Ghosted: A Novel

Sarah

Iam rotating slowly, hovering above my life. There are hexagons and octagons, maybe ceiling tiles, or perhaps it’s just the fine detail of the thing I was leaning my forearms on earlier, that chair . . .

There have been many tiny furniture details during this parallel time, things I have stared at so hard they’ve gone macro and taken on patterns, danced: a kaleidoscope in heaven.

Happy times. Positive images. Things that will stimulate oxytocin. That’s what I’m meant to be thinking about. I play happy times on the screen in front of my brow bone. There is the fat little pony that belonged to the woman who lived in that house beyond Tommy’s—

Pain. A roaring waterfall of it. But: I trust my body, I repeat, because that’s what I was told to do. I trust my body. It’s bringing my baby to me.

There is Hugo, Tommy’s cat, the funny one that didn’t drink enough water in the summer.

The midwife is doing something to my abdomen again. Tightening straps. Since I moved into this room they’ve been monitoring my baby’s heart with a device that looks like a laboratory experiment. One sensor for your contractions, one for baby, she reminds me, catching my expression. I nod, and try to take myself back to happy memories.

There is a child called Hannah; she is twelve years old. She wears a sling; her eye is swollen and green, her skin pockmarked with cuts and bruises. Her best friend is dead and she hates me.

No, this isn’t happy. I search through layers of pain and exhaustion for something better. I breathe in for four, out for six. Or was it eight? Trust your body, they said at the classes. Trust your body. Trust the process of labor.

But I’ve gone into some sort of tunnel, and it’s so deep I don’t quite know where I am. I think there are drugs. That’s right: there was an injection in my thigh, and there’s the thing near my mouth. I clamp around it and breathe in sweet stories as I start to climb another mountain. It’s floating—someone tries to take it away, so I hold on hard.

There is a room full of medical equipment, and that same girl, Hannah, only she’s different now: she’s my sister again, but she’s a woman with a family and a career. She’s my birthing partner. She’s been having counseling because she doesn’t like herself very much. She says she was awful to me.

But she wasn’t awful. She was never awful. Hannah is in the bank of good memories getting me through this tunnel. I breathe in the wonder I felt in my heart the first time I saw her, when she turned up at Mum and Dad’s house on the morning of Granddad’s funeral. How she held herself stiffly in front of me and then crumpled forward, and the otherworldly joy when I hugged my sister for the first time in nearly two decades.

More shapes and patterns; a moving scrapbook. I am only half aware of the people in the room, the things they’re doing to my body, the gentle commands.

I remember a café in Stroud, Hannah and I on our first date together as adults. The silences, the nervous laughter. The apologies, from both of us, and the sight of my father crying when I told him that Hannah had invited me round to her house to meet her family.

But . . . my baby. Where’s my baby?

The sea falls in on itself, again and again, and a cuckoo sings its two notes into a dusky wood. Eddie is laughing. They’re examining me again now. People, lots of them, looking at a screen that’s printing out jagged lines . . .

Where is my baby?

My baby. My baby that I made with Eddie.

Eddie. I loved him so much.

•   •   •

Eddie. That’s the name Hannah’s telling me. She’s telling me about Eddie. She says he’s outside. She looks shocked, amazed, but now I have to listen to a doctor, who takes the tube from me and starts talking slowly and clearly. “I’m afraid we can’t wait any longer . . . ,” she says. “We need to get this baby out: you’re still not fully dilated . . . the fetal blood sample indicates . . . oxygen . . . heart rate . . . Sarah, do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Eddie?” I ask. “Outside?” But there are more words from the medical people and then the bed-chair thing starts moving; it’s leaving this room.

The tunnel is fading. There are ceiling tiles. Hannah’s voice is close to my ear. “You agreed to have a cesarean,” she’s telling me. “The baby’s struggling. But don’t worry, Sarah, this happens a lot. You’re going straight to surgery and the baby’ll be out in minutes. Everything’ll be fine . . .”

I ask her about Eddie, because it might just have been one of the stories from the kaleidoscopic tunnel. I am so tired.

Not enough oxygen?

But it’s a real fact, not a tunnel fact: Eddie is waiting for me. He’s outside. He’s been messaging my phone; he says he loves me. “And he keeps saying he’s sorry,” Hannah tells me. She is astounded. “Eddie Wallace,” she mutters, as someone takes her by the elbow and tells her she will need to put on a surgical gown. “Father of your child. I mean, what?”

Eddie says he loves me. My child is in trouble.

Then the doctors all just sort of cave in on me, all talking, and I have to listen.