WE ARE US

by Leigh, Tara

Today, nothing is as it should be. Nothing.

  My son is dead.

  My daughter, though, is very much alive. Through a flat screen hung on the wall of my hospital room, I watch her squirming inside me as tears streak down my face. Does she know, somehow, that her brother is dead? I try to read her expression, looking for signs of distress that her playmate isn’t playing with her anymore. My vision is so blurred, I can barely see.

  There are tests, tests, and more tests. Hushed whispering by doctors, strained expressions from sonogram technicians, pitying glances from nurses. Save my daughter, please.

  “I’m afraid there’s an infection in your uterus, Mrs. Stockton.”

  “An infection,” I repeat, a tiny pinprick of hope piercing the layers of anguish pressing against me. An infection can be treated. An infection can be cured

  “How did she get an infection?” Tucker asks, standing by my side. “My wife hasn’t missed a single doctor’s appointment. She is getting the best care money can buy.”

  “Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing. There are some mysteries medicine can’t solve.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Well, I believe the infection is what led to fetus A’s death. His placenta ruptured this morning, which is what preceded your wife’s trip to the hospital today. It was her body’s way of attempting to expel the fetus.”

  I wince at the clinical terms he’s using to describe my perfect little boy, now frozen and unmoving inside of me. He looks like he’s sleeping. “What does this mean for my daughter?” Cut me open, do anything you need to, but please, save my daughter.

  “Your daughter is only nine ounces. She has less than a ten percent chance of survival outside of the womb, and a zero percent chance of living without major health problems. If we don’t treat this infection immediately, your uterus will be compromised, which will mean a hysterectomy. And if the infection spreads, the toxins will invade your bloodstream. You will die, Mrs. Stockton.”

  “How long?” I ask, gripping Tucker’s hand.

  “How long… ?” There are too many variables, the doctor doesn’t know what question I’m asking. How could he? He’s not a mother.

  Through gritted teeth I complete my thought. “How long must my baby girl stay inside of me to have a fighting chance?”

  His face twists with impatience. He’s tired of my questions and is eager to treat the problem. “By the time she has a chance, you will be dead.”

  No. No, no, no.

  I would trade my life for my daughter’s in a heartbeat. But that isn’t an option. She can’t live outside my body, and if I delay treatment, neither of us will live.

  So, no chance. No options. And no time.

  After that, I don’t have any more questions. Just grief.

  Grief for my son, floating inside my belly like a fossil suspended in amber. Grief for my daughter who is still so alive—beautifully, gloriously alive, but for whom death is imminent and inevitable.

  She is swinging her hands, kicking her feet, bumping into her brother. Sometimes it appears that he is moving, too. But the sepia flutter of his heart is still. So fucking still.

  I want to turn away, to close my eyes and hide my head. But I don’t. I force myself to watch every last second I have left with my babies. I barely allow myself to blink, needing to sear the memory of them into my brain.

  I am numb, and yet electrified with heartache. It’s a roar in my skull as I listen to the doctor speaking to Tucker. Nothing to be done, he says, except to suction and scrape every last bit of my babies from me so that I can start over.

  Suction. Scrape. Start over.

  Foreign, awful, chilling words. I want to put my hands over my ears and scream fa, la, la, la, la until the doctors and nurses stop talking. More than that, I want to will myself back in time, to the last minute I felt both babies move inside me. When was that, exactly?

  Panic rises up inside me, hot as lava. When was the last time I could feel both of them? Their final soccer match. When? Think, think. If I can just remember, I can will myself back to that moment. Think hard, damn it. Immerse myself in that last, perfect moment and everything else will fade away, like a terrible nightmare. Because this can’t be real, it just can’t.

  Think, damn it. Think!

  And then I remember. Two nights ago, in bed. Tucker was home and he’d rolled over in his sleep, jostling me. His arm had closed around my hip, and I’d pulled it over my belly, pressing his palm against my skin. Our children had danced then, in our darkened bedroom, high above the racing cabs and dirty streets of Manhattan. My little prince and princess.

