“I don’t,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Wall, I didn’t catch that.”
“No,” I said a little more loudly.
“You suffered a miscarriage.”
You know when you stand up too fast and the blood rushes from your head? Everything goes dark for a minute and you feel like you’re going to faint? That’s what I felt when Dr. McClintock told me what had happened. I was sure she must have had me confused with someone else.
“Oh, Dr. McClintock, sorry I didn’t know you were in here. The patient was tachycardic.”
I looked up to see the nurse I recognized as Michelle. She’d come in for a bed check the night before and hadn’t been expecting me to be awake. I was reading and she’d offered me a sleeping pill, but I’d lied and told her I’d be asleep in a few minutes. I’d kept reading until the morning.
I zoned out as Michelle bypassed Dr. McClintock and started fussing with the machines I was hooked up to, still processing what the doctor had told me. Miscarriage? She’d said miscarriage. That couldn’t be right. That would mean a baby had been inside me.
Eli’s and my baby. A baby made from us. Our baby.
“Looks good.” Michelle squeezed my arm. “Don’t know why your heart was racing so fast but everything is good now.”
As the door closed behind Michelle, the doctor’s attention focused back on me. “Do you understand what that means?”
“I lost a baby,” I whispered. Suddenly the three students behind her didn’t feel like people learning, but voyeurs intruding on the worst moment of my life. I wanted them to leave. I wanted everyone out. How was it possible to feel so much for something you hadn’t even known you had?
“Did you know you were pregnant?”
I shook my head, too shocked to speak. Dr. McClintock placed her hand on mine. The gesture was so kind and unexpected that sobs tore from my body. I couldn’t help it. A floodgate released as I mourned the loss of a child never to be born. I mourned the future Eli and I would never have. I grieved so many losses unaccounted for and racked up over the years that my body began to wither from the weight.
Eventually the doctors left, leaving me to my own tear-soaked misery. Some time later, the amount unknown by tears, a social worker came into offer comfort. Snot and tears tattooed across my face, I wailed at her to leave and was left alone for hours.
Mama came back but only dropped by to give me a kiss on my cheek. She wouldn’t look me in the eyes, and I wondered if she knew, if the doctors had told her what happened. She seemed so much more distant than before. I yearned for her touch, for comfort, but I knew it wouldn’t come. The only comfort Mama could offer was books, and she’d already given me that.
When there was a knock on the door and Dr. McClintock entered, Mama stood up and left to give me privacy. I wanted to yell at her to stay. I wanted to tell her I couldn’t do this on my own, that I needed someone with me to tell me everything was going to be okay. Instead I watched her close the door.
She knew. She was ashamed of me. I was unclean.
I looked at Dr. McClintock, her hair was a neat brown bun with only a few frays straying from the crown. She had wrinkles but unlike Mama’s deep grooves, they were light and accentuated her kind eyes and lips. She was not how I had imagined the grim reaper to be.
Dr. McClintock sat down in the same way she had before, when she’d unloaded the biggest of bombs. I braced myself, unsure of what more she could have to tell me.
“Never again?” Dr. McClintock’s words drummed in my ears like the finite reverberation of a gong.
“I’m afraid the hemorrhaging has caused irreparable damage to your fallopian tubes. The bleeding wouldn’t stop so we had to remove one tube and the scarring on the other is extensive.”
I blinked, trying to absorb what she was saying. I would never have children. Ever. I would never, ever have children. I didn’t even know if I wanted to have children, but there she was saying I had not only lost one, but I would also never have one again. Ever.
“Why?” I croaked. My tears had dried up. I was probably too dehydrated to produce them, but the cramping, aching feeling of sobs still remained. The lonely, tearing sensation in my gut was still there as I asked her the question I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to.
Dr. McClintock adjusted her glasses. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you why you miscarried in the first place. I can give you a list of possible causes, but this early in the pregnancy they’re all just guesses. I can tell you how this happened. Your body had a natural miscarriage; likely you thought it was an early period. You’ve probably been noticing some light spotting.”
