Missed
You’re surprised by the softness of socks. They are thick and woolly, like tennis socks, and slightly too tight; their elastic nipping your calves. But they are so soft, and you want your feet to stay swaddled in them for a very long time.
“Oh, look at that. I don’t know why they leave the socks on sometimes,” the nurse says brightly. She pulls them off your feet like you’re her daughter and she’s getting you ready for an after-school bath.
Your tongue is a thick, braided rope. You’ve been instructed that you must drink, eat, and pee in that order, so you take a sip of water from the paper cup, your first in six hours. The coldness rattles your teeth. You scoff a Graham cracker, its crumbs sandy. Can you get up, now? No, the IV must be untentacled first. You touch your left forearm and it reminds you of the silk lining of a suitcase.
This body does not feel like your body.
Willing to do whatever it takes to get released, to get the fuck out of this room that you shouldn’t be in, you shuffle to the bathroom, where there is a potty perched over the bowl that they will use to judge whatever comes out after they scraped your cervix.
“Hardly any blood!” The nurse seems pleased by the contents of the bowl. She points to the locker. “You can get dressed and then let’s wheel you out to your husband, shall we?”
These clothes do not feel like your clothes. You put them on as if you are puppet.
You can’t believe that you’re awake already. You can’t believe that you were – just a mere second ago, wasn’t it? – on a hospital gurney in a chilly room, listening to doctors deliver you that daily compliment about your accent that Americans seem to think you like hearing:
“Oh-my-God-where-are-you-from-I-love-your-accent.”
And then something was spurted into the bend of your arm, and time leapfrogged from that second to this second.
This is your first ever operation. Your first ever general anesthetic. You’ve not so much as even had a wisdom tooth yanked or a tonsil removed. It’s also your first time in an American hospital; your first time navigating health insurance without the freedom of the NHS. Turns out, you needn’t have worried. You’re fully covered, just a $20 copay (what value!), the procedure deemed “medically necessary.” Even the insurance company is calling out how necessary it is: when your own body thinks it’s still pregnant, when modern medicine must step in to save the day.
Nobody back in England knows. Nobody, because telling your family would mean the whomp of expectation. It would mean that they would cry and hold each other, but they’d also burn with excitement that a grandchild could be on the cards in the future, and you’d be an ocean apart, helpless to put a stop to it.
You insist that you can walk out (You’re fit! You’re fine!), but it’s hospital policy to be wheeled. Your knees weld themselves together, all ladylike, very English. You clasp your handbag on your lap: a silver backpack that contains your phone and the knickers you had on when you came in. The mummy-like, hospital issue panties that have been put on you, presumably at the same time as the tennis socks, come up to your bellybutton like a tummy-control swimming costume. You comment on their comfort. The nurse gives you a spare pair to take home, like she thinks you’d be interested in wearing them again.
Your husband pulls your car up and the nurse deposits you from the wheelchair like she’s tipping a watering can. You’re his problem now. You kiss. He drives. You don’t say that you’re not pregnant anymore. If either of you were to say it now, aloud, driving home from the hospital, you’d be lost.
—
For so long, you weren’t sure. Womblets, you’d joked. Crotchlings. You’d done everything to set up your lives in such a way that chucking another human being into your balance seemed like too big of a risk. Your twoness would surely tremble. And you had no family in the States, no built-in babysitters ready to sweep in to free you up for date nights or let you catch up on lost sleep.
“Are we doing this?” he’d asked one April evening over warm pita and kalamata olives. This is the year you would turn thirty-nine. Now or never.
“I think we’re doing this,” you’d replied. “Aren’t we? Would we be remiss not to at least try?”
You’d kept asking questions until you’d talked yourselves into it.
The next day, you made an appointment to have your IUD removed.
—
It happened right away. You messed up a few of the tests, splashes of urine hitting the wrong measure of the plastic stick. The results seemed so improbable that you kept taking them just to make sure you were reading them right, that you hadn’t imagined the darkening line, smudged like a kohl pencil.
“I can’t be. Already? Can I?”
“It doesn’t seem real,” he said, and you knew exactly what he meant, because your reality had been so thoughtfully mapped until that moment.
How dare you be pregnant already? You were angry at your body. You were angry that – even though you’d chosen this path – it happened so fast. The speed took you off-guard.
You didn’t feel pregnant. A serial insomnia sufferer, you didn’t equate those wide-awake hours to some other, deeper physiological change. Thanks to the IUD, you hadn’t had a period in ten years, so its not-thereness now wasn’t anything alarming. But you went in for consistent bloodwork, and your doubling hCG levels confirmed that yes, science said so.
You took to pregnancy like a duck to lava.