  Their movements thrummed beneath my belly, and Tucker had been roused from sleep when dancing became kicking. He’d moaned, kissing my shoulder and rubbing my belly drowsily. “Go to sleep, babies,” he had whispered. They listened, growing quiet soon after.

  And I had lain awake for hours, imagining future dance recitals and soccer games. Park playdates. Ice cream cones on sweltering summer days, hot chocolate on bitterly cold ones. Potty training and training wheels. Boo-boo bunnies and Tonka trucks. Love.

  So much to look forward to.

  I want to go back in time. Two days. I wouldn’t have let Tucker tell them to go to sleep. No. I would have drank orange juice and lain on my left side. I would have let them play soccer forever.

  Two days. Is that really too much to ask? Just two days. I’ll stay in bed. I won’t move. I’ll spend the next few months eating the healthiest foods.

  I will be the best mother-to-be ever. A perfect incubator.

  Two goddamn days. Please!

  “Poppy, look at me.” Tucker’s breath is hot on my face. I turn away, rolling over and curling my knees up to protect my belly. He’s ruining everything. I need to focus. Need to concentrate on that magical hour. I can get back there, I know it.

  But his hand is on my shoulder, he is shaking me. “Poppy, enough. Let the doctor take care of you.”

  “Forget about me. He should be taking care of them. The next generation of Stocktons, remember?” I am begging, desperate. Emotions charge at me, thudding in my chest. Fury and fear held together by the thinnest thread of hope. “Tucker, make him understand. We have to save them—don’t you understand? They’re why we’re together. They make us make sense.”

  But I can see that Tucker doesn’t understand. He buried both his parents and was back at work the next day. We don’t process grief the same way. Is he hurting at all?

  Tucker takes a long, ragged breath and for a moment, it’s as if I’m looking at a rainy puddle that reflects the sky above, and there is an instant of confusion. Up is down and down is up. What am I looking at—the puddle or the sky? What’s real?

  “They’re gone, Poppy. There’s nothing anyone can do. Not you, not me, not any of these doctors.” He roughs a hand through his hair, leaving it messy. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  I wince at my husband’s artless, and unnecessarily cruel, candor. “Get this over… ?”

  I have one choice left. One final act that cannot be taken from me. I shift my stare to the doctor. “I want to deliver them.”

  He draws back. “Mrs. Stockton, that is highly unusual. We can put you under anesthesia right now. When you wake up it will all be over.”

  I shake my head, my voice a screech. “No. You’re not cutting my babies apart and sucking them out of me like garbage.”

  Every part of me aches for my little boy and girl. There are no pink tutus or soccer balls in their future. They have no future.

  I will never rub my cheek against their downy, baby-soft skin, give them a bath, or see their smiles on Christmas morning.

  I will never hear the sound of their laughter.

  The doctor backs away, his face a mask of disapproval that is mirrored by my husband. He starts to protest further, but the pure fury coursing through my veins daunts even him. “Don’t you take this from me,” I howl. “Don’t you dare.”

  A needle is filled with pot
assium chloride—the same concoction given to prisoners on death row—and inserted through my stomach. I hurt so much that the physical pain is a welcome reprieve. They are using a sonogram to aim the needle, and I watch it move through the amniotic fluid towards my daughter’s translucent skin. In my head, I’m screaming at her, begging her to move, to run, to escape.

  But she can’t, she’s trapped inside of me. Held captive by me. As the tip of the needle punctures her placenta, delivering its lethal dose, she extends her arms wide embracing her brother.

  It’s as if she knows. As if she is seeking comfort from him. Comfort I cannot give her. Because I am killing her.

  I might not be holding the needle, but I’m not stopping it.

  Her teeny-tiny heart is still visible through her translucent skin. Its flutter slows, becoming weaker and more imperceptible until finally, my baby girl’s heart stops altogether.

  I watch my daughter die.

  In no time at all, she is as still and lifeless as my son.

  Two frozen dolls inside my infected womb.

