14. Zelda
ZELDA
The cramp wakes me a little after eleven on Christmas Eve.
It sits low, under the drawstring of Hedy’s borrowed pajamas, and it pulls. I lie still in her spare room and tell myself I ate too fast. It comes again, longer.
In the bathroom I find blood. A smear of it, rust-colored, on the paper. My legs go and I sit down hard on the edge of the bath.
“Hedy.” It comes out as a croak. I try again and it comes out as a scream. “Hedy!”
She is in the doorway before I’ve finished her name, one sock on. She looks at the paper in my fist and then at my face.
“How much?”
“That. I don’t know. It hurts.”
“Shoes,” she says. “I’ll get the car.”
I hold the underside of my stomach with both hands the whole way. It is a stupid way to try to keep a baby in, and I can’t make myself let go. “Stay,” I tell him. “Otto, please. Stay where you are.” Hedy runs a red light on the empty ring road and doesn’t apologize for it.
The midwife on the assessment unit is wearing felt antlers. She takes them off when she sees my face. She puts me on a bed with a paper sheet and clips a sensor to my finger, and the monitor beside me starts counting my pulse in green. One hundred and twelve.
“Eighteen weeks tomorrow?” She squeezes gel onto my stomach. It is cold. “Any fall? Any knock?”
“No.”
“Is somebody with you?”
“My sister.” I turn toward Hedy so quickly the paper shifts under me. I need to see her, although I know she’s there.
“And the baby’s dad? Is he on his way?”
I try to answer. What comes out is a laugh, an ugly sound that breaks into crying before I can stop it.
“I left him. Last night.”
“All right,” she says. She doesn’t stop moving the probe.
Hedy has my phone. She took it from me in the car to find the hospital’s number. Now she is standing at the foot of the bed with the screen lit in her hand, and she has stopped moving.
“What is it?” I say.
“I have his number here,” Hedy says. “Do you want me to call?”
She comes beside the bed and turns the screen toward me. His last message is above my answer about collecting clothes. I recognize the shape of it before I can make out the words.
I want him here so much I nearly say yes.
“Read it,” I whisper.
Hedy looks at me.
“The last thing he sent. Please.” I need someone else to hear it. I can’t explain why I want my husband and am frightened of what he’ll say.
She reads it quietly. “I want you home. We can resolve this if you admit that embarrassing me in front of our guests went too far.”
The probe slides lower. The little speaker gives out a rushing noise, my own blood, and under it nothing. The midwife tilts her wrist. Nothing. The green number on the monitor climbs to one hundred and thirty.
“I want him,” I hear myself say. I clutch at the edge of the bed, ashamed to want him after asking her to read that. “I want Jeremiah. I want him to walk in here and hold my hand, and I want him to have told them the truth first. I want both, Hedy.”
“I know.” She is crying too, without a sound, and she wipes her face on her shoulder because her hands are full of my phone. “Do you want me to tell him where you are?”
The speaker hisses.
“Tell him. He’s the father. Tell him we’re here and they’re looking for the problem.” My teeth are chattering and I can’t stop them. “Don’t let him in this room. If he stands at the end of this bed and tells me I embarrassed him, I can’t... Hedy, I can’t hear it tonight.”
“He won’t get past me.”
She types quickly while the midwife presses down above my pubic bone, hard enough to hurt, and angles the probe toward my left hip.
A fast, wet gallop comes out of the speaker. It is quicker than mine.
“Hello, you,” the midwife says to my stomach. “One fifty-two. That’s a lovely heartbeat.”
The noise I make isn’t a word. My fist closes on the paper sheet and it tears. Hedy drops my phone on the bed and bends over me, pressing her cheek to mine.
“I’m going to fetch the doctor to scan you properly,” the midwife says. She pulls the blanket up over my knees. “But you rest, and you eat. Whoever is making you cry like that can wait in the car park.”
I lie back. The heartbeat keeps going on the speaker, quick and even. I flatten my hand on my stomach beside the probe and listen to my son being alive.