Bringing in Finn (14 page)

I brought my last batch of progesterone injections with me to my parents' house. My mother gasped in the kitchen when I
pulled down my pants and she saw the punished skin. I'd also lost weight—something I didn't know could happen in a pregnancy but frequently can in the first trimester of a twins pregnancy. My jeans fell over my hips, and the back pockets sagged where my body had previously rounded them out.

“We're going out to eat right now,” my father said. “We have to feed you and those babies.” We went out to dinner, and in the mornings my dad bought bagels from the deli nearby, which we ate with cream cheese and soft butter.

 

At fourteen weeks,
my stomach popped. Bill took a picture of me against the white of our kitchen door. I hadn't bought maternity clothes yet and was wearing a loose-fitting turquoise sundress. I pulled the material tight over my belly and stood sideways, facing our deck garden. I held up four fingers of my right hand, and Bill snapped the shot on his phone. We had reached the four-month mark.

Kaitlin and I had kept up our semimonthly call, every other Tuesday, since I'd moved back from England. She and her husband had been trying for over a year to get pregnant and had had two miscarriages, at six and eight weeks. The first week in August she told me they were pregnant again—just barely. I prayed for her baby daily. It terrified me to think about either of us experiencing such a loss, and I was grateful that Bill and I were well into the second trimester.

At the second-trimester mark, BabyCenter had sent an email that said: “Congratulations! Your risk of miscarriage has gone to less than 10 to 20 percent.” We still had one final appointment left with Dr. Colaum when we met with our new OB.

Bill's business partner and his wife got us in to their OB-GYN practice with their doctor, Elsbeth Baker. Even though we'd done weekly ultrasounds with Dr. Colaum, Dr. Baker asked us to come in for an ultrasound. By week twelve, the twins had all of the important
body parts and the doctors sent us home with photographs: crisp black-and-white images of little faces, hands, and feet.

At our final appointment at RMI, Baby A did a scissor kick right to camera and I was sure I saw
something
between his legs. Dr. Colaum saw it, too. She checked my face, presumably to gauge my response. “Was that—” I started to ask.

“Did you want to know the sex?” she asked. I nodded.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I think I saw a penis.”

“I think so, too,” she said, angling the wand to see if Baby A wanted to reveal himself again. “That baby is a boy!”

To find out about Baby B, we'd have to wait until the twenty-week ultrasound. Bill said he'd wait for the technician to confirm the sex of both babies, as he did not trust my ultrasound reading and seemed offended about not having been there to witness it himself. Our appointment was scheduled for a Monday toward the end of August. We were five months pregnant now, and my belly amply filled out the stretch maternity tops I'd bought at Target and the Gap.

We'd dressed up for the appointment and planned to go out to lunch afterward. I wore a green wrap dress and liked being undeniably pregnant now, and the way my body rounded and curved. The twenty-week ultrasound appointment took place in a special suite several OB practices shared. The exam bed was covered in rich leather. The lighting was dim, like in a theater, and the walls were painted a soothing brown. Mounted on the walls were two fifty-two-inch plasma TVs. A dark-haired female technician wearing a lab coat entered the room. Without introduction, she invited me to the bed, switched on the ultrasound machine, poured gel onto a roller, and dimmed the overhead lights even more. “Enjoy the show,” she said.

Bill and I watched as our babies were projected on the large
screens. Having seen them weekly, I felt they were familiar now. I recognized the way they moved, the shape of their heads, the swimming motions they liked to do with their arms and hands.

“Ten fingers and ten toes,” the technician said. “See?” She angled the roller to show us each baby's extremities.

She moved to the heads. “The brain looks good; skull bones are all forming nicely.” She took us on a tour of the noses, lips, throats, and teeth. We saw the babies' kidneys and adrenal glands and even Baby A's bladder full of liquid. The technician zoomed in on the four beating chambers of the heart. Then she shifted to look at Baby B, who sat lower in my uterus. As the technician measured the femur bone, the baby stuck a thumb in its mouth.

