Under Water by Rachel Callaghan

Author:Rachel Callaghan [Callaghan, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Empower Press
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

“Counseling, Benny? You feel things are that far gone?”

“Iris.” Benny put his right arm around her shoulder. “I’m not good at discussions like this, so forgive me if what I said was clumsy. Finding the baby’s body must have triggered memories for you—they did for me, too. I know that’s why you’re so attached to him and have gone on this… this quest to learn more.”

Iris sighed. She wished the frogs were singing. The little frogs that made such an amusing chorus of sounds. All that she heard now was the rustle of leaves in the slight breeze.

“This is what happened. What I remember.” Benny reached across her lap with his left hand and took hers. “We made the decision together for you to go through labor rather than have surgery. It seemed the best decision at the time, since they laid out the risks of a cesarean, with the scar and the problems when you got pregnant again. We agreed, even when they said the induced labor might be hard.”

Her eyes filled, blurring her sight, and she was nearly overcome with the desire to stop his voice. It was ringing too true, awakening vague, misty recollections of so long ago.

“We didn’t know… they didn’t know… that an infection had started. Some insidious…”

“Not of the baby!” Iris had a horrid image of her infant crying, feverish in her womb.

“No, not of the baby.” Benny said. His voice was so soothing, it occurred to Iris he might be lying, but what difference did it make now?

“She was perfect. It was the other tissue, the lining of the uterus, the fluid, the placenta, something…” He gave a short little laugh. “I couldn’t handle getting too savvy about it all. Anyway, you didn’t even have a fever for the first day or two, but your temperature suddenly spiked…” Benny’s voice cracked then. He had to clear his throat before he went on.

He had been there, she remembered now. He’d sat on the horrid vinyl cot reading to her—so young he didn’t need glasses to see the words. She remembered his knuckles pressed into the small of her back, a fulcrum for her writhing, somehow easing the agony. How eagerly she had arched into that tight fist, a grotesque simulation of the passion with which they’d conceived their doomed child. But then her memory failed and there was nothing but jumbled nightmare images: people and machines looming out of a fog, pain everywhere, strange noises. Recognizing no one. A time when she was more alone than she’d ever been.

“And you hemorrhaged suddenly into the bed and I yelled for the nurse and you started talking… not talking but babbling, making no sense at all, and then you were gone, Iris.”

“Gone?” Had she died? Had Benny lived through her death and made her return to him? Her memory clouded in a mass of swirling images. Had she seen a light? The face of God? Or simply medical staff and cleaners, anonymous, alien in their masks and gowns?

“You were delirious.

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