Marc and I had lunch plans with Colin. I wanted them to meet each other and also to tell Colin the news that I was pregnant. We met at Le Pain on Melrose; it was a really beautiful day. I was nervous for them to meet, but I knew they would hit it off. They were both people that everyone seemed to like a lot, so why wouldn’t they like each other? We ate a leisurely lunch and chatted about Colin’s new girlfriend and the movie he was about to do. They were thinking of moving to New York together, which I thought sounded like a good idea for him.
During lunch, I noticed that Marc kept pulling his phone out of his pocket and looking at it, without trying to be rude. Finally, right as we were paying the check, he excused himself and took a call. I assumed it was from Abby, some work crisis or her wondering when he would be around to work that day. We hugged Colin goodbye and started across the street when Marc grabbed my arm, “Buddy. I need to tell you something. And I need you to remember that you’re pregnant, okay? You have a baby inside you and I need you to remember that.”
His voice was weirdly shaky. I was confused.
“Okay?”
We were at his car. He opened the passenger door and sat me in the seat and looked at me. “Heath is dead. He’s dead. They found him in New York.”
I could not process what he was saying to me. I had talked to Heath on the phone a few months earlier, on Michelle’s birthday, when they were really breaking up, and it had been awful.
I didn’t know what to do. Michelle was in Sweden shooting a movie and her phone never works when she’s out of the country. I called our friend Ben Lee, who answered and told me everything he knew. Then I called Michelle’s agent, I think, who gave me her Swedish cell phone number. I sat there, trying to breathe through my sobs, and then I called Michelle, who answered immediately. I don’t know who called her to tell her. She already knew. I told her I loved her. I told her it would be okay. I told her I would fly to New York and meet her there. I told her I loved her. I told her Matilda would be okay. I told her I was sorry. I told her I loved her and I would see her in the morning. She could barely speak.
Marc booked a red-eye for me. I sat by the window, and on the seat back of what felt like every seat, CNN played nonstop footage of Heath’s death. I felt like I was in an actual nightmare. I sobbed and sobbed and the girl sitting next to me looked over and put her hand on my arm and quietly said, “You knew him, huh?”
I didn’t have the energy to lie, so I just nodded and then she shut off her TV. I coordinated with Michelle’s mom, who was flying from San Diego and landing around the same time as I was. Colin somehow arranged for a driver to pick us up at the airport. We had to get keys from Michelle’s longtime friend Dan when we landed, which was a little tricky since it was so early. We pulled up just before 6 a.m. and there were already paparazzi camped out. Michelle and Matilda arrived two hours later.
I have snapshots in my head from that time, those first few awful weeks. Things that will stay with me forever. Every person I loved in my twenties lost someone they loved most. Even Marc, although this happened before I knew him. I don’t know why. But I was there. To be there and sit with them, I guess. To be a friend. To cry with them and get them cold washcloths for their eyes and calm them down. And to make plans when they couldn’t and make a joke when we needed to laugh.
I understand the public’s fascination with Heath’s death, with him in general, as a cultural icon or as the greatest actor of a generation or whatever. But you know, for me it was really simple. He was my best friend’s love and the father of her child. My beautiful magical goddaughter. A child we all love so dearly, who has so much of him in her, without even trying. He was my friend and I loved him.
My prenatal yoga teacher told me to talk to my baby and reassure her that my grief was about something else and that everyone was so excited for her to be born. I did it every day, talking to my little belly and reassuring my unknown child that my tears were for another reason, not her.
As I got bigger and bigger, I couldn’t imagine ever working again. I was gaining so much weight, but my baby was healthy and I guess so was I—I didn’t have gestational diabetes or anything. What I did have was a craving for fresh strawberry milkshakes and donuts, so I think that probably had something to do with the weight gain.
