What We Have by Amy Boesky Read Free Book Online

already talked to her twice that morning, once to hear that her boss had reassigned her to yet another dismal case, once to complain that my mother had returned the perfectly nice scarf from Nordstrom we sent for her birthday because it was “too expensive” and she’d never wear it. I was all set to hear another story about the Justice Department or those anticipated syllables—“Em . . . il . . . leee”—but it wasn’t Julie, weirdly enough, it was Jon, and I was still half-laughing as I tried to change gears and make sense of what he was saying, hospital, ultrasound , it was all jumbled, I could barely hear him, and then it wasn’t him. Julie took the phone, her voice clear as a bell. “I had my ultrasound, hon.” Pause. “The baby—” Her voice broke. She was nineteen weeks pregnant, half a week in front of me. Beginning of month five. “The baby died. I have to go to the hospital.”
    I was trying to catch up with her. My heart began to pound, long, slow beats.
    “I have to have it anyway,” she said.
    It was a girl. They could tell from the ultrasound.
    Emily.
    Jon took the phone again. Tried to fill me in. The technician had taken forever. She kept fiddling with the monitor. Finally she left to get the doctor, and then the radiologist herself came in and fiddled some more, and then, after two or three agonizing minutes, she told them: She couldn’t find a heartbeat. “She thinks,” Jon said brokenly, “it may have happened a week ago.”
    Their baby had been dead for a week, and they hadn’t known. None of us had known.
    I tried to work my way back through the past week, remembering what we’d been doing. A few days earlier, Saturday morning, at her kitchen table, Julie and I had been bent over pictures of nurseries in one of those articles we derided, “Making Your Spare Room Ready for Baby.” Scorning the bunnies and the sheep.
    I thought, We will never go back to that again. Uneventful is over .
    We were back to grief and worry. To bodies that betrayed us. I remember how I’d been convinced being pregnant gives you immunity from grief. What had I been thinking?
    She got back on the phone, her voice like a stranger’s.
    “I have to go to the hospital. Dr Weiss says I still have to go through labor.”
    It was like we’d changed genres—sitcom to tragedy. I called Jacques, but I was crying so hard he could barely understand what I was saying. I kept stumbling around, picking things up and putting them down again, like a parody of a woman in labor who doesn’t know what to take to the hospital. Finally I stuffed something to read and a stray roll of Tums in my book bag.
    Jacques met me at Columbia Hospital for Women. Not in one of the peach-and-celadon rooms we visited later with New Age music piped in, not even in Labor and Delivery, but on a surgical floor, a beige, no-nonsense hallway with closed doors where we found Julie propped up in bed wearing a hospital gown, her face white as the sheet behind her, Pitocin dripping into a line in one hand, monitors bleating. My breath felt ragged. Jacques kept rubbing my arm and telling me I had to stay calm. Stay calm —a funny phrase, when you think about it, since I wasn’t calm in the first place. I’m never calm. We were in and out of the room, Dr. Weiss was there, stricken and grave, a sober-faced nurse with her, and they both kept telling us, go home . They said it would be hours before Julie gave birth. “You need to go home and rest,” the nurse kept saying.
    “Go home, hon,” Julie said, her eyes lifeless. “ Please .”
    I looked at Jacques, and he nodded. “They need some privacy right now,” he told me in the hallway. Just before we got to the main exit I grabbed on to him.
    It was the most inexplicable feeling, like something inside of me the size of a stitch had just pulled taut and released. A spider unspooling its first strand of web. A match catching and holding.
    “The baby,” I said, my mouth opening. “I