I nodded, feeling numb. Earlier that week I had thought I started my period.
“What happened was tissue from the fetus remained inside you and made it impossible for your body to heal. The large, blackish blobs you noticed were blood clots that your body made while trying to heal itself.”
I thought back to when I’d sat in the tub as black, slimy blood flowed out of me. It was like a scene out of a horror movie. Mama watched from outside the bathroom, offering no comfort, just a fearful face. Daddy had prayed in the hallway, not for my safety but for my sins.
“You lost nearly half your blood, Grace,” Dr. McClintock said. “It’s a miracle you’re alive.”
The nice doctor touched my hand again and I nodded, barely hearing her. The look on Daddy’s face when the ambulance had wheeled me away hadn’t been of concern or fear, but of hate. Even a crazy man knew what that amount of blood between the legs meant. I was condemned in his eyes. A harlot. A whore. A demon. Everything he had tried to beat out of me from birth.
I was barren. The one baby I’d had and ever would have was dead. Eli and I were dust in the wind. If this was a miracle then I didn’t want to know what a curse looked like.
There was a reason why Daddy wasn’t there and Mama was avoiding me. The hospital staff kept asking if they could call someone or if they should look out for visitors. I didn’t have it in me to say no, no one was coming. I was all alone.
I hadn’t realized until the cab pulled up how much I was dreading coming home. Don’t get me wrong, I hated the hospital. I hated everything from the ambulance ride to when they checked me out. It was without a doubt the worst experience of my life. In a matter of days I had gained something irreplaceable and lost it before I could count to three.
Mama paid the taxi driver with a credit card. The past few days had been one soul shock after another. Mama had a credit card? I wanted to ask her how she’d gotten one or if Daddy let her have it, but my tongue was numb. My entire being was numb. I could only experience things in my periphery now.
I couldn’t think of what happened, because any time I thought about the reason I was at the hospital my lungs seized up. The doctors said it was a panic attack. I didn’t feel like I was panicking. I felt like I was dying. I nearly welcomed that feeling, too, because what did I have left?
I’d ruined my relationship with Eli and I’d…
Oh lord.
The feeling.
My lungs were seizing up.
I clutched the dark oak doorway for support.
“Gracie?” Mama put her bag down and turned to me. “Gracie what’s wrong? Is it the panic attacks again?”
I nodded. I couldn’t respond because my throat was paralyzed by brutal memories. I had failed. I had failed something that completely and utterly needed me and I didn’t know it until it was too late.
I was basically a murderer. I was no good, like Daddy said.
Tears burned my lids as I slid down the doorway, too exhausted to stand. Mama grasped my shoulder, concern etching her wrinkles like grooves in tree bark. “I’m gonna find Daddy so I can take you to your room.”
In the hospital, surrounded by rules and routine and nightly bed checks, Mama and I had more freedom than ever. We had freedom to choose our meals, freedom to ask questions, freedom to be. Now back in the darkness of our home I understood without hesitation why Mama had l
eft me sufferin’.
When a patient in the hospital was having a panic attack or any type of discomfort, the nurses and doctors dropped everything to attend to them. It didn’t matter what was happening or if they were busy reading, they dropped everything.
I think maybe Mama would have liked to live like that, with the freedom to drop everything and choose. Once upon a time she’d had her choices. She had to have. She’d chosen to marry Daddy, right? Now, her ability to choose was as dried up as the grass on our lawn.
Mama unclenched my shoulder and made her way into the darkness. Even though we’d been back for at least ten minutes, I hadn’t heard a sound from Daddy. He was no doubt ignoring us as punishment for leaving. For getting treatment. For getting help. If all Daddy did was give us the silent treatment, though, we’d be gettin’ off easy.
I lay against the hard, wooden doorway, my breath slowly returning to normal and the spots in my vision disappearing. In the hospital Mama would’ve called for help, but here we waited for Daddy’s permission.
