And still, I counted the days, waiting for that magic week when viability would be reached. Nothing was medically wrong, and I kept reminding myself of all that I knew about pregnancies and birth, telling myself it would be okay.
But there’s another thing midwives know, and it’s that some mothers have a sixth sense about their babies, even in utero.
The dread lurked in the back of my heart.
At twenty-two weeks and four days, when I was sitting on the floor making a city out of blocks with Dylan, I got up to answer the phone and saw a splotch of watery red on the floor. For a second, I assumed it was ketchup—Dylan had had ketchup with his carrots at lunch, and somehow, he must have . . . Nope. No.
A sudden, knifelike pain pierced my abdomen, causing me to bend over, keening. “Mommy, what’s wrong?” Dylan asked.
I forced myself to straighten up. “Nothing, honey. I’m fine.”
Another rush of blood soaked my jeans, and I shuffled into the bathroom, holding my stomach. Called 911, then Brad, and told him to meet me at the hospital. Called Beth and told her to come get Dylan right now. I managed to put him in his car seat and drive down Black Pond Road to Route 6 so the paramedics could get to me faster.
My daughter was born in the back of the ambulance on Route 6 about fifteen minutes from the hospital. Tiny, perfect, beautiful, stillborn, shockingly white in a sea of blood.
I stayed in the hospital for six days—complete placental abruption, requiring an emergency hysterectomy and four units of blood. Brad brought Dylan to see me, and he was so sweet, so kind. “I’m sorry, Mommy,” he said. “I love you.” He had drawn a picture of the three of us, giant heads with eyes and smiles, long stick legs, all of us holding hands. My mother came and was uncharacteristically silent. Beatrice wept and held my hand, making me feel awkward. Hannah sent flowers and brought Dylan some presents to distract him and called me to say how sorry she was. And for the first time in my life, I saw my father cry as he sat at my bedside.
These things happen. Oh, they happen all the time. Everyone’s life—especially every woman’s life—is marked by something like this, it seems. Miscarriage, infertility, breast or ovarian or uterine cancer. It’s so personal when our female parts fail us in some way. So hard not to think that we—that I—had caused this, should’ve known, should’ve done something. No matter what my doctors said, I knew. My hubris at thinking my scarred, weakened uterus could hold another baby. My greed in wanting another child when my first had been nothing short of a miracle.
Because she was born after twenty weeks’ gestation, my daughter got a fetal death certificate, which meant she needed a name. We could have left that part blank, but it seemed so cruel not to name her. But we hadn’t settled on one yet, and oh, the deep, aching pain of naming a child who was already gone. The tragedy of it all. The absolute, wrenching grief.
Grace Mariana Silva Fairchild. I could never bring myself to think of her by name. After all, she had never been called that in life . . . to me, she was just my poor little daughter.
Dylan was sad and so sweet for a few days after I came home. He knew “Mommy’s tummy hurt,” and there would be no sister for him. He brought me his stuffed animals to comfort me. A few days later, he said that he’d woken up from a dream where his baby sister was snuggled against him, and he cried because she went away.
Then, cruelly, he forgot about her, as toddlers do.
We had her cremated and took the achingly small box and scattered some of her ashes on Herring Pond. I buried the remainder in my garden and planted blue forget-me-nots in that spot.
We got screened by a few adoption agencies, but we never got a call, and honestly, affording it would’ve been a stretch. Foster parenting was fraught with the idea that a child could be taken away from us, and what would that do to Dylan? By the time he was seven or eight, we had withdrawn our applications and settled into the reality of being a family of three.
We knew we were lucky. Dylan was everything to us, and there were plenty of studies showing that only children had many advantages. I worked as a nurse part-time, and helped out with stagings or showings for my in-laws. Brad had a full load of patients. Our little house was coming together bit by bit, year by year. We were happy. Of course we were. It was a choice we had to make.
And still, I thought of my poor little baby every day. I’d held her there in the ambulance, and after my hysterectomy, they let me hold her again. I’d memorized her perfect face. Every year on the first of December, the day I’d lost her, Brad would bring me flowers, and I’d cry a little （or a lot）， remembering the fear and love and grief so pure it was like a scalpel, slicing my heart in half.