15. Jeremiah
JEREMIAH
Hedy’s message lands at eleven fifty-two. I am on the sofa with the tree lights on and the television off.
Zelda is at the General, maternity assessment. She’s bleeding. They’re looking for the heartbeat. She has asked me not to let you into the room.
I read it standing. I don’t remember getting up.
I drive without a coat. The roads are empty and wet, and it has started to snow again, small dry flecks coming down into the headlights. At the ring-road lights I say “please” out loud to the windscreen. I haven’t prayed since I was nine.
Looking for the heartbeat. She typed looking. She did not type found.
The maternity entrance has a paper chain taped around the desk. Hedy is standing in front of the double doors with her arms folded and her coat over her pajamas. She has been crying.
“Is she...” My voice goes. I start again. “Hedy. The baby.”
“They found the heartbeat. A hundred and fifty-two. The doctor’s scanning her now to check the rest.”
My hand finds the edge of the desk. I breathe in and it shakes going down. The sound I make on the way out is one I have never made in front of another person. The receptionist looks at her screen.
“I need to see her.”
“No.”
“She’s my wife. That’s my son in there.”
“She’s my sister.” Hedy doesn’t raise her voice.
“Do you know what she did when they couldn’t find him?
She asked for you. She lay there with that thing on her stomach and nothing coming out of the speaker, and she said she wanted you to hold her hand.
Then she told me to keep you out, because she couldn’t stand to hear you say she’d embarrassed you. ”
“I wouldn’t...”
She holds up Zelda’s phone. My own message is on the screen. I want you home. We can resolve this if you admit that embarrassing me in front of our guests went too far.
I sent that before noon from the dining room, with her wedding ring in my shirt pocket.
“You wrote this to a pregnant woman who has told you the truth for three weeks,” Hedy says. “You knew. At that table, you already knew.”
“Yes.”
She takes a step back from me. “The midwife said whoever was making her cry like that could wait in the car park.”
“Then that’s where I’ll be.” It comes out cracked. “I won’t come in. If she asks, I’m outside. If anything changes, anything at all, come and get me. Please, Hedy.”
She doesn’t answer. She goes back through the double doors, and they close behind her.
The car is where I left it, across two spaces, with the driver’s door open. The seat is wet. I sit in it.
Snow lands on the windscreen and I don’t run the wipers. Eleven windows are lit on the second floor. I don’t know which is hers. I pick one and watch it.
She asked for me. Our son’s heart wasn’t showing up on a machine and my wife asked for me. Then her sister had to keep me out.
I take out my phone and read what I sent her this morning. I read it until the screen dims. Then I put my forehead on the steering wheel and sob. It is loud, and I can’t shut my mouth on it. I am in a hospital car park on Christmas Eve. Nobody comes to tell me it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
If she had been at home, I would have driven her here myself. I keep seeing it: her hand on my arm, my keys, the two of us through those doors together. I want to start the night again from there.
Then I see the message on her phone.
She could have been beside me on the sofa and still been afraid of what I would say.
I lift my head. The window I chose is still lit. I want to go inside and tell Hedy I understand now.
But she would have to leave Zelda again to listen to me.
I stay in the car.
At twenty past four my phone lights up. Scan is clear. Placenta fine, cervix closed. They’re sending her home to rest. Go home, Jeremiah.
Hedy’s car pulls out of the far exit a few minutes later with two people in it. The passenger has her hood up and her head against the window. I don’t follow them.
I drive back to the house, where Zelda’s stocking is still on the mantel and the lights she set on a timer have switched themselves off.