I looked out the open door, past the porch at the dead grass and overgrown weeds. Beyond I could faintly make out the town square. We didn’t have a hospital, just one doctor older than medicine itself. The ambulance had to take Mama and me to the nearest city. It was nearly a forty-five minute drive, or at least that’s what they had told me. I passed out.
I’ll never forget the look on Mama’s face when I woke up. It was like she was seein’ a ghost. Maybe she was. Maybe I was dead and this was hell.
I watched as storm clouds formed on the horizon, casting clouds over the yellow grass and turning it an odd grey color. Maybe the grass was a metaphor for my life: barren and dead, even with rain. As more tears of self-pity threatened to fall, I heard a scream. Mama’s scream. Like the doctors and nurses at the hospital, I jumped up and ran to her without hesitation.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard Mama scream over the years, of course. Screams in our house were like crickets at night. At first they were loud and annoying, but then you just started to ignore them. I think something had changed in me at the hospital, though.
Well, of course something had changed in me, but I mean something…mental.
I didn’t want to listen to the screams any more. I didn’t want to willingly let myself hurt and I didn’t want to let Mama hurt either. We’d not yet been home for half an hour and already she was screaming. That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t how life should be.
I ran to her without thinking, following her scream all the way to Daddy’s study. As I entered the study I saw only her back, hunched over.
“Mama? Mama what is it?” I stepped gingerly toward her, reaching my hand for her back. “Mama? What is it Mama? You’re scarin’ me.” She wouldn’t respond, even as I touched her shoulder. From behind it looked like she was fixated on something. I stepped to her side to get a better look.
“Mama—” The words died in my throat. In front of us lay Daddy, on his stomach, unmoving. What skin I could see was a terrible blackish green and his hair was falling out. Now, Daddy never had much hair but he did have some and the some that he had was hanging off his head in a way that wasn’t right or natural.
I didn’t need to see anymore, and I definitely didn’t need to smell anymore. The smell was enough to cause bile to rise in my throat.
“Mama.” I grabbed her by the elbow, trying to lead her out, but she wouldn’t budge. She stared at the corpse with a steely gaze that I couldn’t place. “Mama we have to call 911.” My words may as well have floated right through her ears. I let my grip drop and ran to Daddy’s desk, the only place in the house with a phone.
Maybe that was fortune. Or maybe it was fate.
It wasn’t lost on me that this was the third time our whole lives we’d called 911 and most of those times had been this week. There was a saying that when it rains it pours, and I was starting to believe that.
“911, what is your emergency?” The operator’s voice came clear and calm through the phone. I, on the other hand, was a wreck.
“My daddy,” I squawked. “I think he’s dead.”
“Can you feel for a pulse?” the operator asked, her voice still smooth and controlled. I looked at the putrid body that had once been my father. The thought of touching it made me want to vomit. “Ma’am, can you feel for a pulse?”
I swallowed my disgust and walked over to the body. Bending down I reached a shaking hand out to his neck. Mama watched us, her eyes glazed over, her body stiff. Daddy’s neck felt warm and slimy and I quickly withdrew my fingers. It wasn’t enough time to feel for a pulse, but there was no way what I’d just felt was alive.
“There’s no pulse!” I screeched into the phone, wanting to jump in a hot shower.
“I’ve dispatched responders to your location, ma’am.”
I lowered the phone from my ear and watched the scene around me, feeling like an actor in a movie. Mama was standing over Daddy’s dead body. My hands were covered in Daddy’s deadness. In the distance I heard sirens.
Dreams plagued my sleep like phantoms. My whole body ached and my head pounded like I’d been drinking. I could count the number of times I’d had spirits on my right hand, and I could count how many times I’d been drunk to boot: once. It didn’t take a genius to figure why I didn’t drink. When your daddy beats the fact that spirits are the devils juice into you over and over again, you start to believe it.
Funny thing is, that didn’t stop Daddy from partaking.
