After Forever Ends - Ramone Melodie - Страница 57

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I could hear him crying. Oliver crying.

Oh no! Oliver!

I tried to reach for him, but I couldn’t move. My arms were like lead weights, immobile. I’d never seen my Oliver cry. I’d never seen him sad. I didn’t want him to cry because of me. I was there, I was fine. I had to let him know. I tried to open my eyes, but I couldn’t.

Oh, Oliver, don’t cry…I’m all right…please…

But he did. I heard him sob and I couldn’t do a thing to comfort him.

“Come on now! Oliver, stop! She’s going to wake up! They sedated her is all! When we got here she was confused! She was talking nonsense and fighting the nurses! Oliver! Come here,” Alexander’s voice was gentle. I could hear a rustle of clothing beside me as if Alex had taken his brother into an embrace, “She’s going to be fine, Big brother. She’ll be fine.”

The room went quiet again. I fell into blackness. I was floating.

I felt a pinch in the back of my hand. I was suddenly aware that there were tubes plugged into an IV, all attached to a vein in me. I could once again hear pieces of conversations.

“…I feel so guilty…”

“…not your fault, Son…” Edmond’s voice, “Thank God…someone up there was looking …your brother was listening…”

“So odd, really…” Alex sounded like he was speaking from a within a dream, “...just knew I had to get there and fast…kept thinking Sil’s all alone and she needs something…seemed so urgent…”

I fell into blackness. I was floating.

I could hear movement, a chair being rolled across a floor. My shirt was pushed up, my belly felt wet and cold. Something slick and round was pressing against it. A man was speaking, “I’m sorry. There’s no heartbeat.”

“Are you certain?” Oliver asked. He was holding my hand.

“Yes. I’m absolutely certain.”

“The baby’s dead then?”

“I am so sorry.” The object left my belly.

“How far along were we?” Oliver’s voice was hardly a whisper.

“I would say about fifteen or sixteen weeks.”

“Oh, Christ!” It was Alexander, “Why?”

“Please,” Oliver whispered, “Explain why this happened.”

“I don‘t know,” The man speaking was wiping my belly with a towel. He pulled my shirt back down and it stuck to the goo that was left, “The placenta has separated from the uterine wall. It happens, but almost never this early in pregnancy,” He sounded far too casual, almost as if he were reading off a card. “There are many factors that can lead to miscarriage in the first and early second trimesters. We’ll have to run some tests to find out for certain, but chances are that no one could have done anything to prevent this. Spontaneous abortions occur in about twenty percent of pregnancies. They might even be more common earlier on and women just associate the bleeding with their normal cycles. In your wife’s case, this was a medical event,” I managed to open my eyes just a crack. I could see a doctor standing to my right, speaking to the twins. A nurse was preparing a large syringe. “We’ve got the bleeding under control, but her body hasn’t expelled the fetus.”

“I want my wife to be well. What do I have to do to make her well?”

“We need to induce dilation and expel the fetus.”

Oliver swayed on his feet. Alexander steadied him. “What does he need to do? “ Alex asked, holding his brother tight against his side.

“He needs to sign the consent forms.”

“Fine,” Oliver’s voice was just over a whisper, “Get them. Let’s do it now.”

“I’ll have the nurse get them.”

Oliver looked sincerely ill, “Will she give birth then? “

“She’ll have to, yes. “

“Will she be awake?”

“She’s only lightly sedated.”

“Put her out,” Oliver said flatly, “Put her out cold. I don’t want her to feel any pain. I don’t want her to know what’s happening to her.”

“That can be done.”

“I want to be with her.”

“You can do that. You do understand that it will be a still birth? “

“I understand.”

The nurse injected something into my IV line. I fell back into blackness. I was floating.

A growl, a gurgle…it was a machine. There were bright lights and voices. Something hot was pressing on the inside of my thigh. I could feel pain, pain in my abdomen. Horrible pressure in my bottom. I gagged, trying not to vomit. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I could feel fingers. Someone was touching me down there. That sound I heard was suction. They’d put some sort of vacuum inside of me and they were drawing out my baby.

“No, no!” I thought desperately, gagging, “Wake up, Silvia! Wake up! It’s a nightmare, it’s a bad dream! Wake up! “I tried to move my fingers, tried to shake my head, “It hurts! Oh, ouch! Ouch! Help me! Oliver! Oliver! Oliver, help me!”

He was holding my hand. The IV in my arm jerked as he leaped to his feet. “Something’s wrong! She’s moving! She’s awake! Help her!”

I opened my eyes. I clasped and unclasped my hands, but I couldn’t move my arms. I looked at Oliver, desperately at Oliver, but all I could see was a shadow of him, a blurred outline of his figure. I tasted vomit in my throat, gagged harder, more painfully, and realised I was choking. I still couldn’t move my arms. I felt my body convulse, lift up off the mattress and slam back down. Oliver shouted again, but I couldn’t hear what he said through the blood rushing through my ears. I was helpless. All I could do was gag and jerk and lie in that awful bed.

Someone turned my head to the side and held it down. “Clear the airway!”

“Damn it!” Oliver shouted, “I said help her!”

A tube slipped into my mouth. More gurgling. I made a grab for it, wanting to shove it away from me. Someone else held my shoulders. I closed my eyes and tried to scream, but I only choked more. A nurse streaked around the bed and took the IV line into her hand. She held down a plunger and I felt my body go slack. I tumbled back into blackness. Then I was floating.

A voice said, “She’ll rest a while longer. There doesn’t appear to be any lasting damage.”

“Will she be able to have more children?” It was Ana who asked.

“She’ll be able to conceive just as she did before the miscarriage. This sort of thing doesn‘t typically repeat itself.”

“She’ll be fine then?” Oliver’s voice was trembling.

“We’re going to keep her overnight. She should be out from under the sedative in a couple of hours. She should be on her feet by the morning. We’ll see how she feels.”

“Thank God! Thank sweet, sweet God!” Edmond said it.

There was relief in Alex’s voice. “You can breathe easy now, Ol.”

“We all can,” Oliver smoothed my hair with his hand and kissed my forehead, “Thank you so much, Sir. I couldn’t lose my Sil. She’s the whole world to me.”

They were all there with me, the Dickinson’s. My family. I felt a tear catch in the corner of my eye and hang there, but I was unable to cry. I wanted to thank them all for coming, to thank them all for loving me as one of their own, but I still couldn’t even open my eyes. I wanted to let them know how much they meant to me. No one had ever loved me but them, no one but them and my Oliver.

Oliver kissed me again. I wanted to tell him about the conversations I had heard. I wanted to lie in his arms and cry until I couldn’t cry anymore. There were so many things that I wanted to tell him and I just couldn’t. I wanted to tell him that he had been right, the Lord and the Lady were kind. I wanted to tell him that they saved me, that it was the Lord who went and got Alex. I wanted to tell him what their names were. I wanted to tell him about the tree I was talking to and about Aflie being there and about the cobalt blue sky. I wanted to tell him what I had learned that day about life and how close Death had been and how he had not been there for me, but I tried to fight him anyway. I wanted to tell him that I would have fought Death for our baby. I would have torn him apart before I allowed him to take her, but Lady Folia had put me to sleep because she knew I’d fail, because she knew I had no chance against him.

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