The Promise of Stardust (4 page)

“Actually, the pregnancy test in the ER was positive,” Blythe said. “And the beta hCG indicates she's close to eight weeks along.”

Phil cleared his throat. “Somehow we overlooked it before we took her to the OR. I don't know how that happened.”

“No. She can't be,” I said, remembering the pregnancy test beneath the bathroom sink, the one she bought last month, the one she didn't take because her period started on her way home from the store. That was only a couple of weeks ago. Besides, we'd been careful.

“Has she been taking the baby aspirin?” Blythe asked.

“Yes.” After Elle's third miscarriage, Blythe figured out that Elle kept losing babies because she had an autoimmune disorder. Aspirin really is a miracle drug; it even treated Elle's APS.

Blythe passed me the lab printout.

I gripped the paper. Elle
was
pregnant. “Seriously? She had a period a couple of weeks ago. This isn't a mix-up?” I asked.

“Maybe she had breakthrough bleeding, and that's why you didn't know. I want to do an ultrasound to see if there's a fetal heartbeat. After what's transpired today, there's a good chance she may have miscarried.”

I raked my hair, still flummoxed.

Blythe beckoned a nurse, who closed the drapes and bedside curtains, darkening the room. Then Blythe took a wandlike ultrasound probe and covered it with a sterile cot and transducer gel. “Matt, I need to do an internal exam. Do you want to leave?”

“No, but, Phil, do you mind?”

He ducked away.

The nurse, barely out of college, raised Elle's right thigh and draped her perineum. Blythe inserted the probe into Elle's vagina.

Anxiety jacked up my heart rate. How many X-rays were done that day? How many teratogenic drugs did the emergency room pump into Elle? What might that have done to a developing fetus? At the same time I remembered reading a journal article about one brain-dead woman who carried a baby to a good outcome and I wondered if it was possible.

“There,” Blythe said, pointing at the monitor. “A heartbeat.”

I narrowed my eyes and approached the ultrasound machine. The little flicker on the screen fortified me. “She's really pregnant.”

“I'd say about eight weeks is right.” Blythe pointed, marked it, and saved the results to the hard drive. Drawing a deep breath, she turned to me. “I can make some phone calls to find out how this would work. I've never treated this kind of situation but, at a conference, one of the presenters talked about a case. The family didn't know the woman was pregnant until after a motorcycle accident. She stayed in a persistent vegetative state throughout the pregnancy and still delivered a healthy baby.”

I remembered to breathe only after stars started bouncing around the periphery of my vision. “Given Elle's history … do you think it's possible?”

“Maybe.” Blythe shrugged. “Phil said her pituitary gland and hypothalamus looked okay. So if the injury didn't destroy her pituitary, her body should be able to regulate her hormone levels, maintain her body temperature. But I don't know, Matt. It's hard to say.”

“She's been pregnant four times; she's never gone to term.”

“The last one was close. The reason the baby died had nothing to do with anything that we'd expect to recur.”

The blood drained from my head, remembering Baby Dylan's lifeless body in my arms.

Blythe rested her hand on my shoulder. “I'm not trying to tell you what you to do. But I do think you should have all the facts before you decide to withdraw Elle's life support.”

   3   

Mom entered Elle's hospital room carrying two cups of coffee and a bag with sandwiches from a shop across the street. I set it aside. For some reason, people try to fill you with food when you're filled with grief. I didn't need food. I needed a reason to keep living.

“You have to eat, Matthew.”

I shrugged and continued to stare out the window, agonizing about what Elle would want me to do.

Mom set the sandwich on my lap again and turned toward Elle. “Do you think she's in pain?”

“No. She's …” Elle was brain-dead. She wasn't experiencing anything anymore, and I was so lonely for her that nothing could ever take up the hollow space she'd left vacant.

Mom bent down and kissed Elle's cheek. “Do you think she might still be able to hear us?”

“No.” Her temporal lobes, the parts of the brain which hear, were saturated with enough blood to create their own Red Sea. She couldn't hear. Or see. Or act. And still I'd spent most of the last hour whispering to Elle and asking her what she wanted me to do.

Touching my shoulder gently, Mom said, “It's late. Let me drive you home.”

“I can't.”

My mother pulled up a chair beside mine, in the already crowded space between the bed and the wall. “It took me hours and hours to leave when your father passed away. But she's not here, if what you said is right—that she's brain-dead—she's not here anymore. You don't have to stay.”

I didn't want to start crying. Not about Elle. Not about Dad. Yet the mention of his name nearly undid me. And the longevity of grief, the endlessness of it, settled into my future reality. Besides, I was hoping Elle's spirit lingered nearby, even though I didn't believe in bullshit like that. “Listen, Mom, you can go. I'm fine,” I said flatly.

I could feel it in her exhalation, her desire to do what mothers do. She wanted to take me away from this sadness, but she couldn't fix this.

