Every Second With You

by Lauren Blakely

  She leaves quickly, her rapid clip the surest sign that whatever is happening to Harley is speeding into the danger zone. My blood races at a kamikaze pace, because when the nurse takes off to find the doctor, you know the news is going to be bad.

  “Sherlock.” Harley’s voice is so soft now, so weak, as she tries to play the name game again.

  I’m about to say Watson when she draws a sharp breath, and slaps her palm against her forehead. She scrunches her eyes closed and moans, like a cat trapped, and the sound turns my skin cold. “What is it?”

  “My head hurts so much.”

  My stomach drops. I can’t sit here and let this happen. “Fuck. We need to figure out what’s going on.”

  I stand up and head to the doorway, scanning the halls quickly for the nurse or the doctor. I look past the counter where all the lab techs are gathered around charts and computers, then the other direction, where I come face to face with the doctor.

  “Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?” I ask heavily.

  “Her blood pressure is rising, and her platelets are low,” the doctor says.

  “Which means?”

  “It means her preeclampsia has advanced into HELLP syndrome.”

  “I have no idea what that is.”

  “It’s a variation of pregnancy hypertension. She and the baby are at risk, so we need to deliver immediately.”

  “Okay. But I thought that was already the plan. To deliver,” I say, and my throat is dry, my heart is thumping. “So are you gonna induce or something?”

  He shakes his head. “No. We need to deliver right away. We were hoping to give her more time on mag, but we need to move quickly. She’s going to need an emergency C-section. We’ll need to start prepping her now.”

  Emergency.

  The word rattles in my head, rings in my ears. The word I least want to hear. The word no one wants to hear.

  With leaden feet, I follow the doctor into Harley’s room where he gives her the new diagnosis.

  “Is the baby going to be okay?”

  The doctor clasps his hands. “Our goal is always to protect the health of the mother and the baby, and to do that, we need to get the baby out of you as soon as possible.”

  She turns her head to me, and it looks like it takes all the effort in the world for her to move. “Can he be with me during the section?”

  The nurse chimes in. “You can’t have the epidural with your platelets this low, so you need to be under general, and that means no one can be in there but doctors and nurses. But we’ll bring the baby to your husband as soon as he or she is born.”

  “You’ll meet our baby first,” Harley says to me, and her hoarse voice hitches. “Please give my love to our baby.”

  My heart lurches toward her; I’d do anything to comfort her. “I will. I promise. And you’re going to be fine,” I tell her, leaning in to give her a sweet kiss on the forehead. “I love you.”

  “I love you. I’ll see you on the other side.”

  And then they wheel her away.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Trey

  I wear a tread on the linoleum in the hallway. I can’t bear to be in the waiting room. I can’t sit and fidget, and check messages on my phone like half the people in there are doing.

  Debbie and Robert are there too; Debbie’s spent most of the time looking at her watch. But I’m in the hallway, and yeah, I’m looking at my phone, but I’m not texting, that’s for sure.

  I’m researching.

  And I’ve just learned how fucking awful preeclampsia is. I learn it can show up silently.

  Check.

  That its symptoms often masquerade as symptoms of other conditions.

  Check.

  That it can go to hell quickly.

  Check.

  Check.

  Check.

  But the worst part I learn is this: that HELLP syndrome is life-threatening. Those two words blare at me like a neon sign.

  Life-threatening.

  It can damage the liver. Some moms and babies die from HELLP. I read words like bleed out and renal failure and hemorrhage, and I want to shout, Make it stop!

  My entire body is tight, coiled with tension. I want to hope so badly that everything will be fine, but I don’t know how anymore. Because all I can feel is the possibility of the end, and it’s fraying me inside.

  Maybe I’m the curse. Maybe I bring bad luck to people I love. Maybe there’s no such thing as lightning only striking once, twice, three times. There is only things happen. And so many things are happening that it’s feels like I’m dodging blocks of concrete being dropped from windows in a cruel cartoon.

