"Something's wrong with the baby."
It's the last thing I manage to say before losing my power of speech. I brace myself against the counter in pain.
Something's wrong with me.
I'm watching myself again, as if completely removed from my physical form. If this is an out-of-body experience, it's also out-of-time: I immediately recognize the college T-shirt Owen was wearing that day back in June when the "visual disturbances" wouldn't go away.
There he is, on the chair that he's pulled up against the exam table, holding onto my limp hand. And there I am, vomit from earlier in the day smeared across the sleeve of my loose sweatshirt. My body is slumped over Owen's lap.
I remember now.
Everything looked so strange to me before I lost consciousness, but now I experience the scene as vividly as the one in the shed, which somehow occurred both six months later than where I am right now – in mid-June, at Dr. Syed's office, with visual disturbances – and also just moments ago.
What happens next feels more like déjà vu than like remembering.
I watch Dr. Syed snap into action and administer to my unconscious body while Amanda Lee runs back into the room with a stretcher. She's on the phone with the team at St. Elizabeth's, where I'm supposed to give birth months from now. They move quickly to get my body on the stretcher, with one hip propped on a pillow so that my pregnant belly is supported, and rush me past the no-longer-smiling receptionists out to a waiting ambulance.
In the operating room, the loudest sound is the conflicting rhythm of two desperate heartbeats. They're coming from monitors attached at various nodes to the exposed torso on the operating table. The air is buzzing with hushed directions and questions among a group of four or five young-looking doctors who assist the surgeon and two nurses.
Owen sits on the far side of a blue screen, which blocks the gore from his empty gaze. He looks much too pale.
I watch my body giving birth from the outside.
And from above, I see everything for the first time.
Thomas is pulled from my body, born extremely tiny at only twenty-seven weeks of gestation. He's immediately whisked away to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where he will eventually learn how to live.
They let Owen stay by my side. No one ever properly sews up the wound where my lower abdomen was sliced open, because it doesn't matter.
When it comes down to it, there was a choice between two lives and they chose Not Mine. That cluster of unwilling parts of me, mixed with a violent stranger, had existed for twenty-seven weeks and that was too long for the doctors at St. Elizabeth's to risk losing it.
It would get to become Thomas, but it would never get to have a mother.
Now I know the truth with a sense of Yes, of course, and an ability to see what has never been obscured, only unnoticed:
I haven't really been here at all, and I could never belong here again.
I see Diana redoing all the chores whenever I thought I was helping her and thanking Owen for tasks I tried to complete around the house. I see Sadie, whose story still needed me in it these past few months, telling Owen and Diana that she'd seen me out by the shed. I see Carmen and Marcus fighting as if I'm not even there and never even bothering to confront me about lurking outside their house. I see poor Thomas belonging in my arms but unable to drink from my breast.
Finally, I see Owen recoiling from my touch and ignoring me when I call for him. He didn't leave without his wedding band because he couldn't stand to be around me; he left because I couldn't yet understand that it was me who was meant to go. Horrified, I see myself speaking to him, touching him, sitting with him.
I have been haunting him.
When Diana saw his note in the kitchen – the note he must have left for her – she said, "I understand" aloud to an empty room. And now I understand, too. I will always be on that parlor davenport for Owen, and anywhere else he needs me to be. But this is where my story ends.