It was nothing. Just a gray clump amongst the drenched, bright burgundy of blood and the stark white of the toilet paper in my hands.
“Is that it? Is that the baby?” Peter* asks, standing in the doorway of the bathroom, his hands resting against the sides as though to block me in. I pull my knees together, the toilet seat hard and warm against the back of my legs. The yellow glare of the overhead light only seems to make the blood that much darker. I look up from the clump to stare at him, but he’s not looking at me. His focus is on the massacre in my palms. My body seizes then, the cramp radiating through me as I feel the remnants of life fall away into the toilet bowl.
I nod and curl my hands around the tissue. There’s a ziplock bag sitting next to the sink. The doctor had said that if this happened, to save the clump so that they could confirm if it had indeed been a baby.
The pain is excruciating, worse than any period cramps I’d ever had before, radiating and spasming from the core of me until every limb shook. My hands begin to tremble and sweat beads across my forehead. I curl over, one hand pressed to my abdomen while the other held my child.
No, not my child. Just the last try for one.
“I think I need to go to the ER,” I say as I place the bloody tissues into the ziplock bag. My breath is coming in panting, ragged huffs that cut through the rending of my uterus.
“Peter, I think I need to go to the ER,” I say again as I reach down toward my ankles for my blood-stained underwear. I see the inside of the toilet bowl then. It’s bright red and thick, streaked with the curling drips of the life that had just left me.
He says nothing though. Instead, he presses his lips together and I watch as the light seems to dim from his eyes. There’s a shutter there, a finality. Whether he blamed me or himself, I wasn’t sure, but what I did know was this would be the last try. I watch as he turns away and disappears into the hallway. There’s the jingling of keys, and then the soft sighing of the front door opening and closing. The click of the lock is deafening.
The roiling pain seems endless, doubling me over as I try to numb myself to the inevitable truth, that even as my womb had expelled the life inside me, the bigger death was that of my relationship. This was something he wanted. This was the natural progression of his expectations and I couldn’t deliver it. Each time had ended the same way, but this time was the worst by far because he and I both knew there would be no returning from this.
The distance between us had stretched out like an overwrought rubber band, thin and taught, waiting to snap, taking over days, months, years. The length between us was longer than the hallway, or the steps to his car, or the stretch of highway that would lead him to someone else. The babies had been his idea, his want. They’d be an affirmation that he could be more and I’d given in. I loved him, I told myself. I wanted him to be happy, to love me too. I’d give him this, I’d convinced myself, if it meant fulfillment for him. I wouldn’t mind it and I’d surely love any child that came to be.
But in the end, there was only this. I pull myself into the bathtub, turn on the shower, and allow the hot water to wash me away, my life a river streaming into the drain. I stay there until the red streaks turn pink, until the heat turns cold, until the sobs become silence. When the dawn comes, when the birds begin their morning song, I would have to find a way to live again.
.
.
.
*Names have been changed for privacy.