We still couldn’t sell my house, which started to feel like maybe it was a problem since there was a writers’ strike, I wasn’t working, and now we had two mortgages, but Marc was fairly chill about things, so I tried to be as well. My old friend Josh Friedman called me up and asked if I would be interested in doing a few episodes of his TV show, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles even though I would be hugely pregnant. I thought why the fuck not, it would be something to do and might be fun to be on TV hugely pregnant. My first day on set, Thomas Dekker, who I think was maybe a teenager still, looked at my giant belly and laughed. “Oh my God! Normally our prosthetic dudes are really good, but that looks insane! They overdid it!!!”
His little face fell when I told him that it was real.
“Oh shit! I’m so sorry! I’ve just never seen a pregnant belly that big!”
I couldn’t blame him. It did look fake. I shot my last scene a week before I gave birth. I am convinced to this day that I am maybe the most pregnant person to ever act on a TV show.
We had moved into our new house when I was eight months pregnant and were settling in. All of my friends came over and helped unpack us. Jennifer Carpenter and Candi unloaded all my books and put them on the shelves, Emily and my mom tackled the kitchen, and I waddled around and pointed a lot. Marc and I were sitting in our new living room, watching TV one night, when he turned to me and rubbed my giant belly, “You know, this really feels like home. I think we did it.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than we heard a commotion coming up our front steps. Marc jumped up and ran to our front door, which is a huge glass door. On the other side was a man, in his late thirties probably, with a woman who was pulling her hair in front of her face. The man was screaming profanities through the glass at Marc and yelling that he was going to kill him. It was all so chaotic, I got up and waddled into the foyer forcibly saying, “NO! NO! THIS IS NOT HAPPENING! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
The man looked at me, taking in my sizable figure, and shouted, “My beef isn’t with you, pregnant lady! My beef is with the BEARD!”
I grabbed Marc to pull him away from the glass door. Marc was legitimately trying to figure out what the man was upset about, but it was clear to me that they were cracked out on drugs. They had somehow made it up into the hills from Hollywood and were looking to fuck some shit up and saw our lights on. I was not about to be murdered while eight months pregnant, or worse, have my husband murdered in front of me, leaving our unborn child fatherless before her birth. I called the police on my home phone as the man started pounding on our glass door, screaming that we needed to give him back his car (the most we could ever figure out was that he had parked a stolen car across from our house and it had been towed, which was not our doing, anyway).
“I’m on the phone with the police!” I yelled. “They’re on their way!!!”
“Yeah! You call the police!”
He screamed back at me defiantly as he banged on the door a few more times. I was terrified the glass was going to shatter, but then there was silence. He and the woman were gone. My cell phone rang. I handed the home phone to Marc to stay on the line with dispatch as I picked up my cell phone. It was my neighbor across the street, Johnny.
“Shit! Busy! What’s going on!? Are you guys okay??”
“Yeah. Yeah,” I told him. “Some fucking crazy dude is trying to kill us maybe? Can you see over your fence?”
Just then there was a crazy commotion and screaming from the street.
“HOLY SHIT! Busy! Are the police coming—HOLY SHIT! Oh my God. I’m gonna call you back!”
The lady from dispatch was asking what was happening, but we couldn’t see down to the street from our house.
“MARC!” I said. “Do not go outside!!!”
But of course he did. Because men are dumb. (I’m sorry, that’s a generalization. They’re not all dumb. Just when it comes to things like this.) Eventually, I saw the red-and-blue lights on the street and felt like it was relatively safe to waddle down the steps and talk to the police. I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw in the street: a yellow cab with the seats and center consoles ripped out. There was money and change everywhere and also lots of blood. There was an older man, the driver of the cab, holding a rag to his horribly beaten face, talking frantically to the police in a heavy Russian accent, trying to explain what had happened. I had never actually seen someone who’d been beaten up that badly in person. It was truly horrifying. Another police car pulled up, along with several cabs, who apparently the driver had reached out to and were coming to check on their friend. It was chaos and the two perpetrators were nowhere to be found. After a few minutes, the two cabs sped off, followed shortly by one of the cop cars. The other officers stayed to take statements from all of us and then told us to try to go to bed and not worry about it. And to obviously call 911 if they came back. And to HAVE A GOOD NIGHT!
