an hour after he left. When they got her to the emergency room, her blood pressure was sky-high and there was protein in her urine. “All signs of preeclampsia, so they admitted her right away,” Mr. Heffernan explained to him over the phone. “This can hit very suddenly like this, without too much warning. The blood pressure is fine one day and it skyrockets the next.”

  In the process of getting her admitted to the hospital, Mr. Heffernan had to call her parents and tell them what was going on.

  “What did they say?” Matthew asked.

  “Well, they’re happy she’s alive. A brush with death usually makes parents forgive other transgressions.”

  But this was a big one. Never mind the sex and the baby it produced. There was also the matter of leaving school without telling her parents. Of staying with an old teacher her mother hated.

  Later that morning, he met Mr. Heffernan in the lobby of the hospital. Together they walked to the floor where Amy was staying and saw her parents in the hall, talking to a doctor. Nicole was listening, her brows furrowed, nodding. Matthew felt a stab of panic. She’ll blame me for all of this. She’ll say it’s all my fault.

  Nicole didn’t look away from the doctor’s face, but her father did. When he saw Matthew, he smiled. “Go on in,” he mouthed, and pointed to the door.

  Though Matthew hated to say it, he couldn’t believe how terrible Amy looked—swollen and blotchy and ghostly pale. Then her mouth dropped open when she saw him and he felt relieved. This was her smile. Smiling like this, she looked like her old self. She lifted one hand. “Hii-i-i-ah,” she said.

  “Hi, Aim.” He looked around for her Pathway, which was on the table. “Can I give you this?” He placed it on the bed next to her hand and waited for a minute. She didn’t make a move to type anything.

  “So I talked with Mr. Heffernan down in the lobby. He told me what was going on. Sounds like it was scary, but you’re okay now?”

  She closed her eyes and nod
ded.

  He wasn’t sure what else to say. “It also turns out he gave me a conditional B-plus in his class. Apparently I still owe him a lab write-up.”

  Amy smiled but didn’t laugh.

  “I saw your mom and dad. They’re talking to the doctor. Mr. Heffernan said the doctors still aren’t sure what’s going on—”

  “I KNOW.”

  “You do?”

  She nodded.

  “What is it?”

  He realized then that her eyes weren’t closed from exhaustion. She turned her head away. She was trying not to cry. Her hand pushed the computer away, across the bed, onto the floor. Matthew understood. She didn’t want to talk or answer questions. “I’m here, Aim. That’s all,” he said, pulling a chair from the far wall next to her bed. “I’m just here, if that’s okay.”

  He sat down and squeezed her good hand. “Is that okay?”

  Her hand felt different. Tight and swollen. She couldn’t squeeze back. That’s when he noticed her whole left side was swollen. Her leg, her hand, even her face and neck were puffed up on one side.

  By the afternoon, he’d filled in enough details to know why Amy didn’t want to talk about it. Preeclampsia was essentially a pregnant woman’s bad reaction to the baby she’s carrying. For now they would keep Amy in the hospital. If it was preeclampsia, they would do everything they could to bring her blood pressure down, but ultimately it would only be a temporary solution, because the only cure for preeclampsia was delivery of the baby. At twenty-seven weeks, that would mean a preterm baby—less than three pounds, probably—who would almost certainly have medical complications. Though the doctor didn’t say this, everyone recognized the cruel irony: delivering the baby to save Amy’s life could leave the baby as disabled as the mother whose life was being saved. Whose life was worth more? Which risk was worth taking?

  After a day, there were decisions to be made. Sanjay called once and talked to Nicole long enough to make it clear: he wanted no part of making this decision.

  “IT’S JUST AS WELL,” Amy said. “IT MAKES THIS EASIER.”

  “It makes him a jerk,” Matthew said.

  “MAYBE. SOME PEOPLE CAN’T DEAL WITH SOMETHING LIKE THIS.”

  Matthew liked what this implied: he could deal with it. He was dealing with it.

  And he was. All day he surprised himself with something new he was doing, no problem at all. Help a nurse lift Amy onto a gurney by holding her bag of pee: no problem, apparently. He washed his hands afterward, but only once.

  As often as possible, he held Amy’s hand. Sometimes that meant sitting for an hour, not talking at all. Sometimes it meant holding her bad hand so her good one was free to type.

  One afternoon, Amy slept so soundly that he picked up her Pathway, thinking he might check his messages. He switched it over to wireless mode and the desktop appeared with a file that caught his eye: Notes to Matthew—Unsent. He opened it and read through everything she hadn’t told him about her time at school.

  That night, he went home and tried to write her back:

  Aims,

  I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I read the file Notes to Matthew on your computer. I wish we hadn’t wasted so much time being mad at each other. I wish it were easier to say certain things. Like now, for instance. I want to say that I don’t think this whole business of our not speaking for three months was completely my fault. You could have sent some of those letters you wrote. That would have been a pretty good start. If I hide behind my OCD sometimes, maybe you do the same thing. Suddenly you turn into Ms. I Can’t Talk At All! No One Will Stick Around To Listen To My Speech Device! Which makes me want to say, Of course they don’t! No one sticks around to listen to anyone. You might not be able to talk, but you make your points better than anyone else I know.

