Child of the Sky (Vanished, #5) by B. B. Griffith

Author:B. B. Griffith [Griffith, B. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Griffith Publishing LLC
Published: 2023-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

16

OWEN BENNET

Caroline is finally asleep. I’m on one of the clinic’s remarkably uncomfortable pleather chairs next to her bed—no sleep for me tonight. I can’t stop watching the fetal monitor for my daughter. I’m helpless as the heart rate drops and drops, about a beat an hour. Caroline is sleeping due to exhaustion. Her body shut itself down. But I don’t have that shutoff button anymore.

I used to be able to sleep anywhere in these clinics, hospitals too. When I was a resident at Mass General, before I left all that insanity behind for ABQ, I could sleep in the cleaning closet if I had to. That’s what happens when a person works fifteen hours a day. In my experience there are two types of exhaustion. One is aching bones, day-work weary, and after it’s all done, the sleep comes easily. The other type is deeper. You might call it a weariness of the spirit, of the soul. It’s every bit as bad, probably even worse, but it won’t let you go. It holds your eyes open at night. Scares away sleep. Makes you consider every new disaster, every ungodly reality.

And the reality I must face is that soon, this little unborn girl will be nonviable.

Caroline and I have this policy of straight talk, but I couldn’t tell her. I said, “The best thing you can do is sleep,” when what I meant was, “The best thing you can do is sleep through this.” If your body gives you the gift of blacking it out, please, God, take that. That is a gift a great many do not get.

Dad never thought I’d make a good doctor. He said medicine wasn’t where I’d make my mark. The Bennet bloodline sneezed good doctors. Our bench was deep. I guess he thought I’d never stand out. He said I should try farming instead and even walked me through the soil and seasons with the caretakers we had at the Concord estate, which did nothing but piss me off and push me even more into the medical books. And when I actually ended up being a good doctor, I remember him saying, “But I bet you’d have been a great farmer.”

Never a day in my life did I think I should’ve been a farmer—until today. Even in the early stages of Caroline’s bleeding, I thought it was routine. Plenty of literature would back that up. Then she kept bleeding, and she bleeds now, in her sleep. And I realized that nobody is here to tell me “it’s routine” or “plenty of literature will back up the idea that women in her risk profile come out just fine.”

I’m the one that says that, but I know that if I were to say that now to someone else—some other woman in Caroline’s place in this mess—it would be so that she could get some sleep before the inevitable happened.

Here are the realities I am not telling her, listed out the way she would:

Our unborn baby girl may already be brain dead from a lack of necessary oxygenated blood.

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