Even with our house alarm set, I barely slept. Marc took a giant kitchen knife and put it next to the bed, but then I made him return it to the kitchen because I was afraid that somehow one of us would end up accidentally stabbed. I tossed and turned all night, sure that the two perps would come back for vengeance against the beard and the pregnant lady. Here I was, my life was just beginning, and I would be murdered in my sleep over a stolen car. A few days later, I got a call from a detective who was assigned to the case.
“Hey! You must have seen the news! Yeah. Those two went on quite a spree. Seems like it started at your house! We may need you to testify, but honestly, them threatening you is the least of their problems, so we may actually get away with just playing your 911 call. The prosecutor will reach out eventually. You sound really distressed on the call.”
We hadn’t seen the news but then we looked it up. They had indeed gone on quite a spree, beating up several more people and eventually successfully stealing a cab that, after a high speed chase, they then crashed into a restaurant, which was thankfully closed, with no one inside. And thankfully, they ended up behind bars, so they didn’t come back to kill us. Yet.
As the summer wore on, I tried to remain cool, both physically and mentally. I was huge. And it was hot. I was roughly the size of a house and had taken to getting on the scale at my doctor’s office backward so I didn’t have to see the number. What I do know is that I was hovering around 140/145 when I got pregnant, and two weeks after the baby was born, when I was brave enough to weigh myself, I was 212. So that’s sixty-seven pounds right there and I’ll bet it’s possible I had lost a solid fifteen to twenty in those first two weeks. It’s always fucking amazing to me what people say to you when you’re pregnant. I mean, the number of people who asked if it was twins, or would say knowingly, “Any day now?” and I was like five months pregnant. One time I was hiking with Candi when I was about six months along and a woman sidled up to us and cut in, “Are you trying to put yourself in labor?! You look like you’re about to pop!”
Nope. Just trying to stay healthy, lady! The worst was a woman at Rachel Davidson’s wedding who insisted there must be something “wrong” with me because of how big I was. It was so humiliating. She was an older woman, so I didn’t tell her to fuck off, but seriously, the exchange was insane.
“I can tell you’re ready to go!” she said, beaming at me. “Any day now?”
“Oh no . . . I’m just seven months—the baby is due in August!”
“NO! That can’t be right!! Is there something wrong with you? It’s not normal to look that big at seven months!!!”
“Nope. Nothing wrong with me. Okay. Nice to see you. Enjoy the paella! ’BYE.”
So around, eight and a half, nine months, I was ready to get this baby girl out of me. Let me say this: I’m a big believer in choice. All across the board. I mean, the choice to have a baby, certainly. But then beyond that, how you choose to have your baby is totally up to you: if you want to breastfeed or not, save the cord blood, give birth in a pool of dolphins, be knocked completely out, whatever. I couldn’t care less. But I have always felt really strongly that I personally would not get an epidural. There are a couple mitigating factors in me feeling really strongly about this. I mean, the least of which is that when I decide to feel really strongly about something, it’s hard for me to stop feeling really strongly about something. I remember watching a 20/20 when I was in middle school with my mom that was about hypnobirthing (which is a natural and drug-free way to give birth, basically involving meditation and deep breathing and visualization), and I declared after the segment that that was how I would have a baby someday. My mother rolled her eyes and said, “Sure, Biz” (I feel like that was her response to me for most of my teen years.)