  I’m taken to another room, hooked up to a Pitocin drip. An anesthesiologist offers an epidural, which I refuse even as the contractions take my breath away. Each sharp slice of pain brings me closer to holding my babies. I need to see them, touch them, feel their weight in my arms.

  It is hours before I am fully dilated. Hours of coiling, crushing, unrelenting agony I don’t actually want to end. Once the pain ends, I won’t be pregnant anymore.

  Not pregnant. But not a mother. At least, not defined as a verb. I will never mother my children. I will never nag them or praise them. I will never build sandcastles on the beach with them.

  I will never pin their artwork on the refrigerator.

  I will do exactly one thing for my babies. I will bury them.

  Is there a word for what I am, what I’m experiencing?

  Tucker’s determined gaze clashes with my turbulent one. He wants this over. I have failed him and he wants to put the proof of it behind him as soon as possible. “You’re doing great,” Tucker says, holding my hand as I pant and push, trying to will my body into compliance.

  I want to slap him. Great? Not even close.

  I’m in labor but I’m not giving birth. What the hell am I doing?

  Our children finally slide out of me. Tiny and still and silent. Dead.

  A nurse cleans them and wraps them in blankets, placing them gently in my arms before leaving the room.

  My boy is bigger than his sister and looks like just Tucker. My little girl looks like me. Their hair is wispy, their eyelids as thin as rose petals, their lips puckered as if there are about to suckle at my breast. They are sleeping angels. Perfect in every way, but one.

  They are not breathing, and they never will.

  Angels, here on earth.

  Tucker doesn’t want to hold them, although eventually he reaches out a finger to brush a cheek, touch a delicate ear. He makes a sound, low in his throat, swallowing down a sob. I glance up at him, and for the briefest moment, his grief and fury are exposed for me to see.

  It’s the first time since the doctor explained what happened with our son, and what we had to do to our daughter, that I’ve felt in step with Tucker. The first time I see that he is in mourning, too.

  Outside the window, the sun meets the horizon, flooding the room in a dreamy, gauzy gold that blurs the edges of Tucker’s profile and drenches my babies in light. I blink once, twice, and the room is dim again.

  But I feel a wrenching pain, a pulling away. As if the souls of my children have left on that sweeping sunbeam.

  Too soon, the nurse returns. She takes my son and my daughter from my arms.

  And then I scream. I scream and I scream and I scream. A tortured wail that doesn’t sound like it belongs to a human. I am on fire from the inside out, my nerve endings flayed open and exposed. Toxic lava flowing from my broken heart to incinerate my organs and blood vessels, my bones and skin.

  But this sound, this anguished scream, it belongs to me. I can’t stop screaming. Maybe I never will.

  Chapter 41

  New York City

  Two months later

  I’ve never been so empty in all my life. My body is a vacant, vacuous cavity I can hardly stand to inhabit. My heart is an aching void that beats for no reason, every dull thud a betrayal of the two hearts that don’t.

  Our glamorous penthouse apartment is nothing but a shell. Because, really, what is it holding? Grief.

  Tucker is gone all the time now. Working, traveling, schmoozing. Maybe he’s even fucking Wren, too, because he’s sure as hell not fucking me. I cannot bear to be touched. Not by him, not by anyone.

  I want to laugh, nearly as much as I want to cry. Now that I’m empty inside, have I truly lost Tucker to Wren? We’ve known each other for nearly a decade now, but I’ve never considered Wren my friend. Frenemy, maybe. Nemesis is probably a more accurate description.

  She would be only too happy to comfort him with open arms. And her pale, slender thighs with their gap in between when she stands up straight. Every bite of food I haven’t eaten, every bite I’ve thrown up over the years has been because of that gap.

  Is that what I’ve spent so many years chasing? The empty space between Wren’s perfectly long, lean legs?

  The joke is on me, I guess. I have no interest in food anymore. Not even to binge and purge. It’s been a long time since I put a finger down my throat, forcing myself to give up all the things I’d swallowed. Not since I began trying to conceive. This cycle has followed me, I guess. Full, then empty. I am empty now. So empty I don’t care if Tucker is having an affair with Wren. She can have him.

