Chapter Thirty-Two #2
Did it matter why she was terminating? Did it make her less guilty to herself, to others?
Did it change the weight of the choice, the way it would forever sit like a scar etched onto her heart?
The most intimate decision of her life, the hardest moment she had ever experienced—and the whole damn world had an opinion.
Except when it came to her grief. She felt alone in that experience.
She became consumed by a heartbreak so deep and so vulnerable that even David could not reach her.
It was easier to just pretend it never happened.
She took three days off work. All the time left in her paid time off that she could afford.
She covered what was left of her belly with an oversized sweatshirt, and returned to the office with cabbage leaves in her bra.
One reminder of her loss appearing after another .
. . before sucking it back so she could simply function.
And now, she was standing at the threshold of a hospital room, watching her baby girl be born.
The worst and best moment of her life. She didn’t want to step inside, inch closer, see the doctor take her baby out of her body.
I will try to get you footprints and handprints.
That was what the nurse said. But Evelyn didn’t want footprints and handprints.
She didn’t want pictures, either. What she wanted was April, alive and well . . . because oh, how Evelyn loved her.
She made the choice not to see her baby. Or hold her. Or kiss her head and tell her goodbye. It was just too hard.
David stood in the threshold, talking to the medical staff, accepting condolences.
Tears rolled down his cheeks, and the rawness of his pain caused her own eyes to water in response.
He had held back his own grief for her sake, but now, the chicken nudged her forward, toward a hospital incubator waiting in the corner.
“You should go closer,” she said.
“For what?”
The rescue chicken flapped her wings. “You’ll understand when you get there.”
Evelyn shifted in her spot. It had taken everything she’d had that day just to survive the termination.
But now, she took tiny steps towards her little girl, readying herself for some half-formed horror.
Instead, she gasped. April was so small.
Her skin translucent. Evelyn could see every vein and organ inside her body, which had tried so hard to develop.
But she could also see that her daughter was at peace.
Her little eyes pressed shut. Her tiny pink lips—she was almost smiling.
She searched her baby girl’s form, that tiny belly, those sweet little feet and hands.
All that tumbling that had happened inside her, now quieted.
Her child was not a gymnast, after all, but a fighter.
“She’s beautiful,” Evelyn said.
The chicken agreed.
Was she having another dream? A delusion brought on by migraines and a head injury? What were the odds that a paranormal specter had appeared in her life in order to teach her some lesson? Truth was, it no longer mattered.
All she wanted was to be with her little girl.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, leaning over. “I’m so sorry that this had to happen to you, but I want you to know that Mommy would have done anything, anything in the world, to make you okay. Anything to give you the life you deserved. And I’m so sorry . . . I’m so sorry you’re not here.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks, blurring her vision.
She could feel an ache in her chest so deep that she had to physically force herself to breathe through it.
Her baby was dead. Her little girl, gone.
And then, in the depth of her despair, David’s voice reappeared.
She looked up, wiping away the wet spots with the back of her hand, to see him speaking in hushed tones to their little girl.
“I’m so sorry,” he cried. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you. But I want you to know that you were wanted, so, so wanted . . . and so very loved. We will never forget you.”
Evelyn could see the pain in his eyes. Like she could feel the hurt in his creaky, broken voice.
It mimicked her own. It grew like their tragedy, nonsensical and out of control, until it turned into a full wail.
She couldn’t stand hearing David crying like that, and so, out of anger and helplessness, she turned to that rescue chicken, blurting out the words, “What is the point of this? All these heartbreaks, all these memories . . . What is the purpose of bringing me back to all these horrible and tragic memories?”
The rescue chicken flapped her wings. “You still don’t know, huh?”
“Of course I don’t know!”
“Look around,” the chicken said, shaking her tail feathers. “Look around and see, see, see!”
She considered turning the fowl into cutlets.
She would never understand why her baby had to die. Or, how David—her husband—could leave her in the aftermath. If she had closed herself off to the world, buried herself under work, who could blame her? Because Jared Sparks was right. The universe had squeezed her until she’d yelped.