I rolled over, groaning into my pillow. I wished I had a magical remedy to remove the memories from my brain. In the day I could work hard and drive them to the back of my skull, but at night they surfaced. I wasn’t safe in my sleep.
Sun so bright it saturated my curtains made the room a luminous yellow-grey. I moaned and rolled over again because the sun hurt my eyes. The memories had drowned me and made me drunk without my consent, and now I was paying for it the morning after. They still thrummed in my head. With each punch of my headache a memory banged against my skull.
“Go away!” I screamed into my pillow, banging my fist against the headboard.
“I was just coming to check on ya.” I lifted my heavy head to see Vera in the doorway, holding two cups of some kind of liquid. “I brought you tea.” She raised the cups. “It’s past noon, I was getting worried. Have a little too much fun last night?”
I shifted and sat up in the bed. Slouched, my head hung low and my dark hair made a curtain against the sun’s rays. Feeling like a flu had taken a hold’a me, it took all my energy to simply raise my arm and beckon Vera inside.
Vera jumped on the bed, rattling my insides.
“Mmm,” I said after taking a sip. “Tea.”
“Sweet, just like Mama made it,” Vera chirped.
“Where is your mama?” The words slipped out. I was so tired and ill feeling I didn’t think how personal a question it was. I was about to tell her she didn’t have to answer, but Vera was already speaking.
“Dead.” She said it so simply, as if I’d asked her the time or weather. I nodded, sipping on the tea, not sure if I should keep asking questions or offer comfort. “What about you?”
“My mama? She’s alive. Or something.” Or something…I wasn’t sure you could call Mama alive. She was simply takin’ up space in the world now. Before, when Daddy was around, there hadn’t been much of her to begin with. She survived for me, so that I would live, I think. She’d bandaged my wounds and brought me books. She’d done the best she could, considering.
Considering Daddy was doing the best he could on her, nightly.
“Or something?” Vera asked.
“Or something,” I responded. I was still wrestling with my errant memories from the night’s dreams; I didn’t want to dive into the memories of Mama and Daddy with Vera.
Vera nodded. We held our cups of tea, watching the sunlight dance against the curtain. I think we were both caught up in memories we’d rather have forgotten. That’s the thing about me
mory, though. The ones you want to forget stick like glue and the ones you want to remember slip away like pictures in sand.
“Do you have a daddy?” Vera asked as another bright spot of sun spun like a ballerina against the curtain.
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’d be the only one,” I whispered into my nearly empty cup.
“I never knew mine,” Vera said. “Always wondered what he was like.”
I wondered what that would have been like, to never know Daddy. I imagined I would have been like Vera, wishing and wonderin’ about him. A bitter laugh threatened to escape my throat and it burned like bile in my body.
What a putrid thing, to wish for Daddy.
“I’m sorry you never got to know your daddy,” I finally said.
Our teas were long finished but Vera still took up space on my bed. We sat shoulder to shoulder, leaning on the cushiony headboard of my bed.
“We ever gonna talk about what brought you here?” Vera asked, her voice like a gong in our stillness.
“I told you. My brother.”
“What really brought you here, Grace.”
“Why do you care?” I felt defensive. If I told Vera the reason I’d left town then I’d have to admit it to myself and I wasn’t ready for that just yet. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready for that.
“I’ll tell you why I left,” Vera whispered. “Why I really left.”
“Vera…” I trailed off, still staring out my window. People were starting to walk on the sidewalks and get into their cars. The sun had passed its zenith and the Carolina sky was replaced with the blue-grey of dusk. “I don’t want to do this right now. I have to get ready for work.”
“His name was Cruz,” Vera said, her voice almost as quiet as mine. “His asshole friends called him Zero. I loved him, or I don’t know, I think I loved him. He hit me and called me stupid. But there were times when he called me beautiful and said I was the reason he walked. I lived for those moments, ya know?”
Let Me Go (Owned Book 2) Page 9