“Is he?” I said

“Sucking his thumb,” the technician affirmed.

“I used to suck my thumb!” I said, gobsmacked by the undeniably real infant gesture.

“I did, too!” Bill said.

“Hold steady if you can,” the technician asked. The appointment took a long time. The technician had to do close to a hundred measurements for each baby.

Bill shifted in his chair. I started to feel lightheaded. My stomach grumbled. I wished I'd brought a snack.

“Do you want to know the sexes?” the technician asked. I stopped thinking about food.

Bill leaned forward in his chair. “Yes!” he said.

We held hands.

“Baby A is a . . . ” She drew the words out slowly. I looked at Bill and then at the technician. “Boy!” she said. I nodded. I'd seen the confirmation already. “And Baby B . . . ” she said, angling the roller so we could see with her. I waited for her to say “girl”; Bill believed we were having a girl as well.

“Another boy!” the technician said.

Bill dropped my hand. “Are you sure?” he said.

I looked at the screen and saw his little white member hanging between his legs. He put his thumb back in his mouth, and I melted into the table.

 

The revelation that
we were having two boys took a few days to sink in. It seemed we now knew so much more about our twins. By the weekend, we were on baby websites, looking at names. On Friday, September 1, we went to Carnival, a cavernous Latin restaurant in the West Loop, to celebrate a friend's fortieth birthday. At dinner, she told me about a boy she'd dated in South Africa who came from a family of four boys. “Their mother was like you—creative and beautiful—and those boys adored her. I imagine that's the way your boys will be: lovely, fun, rambunctious, and adoring.”

On September 4, I met with two clients in the morning. I invited my eleven o'clock client to meet upstairs in our living room, thinking the light was particularly beautiful that day. The sun filtered through the large dome window, bathing the sofa and chairs in light. Toward the end of the session, I felt a small cramp. Throughout the pregnancy, I'd had no cramping or pain. I'd felt flutters in my belly recently, though, and Dr. Baker had said these were the first movements of the twins that I could feel.

I walked my client to the door. Another cramp came, the kind that sometimes preceded an urgent need to go to the bathroom. I moved gingerly to the kitchen, taking my time and holding on to the railing of the short staircase that led up to the kitchen bathroom. I felt a slight rush of dizziness in my head, but it passed quickly. I switched on the light and pulled down my pants, getting ready to sit on the toilet. I felt another light cramp, and then I saw it: blood. A thick stand of it fell from between my legs. I braced myself between
the two walls of the bathroom, praying that it was a trick of my eye. I looked down again and saw another streak running down the side of my right leg. More blood, coming faster now, falling into the basin of the toilet. A few drops splattered onto the blond boards of the hardwood floor. I bunched toilet paper between my legs and cupped my hand beneath me, trying desperately to think of anything I could do to stop it.

I
've heard people claim at dinner parties, or the occasional client intake session, that they are “good in a crisis.” They mention this the way one might share about other useful skills, like being able to tie nautical knots or start a fire in the wilderness with a piece of wood and some flint. I have never aspired to have this skill.

I'm guessing, like intuition, the ability to be good in a crisis is something we all possess—perhaps a gift of Darwinian evolution. And I am sure we all benefit from this ability, yet I've also often heard it takes being in a crisis to know if one does indeed possess this skill.

When the blood continued to flow between my legs as I stood in the bathroom, a few drops now spilling onto the floorboards, I became hyperconscious of my body and my feet on the floor. My thoughts narrowed to a single message:
Get to the phone and call the doctor.

Stuffing more toilet paper between my legs, I walked awkwardly across the kitchen to my cell phone, jeans still around my knees. My green maternity top stretched over my extended belly. I looked seven months pregnant because of the twins. I had to steady my hand on the kitchen island as I scrolled through my list of phone
numbers and called the OB's office. I kept my voice even as I provided details to the nurse.

