If Only I Had Told Her

“Everything looks good,” the doctor says as she scans my chart. “If you could try again to pee for us before you go…”

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s like all I do is pee, and then I can’t when I’m supposed to.”

“Happens all the time,” she says. “Just try again because it is the best way to predict preeclampsia. Do you have any questions before the organ scan?”

“The what?”

“The ultrasound.”

“Uh, no.” The room is cold, and I’m anxious to put my new maternity jeans back on.

“That’s scheduled for next week, right? No, week after next.” She pauses, makes a note, and looks up at me and smiles. “Let’s see about peeing again, okay?”

In the restroom, crouched over the toilet with a cup between my legs, I think about what Dr. Singh said about love being an action and how my actions say I’m doing the best I can to love myself and the baby I don’t quite believe in. I wonder if trying to urinate for the preeclampsia test counts as an act of love, which makes me giggle, and then I finally pee.

When the nurse takes the cup from me, I ask, “So they’ll make sure the baby has all its organs and stuff week after next?”

“Yup. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

I say, “I’m not worried. I was just surprised when the doctor called it an ‘organ scan.’ I mean, it makes sense, but I never thought of it that way.” I’m babbling and not exactly sure what I’m talking about. The poor nurse smiles tightly at me and says something about needing to get this—with a nod to the urine—into the back.

I check at reception to see if they need anything more from me, but Mom has already made my next appointment and paid the copay with the little gold card, so we’re on our way.

“Everything good?” Mom asks. “You were in there awhile.”

“I couldn’t pee.”

“But all you do is pee, Autumn.”

“That’s what I said!” I lean my head against the window. There’s a fluttering in my middle that could be Finny’s baby, or it could be yesterday’s lunch. I still can’t tell.

Organ scan.

They’ll scan for the organs and make sure they’re all there, all in the right places, all in the right sizes and shapes, because sometimes they aren’t.

Sometimes the kidneys aren’t there, or the brain isn’t the right size, or the heart isn’t the right shape.

Sometimes babies die in their sleep for no reason, and with a gasp of breath, I realize that someday this baby will die.

Hopefully, this baby will live for a hundred years, but someday it will die, just like Finny. Just like I will.

The best I can do is hope that I will die before the baby.

The absurdity of it all.

“Are you okay?” Mom asks.

“Thinking about the ultrasound,” I say. “I hope everything is okay.”

“It probably will be,” she says, but nothing more, because she knows that for eighteen years, Angelina believed that Finny would outlive her. She knows that sometimes babies die in their sleep.

And neither of us is foolish enough to believe that lightning doesn’t strike twice.