He Lived Next Door by Portia Moore

Author:Portia Moore [Moore, Portia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

One Year Ago

Something doesn’t feel right.

Those are the words that began this nightmare. Everything was fine. I thought she was being paranoid, overreacting, having first pregnancy jitters.

It shouldn’t be happening like this.

When we woke up, the sun was shining. We had breakfast with my parents. We were supposed to celebrate that I’d gotten my pilot’s license, that she’d hit publish on her third book. Tonight she was supposed to sleep in my arms with my hands resting on her stomach as I counted the days until we’d meet our son.

Instead, what’s supposed to be the happiest moment of our lives has turned into a nightmare.

It began the moment the doctor told us our son didn’t have a heartbeat. My entire body felt frozen and my heart collapsed. My eyes shot to hers and she stared at him, her face unreadable, blank. She didn’t burst into sobs, didn’t begin to hyperventilate or scream and curse.

Chas looked as if she didn’t understand or hadn’t heard what the doctor had just said. I told him he was wrong. I demanded he do something.

He was supposed to be the best OB-GYN in the state—my parents made sure of that—and he couldn’t tell us what had happened? He couldn’t tell us what we were going to do to fix it? He just sat there with a somber look full of pity?

It took two orderlies to keep me from destroying the room when he told her she would still have to deliver him, to go through the full process of labor.

She said nothing.

After I calmed down and I went into the delivery room with her, she held my hand and smiled, saying she still had hope. I think that’s what hurt the most, the hope she still had. I knew it took everything in her to believe this was a mistake.

Even after he came into this world and didn’t take his first breath, she still smiled and kissed his forehead. Horses stampeded on my chest as I did the same, and then she broke. Her emotions exploded into the most painful wails I’ve ever heard. The same voice that had made me fall in love made me see the crack that ran through our life. Our little miracle, with his mother’s hair and my nose, lay dead in her arms and there was nothing I could do to fix her. I wanted to take her pain and swallow it. I could handle it, but I knew that she wouldn’t be able to handle it. I wanted to carry the burden for both of us, but that was the one thing I couldn’t do.

I had to tell her mom that her grandson had died and it looked as if he’d taken her daughter’s soul with him. Her mom and I have never been close, but we cried together as if she were a part of me. Chas’s dad and stepmom looked as if they’d been hit by a truck. Hearing her dad call her sister and tell her was draining.

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