When the Mother finally woke up in the hospital’s ICU, her Husband was the one who broke the news: Catastrophic Obstetrical Hemorrhage. He said it twice, although the Mother had already figured it out, had already guessed that she wouldn’t have a tube in her nose and one down her throat and giant cuffs around her legs that squeezed and released every time a machine went hee and whoosh, unless something catastrophic had happened.

She looked up at him through the tubes and wires and asked him with her eyes, What happened? and Where is the Baby? and Tell me?

The Baby was fine. He was in the nursery and her Sister was with him. She was glad to hear that, to know that if the Baby couldn’t be with her, couldn’t be sleeping peacefully on her chest, rising and falling with her breath, at least he wasn’t alone.

They had to operate on you to stop the bleeding, said the Husband.

So that explained all the tubes and machines.

They said they’d never seen anything like it, he said, like the way you bled. You bled so fast you had a seizure. You’ve been asleep since the surgery. That was two days ago.

A seizure! Sleeping for two days! Her maternity leave was only four months long and only that long because she had worked until the bitter end and didn’t take vacation days. She didn’t have time for seizures and sleeping. She was supposed to have been home by now. She had a lot to learn. How to change a diaper. How to give a bath with one hand. How to take care of the belly button. How to protect the Baby from terrorists, priests, and cousins who didn’t wash their hands. Danger was everywhere. Who had time to sleep? She had given up on sleep in her first trimester.

They had to give you a lot of blood, the Husband said, his whisper cracking just a little, tripping under the weight of the word blood, but then clearing, rising and bravely going on. He was not usually brave. She was the brave one. The one who never panicked. She had done enough of that earlier, when she was dating and single and getting tired of being alone. She was the calm one, no matter what, even when a huge thunder storm shredded their backyard tent on their wedding day. Even when their washer and dryer broke within a week of each other and they were still paying off the tent. He was the one who had to get the calculator out every five minutes so he could run the numbers one more time and hyperventilate. But not now. Now he was grateful and brave and a new man. She could see it in his face. He was so relieved, he glowed.

Really a lot, he said. Seventeen units. They told me that’s a record for someone your size.

So that explained it, the feeling that she barely existed in this light. That her outline was fuzzy. That if it weren’t for the tubes she would be hard to see. That despite being 15 pounds over her ideal pregnancy weight she would liquefy and simply disappear into the sheets. Poof. Just like that...

(Online subscribers have full access to the story: please login if you are an online subscriber, or go to our subscriptions page if you would like to subscribe)