The Appointment by Iris Rosewater

Amy was not running late to her appointment. She found herself, however, in an anxious flurry - fumbling with the hangers in her closet, looking wildly all over the apartment for her left boot, only to find it after ten minutes sitting innocently in the middle of the living room floor. She tried to look at her face without seeing herself as she applied make-up, drawing shakily around the rims of her honey-brown eyes with charcoal eyeliner, rubbing the mascara-smudge with a wet Q-tip. She met her reflection in the mirror and hesitated. A mixture of excitement and fear arranged her features unnaturally. She stopped and sat on the edge of the bath tub, forcing long, deep breaths through her short, shallow ones.

As she waited for Gabe at the doctor’s office, Amy distracted herself by looking around the waiting room. The walls were a soft orange sherbet color, with a floral wallpaper border. A table water fountain bubbled musically in the corner next to some oversized house plants with broad leaves that sprawled out and weaved between the legs of the seats beside them. The phone rang softly behind the secretary’s desk, and she answered each time using the same generic greeting, her voice rising and falling with the same melodic inflection. Otherwise, it was very quiet. Amy was glad to have made her appointment during a workday morning. The waiting room was sparsely filled. The patients sat with a comfortable number of empty chairs on either side, some thumbing through outdated Parents magazines or reading books they’d brought with them. Several women had large round bellies, all of whom seemed to smooth their hands over the protrusions absently. Amy looked away, as memories of her last visit to this office flooded into her mind.

When Amy found out she was pregnant, she was ecstatic. Gabe bought her pickles and chocolate to celebrate. They bought piles of books about pregnancy, marveling over the photos of zygotes and embryos, pouring over what to expect from week to week. They said goodnight to the baby when they went to sleep and Gabe kissed Amy’s belly good morning before he got up for work. They couldn’t wait to bring home a fuzzy black and white glimpse into her womb. When the day came for her very first ultrasound, they held hands as the technician dimmed the lights. She watched the monitor intently, searching with untrained eyes for a feature she could recognize… a hand, a curved spine, a silhouette… the flutter of a heart… but, it was over very quickly. She saw only for a few moments a small curled figure - still and white. The technician said something Amy didn’t hear and excused herself. And then the doctor returned alone. “It looks like this is a miscarriage. I’m so sorry.”

It rained that night, and Amy laid awake in her bed long after Gabe fell asleep. Her thoughts overtook any chance of rest. She wondered what she had done wrong… if maybe she shouldn’t have jogged in the mornings, or taken the cold medicine before she knew… as if it mattered now. Those questions quickly gave way to bigger ones and she stared at the shadow of her window on the wall, water splattering and smearing down the pane, evaluating her life. They were good people, weren’t they? She had felt so strongly that this was the right thing… maybe she had been wrong, and she was somehow unworthy of motherhood. Through the long night, sorrow gave way to anger and she felt cheated. Why would she be given a life only to have it snatched away? How stupid and silly of her to have believed this was real when it was only a cruel joke. She touched her belly, which entombed her deceased child and wept to the sound of the rain chiming against the dark glass.

It was seven harrowing days before the bleeding began, and it came so heavily and painfully that she felt faint. She realized distantly, crumpled and groaning in bed, that this must be what it feels like to give birth, and then almost laughed through the misery of it, because she also realized that she was.

For weeks, the public was a brutal place to be. Everywhere she went, she was surrounded by what was denied her. Pregnant women seemed to congregate at the grocery store, leaning back uncomfortably, looking flushed and exasperated in the summer heat. Babies chewed on their chubby little hands, babbling and cooing with gorgeous round eyes at their mothers, who seemed always to ignore them. The jealousy was consuming. In her mind, Amy judged them for taking what they had for granted. And what they had was everything… and what she had was nothing… until Christmas came.

On Christmas morning, Amy felt a bit “off” again. The celebratory brunch made her stomach churn just smelling it as she walked through her parent’s front door. Nibbling her toast (and breathing through her mouth discreetly) she ticked off the days since her last period. She was terrible about keeping track, but it had been irregular since that Summer, so she had stopped paying much attention. The numbers added up like a punch in the stomach and she politely excused herself from the table, grabbing her purse and keys on a hunt for an open drug store.

As Gabe arrived at the office and they kissed hello, their tension met and multiplied. They were much more guarded this time, unwilling to believe that it was real, afraid to dangle their hopes at the altitude from which they had previously fallen.

With sweaty hands clasped, they watched with unbridled emotion, the tiny black and white strobe of their baby’s heart.