Ari squeezed her hand. “Do you really believe that?”
Emily thought for a moment. “Intellectually, no,” she said. “But I still feel that way. Otherwise why would this happen to me now? What if . . . what if it really was Mom’s soul and then I was an idiot and it was my fault that . . .”
Ari turned toward her sister. “Em, you’ve gotta forget I ever said that. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t even really believe it then. I don’t know why I thought it, why I said it. It was dumb.”
“But maybe it was true. And that’s why—”
“It’s not true,” Ari said, interrupting her sister. “And even if it were, it wouldn’t have anything to do with what happened now. I looked it up last night. Twenty-five percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. And the WHO website said two hundred thirteen million women get pregnant each year. So think about it, that’s more than fifty-three million miscarriages.” She paused. “In one year.”
Emily let out a small laugh. “That sounds like something Ezra would say.” She wanted to tell her sister that she wasn’t a number, she wasn’t a statistic, she was a person. But she knew that Ari took comfort in numbers the way Ezra did. Even if it didn’t help, she knew Ari was trying.
Ari laughed, too. “I’ll get you a shirt: I love people who love statistics.”
Emily stopped laughing and was quiet for a moment, processing her fears, knowing she could share them all with her sister. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me, Ari. Maybe I’ll never be able to stay pregnant for more than seven weeks.”
Ari sighed. “It’s possible,” she said. “But it’s also possible that what happened in college is completely unrelated to what’s happening now. You fell out of a tree. You were taking painkillers. You were getting high. It’s not entirely surprising that you miscarried then. And that was at, what, six weeks? So a different time marker.”
It was five weeks and six days.
“What about now, though?” Emily asked, her voice small. “I did everything right. I feel like I studied and studied for a test that I somehow failed.” That was the part that scared her the most. She could do everything right and still miscarry.
“Maybe you just weren’t meant to have this particular baby at this particular point in time,” Ari said. “Maybe it’s like Mom said—everything that happens is exactly what’s supposed to happen.”
“But I want to be a mom,” Emily said, tears overflowing her eyes. “I want to be a mom now. I waited until Ezra was ready, and . . . I want to be a mom.”
“I know,” Ari said, gathering her sister in her arms. “I know you do.”
And while it didn’t change what had happened, just being in her sister’s embrace made Emily feel better. It made her feel like at some point she would learn how to live with this loss the way she had learned to live with so many others. And that, no matter what, she could count on her sister to be there, helping her along the way.
xvii
I went back to school after winter break, but nothing felt the same. I was grieving a loss I refused to acknowledge, and one I did—the loss of my ability to play piano, at least for a while.
Your dad found a guy who could play the keyboard, but I still went on stage to sing. The bars that booked us had booked us because of the demo that had us performing together. They’d booked both of us. So I sang. I sang backup, I sang harmonies your dad wrote for me. I sang in our duet finale, which was a hit every night. I was performing, but I felt weird without an instrument, wrong. When I told your dad, he gave me a tambourine. I felt even weirder with the tambourine.
Also, the keyboardist was a jerk. I’m not just saying that. He really was. He showed up late for call, he took smoke breaks instead of hanging out with the rest of the guys. No one liked him, even if he was a great musician. Your dad and I were both counting down the days until my cast came off. I kept thinking that once it did, everything would go back to normal. I would be happier, your dad would chill out a little, things would be the way they were before. Of course, we hadn’t figured out what came next, what the next year would look like, whether I would stay in school, but we were so focused on my hand getting better that we couldn’t see that far.
* * *
—
“You’ll need some physical therapy,” the doctor told me when he took the cast off.
Underneath the fiberglass, my arm and hand had atrophied. It looked small and pale and weak next to my other hand.