“What is it? Is the baby okay?”
“Can you come?” he asked.
Later, she would determine that he couldn’t bring himself to tell her, to say the reality out loud. He had to show her.
When Sasha pulled up to Daphne and Jay’s house, her mother’s car was pulling up at the same time. An ambulance was out front, lights flashing. A woman was standing on the front steps, a phone pressed to her ear. Her long cotton dress was covered in blood.
“Oh my god,” Sasha’s mother said as she slammed her car door shut and ran toward the house.
The baby had died. Sasha knew this in her bones as she ran after her mother. She braced herself for her sister’s devastation, the unbearable pain she would be in, the way it would be evident on her crumpled-up face.
The woman with the blood-covered dress lowered the phone from her ear when she saw Sasha and her mother approaching. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but Sasha’s mother just pushed right past her.
This woman was the midwife. Sasha would realize that later.
“Where is she?” Sasha’s mother yelled, head turning one way, then the other. She was frantic. Sasha had never seen her like this.
Jay appeared, stepping out from the doorframe of their master bedroom into the hallway. He was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. They were covered in blood. When he put his hands to his face, Sasha saw they were covered in blood too.
“She’s gone, she’s gone,” he wailed when he saw Sasha and her mother.
The baby had been a girl. Sasha took in this information.
“Where’s Daphne?” Sasha asked, peering around him.
He clung to Sasha and her mother as if he would fall to his knees otherwise. His desperation was terrifying. He was the drowning person; they were buoys.
“She’s gone,” he repeated.
Two medics came into the hallway then. They did not seem to be in a rush. Their faces were somber. They nodded toward Sasha and her mother.
“Oh dear God,” Sasha’s mother said.
That was when reality started to make itself known, despite Sasha’s adamant refusal to know it.
The next several hours were completely erased from her memory—missing frames from a strip of film, snipped away, disposed of, never to be seen again. She must have seen her sister’s dead body there in that bedroom, lying next to the dead baby’s, pools of blood, but she has no image of this saved in her brain. She wonders if it will surface one day, this image, when she is going about her daily life, when she least expects it.
Things had gone horribly wrong. That was the unofficial cause of death. The baby had become stuck in the birth canal. The head had emerged, but not the body. The baby had gone without oxygen for too long, was dead when the midwife finally got him—the baby was a boy—out of Daphne’s body.
When the bleeding started after the delivery, the midwife was in denial of the severity at first. By the time she realized she was in the midst of a catastrophic hemorrhaging event, it was too late. She called 911, and they came, but there was just too much blood. Daphne was dead before they could even transport her to the hospital for the requisite care, which, even if it had been done, might not have saved her life.
There was immediate talk of a lawsuit, but in the end, Jay wouldn’t go through with it. It was his fault, he told himself. He shouldn’t have just gone along with what Daphne wanted. He should have researched home birth, vetted the midwife. He had been so stupid. Everyone told him not to blame himself, but how could he not? He was the one person in Daphne’s life who could have stopped this.
The funeral was a blur of condolences and tears, Daphne’s casket next to the impossibly small casket for the baby boy named Theodore. That had been their pick for a boy name. They would have called him Theo.
People said things like “At least they are together in heaven,” and Sasha decided that no statement starting withat leastoffered any real relief. Jay was a mess. He hadn’t been eating or sleeping. When he approached the podium to say a few words, he promptly fainted. Everyone gasped, a few relatives in the front row rushing to his aid. While he came to in the back of the room, Sasha went up in his place. She hadn’t planned to say anything, didn’t think she’d be able to utter a word without breaking down, but she felt she owed it to Jay and her sister.
“Thank you all for coming. My sister was such a beautiful soul,” she said. Predictably, her voice cracked, and she started to cry. The church was silent as people waited for more. What was there to say to sum up who Daphne was, the magnitude of her loss?
She stepped down, feeling unsteady on her feet, and took her seat next to her mother. Her mother grabbed her hand and didn’t let go of it until the end of the service.
In the days right after Daphne’s death, the funeral had been a welcome to-do item for Sasha to focus on. She excelled with a task, a project, always had. Once it was over, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She tried to refocus on her dissertation, but Professor Williams advised her to take time off.
“I don’t even know why you’re here,” Professor Williams said when Sasha showed up for their usual Friday meeting time.
“I don’t know where else to be,” Sasha said.
“This is a huge thing, Sasha. You need to grieve.”
