Chapter Thirty-Three Tessa
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tessa
I don’t know where Gabe’s taking me. The prelabor is too intense for me to focus on our surroundings.
A contraction releases, but my entire midsection burns as intensely as if another one has started.
We’re on the highway now, headed east in near-standstill traffic.
We aren’t going to Longevity or Rosebud, that much is clear. He could be taking me anywhere.
Gabe monitors the stop-and-go traffic ahead.
“This is too slow.” He pulls onto the shoulder, barreling toward the next exit. I try to read the sign, but I’m pummeled by another contraction. I hug myself, hoping he’s not as big of a monster as I fear.
“Gabe, where are we going?” I grunt.
“We’ll be there soon, love.” Through the agony, I feel him squeeze my knee, and the nausea his contact induces.
“Did you kill them?” My unanswered question echoes through the car. The fear sends my brain spinning, trying to focus between contractions. He killed them. After he delivers the baby, he’ll kill me too.
When the car slows to a stop, I think, This is where it ends.
Only, when I look out the window, we’re parked at the entrance to Cedars’ labor and delivery.
“You took me to the hospital?”
“Where else would I take you?” I gaze into his dark eyes, the golden specks that used to make me melt. Maybe he’s still the man I love.
Then a flood soaks the seat of my pants as my water breaks, a reminder that he’s already violated me.
From there, everything happens too quickly. Gabe throws my door open and attempts to lift me out.
“Don’t touch me,” I scream. Gabe recoils as a nurse maneuvers around him and helps me out of the passenger seat. Gabe shouts that he’s going to park the car, then he’ll be right in. I’m fully focused on getting the nurse’s attention.
“I need your help,” I say to the nurse who’s pushing me through the hospital corridors.
“Just breathe,” he tells me.
“It’s about my husband. He’s dangerous.” Another contraction pummels me. It seems impossible that they could get stronger. Somehow, there’s always more pain.
Inside, the attendant shouts to another nurse, who takes over. He doesn’t say goodbye, let alone respond to what I’ve told him. This nurse is female. She’ll be more likely to listen.
“Please, I need your help,” I pant.
“We’ll just get you into your room, okay?” She pushes me down the hall, motioning to another nurse, her focus everywhere but me.
“No, it isn’t about the baby. Something’s happened.”
In the hospital room, she clicks the brake on my wheelchair. “I know it’s scary. You’re in good hands.”
Two other nurses help me stand and change into a gown. I’m not sure I’ve managed to say anything beyond “Wait. Stop. Please.” One puts a blood pressure cuff on my arm while the other scans the back of my hand for a vein.
“I need your help,” I whisper right before she inserts a needle for the IV with no warning. It’s violent, like she’s trying to hurt me. I wince, and at last she makes eye contact.
“All done.” She smiles.
Before I can speak again, several more nurses come in and wheel me down another hall.
“Please,” I keep saying. “I need you to call the police.”
One nurse, a decade older than the rest, shouts orders to the others, outlining what to do when we get into the OR.
“Please,” I whimper. “Police.”
In the OR, the anesthesiologist introduces himself, asks me a few questions about my history with anesthesia. I manage to tell him I get nauseated and then say, “Please, I need you to stop for a moment. I’m in danger.”
“We’ll take care of you,” he reassures me.
“Police,” I say. He casts me a confused expression, then tells me to spread my arms on the rests they’ve positioned at a cross.
A blue paper sheet hides everything below my belly button.
Before I can say anything else, the cold rush of whatever he’s put into my IV courses through me.
The nausea is instantaneous. I tell him I don’t feel so good.
This he hears. He gives me something for it.
Just as quickly I feel fine, then nothing at all.
The nurses work quickly. I can no longer speak.
I’m in a haze from fear and the drugs and the fact that in a few minutes I’ll be a mother of two.
As they prepare my body for the C-section, the nurses debate the length of my pubic hair, whether they need to shave me, which even in my current state is incredibly embarrassing.
I’m positioned supine on a cross, sacrificial.
They’re remarking on the doctor’s preferences when Gabe comes in wearing scrubs.
He’s going to operate on me. I try to lug my limp body up.
“Keep your arms down,” the anesthesiologist says.
Gabe sits on my side of the sheet. With Jasper, I was so scared, but we had this, me and Gabe, harbored from everything on the other side.
This time, I’m far more afraid of Gabe than anything going on behind the blue curtain.
He’s stolen this moment from me. He’s already taken so much, and now he’s taking even more.
Two doctors come in and quickly introduce themselves, explaining that Dr. Avagyan is in surgery with another patient.
Then they disappear behind the curtain. Gabe is saying all the right things, how I’m so strong and brave.
