She turns to me and rubs her hands together. “Ready to see if we can view this baby?”
“Absolutely.”
It was the same thing I said when I came here to be artificially inseminated.
“Are you completely sure you want to do this?” Dr. Mercer asked me.
“Absolutely,” I replied.
“Okay. Here’s the specimen I’m going to use.” She handed me a medical vial. “Check and make sure it’s the right donor number.”
I compared the number on the vial with the number Brooke had copied for me. “That’s it,” I confirmed.
“All right, then. Lie back and put your feet in the stirrups.”
“Can you sing a few bars of ‘I Will Always Love You’ while you do this?” I joked.
Dr. Mercer laughed. “Sorry, but that’s beyond my skill set.”
I lie back on the exam table now, Sarah on one side of me, Dr. Mercer on the other. I pull up my black-and-white top and tug down my black pants to expose my stomach. She tucks a paper medical cloth into my pants’ waistband. “I’m going to apply some ultrasound gel, and I don’t want to get it on your clothes.”
“I appreciate that,” I say. I raise my eyebrows as she squirts the gel over my belly. “Oh, it’s warm!”
“We do everything we can to make our mothers comfortable.” She turns on the ultrasound machine, and the screen lights up. Then she picks up an object that looks like a computer mouse. “This is the transducer.” She puts it on my belly and slides it around. “Let’s see if we can find this little one. At nine weeks, your baby is basically the size of a grape.”
“Nine weeks?” I lift my head from the table. “I was inseminated just seven weeks ago!”
“Yes, but pregnancies are dated from the mother’s last period.”
“Even when you know the exact date of conception?”
She nods. “Even then.” She runs the transducer over my belly. “Let’s see if this new machine lives up to its hype.”
My heart feels as if it’s about to beat out of my chest. Sarah stands beside me and holds my hand.
“Ah—there it is! Hear that? That’s the heart.” She turns up thevolume, and I hear a loud, fast swooshing sound. “That’s your baby’s heartbeat!”
“Oh, wow.Wow!” I listen in amazement, my throat growing thick. “Is it supposed to be that fast?”
“Yes,” Dr. Mercer says. “At this age, it’s supposed to be between about one hundred and fifty and one-seventy beats per minute, and this is showing one hundred and sixty-five. That’s perfect. As your baby gets older, it’ll slow down a little bit, but it’ll stay really fast.”
“That’s incredible.”
“Everything looks wonderful,” Dr. Mercer says. I stare at the screen, tears pooling in my eyes. I can only make out black and gray shapes. Nothing looks like a baby.
She adjusts a knob on the machine, zooming in on part of the image. “That’s the head.”
I squint. “It looks enormous!”
Dr. Mercer laughs. “Don’t worry. The rest of the body will catch up. All of your baby’s organs are starting to grow. The heart already has all four chambers.”
I peer at the screen. “That’s what we’re hearing?”
“Yes.”
“The chambers of my baby’s heart,” I murmur. Goose bumps run up and down my arms. “I’m listening to chamber music.”
“Yes.” The doctor smiles. “Yes, you are.”
