Chapter 8 Sasha
Sasha
The week before Daphne’s due date, Sasha texted her to check in, not knowing those would be the last texts she would ever exchange with her sister.
Sasha: I’m gonna need a photo of the current bump situation
Daphne: get ur ass here and see it in person
Sasha: I’m sorry. This weekend? I’m a horrible sister
Daphne: U are, but I forgive u
Daphne texted a photo of herself sitting on the couch, her belly huge, taking up most of the frame. It would be the last photo Sasha would ever have of her sister.
Daphne: I feel like a whale
Sasha: You look beautiful
Daphne: Like a beautiful whale
Sasha: Any day now, right?
Daphne: That’s what they say. My midwife thinks I may be late. No signs of action yet
Sasha: You better text me when there are signs of action
Daphne: Jay’s on duty for that. Don’t think I’m gonna wanna be texting anybody lol
Sasha: I’m excited for you
Daphne: Thanks, boo. I’m excited too. Ur gonna be the best auntie
That was it. Sasha abandoned the text conversation to reply to an incoming text from Professor Williams, her faculty adviser.
Days later, she would still be thinking about how she wished she’d ended with an “I love you” text.
It was something small, silly, but it would have offered a bit of comfort.
Sasha got a text from Jay the very next night, just after 7 p.m. He sent it to Sasha and her mother.
Contractions started
Sasha texted back with a party-hat emoji, something she would deeply regret later. Her mother responded with a barrage of questions: When did they start? How far apart were they? What was the pain on a scale of one to ten? How was Daphne feeling?
Jay didn’t have time to get into details. He just wrote:
I’ll keep y’all posted
Sasha knew that labor wasn’t fast and dramatic like it was in the movies. It could take hours, days, even. Her mother had said she was in labor with Daphne for twenty-seven hours and with Sasha for ten hours—firstborns took their sweet time, she said.
Still, Sasha sat on the edge of her couch, awaiting any further information.
After a few hours, she texted her mother to ask if she’d heard anything.
She hadn’t, but she said this was all normal.
They were probably just in the beginning stages, focusing on managing the pains, preparing for the real battle ahead.
We should both get some sleep. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was still laboring in the morning.
Sasha took her mother’s advice, going to bed around 11 p.m. She couldn’t sleep, though. At the time, she chalked it up to excitement. In retrospect, it was anxiety. Her body could not rest because something didn’t feel right—a sisterly premonition.
Sometime during the night, she did manage to fall asleep, because the next thing she knew, morning light was coming through the window in her bedroom, and her phone was buzzing with an incoming call.
Her eyes flicked to the digital clock on her nightstand—she was someone who still had a digital clock, not wanting to tap her phone every time she wanted to know the time.
It was just before six. When she glanced at her phone, Jay’s name flashed on the screen.
Her heart started pounding at the sight of it.
“Is the baby here?” she asked immediately.
It was silent for a moment, and she looked at the screen to see if the call had dropped. He was still there, though, the seconds of the call ticking by.
“Jay?” she asked.
She heard the sound of a pained animal, and it took her a second to realize it was him.
“Sash,” he said.
His voice was high pitched, screechy, the voice of someone crying. Sasha felt a bolt of adrenaline through her body, readying her for whatever was coming.
“What is it? Is the baby okay?”
“Can you come?” he asked.
Later, she would determine that he couldn’t bring himself to tell her, to say the reality out loud. He had to show her.
When Sasha pulled up to Daphne and Jay’s house, her mother’s car was pulling up at the same time. An ambulance was out front, lights flashing. A woman was standing on the front steps, a phone pressed to her ear. Her long cotton dress was covered in blood.
“Oh my god,” Sasha’s mother said as she slammed her car door shut and ran toward the house.
The baby had died. Sasha knew this in her bones as she ran after her mother. She braced herself for her sister’s devastation, the unbearable pain she would be in, the way it would be evident on her crumpled-up face.
The woman with the blood-covered dress lowered the phone from her ear when she saw Sasha and her mother approaching. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but Sasha’s mother just pushed right past her.
This woman was the midwife. Sasha would realize that later.