  Everything I learn about HELLP is a canyon of awful. I open page after page, desperate for information, for a fact, a piece of data that can somehow soothe me. But even if I find it, how could a statistic reassure me? I am a statistic of one. One family—mine. And I have no idea how the hell my wife is doing. Or why this C-section is taking so long. Or when I am going to see her and the baby. Or if the baby is even okay. If my kid survived. Or if I am going down the route of planting another tree, and the prospect of that makes me feel as if a limb is being amputated.

  I am existing in a black hole of information as life goes on around me, as nurses walk down halls and check on patients, as technicians roll on by with machines, as doctors make their rounds.

  All the while, my Harley—the only woman I love, have ever loved, and will ever love—is unconscious with her belly sliced open, and her blood pressure rising, and her platelets falling, and I don’t have a clue what happens next.

  Then I hear the tiniest little cry and I know.

  Don’t ask me how.

  Don’t ask me why.

  I just know the sound of my own kid, and it stills all the jittery nerves inside me. It is like a balm to my aching heart.

  I turn around to see a ruddy-cheeked nurse with wide shoulders and big hands walking toward me. She’s wearing Snoopy scrubs and carrying a baby wrapped tightly in a white blanket with blue and pink stripes.

  “Mr. Westin?”

  I nod.

  “This is your daughter.”

  The world slows to this moment; all time has become this second as she hands me my baby girl, and I hold her in my arms for the first time. Everything in me shifts, the terror fleeing my body as my heart starts to jump wildly, pumping joy and wonder through my veins.

  She’s perfect in every way. Her face is still red, and she looks like she’s been screaming, but her eyes are wide open and gray, and she has little tufts of blond hair from her mom. I lean in to plant a gentle kiss on her soft baby cheek, and she feels like a complete and absolute miracle, and already I can feel—deep in my bones and my cells—that sense that she’s mine. And I don’t know where it comes from, how you can go from never having met someone to loving them in the blink of eye, but here it is. It’s happened to me.

  I love her. “I love you, little girl,” I say, the first words she hears from her dad. “And your mom does, too.”

  When I glance up, with a tear streaking down my cheek, the nurse is still here, a grave look etched on her sturdy features.

  And I know too—in the blink of an eye—that something’s wrong with Harley.

  “How is my wife?” The question tastes like stones in my mouth.

  “It was a very rough delivery. Her liver nearly ruptured, and she’s lost a lot of blood, and she’ll likely need a transfusion.”

  “Do you . . . do you need some?” I hold out an arm, as if she’s going to stick a needle in me and take whatever she needs for Harley.

  She flashes a brief, but kind smile. “We have some.” Then she sighs. “But I want to let you know she had a seizure during the delivery.”

  I stumble against the wall, clutching the baby tight as my back hits the bricks, and I sink to the floor.

  “A seizure?”

  The nurse bends down. “It happens with HELLP,” she says trying to reassure me, but there is nothi
ng reassuring about a seizure. “The doctors are working on her now. They’ve dealt with this before. She’s in good hands.”

  “Is she going to be okay? Is she going to live?” I choke out.

  “We’re doing everything we can.”

  * * *

  But they don’t know if everything is enough. How can anyone know? Nobody can. One minute you are here, the next minute, gone.

  One moment you are unborn; the next you are loved.

  Life is strong, and life is fragile. It is beauty, and it is pain. I have both, so unbearably close to each other right now that it feels like a cruel game that some wicked master puppeteer is orchestrating.

  Not once, not even in the overactive far corners of my mind, did it occur to me that I could lose Harley. I only ever believed I could lose a baby. That’s all I ever worried about. That was the fear I had to face every day, the fear I had to learn to live with every second. But never, in all those moments of staring that fear in the face, of walking past it and through it and by it and over it, did it ever dawn on me that I could have my child safely in this world, healthy and whole, and with a strong beating heart, all while Harley lies bleeding out, unconscious on a hospital table somewhere nearby, and I am helpless to do anything.

