We Took Our Maternity Photos on Saturday. By Tuesday, the Ultrasound Room Had Gone Quiet

It’s 2:14 a.m. and I’m sitting on the bathroom floor because it’s the only room where my crying doesn’t wake Wyatt. The tile is cold through my leggings. My knees hurt. I’m 29 weeks and I can’t really get up fast anymore, so I just stay here.

On the counter there’s a cup of decaf from this morning with a skin on top. Next to it, the parking stub from the hospital garage. $14. I folded it into my phone case like it was something worth keeping. Maybe it is. It’s from the day everything changed.

Saturday we did the maternity pictures at the park off Route 9. My sister-in-law Dana took them on her good camera. I wore a white dress I got on clearance and Cole said I looked like a candle, which is a weird compliment but I took it. Wyatt is three. He insisted on holding the stuffed lamb he picked out for his baby sister at Target, the one with the floppy ear. Nobody else was allowed to touch it. Every single picture, there’s that lamb.

Tuesday was the 3D scan. We paid $129 for it out of the grocery jar because I wanted to see her face. And I did. Her little fist pushed up against her cheek, like she’s thinking about something. The tech was chatty, asking about names, and then she moved the wand to the left side and got quiet. Real quiet. She said she’d be right back. She was gone eleven minutes. I counted them on the clock above the door.

The doctor used words I had to google in the car. Something with her heart. One side didn’t grow the way it’s supposed to. She’ll need surgery within days of being born, maybe more than one. Not here, they said. A children’s hospital three hours away.

Cole held it together in the office. In the truck he put his forehead on the steering wheel and didn’t move for a long time. I sat there with the printout of her face in my lap, the one with her fist, and the paper got wet and wrinkled.

Since then my phone won’t stop. Daycare: “Reminder, balance of $215 is past due.” Cole’s boss: “Need you Saturday, confirm.” My mom has called three times. I haven’t picked up. I don’t know how to say it out loud without it becoming real.

Wyatt doesn’t know. Tonight at bedtime he put the lamb on my belly and said “she’s sleeping.” I said yes baby she’s sleeping. Then I came in here.

When we were trying for her, I used to think the hard part would be two kids under four. The laundry, the no sleep, the double stroller. I was so sure I knew what was coming. I was pregnant with my second and I honestly had no idea what kind of road I was walking onto. The second time you’re supposed to know everything. And then you know nothing.

I keep looking at the pictures Dana sent this afternoon. Me smiling in that white dress, Wyatt with the lamb, Cole’s hand on my back. We look like people who have no idea. Because we didn’t. I’d give a lot to be her again for one more Saturday.

Wyatt picked out a lamb for his sister. What did your oldest pick out for the new baby?

At 8:40 the next morning the nurse calls. Her name is Lorraine and she talks slow, like she’s done this a hundred times, which I guess she has. She says my file is already at the children’s hospital in Nashville and a fetal cardiologist wants to see us Friday. Then she says it. “Honey, I need you to hear this. Babies like yours go home. Not all of them, and not easy. But they go home.”

I write it on the back of the daycare invoice because it’s the only paper near me. They go home. I underline it twice.

Cole is in the kitchen pretending to eat cereal. I read it to him off the invoice and he puts the spoon down and nods, and nods, and keeps nodding, like if he stops his face will fall apart.

That afternoon I finally call my mom back. I’m in the car in the Kroger parking lot with the engine off, because Wyatt hears everything now. She picks up on the first ring and says “Kayla, what’s wrong” before I even say hi. I tell her. She doesn’t cry, which surprises me. She just says “Okay. I’m coming Thursday.” She doesn’t drive highways anymore. She’s going to take a Greyhound eleven hours with her bad hip for this.

Friday in Nashville is long. The scan takes almost two hours. A doctor with very gentle hands and a bowtie points at a gray screen and draws on a whiteboard. A small chamber, a big one. Probably three surgeries over her first few years, the first one in her first week. He doesn’t sugarcoat and he doesn’t scare me either. He just explains, again and again, until Cole stops asking the same question in different words.

I’ll have to deliver there. Not at our little hospital twenty minutes from home. Which means at 38 weeks we pack up and wait near the hospital, three hours from our own bed.

On the drive home we do math on a Cracker Barrel napkin. Gas, $62 each way. Lodging, who knows. Cole’s paycheck if he takes unpaid weeks. That last number makes us both go quiet. Three weeks ago my biggest worry was whether the double stroller fit in the trunk.

Sunday Cole gets up before anybody. I hear the truck leave. He’s gone almost four hours, doesn’t answer texts, and I’m halfway to scared when he pulls back in. He sits me down at the kitchen table, Play-Doh still stuck all over it.

He went to his boss’s house. Knocked on the door Sunday morning while the man was in his church clothes. Told him everything. And this boss, the one Cole has complained about for six years, the one who docked him once for being nine minutes late, listened to the whole thing on his porch. Then he said, “You take what you need. We’ll figure out the money.”

Cole cries telling me that. Not the baby part. That part. Somebody being kind when he was braced for the opposite.

Then there’s Wyatt. We don’t know how to explain it to a three year old, so we use the lamb. Cole holds it up and says sister’s heart is a little bit different, so when she’s born she’ll stay at a special hospital and the doctors will help her. Wyatt thinks about it very seriously. Then he takes the lamb, presses its floppy ear to my belly and whispers something we can’t hear. When I ask, he says “it’s a secret between us.”

I don’t push. Some things already belong to them.

That night I pack a bag. Way too early, I know. But my hands need something to do. Two nightgowns. Phone charger with the long cord. The tiny pink hat. The white dress, folded at the bottom, I don’t even know why. And the lamb, which Wyatt has agreed, after long negotiation and two popsicles, can go with sister “only for borrowing.”

Her name is Josie. We say it out loud on Monday for the first time. Josie Ann. It matters to me that she has a name before the doctors ever meet her.

I still sit on the bathroom floor some nights. That hasn’t stopped. But now I bring the invoice with me. They go home.

The park pictures are on the fridge now, printed at Walgreens. Wyatt touches the one with the lamb every morning before breakfast, like it’s a rule. And I’ve stopped wishing I could be that woman in the white dress again. She was happy. But she didn’t know a tired man could open his door on a Sunday. She didn’t know her son could keep a secret with his sister before she was even born.

I know now. I’m going to need every bit of it.