Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 34: Then

Ribbons of garish light flickered in front of my eyes. I blinked, trying to clear them away, but they persisted. The day before, I'd noticed those same lights dancing around the periphery of my vision while I was rinsing the shampoo from my hair. I'd rested my weight against the shower wall for a few minutes until they passed and I hadn't mentioned them to Owen.

But this time the lights lingered. They wouldn't quite come into focus.

The festively colored bathroom tiles were cold beneath my folded legs as I leaned against the edge of the tub.

Making this slight movement reawakened the pain that had bloomed between my eyes that morning and hadn't gone away.

I used the sleeve of my bathrobe to wipe the vomit from my mouth.

"Owen!" I cried, blinking hard again. I wasn't sure what else to do but call his name. Tears collected in the corners of my eyes, further obscuring my already confused vision. "I'm seeing those lights that Dr. Syed said...!"

It was hard to form a coherent sentence. The pain burned brightly somewhere behind my forehead.

Owen appeared in the doorway within seconds. Clearly alarmed, he flew to my side on the floor by the toilet, which he flushed without mentioning its contents.

"You're having visual disturbances?" Leave it to Owen to remember what the flashing lights were actually supposed to be called. "Are they still there?"

I stared through the little gold streamers, trying to will them away from the space between our frantic pairs of eyes. The best I could offer was, "Well, maybe they're fading." There was no reason for us both to be in a state of panic. I was probably just dehydrated. "Yeah." I let Owen help me up onto the closed lid of the toilet. "I guess they're gone now."

But they weren't gone.

"You know, just to be safe –" I didn't even finish my sentence before Owen was helping me up again gently, grabbing the keys to his Subaru, and helping me into the passenger seat.

We both knew we had to go to Dr. Syed's. Just to be safe. But what did it mean to be "safe," anymore? If I'd been safe, I wouldn't have been raped. I wouldn't be pregnant. Come to think of it, I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt safe.

We took the same route to the doctor's office that we'd driven a little more than a month before, when I'd fantasized about having a miscarriage, right before we found out that Thomas would be a boy.

Now, twenty-seven weeks into the pregnancy, I remembered what Dr. Syed had said about all the preeclampsia symptoms I was supposed to be looking out for.

Early in the day, a terrible pain had stabbed me between the eyes and it hadn't stopped. That was the first thing to set off an alarm bell in my gut. I'd chugged a full glass of water, but by the time Owen found me on the bathroom floor that afternoon, I'd vomited it all up.

Ever since we decided to keep the baby, I'd been following all Dr. Syed's instructions. At first, living according to the many rules surrounding food, rest, and exercise during pregnancy had struck me as exhausting. But now, I thought of them as a chance to exert some control over my body and my life.

Since we'd found out we were going to have a boy, Owen's enthusiasm about becoming parents had only grown. He'd started compiling a list of boy names, and so far, I hadn't been able to bring myself to consider any of them seriously. Seeing this fetus's little body had made everything that was about to happen much more real for me, and I just wasn't ready to name it.

Owen pulled the Subaru into a spot right at the front of Dr. Syed's parking lot. He came around to help me out of the car. The lights in front of my eyes had faded, but I still had that headache.

In the examining room, I stared at the diagrams of pregnant bodies on the office walls.

Now, the one that most closely resembled my own was labeled Seven Months and it looked like a horror show. I glared at the fetus and tried to imagine that grotesque, tadpole-like creature breathing, its lungs expanding and contracting in rapid flutters.

I imagined it struggling to get air, the translucent little throat convulsing, the lipless mouth gasping and choking until it finally gave up.

I wondered, numbly, if that was what was happening inside of me.

The door opened and Dr. Syed stepped in, followed by Owen, who immediately pulled his chair up next to the exam table where I was sitting and grabbed my hand.

Owen's hand looked strange in mine, like I had never seen it before.

I noticed my own hand in his, and it, too, looked foreign to me.

My eyes darted back to the diagrams on the walls, but suddenly I couldn't tell what they were even supposed to be. The words blurred into gibberish. Had they ever made sense?

Nothing in the room felt familiar at all.

Just as it occurred to me that something must be terribly wrong, I tipped forward into darkness.