53
Day 160
When Elle’s mother was sick, I remember thinking that the dying was taking too damned long. Every groan and every gasping breath tortured Elle, and I finally realized that Alice’s illness hurt Christopher, too. And Hank. Watching Elle this way was like being scourged, but I kept in mind that every day she lived was another chance for the baby.
The ultrasound at the end of October indicated the baby was a girl. The one at Thanksgiving confirmed it. There is uncertainty in hope, but even with its tenuous nature, it summons our strength and pulls us through fear and grief—and even death. So I named my little girl Hope.
But she wasn’t out of danger yet. Elle’s blood pressure was becoming increasingly problematic, and Blythe was now ultra-sounding the baby daily to determine if Hope was tolerating Elle’s deterioration. I tried to be there each time, but that day I was running late. One of my patients suffered a slight complication with his anesthesia that morning, which messed up my schedule. I crossed the snow-covered parking lot to the nursing home and then raced through the lobby full of the wheelchair-bound, fragile-skinned, white-haired women—and a few men—who had lived long enough to end up in a place like this one.
Our family had taken over the two rooms down at the end of the north wing of the Seashore Nursing Home. Most nights I slept there. Hank spent most days reading aloud to Elle. She couldn’t hear her father, but I never discouraged him.
I missed her, and the only way I could cope was to write my own letters, Dear Peep. Maybe one day Hope would want to know the story of her parents’ lives together. But for now the letters were a way to keep me sane.
Blythe was cleaning the ultrasound wand off as I entered Elle’s room. “It’s time to take down the Christmas decorations. January is over tomorrow.”
“Elle loved Christmas,” I said, but I meant, this was her last Christmas. “How’s the baby?”
Blythe turned away from me as she spoke. “Not too bad, sucking her thumb, actually. Elle, however … Matt, she’s slipping. Her blood work is worse. I want to move her back to the hospital today. Her kidneys are shutting down, too, and her blood pressure is up. Even though I lowered the dose of her heparin yesterday, her morning labs showed her blood-clotting time is way off. She could hemorrhage. I could go on, but you get the idea. It’s not good.” Her pink ribbon fell out of her hair, and she bent to pick it up. “Did you notice the petechiae?”
“No. Where?”
Blythe pointed to small hemorrhagic pinpoints, another indicator of abnormal bleeding, on Elle’s forearms, her belly, and her forehead near her hairline.
“It’s still early to deliver the baby,” I said.
“The odds are pretty good at thirty-one weeks. And under the circumstances, the odds are better for the baby outside, but we’ll try to give her twenty-four more hours. I want to give Elle one more round of steroids for the baby’s lungs first,” Blythe said.
I pulled up a chair to Elle’s bedside and took her hand in mine. “When do you want to move her?”
“I already called for transportation. The ambulance should be here within the hour.” She slid a lab report at me.
Elle’s levels were far worse than I thought. “But the baby is okay?”
“She’s holding her own, but she’s not growing as well as I’d like. We can’t wait. It could go bad fast. I’ll give you a few minutes alone.” Blythe closed the door behind her as she left.
I rested my hand on Elle’s. “I love you, Peep. God, this is it?”
Silence can be deafening. She left so long ago.
“I miss you.”
I bent down and kissed her belly. “It’s okay, Hope. Daddy’s here, and Mommy wrote all kinds of letters, and I’ll make sure you know all her stories.”
Sometimes, my mind takes stills, pictures that seem frozen instead of running film. As the double doors to the labor room opened, we passed by the admissions desk, where a man sat holding his wife’s white-knuckled hand. A consoling smile on his face, concern in his eyes. I don’t know why I only saw his expression and not hers. It was as if she were a ghost.
Usually people anticipate new life on the OB floor. That was my expectation, too. But I was also anticipating grief. I was afraid. Afraid for the baby, afraid for Elle, afraid for the distilling moment when her body would eventually die, and I knew that time was racing toward us. I was afraid for how empty I would feel without any part of Elle left in this world.
