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Chapter 145


AN: Thanks to everyone who gave their input on the last chapter!!


Claire was sent home from the hospital with medications to keep her heart rate and blood pressure under control, a host of literature about multifetal reduction, and a horrible decision to make.

“I’m afraid the procedure needs to be done between the tenth and twelfth weeks of pregnancy,” Dr. Gray had told her, which gave her a window of only two weeks to decide; she was going into her tenth week now. “Go home, think on it for a few days, a week, however long you need. Call me at my office when you’ve decided what you want to do.”

She had given Claire a business card with her phone numbers at both the hospital and her separate obstetrics clinic. The small, white card now sat on the kitchen counter, near the phone. Someone – apparently Jamie – had turned it upside down, as if to make it less noticeable, but there it remained, the blank white reminder that made Claire’s stomach turn over in dread every time she caught sight of it.

If it was up to her, she wouldn’t have gone into the kitchen at all; she hadn’t had much of an appetite since coming home from the hospital. But Jamie kept insisting that she eat and drink plenty of water. “You have to take care of yourself and our babies,” he would say. “You have to do everything you can to stay healthy and make this work.”

Those were the longest sentences he’d spoken to her since driving her home from the hospital. Ever since her discharge, he had been sullen and withdrawn, much like he had acted when Dr. Gray had delivered her grim verdict in the hospital. Rather than sitting down with her to talk about the choices they had to make together, he had thrown himself into getting their new house in order and seemed determined to do it all by himself. When she tried to help, he told her to go rest, and if she sat down in the same room as him, he found an excuse to send her away or leave himself. When they did cross paths, he pestered her about eating and drinking and taking her medicine, as if she wasn’t used to remembering to take it herself.

At night, when she retreated to bed, he stayed up, watching TV on the couch into the wee hours of the morning and eventually crashing there. She sometimes got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and found him there, staring at the TV like a zombie as he flipped channels, barely pausing to even take in what was on the screen. If he even noticed her, he never said a word.

For the first two days, Claire gave him his space. This was his way of dealing with problems, of grieving: he shut himself up and avoided everyone and everything, including the problem itself. He had always been like that. Even in high school, when he had a big game or a big test coming up, he would hole himself up in his room, refusing to go out with her or even to talk on the phone until whatever was bothering him had passed. She’d always assumed he was in there studying or looking over soccer plays, but if she offered to help, he always refused. Now she wondered if he’d just lain on his bed and flipped channels, though that didn’t explain his good grades or amazing soccer performances.

Jamie was a typical guy in those respects; most of the time, he was very closed-off emotionally, and he didn’t like to talk about his feelings or his problems. She had always been surprised he had called her when his father had died, asking her to come to Iowa, for even when they were dating, he hadn’t liked to lean on her for emotional support. It happened, of course; like anyone who kept too many emotions and burdens bottled up, he was prone to exploding now and then, and she’d seen him through more of those outbursts than she could count, most of them involving him raging and then sobbing against her, his troubles finally escaping through a flood of tears. It happened every time, once he’d built up enough, and she wondered when he would ever learn to just talk to her in the first place. She’d thought he was getting better with age, but here he was again, avoiding her and the heavy burden hanging over their heads.

She understood why he was acting the way he was, but at the same time, she couldn’t stand it, mostly because she was the exact opposite. Most of the time, she said what she felt; it killed her to keep her thoughts and feelings bottled up inside. She liked to talk things out, so being left to her own thoughts for two days straight, when she was desperate to talk about the decision she knew she and Jamie couldn’t avoid forever, was like dying a slow death. It was agonizing.

The worst part was that she had no idea what he was thinking. What did he want to do? Which option was he leaning towards? He had given her no indication; from his reaction, all she could deduce was that he was angry. But angry at what, exactly? Was he mad at her? Or just the situation itself? She couldn’t tell.

