Carrying the Single Dad's Baby

by Kate Hardy

  Daniel nodded and squeezed gel onto Jessica’s stomach.

  Beatrice swept the head of the transponder over Jessica’s abdomen; on the screen, she could see the baby clearly and also signs of the abruption. Right at this point, she didn’t think the tear was bad enough to warrant an emergency Caesarean section, but she definitely wanted to keep Jessica in overnight for observation in case the situation changed.

  She took Jessica’s hand. ‘OK. I can see everything clearly and I can see what’s happened. The baby’s looking OK. The reason why your tummy feels as if it’s bruised is because there’s a little tear in your placenta and part of it has come away from your womb. It’s called a placental abruption.’

  Jessica looked too shocked and scared to say anything.

  ‘It sounds a lot scarier than it is,’ Beatrice said. ‘It’s actually quite common; around one in a hundred women have a tear in their placenta.’

  ‘Sometimes it happens after an accident, like the one you just had, and sometimes it just happens and nobody knows why,’ Daniel added.

  ‘The good news is that I don’t think we need to rush you into Theatre and give you a Caesarean section,’ Beatrice reassured her, ‘but I do want to admit you to the ward so they can keep an eye on you and the baby, in case the situation changes overnight.’

  ‘And then they’ll have to rush me into Theatre and give me a Caesarean?’ Jessica dragged in a breath. ‘But I’m only twenty-eight weeks. It’s too soon for the baby to born. He can’t possibly survive.’

  ‘Twenty-eight weeks is early, yes,’ Daniel said, ‘but if we do have to deliver the baby then he’s got a good chance of survival. Neonatal intensive care is really good nowadays.’

  Beatrice thought of Taylor, and it was as if someone had punched her hard and taken her breath away. But this situation was different. Taylor hadn’t been breathing at all and had no heartbeat; she hadn’t stood a chance. This baby had a strong heartbeat and he was fighting.

  ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ Jessica asked, her voice shrill with fear.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Beatrice said.

  ‘But, just then, the look on your face...’

  Memories. Jessica really didn’t need to hear that particular horror story. She needed reassurance. Beatrice squeezed her hand. ‘I promise you, there’s nothing I’m not telling you. Let me show you so you can see for yourself and relax a bit.’ She turned the monitor round so Jessica could see it and swept the scanner head over her abdomen again. ‘See? One beating heart, four waving limbs, one baby who’s holding his own very nicely right now and is completely oblivious as to how worried his mum is.’

  A tear trickled down Jessica’s face. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I was just so scared that—’ her breath hitched ‘—that the baby would die.’

  Beatrice had been there. Except in her case her baby had died. ‘I know,’ she said gently. ‘Everything’s going to be OK. It’s easy for me to say, but try not to worry. We’ll keep a really close eye on you both.’

  And then, thankfully, Alex came rushing in, full of apologies. Once she’d introduced him to Jessica and filled Alex in on their findings, Alex took over Jessica’s care, and Beatrice was able to concentrate on clearing up and checking everything was stocked ready for the next emergency, and doing the routine tasks helped her push the old memories back into place.

  * * *

  Something was wrong, Daniel thought. He’d seen that look on Beatrice’s face, when he’d said that twenty-eight weeks was early but the baby had a good chance of survival. Misery and pain and worry had blurred together. It had been brief, but long enough for their patient to notice, too, and panic that Beatrice was trying to work out how to tell her some bad news.

  Right now Beatrice was all brisk and smiling and sorting everything out. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. She was a little bit too bright, as if by forcing herself to smile she could lift her mood.

  He’d been there himself, when Jenny’s postnatal depression had been at its worst. Trying to keep everything together, being bright and brisk and smiling.

  The one thing that had helped was talking. And maybe he could do that for Beatrice. Listen to her, as she’d listened to him when he’d explained about Jenny. Dating her, much as he wanted to, wasn’t an option—but he could be her friend.

