cord is cut. They take her over to the other side of the room, check her over. I can hear the sound of suction. Rachel cries all the more. I think she wants her mother.
Wednesday
12.17am
The nurse hands our daughter to her mother. She is wrapped up, but her little face is visible, pink, covered in white and red. Her eyes are open like she’s aware and taking in the wonder of her life that has just begun. She can’t see anything, of course, but Quinn looks down at her and smiles like the two of them have seen each other and connecting. Which they are, in ways I cannot begin to understand.
“Hello Rachel,” Quinn says. It’s the first time her name has been said to her, like she’s been anointed with it. “We’ve waited so long for you.”
And that is true. From the moment that we’d lost our son we had been waiting for her. I know that I pushed Quinn too early, but even then the dreams for another child had been planted into us. But we weren’t ready then. We needed to grieve him and we needed to make our mistakes. We needed to destroy ourselves, even to our very foundations, so that we could be built again from the ground up. And then we were ready.
And that’s the reality of our lives. That’s why we work. It’s the simplicity of it. Birth – death – birth. It’s all a cycle. We were born together, growing, loving, but we were flawed and incomplete. Then we died. We suffered, we lost, we sacrificed. And then we were born again. We became new. We learnt new ways to be, to love.
I turn my eyes from Rachel to Quinn. Her eyes are closed. Her skin is pale. Her lips are a little blue.
There are voices, urgent words, coming from the space between Quinn’s legs. Rachel is gone. She is snatched up by a nurse and placed back on the warming table and wheeled out of the room.
People say then in times is extreme stress, when horrendous things are happening, that time slows down. Everything moves in slow motion. But not for me. Not in that moment. Things happened so quickly that I had not time to think, to react.
There are words spoken. I don’t understand many of them. I understand the way they’re said: rapid, desperate. Some words I know: rupture, haemorrhage, cross-match, stat. My problem is that I know what they mean on their own. I just can’t put the whole story together. My mind cannot fathom what is happening around me.
Quinn is gone, placed on a trolley and taken away from me. The sheets in the space she occupied are covered in bright red blood. It’s on the floor, it’s on the table, it’s everywhere.
Quinn’s blood.
“Mr Altman,” says the doctor. He’s the only one left. His gown matches the sheets and the floor. His gloves, previously blue are dark red. “Can you hear me?”
I nod. I’m in shock. I can’t speak. I can’t think. I want to run after my wife and hold her and make sure that she is alright. But I know she isn’t and I know she doesn’t need me right now. She needs the man standing in front of me.
“Your wife is bleeding. She’s on the way to the OR right now. Do you understand?”
I nod again.
“I suspect that her uterus has ruptured, probably because of its shape. I won’t know until I get in there. What I need from you is your consent. Can I operate on your wife, Mr Altman.”
I nod a third time.
“She’ll need a blood transfusion. She’s lost a lot of blood. She’ll lose more. Do I have your permission?”
I nod a fourth.
“And one last thing. If there’s too much damage to her uterus, I might not be able to save it. I might have to remove it to save her life. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand what that means? She won’t be able to have any more children. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Any questions?”
I shake my head. Just get in there, I think.
He nods himself. Turns to go.
“Please,” I say, like a prayer, like a should be saying this on my knees. “Save my wife.”
“I’ll do my best. I’ll do my very best.”
Jen comes to me, wraps her arms around me and we both cry tears of fear for Quinn, her life in the balance.
01.00am
I sit in the corridor outside the labour room. It’s being cleaned, ready for the next victim. They want me to move on but I can’t just yet and they don’t have the heart to force the issue.
For some reason I’m thinking back on the events of the last few days, events that took me from her side. I think how close I came to screwing things up again. I think of Penny.
“Are you serious?” she asked me. We sit in her dining room. It’s early yesterday evening. Quinn’s labour hadn’t started yet, but it was close.
“I think I am,” I said. “I think that I love you.”
“You’re confused. This thing with Quinn has got you turned around.”
