R. Lilley - Rock Bottom

I slipped under the covers, hugging her to me. She was so deeply asleep that she didn’t so much as twitch.

Forgetting entirely that I’d been meaning not to wake her, I slipped my hand up her shirt, then ran it over her body, starting at one cool, rounded breast, over her belly, meeting resistance in the form of bunched up cloth as I tried to delve between her legs.

Impatient, I dug deeper into the swaths of fabric.

I tensed as I my seeking fingers touched something wet and cold.

My heart started pounding.

It was the loudest sound in that still as death room.

I stumbled back, sobering instantly, but becoming no less clumsy as I fumbled along the wall for the light switch, sheer panic setting in.

I’d taken the covers off her with my rough attentions, and so the first thing I saw was the blood.

So much blood.

My breath stuttered in my lungs as I moved back to her, my fingers trembling as I put them to her neck. My eyes closed in relief as I made out her faint pulse.

I swallowed hard as I glanced again at her lower body.

So much blood.

A thick towel bunched between her legs was soaked through with it. Underneath her, the bed was soaked with it.

So much blood. Too much blood.

I fumbled in my pocket, fishing out my phone. I didn’t remember dialing 911, or even speaking, and I didn’t know how long I held the phone to my ear even after it went dead.

I was terrified to move her, and so I huddled over her, trying to warm her up, pulling her baggy T-shirt down to cover as much of her lower body as I could manage.

I stroked her hair, and murmured reassurances in her ear. They were for my benefit alone, since she didn’t stir, didn’t so much as twitch under my reverent, soothing hands.

I’d never been so scared, abject terror making my limbs numb. I could hear my teeth chattering with it, tapping out a click-click-click noise that seemed to fill up the room.

Click-click-click.

I pulled the blanket up to her neck. I checked her pulse again.

Click-click-click.

Time slowed down, until it felt like I’d been waiting hours, and still she didn’t rouse.

Finally, the sound of the ambulance approaching, a fairly common sound in Vegas, and one I’d never been so relieved to hear before in my life, got me moving.

I made sure the front door was unlocked, reconsidered, and just left it open.

I was hovering over her when the paramedics came in. They were loud but efficient.

My eyes stayed glued to Danika, desperate for any sign of life from her.

She stirred as they moved her from the bed to a stretcher, her hands shifting over her taut belly.

My gut clenched. It could have been the state I’d been in walking in the door, or just plain shock, but it only occurred to me then that the baby was in danger. I’d been too singularly focused on the peril Danika was in to even consider it before.

No . My mind shied away from it, from either possibility. I couldn’t take that, not on top of everything else.

I’d been a flake lately, just letting too many things go, but this, this was too much. I couldn’t bear the thought.

I wanted our little family, needed it.

Danika roused in the ambulance. She cried and screamed and cursed as that little life bled out of her, but in the end, she was as helpless as I was.

Hours later, utterly defeated, she finally rested, with the help of some much needed painkillers.

I spent the longest night of my life in the St. Rose Dominican hospital, where we lost our baby.

I hadn’t thought that life would hand me another thing that could break me like Jared’s death had, but this did.

Jared’s loss had left a small hole in my heart that had been seeping slowly and steadily since his death, but this, this was a hemorrhage .

My mind focused, with morbid determination, on the things I could have done differently.

I sat in that hospital room, moving as close to a sleeping Danika as I could get, and went through every call I’d missed, every message I’d ignored. For hours, she’d reached out to me, but I hadn’t been there, and look what had happened. No woman should have to go through something like that alone. Her phone had died, I’d heard her mumbling to the paramedics earlier. She’d been stranded there, no help in sight.

No matter which way I turned that over in my brain, I was to blame.

I kept vigil over her prone figure through that long night and hated myself. It was a poison, that hate, and once it got in my bloodstream, it stayed there.

The abject horror of finding her the way I had, not knowing if she would live or die, the horror turning into pain at our loss, and finally, that pain turning into a quiet resolve.

What was I doing? What was I thinking? Did I have a right to keep this woman, this beautiful creature with her bright future, in my twisted disaster of a life? Was I strong enough to let her go?

I had no answers. Or at least none that I was willing to acknowledge just then. I had lost too much already.

When she finally woke, she barely looked at me. When I asked her how she was doing, she only closed her eyes, tears seeping out of her lowered lids.

Did she hate me now, too? I didn’t have the courage to ask.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” I told her, clutching her hand and crying with her.

I was driving her home before she delivered the final blow, her whisper ragged with grief.

“It was a boy.”

I pulled the car over, my shoulders shaking. Her hand touched my arm, and I turned to her, sobbing into her neck.

“Jared Jeremiah Vega,” she said, her voice devastated.

Broken.

“Jeremiah for Jerry?” I finally found the strength to ask.

I felt her nodding against my cheek.

“It was the perfect name, Danika.”

She’d been crying silently, but now she began to sob. It came out of her in a great, heaving flood.

“This is all my fault,” she told me. “I fell down in the shower that morning, then just went on with my day, thinking everything would be fine. I should have gone straight to the hospital. Then none of this would have happened. We’d still be having our baby boy.”

I couldn’t stand it, couldn’t take that she was blaming herself for an accident. “No, no, no,” I whispered tenderly into her hair. “It’s not your fault. Don’t ever say that. I can’t bear it. It’s my fault. I should have been there.”

She protested, telling me it wasn’t, and I didn’t know if it was her tone or my conscience, but I didn’t believe her.

Tragedy never took its full chunk out of you right away. It always took a while to hit you head on, and sink in and for something substantial, some hint of the real feeling, the real reaction, to come to the surface, and this loss was not done taking its toll on us.

DANIKA

After that, it was a slow motion free fall for us.

A quiet, helpless unraveling.

Some days I raged against it with every fiber of my being, but others…others I was as far gone as Tristan, and I didn’t even need to be drunk to get there.

So much had been torn apart with the miscarriage, so many little pieces of us that needed to be sewn back together. Only, there was hardly any thread left. Barely enough for one of us, and certainly not enough for both.

He was gone nearly all the time after that, it seemed. I had no one to comfort me, no one to share in the pain.

I never told Bev or Jerry what had happened. As far as they knew, I’d simply spent a few days at Tristan’s apartment. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I couldn’t make myself talk about it, and though Bev’s keen eyes told me that she knew that something was wrong, I never admitted it out loud.