She turned her head to find Stephen’s face. He was sitting in a chair pulled up right next to her bed, her small hand clasped in both of his. They were alone in a hospital room. Blank walls, white floor. The sterility was smothering.
“The baby?” she whispered, afraid to know.
But it was the one thing she had to know, the only thing that mattered. She didn’t care if she had lost a foot, broken ten bones or had snapped her spine. Her baby’s life was her sole focus.
He looked away as he shook his head, not knowing how to say it. The look on his face was enough. Crushing sorrow bowed her shoulders with its weight and she closed her eyes as her heart silently broke into pieces.
“I’m sorry, Syd. They did everything they could. You’re lucky to be alive, that it didn’t rupture your liver. One of your lungs collapsed.”
Her arm brushed against a tube connected to her chest. The severity of her situation began to dawn on her.
“What happened?” she whispered.
The details were foggy. She remembered a beat-up black car and that was pretty much it. She hadn’t even been in the street. She had just barely stepped out of the 7-11.
“You don’t remember? Someone plowed into you and then drove away. The police were already here. They’re going to check the surveillance footage from the convenience store to try to identify the guy.” He squeezed her hand lightly. “They’re going to come back to talk with you.
“Sydney, I’m so sorry that I didn’t go with you. Maybe if I had…” His voice trailed off and he looked down at his hands, his chocolate brown eyes filled with regret and guilt. She shook her head. It wasn’t his fault. But she would have to address that later.
Right now she needed proof, because she couldn’t quite wrap her head around her loss without it. The last time she had opened her eyes from sleep, her baby had been healthy and kicking, bruising her ribs with every movement. She couldn’t go from that to this without seeing the evidence.
“Where’s my baby? I need to see her.”
Her voice was soft, but firm, even though every word she spoke rasped against her tender broken ribs like a scalpel.
She knew beyond any doubt that it had been a girl. She had known that from the moment she took the pregnancy test. She had also known that she was going to name her Aspen Nicole. That name just seemed to match the perfect little face that she had already seen in her head a hundred times. Her sense of loss was all-consuming and she tried to steel herself against it.
Stephen looked away, again uncertain how to respond.
“Stephen?”
She didn’t need to ask the question again.
For the second time that day, Stephen had to apologize for things that were out of his control. He fiddled with the edge of her blanket, apparently unsure what to do with his hands. He finally settled for picking up her hand again.
“Sydney, she’s gone. I’m so sorry. Your parents were here, for a little while- to sign all of the papers. They told the nurses to dispose of her.” He couldn’t hold her gaze and she stared at his sympathetic face.
To. Dispose. Of. Her.
A lead weight sprung up in her stomach and pinned her to the bed. She fought back nausea, as pain welled up from her stomach into her throat in the form of acidic bile. They had thrown her baby out with the garbage and then they just signed the necessary paperwork and left. Before anyone saw them, she was sure. And they hadn’t even waited for her to wake up. She wondered if Stephen was so firm in his convictions that they loved her now.
“Did they even look at her?” she asked thinly, although she knew the answer before he shook his head.
Of course they hadn’t. To them, she was just a mass of cells, a problem. If they looked at her, they would have to acknowledge her…to acknowledge that she had little hands and feet. They wouldn’t do that. So no one had seen her baby- the little face that she had waited for months to see. Her pain was overwhelming and she was on the verge of losing it… of snapping, screaming, thrashing, throwing things. She took a deep breath, then another. And leveled her gaze at her cousin.
“She was a girl, wasn’t she?”
Her voice was deadly calm and oh-so-frail and he nodded slowly, assessing her face. She showed no outward signs of distress, but anyone who knew her at all knew that it was a façade. Something she had 17 years practice at perfecting.
He squeezed her hand gently, because there was nothing he could say right now that would help. He knew that and so did she. She laid her free hand on her hollow stomach and lay perfectly still, listening to the clock on the wall tick past the seconds and staring listlessly at the wall. Words would be a distraction. She only wanted to think.
An hour passed as they sat in silence, with only the beeping of the hospital machines and the muted thudding of the nurses’ shoes in the hallway for noise. Time did not register with her. She was only cognizant of trying to repress the waves of pain and shock, to tuck it into the furthermost corner of her consciousness…into a safe place. A place that wouldn’t hurt her.
The more still she became, the more she was able to empty her mind and think of nothing. It was numbing, like anesthesia. So she found a spot on the wall and fixated on it, breathing deeply in and out, as if she were meditating. On the outside, it wasn’t apparent that she was desperately clinging to the last vestiges of her sanity. But she was. And Stephen quietly held her hand, not saying a word, giving her exactly what she needed. Silent support.
Later, when she recalled that day, she would be able to pinpoint that it was at that exact moment that she fell in love with him. But she was too immersed in the moment to recognize it at the time. Too overwhelmed trying to survive the pain.
She eventually drifted off to sleep. It seemed like a good idea for her to escape. The nurse had come in to give her another pain shot and the drowsiness overtook her like a current in the ocean. She let her eyes drift slowly closed, clasping Stephen’s hand tightly, silently willing him not to leave…to stay with her. She had never felt so alone in her life.
He was still watching her sleep when the police returned to interview her an hour later. They knocked briefly on the door, two quick raps, before they went ahead and entered. Sydney stirred from her drug-induced rest as she heard the voices next to her bed.
“Ms. Ross?”