Heartbeat. Elizabeth Scott

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      5

      It took almost two years for my mother to get pregnant. Two years of planning, of Dan smiling and talking, hoping. Of Mom going to the fertility doctor’s office over and over again.

      Of me hearing her crying sometimes.

      “I’m sad,” she’d say when I asked, and I would watch her, so drained-looking, and wonder why she was doing it.

      But then Dan would show up, dry her tears, kiss her, and she’d smile and I’d know why. She wanted him to be happy. She loved him.

      So she tried. And tried.

      And tried.

      She was pregnant with me when she married my dad. She didn’t know it, but she was. She used to say I was such a quiet baby that she didn’t even know I was there until her clothes started getting tight.

      “Of course,” she’d say, “you made up for it with the colic, but still, you were worth it.” And then she’d kiss my forehead or my cheek. She used to talk about how easy it was, being pregnant with me, before she started trying for Dan.

      Before trying to get pregnant took over her life.

      My dad named me. His parents, who’d died when he was fourteen, left him in the care of his aunt Emma because one set of his grandparents was dead and the others were both well on their way to drinking themselves there. Emma loved history, just like my father, and took out a second mortgage on her house to send him to graduate school. She got sick with a cold the day before he got his doctorate and died of a massive internal infection a week after she saw him get it.

      Dan’s parents are dead, which is the only thing he and my dad have in common, besides the whole being married to Mom part. My mother’s parents are both alive, but they live in Arizona and I’ve only met them twice. Both times were awful. They basically spent the entire visit telling my mother that she was such a disappointment and she needed to “turn herself into someone better.” The second time, Mom told them that maybe they needed to fix themselves and then we left. They didn’t try to get in touch with her again and when she died, they called and left a message.

      I think that’s why Mom was such a great mom. In spite of her parents, or maybe because of them, she taught herself how to love.

      And she did.

      She loved so much, and she loved with everything, with her soul. I wanted to be like that.

      I don’t anymore.

      Mom did a lot of stuff for Dan, but what she did to get that baby...some of it sounded pretty gruesome. Painful, even. I once heard her tell Dan, “I don’t think I can do it. I just...my body is like this thing now.”

      “We’ll talk to the doctor,” Dan said. “He did warn us that with that blood clot you had, things could be even riskier. And I know being on the drugs is hard. So if you’re this unhappy...”

      “No, no,” Mom said, but of course she’d say that. She loved Dan. She knew how much he wanted a baby. She knew that because she was over forty when they started trying, her best chances of having a baby—“The dream baby,” she used to say with a smile—lay with drugs and testing and all kinds of stuff. And risk. So much risk.

      Dan began setting up a nursery in the guest bedroom about thirty seconds after the clinic called to say it looked like she was pregnant, and I can remember Mom saying, “Dan, it hasn’t even been a day yet. I don’t want you to hope too much.”

      “Don’t be afraid,” Dan had said. “I know it’s true.” He grinned at me as I stood in the corner of the already-changing guest room. “You’re going to have a brother or a sister, Emma!”

      “But if it hasn’t even been a day—” I said, and then broke off as Mom looked at me, her face full of love and pleading.

      “You need help with what you’re doing?” I said to him, and helped Dan box up the extra linens in the closet, sat with him while he drew up plans for what would go where and Mom sat, listening to him and smiling a little.

      She was pregnant for real then, finally. But it was a hard pregnancy from the start. She was sick all the time, so much that she lost weight. Dan made her favorite meals to try to get her to eat but it didn’t help much.

      And then, in the second month, she had some spotting and had to go the hospital. Dan rushed there from the house so fast he forgot to call the school and tell them to find me and tell me what was going on.

      I still remember coming home and finding Mom in bed.

      “What happened?” I said. “Is something wrong with the baby?”

      “No, everything’s fine,” Mom said. “I just—I was bleeding some before and—” She broke off, her voice cracking, her eyes filling with tears.

      “Lisa, honey, don’t cry. You’re okay. You’re going to be fine,” Dan said, and Mom nodded but she didn’t look like she believed him. She looked scared.

      I waited until Dan left and sat down next to her. “Mom, are you okay about the baby? Dan talks about it all the time, but you don’t and I’m wondering if—”

      She squeezed my hand and said, “Emma, honey, I know what I want. I just...it was hard to get here. But now I am. I beat all the odds—over forty, all the drugs, the warnings about the clot—ugh, I already went over it. And over it.”

      She touched her stomach and I kissed her cheek and lay beside her.

      “I could get used to this,” I said a while later, stretching out with one foot to try to pull the TV remote up toward me.

      “Not me,” she said. “I’d like to be able to get up and move around. I feel trapped just lying here. I mean, if I could paint your ceiling after the clot came out, why can’t I walk downstairs?”

      “I heard that,” Dan called from the hallway. “No rest, no chocolate cake.”

      “Meanie,” Mom said, grinning, but she was tapping her toes against the bed, like she heard a song and was following the beat. Like she wanted to move to it.

      She was able to get out of bed after a week, and everything after that went okay. She still got sick, but not as much, and she started to finally gain some weight.

      And then, on a Wednesday morning, after I’d already left for school with Olivia, she went to grab a piece of toast in the kitchen and fell down.

      That was it.

      That’s how she died.

      She was getting breakfast, something she did every day, something normal, and her body just...stopped.

      Dan ran right over to her and performed CPR until the ambulance came. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—open her eyes. Couldn’t СКАЧАТЬ