Lily took a deep breath. “The ache in your heart will still be here when you wake up. This is something that only time can heal, honey, not sleep or drugs.”
She nodded her understanding but said nothing.
Finally Lily said, “I wouldn’t normally do this.” She stood and walked to the door, requesting a nurse bring her five milligrams of Ativan.
Returning to her seat, she whispered, “I’ll do this for you one time, Jade. I know it hurts, but this type of pain isn’t the kind you medicate. You need time. If in a few days you’re still out of sorts, we’ll talk about other kinds of prescriptions. These past few months have been incredibly difficult. I’ll write you a script for bed rest and have Nancy start the paperwork so you can file for a temporary leave of absence. Not that I expect you to stay in bed or recommend it. I want you to keep yourself busy. Try to enjoy the holiday, maybe spend the New Year in Antigua. Take time to be sad, but then take time to realize all the things you have to be happy for. Doctor’s orders.”
She loved Lily, but she made everything seem too simple. That’s how most people would treat her loss, like it didn’t count. While they never saw her child, she felt it, heard its heartbeat, and in four more weeks, she would have seen its tiny face at her next ultrasound. Unable to prevent it, a sob escaped.
Thankfully, the nurse arrived. She took the pills and quickly swallowed them. It was just too much. She needed to make it all go away.
When morning finally came, Jade sat on the edge of her hospital bed feeling physically tender and emotionally hopeless. They were kicking her out, or ‘releasing her’ as they put it.
She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to do anything, but apparently, her situation didn’t usually require patients to be admitted longer than a day.
Whatever.
She just wanted to get out of there and find her own bed, away from the rest of the world.
“You ready?” Jeremy asked from the door, his voice gentle.
She nodded. The simple movement required more energy than she had.
After she signed all the release forms, Lily gave her a hug, and Jade was escorted to Jeremy’s car parked by the visitor’s entrance where Kat and Tyson waited. Jeremy was very attentive, supporting her weight, speaking in soft tones. He seemed to think the slightest movement or noise would shatter her into a million pieces. He was probably right.
They all scrutinized her, waiting. For what, Jade didn’t know.
Kat’s brow creased with worry. She stood by the fender of Jeremy’s Jeep, wringing her hands in front of her slightly swollen belly. Jade had to look away.
Jeremy helped her into his car and fastened her seat belt. Before he closed the door Kat came to Jade’s side. Her friend couldn’t look her in her eyes, so she just looked toward the ground as she wrung her hands.
“We’ll be there when you get home. I went to the store and got your favorite DVD’s. I also charged your cell phone and left it by your bed, so call if you need anything. I’ll bring you something to eat in a little bit, okay?”
She wanted to tell Kat she didn’t need to do all that. She wanted to tell her she was okay, but all she could manage was a nod.
As she shut the door, Jade shut her eyes. She was a terrible friend, incapable of seeing past Kat’s condition, seeing everything her friend still had in comparison to all Jade had lost. She couldn’t seem to stop her envy from swallowing her whole.
When they pulled into her driveway, Jeremy again helped her to the door. He unlocked the door and a shrill, repetitive squawking pierced her eardrums. She jumped and the tight pull of her abdomen was like an emotional explosion in her brain. Jeremy cursed and quickly typed a code into a panel on the wall.
“Sorry.”
She silently nodded.
He got her settled into bed and brought her a glass of iced tea. Once he put in one of the DVD’s Kat had picked up, he told her he’d be back in a few minutes. “Call me if you need anything. I’ll be right next door.”
As he left, she rolled to her side, shut her eyes, and cried.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“How is she?” Kat asked as Jeremy walked into her kitchen.
“The same.” He took the beer Tyson offered, exhaustion settling in every muscle of his body.
Kat frowned. “Ty, it’s eleven-thirty in the morning.”
“Let the man have a beer, Kat. He hasn’t slept in thirty hours.” Tyson pulled out a pitcher of iced tea for himself.
