Chapter 145
AN: Thanks to everyone who gave their input on the last chapter!!
Claire was
sent home from the hospital with medications to keep her heart rate and blood
pressure under control, a host of literature about multifetal reduction, and a
horrible decision to make.
“I’m afraid
the procedure needs to be done between the tenth and twelfth weeks of
pregnancy,” Dr. Gray had told her, which gave her a window of only two weeks to
decide; she was going into her tenth week now.
“Go home, think on it for a few days, a week, however long you
need. Call me at my office when you’ve
decided what you want to do.”
She had
given Claire a business card with her phone numbers at both the hospital and
her separate obstetrics clinic. The
small, white card now sat on the kitchen counter, near the phone. Someone – apparently Jamie – had turned it
upside down, as if to make it less noticeable, but there it remained, the blank
white reminder that made Claire’s stomach turn over in dread every time she
caught sight of it.
If it was
up to her, she wouldn’t have gone into the kitchen at all; she hadn’t had much
of an appetite since coming home from the hospital. But Jamie kept insisting that she eat and
drink plenty of water. “You have to take
care of yourself and our babies,” he would say.
“You have to do everything you can to stay healthy and make this work.”
Those were
the longest sentences he’d spoken to her since driving her home from the
hospital. Ever since her discharge, he
had been sullen and withdrawn, much like he had acted when Dr. Gray had
delivered her grim verdict in the hospital.
Rather than sitting down with her to talk about the choices they had to
make together, he had thrown himself into getting their new house in order and
seemed determined to do it all by himself.
When she tried to help, he told her to go rest, and if she sat down in
the same room as him, he found an excuse to send her away or leave himself. When they did cross paths, he pestered her
about eating and drinking and taking her medicine, as if she wasn’t used to
remembering to take it herself.
At night,
when she retreated to bed, he stayed up, watching TV on the couch into the wee
hours of the morning and eventually crashing there. She sometimes got up in the middle of the
night to go to the bathroom and found him there, staring at the TV like a
zombie as he flipped channels, barely pausing to even take in what was on the
screen. If he even noticed her, he never
said a word.
For the
first two days, Claire gave him his space.
This was his way of dealing with problems, of grieving: he shut himself up and avoided everyone and
everything, including the problem itself.
He had always been like that.
Even in high school, when he had a big game or a big test coming up, he
would hole himself up in his room, refusing to go out with her or even to talk
on the phone until whatever was bothering him had passed. She’d always assumed he was in there studying
or looking over soccer plays, but if she offered to help, he always
refused. Now she wondered if he’d just
lain on his bed and flipped channels, though that didn’t explain his good
grades or amazing soccer performances.
Jamie was a
typical guy in those respects; most of the time, he was very closed-off emotionally,
and he didn’t like to talk about his feelings or his problems. She had always been surprised he had called
her when his father had died, asking her to come to Iowa, for even when they
were dating, he hadn’t liked to lean on her for emotional support. It happened, of course; like anyone who kept
too many emotions and burdens bottled up, he was prone to exploding now and
then, and she’d seen him through more of those outbursts than she could count,
most of them involving him raging and then sobbing against her, his troubles
finally escaping through a flood of tears.
It happened every time, once he’d built up enough, and she wondered when
he would ever learn to just talk to her in the first place. She’d thought he was getting better with age,
but here he was again, avoiding her and the heavy burden hanging over their
heads.
She
understood why he was acting the way he was, but at the same time, she couldn’t
stand it, mostly because she was the exact opposite. Most of the time, she said what she felt; it
killed her to keep her thoughts and feelings bottled up inside. She liked to talk things out, so being left
to her own thoughts for two days straight, when she was desperate to talk about
the decision she knew she and Jamie couldn’t avoid forever, was like dying a
slow death. It was agonizing.
The worst
part was that she had no idea what he was thinking. What did he want to do? Which option was he leaning towards? He had given her no indication; from his
reaction, all she could deduce was that he was angry. But angry at what, exactly? Was he mad at her? Or just the situation itself? She couldn’t tell.
