Passion for Perfection | Open Novella Contest 2019

12. Crossing the Jordan

Death is a sinister thing. It creeps up on you in the cruellest way possible and rips out your heart, sucking all the joy out of your world. It is especially painful when you've lost so much already. Even more painful than the spring morning when I woke up with shooting pain in my stomach.

Oh god! Oh god! We're dying! Mel panicked in my head and sent my heart racing in my chest. I rolled out of the bed, careful to not squash my now visible bump. I sat on the floor and breathed heavily as I tried to decipher the cause of the burning and cramping I felt inside me.

Mel, calm down! Just call a god damn ambulance! Jesse sighed and I could tell he was probably rolling his eyes at her hysterical state.

"No, not an ambulance. I doubt it's that serious." I said out loud. "Pains are common in pregnancy right?" I winced as I felt a jab again.

Taxi then, Jesse suggested and I agreed, so I carefully pulled myself up onto my feet and called a taxi.

"You're going to be fine, alright honey?" I cradled my stomach and imagined myself holding the baby inside with a smile. My tiny human was the only physical company I had these days.

The journey in the taxi while pregnant wasn't the most comfortable of all journeys. It was like travelling along a country road in a wooden carriage that was about to fall apart underneath you. I felt every pothole rattle through my bones and I worried that the baby could bang its head against something and injure itself. The thought only made me cradle my precious bump more.

Thankfully in less than twenty minutes, I was in Dr Mitchell's office. When he saw my sweaty forehead and my heavy breathing, he instantly made me relay every detail of what was wrong and where it hurt. When I finally finished talking— something which was difficult to do between jabs of pain— he wheeled me on a wheelchair to a room and said he's going to carry out an ultrasound scan. I didn't object.

Some tiresome minutes later, after two thorough scans and multiple tests, I was finally allowed to return back to his office. I sat down in the chair with a sigh and waited for him to return to me.

When he finally walked through the door and sat down at his desk he didn't speak up immediately. Instead, he started typing up something on his computer and looked through some pages. The silence was making me increasingly uncomfortable and Mel's constant paranoid thoughts were not helping.

As I was getting ready to speak up, Dr Mitchell finally sighed and looked up at me.

"Unfortunately I have some bad news for you, Mrs Whittaker." He said slowly, making my heart clench and I gulped down the panic rising up from my chest.

"What is it?" I said, my voice so small and quiet I wondered if he'd heard me at all.

"It seems that your baby does not have a heartbeat."

The words echoed around the room and I felt as if a bomb just went off. My ears rang and my vision got blurry. The overwhelming sadness suffocated me and I couldn't breathe. I couldn't say anything. I couldn't react at all. I thought maybe Jay would take over but he seemed insistent on staying put in my head. However, my vision didn't clear and I let myself be dragged down into the pits of blissful darkness as someone else took control over our body.

***

I cried. I remember lying in the void and crying, oblivious to the passage of time. I'm not sure how long I spent there. It could have been days, months or years. Time is a weird thing in my inner world. Obviously, I knew I could go to any place in there; I could go to my old bedroom, I could go to my school classroom, I could even go to my current apartment. However, I didn't want to. I just wanted to let the darkness comfort me like a blanket of tears.