“Fine, but don’t forget you have to pick up Mia in a few hours.”
“Do you see me drinking?” Tyson snapped and Jeremy worried he’d walked into something he shouldn’t be a part of. The fridge slammed and, without another word, Ty left the kitchen.
“Sorry,” Kat said, her voice trembling. “We just had an argument. He told me I coddle Jade and I got a little defensive.”
Jeremy didn’t want to get involved in their argument so he took a sip of his beer. He just wanted to get Jade’s lunch and get back to her. He didn’t like leaving her alone.
“Maybe I do,” Kat said, apparently satisfied with having a conversation with herself. “It’s just, Jade did everything she could when I was pregnant. She was always there when I was scared and alone.”
He tried not to wince as guilt sliced through him. Kat would have never been scared or alone if he had manned up and acted like a father from the start.
She sighed. “I remember, right after my parents kicked me out, I didn’t budget my money well enough and my electric was going to get shut off. Jade loaned me the money. And when Mia was an infant, she got sick. I didn’t have a prescription plan and the antibiotic the pediatrician prescribed cost over a hundred dollars. Jade picked it up and never asked for the money. She got me all the papers to apply for a government medical plan after that.”
“She has a good heart,” he said, stating the obvious.
“She’s always helped out any way she could. She picks up Mia when I can’t be there, takes her overnight. She’s so good to our daughter. She’s stuck by me through every bump in the road and convinced me I was strong enough to make it through and now…” Her voice cracked as she gave in to her tears. “Despite my hopeful words at the hospital, I don’t know how to get her through this.”
Jeremy tentatively rubbed a hand across her shoulders and Kat turned into his arms. “I feel incredibly selfish for being pregnant while she’s going through this.”
He hugged her, wishing Ty would come back so he could return to Jade. But maybe this wasn’t Ty’s mess. Maybe it was his.
“Kat, that’s crazy. You can’t feel like that. Jade would never hold your pregnancy against you. She loves you. She’s happy for you and Tyson. Just give her time before you start asking her opinion on baby names. She’ll get through this just like you said. We have to be patient while she adjusts. It’ll take time, that’s all.” He hoped his words were true.
“I know you’re right.” She wiped her eyes and took a step back. “But I’m not going to stop taking care of her. So, if you or Tyson or anyone else has a problem with that, they can just … eat shit.”
Jeremy laughed. Kat never learned how to use swear words with the right confidence to back them up. The girl could be in the middle of a catastrophe and the vilest thing she’d utter would be somewhere along the lines of fiddlesticks.
“You do whatever you think helps. She may not appreciate it now, but I’m sure she will in the long run.”
There was one more thing he needed to readdress, something he should have made clear a long time ago. He took a deep breath.
“Kat, I was wrong to leave. I know I said it before, but maybe I don’t say it enough. No matter how hard your situation was, you proved to be one of the most incredible mothers I’ve ever met in my entire life. I’m eternally grateful you loved our daughter when I didn’t know how. I was selfish and wrong and I can never apologize enough for abandoning you and Mia.”
She smiled and wiped the tears from her eye
s. “Our daughter has two good fathers now. That’s all that matters, Jeremy. Even if one was a little late, he showed up and hasn’t missed a day of her life since. That’s what counts, Jeremy. That’s what she’ll remember.”
As he walked back to Jade’s with a covered bowl of chicken soup, he saw Kat hugging Tyson in their backyard. When he entered the cottage, he quickly shut the door and punched in the code so the alarm wouldn’t disturb Jade. He opened a drawer, retrieved a spoon, and grabbed a napkin, heading into her room. She was asleep again.
Placing the bowl on her dresser, he covered her with a blanket. As he sat in the chair beside her bed, he recalled the days after his buddy Josh died in Iraq, how all he wanted to do was sleep. Those were some of the worst days of his life, the kind he didn’t have the strength to face ever again. He figured there wasn’t any harm in letting her rest a while longer.
