Lily Love
Authors: Maggi Myers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
copyright © 2014 Maggi Myers
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
Cover Design by Anna Curtis
ISBN-13: 9781477822425
ISBN-10: 1477822429
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013921695
For CJ and Cameron:
Every day you teach me, and everyone you meet, that different does not mean less. I love you more than life. Ugga Mugga, always, Mama
contents
epilogue: the end where i begin
prologue
W
here’s my baby?” I startle awake. My heart starts racing before my mind completely registers where I am. A nurse hovers above me, tending to the frantic beeping of a monitor.
“Welcome back, darlin’,” she drawls out in a thick Southern accent. “You gave us quite the scare.”
“Where’s my baby?” I try to sit up but can’t coordinate my movements. The nurse silences the alarm on the machine she’s tending to. It’s then I realize that all that noise was the rapid increase of my own heart rate on an EKG. As the veil of unconsciousness lifts, I become aware of my surroundings.
No Peter.
No Lily.
I panic. Every instinct in me screams for me to get up and go find my daughter and husband. My body refuses to cooperate with my brain; it takes a herculean effort just to lift my head.
“Shh, now.” The nurse speaks with a gentle firmness. “Your baby girl is just fine. She’s in the nursery with your husband. You can’t get yourself riled like that. You had a stroke, Mama. You’ve been in and out for two days.”
A stroke.
I close my eyes to sift through the pieces I can recall. I remember riding in the back of the ambulance and feeling nauseated from the motion. The paramedic who rode with me did his best to keep my spirits up, chatting about movies and books, anything to keep my mind off of my early labor.
“Caroline?”
The sound of my name brings me back to the present and to a harried Dr. O’Donovan.
“How are you feeling?” she asks. I blink at her, confused, as she uses her pen to scratch the bottoms of my feet, sending an uncomfortable shiver through my body.
“Reflexes are good. You’re very lucky.” She sits next to me on the bed and shines a penlight into my eyes. “Do you remember what happened?” Her face reflects such kindness and compassion it makes me want to cry.
“Is Peter here?” Dr. O’Donovan smiles brightly. Too brightly. I place a protective hand across my swollen belly and wait for bad news.
“No, he had a meeting he couldn’t get out of.” I swallow hard. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Well, you have some protein in your urine, and your blood pressure is elevated. Those are indicators of preeclampsia, which is very serious. The good news is, the baby isn’t showing any signs of stress. Her heartbeat is nice and strong.” The doctor places her hand on my knee, squeezing gently.
“What is the treatment for that? Do I go on bed rest or something?” My mind races through the litany of things I thought I had two more weeks to take care of, none of which seems important now.
“The only way to resolve the preeclampsia is to deliver the baby,” she says in a manner so matter-of-fact I’m almost put at ease. “Jackie will start an IV, so we can begin a course of magnesium sulfate immediately—”
“Wait,” I say. “I need to go get my overnight bag and call Peter. Can’t I meet you at the hospital?” To punctuate my question, Dr. O’Donovan’s nurse, Jackie, comes into the exam room with her IV kit.
“Caroline, I don’t want to scare you, but this is very serious. Reception will contact Peter to let him know what’s going on.” Dr. O’Donovan knows how hard it was for me to get pregnant. She’s been my doctor through all of my fertility treatments and three miscarriages. She would never unduly alarm me.
“What exactly
is
going on? I don’t understand.” Fear shakes my voice.
“Listen to me very carefully, Caro.” Dr. O’Donovan grips my hands in hers and levels her resolute gaze on mine. “Jackie is going to start an IV so we can begin to treat you right away. The sooner we get your blood pressure under control, the better. This means that I need you to stay calm, okay?”
“Her name is Lily,” I whisper. I need her to know this isn’t “the fetus” or “the baby.” This is Lily Hope, the little girl I’ve dreamed of holding for the last nine months and prayed for all these years.
