Chapter 6 Willow
WILLOW
A framed watercolor of marsh grass hangs over the chair where I don’t know how to sit. The OB office’s nurse is kind without being syrupy, her questions efficient, her pen moving like she’s translating my life into an alphabet only the clinic can read.
“Last menstrual period,” she says, and I say the date and watch her nod and type. “Any cramping? Bleeding?”
“No,” I say, and I’m surprised by the shame that slides in on the heels of the word, as if I’ve already failed to do something I don’t understand.
She clips a pulse ox to my finger. “You’re okay,” she says, reading something in my face. “I know it’s a lot.”
When the ultrasound tech comes in, she introduces herself and then sits in a way that tells me she’s not counting the seconds to her next patient.
She doesn’t look like my mother or my favorite teacher or any of the soothing archetypes in my head; she looks like a woman who has seen every version of this moment and still thinks it matters.
“We’ll do bloodwork today,” she says. “For confirmation if it’s too early for an ultrasound. If your dates are correct, we might see a heartbeat today, though.”
The word heartbeat hits me like a door closing softly from the other side. Cheyenne’s fingers twitch where they’re tangled with mine. I nod.
The rest of what she says sounds like an alien explaining something to me during an abduction.
The cold goop feels like something an alien would put on me during an abduction too.
It’s fitting, given that I feel like I’m on another planet.
The gel is cold. The wand exudes a pressure I don’t have the language for.
I stare at the ceiling while she moves the transducer, searching.
Even the word—transducer—feels wrong, like something meant for space.
“Okay,” the tech finally says, breaking the silence that I’ve taken as safety, and turns the screen. “So.” Grayscale stars. Static that isn’t static at all if you know how to read it. She points, her fingernail a crescent. “Here’s your sac. And here…” She drags the cursor. “And here. And here.”
I look. I don’t understand, and then I do. Three dark shapes. Three bright flickers. Three.
Cheyenne squeaks. “Are those…are there three?”
“Looks like it,” the tech says, eyes kind, voice matter-of-fact. “Three yolk sacs. Three fetal poles. Congratulations. Do you have triplets in the family? They’re not usually a surprise to folks.”
I’m vibrating, a tuning fork struck. My brain empties of the language to answer her and fills with pictures instead: three car seats.
Three sets of socks. Three cries I can’t tell apart in the night.
Three faces looking at me like I should know what I’m doing.
I grip the paper sheet and it crinkles like dry leaves under my fingers. Not usually a surprise.
I look up at Cheyenne and see the same way I feel reflected on her face. “Chey,” I whisper to her, and she nods, resting her palm on the top of my head like I’m a button she can turn off.
“I know it’s a lot,” the tech repeats, the same way she did before, as if saying it’s a lot makes it more manageable.
“Can we hear the heartbeat?” I ask. My voice wobbles, a kite in bad wind, and I correct myself. “Heartbeats?”
She nods, turns up the volume, and the room floods with the wooshing like inside a conch shell, the wooshing like your arm against your ear during high tide, the wooshing of standing too close to a train.
The sound the universe makes when it’s stitching something new.
It’s fast. It’s impossibly fast. It’s three metronomes set to a tempo no part of me can keep up with.
Cheyenne cries openly. I don’t. I stare at the screen like if I blink, they’ll vanish.
The doctor comes back after, prints in hand, folders with tabs. She sits, looks from me to Cheyenne, and chooses her words carefully. I can tell from the way she lays them out that it’s not good.
“You’re measuring at about seven weeks,” she says.
“Triplets. Trichorionic, most likely—three placentas, which is safer than some configurations, but it still raises your risk significantly.” She flips the chart, checks the notes again.
“And with an IUD in place at conception, we consider this extremely high-risk. There’s a higher chance of miscarriage, infection, and preterm labor.
We’ll want to monitor you very closely.”
Her eyes meet mine, steady. “We recommend transferring your care to MUSC’s maternal-fetal medicine program so you have access to specialists who handle complex pregnancies every day.
It doesn’t mean anything will go wrong,” she adds quickly, when my throat tightens and my hands grip the crinkled paper beneath me.
“It means we plan ahead. It means we’re careful. ”
MUSC. The letters sit heavy and official.
