Rachel

He tells her to undress, and maybe she should since the doctor might need to look at her down there, but she doesn’t. Instead, she curls up on the plastic mattress with its stretchy t-shirt of a sheet and hugs her knees to her chest to try to keep warm. There’s something sticky-looking on the sheet at the foot of the bed and she doesn’t want to touch it with her feet. Did it come out of someone else’s body? She tries not to think about it, but who knows how long they will leave her back here before someone comes in that she can ask, or even to bring her the warm blanket she requested before he left the room. She’s been in ERs before. She know how this goes. 

She can feel it between her legs, the warm oozing of blood. Is she bleeding to death? No, probably not, but she’s bleeding more than she should be, at a time that she shouldn’t be bleeding, so it’s okay if she waits a while. She just wants to know what is going on with her body. Something isn’t right  and she knows it. She isn’t pregnant and it isn’t her period, so she has to find out why the blood keeps coming.

There is a television in the room, the sound is turned up too high, but she doesn’t know where the control is, so she places her arm over her ear and tries to block it out. As hard as she tries not to listen, she still hears the story and knows that a guy killed a young woman and her kid and his sister and now he says he didn’t mean to do it. 

Who kills a kid? 

There are people who don’t want kids. She was one of them for a long time, but then she had one in her belly and that changed everything. The minute she found out there was a tiny nugget of life in there, she mentally started rehearsing how to pack nutritious lunches. She felt the warmth of her child’s hug and the sweetness of his kisses on her cheek, and couldn’t imagine that she ever wasn’t a mom. 

Except she wasn’t. That time the bleeding came with pain. Evan was there, holding her hand. When the nurse wasn’t in the room, he let a few tears drip down his cheek, then he wiped them away hastily with his sleeve and swallowed hard. She saw his fatherhood drop down into his stomach, ready to pass through and become shit.

They didn’t talk about it much, especially given that they hadn’t planned to become parents yet anyway. He went to class every day and she stood at the hotel counter and welcomed every guest. 

“Checking in?” she’d ask, smile plastered to her face. Whoever said that smiling on the outside would make you feel happy on the inside was full of crap, she could attest to that.

They clung to each other in bed, on the nights that she wasn’t at work. At first they didn’t make love. She thought maybe he was afraid to hurt her, after what happened. She felt fine down there, and the doctor hadn’t given her any restrictions so she was free to have sex if she liked, but she didn’t mind not having it. She liked that he nuzzled his lips against the base of her neck and just stayed there, breathing. 

Eventually she started to feel him coming back to life, firmness against her buttocks as he spooned her, and when it happened she arched her back just a little to let him know she was ready.

There is a tapping on the door of her exam room, and it opens before she can say “come in.” 

A woman comes in, holding a clipboard. She sees the long white coat and a stethoscope clutched in her hand. She introduces herself as doctor something-no-one-can-pronounce and asks her what her name is.

“Rachel Snow,” she says, immediately feeling the ordinariness of her own name next to the doctor’s exotic one.

“Ms. Snow, nice to meet you,” the doctor says, pleasantly enough. “What brings you to the ER today?”

She tells the doctor about the bleeding, about how blood clots just seem to randomly fall out of her vagina. She waits for the doctor to show signs that she doesn’t believe her or doesn’t think it’s important, but they don’t come, so she continues and tells her about the miscarriages, and how she had the same bleeding last month and then her regular period in between. 

The doctor asks her if she is sexually active. She asks if she has had an ultrasound of her reproductive organs. She asks if it hurts when she pees. She pushes on her belly and nothing changes.  She tells her they will run some tests. This is what Rachel expected.

There were a lot of tests run after the second miscarriage, because that time, she was five and a half months pregnant. That baby was more than half-cooked. That baby was a girl and her name was Alisha, but all of a sudden, there was cramping and nothing was right.  Evan called 911 and it only took them only, like, two minutes to get there. 

“Don’t worry, Miss Snow,” said the blurry young face that wheeled her into the ambulance, “you are in good hands.”

They took her to the Labor and Delivery Department, because she was more than sixteen weeks pregnant. That’s what Blurry Young Face said was the cutoff. If you were less than sixteen weeks you went to the regular ER.  She was grateful for this, remembering that her last ER visit took up an entire day. Not that losing a baby had any time constraints. They said that time didn’t matter and nothing would have changed it anyway.

In “L&D” as Rachel learned to refer to it, she was taken off of the rescue stretcher and placed on a bed. Her belly was geared up with a monitor to let the nurses know what was happening with the baby’s heartbeat and to see if she was having contractions. They stuck a needle in her arm and started running cold fluid through it and told her to keep her arm straight so the fluid would flow. She kept forgetting and placing her hand on her belly and that kinked the IV and sent the nurse back in to chastise her. 

“Who is your OB?” a skinny nurse with a boyish haircut asked.

“My what?” she asked.

“Your OB. Your obstetrician.” 

“I don’t have one,” she answered.

“Have you had prenatal care?” the nurse asked, and Rachel noted the furrowing of her brow and downturning of her mouth that followed the question.

