Mehar
Like lifting a rusted shut window, I struggled to peel my eyelids open. And when I did, the first thing I noticed was the ceiling.
After being stuck on an island with no ceilings, it was jarring to see this white, flat surface above me. Had I died? Was I in heaven?
The second thing I noticed was the pain, which was doing the absolute most across my entire midsection.
And the third thing was Quest’s hand wrapped around mine, his head tilted sideways in a chair, mouth slightly open, looking like he hadn’t slept in a week.
Honestly? He probably hadn’t.
I tried to say his name but my throat was giving absolutely nothing.
Just a dry, cracked cough that sounded like I’d been gargling sand.
Quest’s eyes flew open so fast you would’ve thought I’d fired a gun.
He looked at me and his whole face just…
crumbled and rebuilt itself in about two seconds.
Relief, terror, gratitude, all of it fighting for space.
“Mehar.” He said it like a prayer. “Hey. You’re up. Hold on, let me buzz the nurse.” He was already moving, pressing the call button, then practically lunging toward the little table by the window to pour water.
He held it to my lips and I drank like I’d never tasted water before. Finished the cup. He filled it again. I finished that one too. And somewhere between the second and third swallow, my brain started catching up to my body.
My hand went to my belly.
Instinct. The same way I’d been reaching for her for months, checking, always checking, needing to feel the curve and the movement and the proof that she was still in there.
But there was no curve. My belly was flat.
Empty. And under the hospital gown my fingers hit gauze, tape, and a line of stitches that told me somebody had opened me up while I wasn’t awake to have an opinion about it.
“Quest.” My voice cracked hard. “Where is she? Where’s our baby?”
He sat on the edge of the bed and took both my hands and I could see him choosing his words carefully which scared me more than anything. What was he afraid to tell me?
“She’s here. She’s in the NICU. She’s alive, Mehar.”
“The NICU? Why? What happened? I don’t remember anything after the boat, I don’t remember…”
“They had to do an emergency C-section. She came early, about thirty-two weeks. Her lungs needed some help so they put her on a ventilator. But she’s doing better. Getting stronger every hour. She’s three pounds eleven ounces and she’s fighting like hell.”
Three pounds.
Three. Pounds.
I tried to picture what three pounds even looked like and my brain couldn’t do it because three pounds isn’t a baby.
Three pounds is a bag of sugar. Three pounds is nothing.
Three pounds is way too small to be alive outside my body when she was supposed to have eight more weeks of growing to do inside of it.
The tears came fast and ugly. I’m talking that deep, guttural, can’t-catch-your-breath crying that made my stitches burn every time my body heaved.
But I couldn’t stop because she was alive and I wasn’t there.
I didn’t get to hear her cry. I didn’t get to see her face.
I didn’t get to count her toes or hold her against my skin.
I missed all of it because I was knocked out on a table while strangers cut my baby out of me and put her in a plastic box.
Quest climbed onto the bed, careful around all the wires and tubes, and pulled me into his chest. Held me the way he held me in the cave during the storm, like if he let go I’d dissolve. I grabbed his shirt and buried my face and cried until there was literally nothing left in me.
The doctor came in about twenty minutes later. Young, calm, same one from the ER based on the way Quest looked at him. He pulled a chair to my bedside and sat down.
Sat down.
Doctors don’t sit down for good news. Ever. That’s universal. If a doctor pulls up a chair and gets comfortable, whatever’s coming next is going to require you to already be sitting.
“Ms. Ali, I’m glad to see you awake. How are you feeling?”
“I’m in pain. But I want to know about my baby.”
“Your daughter is progressing well. Her oxygen levels have improved significantly and the team is cautiously optimistic about her respiratory development. She’s a strong little girl.”
Strong. She survived a plane crash in my womb, three weeks on an island, a category three hurricane, and a premature delivery. Strong wasn’t even the right word. We hadn’t invented the right word yet.
“There’s something else I need to discuss with you regarding your surgery.” He glanced at Quest. And Quest gave a slight nod. One of those loaded, we-already-talked-about-this nods that told me my fiancé had been carrying something heavy and waiting for me to wake up so he could put it down.
That look between them scared me more than the stitches.
“During the cesarean delivery, you experienced a severe postpartum hemorrhage. The bleeding was extensive and the surgical team made every effort to control it using standard interventions. Unfortunately, the hemorrhage did not respond to those measures and in order to save your life, we had to perform an emergency hysterectomy.”
The word walked into the room and sat down. Right next to the doctor. Made itself comfortable. Wasn’t planning to leave.
Hysterectomy.
