His eyebrows collapsed. “I’m afraid it’s very serious. If brought to full term, there’s a seventy-five percent chance the baby will be stillborn. For those that do survive the birth, they will likely only survive for a few days, perhaps weeks.” He shook his head. “There’s no cure.”
The world telescoped away from her, the walls of the examination room collapsing like a house of cards. She heard a great rush in her ears, as if she were standing at the edge of a waterfall, and then she felt herself plummet into the dark. When she opened her eyes, the doctor was standing above her, his eyebrows knitted together, the careful mask stripped away, leaving only a sad, helpless man behind. “I’ll get you something to drink, and then we can discuss next steps,” he said quietly, once she was able to sit up again, and the door shut behind him with a soft click.
In the silence, all she could hear was the soft whir of the air conditioner and the far-off beeping of machinery in an adjacent room. She pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them tight. If she made herself small enough, she could protect her baby. She could heal it just by the force of her will. She pictured the little bean swimming around inside her, the clusters of fingers and toes and the tiny swooping nose and the soft curve of eyes. She had seen it just minutes ago, watched it hovering on the screen. A miracle. A ghost. The nurse’s breath had caught in her throat when she’d seen it, but Rebecca had thought that was a natural reaction to seeing her baby swimming inside her body. How could anyone not be awed by it? But now she could see it clearly: the way the nurse had avoided her eyes when she’d moved the wand across her swollen stomach, her smile disappearing like quicksand. She had known the baby was doomed.
Rebecca dressed quickly, her fingers fumbling with the buttons on her shirt, her shoes feeling heavy and leaden as she laced them. The paper crinkled as she stood up from the table. She didn’t want to be there when the doctor returned. Maybe, if she didn’t see him again, what he’d said to her would be made untrue. She grabbed her bag and ran out of the office, ignoring the receptionist’s calls to book another appointment. She would never go back, she decided as she unlocked her car door and slid into the driver’s seat. She would go home and stay there until the baby was ready to come, and then she would bring it into the world herself and cradle it in her arms, and she knew—she knew!—that she would be able to protect it. She would be able to make the baby okay.
She turned the key in the ignition but couldn’t bring herself to drive. Instead, she sat there idling in the parking lot, watching other expectant mothers trail in and out of the doctor’s office, faces flushed with excitement or pale with nausea but all of them happy. None of them looked like the face she saw now in the rearview mirror, ashen and devastated.
She pulled her phone out of her bag and Googled it. Anencephaly. Reams and reams of photos came up, babies with heads shrunken and deformed, eyes closed, mouths open. She knew she should stop but she couldn’t, she looked and looked until her eyes felt gritty and sore. She didn’t know how long she sat there. An hour? Two? There was a knock on the window and she jumped, her phone skittering out of her hand and under the passenger seat. When she looked up, she saw the face of the nurse who’d done the ultrasound peering down at her. The woman mimed rolling down the window, and Rebecca pressed the button without thinking. The window whirred down.
“Are you okay?” the nurse asked, though she could see for herself clear as day that Rebecca was not okay, nowhere near it, and she knew exactly why.
Rebecca was silent. Something dark and heavy had lodged in her throat. This grief would live with her now, deep inside her, quietly choking the life out of her. She knew she should cry, but she was beyond tears.
The nurse opened the door and crouched down next to her. “Do you want to come back inside?” she asked. Her eyes were filled