  But click.

  The nurse takes the baby back to the nursery for monitoring, and I pace the halls, hunting out more info. I can’t stop looking at site after site, and I don’t know why I’m doing this, sticking my finger in the fire and letting it burn. I can’t turn away, even when I start watching a video on my phone of a young father who lost his wife to HELLP. When his voice starts to break, and he lowers his head to his baby, I hit stop.

  I can’t take it anymore. I can’t watch another second. I turn off my phone, and jam it into my pocket. Now my head is cluttered with facts that have done nothing to change my reality, or Harley’s. I return to the nursery to hold my child.

  I cling to my daughter, clutching her in my arms so tightly. She is my anchor. She is rooting me to this earth. Without her, I’m sure I’d fall off the planet, tumble into the void of space. I reach for her hand, small and precious, and she grasps my finger instinctively, and we hold onto each other.

  One half of me is singing; the other is caving in. I am empty without Harley, and I am flooded with happiness for the six pounds of joy in my arms.

  Soon, Debbie and Robert find us, and sit with the baby and me. Tears flow down their cheeks too, for the new life, for their granddaughter, for everything that is lost and found at the same terrible time.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Trey

  The minutes tick by, knitting themselves into an hour, and the nurse threads her way over to me in the far corner of the nursery. She tells me two things.

  One, Harley’s having a blood transfusion now.

  Two, she also thinks I ought to feed the baby.

  Life hangs in the balance, and yet daily needs must be met.

  The nurse gives me a bottle, and I feed my hungry child for the first time, and the four of us wait and wait and wait. Only the baby is immune. She sucks down the formula as if it’s all that matters in the world, her tiny lips curved around the bottle tip.

  I watch her the whole time, the way she’s so focused on one thing only—eating. She’s determined to fill her belly. When she finishes, she pushes the bottle away with her lips, closing her mouth, content with the meal inside her. And still, there is no Harley. No news. No reports. Only other doctors, other nurses, other parents roaming the nursery.

  Then, someone clears her throat. The doctor is in the house, but not the baby-faced guy. This doctor is older, with lines on her face, and dark blue eyes that have seen more than I want to know. I stand up, and give the baby to the nurse. My hands are shaky, and my legs are jelly. I follow the doctor into the hall, Debbie and Robert close behind.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m Doctor Strickland, the surgeon who took care of your wife.”

  Took care.

  That’s good, right?

  I try to form words, to ask how she is, to ask if she is. But the doctor is faster than me. “She’s out of surgery, and in recovery.”

  Recovery.

  With that one beautiful word, relief flows fast in my veins. Doctor Strickland keeps talking, saying transfusion, and lost a lot of blood, and still not awake, but all I can think is she’s alive.

  I want to grab the doctor and kiss her. I want to fall to the ground and hug her knees, and cry thank you over and over. But most of all, I want to see Harley.

  “When can I see her?” I say, the words practically blasting out of my mouth.

  “Not yet. She’s in the recovery room. She’s not awake. Probably not for another hour.”

  The next hour is the longest of my life, and I wish I had asked for an extra dose of patience for Christmas because it would have really come in handy as I watch the minute hand move so slowly. But the nursery is a safe haven, and my daughter falls asleep on my chest, warming me with her tiny little body. Somehow, that patch of heat against my heart makes me feel as if everything is going to be okay.

  Okay.

  I have officially decided that’s the only word I ever want to hear anymore.

  Okay.

  “She’s going to be fine,” Debbie says, squeezing my shoulder. “And you two are going to get to work soon on naming this sweet little girl.”

  “Yeah,” Robert says, chiming in from our little huddle in the corner. “Why don’t you have a name yet? We want to start cooing at Sally, Jane, Mandy, or something, instead of saying Hi Baby all the time.”

  “Not Sally, Jane or Mandy. She’s definitely not a Sally, Jane or Mandy,” I say as I stroke her cheek softly. She releases a small, contented sigh as she sleeps so peacefully in my arms.