And even though he had left her to think things out on her own, she wasn’t sure about her own feelings either. Mostly, she felt torn. She had no idea what she was going to do. It was the worst decision she’d ever had to make: sacrifice one of the babies she’d been through so much to conceive, in order to save herself and the other two, or keep all three and risk losing everything, including her own life?

Even though she’d been through the pros and cons of both choices time and time again, it was hard to think rationally about such a decision. It wasn’t as if she could take a tally of each and choose the one with the best score. This was a matter of her heart and soul, not her brain; logic didn’t count. And her soul felt was if it were split in half.

A large part of her flat-out refused to even consider the idea of aborting one of the babies. They were her children, all three of them, and though unborn inside of her, they were alive; she had seen and heard all three of their tiny hearts beating. How could she think of choosing to make one stop? It went against everything she had always believed. It was murder, and murder was a mortal sin. As a Catholic, she had always been held to that belief, but even though she had fallen out with the Catholic Church over her in vitro fertilization, she still maintained it. In choosing to go through with the reduction, she would be, in essence, killing one of her babies.

But what if she decided not to go through with it? What would she be doing then? It was impossible to know, and that scared her. What was even more frightening was that fact that if she took such a risk, she could end up condemning all three babies to an early death or a futile existence because of the complications that could result from a difficult pregnancy. As much as it hurt her to think of losing one of them, it killed her to imagine losing all three. She had been through so much to conceive them; she wanted them so badly it hurt, and yet, if something terrible happened because of her decision, she could end up with nothing to show for it all, no children to love and raise. And with all of her problems and the age of the embryos that were still frozen at the clinic in Tampa, who knew if she would ever be able to get pregnant again. This could be her one and only chance to have children of her own.

And of course, she had to think of herself too. In some ways, it seemed selfish, but even in thinking first of her children, she had to think of herself. The truth was, she didn’t want to die young, and she didn’t want to give birth to three children, only to leave them motherless and Jamie without a wife. She wanted to enjoy being a mother and live a long life, the life cancer had nearly taken away from her. She had fought hard for it, and she wasn’t about to give up now.

But for one of her children…? It seemed a mother’s duty to risk her life for her child. What kind of mother would she be if she did the opposite?

Even though she had been going to bed early most nights, tiring faster than usual because of the strains of pregnancy, these troubling thoughts kept her awake in the middle of the night. Knowing that Jamie, too, was sitting up at the other end of the house, with the same things on his mind, made her wonder, why wouldn’t he just talk to her??

This decision wasn’t going to be easy to make, in any case, but it seemed it would help if she and her husband could just communicate. She knew one thing for sure: she couldn’t make this decision on her own. The babies growing inside her were Jamie’s too, and she wouldn’t do anything without her husband’s support.

She just wished she knew what he wanted to do.

On the third morning, after two days of letting him have his space and solitude, Claire decided it was high time to confront Jamie. She let him putter in the basement while she stayed upstairs, battling the usual morning nausea, but when he came up for lunch, she had two sandwiches waiting on the kitchen table, across from one another.

“Oh,” said Jamie, stopping in his tracks when he saw that she’d set the table for two. “You made lunch.”

“Roast beef, from the deli,” she replied. “Hope that’s okay. I was going to make chicken salad, but the smell of mayonnaise makes me want to hurl now, so…”

“This is good,” Jamie said, in the same monotone he’d been speaking in for three days. He walked over to one of the plates, hesitated for a few seconds, and then picked it up, turning around slowly. “I… I’m just gonna take this downstairs,” he muttered, avoiding her eyes. “I’m working on getting the entertainment center set up, and there’s all this wiring… if I take a break, I’ll forget what I’m doing and-”

“The entertainment center can wait,” Claire interrupted him in her best no-nonsense voice, giving him a hard stare. When he looked up, meeting her eyes briefly with a begrudging look in his own, she added sarcastically, “I’m sure you want to get it all hooked up so you can escape down there and watch TV for hours on end instead of up here, but we need to talk.”

