Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

I nodded, lying back, concentrating on not crying. Crying wouldn’t do me any good. I stayed perfectly still, breathing shallowly. I could not lose this baby. I could not.

Coop’s face was a ghostly white as the ultrasound technician swabbed gel on my belly and pressed what looked like a microphone against my skin. On the computer screen a wedge of static began to form into round balls that shifted and changed shape. “There you go,” the technician said, marking with graphic arrows the tiniest circle.

“Well, the pregnancy isn’t in a Fallopian tube,” the doctor said. “Blow that up.”

The technician enlarged the area. It did not look like a baby; it did not look like much of anything but a grainy curl of white with a black dot in its middle. I turned to the doctor and the technician, but they were not saying a word. They were staring at the screen, at something that was apparently very wrong.

The technician pushed harder against my belly, rolling the wand back and forth. “Ah,” she said finally.

The black dot was pulsing rhythmically. “That’s the heartbeat,” the doctor said.

Coop grasped my hand. “That’s good, right? That means everything is all right?”

“We don’t know what makes someone miscarry, Dr. Cooper, but nearly a third of early pregnancies do. Usually it’s because the embryo isn’t viable, so it’s for the best. Your wife is still bleeding heavily. All we can do now is send her home and hope things turn around in the next few hours.”

“Send her home? You’re just going to send her home?”

“Yes. You should stay off your feet. If the bleeding hasn’t slowed by morning, or if the cramps intensify, come back in.”

I stared at the screen, frozen on that small white circle.

“But the heartbeat,” Coop pressed. “That’s a positive sign.”

“Yes. Unfortunately, the bleeding is a bad one.”

The doctor and technician left the room. Coop sank down on a chair beside the examination table and spread his fingers over my stomach. I covered his hand with my own. “I’m not letting go of this baby,” I told him firmly. And then I let myself cry.

Coop wanted to take me to his apartment, but it was too far away. Instead, Sarah insisted we come back to the farmhouse where she could watch over me. “Of course, you’ll come too,” she told Coop, which was why he allowed the decision to be made.

He carried me up to the room I shared with Katie and set me gently on the bed. “Here,” he said, arranging the pillows behind my head. “How’s that?”

“Fine.” I looked at him and tried to smile. He sat down on the edge of the bed and twined his fingers with mine. “Maybe this is nothing at all.”

I nodded. Coop worried the edge of the quilt through his hands, looking at the nightstand, the window, the floor-anywhere but at me. “Coop,” I said, “do me a favor.”

“Anything.”

“I want you to call Judge Ledbetter. Let her know what’s going on, just in case.”

“For God’s sake, Ellie, you shouldn’t even be thinking about that now.”

“Well, I am. And I need you to do this.”

Coop shook his head. “I’m not leaving you.”

I touched his arm, whispering the words neither one of us wanted to hear. “There is nothing you can do.”

I turned my head away, and a moment later I heard his footsteps as he left the room. But too quickly, the door opened again. Expecting Coop, I opened my eyes, and found Sarah pouring a glass of water from a pitcher.

“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

She shrugged. “I’m sorry this is happening, Ellie.”

I nodded. However she might have felt about having yet another unwed mother-to-be in her household, she was gracious enough to offer sympathy to me right now.

“I lost three babies between Katie and Hannah,” Sarah said matter-of-factly. “I never did understand why they say it that way in English-lose a baby. You know right where she is, don’t you? And you’d do anything to keep her there.”

I stared at her, this woman who understood what it was like to be at the mercy of your own body, what it was like to have no control over your own shortcomings. It was just like Katie had said-it didn’t matter if it was accidental; you felt guilty all the same. “She’s real to me, already,” I whispered.

“Well, ’course she is,” Sarah agreed. “And you’re already willing to move heaven and earth for her.”

She bustled around the room. “If you need anything, you just call, you hear?”

“Wait.”

Sarah paused at the door.

“How . . .?” I was unable to form the question, but she understood me anyway.

“It’s the Lord’s will,” she said quietly. “You get through it. You just never get over it.”

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I remembered, the sun was nearly setting and Coop was sprawled on Katie’s bed across the room. As I stirred, he sat up and knelt beside me. “How do you feel?”

“I’m okay. The cramps are gone.”

We looked at each other, afraid of what that might mean. “I called the judge,” Coop said, quick to change the topic. “She said the jury is still deliberating, and that if necessary she’d keep them sequestered until you were up and about.” He cleared his throat. “She also said she’s praying for us.”

“That’s good,” I said evenly. “We can take all the help we can get.”

“Can I ask you something?” Coop picked at a thread on the quilt. “I know this isn’t the time, and I know that I promised I wouldn’t do this, but I want you to marry me. I’m not the lawyer here, so I don’t have any fancy arguments to convince you. But when Katie called me today from the hospital, I couldn’t breathe. I thought you were in an accident. And then she said it was the baby, and all I could think was, Thank God. Thank God it wasn’t Ellie.

“I hate myself for that. I wonder if I deserve this, just because of what popped into my head. And now I’ve been imagining this baby, this gift that I didn’t expect to have in the first place, getting taken away. If it happens, El, it’s going to hurt so badly-but it’s nothing compared to the way I’d feel if you were taken away. That . . .” he said, his voice breaking, “that I wouldn’t make it through.”

He brought my hand to his lips and kissed the knuckles. “We’ll have more babies. They won’t be this one, but they’ll be ours. We can have ten of them, one for every room in our house.” Coop raised his face. “Just tell me that you want to.”

I had once left Coop because I wanted to see if I could be the best, if I could make my own way in the world. But living for months with the Fishers made me see the value of intrinsically knowing there was someone to help me up if I stumbled.

I had turned Coop down a second time because I was afraid that I’d only be saying yes out of responsibility, because of the baby. But there might not be a baby, now. There was only me, and Coop, and this terrible ache that only he could understand.

How many times would I throw this away, before I realized it was what I had been looking for all along?

“Twelve,” I answered.

“Twelve?”

“Twelve babies. I’m planning on a very large house.”

Coop’s eyes lit up. “A mansion,” he promised, and kissed me. “God, I love you.”

“I love you too.” As he climbed onto the bed with me, I started to laugh. “I’d love you more if you helped me into the bathroom.”

He grinned and looped his arms around me, carrying me down the hall. “Can you do this yourself?”

“I’ve gotten very good at it after thirty-seven years.”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” he said gently.

“I know.” We stared at each other for a moment, until I had to turn away from the sorrow in his eyes. “I can handle it, Coop.” I closed the door behind myself and hiked up my nightgown, steeling myself for the sight of another heavily soiled sanitary napkin. When I glanced down, I started to cry.