  “Well, she needs to be something soon,” Robert says, and it feels so good to be having this conversation about names instead of about blood.

  * * *

  Two oxygen tubes snake out of her nostrils, coiling around the bed, and slinking up into a machine that sends breath to her nose. Her arms are covered with bandages, the crook of her elbow has been target practice for needles, and an IV drip pumps into her body. Her gown has slipped down her shoulder, her collarbone exposed, the arrow from her heart tattoo peeking out. A yellow blanket covers her, up to her chest that’s rising and falling slowly.

  Her eyes are closed, though, and I would give anything for them to flutter open. They haven’t yet, and no one knows why. It’s been like this for the last two hours. I’m sitting next to her, holding her hand, hoping.

  I’m doing so much hoping that there’s no room in me for anything else but this desperate, frayed desire for her to wake up. Every nerve in me is a piece in a mechanical clock, and a malevolent clock winder is turning the cranks, over and over, maniacally cackling as they start to break.

  All as I wait for a sign that still hasn’t come. Harley is deep in some sort of post-surgery cocoon that no one expected to last this long.

  “Any minute now, I’m sure,” an ICU nurse tells me as she checks on Harley’s vitals. This nurse has a long black braid down her back, and pink scrubs with dog bones on them. “She’s just taking her sweet time to wake up. But all her tests look normal. Her vitals are fine.”

  “She was supposed to wake up two hours ago.”

  “She’s taking a little longer than we thought,” the nurse says sweetly.

  “But I don’t understand,” I say, and my voice sounds whiny, and I hate it, but I hate the lack of knowing more. I hate it so damn much. Because they keep telling me she should wake up, but she keeps lying here, breathing in and out, and that’s it. She’s been out of surgery for four hours, out of recovery for two hours, and she’s still not awake. She’s still not responding, not to light, not to voices, not to touch, not to the life going on around her.

  Not a bat of the eyelids, not a wiggle of the fingers, not a cough.

  The nurse says nothing, just shoots me
a sympathetic smile.

  I drop my head onto the mattress, and squeeze Harley’s hand. “C’mon Harley. I know you’re there. Just give me a sign. Squeeze my hand, or something,” I mutter.

  She doesn’t squeeze my hand.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Trey

  My daughter is six hours old and nameless.

  The nurses in labor and delivery would probably tease me if we were simply that couple who hadn’t picked a name yet. But the nurses don’t tease me. They call her Baby Westin, and Baby Westin has had her second feeding already, and her diaper changed, and she’s sleeping again.

  She’s doing everything she’s supposed to be doing: opening her eyes, squeezing my hand, crying, sighing, eating, living.

  She’s living.

  And Harley is only breathing.

  It’s midnight now, and the watch continues, and nothing changes except the ICU doctor. Doctor Strickland is gone, and now Doctor Whitney enters the room, introduces himself, and says he’s on rotation now.

  I launch into questions. “Why doesn’t she open her eyes? Why doesn’t she move? Why is she only breathing?”

  “Let me examine her,” he says calmly, and then asks me to leave for a moment, so I do, waiting in the hallway.

  Pacing again.

  So much pacing.

  Robert and Debbie are parked in chairs outside the room. He yawns, and Debbie does the same, but no one goes, no one leaves, no one sleeps. Debbie takes another sip of her coffee, and Robert offers to get me one.

  I shake my head.

  “Diet Coke then?”

  “No thanks.”

  Doctor Whitney pokes his head out, and invites us back in.

  “We thought she’d be awake by now,” he says. “And her tests are fine, her vitals are fine, everything suggests she should have woken up, but she has slipped into a comatose state.”

  And I break.

  I fucking break.

  I shatter into a million angry pieces.

  “What?”

  The doctor nods, and shifts his hand back and forth like a seesaw. “She’s been teetering between unconsciousness and coma, and she remains unresponsive to stimuli, like light.”