13. Willow
— ? —
Willow
Two weeks at Glenn’s, and my body gives up on pretending.
I’ve been careful. I time my trips to the bathroom for when he’s out or asleep.
I flush fast, run the water, chew mint gum.
I eat just enough at dinner to look normal and lose it quietly an hour later.
Glenn is barely keeping himself alive right now; he doesn’t need to know that I can’t keep anything down, that my jeans hang off my hips, that I’ve started planning my days around the distance to the nearest toilet.
After what he did at the foundation, Glenn installed a new rule: we don’t say his name in this house.
It helps and it doesn’t. The name is gone but the man is everywhere, in the forty-one unread messages on my phone, in the flowers that arrive every morning and go straight into the trash, in the dreams I don’t tell anyone about.
It’s a Tuesday morning when it happens. I’m carrying a laundry basket up Glenn’s stairs, and the stairs tilt sideways.
There’s no warning, or the warning has been happening for two weeks and I refused to read it.
The basket goes over the railing. The world goes white at the edges, then gray, then Glenn’s voice is coming from very far away, shouting my name, and the last thing I feel is his arms catching me before the floor does.
I wake up in an ambulance. Then a hallway. Then a room with an IV in my arm and a blood pressure cuff squeezing my bicep and a doctor with kind eyes and a clipboard full of bad news.
“Hyperemesis gravidarum,” she says. “Severe and persistent vomiting in pregnancy. You’re significantly dehydrated, your electrolytes are a mess, and there are ketones in your urine, which means your body has started burning things it shouldn’t burn. The baby is fine. You are not.”
IV fluids. Antiemetics. And then the sentence that rearranges my life: “This isn’t a push-through-it situation. You need rest, monitoring, and someone with you around the clock. This condition can last weeks. Sometimes months.”
Around the clock. For weeks. Sometimes months.
Glenn sits in the corner of the room, gray-faced, having caught me at the bottom of a staircase a month after burying his husband, and I look at him and I already know I can’t do this to him.
He’s drowning. He sleeps three hours a night.
He came apart in a restaurant two weeks ago because a stranger’s cologne smelled like John’s.
I cannot ask this man to become a live-in nurse for a high-risk pregnancy. I won’t.
The math does itself while the IV drips. My salary is a joke against months of private care. My savings would last six weeks. And my mother’s door closed five years ago. I’d rather sleep in this hospital chair than knock on it.
Which leaves one door.
The nurse comes in to check my vitals and says, without meaning anything by it, “Your husband can bring your things whenever visiting hours…”
“There’s no husband coming,” I say, and she has the grace to just nod and fix the tape on my IV.
Except there is. There’s a husband forty minutes across town in a house I decorated, a husband who has sent forty-one messages I haven’t read, a husband who believed the worst thing anyone has ever believed about me.
Forty-one unread messages from Corey sit on my phone. I’ve counted them. I haven’t read a single one.
I pick up the phone. I type and delete four different sentences. What finally survives is the shortest one.
Meet me at Mercy West. Room 314.
Send.