Jeremy’s concern grew over the passing days. Jade had only left her bed to use the bathroom, had uttered nothing more than a simple yes or no answer, and slept for hours on end. She wasn’t eating and when she was awake her eyes looked vacant and haunted. Needing to do something, he flipped through the contacts in her phone until he found the number he wanted.
“Dr. Wolfe’s office, this is Jennifer. May I help you?” the receptionist answered.
“Hi, this is Jeremy Larson, Jade Shultz’s boyfriend. May I please speak to Dr. Wolfe?”
“Oh, hi, Jeremy. Jade missed her appointment today. Is she feeling okay?”
“Well, that’s why I’m calling. Is Dr. Wolfe available?”
“She’s with a patient right now. Would you like me to have her call you when she’s finished?”
“Yes, please.” Jeremy gave the receptionist his number and returned Jade’s phone to her nightstand.
When the doctor finally got back to him he explained what had happened. She was, of course, concerned and very upset to hear that Jade had lost the baby. Jeremy explained how much she was sleeping and how little she was eating and communicating. Dr. Wolfe agreed to stop by to see her later that evening.
Jade woke up to the sense that someone was watching her. She opened her eyes and found Jeremy sitting beside her on the bed.
“How you feeling?”
She shrugged, lacking the energy to pretend otherwise.
“You have a visitor.”
She cringed. She didn’t want company. She wanted to be left the fuck alone.
Over the past couple days, when she wasn’t crying, she was suppressing the urge to cry and claw the walls. She wanted to kick at the furniture and slam things and punch anything close to her until her knuckles bled.
“Who?” she rasped and winced, her throat hoarse from disuse.
“Why don’t I let you see for yourself? I’m going to run next door and see what Mia’s doing. I’ll be back in a little bit.”
She wanted to object. It wasn’t that she cared if he left, she just didn’t want to be left alone with company. Before she could voice her protests, he kissed her on the head and said, “Call if you need me.”
As he left the room, Jade sat up and frowned at the door to her bedroom. No visitors. Why was that so fucking hard for people to understand?
Chloe entered her room, and her anger washed away with relief. Her grief faded for a millisecond, replaced with gratitude, and then every emotion tumbled through her in an avalanche she couldn’t handle. Jeremy figured out the one person Jade didn’t mind seeing.
Unrelenting emotions slammed into her, and, as if a trigger was pulled, she broke beneath the weight. Letting out a sob that was more like a war cry, she moaned as her shoulders quaked.
Chloe was by her side, pulling her into her arms in a matter of seconds. “Oh, honey. Let it out.”
Jade flung every broken word she knew. She sobbed and wept and pleaded and crumbled while Chloe sympathized through it all. When she finally calmed down, Chloe tried talking to her.
“I know it hurts, Jade. It’s going to for a while. I can’t imagine the loss you’re suffering right now, but it isn’t healthy to let it destroy you like this. Like I said before, sometimes life takes us on unpredictable turns and we scrape our knees along the way, but we have to keep moving. This is one of those turns. You need to take a moment to look at your path, accept the detour, and figure how you want to move on. This is not a life sentence. I know you loved your child. No one’s taking that away from you.”
“How can anyone bear this much pain?”
“It’s an unfortunate part of the miracle of life. Look at this as a sad experience you survived because you are strong. And you learned a bit about yourself, too. Now you know how much pleasure being a mother could bring you, no matter what the circumstances. I’m not telling you to run out and get pregnant. No child will ever replace the one you lost. But you need to keep in mind that your days of becoming a mother are not over.”
“But that one’s gone. I’ll never hold him or her. I never got to give all the love I felt.”
“You gave everything you could, honey. You’re young. You’re healthy. All that love will find a place to go. You just have to hold onto it a bit longer than you expected.”
“I just feel so empty.” Jade wiped her eyes. “I feel like there’s a hole in my heart and a gaping void in my womb. It’s like an amputation. I reach for my stomach to connect with my baby, but then I remember nothing’s there and I want to scream and punch something.”
