Because he’s lost this, too, even if he doesn’t know it yet.
My first call goes straight to Patton’s voicemail.
I try again and again, each ring feeling endless, each trip to voicemail as painful as the cramps wracking my body and crushing my soul.
A voice in the back of my head reminds me that he said he’d be unreachable for the next few days, on a set in some remote part of Thailand with spotty phone service. Still, each failed attempt hurls me deeper into a despair that’s swallowing me whole. A despair, as thick as tar, that I can’t see past or swim through.
On the fifth try, my hands can barely hold the phone, my shaky whisper hoarse and unfamiliar to my own ears. “Please, Patton, pick up. Please . . . I need you.”
But he doesn’t.
And who knows when he finally will. In a day? A week? Definitely when this is all over and there’s nothing left to talk about.
Nothing left to save.
Thirteen weeks. A baby I’ve been whispering and singing to for thirteen weeks.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, my voice gurgling past my tears as I run a hand down my throbbing abdomen. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. So sorry that I couldn’t keep you, couldn’t be your mommy.”
My voice breaks around the gravel in my throat. “I’m s-so sorry I couldn’t hold you. Kiss you. Show you how much I l-love y-you.”
Tears stream down my face, soaking the collar of my tank top, as I continue to shake my head against the wall, my words a chant against the reality I’m having to face alone. “I’m so sorry . . . So sorry I failed you.”
How much longer can I keep watching my body fail to do what so many other women do so easily? So naturally.
My sister got pregnant without even trying, and she carried my nephew to term without a single complication. The women at my salon chatter about how hard it’s been to lose the pregnancy weight, not how hard it was to get pregnant; how hard it was to stay pregnant.
And the look in my boss’s eyes when I told her I needed to adjust my schedule around some of my treatments. Her eyes spoke the words her decorum didn’t afford her lips—“Poor thing. So young. How could you need treatments to get pregnant?”
What would her eyes say watching this—my body, barely past one trimester and already giving up? Again.
How much longer can I endure going through this alone, without him?
I can’t. I just fucking can’t anymore.
The anger hits me suddenly, white-hot and all-consuming, like the explosion of a star. I’m furious at my body for forsaking me, furious at Patton for not being here when I need him again, and furious at God for not giving me theone thingI’ve wanted more than anything else in my life.
But mostly, I’m furious at myself for getting so excited so quickly. For thinking that this time would be different because I passed the first trimester date. I’m furious at myself for allowing hope to settle in my heart, for allowing myself to daydream about the future.
My breaths come out faster, ragged and shallow, as if each gulp of air is trying to fill the emptiness my womb just created. The cramping is getting worse, and I know what this means.
I need to get to the ER.
But I sit a little longer, clutching the phone in my trembling hands, willing it to ring. Willing him to see the missed calls, to sense that I need him. To realize through some telepathic connection that our real world is crumbling while he’s on set creating a fictional world for others.
Except all I get is silence.
And in that deafening silence, I come to terms with more than just what my body wasn’t able to hold.
I come to terms with the distance that’s grown between us, not in the past few weeks, but over the past four years. A distance accumulating like mold inside walls, slowly and silently, until one day the structure decays from within.
I come to terms with the lonely nights, the missed calls, and the conversations interrupted by more important phone calls.
I come to terms with the fact that love alone, even as immense as an ocean, isn’t enough to keep two people from drifting apart.
twenty
nisha