And even
though he had left her to think things out on her own, she wasn’t sure about
her own feelings either. Mostly, she
felt torn. She had no idea what she was
going to do. It was the worst decision
she’d ever had to make: sacrifice one of
the babies she’d been through so much to conceive, in order to save herself and
the other two, or keep all three and risk losing everything, including her own
life?
Even though
she’d been through the pros and cons of both choices time and time again, it
was hard to think rationally about such a decision. It wasn’t as if she could take a tally of
each and choose the one with the best score.
This was a matter of her heart and soul, not her brain; logic didn’t
count. And her soul felt was if it were
split in half.
A large
part of her flat-out refused to even consider the idea of aborting one of the
babies. They were her children,
all three of them, and though unborn inside of her, they were alive; she
had seen and heard all three of their tiny hearts beating. How could she think of choosing to make one
stop? It went against everything she had
always believed. It was murder, and
murder was a mortal sin. As a Catholic,
she had always been held to that belief, but even though she had fallen out
with the Catholic Church over her in vitro fertilization, she still maintained
it. In choosing to go through with the
reduction, she would be, in essence, killing one of her babies.
But what if
she decided not to go through with it?
What would she be doing then? It
was impossible to know, and that scared her.
What was even more frightening was that fact that if she took such a
risk, she could end up condemning all three babies to an early death or a
futile existence because of the complications that could result from a
difficult pregnancy. As much as it hurt
her to think of losing one of them, it killed her to imagine losing all
three. She had been through so much to
conceive them; she wanted them so badly it hurt, and yet, if something terrible
happened because of her decision, she could end up with nothing to show for it
all, no children to love and raise. And
with all of her problems and the age of the embryos that were still frozen at
the clinic in Tampa, who knew if she would ever be able to get pregnant
again. This could be her one and only
chance to have children of her own.
And of
course, she had to think of herself too.
In some ways, it seemed selfish, but even in thinking first of her
children, she had to think of herself.
The truth was, she didn’t want to die young, and she didn’t want to give
birth to three children, only to leave them motherless and Jamie without a
wife. She wanted to enjoy being a mother
and live a long life, the life cancer had nearly taken away from her. She had fought hard for it, and she wasn’t
about to give up now.
But for one
of her children…? It seemed a mother’s
duty to risk her life for her child.
What kind of mother would she be if she did the opposite?
Even though
she had been going to bed early most nights, tiring faster than usual because
of the strains of pregnancy, these troubling thoughts kept her awake in the
middle of the night. Knowing that Jamie,
too, was sitting up at the other end of the house, with the same things on his
mind, made her wonder, why wouldn’t he just talk to her??
This
decision wasn’t going to be easy to make, in any case, but it seemed it would
help if she and her husband could just communicate. She knew one thing for sure: she couldn’t make this decision on her
own. The babies growing inside her were
Jamie’s too, and she wouldn’t do anything without her husband’s support.
She just
wished she knew what he wanted to do.
On the
third morning, after two days of letting him have his space and solitude,
Claire decided it was high time to confront Jamie. She let him putter in the basement while she
stayed upstairs, battling the usual morning nausea, but when he came up for
lunch, she had two sandwiches waiting on the kitchen table, across from one
another.
“Oh,” said
Jamie, stopping in his tracks when he saw that she’d set the table for
two. “You made lunch.”
“Roast
beef, from the deli,” she replied. “Hope
that’s okay. I was going to make chicken
salad, but the smell of mayonnaise makes me want to hurl now, so…”
“This is
good,” Jamie said, in the same monotone he’d been speaking in for three
days. He walked over to one of the
plates, hesitated for a few seconds, and then picked it up, turning around
slowly. “I… I’m just gonna take this
downstairs,” he muttered, avoiding her eyes.
“I’m working on getting the entertainment center set up, and there’s all
this wiring… if I take a break, I’ll forget what I’m doing and-”
“The
entertainment center can wait,” Claire interrupted him in her best no-nonsense
voice, giving him a hard stare. When he
looked up, meeting her eyes briefly with a begrudging look in his own, she
added sarcastically, “I’m sure you want to get it all hooked up so you can
escape down there and watch TV for hours on end instead of up here, but we need
to talk.”