The routine things happened next, a transfer from the gurney onto the hospital bed, the placement of the fetal monitor, the starting of an IV in Elle’s hand. Elle, who was once afraid of needles, did not flinch.
The less routine things followed. My mother’s face appeared in the doorway of Elle’s hospital room. We both wept when I explained Elle’s body was spiraling down, slowly perhaps, but in the irreversible way that water runs down a drain.
I was pacing the eight feet of floor space. Two steps one way, two back. My mother hugged me, anchoring me, holding me still. But stillness was uncomfortable. Stillness was death. Stillness was Elle.
“Let’s take a walk, honey,” Mom said.
I shook my head.
She squeezed my arm the way she used to when I was a kid, the way that made me pay attention to her without raising her voice above a whisper. She wasn’t making a request. She was telling me. “You have to take care of yourself. The baby needs you, and worrying about Elle won’t help the baby. You can’t afford another heart attack now. Nothing’s going to happen for hours. Let’s get something to eat.”
I followed my mother out of the room, but not before I looked back. I would always look back.
As though she’d heard my thoughts, Mom said, “You have to think about the baby, not about Elle. You have to look forward.”
My mother was right. I didn’t want to remember Elle like this. I wanted to see her as I did the morning before the accident, backlit by the blue sky and the sun reflecting off the river. I wanted to remember her strong and healthy. I wanted to have her back that way. Elle was giving our daughter life. And I wanted to give Hope the memories of Elle—the way she was for thirty-five years, not the memory of her dying in a hospital bed.
I followed Mom to the coffee shop, not exactly the best place for a heart-healthy meal. The smell of bacon filled my nostrils, but I ordered a bowl of vegetable soup. I hadn’t had an appetite for months and I’d dropped weight. The only reason for eating these days was to appease my mother. We both made calls. I left voice messages for Keisha and Jake. Phil said he’d cover the hospital.
Mom’s cell phone rang, and after a minute of monosyllabic grunts she clipped it closed. “Christopher doesn’t want to be at the hospital any longer than necessary, but he said to let him know when they take her in to deliver the baby. He will be there in the waiting room.”
I tapped my foot, reminding myself that if Elle were still here, she’d remind me Christopher was doing the best he could, that he was just a kid when Alice was sick, that it scarred him, too.
“Hank was in a meeting, but he’ll be here soon,” Mom said.
Although the sound of Hope’s amplified heartbeat steadied me as we returned to Elle’s room, I didn’t notice how slow it was. The chaos must have distracted me. A respiratory therapist was using an ambu bag to move oxygen in and out of Elle’s lungs. She’d been breathing by herself since I’d woken after my surgery. And now she wasn’t.
I strode into the room. “What’s happening?”
One nurse was hanging blood and another was starting another IV. “Her blood pressure dropped. We’re taking her to the OR for a stat C-section.”
“How low is her pressure?” I asked.
“Sixty over twenty-seven.” Meaning Elle was in shock. The nurse, whose name I couldn’t recall, turned to Mom. “Blythe’s scrubbing.”
I pushed past the others in the room and made it to Elle and kissed her forehead, noting that the little petechiae had grown more pronounced in the forty minutes
we were gone. “Hang in there, Peep. Just a little while longer.”
Mom was pulling out the fetal monitor strip and examining it.
“How’s the baby?” I asked.
She blanched. “Come on, Matt. Out of the way. Let them get Elle to the OR.” She took my arm and pulled me out to the hall.
“The baby? Mom? What’s wrong?”
“Bradycardia. The fetal heart rate is only in the sixties.”
That’s when I realized it. I wasn’t hearing the rapid fetal heart rate. Hope’s was slower than my own. And if a baby’s heartbeat was that low, she warranted CPR.
“I’m going to change into scrubs,” I said, starting down the corridor.
“They aren’t going to let you in the OR, Matt.”
“Yes, they will.”
Mom’s eyes filled with tears. “Not like this. Elle is going to die in the next few hours, or maybe sooner in the OR.”