My two closest friends who’d given birth, Michelle and Kate, had both done it without drugs, too. Also, the idea of sticking that huge needle into my back, inches from my spinal cord was way scarier to me than any trauma my vag was going to go through. Vaginas are meant to birth out babies (I thought!). Needles are not supposed to be put inches from my spinal cord! But most everyone I told that I was going to do the birth without drugs said I was crazy or that it would be impossible. Most of Marc’s girlfriends would just snort and give a knowing, “Yeah. Okay. Talk to me after . . .”
My due date was officially August 15, but I knew from my hypnobirthing that babies come when they’re ready, not some random date based off when you remember your last period starting. I was secretly hoping the baby would show up on August 8 so her birthday could be 8/8/08 but alas, it was not meant to be. Plus, my doctor later told me that the hospital was a total shit show of women getting induced for that very reason. I’ve always had this picture in my head of women giving birth in the hallways of Cedars-Sinai because they wanted a cool and auspicious birthday for their baby.
In the weeks leading up to the birth, we didn’t have much to do. I didn’t really feel like going out, although a few times Marc forced me out of the house to go see bands play or to a friend’s birthday party, where I was always miserable. Not that he noticed, since I think he was just happy to be out and seeing people. We spent a lot of time watching TV leading up to my labor. It was August 2008. The second season of Mad Men was about to start airing on AMC and people were just finding the show and getting into it. THERE WAS A LOT OF HYPE. Marc and I decided we should watch the first season in the two weeks before the second season started so we could jump in and be all caught up. Marc and I watched every episode of Mad Men that existed and SOME OF THEM TWICE, which was a lot of Mad Men in a little amount of time.
On Monday the eleventh, I went in for a checkup where my doctor was a little concerned that my amniotic fluid was low. We did a stress test on the baby, which is where you sit in a chair with a fetal heart rate monitor on for an hour and they make sure the baby isn’t showing any signs of distress. She was fine, so he told me to leave and go drink a ton of water and come back that afternoon. When I went back, my fluid was better, but he still was thinking that the baby could come sooner rather than later. Since he knew and was on board with my vaginal, no-drugs birth plan, he suggested something called “stripping the membranes.” (I’m so, so sorry if you haven’t had a baby yet and are reading this, because it all sounds disgusting. And I mean, for the most part, it kind of is. But then you get a baby at the end of it all! Yay?) Basically, if you’re a few centimeters dilated, your doctor can put on a glove and then (gross) stick his fingers up in your cervix and kind of sweep around and sometimes this induces labor. But it’s way less intense than having a drug like Pitocin.
So! Membranes swept, I went home. We watched some Mad Men, took a walk when it cooled down, and waited for me to go into labor. Which didn’t happen. I started feeling some contractions for sure, even painful o
nes (or so I thought) but they weren’t consistent enough to count. The next morning, Marc and I went back to sweet Dr. Crane (who is totally famous now, because he’s the Kardashians’ doctor and was on their show, but he was always famous in L.A., because he’s seriously the best). Again, my fluid was on the low side, again stress test for baby; she was fine, again with the membrane sweep. Dr. Crane suggested we walk around Beverly Hills for a bit and see if anything started to happen. We did and bought some pool furniture that was on sale (because why not?) and then walked back dejected. Nothing.
Dr. Crane did one final membrane sweep—I mean, at this point, were there any membranes left? It clearly wasn’t working, but whatever. I knew that I would probably end up on Pitocin in a day or so and then probably have to get an epidural. I was a little bummed and tried to google the name of some restaurant in the Valley that serves a salad that puts women into labor, but I couldn’t find it and it was too hot to drive to the Valley anyway. Marc had to go to work and I decided to go get my hair colored because I felt like after the baby came, it would be a while before I could get my roots touched up. So I did that, and went home and watched some TV, bored and hot and wanting to go into labor. After it got dark, Marc suggested we take a super-long walk, ending with me hiking up the giant hill that leads up to our neighborhood. We must have looked insane. I was a giant inflatable beach ball, and here was my tall skinny husband pushing me up a hill. We watched the last two episodes of Mad Men we had left and then went to bed.
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