The Promise of Stardust (18 page)

My heart raced. “What?”

Her eyes narrowed like I was an idiot for trying to cover it up. “I heard her talking to her mother.”

How could Elle talk to Alice? “What do you mean?”

“I take breaks, and Elle always sits with Alice when I go outside for a smoke, but sometimes I hear her talking to her mother. Listen, Elle's very scared. She looks like she's handling everything okay, but she isn't. She's just a kid.”

“What did she say to Alice?”

“She promised to name the baby after her mother,” she said.

I could hear my father saying my mother couldn't give up my brother once she felt him move. Elle had picked out a name. Jesus.

“It's hard to be fifteen and pregnant,” the nurse said. “Even harder to watch your mother die, not to mention the bender her father is on. I know you're just a kid, too, but stick with her through this or she won't make it.”

I didn't know what I'd done that would make this nurse think I would ever abandon Elle. I grunted something and continued up the steps. We were both scared. True. I'd been accepted at all the colleges I'd applied to. I still wanted Columbia, but given the circumstances, I'd be lucky to commute to the University of Southern Maine—or even to a good trade school. I was feeling resentful. Guilty and resentful. Maybe the nurse saw that.

I cracked opened Elle's bedroom door. She stirred at the sound of the creak, and then settled down into the pillows again. Her shirt rose up a bit, revealing her pregnant abdomen. That my mother hadn't noticed was absurd. Hank had an excuse. In the past few months, he hadn't been sober.

Suddenly Elle drew her legs up as if she were in pain, rising with it. “Oh God.” Her eyes flew open.

I sat beside her. “What is it, Peep? Are you sick?”

“Matt? Oh.” She grimaced. “Cramps.”

“It's not the baby?”

She cradled her belly. “Of course not. I'm not due for months.”

I accepted her explanation. “Do you need to go to the doctor?”

“I don't think so. Matt, the nurse knows about the baby. She asked me point-blank.”

“I know. We have to tell your father before he finds out.”

“Not yet.” Her chin dropped low.

I couldn't tell if she was afraid or ashamed, and I didn't want to ask. I searched the room for something else to talk about. These days we discussed only two things, her mother and the baby. It was becoming such a hellhole. “There's the dance Friday night. Want to go?”

She lit up. “Really?”

“Yeah. It'd be fun, right? Hang out. We've never done that together, gone to a school thing.”

She raised an eyebrow and pointed to her belly. “What about?”

“Who cares? Everyone will know pretty soon. We may as well hold our heads up.” I rested my hand on her belly. “How's the little kiddo anyway?”

“Quiet,” she said.

For two months I'd watched her mother writhe. I'd learned the body language of pain, the tensing and the wash of it as it pounded into a person.

Elle's belly went rock hard, and she gasped.

“What the hell is that?” But I knew the answer to the question. My mother had talked about how a woman's belly could get as hard as granite during a contraction. “Are you in labor?”

“No,” she said. “It's too ear—” She grabbed my arm.

“I'm taking you to the hospital. Wait right here.”

“Maybe to the clinic.”

“The hospital.” I bolted down the stairs and stopped in the living room. The nurse glanced up at me. “Something's wrong with Elle. I'll be right back.”

The nurse headed up the steps two at a time.

My mother's car was in the driveway. I scurried over the fence, the snowbank piled on top of it, and blasted into the kitchen. Mom was peeling carrots, humming some stupid Supremes song, “Stop … before you break my heart.”

“I need to borrow the car.” I grabbed her keys from the rack and turned for the door.

Mom swung around. “Have a horse of your own, and then you can borrow another's. I have to go to the—”

“It's an emergency. Elle. She's sick. I have to take her to the hospital.”

Mom grabbed her purse from the kitchen table. “What's wrong with her? Where is she?”

I needed a lie. This wasn't something to spit out like gum. “Food poisoning. I don't know for sure. Let me have the car, Mom.”

“I'll drive if Elle's sick.”

I didn't know what to do, but before I could think of a response, we were pushing through the McClures' front door. Alice was so still I wondered if she'd finally had the grace to die. Mom paused for a moment to check Alice as I barreled up the steps to Elle's room, which was empty. I stepped back into the hall. Mom was three-quarters of the way upstairs.

The nurse was coming out of the bathroom. “She needs to go to the hospital. I think she's in preterm labor.”

“Who's in labor?” Mom asked.

I swallowed. “Elle. She's pregnant.”

Shock registered on my mother's face, but she didn't pause or hesitate. She yanked open the bathroom door and found Elle lying doubled over on the floor.

“How far along are you?” Mom squatted beside Elle.

“I'm supposed to go to the clinic tomorrow for my five-month checkup. It's just cramps.”

Mom set her hand on Elle's belly to assess the contractions, and within two minutes we were on the road to the hospital. My mother put aside her surprise, disappointment, and anger to contend with the pragmatic concerns. “I have to get ahold of your father, Elle. Do you know where he is?”

“Please don't tell him.” Elle shook her head. She sounded so much like a little girl for a moment that I recognized something so frank and apparent, but totally elusive to my usual perspective. She was a child. And so was I.

“We have to reach your father to consent for treatment.” My mother had taken on a role I rarely saw. As a labor and delivery nurse, she'd told stories of seeing a zillion women give birth, but somehow I hadn't considered her in this context, taking over, not as my mother, but as something else.

“But I'm pregnant. Doesn't that mean I can—at the clinic—they let me—agh.” Elle's face knotted in pain again.

“Where is your father?”

Through gritted teeth, Elle said, “I don't know—somewhere getting drunk.”

That seemed a little optimistic on Elle's part. “Getting drunk” suggested Hank had been sober at some point during the previous day. Or week. Or month.