  All the years I’ve spent, trying so hard to be the perfect girlfriend, the perfect fiancée, the perfect wife. Now look at me. My empty stomach is no longer as flat and firm as it once was. Stretch marks mar my hips. My hair is greasy and my roots are showing. And my clothes are the same ones I put on after getting home from the hospital and have barely taken off in the weeks since.

  I’m an exile from Stepford.

  All I want is to be a mother. Even an imperfect one.

  Sadie has stopped looking for an apartment of her own, and she’s here more often than Tucker. Isla, too, although at least she knows to leave me alone. Sadie, not so much. She is constantly pestering me to take a shower, go for a walk, get some fresh air. Even Wren has taken advantage of the opportunity to come over, to see me at my worst. Oh, she says all the appropriate things, even schools her face into an expression of sympathy. But I know what she’s really doing. On the inside, she’s gloating. She’s saying to herself, I was right all along. Tucker should have never chosen you over me.

  And maybe she’s right.

  Wren aside, I don’t mind when Sadie and Isla coddle Tucker. These days, I’m certainly not. Sadie is now the one he shares the Sunday New York Times with, handing her the style section while he pores over everything else. And Isla hovers nearby whenever Tucker eats the meals she prepares for him, jumping up to grate fresh pepper over his food or refresh his drink before he can even ask.

  I don’t want to look at Tucker, let alone cater to him. I don’t want to do much at all, actually. I am exhausted just brushing my teeth in the morning, and brushing my hair seems pointless. Why? I’m not going anywhere. The world outside these walls is chaotic, dangerous.

  I might never go anywhere, ever again.

  Mostly, I sit in my babies’ room, in their rocking chair. The drapery panels and blackout shades were installed, probably at the very moment I learned my son was dead and my daughter would be soon.

  Offensive sunlight streams through the windows because I’m afraid to pull the shades. I’m afraid to touch anything, actually. Because if I do, I might just keep pulling and pulling. And then I might knock over the never-used furniture, tear apart the cribs, smash the chandelier, rip up the rug.

  There is so much rage inside my body I don’t know how it hasn’t boiled over and consumed
me. I am a lobster in a pot, cooking and cooking and cooking. When the water finally evaporates, all that will be left of me is a shell.

  I hate Tucker. I hate him.

  He brought me here, into his perfect life. And I fell for his trap. He is Tucker Stockton, how could he not have super sperm? I married into his family, knowing our children would be winners of the ultimate DNA lottery.

  But I was duped, that dream was a hoax. A mirage.

  My body is empty, my husband feels like an enemy, and I am sitting in a room I decorated for two babies who aren’t alive to see it.

  I think back to all the moments when I should have seen Tucker for who he really is—a mean, manipulative, controlling son of a bitch who has ruined my life.

  There is his mistake, of course. Our original sin.

  And then Tucker stepped in when I lost my scholarship. Later, once I was financially indebted to him—he compounded the fact by putting my mom in the most expensive rehab facility in New England. I know, because the bills came to me… so that every month I had to go to Tucker with my hand out.

  Tucker bought me clothes that were too small, so I had to agonize over every calorie.

  He hacked into my phone. And by then, I didn’t even put up a fight. I just accepted it, as if I didn’t deserve a shred of privacy.

  Just like I accepted Wren joining us on our honeymoon and practically being a third person in our marriage.

  Tucker convinced me to quit a job I loved.

  Because of him, I gave up any hope of reconnecting with Gavin. And the worst part about that is that I can’t even blame Tucker entirely. I allowed myself to believe in the fantasy world he invited me into. I wanted to, so damn badly. And that’s my fault. I was so naïve. So stupid.

  But my eyes are wide open now, the veil swept aside. I’ve been thinking about that night again. Going over and over every detail in my head. And all those feelings, all those emotions I pushed down have risen to the surface. They are choking me.

  I wouldn’t admit it back then, not even to myself, but I know it now. This is what it feels like to be raped.