Shan cringed at such a clinical word, its cruelty in this context. For the doctor, it was only a fetus, one of many she would see throughout her day. For Shan, it was her sweet baby. Come, my little one, please, now, for Mama. Please stay with me. I love you so much.

That’s when she noticed the stillness. During the last ultrasound, their baby had squirmed and flitted, had danced and waved. This time it resembled a leaf floating on the surface of the pond.

CHAPTER NINE

The two days after the miscarriage had been a fog. A comforter of used tissues. Half-drunk mugs of herbal tea. The cotton of an Ibuprofen bottle. Plates with peanut butter crackers, slightly burnt grilled cheese, just how she liked it. Except she no longer had an appetite. Her bedsheets stank of tears and sweat. Her hair knotted like a nest against the pillow. Because the ultrasound was late on Friday, the D&C to remove the baby had to be scheduled for first thing Monday morning.

The delay was agonizing.

A few hours after her ultrasound appointment, her ob-gyn had called to ask Shan if she wanted to know the sex. How odd it was to ask this question, under these circumstances—that one could even know the sex of a baby this small. Shan didn’t think she could feel any more agony in that moment, but as the tears spilled down her cheeks, she said, “Yes.”

“It’s a boy.”

The present tense had confused Shan, made her feel, for one brief hopeful interlude, that the baby was still alive, that the radiologist’s initial diagnosis of a nonviable pregnancy had been false. But no, the baby, the boy, her son, was still gone. Her doctor may have thought she was being kind, allowing Shan to feel one second of happiness, of pride, affording her a fuller imagination of who their baby might have become. But possessing this knowledge that she was carrying a son gutted her even more. It made their baby less of a hypothetical, more real.

Shan sat up and dragged her legs off the bed. Early that morning, Max announced that he had to go into the office. “On a Sunday?” she asked. “Two days after our miscarriage?” He mumbled something about trial preparation and she let it go. He’d barely spoken since the ultrasound, had been lost somewhere in his mind as he puttered throughout the house. She knew the miscarriage had been hard on him, wanted to believe he felt the grief as deeply as she did.