V
I blinked open my eyes from a dreamless sleep, unsure of what had happened or where I was. X’s handsome, worried face swam into view.
What had happened hit me. “The baby,” I croaked.
“Hey, you’re awake.”
“Please, the baby.”
I struggled to sit up, but X’s hand on my shoulder kept me pinned to the bed. “It’s okay, she’s alive.”
“She?” Emotions tore through me.
He nodded. “Yes, we have a little baby girl. A daughter.”
“Oh, God. How is she?”
“She was struggling to breathe, so the doctors have put her on a machine to help her. She’s in an incubator now in the NICU. She’s a fighter, like her mom.”
I managed a weak smile. “I want to see her.”
“You can as soon as the doctors say it’s okay. You lost a lot of blood and were given a blood transfusion. You both gave me a scare for a while there.”
“I’m so sorry you had to go through that alone.”
“Don’t be crazy. Nicole was here, too. She hasn’t left the hospital since you were admitted.”
Oh, Nickie. I’d forgotten all about her.
“Is she still here?”
“Yeah, she went to get coffee. She’ll be relieved you’re awake. She’s been worried sick.”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling helpless.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for. You did great. You were amazing.”
“I really want to see her, X. I want to see our baby.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Nicole appeared in the doorway. “Oh, thank God.” She burst into tears. I put my arms out to her, and she stumbled over. X whipped the two cups of coffee out of her hands, and she hugged me hard. “I thought I was going to lose you.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She wiped tears from her face. “You have a daughter, Vee.”
I nodded. “I know. I want to see her.”
Nicole looked to X, who nodded. “I’ll go and try to find a doctor,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, I was being wheeled through the hospital corridors toward the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Nerves churned inside me at the thought of seeing her. How sick would she look? Would I be able to touch her? Would I want to? My hands trembled, but I didn’t know if that was the result of the trauma of what I’d gone through, or my fear of seeing my child for the first time. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go, how I’d imagined my first contact with my baby. I’d thought she’d be delivered and handed to me, this little chubby newborn, and we’d look at each other and immediately fall in love. Instead, this was all alien.
We reached the NICU.
“X, wait.”
He stopped pushing my wheelchair.
“What does she look like?”
He thought for a moment then said, “She’s very small, and pink, and there are lots of wires.”
I nodded. “Does she look like you or me?”
“I’m not sure, Vee. How about we go in and try to decide?”
I knew what his words meant—that we couldn’t stay out here. I needed to face up to my new reality.
X pushed open the doors and wheeled me inside.
There were several babies in what looked like plastic boxes in the NICU, but X seemed to know exactly which one was ours. He wheeled me over and came to a stop.
I took a breath.
Just as he’d warned, she was covered in wires, a tube going into her mouth to help her to breathe. Her skin looked too red—though it was far better than the terrible blue it had been on my first glimpse of her after she’d been born. She did look like a baby, though, which I was relieved about. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but the thought of her being hideous had haunted me.
She wasn’t. She was beautiful. Tiny, fragile, but beautiful.
‘Baby Guerra’ was written on the clear box she was in. I suddenly realized she didn’t have a name.
X must have thought the same thing. “What are we going to call her?”
I thought for a moment. “My mom’s name was Eleanor. Eleanor May. But that seems like too big a name for such a tiny person.”
“What about Ellie?” he suggested. “Ellie-May?”
I smiled. “I like it. Mom would have liked it, too.”
“Good. Ellie-May, it is.”
We smiled at each other and he leaned in and kissed me. “I love you, Vee. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, and I don’t want you to forget that.”
“I love you, too.”
***
Two days later, I was fit enough to leave the hospital. I was discharged, and we had to go home without Ellie-May.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, sitting in the passenger seat while X drove away from the hospital. I sat, dry-eyed and empty, staring out of the window, feeling like everything was wrong with the world.
Back at the house, X and Nickie flapped around me, trying to make me comfortable and distract me from my thoughts. Nothing worked. How could it?
I’d never felt so alone. Isolated. No one around me could understand how I was feeling. Yes, Ellie-May was X’s baby, too, but it wasn’t the same. He didn’t have a body which needed to take care of her, all the physical and emotional changes I was going through, when I should have had a baby to nurse and hold, but didn’t. I wanted to see her, see her properly, without all the tubes and wires. Even her diaper was so large, it covered most of her tiny body. I felt like I didn’t even know what my own child really looked like. I set my alarm and pumped my milk, bringing it to the hospital to feed her, feeling like it was the only thing I could do that connected me to her as her mother. Every time I saw another mom with a healthy child, it was as though someone had stabbed me in the chest.
All my other worries faded into the background. I’d left the business to be run by Dylan, with X making decisions when needed. Dylan was probably happy to have free rein on the business, and had stopped asking when my father was coming home. Perhaps he was happy to have Mickey Five Fingers gone as well. I never did hear anything about what had happened to him from the hospital, and I no longer cared. All my attention was on the tiny baby fighting for life in a plastic box.
Days and weeks went by, with the same thing happening over and over again. I pumped my milk, and then went to the hospital. Sometimes, things would be looking good for Ellie-May, but just as quickly she would take a turn for the worse, and we were left panic-stricken and preparing ourselves. For the first time, X was unable to comfort me. I knew I was pushing him away, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I’d always felt as though I walked around with a protective shield around my emotions, but now I’d gone into shutdown. I resented everyone around me. In my darkest moments, I wondered if X would be better with Nicole, and that I should push the two of them together, but I knew I was only doing it to punish myself. Did I blame my own body for not keeping Ellie-May safe? I had failed her, even before she’d been born. I’d always failed people during my life, and it seemed I’d started with my daughter before I’d had the chance to hold her.
I no longer gave any thought to my father, or what had happened with my mom. It was as though the birth of my daughter had shut down my connection with the past. I was stuck in the moment, living day by day, unable to envision a future, too frightened to in case it was wrong. I couldn’t allow myself to hope about bringing Ellie-May home in case the phone rang in the middle of the night and I was told there was nothing more that could be done for her.
Maybe this was the time when I should have cried, allowed my emotions to finally overwhelm me, but I felt hollow inside. I could feel the other mothers and the nurses, too, looking at me strangely, probably thinking me a terrible mother, a terrible woman, for not being more emotional over her tiny, sick child. I’d always felt this way, as though I was somehow removed from the rest of womanhood. As though I was missing something that had been gifted to others, some kind of empathy or natural maternal instinct. This situation now only heightened that feeling inside me. I’d gone through pregnancy feeling warm and connected to the child growing inside me, but now she was here, I struggled to feel anything at all.