  Before they saw their next patient, he called his mother. ‘Mum, can you do me a massive favour and pick Iain up from Diane’s today?’ Thankfully Diane’s mother was on the mend from a mini-stroke, so Diane was back in her usual routine of picking Iain up after school.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Susan said. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Just busy,’ he fibbed, not wanting to share his suspicions about Beatrice even with his mother.

  ‘Leave it to me, love. I’ll take him back to yours and give him his tea.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum. I owe you.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for. To support you,’ Susan reminded him. ‘I didn’t do it when you were young, so it’s payback.’

  ‘That’s all in the past and you’ve done way more than your fair share, these past five years,’ Daniel said. ‘And I hope you know you’re the best mum and gran in the world.’

  ‘Och, away with you,’ Susan said, but the thickening of her accent told Daniel she was pleased.

  He caught Beatrice at the end of her shift. ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘are going for a cup of tea.’

  She blinked. ‘Are we? Why?’

  ‘Resus, this afternoon.’

  She spread her hands. ‘What about it?’

  He recognised the brittleness in her eyes. He’d seen it in Jenny’s. ‘When our patient said there was something you weren’t telling her, I saw it in your face, too.’

  Just as he could see the moment of horror in her face now, quickly masked.

  ‘We’re friends, Bea,’ he said gently.

  ‘Friends,’ she echoed.

  ‘I think you need someone to listen to you.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’

  ‘I’ve been there,’ he said, ‘so I don’t think you are.’ When she said nothing, he added softly, ‘Whatever you say to me isn’t going to be passed on to anyone else.’

  ‘I...’ Her eyes filled with tears, and she blinked them away and wrapped her arms round herself.

  ‘Tea,’ he said. ‘Not in the hospital canteen. Mum’s picking Iain up from Diane, so I have all the time in the world.’

  ‘Let’s go to my place,’ she said, and there was the tiniest wobble in her voice.

  ‘OK.’ He didn’t push her to talk on the way, guessing that she needed to get her head together. She let them in, and he followed her into the kitchen.

  All the colour had leached from her face, and she looked bereft. ‘Sit down,’ he said, gesturing to the table in her kitchen. ‘Tell me where you keep your tea and I’ll make it.’

  ‘The teabags are in the cupboard above the kettle,’ she said.

  He filled the kettle with water and switched it on, then opened a couple of cupboard doors and retrieved two mugs. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that her tea was a fine and delicate Earl Grey. Well, she didn’t need fine and delicate right now. She needed strong tea with sugar—even though he knew she usually didn’t take sugar. He busied himself making two mugs of tea, added milk to both and sugar to hers.

  ‘Here go you.’ He put one of the mugs in front of her, and pulled out the chair opposite hers.

  ‘Thank you.’ She took a sip and grimaced. ‘Sugar.’

  ‘Simply because you need it right now.’

  She didn’t protest again, just took another sip and stared into the mug, as if bracing herself. Then she took a deep breath. ‘What you told me about Jenny—I’ve kind of been there.’

  Postnatal depression? But as far as he
knew she didn’t have children.

  Kind of. Perhaps not PND, then.

  He said nothing, just reached across the table and took her hand. No pressure, no demands: just letting her know that he was here. He didn’t push her to talk; from working with his patients, he knew that sometimes you needed space and time until you felt comfortable enough to talk.

  And eventually the words came out.

  ‘It was our patient, this afternoon. The one with the abruption.’

  He guessed then that it had brought back memories for her. A past patient, or someone close to her?

  ‘That happened to me, nearly five years ago,’ she whispered.

  An abruption? He went cold as he realised what she was about to tell him. His own personal nightmare was if anything should ever happen to Iain, and no doubt it had been the same for her.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked softly, still holding her hand.

  ‘I was in a queue of stationary traffic. I’d had an antenatal appointment that morning and I was driving over to my parents’ for lunch.’ She blew out a breath. ‘It was just an ordinary day. The sun was shining and I was singing along to the radio.’