“I know. That’s why I will be there. For her. For Hope,” I said as I ducked into the men’s locker room. I needed to know that even though I couldn’t save Elle, I never abandoned her. Less than a minute later I emerged wearing blue scrubs in time to see them pushing Elle’s gurney through the double doors to the C-section room. I followed at a breakneck speed, slowing at the outside door to don a surgical mask, cap, and shoe covers. Fully garbed, I stepped to the side as they positioned Elle on the OR table.
The anesthesiologist stripped off Elle’s hospital gown and put lead wires on her naked chest, just before they buried her under a mass of sterile drapes. Then he shoved a tube down her throat to suction out the contents of her stomach, but instead of pulling up her tan-colored feeding formula, what looked like old blood was coming up through the suction catheter. The anesthesiologist’s eyes widened as the color changed to bright red. Elle was hemorrhaging.
Her heart monitor alarmed. “She’s throwing a lot of PVCs and odd-looking cardiac complexes, and she’s having a GI bleed. You better get that baby out fast, Blythe,” the anesthesiologist said.
“Hang lidocaine for the arrhythmias,” Blythe said.
My mother came in behind me.
“You sure you want to be in here, Linney?” someone asked.
Mom took my hand in hers, leaned into me, and summoned her voice. “Yes.”
The NICU team shoved in, three of them—a neonatologist, a nurse, and a respiratory tech. They checked the resuscitation equipment for the baby. “How’s the baby’s heart rate?” one asked.
“We lost it about a minute ago.”
My head started to reel, and a stool was pushed behind me. “I should take you out of here,” Mom said.
“No,” I said, putting my head down between my knees. “No.”
The OB resident dumped Betadine, an orange-brown antiseptic, on Elle’s belly, and without leaving time for the disinfectant to kill a single bacterium, Blythe cut into Elle’s abdomen with a deliberate swipe of her scalpel. “Suction. I need more suction,” she said. The blood was pouring out as if Blythe hit an artery. She hadn’t. This was a combination of the blood thinner and possibly the preeclampsia doing its damage.
One of the neonatal people, not recognizing that I was there, said, “Call for backup. This is not going to be good. Start drawing meds. I want a bolus of saline ready and …” He continued on.
One nudged the other. “Shush, that’s the father.”
“What’s he doing in here?”
Blythe was cutting fast. Another doctor was tugging on a retractor so hard that he nearly pulled Elle off the OR table. More blood gushed out and onto the floor.
Then, with strength and tenderness, Blythe reached into Elle, practically elbow-deep, and pulled out my blue, limp daughter. It was like seeing Dylan again.
The NICU team put her on the radiant warmer and closed in around her.
Please, God, save Hope.
I stood and crossed to where the anesthesiologist was at Elle’s head. I knew him. He knew me. He looked away. Certainly I shouldn’t have been there at that moment, but it was as if they had all turned blind eyes.
Blythe was operating frantically, cauterizing bleeders. As if it mattered now, as if it was still possible to save my wife.
I dropped to my knees beside the operating table and matched my fingertips with Elle’s. Please, Elle, know how much I love you.
“She’s in V-fib,” the anesthesiologist said to Blythe.
“Matt, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to resuscitate?” Blythe asked.
I hesitated for a moment. I had promised to respect Elle. “Do not resuscitate,” I said. “Let her be at peace.”
This was anything but peace.
Everyone had said it was impossible, but I told them to save the baby anyway. I told them to try. I wanted the baby no matter what it cost, but I hadn’t thought it would be like this, with them violently ripping Elle open. And the baby dead, too. The NICU team was there, trying to resuscitate Hope, but she looked like Dylan did when he was stillborn, pale and limp.
“Do you have Apgar scores?” Blythe asked.
“Six at one minute. Not quite at five minutes for the second one.”
Apgar of six?
“Heart rate one-sixty,” a female voice said.
“Come on, breathe,” the neonatologist said. “That’s it. That’s better. She’s coming around.”
I jumped to my feet.
“She’s pinking up,” the neonatologist said, turning to me slightly.
And suddenly my tiny daughter cried, a big whelping scream.
“There you go,” the nurse said.