For nine weeks, you moved through your days harboring your secret, unable to equate one week’s progress to the next to the next, the silly fruit size comparison on the paid-for app nothing more than a childish cartoon. You continued Zoom meetings without telling anyone at work, went swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, went out for dinner with friends like before. You sent your parents messages about the weather and the price of Christmas flights and upcoming birthdays.
Giving up wine and deli meats and sushi – some of your very favorite things – wasn’t as hard as you’d imagined. You ordered mocktails before your party arrived and passed them off as booze. It didn’t feel like a genuine change – the change you were craving. Instead, sleep tickled its sexy feather on your face in a wicked taunt, your boobs ached in bras, and every day after lunch, your throat throbbed with bile. But you wanted more. You were waiting to feel. You wanted to place a hand on your abdomen like you see women do on TV, rub yourself, and just connect.
—
The first scan showed small growth and a barely-there heartbeat. The technician made you hold your breath just so she could register a cadence. You were told to wait ten days, that your chances were fifty-fifty. You felt ill. You left with a glossy photograph. Your husband had to explain the shapes represented in monochrome. You couldn’t unpack their form, and they were nothing like what you thought you were looking for.
At the second scan, a different technician did not ask you to hold your breath. She tilted the screen away so that the only place you could look was at the pocketed ceiling. She wished you “the very best of luck” as she led you to the OGBYN’s office, where you were weighed, informed merrily that you had lost 3lbs, and had to wait half an hour before being told that there was no heartbeat.
“It’s OK to cry,” the doctor said. “I know this is a desired pregnancy.”
Is it? You think. Is this what you desire?
You were wearing a medical face mask, but you weren’t crying. For reasons unknown, you pictured lard. Shiny, cream-colored lard. You thought you’d like to run a bath of lard and luxuriate in it. You wanted to squeeze it in your fists, the juice squelching through the cracks. And mostly, you wanted to slather it all over your belly like tanning oil.
Perhaps the doctor thought you were in shock. But you knew what real shock was; you got struck by it last year when your grandfather had a heart attack and you had to fly back to England on the red eye. He’s fine now, but you’ll never be fine again after that plane journey, how it stretched for hours and hours into the transatlantic clouds, how all the way you trembled with grief for a death that never came, lamenting your selfishness to emigrate.
The doctor presented you with three options for a missed miscarriage:
Wait for your body to pass it naturally;
Put pills in the side of your cheeks like a hamster and bleed for an undefined amount of time;
Have a D&C.
The first two weren’t real options. Every day you waited would heighten the medical risk. Taking the pills wouldn’t guarantee that you wouldn’t have to have a D&C anyway, and would certainly mean a prolonged absence from work.
“Does it hurt?” you asked.
“The D&C? Most women find the physical effects minimal. You might get some bleeding for a couple of days. No sex, swimming, or hot baths for two weeks. Your period should come back in four to six weeks, and then you can try again.”
“OK. Let’s do that. I trust science,” you said. “When can you get me in?”
—
You want so hard for it to be over, for the time to pass like a white moon waning, and when it really is over, when nothing but a pink, watery smear appears on the toilet paper, when physically, just two days after the procedure, you are fine, no, really, YOU’RE FINE, and the days, then weeks pass like the slow flip of a calendar, you have a word with your body.
You ask it, calmly, what’s going on. Why it missed it. Why it didn’t get the message. Why the chromosomes couldn’t connect. Why you had to have a fucking operation to finish the job, why you had to keep it a secret from your family, and with the assault of fault surging around your belly, you are forced to tilt your chin skyward, to move on.
“Just try again! You’ll make another.”
This is excellent, universal advice, and you wholeheartedly trust the professionals. You trust your husband, the warmth of his body, the force of his torso as he holds you close. You trust the negative pregnancy test that finally appears weeks later, the period that follows, the reset button. You have to place your trust somewhere because you sure as shit can’t trust your body. She is slippery; she can’t be depended upon to deliver.
It’s OK to cry, you’re told. It’s OK to feel sad, you’re told.
But you don’t cry. You don’t feel sad. You have nothing to miss. Your body did the missing for you.
Natalie Harris-Spencer is an English writer, digital editor, and blogger living in America. Her work has appeared in Allegory Ridge, the Stonecoast Review, Hobart, The Dark City, The Satirist, and others. She is the winner of the Chestnut Review Stubborn Writers Contest, the Hummingbird Flash Fiction Prize, and she was selected by Oyster River Pages as one of their Emerging Fiction Voices. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Stonecoast, and she is the Editor-in-Chief of Aspiring Author. She is currently working on her debut novel. Natalie enjoys surprise in fiction. And tea.