“It’s okay to be angry, expected actually. You’ve been through one traumatic ordeal after another and perhaps, after all this, you’re coming to terms with everything you’ve suffered. There are stages of grief. Anger’s one of them, but your friends aren’t the enemy here.”
She was tired of being blindsided by life. “What are the stages of grief?”
“Well, there’s denial, anger, bargaining, depression, then acceptance. I’d say you’re passing over the first stage and entering the second. Most people bounce back and forth, in and out of stages for some time after a trauma.”
“I don’t understand how bargaining’s a stage. It isn’t like I can make a deal with God to bring back my child.”
Chloe gave a sympathetic smile. “Perhaps the loss of your baby isn’t the only thing you are grieving. What have you consistently said since our first session, Jade? This baby was the one beautiful thing out of an entirely ugly experience. I think the baby was a shield for you, something you focused on to cope with what you went through. The baby’s what got you through the stage of denial, a bargaining chip for your initial loss. Now that shield’s gone and you’re probably realizing some lasting affects the baby helped you ignore.”
“Chloe,” she said, shaking her head in shame. “I’m so incredibly angry.” She pressed her lips together and frowned. “I’ve never felt like this before. I feel like I have poison in my veins that needs to be bled out. I can’t stomach their happiness when I’m so very sad. Kat has Mia and she’s having another child when I have nothing. Isn’t that the most wretched jealousy you ever heard? I’m disgusting for even admitting that. If you could hear my thoughts you’d be appalled. I’m a horrible person and an even worse friend. But where’s the fucking balance?”
“And there’s your bargaining. What you just did is the grieving equivalent to counting your cards before placing a bet. You see, it isn’t about what’s fair. It’s about what’s real. Good or bad, this is the life you’ve been given. You can accept it and try to make the best out of a horrible situation, or you can spend your days complaining about all the things you didn’t get.
“But that’s not you. You’re too smart to let life pass you by. I know it hurts now, but, with time, it’ll hurt less. It’ll become a memory you hold in your heart and think about from time to time, but what you will eventually remember most, is not how sad you feel now, but how hard you fought to survive that sadness, how much love that baby filled you with in the short amount of time you had it.”
Tears silently fell as she nodded, taking in everythi
ng Chloe said. “Thank you.”
“You know I’m always here. Tell me what you want and, together, we’ll figure out a way to reach your goals.”
She sniffled. “I want to be happy again. I want my life back. I want to stop feeling victimized, like I’m the result of someone else’s actions. I want control of my own life.”
Chloe smiled. “Good. Well then, I’d say the first thing to getting back to your old self is getting out of this bed and taking a shower. Put on some makeup and do your hair. Even if you just want to lie around and watch movies all day, do it with confidence. Put on jewelry and perfume and remember who you are—start acting like the woman you want to be. Before you know it, you’ll find her again. What else do you want?”
“I want a martini,” Jade said and laughed. She hadn’t had a drink in months.
“I think we can arrange that.”
She looked at Chloe and, with absolute calm and determination, said, “And I want to find the person who derailed my life and make it so I never have to feel threatened or victimized by him again. I want justice.”
Chloe’s smile was replaced with absolute understanding. She nodded tightly. “Okay, Jade. Then we’ll move in that direction.”
Chapter Thirty
“You’re sure about this?” Jeremy asked as he held a bottle of chilled Patron and a bowl of oranges.
“Absolutely.” Jade smiled as she sat across from him on her couch, legs tucked under her as she bounced with anticipation.
She’d done exactly what Chloe advised. She’d gotten herself out of bed and slowly but surely started acting more and more like her old self. Jeremy had been relieved to see the change in her mood and was now convinced Chloe was a magical person akin to the Easter Bunny or Merlin the Magician. Jade kind of thought the same.
Although she still suffered from severe moments of sadness almost too heavy to survive, she pushed the melancholy thoughts away and focused on the positive. She allowed herself time to cry, alone in bed at night, but maintained as normal of a life as she could manage during the waking hours of her day.