”Maybe it will be okay”, I tell her as I hold her hand.
Her palms are clammy and cold and I detect a faint shiver running through her. Barely noticeable.
Shawna and I were close friends and had worked together for more than three years now. We had traveled places together for work, stayed in cramped hotels, and shared many a drink late into the evening. She was a quiet gentle girl probably around my age, I presumed. She always wore a small pendant with a cross around her neck and her skirts were always longer than they needed to be, which is why it was a surprise when one day she casually in between a coffee break suddenly broke the conversation to something else.
“Can I tell you something if you can keep it to yourself?” she says, her voice laced with a slight tinge of trepidation.
“I am eight weeks along”, she mentions even before I could nod. She just wanted to get it out there. I smile and give her a big hug followed by the usual standard exclamations of post news joy. I am not quite sure why she shared it with me, but I am excited and happy for her.
Days later when things are quiet and we are catching up on the patio outside at a company-sponsored lunch, I slowly dig in for details. She discovered that she was pregnant the summer after her mother died. She had been trying with her boyfriend of three years — or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they hadn’t been not trying. She was pushing thirty-seven. Well, thirty-seven and a half. Half years had become important in matters of midlife fertility. She was squeaking in right under the wire. Blessedly avoiding the nightmare she had seen so many of her friends go through: the doctors, tests, labs, drugs, and invasive procedures so often ending in heartbreak. She had been through enough.
She tells me about her brother John’s illness, her mother’s death. The last few years had been rough. Didn’t she deserve a break? Even though words like deserve really aren’t part of my psychological makeup, still I wonder if there was a little bit of reverse hubris. A feeling that now — now things would be easier for her. I mean, God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. And everything happens for a reason. Right?
Her pregnancy felt destiné à être — “meant to be.” There seemed a slight poetic symmetry to it: the end of one life, the beginning of another.
“You’re in for a ride”, I tell her laughing and regaling her with my limited experience handling kids. She knew what I meant. As a fourth of the six children, she understood the feeling of a filled-up house, a house bursting with the noisy ambiance of children.
“There is a silence in my house that seems to almost bite me at times”, she had laughed one time looking wistfully at her two young nephews playing in the garden. She had been single for so long, and now she was going to be the mother of a child. The empty seat at her table would be filled. Her ambivalence and fear had vanished. She seemed deeply, powerfully happy. She talks about her call to her obstetrician, about taking prenatal vitamins, and the upcoming appointment to see her in about a month.
It seemed so right that I couldn’t imagine anything going wrong.
Two weeks later as we sit outside on a balmy summer afternoon, she is telling me about her boyfriend who refused to be part of her life anymore. Things were bad long ago and it finally came down to a point where he had slapped her. She had to call the cops and he had packed up and moved out to another state for good.
“Who is coming to the appointment next week?” I awkwardly ask her. It’s a sensitive question and I am aware of the cultural implications of asking probingly personal questions.
I wait for her answer as she stares at me. I am comprehending a politely formal answer, a brush-off, a rebuke for invading someone’s personal circle.
“Nobody”, she says simply staring ahead of me, into space.
At thirteen weeks, Shawna and I drive downtown to see the doctor. It is a beautiful, cloudless morning. Her arms are folded in her lap as she sits in the doctor’s office, looking through well-worn issues of Fit Pregnancy and Child. I linger just behind her as she has her blood pressure measured, and her weight checked. We joke with the nurses and make sure they know we are not a couple.
“He doesn’t need any more kids !!!”, she says laughingly to her doctor as he raises an eyebrow looking at me standing behind her. I try to step outside giving them some privacy but a nurse comes running back outside into the reception even before I pick up the magazine.
“She wants you to be there”. I walk back in.
“Come, sit here. I want you to listen when it happens”, she says laughing.
I feel no worry, no pang of apprehension. Was it the summer joy? I watch as she lays on the examining table and waits.
There are times in my life when all I can remember are people’s faces. I remember my grandmother’s face the moment that she woke me up to tell me my sister was dead; the slight flicker in the neurosurgeon’s eyes when he gave us the news that my aunt had a brain tumor; the tremor of hesitation as Ana told me my father was gone; and in that obstetrician’s office, when she waited for just a small second as she softly mentioned that she was trying to find the heartbeat.
As she lay on the table, the wand of the sonogram pressed to her lower belly, I watched Shawna’s face. She seemed to have heard the doctor’s voice, there was a pause before it registered, and then that soft, caved-in expression — a magnitude of vulnerability — came over her.
“I’m sorry,” she turns to me and says as if apologizing for making me go through a wasted trip.
“Isn’t it possible that it’s still too early?” I ask, turning back to the doctor.
“I’m going to send her for a higher-resolution sonogram.”
That afternoon as we drive to a bigger hospital in midtown Manchester, a machine at another doctor’s office detects the faintest of heartbeats. I see it on the screen, flickering like a distant star. Shawna looks at it and smiles for the smallest second — The tight-winded smile of someone who knows about a won battle and lost wars.
Bed rest for a week is suggested. Bed rest, and then she’d go back in for another look.
“Maybe it will be okay,” I tell her as we drive back to Portsmouth. “Maybe you miscalculated and you’re not as far along as you thought.” my words sound as if they are forced, pulled out from somewhere where they need to be kept buried.
She is silent looking outside as the exits pass by. I remember the sleeves of her summer dress flapping in the wind. Her face, caught in a bright angle of sunlight, is soft and vulnerable.
She holds out a hand and grips mine –tightly, just looking for some comfort — A touch of humanity. The hollows of my eyes burn. I feel like I had hit up against the hard edge of something. I knew I was trying to comfort her — to comfort myself too — but I also knew that it was over.
That faint, flickering star on the sonogram was burning out.