For a
moment, Jamie looked as if he were about to argue, but he must have realized he
had no argument because he finally sighed instead. “Fine,” he agreed and set his plate back
down, slumping into his chair.
She sat
down across from him, her heart beating fast.
He still wouldn’t look at her, choosing to stare down at his sandwich
instead, but she knew this was progress.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to keep him here, though, so,
ignoring her own sandwich, she decided to just get on with the talking. “I know you’ve been avoiding me,” she said,
“and it’s got to stop. We have to
talk about this, Jamie; we can’t pretend the problem doesn’t exist. We only have two weeks to make this
decision.”
“What
decision?” he snapped, finally looking up, his eyes boring into hers, icy, yet
full of fire at the same time. “We’re
not killing our baby,” he spat, the words like rot on his tongue.
She
swallowed hard, her heart pounding faster.
Deep down, she supposed she had always known he would be against the
idea of an abortion; he, too, was Catholic and a more devout one than her. But she hadn’t expected such a strong
reaction from him.
It could
have made her decision much easier, hearing such a heated conviction spat from
her husband’s lips, but instead, to her surprise, it invoked a fire from deep
inside her. The choice wasn’t his to
make alone; who did he think he was, ordering her around like that?
She frowned
slowly. “Have you even thought about
it?” she asked, determining not to snap back at him. One of them had to stay calm, or they’d never
be able to have a rational talk. “Or is
that it?”
“What do
you mean, is that it?” He looked
at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Don’t
tell me you’re considering going through with it! How could you even think of doing that? Selective reduction? Is that what that woman called it? It’s abortion, Claire, and it’s murder. You can’t honestly tell me you’ve been
thinking of letting her murder our child!”
Tears
sprang to Claire’s eyes at the harshness in his words. She tried to blink them away, hating them for
being there, but any hope of calmness was quickly evading her. “Of course I don’t want her to m-murder our
child!” she cried, finding it hard to even repeat his awful words. “But I’ve been thinking about it… about both
sides… and I don’t know what I want to do!”
“Well, you
just said you don’t want to murder our baby.
So what decision is there?” Jamie repeated, without compassion.
She bowed
her head, the tears starting to fall.
They’d been together only minutes, and already, this was going
horribly. “I don’t want to die either,”
she murmured. When he didn’t respond,
she forced herself to look up. His image
swam before her streaming eyes. “Does
that make me a horrible, selfish person?”
Jamie
didn’t answer. He stared at her for a
few agonizing seconds, his face like cement, set and unyielding. Then his chin trembled, ever so slightly, but
before the façade could break, he stood up, shoving his chair back
roughly. “We’re not having this
conversation now,” he muttered in her general direction, and before she could
stop him, he stormed back downstairs, leaving his sandwich uneaten on the
table.
“Jamie! Jamie, get back here; you can’t keep doing
this to me!” she yelled, jumping up. She
hurried after him, but he’d already slammed the basement door shut before she
could get downstairs. She went down
anyway, only to find he’d locked the door.
She turned and twisted the knob with fury, then resorted to banging on
the door. “Open the damn door!!” she
screamed through solid wood. “You can’t
avoid me forever!! We have to talk about
this!!”
“We just
did!” Jamie called back shortly. “You
know how I feel! Now go back upstairs
before you hurt yourself or our children!”
Her pulse
was racing, and she could feel her blood pressure rising. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew
he was right, but at the moment, she hated him for patronizing her, for telling
her what to do. If I do, it’ll be
YOUR fault! she wanted to scream,
but it was a low blow, and she resisted the impulse.
She raged
against the door for a few more seconds, but when he stopped answering her, refusing
to budge, she finally gave up and fumed back upstairs. Calm down… calm down, she warned
herself, as she paced back and forth across the kitchen floor, her hands
clenched into angry fists. But she could
not calm down. Her anger dissolved into
another emotional torrent of tears, and she finally collapsed onto the couch,
clutching a throw pillow to her chest as she sobbed, leaving tearstains across
its pattern.
It had been
a long time since she had cried like this.
