Every Human Love

Sarah had been walking around for weeks with a dead baby inside her. A dead man's dead baby. The baby was no bigger than her thumb, and she'd seen his tiny heart flickering on the screen just a month earlier. Now he appeared as a white, unmoving blob, a moth smooshed against a darkened windowpane.

"There's no heartbeat. I'm sorry," the lady with the ultrasound wand said. "Fetal demise."

Sarah was already crying at that point, and embarrassed to be crying, and embarrassed to be embarrassed. Because it happened, didn't it? She should have known. It was no disaster. Whole families got Ebola and died. This was nothing. Or hardly a thing. She should respond accordingly.

"I'm sorry," the lady said again. "Let's go find Dr. Adler."

Sarah wiped the goo off of her stomach and followed the lady. They went the back way because none of the other pregnant women, smug with their swollen bellies, wanted to see a weeping person with a dead smudge lodged in her uterus. The cruel part, it seemed to Sarah, was that her body hadn't notified her. It had allowed her to go about her business thinking everything was okay.

"Here," the lady said. "Have a seat." She pointed to an office chair in a windowless room—clearly an out-of-the-way setting in which to deal with hysterical women.

Sarah blew her nose and tried to calm herself. She thought of poems she remembered from fat anthologies with tissue-paper pages, poems written at the deaths of children—she had been an English major once—but this seemed to elevate her loss above what it was. She imagined she could feel the slight mass of the baby stilled inside her, its tiny weight like a stone dropped in a river.

When Dr. Adler walked in, she was tall and no-nonsense. Her hair was dyed an artificial shade of red. Sarah liked her clipped, business like manner.

"Do you have someone to pick you up? A partner? A spouse?"

Sarah nodded so as not to be more pitiable all the while knowing she would end up calling a cab. There was no spouse to call. She was a single integer now, bleak and autonomous, asexual as a sea sponge. She'd told no one about the baby.

Sarah's husband, her almost ex-husband, her estranged husband, Will—had he still been living—might have massaged her head afterwards, telling her it was all meant to be, that there would be other chances, that this was nature's way. His words might have partially comforted Sarah but also inspired in her the urge to cry, But I wanted that one.

She whispered it to herself now, But I wanted that one, over and over, a verbal compress against the ache—eventually realizing she was unsure whether she meant the baby, or Will, or both.

________

She was back at work two days later, bleeding any residual out of her and swallowing ibuprofen at scheduled intervals. It was amazing the things you could accomplish while nursing your own inconsequential misery.

"How are you feeling?" Tanea, one of her co-residents, asked, stirring powdered CoffeeMate into her coffee.

Sarah shook her head.

"I'm fine," she said. "A stomach thing."

Because why tell others about your small sadnesses? That wasn't the point of the job. The point of the job was other people unburdening themselves to you; you comforting them.

The community psychiatry clinic where they worked was small and drab and cluttered. Her tiny office had previously been a supply closet. The buzzing light gave the room a horror-movie-set vibe. Sarah hoped that her patients could not see the glue traps behind the shelves. She hoped the potted plant she'd put on her desk and the photograph of flowers on the wall gave the room a consoling quality that she herself was somehow not privy to.

There was not enough funding for psychiatry; the department didn't generate revenue for the hospital. The new part of the hospital...