“Concentrate on Lily, Caroline. Once the IV is in, we’re going to ambulance you to Durham as a precaution. Duke is the closest hospital with a NICU. We’re being extra cautious; there’s no reason to think we will need it, but we want it on-site if we do. Lily is full term at thirty-eight weeks; it’s going to be okay,” Dr. O’Donovan reassures me. “When we get you all checked in, we’ll induce your labor and then Lily will be on her way. You’ll be able to hold your little girl by tomorrow, Caroline.” As if Lily senses that the conversation is about her, she kicks with a force that shakes my belly. “See? She’s ready for her debut.”
My little girl. I’ll get to hold her in just a matter of hours.
I tell myself to concentrate on that and not to be scared, but I’m terrified.
Dr. O’Donovan is talking again. “We had to induce your labor, and you had a very strong reaction to the Pitocin we used. It sped up the rate and strength of your contractions, also causing your blood pressure to spike. You had a mild stroke, Caroline. Do you understand?”
I nod my head, but I don’t really understand. My pregnancy was easy. Sure, I’d had some morning sickness in the first months, but that was it. Everything else had been flawless.
“Neurology will be in shortly to explain the logistics of what happened, but I’ll give it to you straight: you’re very lucky to be alive, and
even luckier that the stroke was as mild as it was. You’re going to make a full recovery, Caroline, but this is it. No more pregnancies.” She studies my face while she waits for my reaction. Before I get a chance to make sense of what she said, Peter walks into the room.
“Caroline, baby,” he whispers as tears fill his eyes. The instant my husband sits on the bed and wraps me in his arms, my anxiety disappears.
“She’s so beautiful.” He is weeping. “She’s absolutely perfect.”
A moment later, the nurse with the heavy accent brings Lily to me. My arms shake with the effort of holding my beautiful girl. Hazy details of her delivery begin circulating through my mind.
Lily didn’t enter this life with her eyes swollen shut, howling at the injustice of being ripped from her mother’s womb. She came into the world with her little eyes blinking in wonder, her lips pursed into a perfect pink rosebud. While the doctors and nurses rushed around my broken body, scrambling to keep me from slipping into the quiet call of darkness, a nurse placed Lily against my chest, encouraging me to focus.
“Look at her, Caroline. Look at your baby girl.” The nurse’s words had sounded tinny and distant through the thickness of my exhaustion. “Stay with us.”
“Caroline, open your eyes.”
I recall the furrowed concern on the doctor’s face as she cut the umbilical cord, and how Lily’s tiny body shuddered as she drew her first breath. It’s the last thing I remember before I closed my eyes.
When Peter kisses my temple and brushes a finger down Lily’s cheek, my heart melts. I’m the luckiest woman in the world. After so many years of struggling with infertility, we’ve finally gotten our happy ending.
If I could go back to the moment I bought into that lie, would I change anything? I don’t know. To change the past would mean changing the future. If I admit I would change my choices, it makes me an awful person. If I say I wouldn’t change a thing, I’d be lying. That’s the way of the world, I suppose. We’ve been conditioned to believe that
things always have a way of working themselves out and that happily ever after is within our reach, if we just work hard enough. The truth is that none of us are immune to tragedy. No matter how hard you work, no matter how good you are, life isn’t obligated to give you a fairy-tale ending.
a sorta fairytale
A
s I glance out the window of the University Hospital waiting room, the memories of my daughter’s birth haunt me. I’d been so incredibly naive back then.
“Mrs. Williams?” I glance up as the nurse pulls me from my memory.
“Yes?” I sigh.
“Lily is asking for you now.” The physician’s assistant is dressed in cartoonish scrubs that are meant be soothing to the young patients of the pediatric wing. I find them mocking. You’d think after three years I’d have grown accustomed to the fluorescent lights and sickly smell that are unique to hospitals, but they do little to soothe my frayed nerves as I wait, yet again, for Lily’s MRI to be done.
God, when did I become so cynical and bitter?
I follow the PA into the belly of the MRI clinic, where I hear Lily’s shrill cry.
“Mama, Mama,”
she wails.
When Lily finally started to use words in a meaningful way, her speech pathologist told me that “mama” was just a word approximation: a meaningless consonant-vowel combination that she was using to test out her voice.