“Are you bleeding through more than a pad an hour?”

“The bleeding just started.”

“You're how far along?”

“Almost twenty-two weeks.”

“Are you in any pain?”

The nurse sounded casual, unconcerned. I could picture the bustling office, always overflowing with patients, running thirty to forty minutes behind. At one point she asked me to hold the line while she answered a question for a patient who was in the office. Her demeanor both enraged me and gave me a shred of hope that perhaps what was happening was not, in fact, dire.

The nurse finally gathered enough information to instruct me to come to the office. Bill, who had been in a meeting downtown, said he would meet me there. I called a taxi and walked out to the front steps to wait. Taxis could take up to twenty minutes, and I wondered if I should call an ambulance. I didn't have any pads in the house, so I'd stuffed more toilet paper in my underwear. I brought nothing with me from the house aside from my wallet and a sandwich (a last desperate attempt at normalcy). The early September light blazed through the trees and onto the sidewalk. I could not comprehend the bleeding.

Dr. Baker had told us to be prepared for the twins to come at about eight months. According to our recalibrated due date, we were entering our third trimester. Anything after twenty weeks was no longer considered a miscarriage. I was terrified to think what was happening. I put my hands to my stomach and tried to feel the babies move. Everything inside my body felt normal. The cramping was gone. Everything felt the same as it had the previous day. A woman walked by, pushing her child in a stroller. I felt one of the babies
move, and I allowed myself to hope that everything would be okay. “Hang on, babies,” I said to the twins. “Hang on.”

In the taxi I started to pray. I texted Amanda and Kaitlin.

“Oh god,” Kaitlin texted back. “All prayers with you.”

Within minutes of arriving at the office, I was in the examining room. Dr. Baker slapped on a latex glove and examined me internally with her fingers. “Your cervix is dilated,” she said. “Did anything happen? Have you been having any cramping? Did you have a hard bowel movement?”

“Could a bowel movement cause a problem?” I asked.

She said no.
Then why did you ask?
I thought, upset.

“I just checked you last week,” she said. “Everything was fine.”

Bill arrived and stood with his hand on my shoulder at the top of the exam table.

Dr. Baker looked worried and sent us to the hospital where she delivered, just a few blocks away.

“Go to the fourth floor,” she said. “I'll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

The women's ward of the hospital was contained in the larger hospital building and had not been touched since the '70s, when it was built.

“You want us to walk?” I asked, confounded. Were we having an emergency or not? Bill took my hand and walked me out of the office and down the street. Dr. Baker's nurse had given me two pads, which I layered inside my thong. We tried not to imagine what might be happening. “Can you feel them?” Bill asked. I nodded and began to cry.

“Let's not panic yet,” he said. “It might be okay.” The hospital's entrance was grimy, like an old subway station, having been subjected to decades of pollution and smog from the El train and traffic nearby. I balked at the entrance, my body bristling like a cat sensing something malicious.

A nurse on the women's floor asked the same questions I'd now answered two times that day. She told me to change into a gown and admitted us to a large, ugly private room. I fought memories of being admitted to the hospital for my cyst. I felt the same taste of bewilderment I had experienced that day as people calmly asked questions and gave me forms to fill out as if I were applying for a car loan instead of bleeding through my jeans and onto the floor.

Dr. Baker arrived minutes later, wearing a lab coat and accompanied by a nurse with curly hair. Another doctor, an attending physician at the hospital who wore wire-rimmed glasses and had thick dark hair on his knuckles, joined her. They lifted my legs into stirrups, and Dr. Baker felt around inside me with her fingers. I winced as she pressed hard.

“She's dilated, probably three centimeters or so. I can feel the bag.”

The other doctor checked to verify the dilation.

“You're in labor,” she said. “Your cervix has dilated prematurely and the babies have begun to descend.”

The labor I'd expected involved water breaking, not blood.

“It's too soon,” she continued. “There's not a good chance they'll survive.”