Mom had pushed her way in by the NICU team. “Matt, she’s beautiful.”
I took my own breath, maybe the first real breath I’d taken in months. “I need to see her.”
The respiratory therapist stepped aside, and my little girl, smeared in blood but decidedly pink, was bawling.
I turned back as the anesthesiologist turned off Elle’s heart monitor.
Blythe spoke softly, “Time of death, one-thirteen.”
Come back to me in dreams; that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.
~Christina Rossetti~
Epilogue
Four Months Later
During the past year I’ve come to think of grief as a tidal wave. It unexpectedly rises from the depths of my being, carrying with it the debris it’s picked up along the way. Sometimes I wake angry that Elle wasn’t more careful. Some mornings I reach out for her, still denying she’s gone forever. Then I lie there pleading with God, begging Him that I would do anything if He would just make the damned nightmare go away. I have wept. I have accepted the love and support of family and friends.
And I have experienced joy because my daughter is thriving. I peek inside Hope’s room.
Our Lab, Hubble, appointed himself her guardian angel the day I brought my little girl home, and now he lifts his head off the carpet as if to acknowledge he has his post covered.
Inside the crib, she sleeps, her arms stretched out wide, her chubby baby fingers splayed. How much she has already grown astounds me. She weighed less than three pounds at birth; she has already more than tripled her weight. She has her mother’s white-blond hair and pointy chin. I see myself in her other features. Her eyes grow darker with each day, brown like mine. She is both of us. She is her own little person.
Hope shows no indication she plans to wake up soon to help me procrastinate. She’s probably storing up on sleep. Her Baptism is tomorrow.
Everyone will come, Mom and Hank, my brothers and their families, Chris, his wife and daughter, Phil and Melanie, Blythe—and even Judge Wheeler. And because of Jake’s role in saving Hope, Father Meehan is allowing my non-Catholic best friend to be her godfather. Officially only one godparent must be Catholic, and Keisha is.
Keisha is very excited these days—and not just about godmothering Hope. Keisha and Guy decided to try
foster-parenting an older child, one who is likely to become available for adoption soon. Last night she called and said they’d passed their home study, so it shouldn’t be too long of a wait. I’m happy for them.
“Sleep a little longer, baby girl,” I whisper to Hope as I turn to go. “Big day tomorrow.”
On the way to the stairs, I pass Hank’s room. He moved in with us—“for the time being,” he says. He takes care of Hope while I work and nights when I get called into the hospital.
Mom helps—in her own way, too. She made a big fuss about painting Hope’s room pink. I said it was too “girlie.” And Mom said, “What other color should it be?” She tells me I know nothing about raising girls, so I have conceded certain points, but not the hot-pink room. Still, Mom has stuffed Hope’s closet full of ruffled dresses—which I’m pretty sure Elle would hate, and my mother, Grandma to Hope, babysits two days a week—which I’m pretty sure Elle would love. Everyone is pitching in. Evidently it takes a single dad and a village to raise one nine-pound baby girl.
But before the celebration, before the sacrament, I have something I have to do.
The decision to bury Elle here on the farm was not a difficult one, but it turned into something quite complex. An ordinance passed that only allowed burials in professionally run cemeteries, and the town refused to give us a variance for interring the casket up in the family plot. The only concession they made was that if Elle were cremated, then I could bury her ashes anywhere on the property, not a real concession at all.
Our family didn’t like the idea of cremation, but Elle convinced me it was best when Celina died. And when Dylan did. “They were stardust,” she said. And no falling star ever shone more brightly than Elle.
Now that the ground is no longer frozen, I will fulfill the promise I made so long ago. Celina’s ashes will rest with Elle—and of course Dylan’s. Certainly she would want him with her, too. But there’s something else. After the two other miscarriages, the ones which came too early for shape and gender, Elle needed a way to commemorate our “babies.” So she purchased two small meteorite fragments, and we buried them in the garden inside a small box made of elm. “Stardust,” Elle said. This morning I dug up the two urns, Celina’s and Dylan’s, and the meteorite fragments.
The Promise of Stardust Page 34
