Tsunami Across My Heart (8 page)

I didn’t want the children to know I was in danger and I didn’t ask for help. I should have called an ambulance but I was afraid I’d lose track of Brittany and Joshua and so I rushed out of the restaurant to the van. Out of my right mind with worry I drove the three of us a few miles to the hospital. I reasoned that it would be faster for me to drive and that it wasn’t far enough for me to lose much blood before I got there.

I parked close to the entrance and pulled the kids out of the car quickly and walked into the Emergency Room. The waiting room didn’t have many visitors and a few people turned towards me as I came in, distraught, crying, and laden with children.

“Please, please, help me.” I started sobbing as I carried Joshua in my arms and pulled
Brittany
along beside me into the emergency room. A nurse rushed to greet me.

“I think I’m losing my baby. There’s blood everywhere.”

She looked at my quizzically because the children were fine.

“No. I’m pregnant. I’m bleeding. It’s everywhere.”

They pulled me into a room and laid me down, cutting off my jeans. The blood was profuse and bright red. It covered my clothing and was quickly getting onto the gurney bedding. The nurse seemed to slow a bit and was tending to me but no longer really rushing as I thought she should.

“Have I lost the baby?” I said trembling

“Ms. Stone, you’ve probably lost a pint of blood. Yes, I’m so sorry, but you’ve lost the baby.” She said, and I just collapsed into her arms and cried my heart out.

Soon David was there and he came into the room and he was worried and frightened but I didn’t’ feel that he was as sad as I was about the loss of the baby. “It’s just like everything that I was afraid of going wrong with this pregnancy has gone wrong, and the timing is just terrible.”

I sensed he was relieved on some level and I was angry with him for feeling that way about our child, and hurt that he was relieved. The nurse came and went and finally she told us, “I need to give you an ultrasound just to make sure all the tissue has been expelled from your uterus so you won’t be vulnerable to an infection.”

I sobbed all over again and felt numb and miserable and wanted to curl up and cry forever.

The machine arrives without a technician and sits there by the bedside for quite some time. I don’t care really, because I’m stricken with grief and exhausted besides.

Finally the technician comes and she apologizes for the violation when I’m suffering a loss. David is gone with Brittany and Joshua, and I’m alone in my sorrow. She gently moves the blanket aside and puts the gel on my abdomen. It’s cold because we’re in the emergency room.

She places the receiver upon the slippery surface of my skin and suddenly gasps “Oh my gosh! There were three!”

There on the screen I see the strangest sight.

There are three separate orbs on the screen. The first is mostly collapsed and empty, folded in upon itself and I thought to myself it explained why I had bled that first month. The last is empty but appears damaged at the base, and she points at it showing me where the bleeding is coming from now. But, amazingly, miraculously, in the center to my complete amazement there is a baby, much larger than the four weeks my doctor insisted that I must be at that point and there is clearly movement from this little gem. There’s a baby, and it’s alive!

“There’s still a baby!!” I shouted and I started crying all over again, but this time for joy. “How far along am I? It looks so big!”

“I’d say you are ten weeks pregnant” she said.

“Ten weeks?!? I KNEW I got pregnant in
Cape Cod
. I knew it.”

The technician is suddenly my best friend and we are both so happy to see the baby well, and alive. Even so I am mystified to see not just one other placenta but two. They are completely distinct, completely different from one another, definitely three, two empty ones and the third completely secure.

Later the doctor appears to say that I had “a” vanishing twin and wondered if we weren’t mistaken about the third sac. Yet, it was there, the nurse and the technician saw it, heard him and gave me a knowing glance…as if to say “You know, and we know, that we really saw that…” and I realized too that each of the sacs was a different shape, and none mirrored the shape of another.

I was instructed to stay in bed as much as possible, and to lift as little as possible in order to get Nathan here
 
alive and well. I spent five months flipping between news channels while Bush and Gore seemingly made a mockery of our election process. Nathan had two siblings we’d lost in that pregnancy and I laid in bed still bleeding for five more months hardly allowed to get out of my room, not allowed to carry Joshua or Brittany and exhausted beyond belief.

David did not seem as happy as I was that there was still a child on the way. He was angry, resentful at having to go to work early, work through lunch, come home later than he wanted and then take care of two children. I could understand that he was tired and that it was hard, but I felt if he loved us that he’d do what was necessary for a while to make sure we were all ok.

My father seemed to feel compelled to tell me how irresponsible it was of me to “insist on having this baby” when I had so many business and financial obligations. I was furious he’d imply that the life of my child, any child, but his grandchild should be sacrificed for the sake of commerce. Worse, for a business destined to fail at this point no matter what I did our how hard I tried. Staying afloat long enough to keep the health insurance intact was the most important thing to do. So this “philosophic conversation” as he described it ignited an argument between us that had been fueled by 25 years of his pushing me out of our family, ostracizing me, for telling about the things he’d done when he was too drunk to even know his own name.

The distance between David and I just seemed to grow deeper and while my focus was just getting Nathan here, David’s was getting me back to the place where I was taking care of him and no one else. Further, David resented that I had the audacity to argue with my father no matter how outrageous what he’d said or done was, and I felt not only that David did not understand me, or want our baby, but worse that he didn’t care about me or the baby’s well being. I was beginning to feel that I’d carried the heavy burden of David on my shoulders long enough, and any man with a law degree completely paid for by Mommy and Daddy ought to be able to make of an independent contribution than he seemed able, willing or prepared to make. Whatever affection and love I’d had for David was waning, miserably, and I felt trapped.