The two doctors gossip. Through the anesthesia and adrenaline, I can’t make out their words.
One is telling the other a story; the other is monosyllabically encouraging her.
They occasionally stop chatting to tell me I’m going to experience some pressure before resuming their prattle.
With time, everything becomes routine, even cutting women’s bodies open and removing their babies.
Even implanting them with another woman’s egg.
The tugging is more uncomfortable than I remember. Last time, with Jasper, I was so nervous, I couldn’t feel anything.
Distantly, I hear that animalistic, newborn squawk.
“Here she is,” one of the doctors says. She lifts my baby over the sheet so I can see her.
My lower body is numb, but a warmth spreads through me as I take in my daughter for the first time.
I want to hold her, to forget everything outside this moment.
Too quickly, she’s whisked away. Gabe is no longer next to me.
He’s joking with the nurses. Then he brings our daughter over to me, leaning her head to mine so we’re nose to nose.
Even though I can’t move, I try to nestle into her.
Gabe pulls her away before I’m ready. He holds her to him, promising all the things I want a father to vow to his daughter in her first moments of life: how we’re so happy she’s here, how he’ll keep her safe.
The tugging becomes more intense, pulling my attention away from my daughter.
“Is there supposed to be so much pressure?” I don’t recognize my own voice. It’s reedy, uncomposed.
“We’re putting your uterus back,” the chattier of the two doctors says. She continues with her story to the other doctor, complaining about something. When I search for Gabe, my baby, they’re gone.
I flail desperately, but I’m only able to move my arms.
“We’re almost done,” the doctor says. “We need you to stay still a little longer.”
“My baby,” I scream. “My baby.”
“She’s with Dad,” the doctor says.
“No, please. Don’t let her be alone with him.” I don’t want his voice to be the first one she knows. His smell. His morality.
“A couple more minutes.” Her voice is so rote, it sounds like a recording.
No one talks to me again until the doctors leave and a nurse finally asks me how I’m doing. Before I can answer, two more nurses come in and count to three as they lift me onto a gurney.
In the recovery room, Gabe is sitting shirtless with my daughter to his chest, eyes closed.
He hasn’t heard us enter. I want to tear my daughter out of his arms. Adrenaline pumps through me, keeping me awake and craving the touch of my daughter.
Otherwise, my body is immobilized. A nurse wheels me in and locks my gurney into place, her gaze softening as she watches Gabe snuggle my daughter.
“I’ll be right back with ice chips,” she says, never taking her attention off Gabe.
Then she’s gone, and I’m alone with my husband and daughter for the first time.
Only, it’s nothing like I expected, nothing like this same moment was with Jasper.
Gabe continues to lounge with my daughter against his skin.
A new fear creeps in. We didn’t do IVF this time.
We weren’t trying to get pregnant. At least I wasn’t.
Could he have implanted Regina’s egg in me another way?
Is it possible my daughter isn’t fully mine either?
I clear my throat, and Gabe’s eyes drift open.
He stands, rocking the baby, in no rush to hand her to me.
When the nurse returns with ice, she asks if I want to try nursing.
Gabe situates my baby against me. I see her wrinkled, elfish face.
As I put my nipple into her mouth, she immediately knows what to do, and I feel that subtle tugging, unlike anything else in the world.
Gabe will never have this. He will never know the sensation of having your child feed from you. Regina won’t either.
When the nurse leaves, he sits beside me and strokes my hair, staring at our baby. It would be so easy to submit to this moment, to trust the man before me.
“You killed them, didn’t you?” I say a little less certainly. Because we are here at the hospital, where he promised to take me. Because seated beside me is the gentle, loving man I’ve always known.
“Tessa.” His voice is rich with disappointment. “I’ve made some mistakes, but I would never hurt anyone. You know that. Especially not Reggie and Aram. I loved them like family.”
He pleads with me, and despite myself, I believe him.
What’s worse, I want to believe him. I want him to tell me that I have it all wrong.
Regina isn’t Jasper’s mother. My baby girl’s.
I search his eyes, which soften when they meet mine, and it hardens something in me.
How many times have these eyes, this handsome, earnest face, reassured me that Regina was a stranger?
Gabe’s right. I do know him. He isn’t violent.
He’s a liar. More than a liar. A perpetrator.
A violator. There isn’t an exact word for how much he’s exploited me.
“I want you moved out by the time I get home,” I say steadily.
He leans over to kiss my forehead. I feel like vomiting, from the surgery, from his touch, from the fear of having him this close to us. “You’re in shock. We’ll talk about this once you’ve rested.”
I fight the urge to lash out at him. Because the truth is, as much as I want to kick Gabe out of this room, our house, our lives, I need an answer only he can provide. I need to know if my son is mine. My daughter too.