Chapter 24
CHAPTER
I’LL NEVER FORGET the look on Max Hunter’s face when I told him our baby was dead.
His face scrunched up into a frown when he let himself into my apartment and saw me curled up in a ball under a blanket on the couch, crumpled tissues clenched in my fists and discarded all around me on the coffee table and floor.
He bent over me and put his hand on my arm. He asked me what was wrong.
When I told him, his frown disappeared, leaving a blank expression in its wake. He stared at me, as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. So I repeated myself. “Our baby … it’s gone. It died. I lost the baby, Max.” When he still didn’t react, I persisted. “Max, did you hear me?”
Finally, he took a deep breath. “What did you say?”
Fresh tears spilled down my face. “I’m sorry … I lost our baby.” Then I was sobbing again, burying my face in my blanket as my body convulsed.
Two deaths. Now I had two deaths to mourn.
My father died about six months before I met Max. The pain was still incredibly raw, like a red-hot sunburn—easy to forget about for a few moments, until you move or twist a certain way, and a lick of fiery pain would rip through your skin, catching you by surprise.
Max seemed to fly through the various stages of grief at lightning speed. First was denial. “No. No, that can’t be right. We just saw the doctor a few weeks ago and she said everything was fine. She said the baby looked great. There must be some mistake.”
But it was no mistake. I told him the night before I had started to feel some cramping, but I’d brushed it off. Surely it was normal. My body was expanding, making room for the baby. I just needed some rest. But in the middle of the night, the pain woke me up, coming on worse than before.
The sun was rising as I noticed the first signs of blood, sitting on the toilet, clutching my abdomen. Then more, later, in my underwear. I’d finally called my doctor’s office, and she’d told me to come in as soon as possible.
By the time I got to the clinic, my obstetrician confirmed the thought that had been creeping up the back of my spine all night, finally tiptoeing inside my brain, carving out a space for itself, making itself comfortable, like a cat curling up on the furniture no matter how many times you shooed it away.
My baby was dead.
His next stage was anger.
“No. Why would she tell us everything looked great if it wasn’t great?” he said, his voice getting louder.
I told him what the doctor said—sometimes these things just happen.
Everything looks good for a few weeks, and then, the baby just dies.
It was an unviable egg, an unstable pregnancy.
It doesn’t mean I don’t have plenty of other strong, viable eggs in me.
Most likely I can get pregnant again and still have a healthy baby girl or boy—just not this time.
He quickly moved into acceptance and sadness. His eyes got shiny, and the first tears fell. He sat down next to me and buried his face in his hands.
He cried next to me on the couch. For a few blissful moments he pulled my head into his lap and cradled it, brushing my hair away from my eyes and out of the path of my tears.
He squeezed my hand in his and even kissed it once.
We mourned together. For a little while, I thought I had someone to grieve with, rather than grieving alone.
But it didn’t last long. After a while, he sniffed, wiped away the wet tears with the back of his fist, and stood up. “I’ve gotta go. I’m sorry. I’ll talk to you later.”
My mouth fell open. “But—”
But he was already gone, pulling the front door closed behind him. I heard his footsteps thumping down the stairs of my apartment building.
I texted. I called. I even went by the insurance company, but the receptionist said he wasn’t in. For days, I sought him out. It was our baby, his and mine—we should be mourning together. Eventually I got one single text back: I’m sorry. I need time.
Apparently, though, it was only me that he needed time away from.
I spotted him leaving his office a couple of weeks later.
I had taken to staking the area out, waiting at a coffee shop across the street, three doors down, where I could see his building’s entrance if I sat at one of the window tables.
That day, I followed him to a bar. I saw him buy a drink for a woman wearing a pink tank top and a black skirt barely bigger than a belt.
I watched them as they left the bar a couple of hours later, weaving, tipsy.
They disappeared into an old Victorian a few blocks away. They didn’t come back out.
After that, following Max became somewhat of a full-time job.
In many ways, now I can see that it was a welcome distraction from the pain of my two immense losses, not to mention the physical pain that lingered.
It took a while for my body to completely expel my child; the cramps lasted weeks, the spotting returning several times.
Max saw Pink Tank Top Girl at least two more times. Each time, he followed her back to her place and didn’t emerge again until the next morning.
After Pink Tank Top Girl, there was Anklet Girl.
I called her that in my mind because she always wore these impossibly high stiletto heels with a gold anklet on her left foot.
She liked to wear her long brown hair high in a ponytail on top of her head, and somehow her outfits looked both expensive and cheap at the same time.
Max found her at a swanky hotel bar in Mission Bay.
The first time he spent the night with her, they just went right upstairs to a room in the hotel.
The next couple of times he saw her, he followed her back to a high-rise apartment building.
Sometimes his trysts overlapped. For example, his first night with Anklet Girl was in between his second and third nights with Pink Tank Top Girl.
But what threw me the most was the next girl I saw him with. The girl with the perfect smile and shiny brown hair, and the diamond on her left ring finger.