For a moment, Jamie looked as if he were about to argue, but he must have realized he had no argument because he finally sighed instead. “Fine,” he agreed and set his plate back down, slumping into his chair.

She sat down across from him, her heart beating fast. He still wouldn’t look at her, choosing to stare down at his sandwich instead, but she knew this was progress. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to keep him here, though, so, ignoring her own sandwich, she decided to just get on with the talking. “I know you’ve been avoiding me,” she said, “and it’s got to stop. We have to talk about this, Jamie; we can’t pretend the problem doesn’t exist. We only have two weeks to make this decision.”

“What decision?” he snapped, finally looking up, his eyes boring into hers, icy, yet full of fire at the same time. “We’re not killing our baby,” he spat, the words like rot on his tongue.

She swallowed hard, her heart pounding faster. Deep down, she supposed she had always known he would be against the idea of an abortion; he, too, was Catholic and a more devout one than her. But she hadn’t expected such a strong reaction from him.

It could have made her decision much easier, hearing such a heated conviction spat from her husband’s lips, but instead, to her surprise, it invoked a fire from deep inside her. The choice wasn’t his to make alone; who did he think he was, ordering her around like that?

She frowned slowly. “Have you even thought about it?” she asked, determining not to snap back at him. One of them had to stay calm, or they’d never be able to have a rational talk. “Or is that it?”

“What do you mean, is that it?” He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Don’t tell me you’re considering going through with it! How could you even think of doing that? Selective reduction? Is that what that woman called it? It’s abortion, Claire, and it’s murder. You can’t honestly tell me you’ve been thinking of letting her murder our child!”

Tears sprang to Claire’s eyes at the harshness in his words. She tried to blink them away, hating them for being there, but any hope of calmness was quickly evading her. “Of course I don’t want her to m-murder our child!” she cried, finding it hard to even repeat his awful words. “But I’ve been thinking about it… about both sides… and I don’t know what I want to do!”

“Well, you just said you don’t want to murder our baby. So what decision is there?” Jamie repeated, without compassion.

She bowed her head, the tears starting to fall. They’d been together only minutes, and already, this was going horribly. “I don’t want to die either,” she murmured. When he didn’t respond, she forced herself to look up. His image swam before her streaming eyes. “Does that make me a horrible, selfish person?”

Jamie didn’t answer. He stared at her for a few agonizing seconds, his face like cement, set and unyielding. Then his chin trembled, ever so slightly, but before the façade could break, he stood up, shoving his chair back roughly. “We’re not having this conversation now,” he muttered in her general direction, and before she could stop him, he stormed back downstairs, leaving his sandwich uneaten on the table.

“Jamie! Jamie, get back here; you can’t keep doing this to me!” she yelled, jumping up. She hurried after him, but he’d already slammed the basement door shut before she could get downstairs. She went down anyway, only to find he’d locked the door. She turned and twisted the knob with fury, then resorted to banging on the door. “Open the damn door!!” she screamed through solid wood. “You can’t avoid me forever!! We have to talk about this!!”

“We just did!” Jamie called back shortly. “You know how I feel! Now go back upstairs before you hurt yourself or our children!”

Her pulse was racing, and she could feel her blood pressure rising. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew he was right, but at the moment, she hated him for patronizing her, for telling her what to do. If I do, it’ll be YOUR fault! she wanted to scream, but it was a low blow, and she resisted the impulse.

She raged against the door for a few more seconds, but when he stopped answering her, refusing to budge, she finally gave up and fumed back upstairs. Calm down… calm down, she warned herself, as she paced back and forth across the kitchen floor, her hands clenched into angry fists. But she could not calm down. Her anger dissolved into another emotional torrent of tears, and she finally collapsed onto the couch, clutching a throw pillow to her chest as she sobbed, leaving tearstains across its pattern.