Probably in an attempt to remove me from this place, if not physically, emotionally—to pull me into memory, to a happier time—Mom said, “I keep thinking about when Alice and Hank brought Elle home from the hospital when she was a baby.”

I nodded, not paying my mother much heed. Elle would probably miscarry, but everything she'd ever said about being pregnant and babies screamed she'd want me to try. In fact, almost everything she'd ever said indicated that.

Almost. Elle didn't want to live in a vegetative state, but at the same time she had risked her life for things she deemed bigger than herself—like on the Space Shuttle.

Mom reminisced. “Her mother put Elle in my arms—well, in your arms, Matt, because you were sitting on my lap. You don't remember it by any chance, do you?”

“I was two and a half. How could I?” Although I'd heard the story enough times, how I had held Elle when she was just three days old.

“We thought you were deaf. Did you know that?” Mom was talking to herself as much as she was to me. She needed to distract herself from Elle's condition, too.

“You thought I was autistic.” My pediatrician said something was profoundly wrong with me because, until the day the McClures brought their new baby over, I'd never spoken. My parents had taken me to a dozen specialists, none of whom could find a damn thing wrong with me other than I didn't speak.

Mom wiped a tear from her cheek. “I didn't believe any of it. I knew you'd be fine, and when Elle started cooing, you said, ‘Peep.' You called her Peep for the longest time. Until you two started dating.”

I nodded. Sometimes I still called her Peep, usually as a term of endearment, rarely in front of anyone else. I twisted my wedding band.
My love, my life, Peep
.

“Your father said you couldn't stand being upstaged by the little baby girl.”

“It was probably more like I'd been waiting around for her to show up. I can't imagine this world without her in it.” I shuddered, on the brink of crying.

My mother nodded. “Me either. It seems impossible, Matt, but you do go on. I did after your father died. You will, too.”

“She's pregnant,” I said.

My mother's eyes widened. “Pregnant?”

I nodded. “It looks like eight weeks, but we didn't know. She hadn't missed her period.”

“Oh my goodness. That
is
why she fainted, then.”

“Maybe.” I shook my head, thinking the pregnancy had done this to her. By getting her pregnant again,
I
had done this to Elle. “I found out a couple of hours ago. Part of the trauma workup.”

“I'm sorry, honey.” Mom put her hand on mine. “Too many losses.”

“Blythe Clarke thinks it might be possible to save—the baby. She's on the phone, talking to perinatologists all over the country. A couple of similar situations made it to term.”

“Matt—Matt, you can't be serious. There is
no way
Elle would want to be kept alive like this.”

“I haven't made a decision yet, but I think she'd want me to try,” I said.

Mom blinked rapidly. “She signed a living will.”

I leaned forward. “I thought you were bullshitting about that.”

“No, she signed one. Don't you remember how much she hated that they kept her mother going for so long?”

“I know, Mom, but Alice had cancer and was suffering. Elle's not in pain. Don't you think she would want the baby to live?”

Mom squeezed her eyes shut, then a moment later covered her face with her hands. “If it means staying on life support for months? No, I don't. I can't let what happened to Alice happen to Elle. Oh my God, it's not even reasonable to think this pregnancy could succeed. She's had so many miscarriages.”

“That was because of the APS. It's treatable.”

Mom pressed her lips together and drew in a deep breath. “Honey, you treated it last time, and you still lost the baby.”

“Not from the APS.”

“But he still died.” Mom reached out and took my hand. “I'm so sorry, but he did. And it almost killed Elle. I think it almost killed you. I don't want you to get your hopes up just to have them crushed again. Let Elle go peacefully.”

“She'd want me to save the baby.”

Mom stood, looked out the window, and sighed. “It's too early. Are you sure
you
don't want to save a piece of Elle?”

“Of course I do, but I'm pretty certain she would want me to put the baby first.”

Mom shook her head. “It's hardly a baby at this point. Matt, for heaven's sake, you don't even call it a fetus until it's eight weeks.”

I glared at my mother. I did not need a lesson in embryology.

“I know,” she said. “My heart is breaking. And I'd do anything if I thought we could bring Elle back. You're shattered, but try to put on your doctor's hat. What do you think the odds are that she could carry a pregnancy now when she never could before? A hundred to one, a thousand? I love her. She's like my daughter, you know that. I want her to wake up and—” Mom's voice broke. “And that isn't going to happen. Letting go is hard. But she made me promise I'd never let anyone do this to her.”

“She's my wife.”

“I'm well aware, but you're grieving, and you aren't thinking straight.” My mother's expression conveyed regret but also absolute immovability.

Panic rose in my gut, not because I was afraid of my mother, but because she is the most relentlessly stubborn person I've ever known. “When did Elle sign this thing? Where is it? Doesn't it say something about pregnancy?” I asked.