A baby that is now gone.
For the first time since waking up, I start crying.
I lost a baby.
I close my eyes and let the emotion wash over me. I listen to what my heart and mind are trying to tell me.
I am relieved and devastated. I am scared. I am angry. I am not sure if any of this is going to be OK.
The tears fall down my face with such force that I cannot possibly catch them all. They make their way to my hospital gown. My nose starts to run. I don’t have the physical capacity to wipe it on my sleeve.
My head hurts from the pressure. I roll toward my pillow and bury my face in the sheets. I can feel them getting wet.
I hear the door open, and I don’t bother to look and see who it is. I know who it is.
She sighs and gets into bed next to me. I don’t turn to see her face. I don’t need to hear her voice. Gabby.
I let it erupt. The fear and the anger and the confusion. The grief and the relief and the disgust.
Someone hit me with their car. Someone ran me over. They broke my bones, and they severed my arteries, and they killed the baby I didn’t love yet.
Gabby is the only person on the planet I trust to hear my pain.
I howl into the pillow. She holds me tighter.
“Let it out,” she says. “Let it out.”
I breathe so hard that I exhaust myself. I am dizzy with oxygen and anguish.
And then I turn my head toward her. I can see she’s been crying, too.
It makes me feel better somehow. As if she will bear some of the pain for me, as if she can take some of it off my hands.
“Breathe,” she says. She looks me in the eyes and she breathes in slowly and then breathes out slowly. “Breathe,” she says again. “Like me. Come on.”
I don’t understand why she’s saying this to me until I realize that I am not breathing at all. The air is trapped in my chest. I’m holding it in my lungs. And once I realize that’s what I’m doing, I let it go. It spills out of me, as if the dam has broken.
Air comes back in as a gasp. An audible, painful gasp.
And I feel, for maybe the first time since I woke up, alive. I am alive.
I am alive today.
“I was pregnant,” I say, starting to cry again. “Ten weeks.” It is the first real thing I’ve said since I woke up, and I can feel now how much it was tearing up my insides, like a bullet ricocheting in my gut.
Talking isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I think I can talk just fine. But I don’t need to say anything else.
I don’t need to tell Gabby that I didn’t know. I don’t need to tell Gabby that I wouldn’t have been ready for the baby I don’t have.
She already knows. Gabby always knows. And maybe more to the point, she knows there is nothing to say.
So she holds me and listens as I cry. And every couple of minutes, she reminds me to breathe.
And I do. Because I am alive. I may be broken and scared. But I am alive.
Ethan and I are circling the block around the café he wants to go to. Despite the fact that it is Tuesday morning and you’d think most people would be working, the street is packed with cars.
“When are you going back to work, by the way?” I ask him. He’s called in sick twice now.
“I’ll go back tomorrow,” he says. “I have some vacation days saved up, so it’s not a problem.”
I don’t want him to go back to work tomorrow, even though, you know, clearly, he should. But . . . I’ve been enjoying this reprieve from the real world. I quite like hiding out in his apartment, living in a cocoon of warm bodies and takeout.
“What if I eat so many cinnamon rolls that I gain four hundred pounds? Then?”
“Then what?” he says. He’s only half listening to me. He’s focused on trying to find a place to park.
“Then would this be over? Would that be a deal breaker?”
He laughs at me. “Try all you want, Hannah,” he says. “But there are no deal breakers here.”
I turn and look out the window. “Oh, I’ll find your weak spot, Mr. Hanover. I will find it if it’s the last thing I do.”
He laughs as we slow to a red light. He looks at me. “I know what it means to miss you,” he says. The light turns green, and he speeds down the boulevard. “So you’ll have to find a pretty insurmountable problem if I’m going to let you go again.”
I smile at him, even though I’m not sure he can see me. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, smiling.
We finally find a spot relatively close to the café.
“This is why people leave this city, you know,” I say as he squeezes into the spot.
He turns the key and pulls it out of the ignition. He gets out of the car. “You don’t have to tell me that,” he says. “I hate this city every time I circle a block like a vulture.”
“Well, I’m just saying, in New York, there’s the subway. And in Austin, you can park anywhere you want. The Metro in D.C. is so clean that you could eat off the floor.”
“Nowhere is perfect. But, you know, don’t go racking up reasons to leave already.”
“I’m not,” I say. I’m slightly defensive. I don’t want to be the person no one thinks is going to stick around.
“OK,” he says. “Good.”
He turns and opens the door to the café, letting me in first. We get in line, and it so happens that the line snakes around the bakery case. I see the cinnamon rolls on the top shelf. They are half the size of my head. Covered in icing.
“Wow,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “I’ve wanted to take you here ever since I first found this place.”
“How long ago was that?” I ask, teasing him.
He smiles. For a moment, I wonder if he’s embarrassed. “A long time. Don’t feel like you need to trick me into admitting I’ve been hung up on you for years. I’m confident enough to say it outright.” I smile at him as he laughs and steps forward. “A cinnamon roll, please,” he says to the cashier.
“Wait, aren’t you having one?”
“They are huge!” Ethan says. “I thought we’d split one.”
I give him a look.
He laughs. “Excuse me,” he says to the cashier. “Make that two cinnamon rolls. My apologies.”
I try to pay, but Ethan won’t let me.
We grab some waters, sit down by the window, and wait for a server to warm up the rolls. I fiddle with the napkin dispenser.
“If I hadn’t stayed out with you on Saturday, would you have tried to sleep with Katherine?” I ask him. It’s been in the back of my mind since that night. I’m trying to be better at actually asking the questions I have instead of avoiding them.
He starts sipping his water. I can tell he is put off by the question. “What are you talking about?”
“You were flirting with her. And it bothered me. And I just want to make sure this is . . . that this is just me and you, and we aren’t . . . that there is no one else.”
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s not another woman on the planet. I’m into you. I’m only into you.”
“But if I hadn’t stayed out . . .”
Ethan puts his water down and looks me right in the eye. “Listen, I went to that bar hoping to get you alone, hoping to talk to you, to gauge how you felt. I tried on ten different shirts to find the right one. I bought gum and kept it in my back pocket in case I had bad breath. I stood in front of the mirror and tried to get my hair to look like I didn’t do my hair. For you. You are the only one. I danced with Katherine because I was nervous talking to you. And because I want to be honest with you, I’ll admit that I don’t know what I would have done if you had turned me down on Saturday, but no matter what I would have done, it would have been because I thought you weren’t interested. If you’re interested, I’m interested. And only in you.”
“I’m interested,” I say. “I’m very interested.”
He smiles.
The cinnamon rolls arrive at the table. The smell of the spice and the sugar is . . . relaxing. I feel as if I am at home.
“Maybe all of this time,” I say to Ethan, “I’ve been looking for home and not realizing that home is where the cinnamon roll is.”