It had been a long time since she had cried like this. The last time she remembered sobbing so was when Casey had died. His death, while not unexpected, had been devastating to her, but even then, she’d had people with whom to share the grief. Casey’s family, of course… and Nick. She remembered how, even though it had been only weeks since their break-up, he had been there for her, turning up for the funeral and sitting with her, rubbing her shoulder in a show of sweet, quiet compassion.

But right now, she felt like she had no one. Jamie had shut her out, refusing to talk to her, leaving her to deal with this horrible weight on her shoulders all on her own. It seemed too heavy a weight to bear alone, even on the strongest set of shoulders, and she wasn’t feeling particularly strong at the moment.

She’d been trying to deal with this on her own for three days, waiting until she could talk to her husband before involving anyone else, but now she knew she could not stand it anymore. She had to talk to someone, and if Jamie refused, it would have to be someone else.

Still crying, she reached for the cordless phone and dialed with difficulty, her hands shaking, the numbers swimming before her eyes. Nevertheless, she managed to push them in the correct sequence, and when a deep voice rumbled, “Hello?” she nearly collapsed with the utter relief at hearing him, the one person who had always made her feel safe and protected. Already, her burden felt just a little lighter, as if he had taken a corner of it for himself without her even asking.

“Daddy,” she said with difficulty, her voice choked.

“Claire?? What’s the matter, sweetheart??”

Through her tears, she smiled a little; of course, he could tell something was wrong, even in just a word. She swallowed, trying to get some control over her voice. “Can you put Mom on too? I need to talk to you…”

Her parents listened and advised her with all the love and compassion her husband could not seem to muster. They let her cry, trying to soothe her and sympathize with her as she got out everything that had happened over the last few days. And once she had calmed down, they just talked, openly, non-judgmentally and without hostility. It was the kind of conversation she had hoped to have with Jamie.

Their reactions surprised her. Though she knew they cared about her above anything, her mother and father were both Catholics who had raised her and Kyle in the Church and continued to go to weekly mass themselves. She had expected them to be against the idea of the reduction, inevitably, though not as condemning as Jamie.

But they weren’t. In their eyes, her life was more important than anything.

“You have to think of your own health too, sweetheart,” her father said. “You’ve been through so much already… I couldn’t stand to see my daughter beat cancer, only to die from something else that could have been prevented. Parents aren’t supposed to outlast their kids, you know; I want to see you live a long, happy life and be there for my grandkids. And it doesn’t matter how many grandkids there are… you giving us any is a miracle in itself, right?”

His words brought a fresh batch of tears to her eyes, but they stung far less than the ones she had cried earlier.

Her mother added, “I know how awful this must be for you. I can’t imagine what I would have done if my doctor had suggested something like this when I was pregnant with you or Kyle. I would never condone a woman’s having an abortion done just because she didn’t want the baby… but I know you want these babies more than anything. It’s just a cruel twist of fate, what’s happened. I think your dad’s right – you need to think of your own life and the other babies. And Jamie. I know he’s giving you a hard time, but he would be so devastated if anything happened to you, sweetheart. Maybe he’ll come around when he realizes he could lose you too.”

“Maybe,” Claire sniffled. “I don’t know, Mom. I think he’s in denial right now… I think he just wants to avoid the whole issue and pretend like nothing’s wrong.”

“Well, give him some time to cool down and think things over, and then try to talk to him again. And in the meantime, you know you can talk to us anytime. We’ll support you no matter what decision you end up making. I just wish I could be there for you, baby… I’m so sorry you’re having to go through this all alone. If you want us to fly up…”

“No, don’t do that… This is for Jamie and I to handle, and I know we will. He just needs more time, I guess…”

After reassuring her parents that she would be all right and that she would keep in touch, Claire hung up. She felt better after talking to them, knowing that they, at least, would support whatever decision she and Jamie made.

But she was still filled with uncertainty. Would she and Jamie actually be able to come to a decision, together?

***