TWENTY-TWO
Augusta—Nine Years Ago
Tears of pain cut quietly down my cheeks as I winced, trying not to squirm as the doctor pressed apart my thighs, encouraging me to relax.
“This will only take a minute, sweetheart.”
I cringed at his term of endearment, wishing the nurse was at least still in here with me, someone to make me feel not so alone on this cold hospital bed, feet in stirrups.
“Have you seen the baby move yet?” He grinned, popping out from behind the sheet covering my lower half.
I swallowed razors and squeaked, “No.”
“Should be any time, most women see an elbow or a foot pop out over the last few weeks.”
I swallowed again, fear spinning through my stomach as I wished like hell he was here with me.
Fallon.
After each girl was enrolled at Sacred Heart for four weeks, a customary blood test was taken.
A test that checked for a lot of things: diseases, disorders, pregnancy.
And that’s when I’d found out.
Not wrapped in Fallon’s arms, our eyes shedding happy tears as we planned our lives together.
But 500 miles away in the middle of nowhere, all alone.
There were other girls who were pregnant. Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon, considering many of the girls who showed up at Sacred Heart came from a sketchy past. This was usually their last resort before juvenile detention.
Once the administrators found out I was pregnant, they moved me to another wing. I shared a room with three other girls who were each expecting, little privacy for homework or reading or crying.
I was still writing Fallon letters.
I couldn’t stop.
I knew I’d never send them, but they weren’t for him anyway. They were for me.
“There ya are, sweetheart.” The doctor patted my knee, my legs falling closed.
I clamped down on my lip, feeling violated not for the first time since I’d been coming to these “prenatal appointments” in the basement of the school. The building wasn’t set up to house a hospital wing, they said, so they’d done very little to spruce up the place and forced us to see a local doctor once a month, outdated equipment tagging along with him.
I’d written my parents early on, begged them to come and get me, told them we could raise the baby together. The house was big enough, I could get my GED, I conjured every happy ending in my head before I realized there wasn’t one coming.
There were no such thing as happy endings, and if I was going to survive, I’d have to save myself.
I wandered back to my room, cold tile floor under my feet as the opening line of “Whiskey Girl” started playing in my mind.
It’s not easy to forget, the bitter taste lovin’ you left…
That same damn song was running through my head another day.
Not a week later, walking into advanced calculus, my water broke, soaking my sneakers and the floor all around them.
Real tears welled up in my eyes as one girl had sneered, whispered about the no-good rich whore having her baby.
The nurses were promising me minutes later that I would soon be holding my baby, that they would let me feed our child, body naked and warm and small against my own. Tiny fingers and toes, steady heartbeat, and his first breathfuls of air as he came screaming into the world. The nurses promised me all of it.
And I hung my future on those hopes.
Once the nurses changed me into a birthing gown and settled me into bed, an IV of fluids puncturing my vein, my limbs were suddenly heavy, eyelids slowly fading before the world was gone a few minutes later.
My next moments of consciousness punctuated by a sense of hope.
My heart felt lighter, as if holding our baby in my arms, knowing I only had a month before I graduated and we could finally start the life we’d been planning, was just around the corner. I was so foolish believing in that dream, assuming we could start again right where we’d left off.
It was the feeling of hope that haunted me after my life was stolen from me a second time.
I called for the nurses, surprised when I found myself in my dorm room, all alone in the middle of the day.
I felt tender, I felt raw, and little did I know I’d just given birth to a tiny human destined to be a stranger.
The nurses bustled in then, smiles on their faces as they tended to my bandages.
Pretending like nothing had happened.
“Where’s my baby?” The words croaked out of my throat.
“Oh, honey. You just need to focus on your classes now.”
I swallowed, disbelieving of her words. “Where’s my baby?”
She smiled with her eyes, lips held tight as she patted my knee. “I’ll go get your breakfast, dear, and then maybe you want to work on your calculus? Success favors those who work hard, Augusta.”
She closed the door, leaving me all alone, my thoughts buzzing at a million miles a second. “My baby,” I whispered, wincing, crawling out of bed, and feeling a searing pain in my abdominal muscles. “Where’s my baby?”
Violent tears streamed down my cheeks, the horror of my reality slowly settling into all the dark nooks and crannies.
“My baby!” I screamed again, making my way to the window, decorative wrought-iron bars meant to disguise their real purpose—to cage me in. “Bring me my baby.”
I crumpled into a heap, laying my cheek on the worn wooden plank floor and sobbing until my entire body ached, the pain in my abdomen long forgotten because the pain of losing a piece of my soul ravaged more.
“Someone stole my baby,” I mumbled, not even registering when the door creaked open a while later, soft hands pulling me up by the elbows. A tenderer touch than I’d had since the night I left Fallon’s arms.
Fallon.
I ached the deepest for Fallon.
He’d probably long forgotten me, his life as a big-city music star an existence far beyond my wildest imagination.
“I missed the first breaths. I missed holding…” My heart cracked in two jagged pieces, shredding my insides as they landed on the floor at my feet. “I don’t even know if…if I had a boy or a girl.” My face crumpled, devastated tears swallowing me whole. “I was going to go home. We were gonna raise the baby together.”
“You’ll get over it, dear. One day you’ll learn, there really isn’t ever any going home.” The headmistress, a woman I’d spoken to once on the day my parents had dropped me off here and only seen lurking the hallways silently since then, was now tucking the white sheets around my shoulders, nodding once over her shoulder before the nurse from earlier stepped up. “This will be better for you, dear. The less you remember, the better it is, we’ve found.”
I opened my mouth to protest before soft straps were looped around my wrists and anchored to a hospital bed.
I tried to overpower them, but the screaming pain in my abdomen, the reminder of everything I’d lost in a single blink, halted any drive I had to fight. Frustrated tears leaked out of my eyes, the need to stay strong and silent more powerful than ever.
“My baby…”
I locked eyes with the headmistress, hovering above my face as the nurse pushed a tiny needle into the vein at my elbow, my muscles relaxing almost instantly before my eyelids grew heavy and I was gone.
The second time in my life I’d lost my everything.