  Just an ordinary day. One, he guessed, that had turned into a nightmare.

  ‘The couple in the car behind me were having a fight. They didn’t notice that the traffic had stopped, they crashed into me and pushed my car into the one in front.’

  A concertina crash.

  The way she was talking about it, it was if she’d detached herself from the situation and was describing it happening to someone else. An impersonal statement of facts. Because sometimes things went so deep, hurt so much, that it was the only way you could deal with them, he thought.

  ‘The airbag didn’t go off because I was stationary.’ She shrugged. ‘Oliver asked about it, but apparently if an airbag goes off when the car isn’t moving it can cause more problems than it solves.’

  He knew neither of her brothers was called Oliver; presumably Oliver had been her partner, and because she’d told him she was single it was a pretty fair chance the relationship hadn’t survived the fallout from the accident.

  ‘I don’t remember the steering wheel hitting my abdomen. I think I blacked out for a minute or so. But I knew immediately that something was wrong. I had pain in my back, my abdomen was tender and felt as if I was having contractions. You shouldn’t feel even Braxton-Hicks at twenty-eight weeks, let alone real ones.’

  Twenty-eight weeks. The same as their patient today. It had taken an incredible amount of courage for Beatrice to deal with the case.

  ‘The ambulance came and the paramedics took me in, but I knew even before I got to the Emergency Department that it was all wrong. It felt wet and sticky between my thighs and I knew it was blood. And I couldn’t feel the baby kicking.’

  Again, the same as their patient today.

  ‘I was trying not to panic—I knew if the crash had caused an abruption and my uterus was woody, I wouldn’t feel any movement, but there’d still be a chance that the baby would make it. A tiny one. That I’d be whipped in for an emergency section and the baby would be in intensive care for weeks, but she’d make it.’ She swallowed hard. ‘But the doctors couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat with the Doppler. They gave me a scan and that’s when they said I’d had a severe placental abruption and the baby hadn’t survived.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s such a hard thing to go through.’

  She gave him a grim smile. ‘That was the start of it. They had to induce me. I gave birth to a stillborn girl, Taylor.’

  He really didn’t know what to say, so he just held her hand and let her speak.

  ‘I didn’t cope very well. I didn’t want to go to work and face everyone’s pity, and I really didn’t want to be in our house and see the nursery we’d put together for Taylor—even though Oliver’s sister was really kind and packed up the nursery for us so we wouldn’t have to do it. I went to stay with my parents, because I still couldn’t face the house. I knew they wouldn’t push me to talk about it, because my family’s really not good with talking. They always have a stiff upper lip and pretend everything’s fine—even my sisters-in-law are the same.’ She lifted one shoulder in a shrug.

  ‘When I saw my doctor, I said everything was fine. But it wasn’t. It was like a black hole sucking me in. Nothing felt right and I was totally disconnected from everyone. I suppose the only place I coped was work, because I was too busy to think about what had happened to me. That, and the gym, where I pushed myself harder and harder, doing the kind of training where you count repetitions so you don’t have any space in your head to think of anything else. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to remember.’

  No wonder she’d understood about Jenny, Daniel thought. She’d been through something very similar herself.

  ‘I kept my lunchbreaks short and I avoided seeing my friends. I avoided Oliver, too. I just didn’t want to be with anyone. I got through the days, but that was about all.’ She blew out a breath. ‘My sister-in-law was due to have George, the same week as Taylor was due. It was so hard to walk into the hospital where I’d lost my baby and visit her, the day George arrived. I couldn’t look at Oliver. I felt as if I was drowning, but I couldn’t say anything because I didn’t want to make them feel bad.’

  ‘Didn’t they guess how you were feeling?’

