‘Dawn,’ Mum said. ‘Don’t. Trust me. Really. Don’t.’
‘But I want to see,’ I said.
‘Really, darlin’,’ Mum said. ‘It won’t help.’
‘It’s entirely up to you,’ the doctor said, actually turning the screen a little further away from me.
‘Show me!’ I insisted.
And so with a sigh she turned the screen back towards me.
At first, I sighed with relief. Because the thing on the screen was far more dumpling than baby. I’d had this terrifying idea that he’d be looking out at me, staring right at me. I’d even imagined him waving.
‘So that’s the head,’ the doctor said, pointing at part of the grey on-screen blob. ‘Or at least, where the head will be.Wouldbe, if we let things continue their course.’
‘Right,’ I said, relaxing. ‘It’s fine. When you said heartbeat, I thought you could actually see it.’
‘Let me just…’ she said, clicking on her keyboard and sliding the scanner head a little lower on my belly.
‘OK, can we just…?’ Mum said, trying to quit while we were ahead. ‘I think that’s enough.’
‘There!’ the doctor said, proudly. ‘You see that? That’s a pulse of about 120. It sounds fast, but at this stage it’s perfectly normal.’
‘Dawn,’ Mum said. ‘Enough! Let’s just get the prescription and get out of here.’
‘Shh!’ I said, peering in at the screen. ‘Can you move that closer?’ I asked, and the woman frowned at me and then with a shrug moved the screen so that it was right next to me.
It was nothing really, just a fluffy grey image of something pulsing at about two beats per second. I don’t really know how to explain this to you, but an unfamiliar, warm, wonderful feeling washed over me. I once read something about how bonding hormones flood your body when you’re pregnant, and maybe that’s all it was. But I remember thinking, ‘A heartbeat! My baby has aheartbeat!’ And in those few seconds, my pregnancy ceased being a problem to be solved and became a potential baby – a potential with a heartbeat!
My next thought was,Billy’sbaby, though of course that was something I didn’t know. But in that moment, as I looked at the blob on the screen, it seemed like I knew. I felt, in that moment, 100 per cent certain that I was looking at Billy’s blob, Billy’s baby – Billy’s baby with a heartbeat. And for some inexplicable reason, I realised that I loved it already, that I loved it more than anything I’d ever loved.
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ I asked, absurdly imagining it with curly blond hair in a tiny green jumpsuit.
The doctor laughed and turned the screen back away from me ‘You can’t tell that yet!’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t know that until at least fourteen weeks.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘So is that when I have to come back?’
At the bus stop outside the hospital, Mum was chewing the inside of her cheek, a surefire sign that she was worried. ‘We’ll just go home and think about it all again,’ she said.
‘I can’t,’ I whispered. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, but I can’t.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Mum said, ‘But you just need to sleep on it. You’ll see things more clearly once you’ve had time to think. Luckily you still have a few weeks before things get messy.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Whatever.’
‘She shouldn’t have showed you the ultrasound,’ Mum said.
And though I was thinking that the moment I’d seen that ultrasound was one of the most amazing moments of my life; even though just the thought of that beating heart made me want to smile, I faked a shrug. ‘Maybe,’ I said. And then I added, in my head,But she did.
THREE
DAWN (BY ROB)
Girl, wooden bench, tears.
The first thing I noticed was that she was crying. What I mean is that at first I didn’t realise it was her at all.
Because my mate Andy was sunning it up in Majorca, I was walking his poodle in Dane Park. As I rounded a corner, I saw a girl on a bench, crying. It was only when we got closer that I realised it was Dawn.