“Where is she?” Sasha’s mother yelled, head turning one way, then the other. She was frantic. Sasha had never seen her like this.
Jay appeared, stepping out from the doorframe of their master bedroom into the hallway. He was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. They were covered in blood. When he put his hands to his face, Sasha saw they were covered in blood too.
“She’s gone, she’s gone,” he wailed when he saw Sasha and her mother.
The baby had been a girl. Sasha took in this information.
“Where’s Daphne?” Sasha asked, peering around him.
He clung to Sasha and her mother as if he would fall to his knees otherwise. His desperation was terrifying. He was the drowning person; they were buoys.
“She’s gone,” he repeated.
Two medics came into the hallway then. They did not seem to be in a rush. Their faces were somber. They nodded toward Sasha and her mother.
“Oh dear God,” Sasha’s mother said.
That was when reality started to make itself known, despite Sasha’s adamant refusal to know it.
The next several hours were completely erased from her memory—missing frames from a strip of film, snipped away, disposed of, never to be seen again.
She must have seen her sister’s dead body there in that bedroom, lying next to the dead baby’s, pools of blood, but she has no image of this saved in her brain.
She wonders if it will surface one day, this image, when she is going about her daily life, when she least expects it.
Things had gone horribly wrong. That was the unofficial cause of death. The baby had become stuck in the birth canal. The head had emerged, but not the body. The baby had gone without oxygen for too long, was dead when the midwife finally got him—the baby was a boy—out of Daphne’s body.
When the bleeding started after the delivery, the midwife was in denial of the severity at first. By the time she realized she was in the midst of a catastrophic hemorrhaging event, it was too late.
She called 911, and they came, but there was just too much blood.
Daphne was dead before they could even transport her to the hospital for the requisite care, which, even if it had been done, might not have saved her life.
There was immediate talk of a lawsuit, but in the end, Jay wouldn’t go through with it.
It was his fault, he told himself. He shouldn’t have just gone along with what Daphne wanted.
He should have researched home birth, vetted the midwife.
He had been so stupid. Everyone told him not to blame himself, but how could he not?
He was the one person in Daphne’s life who could have stopped this.
The funeral was a blur of condolences and tears, Daphne’s casket next to the impossibly small casket for the baby boy named Theodore. That had been their pick for a boy name. They would have called him Theo.
People said things like “At least they are together in heaven,” and Sasha decided that no statement starting with at least offered any real relief.
Jay was a mess. He hadn’t been eating or sleeping.
When he approached the podium to say a few words, he promptly fainted.
Everyone gasped, a few relatives in the front row rushing to his aid.
While he came to in the back of the room, Sasha went up in his place.
She hadn’t planned to say anything, didn’t think she’d be able to utter a word without breaking down, but she felt she owed it to Jay and her sister.
“Thank you all for coming. My sister was such a beautiful soul,” she said. Predictably, her voice cracked, and she started to cry. The church was silent as people waited for more. What was there to say to sum up who Daphne was, the magnitude of her loss?
She stepped down, feeling unsteady on her feet, and took her seat next to her mother. Her mother grabbed her hand and didn’t let go of it until the end of the service.
In the days right after Daphne’s death, the funeral had been a welcome to-do item for Sasha to focus on.
She excelled with a task, a project, always had.
Once it was over, she didn’t know what to do with herself.
She tried to refocus on her dissertation, but Professor Williams advised her to take time off.
“I don’t even know why you’re here,” Professor Williams said when Sasha showed up for their usual Friday meeting time.
“I don’t know where else to be,” Sasha said.
“This is a huge thing, Sasha. You need to grieve.”
People kept saying this, but Sasha had no idea what that meant.
There were the stages of grief—denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance—but apparently, they weren’t linear.
They weren’t a checklist. The experts said people tended to bounce between the stages, which had already proved true for Sasha.
Some mornings, she woke up and told herself that her sister hadn’t died.
It was a bad dream. Daphne was still pregnant, delivering any day now.
Denial. The next day, she would wake up heavy, weighed down by the awfulness of it all.
Depression. Then one day, she was overcome by a tsunami of rage.