  ‘Probably. But, as I said, my family always pretends everything’s just fine and keeps a stiff upper lip. So we never discussed it. And I held that baby and I smiled and said how gorgeous he was, even while my heart was being shredded.’ She looked away. ‘I love George. But every time I see him, a little bit of me wonders what Taylor would’ve been doing now.’

  Nearly five years ago. A child who would’ve been four years old. Late summer-born, just like Iain. Was it the same when she saw his son? Daniel wondered. Did she see Iain and think of her lost little girl? She’d been kind and helped him out last week when he’d desperately needed a babysitter. How much had that hurt her? How much had that cost her in unshed tears and pain?

  He wanted to hold her and tell her everything was going to be all right, except he knew it wasn’t. How did you even begin to come to terms with a loss like that?

  ‘About a month later, I’d got some leave and I was spending it at the castle. And in the middle of that week I just woke up and realised I didn’t want to be here any more. I didn’t want to be anywhere.’ And this time she met his eyes. ‘So I took an overdose. Vicky found me—she’d knocked on my door, planning to ask me to go and help feed the ducks with Henry, and when I didn’t answer she had a funny feeling and opened my door and saw me lying there with the empty packet of paracetamol beside me.’

  An overdose of paracetamol. She’d had to deal with a patient who’d done that, too, very recently. He remembered how the girl’s mother had been raging at her selfishness and Beatrice had stuck up for her and explained it was an illness, not done on purpose.

  ‘She called the emergency services, and they patched me up—thankfully not in my own emergency department, because I think that would’ve been so much worse, facing everyone’s pity.’ She grimaced. ‘When I went back to work, everyone was sympathetic and kind. It just made me feel worse. And then my boss called me into her office. She’d called in a favour from a friend and got me some counselling sessions—and she made me go to them. She took me to the sessions herself; she never asked me anything and never judged me. She just greeted me with a hug when I came out, and took me for coffee and a sandwich, to make sure I ate something healthy.’

  ‘That’s really nice,’ Daniel said. And it sounded like something Beatrice herself would do, paying it forward.

  ‘The counsellor did a lot for me. She taught me how to talk—something I couldn’t do before, and I’m probably talking too much now.’

  ‘You’re doing just fine,’ he said. />
  ‘And she taught me a good grounding exercise.’

  ‘Would it help you to do that now?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘You name five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell or like the smell of, and take one slow, deep breath. I sometimes do that with my patients if I think it’ll help.’

  He’d remember that one. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tell me five things you can see.’

  ‘The picture Iain drew me from the park. My kitchen table. Two mugs of coffee. The kettle.’ She paused and looked him straight in the eye. ‘You.’

  For a second, he couldn’t quite breathe. All he was aware of was Beatrice. ‘Four things you can hear,’ he prompted, hoping that she wouldn’t hear the slight creak in his voice—or, if she did, that she hadn’t guessed what had caused it. Now was really not the time to have inappropriate thought about her.

  ‘A dog barking. A guitar being played. Waves swishing against a beach. A fairground ride.’

  ‘Three things you can touch.’

  ‘And you touch them. The table. My mug of coffee.’ She looked down at their joined hands. ‘Your hand.’

  Did he let her hand go? Or did he keep holding her hand? He had no idea. All he could do was be guided by Beatrice’s actions, and she didn’t pull away, so he left his fingers linked with hers.

  ‘Two things you can smell.’

  ‘Coffee,’ she said. ‘And stocks.’

  ‘Stocks?’

  She gestured towards the kitchen windowsill with her free hand. ‘My big vice. I love fresh flowers. Especially ones that smell as gorgeous as those stocks.’

  A sweet yet spicy fragrance. He could understand why she liked it so much.

  ‘And one deep, slow breath.’

  She marked off the seconds with her fingers as she took a slow, deep breath in and out. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It helped?’

  ‘It helped,’ she confirmed. ‘And thank you for listening.’

  ‘What you’ve said goes no further than me,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry you went through such a terrible experience. Which isn’t me pitying you—it’s empathy.’