Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

The call came at four in the morning. Andrea picked it up thinking that it was a call for Ed, a police emergency, something bad happening to some poor nameless, faceless soul.

But it was Greg. It was dark and still and silent at four in the morning at the Kapenash house, but on Blueberry Lane, where Greg and Tess lived, all the lights were on and Greg was shouting.

“She’s bleeding, Andrea! She’s really fucking bleeding! There is blood everywhere .”

Andrea’s heart fell through a hole and disappeared. Tess was losing the baby. She crossed herself and said to Greg, “I’ll be right there.”

“I’ve called 911. An ambulance is coming!”

“Okay, I’ll meet you at the hospital.” She hung up. Ed rolled over and said, “What’s happening?”

“She’s miscarrying,” Andrea said.

“Shit,” he said.

Ed and Andrea had two healthy kids asleep upstairs, ages seven and five and a half. They had been parents long enough to know how nature worked: one out of every five pregnancies terminated spontaneously in the first trimester. This didn’t mean the woman wasn’t healthy or couldn’t go on to have six future children, all of them perfect and beautiful and headed to Ivy League colleges. It just meant that this one particular pregnancy wasn’t meant to be.

Andrea tried this reasoning as she sat by Tess’s bedside in the hospital. The ultrasound showed that the miscarriage had been complete and clean; there was no need for a D &C.

“That’s good news,” Andrea said.

Tess, who was lying in bed looking pale and despondent, said, “Good news? How can you say that?” She asked the question but did not wait for Andrea’s reply. She burst into tears that became full-blown hysteria, sobbing and moaning about the lost life, the destroyed dream. Tess’s vision of herself as a mother had popped like a soap bubble. Tess’s tears were the most heartbreaking display of sorrow Andrea had ever seen, and she cried in sympathy, and apologized again and again because her words had been insensitive. Insensitive, but true. The pregnancy wasn’t meant to be; there was no reason, these things just happened. It wasn’t Tess’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.

Tess got pregnant again two months later. She told only Andrea and the Chief. She was going to keep it a secret until she had her ultrasound at seventeen weeks. She did not talk about her nausea or her exhaustion or her leaden breasts; she wore smock tops over her swelling midsection. She looked positively morose and at times frightened, as though there were a man with a gun in her house, holding her hostage.

She and Greg heard the baby’s heartbeat at each of their prenatal appointments, but Tess would not crack a smile. She would not relax. She said to Andrea, “I am not going to let myself love this baby until he or she is born.”

Andrea said, “Honey, everything is going to be fine.”

And in fact, at the seventeen-week ultrasound, everything did look fine. Wonderful, even. The baby was a week ahead in its development. It was a little boy.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Tess was able to tell everybody: it’s a little boy, due the week before Christmas.

By then it was summer. School was out. Tess was feeling magnificent and happy, healthy and hungry. She power walked in the mornings, then ate scrambled eggs and a bran muffin with homemade peach jam. She would pack herself a lunch of tuna with pickles and a juicy plum and she would ride her bike to the beach, where she let her swollen belly absorb a moderate amount of sunshine before she carved a wide, shallow hole in the sand and turned over.

She was twenty-one weeks and four days along when she fell off her bike. Nothing happened-there was no oncoming car filled with hooting teenagers, no clap of lightning to startle her-she simply lost her balance, wobbled, and fell, just as she had years earlier when she broke her arm. She fell with a thud onto her side, crushing her swollen belly. She would later say that she knew instantly her baby was dead. There was blood everywhere and pain that made her knuckles turn white as she clenched her hands into fists and screamed without making a sound. Oncoming bikers called 911, the ambulance came, Tess was put on a jet and flown to Boston, and yes, the news was bad-the baby was dead-but it could have been worse. Tess could have died, too, from the hemorrhage.

When Tess gained consciousness, this time in a bigger, whiter, more sophisticated hospital, the Chief and Andrea were there-and Delilah and Jeffrey and Phoebe and Addison. They stood in a semicircle around the foot of the bed. And Father Dominic, the priest from St. Mary’s, was there. Greg was there, too, looking baffled and helpless. He didn’t know what to do. In the minutes before Tess came to, Greg had sung “Puff the Magic Dragon” softly, almost to himself. The song was a lullaby of sorts, meant to comfort, but it was a song of loss, too. By the last verse they were all singing along, even the Chief, even Father Dominic.

Tess opened her eyes. She had perhaps caught the tail end of their singing, and didn’t understand it as a tribute. She ordered everyone out of the room except for Father Dominic.

“What about me?” Greg said, sounding like a jilted boyfriend.

“Go!” she screamed.

There was no consoling Tess this time. She was carrying sorrow and guilt. She had lost her balance and fallen off her bike. She had killed her son. She should never have been riding a bike, it was a lapse in judgment; she had been thinking of herself, the pleasures of a summer day, and not the baby. Her baby was dead, it was her fault, she would not hear otherwise.

There was a small graveside funeral, at which Tess and Greg buried a coffin the size of a shoebox. It was all too sad and too nebulous for anyone to handle; it was the loss of a life none of them had known, and yet this somehow made it worse. Or rather, what was worse was watching a part of their beloved Tess die, the part that was peppy and chipper, the part that was loving and kind and nurturing. She was sad now, unable to think or talk about anything but her loss; she was as crumpled and useless as wet tissue.

She saw a therapist. She went to a pregnancy loss group, where, she told Andrea, her story was by far the most gruesome. She quit attending the pregnancy loss group first, then she quit her therapist.

“Dr. Amlin keeps trying to tell me it was an accident, ” Tess said. “If I hear the word accident one more time, I’m going to cut my ears off.”

Andrea squandered her life savings taking Tess to Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires. Tess halfheartedly submitted to massage and facials while Andrea swam hundreds of laps in the pool. They ate poached salmon and lightly dressed greens in the dining room. When Andrea tried to start a conversation, Tess would shake her head. “I don’t want to talk.” As she and Andrea lay between 600-thread-count sheets in their beds, she said, “I’m not cut out for the whole maternal thing.”

Andrea said, “Like hell you’re not.”

Andrea was spending damn near a thousand dollars a day and getting nowhere.

On the final morning, she dragged Tess out for a sunrise hike to the top of what they would later refer to as the “godforsaken mountain.” All the swimming and weights and yoga and fresh fruit had worked on Andrea: she felt clean, light, and empowered. She basically dragged Tess up the damp, mossy trail, booby-trapped with tree roots and hidden rocks. They did not speak; the hike was too strenuous to spare the breath. It was still dark; they were making their way using a flashlight provided by the hotel. By the time they were a steep hundred yards from the peak (Andrea could spy the yellow banner flying from the pole that marked the top), Tess was bawling. She couldn’t get to the top, and if she did, she was going to be so depleted of resources that she would only have the energy to throw herself off the mountain into the abyss.