  My point is: you know what you want to say.

  A lot of people don’t. You might not even realize this. A lot of us are still trying to figure out what we want to say.

  He stopped writing there, because for some reason writing this down had made him start to cry.

  “I WISH I COULD PUT YOU AS THE DAD,” Amy typed the next day when they were alone.

  He knew the focus of these visits was to do everything possible to keep Amy calm and keep her blood pressure down. “Me too,” he said softly.

  “A FRAGILE BABY NEEDS THE RIGHT PARENTS.”

  “That’s true.” He wished he could say: I’ll do this with you. If we have to, we will.

  “I PICKED SOME PEOPLE. THEIR NAMES ARE SUE AND JIM MALLON. THERE’S A BOX IN MR. H’S HOUSE WITH THEIR PROFILE IN IT. WILL YOU READ IT AND TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK?”

  So far they hadn’t talked about Nicole or how she was handling all of this. She hadn’t been particularly friendly to Matthew, but she hadn’t been openly hostile, either. “Do you want your mom to talk to them?” he asked.

  She was very clear. “NO. I WANT YOU TO.”

  He understood that she asked him to do this because she wanted it to happen. With her parents, it might not.

  That afternoon, he went home with Mr. H and found their profile in one of Amy’s boxes. The woman was blond like Amy and was a website designer with a degree in music composition. The man was an environmental lawyer. Their pictures looked unposed and happy. In most of them, they looked like they were talking or sharing a joke. They had a nice house with a fenced yard, and grandparents nearby. Matthew read through everything until he finally sat back in surprise. Both parents had written long letters to prospective birth moms. Sue’s was longer than Jim’s; in the middle, he found this: “My husband suffered from a mild anxiety disorder in college, which made it harder for him to make friends. He’s much better now, but the journey we shared together bonded us in ways that I feel sure will make us better parents. We have learned that no one is perfect.”

  Surely Amy couldn’t have predicted the situation he was in now, but maybe this was what drew her to them in the first place. “YOU’LL KNOW IF THEY’RE HESITANT,” Amy had told him. “YOU’LL FEEL IT. I THINK WE JUST HAVE TO TRUST OUR INSTINCTS.”

  He called them up and explained the whole situation.

  Sue listened as he described Amy’s condition and the preeclampsia that was unrelated to her CP. “They’ve stabilized her for now but it won’t last long—maybe a week at best. It’s enough time to give her steroid injections to strengthen the baby’s lungs, but the baby is going to be premature. She’ll weigh around three pounds, if we’re lucky. She’ll probably have complications as a result of that. There’s no telling how severe they will be. Amy picked you as her first choice of parents for her baby and now she’d like to know if you’d still be interested in this situation.”

  It hadn’t been an easy speech to make, but he understood why Amy couldn’t make it herself. How could she ask: If my baby turns out like me, would you still want her?

  Sue answered without any hesitation: “Of course we’re still interested. We’ve talked over all these possibilities and yes. Yes, we’re still interested.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE MEDICINE THEY GAVE Amy fogged her brain and made it hard to tell the difference between night and day. She had no idea how long she’d been in the hospital. When she opened her eyes, she saw Matthew as often as she saw her mother, which was a relief. She didn’t have the strength to fight with her mother. Her good hand was too swollen to type out the things she needed to say: I don’t want to be friends with someone like Brooks. I don’t care if he’s smart, and you and Dad decided I should be. I know what I want and it’s Matthew.

  She’d been here for at least two days, maybe longer, and hadn’t been able to say any of that. Instead she drifted in and out of a sleepy/dreamy state, hearing her mother’s voice, which carried her back through time and memories of being with her mother in hospitals and doctor’s offices.
The hours of therapy, of rolling balls between their outstretched legs and blowing feathers across the dining-room table. All of it hard, some of it impossible. (She could never blow, though they kept trying for years.) She remembered being six years old and sitting in her mother’s lap with her arms locked behind her, the pain so intense she couldn’t breathe. She remembered the day she took her first steps without her walker. She was eight by then, and their house had been furnished with this goal in mind, every chair and sofa placed a step and a half apart so she could lurch like a cruising toddler from one handhold to the next. It happened just before dinner. Usually Amy wasn’t hungry at night, but this time she was starving and there was hummus and tzatziki, her favorites. Her mother must have seen the hunger on her face and recognized an opportunity. She put the food on the table and said, “Come to the table, Amy. If you want to eat, come to the table.”

  There were six steps between her and the table. She’d never taken more than three without falling. Amy launched across the divide and veered toward the table. She made it three, then four, then five steps without falling. On the last step, she pivoted too quickly and went down, narrowly missing the edge of the table with her head.

  “There,” Nicole said, pulling her back up. “See? You did it. You walked five steps by yourself.”

  How could she hate someone who’d spent her whole life ensuring that Amy had one? But how could she help choosing a person like Matthew, who loved her in a different, gentler way than her mother ever had? She wondered if there was a way to say this without words.

  She listened and waited and began to hope: maybe she already had. Having this baby was the first truly independent decision Amy had ever made. Maybe they looked at this and saw how she was moving away. Maybe they understood what she was saying in a whisper so soft only the people who knew her best could hear: this body, with its needs and its laundry list of problems, is mine.