Our Eva

“I don’t want to see...”

Tears squeeze out of the corners of Miles’s eyes. “Her, Di. You don’t want to see her,” he pleads.

He reaches for my hands with the gentlest of intentions, and I can’t bring myself to take them. I shrink from him. The hurt in his eyes could fill the ocean to overflowing. If I allow myself to feel the tide, the waves will come and go forever and I will be lost to them.

I have to keep it together.

Miles leans in and tucks my hair behind my ear instead. He will go now, as he has every few hours, out into the hall to lean against the walls and quake. I will hear a nurse’s whispered sympathies and their footsteps will disappear down the hall.

“Please,” he whispers. I reply that I can’t. Miles, I just can’t. I look away. The hospital room is quiet now. The screams, infernal beeping, and the squawks from the intercom have gone from ever pressingly present to a moment preserved in the past. I already want to lock it tightly and throw away the key.

Miles pulls my face into his hands, kisses my forehead and leaves. He doesn’t bring his coat with him, so he won’t be long. He had tried to hold his tears for when he thought I slept, and then noticed that I wasn’t sleeping.

At first I feigned sleep, to allow him time to process alone. I thought I could handle it. I was wrong. The slightest sign of weakness from him threatens to crumble my resolve.

Daylight starts to seep in through the curtains, light of a strong summer sun. I would have preferred it be spring, but you can never control these things. You can’t control anything. I reach for water on a tray by my side. It dampens my lips, but that is about as much as I can do. I can’t bring myself to swallow. Thank goodness for the IV. I press a button to open the curtain and let the sunshine in. The pain in my chest swells to an immeasurably painful crescendo.

Our parents have asked every day whether they should bring something. Whether they can help. Whether there is something they can do. Our friends ask the same, though less often.

Can you bring my baby back? Soft, warm, nestled against my neck, breathing breaths that are too precious, too few. Unopened eyes, a sequence of wrinkles, wisps too impossibly soft to be hair. I touched, breathed, smelled, kissed. Birthed. Protected. Loved.

I can’t face my Mom. She did what I could not, and to see that acknowledged in her eyes would strike me dumb. I can’t face my Dad. The sorrow and disappointment he would try to hide under a wan smile would strip me of every nail I’ve hammered into myself to keep me safe from the tide. He has always advocated for us to experience family life and to see his hopes raised and squandered in series with our own brings its own pain. Miles has seen his parents since. They brought him a home-cooked meal that evening, when they weren’t sure I would make it either. He quietly sent the car seat with them, a trade comical in its tragedy. We will never see it again.

Outside of that window, birds sing. Commutes are driven, jobs done, bells rung, items created and destroyed, life lived, laughter laughed and love loved, and the sun beams down onto it all. My chest sears; I want it to be raining. By all rights the very sky should be torn apart and pouring rain, crying where I cannot. Gales should shake the buildings and make the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling flicker, and thunder should deafen the world to my pain. Instead there is only warmth, gentleness, the threat of comfort.

Nature’s touch aims to heal and I do not want to. I fumble for the button and recall the curtain’s shadow over the room. I want to hold the hurt; it is the only proof I will ever have that this was real.

There is a sense of bitter loneliness that has nipped at my mind from the moment those sterile arms whisked my new heart away. I feel it so thoroughly that it may be entirely who I am now. What identity do I have after all this? The sage green walls of the little room around the corner from our bedroom has no purpose now but to be perhaps emptied or left untouched, I can’t even begin to fathom which. Either option is overwhelming.

I don’t know how to talk about it, there is a feeling of instinctive guilt and fear. Fear that it is my fault. Fear that I didn’t do enough. Fear that I was not enough. Fear that I am being punished. Miles could hardly be punished, the gentle soul he is could never have done something so wicked as to impose this upon us. It must have been me. A thought, an action.

It must have been me.

I struggle to breathe in my hospital gown and roll onto my side. No tears come, but my lungs are wracked with gasps.

There comes a gentle knock on the door, and Miles returns. He has brought juice and a sandwich for us to split and places them onto the tray beside me. I look helplessly up at him. The way he looks back at me I know he understands I can’t stomach anything, but he wants to share regardless. It is something for us to do together. One, simple thing to share, for I’m not sharing much else. Doubling the pain could tear us apart.

Doubling the pain could negate it. Emotional math; multiplying two negatives amounts to a positive. What is the worst that could happen?

I need to protect us. I need to stay strong for us both. One of us has to keep it together, else we will break for the loss.

He will resent me. I resent me.

I take the sandwich wrapper from Miles and break the bread into two even sides, setting one down before him and the other on my tray. He eats in silence but for the rustle of leafy greens, crunch of crispy chicken, and humming monitors. He casts me furtive looks between bites. I wonder if he blames me.

When someone loses something, the obvious next step is to search for it. When someone loses someone, you feel very much the same. But I will never complete the search. The finding never happens; that someone lost is simply that: Lost. Gone. I’ve barely been able to acknowledge this, despite knowing inside of me and feeling physically every single second that it happened. I feel empty. I feel full. I feel numb. I feel pain.

The ground feels as though it is loose beneath me and will crack open and swallow me up. This deep, dark fear and feeling, hopeless, longing, churning, aching, searing, burning, ripping, comes to a head when Miles smiles at me through bloodshot eyes. So gentle. So soft. So loving. He’s been so tender, so patient.

“Eva,” the name tumbles from my lips before I can stop it. “I want to name her Eva.”

The sandwich and tray are pushed aside, the juice box falls onto the floor, and my chest seems to rip apart as I am pulled into Miles’s arms. I open my mouth to say something else, anything else. Does he want a different name? Is he angry? He’s rubbing my back, pressing me tightly to his chest. “Baby Eva,” he croaks out, “our Eva, Di. Of course she’s our Eva.”

Instead of words a horrible, ugly, raw cry I’ve never imagined I could make leaves me. If it were to take corporeal form the sobs ripped from my breast might resemble a cloud of passionate sadness, a howling vortex of desperate grief. Its very own black hole from which I’m not sure I can escape.

I’m collapsing inside of myself.

The sage green bedroom, the safe car seat, the birds singing outside, the sunshine peeking through the curtains, the room, the blood, the lights, the nurses, the needles, the dark, these images and sensations flicker in and out of my mind’s eye.

She’s gone. I held her, and I let her go. How many times will this feeling cycle through? How many lifetimes will I live before the image of her is softened around the edges?

I question how many more dreams of her I will have before the smell of her skin and sound of her cries fade forever. I question and I question and and I cry and curl against Miles, and it feels like it will never stop. I’m apologizing over and over again to the air around us, to the soul in the sky, to her. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. I’m sorry I wasn’t enough. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you. I’m sorry I couldn’t…

Miles is holding the pieces of me together. In the depths of my wails I can feel his fragile heart break further with mine. The tide is all consuming, torrential in its expanse. I cling to him, a life line I feel I can only just manage to hold. My fists bunch around the back of his shirt. He buries his face in my neck and I can feel him sob. It feels better then, less foreign, his grief. Perhaps it is because he’s not as alone anymore, and neither am I. He hasn’t heard me acknowledge her existence apart from the first time I asked where she was after regaining consciousness three days ago. Her. My tiniest best friend. A counterpart to my soul whom I didn’t know I could love so much. My Eva.

Our Eva.