I didn’t need a definition. I didn’t need a pamphlet.
I knew what it meant because I had spent seven months imagining the family Quest and I were going to build.
Two kids. Maybe three. A house with a yard, a playroom, too many shoes by the front door.
Holiday dinners where the table wasn’t big enough and the noise was too loud and we’d look at each other across a room full of kids we made and know that everything we survived on that island was worth it.
Gone. Cut out of me while I slept.
I didn’t even get a say in it. This was worse than when I lost my fallopian tube. Why did this shit keep happening to me?
“I understand this is very difficult,” the doctor said. “The decision was made to preserve your life. Without the procedure, the hemorrhage would have been fatal.”
“I understand,” I said.
He said more things. Recovery. Follow-up. Counseling. My ovaries were still intact. Surrogates. I heard none of it. Quest thanked him for me because my mouth wasn’t cooperating. The doctor stood up, said he’d give us time, and walked out. Door closed.
Just me and Quest and that word still sitting in the room.
I turned to him and everything I’d been holding crumbled.
“I wanted to give you more children, Quest.” The tears were different this time. Deeper. Pulled from somewhere I didn’t know existed. “I wanted us to have a big family. Brothers and sisters for her. I wanted her to grow up in a loud, messy house full of people. I wanted to give you that.”
He took my face in his hands. Those rough, scarred, island-survivor hands that I’d memorized over three weeks of hell. And he looked at me with red, wet eyes that had zero walls up.
“You’ve given me more than I ever could’ve hoped for, Peach.
You gave me a daughter who survived things that would’ve killed grown men.
You survived a plane crash and an island and a hurricane carrying her inside you.
You fought for our family when there was nothing to fight with except your body and you won.
I don’t need more children. I need you. I need her.
And I have both of you and that’s everything. ”
I cried into his hands and he let me and for a long time neither of us said anything because there was nothing left to say that was bigger than what he’d already said.
· · ·
A nurse brought a wheelchair after I was given a check-up.
Getting out of bed was an event. Every single movement sent pain rippling through my stitches and Quest was hovering behind the nurse like he wanted to carry me himself but knew he’d make it worse.
They lowered me into the chair, adjusted the IV pole, and the nurse wheeled me down the corridor toward the NICU with Quest’s hand on my shoulder the entire way.
My heart was climbing with every turn of the wheels. I was about to see my daughter. I’d carried her for seven months. Talked to her every single day on that island. Felt her kick and hiccup through a plane crash and a storm and starvation and all of it. I knew her without ever seeing her face.
And I was terrified that seeing her in that incubator was going to break something in me that couldn’t be fixed.
The nurse buzzed us in. Rows of incubators, each one holding a baby who got here too soon. The beeping of monitors blended together like a heartbeat that belonged to the whole room. She stopped at the third one on the right and I looked through the clear plastic and saw her.
She was so small my brain couldn’t compute it.
She looked like somebody had placed a doll in there as a placeholder.
Her skin was reddish and translucent and I could literally see her veins.
Tubes in her nose. Wires on her chest. Tiny fists curled up tight.
Knees drawn to her belly like she was still trying to be inside me, still curled in the position she’d held for seven months, refusing to unfold into a world she hadn’t agreed to enter.
I couldn’t speak. My hands went over my mouth and I cried silently because sound felt wrong in here. Too big for a room full of babies this small.
The nurse opened the side port. “You can touch her. Gently. She knows your voice and your scent.”
I reached through the opening and touched her arm.
Her skin was warm and so soft it didn’t feel finished yet.
I ran my finger down to her hand. Her tiny fingers uncurled slowly and wrapped around my fingertip.
The grip was barely anything. Almost nothing.
But it was everything. The whole world compressed into five fingers holding onto me.
“Hi baby,” I whispered. “It’s Mommy. I’m here. I’m sorry it took me so long.”
And then she opened her eyes.
“This the first time I’ve seen her eyes,” Quest said.
Just a crack. A sliver. Like she was checking to see if the voice matched the touch. Her face scrunched against the NICU lights and then her eyes opened a little wider and I saw them and the floor dropped out from under me.
Quest was behind the wheelchair. He’d been quiet this whole time, letting me have this moment. But I heard him step closer and I heard the sound he made. A small, sharp inhale. The kind of breath you take when something doesn’t add up.
“Her eyes are blue-green,” he said.
I stared at my daughter. She stared back at me with eyes that looked like Rita’s, Prime’s and Cannon’s. And it made no sense because we had just found out Quest was not directly related to Rita.
He squeezed my shoulder tightly. What was he thinking?