What happens when your new start comes to a halt?
Photo: hudiemm/Getty Images On Tuesday at around noon, while Elliott was at work, Cora found a jagged circle of bright red on her white underwear, like a botched Japanese flag. Nine weeks into her pregnancy and blood was coming out of her. She sat on the toilet, knees shaking, afraid to look at the toilet paper to see how much more showed up.
Her finger hovered over Elliott’s number. If she told him she was bleeding, he would be concerned but calm. In that manner that made him so excellent at his job, he would tell her to go see a doctor right away: he wouldn’t be ordering her, just making it clear—soothingly, persuasively—that he understood what needed to be done. She hadn’t even met the doctor yet; her first prenatal appointment was two weeks from now.
Unless things got worse, she would wait and call the doctor tomorrow. Would count herself in the camp of first-trimester women for whom bleeding was just a symptom of pregnancy, not of its imminent end. The ones who reported happy news to the online forums: All’s well! Alive and kicking! Just a bit of spotting, nothing more. Not the others, not the sad ones, the desperate ones. She was going to close up her computer and shut those women away inside it.
She went to bed early while Elliott watched TV in the living room. Virtuous TV: a documentary special about wildfires. She hadn’t told him about the blood, the cramping, the internet sisters she’d sought out and then tried to forget. He would be on her about that too, and even though it would be out of care, she didn’t want to have to reveal how her body might be failing both of them.
In winter she went out to the courtyard in a wool coat and gloves, the naked branches shining like bones. By spring, when the trees were budding, other students had pushed open the door, and the place was no longer hers. Sometimes Elliott Tishman—a senior, conventionally cute, effortlessly popular, the student body vice president— sat on the opposite bench with his girlfriend, Darcy, a strawberry blonde with a throaty laugh.
She lay loosely in his arms, and in the silence before he began to comfort her, she could feel how she’d hurt him; and she wanted to hug him and apologize and make him feel how much she loved him, and she wanted him to stay hurt. “I don’t think that’s the issue. If you reined in the sentimental language here, and in other places, you could actually generate more emotion for these characters.”
In the bathroom she found more dark red, angry-looking clotted blood. So was this it, in earnest now? How much was going to come out, and would it be too much? Miscarriage. Hemorrhage. Both words shadowy and sinister—womanly in the worst way. The nurse had told her to call Labor and Delivery Triage at the hospital if the bleeding got too heavy. They knew how to deal with the complications of pregnancy at any point. But it was Labor and Delivery, Cora thought.
On Monday morning, Elliott drove her to the doctor’s office. The pink-lipsticked receptionist took Cora’s name, typed something, and then swiveled around to a file cabinet, producing a folder and a book, Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth. Cora recoiled at the cover: a gaggle of smiling women holding babies. “Why are you giving me this?”Cora turned toward the waiting room where Elliott was sitting and looking up at her, and silently handed him the book.
“I’m going to do an ultrasound to see what’s going on,” the doctor said calmly, and Cora thought of the worried women online who’d turned out to still be pregnant in the end, whose babies showed up on ultrasounds and proved their anxious mothers wrong—they weren’t gone, weren’t vanished into nothing. She couldn’t decipher the images that appeared on the screen in front of her, except to recognize that the machine kept zooming in on something: an asteroid blob in a lunar landscape.
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Spain Enters ‘Longest Period Of Mourning’ For 27,000 People Who Died With CoronavirusI am a breaking news reporter for Forbes in London, covering Europe and the U.S. Previously I was a news reporter for HuffPost UK, the Press Association and a night reporter at the Guardian. I studied Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, where I was a writer and editor for one of the university’s global affairs magazines, the London Globalist. That led me to Goldsmiths, University of London, where I completed my M.A. in Journalism. Got a story? Get in touch at isabel.togohforbes.com, or follow me on Twitter bissieness. I look forward to hearing from you.
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Spain Enters ‘Longest Period Of Mourning’ For 27,000 People Who Died With CoronavirusI am a breaking news reporter for Forbes in London, covering Europe and the U.S. Previously I was a news reporter for HuffPost UK, the Press Association and a night reporter at the Guardian. I studied Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, where I was a writer and editor for one of the university’s global affairs magazines, the London Globalist. That led me to Goldsmiths, University of London, where I completed my M.A. in Journalism. Got a story? Get in touch at isabel.togohforbes.com, or follow me on Twitter bissieness. I look forward to hearing from you.
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