Years had now passed without any contact from Eric. Despite that, my mind frequently wandered back over and over again to that “Oh my God, that is some
sweeeeeet……” echo that just rippled over and over in my mind. Any sexual thoughts on my part were quickly followed by that image, that sound, the light, the color, the flowing gauze, the feeling, the chills, the desire, the happiness at Eric’s being mine for that one glorious moment. I must have relived it thousands of times. It grew to be my solace as the months and then years passed and it slowly became evident that all the things I’d aspired to in my marriage were just simply not meant to be.

By the time Nathan was born the distance between David and I was a gulf. Having Nathan took all day long waiting and waiting with no progress and then suddenly in ten minutes flat I was complete and Nathan was trying to leave my body without anyone there on the receiving end to greet him.

It was clear that the business was lost by then and all that was left was the paperwork of closing it and the transfer of some $250,000 worth of business that I could manage for the following year working part time from home.
M
y health had been compromised for so very long by still undiscovered threats. The week before 9-11 my husband, my colleague, my three children and I traveled to
San Francisco
in an effort to meet with my new business associates. They were lovely people, from
India
, and I liked them and enjoyed learning about their culture, their lives.

Traveling south of the city, my entire family and my assistant meandered Highway One all the way to
Monterey
, strolled the city near the aquarium and then we ended up on the beach at
Carmel
. Here I was with three incredibly small children, heavily laden with excess pounds, sadness, millions of dollars in debt and the loss of the promise of my bright future. The prophesied marriage was displayed in its full horror before me and I stood there on that beach facing those rocks, watching the spray once again. The sound of the surf steady and loud, it insulated me from having to reveal my thoughts.

The sound of my children on the shore behind me tunneled through to my consciousness, and I was more alone in my connection with my husband than I’d ever been on my own, despite the fact that it was he, and not Eric that stood on that same shore with me that morning. I had confided the secret of my regret in the loss of Eric in my assistant Kimberly, but I felt in the extremity of her youth, she couldn’t possibly appreciate what the revelation to her truly meant to me. She didn’t know this was the one site that stood apart in my heart with Eric. That I stood in the same place he’d stood with me thirteen years before, knowing I could never be myself with David in the way that I had been able to be myself with Eric, not understanding why I’d been able to make the bridge the way I had with one and not the other. I had never felt so utterly alone in the company of others in my entire life.

Two more years passed, with the horrors of the World Trade Center collapse, a war and an economy that couldn’t be resuscitated, and of course with the promised silence from my long lost love. The inevitable end of my marriage was upon me. We had lost a home, several cars, land, savings, and two businesses, not to mention what constituted our marriage. I’d lost fifteen long years of sobriety, what felt like my youth and my beauty. A confrontation with my father and my family over the sexual abuse was in full swing and David resented that I took the time and space to address this betrayal because it mean
t I wasn’t available to do his
bidding, in the way he wanted it done.

I was on anti-depressants. They didn’t really help, as I wasn’t chemically depressed. So I drank. I got stoned. I prayed seemingly unanswered prayers. I took care of the children during the day while David attempted unsuccessfully to sell mortgages and took unfair advantage of all our friends leaving them with more debt and less money in their pockets and more in his own, and he smoked pot in the yard in front of God and everyone, including our children. I felt my life was a disgrace; I was living in a nightmare that anyone would have been unhappy in.

David was in the habit of dispensing family medications and every night would put my antidepressants in my mouth, even if I complained of this behavior or others, he would persist in them, just wearing me down with the repetition of the exact same form of disrespect on a daily basis.

He hated me for no longer supporting him financially. I hated him for making a mockery of all that mattered to me.

One evening I’d been drinking, not very heavily, but I’d had a few glasses of wine. I was playing a game on the computer and David arrived with my medicine. I put my hand out for it, but he insisted on stuffing them into my mouth again. He had added two Somas to the prescription delivery without my realizing that they were there, or what they were. They were especially strong pain killers sent to him by his best friend from Yeshiva that now lived in
Connecticut
and was a physician’s assistant. Danny was not supposed to be sending samples in the mail, but that had never stopped David and Danny, the bother of following the rules for these two was unheard of.

Their relationship was exceedingly, oddly too close. David would never remember my significant days without prompting and would frequently gloss over them as though they didn’t matter to him at all, yet he killed himself to celebrate those he had with Danny. They joked incessantly
about being homosexual lovers.
I began to suspect, and said to Danny’s wife that it wouldn’t remotely surprise me after ten years of being with David, that those two weren’t joking about the depth of their connection. She didn’t even raise an eyebrow.
I never had proof, but it seemed the only reasonable thing to conclude eventually, that David was really in love with Danny, and no one else.

I
had my usual allotment of red wine to wash the pills down, after the kids had gone to bed. I had fallen into the unhealthy habit of swearing I wouldn’t drink that day, and then with my rising fury against David each night, I was descending into quelling my anger with drink. Time had an odd quality to it. It slipped through my fingers and more and more time passed by without my doing anything about the nightmare, but inside of my world time passed excruciatingly slowly. This evening though, beyond being numb, I was unusually off, tired, and climbed into bed much earlier than usual, and passed out long before midnight.
 

Once I was unconscious David entered my bedroom, where he had not been welcome in a very long time. He started making overtures, removed my clothing and I vaguely remember his trying to have sex with me, struggling, saying “No.” and then passing out again.