I was mourning my baby after childbirth—then my 8-year-old son whispered, “Mom, she’s not gone. I saw what Daddy did.”
My son Elias spent seven months waiting for his sister.
He talked to my stomach every night. He had a whole routine — he’d lie on the floor next to the couch with his head on my hip and give her the weather report, the school report, and a summary of whatever he’d been reading about that week, which for most of the spring was volcanoes.
He helped us paint the little room at the end of the hall a pale yellow that took three coats because we cheaped out on the primer. He put more paint on himself than the wall and Grant let him keep the roller as a souvenir.
And he spent three weeks choosing a stuffed rabbit.
Three weeks. We went to four different stores. He rejected one because its eyes were “wrong,” one because it was too big, and one because it had a bow tie and he said his sister wasn’t going to be “a formal kind of person.”
The one he picked was gray with a slightly lopsided face. He named it Pim before she was even born.
His reasoning, delivered to me in the car with total seriousness: “Every little sister needs somebody to sleep with.”
I was thirty-five weeks along on the fifteenth of May.
I want to lay the medical part out plainly, once, and then move past it, because I’ve had to explain it about forty times since and I’ve got it down to a paragraph.
I had placenta accreta. Nobody knew. It doesn’t always show. It means the placenta grows into the wall of the uterus instead of sitting on it, and when the baby comes, the placenta doesn’t come away, and you bleed in a way that human beings are not built to survive without help.
I went into labor at four in the afternoon. Orla was born at 8:52 p.m. And then the floor of my life fell out.
I remember three things.
I remember the room filling with people, more people than should fit, and how none of them were talking to me anymore.
I remember Dr. Vaught saying a number to somebody by the door.
And I remember Grant’s face over the top of a mask somebody had shoved at him, and his hand crushing mine, and behind him my mother pulling Elias backward out of the doorway with both arms around his chest, and Elias’s face.
That’s the last frame. My eight-year-old’s face going out the door.
Then anesthesia.
They were in there three hours. They took my uterus. I had eleven units of blood.
I woke up at 12:40 in the morning in a room with the lights turned down, and Grant was in the chair next to the bed, and his eyes were swollen almost shut.
I said, “Where is she.”
And he said — I’ve reconstructed this a thousand times, with a lawyer, with a therapist, with a hospital administrator, so I’m confident about the words —
He said, “Naomi, she’s very small. They said she might not make it.”
And I heard: she didn’t make it.
I want you to understand something about that room. I was nineteen hours into labor, three hours out of surgery, on magnesium and a morphine pump, and I had lost enough blood to kill a person. I could not hold my own hand up.
I heard four words instead of five.
And I screamed.
I don’t remember screaming. Grant remembers it, and a nurse named Bettina remembers it, and my mother, who came running from the family lounge, remembers it. Apparently I screamed until my throat gave out and then I made a sound that wasn’t screaming anymore.
And Grant held onto me and said, over and over, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.”
Which is true. Every word of it is true. He was sorry.
He just wasn’t sorry for what I thought he was sorry for.
That is the entire story. Everything else is detail.
I was in that hospital five days. Grant handled everything.
He talked to the doctors in the hallway. He talked to my mother. He answered my phone. He told people. He took a stack of forms off the bed and said, don’t, I’ll do those, and I let him, because I could not sit up without help and because a thing had happened to my brain where I could not follow a sentence to the end of it.
Not once in those five days did anyone from that hospital say the word “died” to me.
I have thought about this so much that it’s worn a groove.
What they said was: “I’m so sorry for everything you’ve been through.” What they said was: “You’ve had a very hard time.” What they said, standing at the foot of my bed with their hands folded, was, “How are you doing today, Mrs. Dressler,” in a voice with a floor under it.
