I went into labor at four in the afternoon. Orla was born at nb 8:52 p.m. And then the floor of my life fell out.
I remember three things.
I remember the room filling with people, more people than should fit, and how none of them were talking to me anymore.
I remember Dr. Vaught saying a number to somebody by the door.
And I remember Grant’s face over the top of a mask somebody had shoved at him, and his hand crushing mine, and behind him my mother pulling Elias backward out of the doorway with both arms around his chest, and Elias’s face.
That’s the last frame. My eight-year-old’s face going out the door.
Then anesthesia.
They were in there three hours. They took my uterus. I had eleven units of blood.
I woke up at 12:40 in the morning in a room with the lights turned down, and Grant was in the chair next to the bed, and his eyes were swollen almost shut.
I said, “Where is she.”
And he said — I’ve reconstructed this a thousand times, with a lawyer, with a therapist, with a hospital administrator, so I’m confident about the words —
He said, “Naomi, she’s very small. They said she might not make it.”
And I heard: she didn’t make it.
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