On the next garbage day I toss the journal tracking her visits. I’m steadier now, and the compulsion to count down the days of the pregnancy has left me. I try to destroy the pages first, wishing to tear them into illegible pieces, before recalling the paper is rip-proof.That’s a weird glitch, I think, because water- and rip-proof paper is a long-ago innovation. An odd oversight on my part.Baby brain, I surmise.
“You’re nesting,” Shelby tells me, when I make tea with my mom’s kettle, becoming emotional for reasons I choose not to share with my mother-in-law. “I went through the same thing, Tilly, around the samepoint in my pregnancies. I also made chicken and dumplings every day—it’s all I ate for weeks! Insatiable craving for it.”
She smiles then, dipping her tea bag in and out by the string. “I believe the past nurtures us when we’re getting ready to welcome the future.” It’s a lovely sentiment, and I’m comforted by it.
After finishing my tea, I check in with Clementine.
“How was your sleep, honey?” I ask, as we’re packing her bag for school.
“Good,” she replies, tucking her hydration pack into the backpack. “Last night I had a dream I was a mermaid. In the ocean. It was fun to be able to breathe underwater, and my tail wasso sparkly.”
She hasn’t mentioned my mother in weeks. I wonder if she remembers the nightmares. I don’t bring them up for fear I’ll spark a regression.
Everything seems fine, and soon enough I begin to trust it is.
Things are going well, so effortlessly well that I’m slow to become superstitious.
Then I get word Cecil has been injured in a fall—he broke his hip while visiting his family in Vancouver. Unfortunately it requires surgery and he’ll be in a specialized rehabilitation unit for his recovery. I briefly worry about what this means for the conservation timeline, but he assures me he’ll stay in touch.
“Only a phone call away, which is no different from before I decided to step on my grandson’s hoverboard, to see what all the fuss was about.”
The following night we wake at three in the morning to blaring sirens. By the time Wyatt and I get downstairs, paramedics are carrying a gurney into our neighbor’s home. Panic seizes me—is it one of the kids? Has something happened to Becca or her husband, Chip?
“I’ll go,” Wyatt says, his face grim in the flashing lights coming through our front windows. He ties his bathrobe around his waist and slips on his house clogs. The door opens and the sirens increase. I’m glad when they recede again, though I perch on the arm of the chairby the front window, trying to see what’s happening through the blinds’ slats. Shelby wakes up and makes us tea—she’s become fond of the kettle. Clementine stays soundly asleep.
The ambulance is for Becca. Wyatt later tells me when he got upstairs, ready to help Chip with the kids as needed, the paramedics were working to stabilize her. Apparently she woke up to nurse ten-week-old Chloe—her fifth child, and only girl—for her two a.m. feeding. Chip was later awoken by the baby’s cries and found Becca flat on her back in the nursery, having a tonic-clonic seizure.
Becca survives, thank goodness, but remains in a drug-induced coma after the subarachnoid hemorrhage in her brain is repaired. When Wyatt and I take dinner over on the following Tuesday, our meal-train night, Chip tells us “that’s it” for children. Becca’s doctors conclude it’s unsafe for her to become pregnant again.
Wyatt squeezes Chip’s shoulder as he cries at the dinner table, a forkful of the chicken pasta we’ve brought over shaking in his hand as his body quakes with sobs. I’m uncomfortable. We are friendly with Chip and Becca, but we are not close.
So while Wyatt comforts Chip, I help the kids wash up after dinner and then feed Chloe a bottle. She rests against me as she drinks, soon falling asleep in my arms. When I place her gently in her crib, I don’t stay long. I don’t want to inadvertently wake her, and I also don’t want to linger on the rainbow plush carpet where Becca seized days earlier.
The whole ordeal shakes me to my core, both knowing how close Becca came to dying and leaving her family behind, and how quickly life can change. It also unleashes a flood of memories. The same sirens and lights, the speed with which the paramedics packed me up to get me to the hospital, like with Becca. The devastation of realizing none of that chaotic urgency mattered, in the end.
“First Cecil, now Becca,” I say once we get back to our place after dinner with Chip and his family. I can’t calm the restless anxiety pooling inside my chest, the sense that there’s more to come. “Bad things happen in threes.”
“Says who?” Wyatt’s tired and it shows both on his face and with his temperament. I pull out a premade vegetable curry from the freezer and set it in the reheater.
“Says the universe,” I reply, sitting back down.
Wyatt sighs, coming over to the stool. He nudges my knees apart to get closer to me.
However, I’m too far along for a proper embrace in this position. The best Wyatt can do is rest his hands on my upper arms, rubbing up and down like he’s warming me up. It does little to soothe me.
“Let’s not do this, okay?” I know what he means—Let’s not make up stories that aren’t real, let’s not catastrophize, Tilly.
“Do what?” I cross my arms now, forcing Wyatt’s hands to drop.
“This isn’t good for you, Tilly,” he says with frustration. “Or the baby.”
Don’t tell me what’s good for me, or this baby—you have no idea what it’s like to be pregnant.
“I’m thinking roti with the curry. It’s faster than rice,” I say instead.
Wyatt pauses briefly. “I’ll go get Clem to help.”
I’m relieved when he leaves the kitchen.