“No,” Rachel replied. “I haven’t.”

“But it says here that you work with the Northward Hotels. They don’t give you insurance?”

“They do if you’ve been there three months,” Rachel answers, “and I started working there right before I found out I was pregnant. I was with Hilton before. I’ve been trying to find someone…”

“It’s okay,” Skinny Nurse interrupted, “we have doctors who can take care of you.”

But by now, Rachel already felt second-class, and something warm oozed out into the space at the top of her legs and she felt lightheaded.

“Ms Snow?” Skinny Nurse asked. “Are you okay?” She placed a hand on her shoulder, and Rachel looked up drunkenly.

“I think I’m bleeding,” she said.

Skinny Nurse lifted the sheet over Rachel’s abdomen and asked her to bring up her knees. She peered in and said, “Oh, I’ll be right back,” and she left the room.

Evan came in just then, said he got there right after the ambulance, but they couldn’t figure out where she was. He was flustered, but seemed really happy to have found her. He right way placed a hand on her belly and still feeling it full, relaxed his face a little.

“I love you, baby,” he said.

“I know,” Rachel said, placing her hand on his and squeezing.

Skinny Nurse burst back through the door, a grey-haired man at her heels. He was skinny too, Rachel thought, too skinny. Did he have cancer? His cheeks were hollow enough to hide baby owls in, but then he smiled and the hollows mostly went away. 

“Ms Snow?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rachel answered.

Cancer Man looked at Evan and extended his hand.

“I’m Doctor McClain,” he said. “You are?”

“I’m Evan Snow,” Evan said.

“Ah,” Dr. McClain said, “related?”

“Yeah,” he said,  “husband.”

“Okay,” Dr. McClain said, “let’s take a look.”

Dr. McClain moved to the lower part of the bed and had Rachel bend her knees again like the nurse had. He positioned an overhead light carefully so that Rachel’s nether-regions were on stage like Beyonce. He moved in closer and placed his right hand gently over her vaginal opening. Rachel felt pressure under his hand in a way she had never felt before, and a sense of fullness. Something was pushing away from her, whether she wanted it to or not.

“Hmm,” Dr. McClain muttered.

“What,” Evan questioned. “What is it?”

Dr. McClain raised his gaze to meet Evan’s, then turned to meet Rachel’s eyes. His right hand stayed in place, Rachel sensing fingertips just below her opening. She didn’t breath.

“I’m sorry, Ms Snow,” he said. “You are having a premature birth.”

Rachel’s heart stopped, then, without her wishing it to do so,  started again.

“It is too early in your pregnancy,” the doctor continued, “to be able to save the baby.”

As he spoke, he fumbled beneath the sheet that separated Rachel’s eyes from his hand, and she felt a release, and a gush, and an emptiness that would last for a long, long time.

So now she still lays, curled on her side, finally a warm blanket to weigh her down just a bit, waiting for the answers. Over the past couple of hours, a fat rubber band has been placed on her upper arm while her elbow space was patted to plump up a blood vessel so the IV could be placed and blood could be drawn. She has been told that the sticky substance on her sheets at the foot of her bed is leftover glue from heart monitor leads that were stuck to the sheets when they were laundered, but she is not sure that she believes it. She has been sent down the hall with a plastic cup to pee in, and the ultrasound technician has violated her in a way that only Evan would have been allowed to do on a normal day. The TV still blares, having been shut off by the Doctor Whose Name Cannot Be Pronounced then turned on again by the technician who drew her blood, for reasons unclear to Rachel. And still she waits.

“Rachel?”  Dr. Whose Name Cannot Be Pronounced says from the doorway. She enters, pulls up the rolling stool, positions it at Rachel’s side. 

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Fine,” Rachel says, although it is a lie.

“So,” the doctor begins, “your blood work and urine both look fine. Although you have been bleeding, your body hasn’t lost more blood than it can keep up with.” 

Rachel nods. Okay, so I’m not dying. That’s what I thought. But what’s going on? The doctor is older than Rachel, but she can’t tell my how much. Probably at least ten years. Not as old as her mother, but close and she has a motherly way about her. Her eyes are blue, creased at the edges, and kind.

“And, although your ultrasound doesn’t tell us why you are bleeding, it does show that you are fourteen weeks pregnant.”

Rachel’s ears buzz and fog fills the room. Is she going to pass out? She thinks of the third miscarriage now, at only six weeks and much more like the first. It was after that one that she felt Evan disconnect, and only a few weeks ago that he had packed his Subaru full of his clothes and guitars and driven off to live with Sophie, the girl that worked the front desk at his gym and who was, she later learned, seven months pregnant with his child. 

Fourteen weeks? Could this one really be the one that takes? Could she dare to wish for it?

“Sometimes bleeding happens early in pregnancy,” the doctor continued, seeming oblivious to Rachel’s vertigo. “We don’t always find a reason for it, and it’s not always a sign that the pregnancy won’t be successful. Today, you are pregnant, and in spite of the bleeding, the pregnancy seems healthy.”

Rachel’s world stops. 

Then involuntarily starts again, launching her, reeling, into her future.