The last time she remembered sobbing so was when Casey had died. His death, while not unexpected, had been
devastating to her, but even then, she’d had people with whom to share the
grief. Casey’s family, of course… and
Nick. She remembered how, even though it
had been only weeks since their break-up, he had been there for her, turning up
for the funeral and sitting with her, rubbing her shoulder in a show of sweet,
quiet compassion.
But right
now, she felt like she had no one. Jamie
had shut her out, refusing to talk to her, leaving her to deal with this
horrible weight on her shoulders all on her own. It seemed too heavy a weight to bear alone,
even on the strongest set of shoulders, and she wasn’t feeling particularly
strong at the moment.
She’d been
trying to deal with this on her own for three days, waiting until she could
talk to her husband before involving anyone else, but now she knew she could
not stand it anymore. She had to talk to
someone, and if Jamie refused, it would have to be someone else.
Still
crying, she reached for the cordless phone and dialed with difficulty, her
hands shaking, the numbers swimming before her eyes. Nevertheless, she managed to push them in the
correct sequence, and when a deep voice rumbled, “Hello?” she nearly collapsed
with the utter relief at hearing him, the one person who had always made her
feel safe and protected. Already, her
burden felt just a little lighter, as if he had taken a corner of it for
himself without her even asking.
“Daddy,”
she said with difficulty, her voice choked.
“Claire?? What’s the matter, sweetheart??”
Through her
tears, she smiled a little; of course, he could tell something was wrong, even
in just a word. She swallowed, trying to
get some control over her voice. “Can
you put Mom on too? I need to talk to
you…”
Her parents
listened and advised her with all the love and compassion her husband could not
seem to muster. They let her cry, trying
to soothe her and sympathize with her as she got out everything that had
happened over the last few days. And
once she had calmed down, they just talked, openly, non-judgmentally and
without hostility. It was the kind of
conversation she had hoped to have with Jamie.
Their
reactions surprised her. Though she knew
they cared about her above anything, her mother and father were both Catholics
who had raised her and Kyle in the Church and continued to go to weekly mass
themselves. She had expected them to be
against the idea of the reduction, inevitably, though not as condemning as
Jamie.
But they weren’t. In their eyes, her life was more important
than anything.
“You have
to think of your own health too, sweetheart,” her father said. “You’ve been through so much already… I couldn’t stand to see my daughter beat
cancer, only to die from something else that could have been prevented. Parents aren’t supposed to outlast their
kids, you know; I want to see you live a long, happy life and be there for my
grandkids. And it doesn’t matter how
many grandkids there are… you giving us any is a miracle in itself, right?”
His words
brought a fresh batch of tears to her eyes, but they stung far less than the
ones she had cried earlier.
Her mother
added, “I know how awful this must be for you.
I can’t imagine what I would have done if my doctor had suggested
something like this when I was pregnant with you or Kyle. I would never condone a woman’s having an
abortion done just because she didn’t want the baby… but I know you want these babies more than
anything. It’s just a cruel twist of
fate, what’s happened. I think your
dad’s right – you need to think of your own life and the other babies. And Jamie.
I know he’s giving you a hard time, but he would be so devastated if
anything happened to you, sweetheart.
Maybe he’ll come around when he realizes he could lose you too.”
“Maybe,”
Claire sniffled. “I don’t know,
Mom. I think he’s in denial right now… I
think he just wants to avoid the whole issue and pretend like nothing’s wrong.”
“Well, give
him some time to cool down and think things over, and then try to talk to him
again. And in the meantime, you know you
can talk to us anytime. We’ll support
you no matter what decision you end up making.
I just wish I could be there for you, baby… I’m so sorry you’re having to go through this
all alone. If you want us to fly up…”
“No, don’t
do that… This is for Jamie and I to
handle, and I know we will. He just
needs more time, I guess…”
After
reassuring her parents that she would be all right and that she would keep in
touch, Claire hung up. She felt better
after talking to them, knowing that they, at least, would support whatever
decision she and Jamie made.
But she was
still filled with uncertainty. Would
she and Jamie actually be able to come to a decision, together?
***