When we arrived at the hospital, my mother grabbed a wheelchair and pushed Elle directly upstairs to a labor room. Three nurses who worked with Mom appeared somewhat baffled.

One cracked, “So are you rounding up girls off the street now, Linney?”

“This is my son, Matt. And this is his girlfriend, Elle McClure. She's pregnant, in her nineteenth or twentieth week, and she's having contractions. What OB is on call?”

“Blythe Clarke's covering. All the regular OBs are at some conference.”

“Thank God. Call her. Elle, change into this.” Mom handed Elle a gown and ushered me out into the hall.

Mom's expression hardened. She whispered, “Why didn't you tell me? I taught you about birth control. And if you didn't listen about that, then she still could have had an abortion. Jesus, she's fifteen. Your whole life just went down the tubes, Matt.”

I figured this wasn't the time to tell her I did my very best to ignore her when she gave that particular lecture, or that I'd used birth control—just not properly. Nor was it the time to tell her that Elle had dismissed an abortion outright. As angry as my mother was at me, I was angrier at myself, and at that moment I didn't give a shit if my mother never forgave me. I was sorry I'd hurt her, probably embarrassed her in front of her coworkers, but I only cared that Elle was okay. “Is she going to be all right?”

In a frustrated gesture, Mom threw her hands into the air then returned to the room. I followed.

The nurse was strapping two belts around Elle's belly. “I've got to find the baby's heartbeat.” The nurse had a disklike device, and she was tracing it around Elle's belly button up, then belly button down. Side to side. Its speaker made a gooey, swishing sound. The nurse, who wore an uneasy expression, looked up at my mother.

“Any bleeding?” Mom asked, taking over the search, continuing to move the probe as it made its scratchy white noise.

“No, just cramps.” Elle drew a breath. “Like now.”

“That's a contraction, sweetheart,” Mom said.

“But it's too soon,” Elle said.

Her reaction flabbergasted me. I didn't understand how she could still be in denial. Because Mom talked about her work, I knew under certain circumstances they could stop premature labor, but not always. Sometimes babies came so early they spent months and months in the NICU.

Mom continued her search for a heartbeat. Elle and I had heard its pitter-patter plenty of times at the clinic. Right now there was no such sound.

Mom swallowed. “The doctor at the clinic, where is he finding the heartbeat?”

Elle pointed to a spot on her belly.

“Is the baby moving?” the nurse asked.

“No, not since yesterday,” Elle said.

Mom's jaw tightened and she turned to the other nurse. “Go get a portable ultrasound.”

“What's wrong?” I asked, but I was thinking,
What
else
could go wrong?

“Sometimes it's just hard to find a heartbeat,” Mom said.

“Is that why the baby's so quiet?” The pitch of Elle's voice rose. She had figured out, as I had, what was happening. Not only was she in labor; something was wrong with the baby. I circled the bed to get to a place where neither hospital machines nor people would come between us. She buried her face in my chest, and I buried mine in her hair.

The nurse rolled an ultrasound machine to Elle's bedside. And in walked Dr. Clarke, pink ribbon in her hair like she was trying to signal she was a girl. Although her hair wasn't as white in those days, she still looked ancient to me. “So what do we have here? Hi, I'm Dr. Clarke. Have you been getting prenatal care, sweetie?”

“At the clinic in Brunswick,” Elle said.

Blythe shot questions. Elle and I filled in the details again. Prenatal vitamins, check. Blood tests, check. Everything fine, check. Nineteen weeks.

“Okay, let's have a look.” She rolled the ultrasound transducer over Elle's belly. A circular image appeared.

“That's your baby's head.” The doctor's eyes darted back and forth from the screen to Elle's face.

“This is the chest.” She swallowed.

My mother squeezed her eyes shut.

Dr. Clarke drew a deep breath. “How long since you felt movement?”

“Last night at bedtime.”

Dr. Clarke put one hand on Elle's and pointed with her other. “This is your baby's heart, and I'm so sorry, but it isn't beating.”

Elle scrutinized the screen. “But … but … it has to be beating. Are you saying—oh no, please. Oh God, please.” The monitor graph showed a rising wave. Still, she squeaked, “You mean she's dead?”

“I'm afraid so,” Dr. Clarke said softly.

So many emotions surged through me simultaneously, sadness, concern, anger, disappointment, and to my shame—relief. I felt relieved, and I was horrified that I felt that way. I took Elle's hand, and she batted me away. My mother tried. Elle reacted the same way.

“That's a pretty hard contraction. I'm going to check your cervix,” Dr. Clarke said.

The nurse passed the doctor a pack of sterile gloves and offered her slimy goop.

“Out of here, Matt,” Mom said, pushing me toward the door.

“Linney, can you stay with me?” Elle whimpered, and again, her voice sounded so young.

“Okay, honey,” Mom said.

“What about me?”

“Wait outside for a few minutes.” Mom shooed me.

Elle opened her mouth to speak and closed it again.

And so I was dismissed, useless, guilty, and sad. Elle didn't want me there. She wanted my mother, any mother, because Elle was a child. And I wanted my mother, too, but all I could think was how much Mom hated me now and how badly I'd hurt Elle. I stood at the door, eavesdropping.

“She's fully dilated. Elle, with your next contraction, I want you to push,” Dr. Clarke said.

“Okay.”

“Let's get an IV into her. Have the lab come up and draw her blood, and get ahold of the clinic to have them forward any medical records.”

What seemed like forever passed, but it was probably only a half hour. Mom came into the corridor, touched my sleeve, and led me down the hall. I stared at her, unable to muster the questions.
Is Elle all right? What happened?