She looked like she could be my sister.
The girl’s eyes widened when she saw me, emphasizing the unusual shade of forest green: just like mine.
In that instant, as I looked at the face I’d known my entire life, I felt myself tumble over that cliff. I didn’t know how far I would fall or how hard I would crash, only that nothing would ever be the same.
ABI
october
‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Mrs Knight?’
I blinked at Dr Griffith, not sure I’d heard him right.
‘Your daughter is pregnant.’ He spoke slowly, as if I were a child unable to grasp his words. ‘Olivia’s suffered irreversible brain damage and she won’t wake up, but Washington State law prohibits us from turning off life support. We have to give the fetus the best chance at surviving. Do you understand?’
I nodded and shook my head at the same time. I did understand, but it made no sense, as if he’d grabbed random words from a dictionary and pasted them into a sentence.
‘Wha –?’
A knock at the door interrupted me, and a pink-scrub-clad nurse with the sad, droopy face and flabby jowls of a Saint Bernard entered.
‘Mrs Knight, your sister –’
Sarah burst past the nurse, elbowing her way into the room. Her blue eyes were laced with red, the translucent skin of her lids as raw and puffy as mine. She grabbed my hand, and I stared at her fingers. Her nails were smooth and perfectly oval, shining red, the color of fresh blood. Even now in the middle of the night, her long, perfectly highlighted hair swung and shone under the anemic hospital lights.
She pulled me in for a hug so hard it hurt my ribs. I stiffened and she dropped her arms, a shadow of hurt crossing her face. It had always been there, this slight distance between us. My fault, admittedly, but I no longer knew how to stop it.
‘Where’s Olivia? Is she okay? What happened? Why was she out in the middle of the night?’
The questions were rapid as a machine gun, asked in Sarah’s most demanding mom voice. The one she’d been practicing since I was ten and she was twenty, when our mother left me on Sarah’s front step with nothing but a backpack of dirty clothes. She’d gone home and killed herself that very day, leaving Sarah to raise me.
I shook my head, tears rising in my throat.
‘She . . . she . . .’
I didn’t know why Olivia was out in the middle of the night.
After my bath, I’d had some wine and then gone to bed with a book. I was asleep while my daughter was out doing . . . what?
The dark fog of anxiety swirled violently around me.
Panic: my old friend.
‘Mrs Knight?’ I heard from somewhere far away.
My vision blurred and a high-pitched whining droned in my ears. I couldn’t hold it away anymore. I crashed to the ground.
‘Abi!’ People rushed around me, hands lifted me up, pushed me into a chair.
I was sweating heavily. The air was like molasses, weighted like water.
Somebody pressed a paper bag into my hands, and I heard Sarah’s soothing voice speaking to me from a great distance.
‘Breathe. There you go. In, then out. In, then out.’
I used to have panic attacks all the time as a kid. But I’d learned to control my emotions, stamping them out like the flames of a fire. Sarah always said I should talk about my feelings, get them out there, but I knew it was better to push them away, pretend everything was okay. It was better not to feel anything.
Somehow, without me even wanting to, my breathing evened, my heart rate slowed. And then my hearing came back. Dr Griffith and Sarah were talking.
‘What happened?’ Sarah asked.
Sarah was good at being composed in tough situations. She never seemed desperate or panicky. I felt a stab of anger that she could manage this. I couldn’t even ask the right questions.
‘A retired paramedic found Olivia on the banks of the ZigZag River, next to the bridge. We don’t know if she fell from the bridge or – well, the police will investigate,’ Dr Griffith replied. He was crouched in front of me, holding one of my hands tightly in his. His skin felt dry and cool against my sweaty palm.
Sarah shifted in her seat next to me, her hand holding the paper bag to my mouth. ‘People come out of comas all the time –’ she began.
‘Olivia isn’t in a coma,’ he interrupted gently. ‘Comas are usu ally from a localized injury. Olivia’s suffered a massive bleed, which has damaged almost every part of her brain. I’m so sorry, I know this is hard to understand and even harder to accept, but Olivia isn’t going to wake up.’
Grief hurtled toward me, crashing into me and beating inside my chest like a giant, furious animal.
‘And she’s pregnant?’ I whispered.
‘Yes,’ Dr Griffith replied.
I looked at Sarah. Her jaw worked, as if she were chewing leather.
‘How far along?’ I asked.
‘We’ll do an ultrasound to find out for sure, but the HCG hormone indicates about thirteen or fourteen weeks.’
I thought back to what we were doing three months ago. It would’ve been July. Olivia was out of school. She was studying for her driver’s test, taking practice SAT tests, swimming, hanging out with her friends.
We hadn’t done anything special. Money was always tight, and I was saving for the tuition I knew I’d have to pay when Olivia went to college. I couldn’t put my finger on when something might’ve changed, when she would’ve gotten pregnant. She must not have known. She would’ve told me if she’d known.
‘Surely the baby’s been exposed to radiation, chemicals . . . ?’ Sarah trailed off.
Dr Griffith winced. ‘Yes. Possibly. Probably. We do a standard pregnancy test when female patients are admitted, but it was delayed by the surgery.’
A dusty vent blew stale air into the room, the noise an obnoxious whine. Sarah and Dr Griffith had lapsed into silence.
‘I want to see her. Right now.’ My voice was hollow and flat.
‘Of course,’ Dr Griffith said immediately.
Sarah helped me to my feet, and we followed the doctor down the corridor, toward the ICU.
Despite the harsh reality of the stark white hallway, a part of me still clung to the faint hope that Olivia wasn’t here – that this was all some horrible mistake, some silly clerical error. Not my daughter.
Dr Griffith walked briskly to the end of the hallway and turned left, then waved a security badge at a locked door. Inside the ICU Jen Stokes, Olivia’s best friend’s mother, hovered over a bed that was surrounded by beeping, clunking machines. A stethoscope dangled from her neck.
‘Dr Stokes,’ Dr Griffith greeted her.
‘Jen?’ I stared at my neighbor. Just a few hours ago, I’d been at a barbecue at her house, and now we were standing in the ICU. She was wearing faded jeans and an old Seahawks jersey under a lab coat. Her eyes were red, her dark curls a messy halo around a pale face. Her hands were clasped into tight fists and pressed into her belly.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘I called her,’ Sarah explained; then I remembered