Night, Forgotten: Draft 1

Chapter 1

I've never forgotten what that felt like. I wish I never knew. In that moment, I was overcome by a stark awareness that this very moment... no, now this one... is the last moment I'll ever notice. After that, everything will be just like it was for me before I was born, and there is no stopping it, there never has been any stopping it, and now it is here, and now it must be here, and now.

That certainty of death's immediacy deeply rattled me and it's why, years later, I was still having such vivid dreams of the accident. It was as if because my brain had been forced to anticipate death, since it had gone to that place once, it could easily return there whenever I let my guard down or fell asleep.

The dreams have mostly stopped, though.

*

I don't fully come back into my body until at least a day after the emergency C-section operation. I find myself seated upright, across from Owen in a room that was clearly designed to be waited in and nothing else. I hope we're waiting there to go home. It feels like we've been in the hospital for more than a lifetime, and for a brief moment it crosses my mind that if I don't get home soon, I'll forget what home even feels like.

That's ridiculous, of course. The home I share with Owen, an old Colonial in a quiet suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, is the only place I've ever been invited to belong. Owen and I have lived there with our sweet dog Daisy for the entire four years that we've been married. We purchased the house on a whim in the month before our wedding. Owen found it listed in a local newspaper that had been discarded on the commuter rail in Boston. I never asked him why he'd decided to spend his short commute flipping through a random old newspaper from a town that wasn't even big enough to have its own high school, all the way at the end of the commuter rail line. I never needed to. Because when I saw the house, I knew we were going to live there together for a long time.

Although it only had two big, main rooms downstairs and three small bedrooms upstairs, its high ceilings and well-kept, hardwood floors made the modest house feel grand. It wasn't officially a historical property, although it must have been built over one hundred years ago. There were lots of homes like it around New England, but this one welcomed us within its cozy walls in a way that made it impossible to leave without making an offer.

That's what we told Owen's mother, Diana, anyway. Like my parents, she was appalled to hear we were moving away from Boston, even though she would still be able to reach us fairly easily by train or car if she felt compelled to visit. She rarely did.

Usually it was just the two of us, filling the cozy space together, and sometimes our neighbors stopped by for dinner or invited us out to a party. It's not that I'm antisocial, but any potential personal relationships have been strained by a long series of rapid moves around the country, the solitary nature of my work as a writer, and a family that has generally failed at staying in touch. I've never resented my parents for their childrearing approach, but since Owen and I moved to Rhode Island they've felt comfortable letting me, their only child, drift into the periphery of their lives.

So I could never forget what home feels like.

And I've never felt more at home than I do in that little old house with Owen. It's pretty drafty and creaky sometimes, which used to scare me when we first moved in, but I hardly notice it anymore. Anyway, I prefer that type of historic character to the sanitized, modern décor of this hospital waiting room, for instance.

If we are, in fact, waiting to be discharged from the hospital, I wish they'd hurry things up because I just want to be back home. With Owen and Daisy. And the baby of course.

I study Owen's lowered face for any sign of the anger I saw on it in the operating room. He just looks tired now.

"Hey," I whisper, but at the same time a door swings open on the other side of the room and a nurse I don't recognize pokes her face in. Before she even speaks, Owen is on his feet beside her, following her into the next room.

I see the sign above the door: NICU. Of course. We haven't been waiting to be discharged. We're in the neonatal intensive care unit.

I slip in behind Owen just as the door closes again. The large space is bustling with a unique kind of controlled urgency. Our baby's bassinet is in the far corner. To reach him we have to weave among dozens of tiny bodies on elevated tables attached to IV stands. We pass another young couple huddled over a bassinet, obscuring it from view. They alternate between sniffling into wadded tissues and murmuring to the oblivious creature sleeping below them.

We stop in front of the bassinet labeled "Thomas Porter."

Thomas is one of the smallest babies there. His entire two-and-a-half-pound body is about the size of Owen's hand. Countless cords and tubes protrude from beneath the muslin blanket in which he's swaddled, and his grey face is nearly obscured by the oxygen tube taped across it. A clear, disinfecting goo has been smeared across his slightly protuberant eyelids. It doesn't look like he should be alive.

I reach out my hand for Owen's, but he is no longer beside me. My fingers foolishly rake the air where they expected to find his hand waiting, and I realize he's gone.

It's all right. I wouldn't have known what to say, anyway. I don't blame Owen for struggling with this.

After all, Thomas is not his son.