I nod like nodding makes me competent, like the act of agreement is the same as understanding.
I answer the tech’s question from earlier even though she isn’t in the room to hear it, just to get words out there, “My sister, Camille—I guess you don’t need to know her name—anyway, she had triplets.
Almost had triplets? How would you say it? The birth came so early she lost two.”
The doctor nods. “That’s part of the reason we want to be cautious.
These pregnancies are delicate already. That and the IUD complicates matters.
We’ll send the referral,” she continues.
“You’ll get a call in a day or so to schedule.
In the meantime, start prenatals. Hydration is important.
Rest, as you can.” She glances at my file. “Do you have support at home?”
Cheyenne answers for me. “She has me and my husband. Her mom.”
“And a job?” the doctor asks, answering her own form before human curiosity. “We can write you a note if nausea’s interfering.”
I think of the hot days in the market, of the tourists grinning while surveying the thousandth woven basket under the canopy.
My boss who lets me sell my own art sometimes.
The water I get to dip my toes in while eating whatever benne wafers didn’t sell.
The smell of horse manure on the sidewalk mixed with the smell of fish. I swallow. “I’ll manage.”
The doctor nods like that is both brave and ordinary. “Questions?”
I could ask a thousand. Do triplets like the same songs?
Is there enough love to go around when you’re one person and there are three of them?
How do you find three Irish men in a city they don’t live in when all you know is the way they kissed?
Instead, I ask a small one: “What can I do for nausea?”
“You can try ginger tea,” she says, and smiles. “Try B6 too. We’ll call with your lab results.”
In the parking lot, the air punches us. September in Charleston can be beautiful if you catch it at the creek in the evening, but the midday asphalt heat is merciless.
Cheyenne unlocks her car with a beep and doesn’t start it, just sits with me and lets the silence settle.
On my lap, the black-and-white ultrasound printout gleams like a secret.
Three.
At home, I put the printout on the fridge with a magnet shaped like a pelican.
It feels absurd, historic, sacred—like filing your prayers or emailing a will.
Cheyenne fusses with toast and lines up vitamins I didn’t know I had, likely expired.
She finds powdered ginger and vows to buy me some fresh.
“We need names,” she says after a minute, because this is how she copes—with lists, with labels that make wild things less wild.
“For the babies?” I ask, whipping my head up. “I don’t even know if I’m…” I don’t finish the sentence: if I’m keeping them. Mostly because I don’t want to say it out loud if I am. But also because I feel pretty certain that I am, though I don’t know why yet.
“No. For the project. Operation Find the Irish.”
A laugh peels out of me, powerless and grateful. “That sounds like a band.”
Cheynne’s eyes are bright. “Doesn’t it? Or a seeking ad in the paper. Looking for three very handsome doctors with questionable decision-making and perfect teeth.”
“They didn’t all have perfect teeth,” I say, chasing a detail to avoid drowning.
She gasps. “Which one?”
“I’m not telling.”
“Rude,” she says, and then her hand finds my knee. “We’ll try the cruise line first. They have to have records of conference attendees. We can narrow by specialty if you remember. Internal medicine? Emergency? Orthopedics? The tall one looked like an orthopedics guy. Big hands.”
“Chey.”
“What? Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking it.”
I manage a small joke. “Wish I had just used his hands.” Cheyenne gasps in response from across the kitchen, turning to offer me a teasing smile, but I can’t look up from the ultrasound printout.
The shapes are still abstract, little beans against a moon.
They don’t look like choices yet. They look like fate.
I stand at the fridge and think about all the people I won’t be telling: my dad, my sister Camille, my mom, the father.
No one except Cheyenne. Soon, Cheyenne will tell Dylan and then there will be three people in the entire world who know about the three blurs, the three beginnings.
For now, that’s all I have. My friends, this city, a referral, and three heartbeats that sound like a future refusing to be theoretical.
In the morning, I’ll call MUSC. I’ll eat a saltine and try the B6 and take shallow breaths when the dishwasher smells like low tide. I’ll make a pros and cons list and decide what my future holds. For now, I’ll let Cheyenne think for me.
Once, when I was a child and afraid to fall off my bike, my dad held my seat while running, his voice whipping away in the wind as he said, “Willow, if it happens, it happens twice because you worried.”
And then he let go.