“It’s not that. I think I’m seeing things clearly now for the first time.”
“What things.”
“I see Quinn for who she is. I thought she could change but she can’t. She’s not the woman I was in love with. She’s someone else. And I’ve let her go a long time ago. Now I’m letting this other woman go too. And I’m coming back to you. You’re good. You won’t hurt me. You love me. You always have. And so, I love you too.”
“That is not how it works, Judd. You can’t just come and go as you like. You can’t just turn up here and expect to climb right into my bed.”
“I wasn’t...”
“You were,” she said sharply. “And it scares me. It scares me because as soon as something goes wrong with you and Quinn you’re going to come back here and I’m going to have sex with you and then you’ll go again. I can’t be the one you come to when you need to say ‘screw you’ to your wife. I won’t be.”
I took a deep breath. “It’s not like that.”
“But it is like that. You were separated, you slept with me. Now you’re fighting again, you want to sleep with me again.”
“It’s more than just fighting.”
“Really?”
“Yes. She had a box of things. Photos. Letters. Gifts. From him. She hasn’t let him go.”
“Hidden away?”
“Yeah.”
“Just a minute,” she said and left the room. She came back with a photo album. It’s old. It’s been looked at innumerable times. She handed it to me, open at one of the pages in the middle.
There I am. I’m about twenty, before I met Quinn. I’m dressed up, in a suit and I kind of look at little dorky but also sure of the man I was becoming. Penny is on my arm. She’s a year younger. She’s beautiful in her dress. Her prom dress.
“You’ve still got this?” I asked her. It’s a stupid question, I know, but I ask it all the same.
“Of course I do. Do you remember that night?”
“Sure. Your prom. You asked me. I took you.”
“There was more to it than that. Do you remember what I said to you that night?”
I shook my head. It was a long time ago. A lot had happened since then.
“I’d loved you for so long - for as long as I could remember. And then I asked you to take me and when you said yes I thought that maybe you loved me too. I know it was stupid, because you were dating Alice at the time, but a girl has got to hope, right?”
I nodded. I looked at the photo, trying to place myself back there, trying to see something of what Penny is saying in the girl who is looking back at me from my past.
“And then we’re dancing a slow dance and you’re holding me so tight and I’m thinking you definitely love me and so I go and tell you that I do and I’m waiting for you to say it back.”
“But I didn’t.”
“No. You smiled and kissed me on the cheek and kept on dancing.”
“I’m only just remembering that as you’re saying it. Damn. Did I really brush you off like that?”
“You were sweet. You were kind. That’s part of the reason I loved you. You took me even though you were seeing Alice ?
?? and I suppose she let you too. But you’re still that way. You’re still sweet and kind. You took back your wife when she did those things to you because you’re you. But that’s not my point. Do you know why I still have this picture?”
I shook my head.
“I like to remember,” she told me. “I like to look back at the photo and see you as the guy who danced with me. I like to remember how that felt. And I look at it to remember how it felt to know that you didn’t love me after all – that it was all just in my imagination.”
“I see. The good and the bad.”
“And you know - you’re not the only man that I’ve had sex with. I’ve had relationships – some good, some bad. The good ones had bad bits - the bad ones had good bits. But I want to remember them all because that’s my life. In the end, by remembering, I’m looking for the good things in my future and trying to avoid the bad. Get it?”
“I think so. So, what you’re saying is that Quinn has a similar thing with her box?”
“Maybe. Did you ask her?”
I shook my head again. “No. But I did yell a bit and leave. I guess I was angry. The yelling is new. The leaving I’m already pretty good at.”
“So you think that Quinn has been holding onto memories of this other man.”
“When you put it like that... But that’s not all. I saw her, in his room.”
“Having sex?”
“Well, no.”
“What then?”
“Sitting on his bed.”
“Sitting. Wow, that’s pretty hot.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know if they’d already had sex or were going to.”
“But you don’t know any of that for sure. So she was just sitting?”
“She had the box there, open. I guess she was showing him what