Not once in those five days did anyone from that hospital say the word “died” to me.
I have thought about this so much that it’s worn a groove.
What they said was: “I’m so sorry for everything you’ve been through.” What they said was: “You’ve had a very hard time.” What they said, standing at the foot of my bed with their hands folded, was, “How are you doing today, Mrs. Dressler,” in a voice with a floor under it.
I had nearly bled to death. I had lost my uterus at thirty-four years old. Every single one of those sentences fits.
I heard all of them as condolence for my daughter.
Nobody corrected me because nobody knew there was anything to correct. And I didn’t ask questions, because you don’t interrogate people about the worst fact of your life. You lie there and let it be true.
I came home on the twentieth of May.
There’s a photograph somewhere on my mother’s phone of me being helped out of the car, and I look like a woman who has been dug up.
The nursery door stayed shut. Grant closed it before we got home and I did not open it for twenty-four days.
I spent most of two weeks in our bedroom. I got up for the bathroom and for Elias and that’s about all. My mother moved into the guest room and did the cooking and the school runs and every night at about nine she’d knock and come sit on the end of the bed and not say anything, which is the only useful thing anybody did for me that fortnight.
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