The doctors were efficient and calm in that way that is more frightening than panic because it tells you they are taking things seriously. One of them explained that I was showing early labor signs along with indicators of placental stress. They needed to observe me closely and were not prepared to call the situation stable yet. I lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the sound of my baby’s heartbeat on the monitor and tried very hard not to think about what might have happened if Dana had not looked up from her grocery bags at the right moment.
Megan held my hand and did not push me to talk. She had been concerned about my marriage for a long time. She had mentioned it once, carefully, about six months earlier, and I had defended Eric with the specific exhausting energy that people use when they are trying to believe something they already doubt. She had not brought it up again after that. She was patient, my sister, in ways I had not always deserved.
Hours passed. The medication worked. The contractions slowed. The room got quieter. At some point in the early evening, when the monitors had settled into a steadier rhythm and the worst of the fear had ebbed enough for thoughts to come back in order, Megan asked me the question I had been keeping at arm’s length for longer than I could honestly account for.
“Claire,” she said. “If he can do this while you’re carrying his child, what do you think happens when the baby is actually here?”
I did not have an answer. But I did not argue with the question the way I would have six months earlier. I lay there and I let the question sit between us and I understood, in the clear and honest way that fear sometimes produces, that she was right. That I had known she would be right. That some part of me had known for a long time.
