Night, Forgotten

Original Edition - Chapter 37: Now

"Something's wrong with the baby."

It's the last thing I manage to tell Dr. Syed before losing my power of speech. I brace myself against the office counter in pain.

Something's wrong with me.

I'm watching myself again, as if completely removed from my physical form. If this is an out-of-body experience, it's also out-of-time: I immediately recognize the college T-shirt Owen was wearing on that day back in June when my "visual disturbances" wouldn't go away.

Everything looked so strange to me before I lost consciousness in Dr. Syed's office, but now I experience the scene as vividly as the one I just remembered in the shed, which somehow occurred both five months later than where I am right now – in mid-June, at Dr. Syed's office, with visual disturbances – and also just moments ago.

There's Owen, crouched beside the exam table, holding onto my limp hand. My body is slumped over his lap.

What happens next feels more like déjà vu than like remembering.

I watch Dr. Syed snap into action and administer to my unconscious body while Amanda Lee runs into the room with a stretcher. She's on the phone with the team at St.

Elizabeth's, the hospital where I'm supposed to give birth — twelve weeks and four days from now.

They move quickly to get my body onto the stretcher, with one hip propped on a pillow to support the weight of my pregnant belly. Amanda rushes me past the no-longer- smiling receptionist out to a waiting ambulance.

#

In the operating room, the loudest sound is the conflicting rhythm of two desperate heartbeats. They emanate from monitors attached at various nodes to the torso exposed on the operating table. The air buzzes with hushed instructions and questions among a group youthful doctors assisting the surgeon.

Owen sits on the far side of a blue curtain, which blocks the gore from his empty gaze. He looks much too pale.

I watch my body giving birth from the outside. And from above, I see everything for the first time.

Thomas is pulled from my open abdomen, born extremely early at only twenty-seven weeks of gestation. He's whisked away to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where he will have the chance to learn how to live.

They let Owen stay by my side. He holds my hand until it's over.

One of the students does his best to sew up the wound where my uterus has been sliced open, but his hands won't stop trembling and no one corrects his messy work because it doesn't matter.

When it comes down to it, there was a split-second choice between two lives and they chose Not Mine. The tiny creature that would become Thomas had existed for twenty- seven weeks, and that was too long for the doctors at St. Elizabeth's to risk losing it.

It would get to live, but it would never get to have a mother.

I'm overcome with a calming sense of comprehension. The truth has never been obscured, only unnoticed: I haven't really been here at all, and I could never belong here again.

Scenes from the recent months unfold before me again, but through a new, focused lens. I see Liza and Marcus fighting as if I'm not even there and never bothering to ask me why I was lurking outside their house.

I see Diana redoing all the chores whenever I thought I was helping her and mistakenly thanking Owen for taking care of the tasks I tried to complete around the house. Refolding laundry. Unswaddling the baby.

I see Sadie, whose story still needed me in it these past few months, drawing a picture of me for Owen and Diana. "Julie with the baby," out by the shed.

I see poor Thomas belonging in my arms but unable to drink from my breast.

Finally, I see Owen recoiling from my touch and ignoring me when I call for him. Wearing his wedding band from a chain around his neck.

He didn't leave the house because he thinks I was unfaithful, or because he hates me. He left because I couldn't yet understand that I was the one who was meant to go.

I see myself speaking to him, touching him, sitting with him. I've been haunting him.

When Diana saw his note in the kitchen – the note he must have left for her to find there – she said, "I understand" aloud to an empty room.

And now I understand, too.