Still (Grip Book 2)(57)

"Did you have it? The drink, I mean?"

I'm asking more than this. She knows it, and her slim shoulders stiffen.

"Not yet." She shakes her head, bites her lip. "Does it matter if I do?"

I'm still not ready.

"What were you looking at on your phone?" I dodge her question, avoid my answer.

Her eyes are windows with bars. Showing me just slices of what she's  feeling before she tucks it away behind her lowered lashes. One shoulder  lifts and falls. I grab her phone from the floor beneath the arch of  her knees and press the home button, bringing up the last thing she saw.

"Grip, don't look-"

"Shit." The strangled curse garrotes my throat. I blink over and over,  but the images don't disappear. Stubbornly, they barely blur as the  first tears sting my eyes. It's a page of horrors: bulging eyeballs  straining from babies' faces, rounded backs and the exposed gray matter  coils of brains, heads half gone, tiny bodies twisted into a mangle of  flesh and bone.

"This is how she'll be?"

They aren't my words. It's not my question, but it takes over and barges  past my lips. It uses my voice. It possesses me, this demon question I  hope she won't answer.

"Maybe." Bristol swallows audibly, her mouth unsteady before she disciplines it into a straight line. "Probably."

There is nothing I've ever experienced that prepares me for these  images, for the possibility that this will be my daughter and then she  will die. Looking at these pictures, I can't help but ask if death would  be a mercy. Am I merciful? Am I selfish? Shallow? Weak? These are just  words, assigning no value to the emotions rioting inside of me. I am  under siege. Terror, rage, and hurt are a fevered mob, torches lit and  setting my heart on fire. It's not fair. All my life I've been tuned in  to injustices, to inequities, but at this moment, they all fade to  nothing. They are dust compared to this. This . . . this is not fair,  that a baby, not even fully formed, has a death sentence waiting for  her, that this world is already tuning its instruments for a dirge, a  requiem for her life before it begins.

This is injustice.

"What do you want?" Bristol finally asks.

And there it is. She's braver than I am. She asked me the question I  came to ask her but haven't been able to. It's the same question she  asked me before I moved to New York, when I wanted her with me but  didn't want to pressure her. I find myself once again possessing power I  don't want to use.

"Bris, you have to decide that."

"This is just as much your baby as it is mine." Her voice is a thin line  that wavers then draws taut. "Don't abdicate this to me. Don't do  that."

"I'm not abdicating."

"We have to decide together."

"We will. I just . . . you heard what Dr. Wagner said."

She said Bristol's body will keep preparing for what's supposed to  happen. It doesn't know to stop. Her pelvic bones will still stretch.  Her ankles will still swell. Her milk will come in. Her body will ready  itself for a child whose death is a foregone conclusion. No matter what  course of action we choose, she won't live. If she does come into the  world, these pictures on Bristol's phone, heavy in my hand, are her  short-lived destiny.         

     



 

"It's your body, Bris." I grit my teeth, but the words escape and I  prepare myself for whatever she decides. "I want you to . . ."

The words hang in my throat, choked and unsaid.

"What do you want to do, Grip?" She moves quickly, settling on my lap,  facing me with her knees on either side of my legs. I stare down at the  little mound of baby taking up the small space between us.

Dwell in possibility.

It's a practical joke now.

"What do you want?" Bristol dips her head to catch my eyes in the weak light.

"Dr. Wagner-"

"Is not my husband." Bristol's words cut over mine. "Tell me what you want."

"This decision-"

"Is ours, not just mine." She leans forward until our foreheads press  together, the contact reminding me of who we were before this thing took  over our lives, reminding me of our honesty, our intimacy that  transcended flesh.

"Please tell me, Grip," she whispers, her cool breath fanning over my lips like a kiss, begging for entry.

"I want her."

The words fly from my mouth like arrows, aiming for Bristol's heart. If  she wants to know what I'm feeling, I'll tell her and hope that she  feels it, too.

"I want to meet her and hold her." Tears flood my throat and then spill  hot down my cheeks. "I don't give a damn if she's here three minutes,  three hours, three days. I want her to know that as long as she is in  this world, her parents love her unconditionally, that we loved her so  much, we had to have her . . . even if we knew it couldn't last, even  though we knew it would kill us to lose her, we had to have her."

I immediately regret saying it. I understand the power Bristol has over  me, that what she wants, I want to give her, and I hold that same power  over her. If she goes through with this because of what I just said, and  it's too much . . .

"Yes." For the first time, Bristol meets my eyes squarely. A new fire  has burned away the haze. They're lit again, lit with determination and  the fierce love few are capable of. "I want that, too."

"Are you sure, Bris?" My question is a raggedy-roped bridge between us. One wrong step and it could fall-we could fall.

"I'm sure." She shifts until she's no longer straddling me, and presses  her shoulder into my chest. Her head tucks under my chin. "I can't  terminate, Grip. I wouldn't judge another woman who did-I've always been  pro-choice, you know that."

She looks up, her lashes damp, her lips stung and swollen from her  teeth. God, she's breaking my heart. I thought Dr. Wagner's diagnosis  drove a stake through me, but seeing Bristol suffer through this is a  level of agony I can't even put into words.

"But this is my choice," she says, eyes locked with mine, searching mine. "This is our baby, and I want to have her."

I can't resist rubbing the subtle roundness of her belly, twin shafts of  pain and joy coursing through me at the contact. Our little girl. If we  do this, every moment of joy will be shadowed by pending pain. Can we  do that? Endure that?

"Bris, this isn't something you can un-decide later." I push unruly  tendrils of her hair back, needing to see her face clearly. The eyes  that stare back at me are clearer than I've seen them since Dr. Wagner  first told us what she suspected. Bristol's backbone is reinforced with  steel, and I see evidence of it in her eyes: a steely determination, a  certainty I can't argue with.

"I understand what this means," she says, closing her eyes briefly.  "That once she's born, there'll be more pain than we can fully  comprehend right now. I'm going into this with my eyes wide open."

Stretching to grab her phone from the floor, she opens a new browser  window, quickly bypassing the photos that disturbed me when I first came  in.

"Tell me again what you used to whisper to her," Bristol says.

The words "used to" grab me by the throat. Ever since we found out  Bristol was pregnant, I talked to our baby every day, several times a  day, every time I got the chance. For the last ten days, I haven't said a  word to the baby. It's like I was preparing myself for the fact that  she was already gone, or that she would never come. Shame spears me.

"Um, I used to say . . ." I lick my lips. "I tell her to dwell in possibility."

"What's possible, Grip?" Bristol asks. "I mean, we know what won't happen."

The fierce light that has entered Bristol's eyes dims for a moment.

"She won't live a long life," she says softly. "She may not even live at  all outside of my body. We know what isn't possible, but what is?"         

     



 

"I don't know, Bris," I confess. Our options seem narrow. Our choices  are crap. I'm the guy who defied every odd to achieve the things I have,  to build the life I have, but I've finally met a mountain I can't  conquer. "What's possible?"

"Life," she whispers. "Maybe not for our little girl, but for someone  else's. For someone else, she could save a life. She could do a lot of  good whether she's here for a moment or for . . ."

Bristol looks down at the phone in her hand and shows me the screen.

It's a website dedicated to neonatal organ donation. I read through the  information, shocked to see the organization was founded by parents who  lost their baby to anencephaly.

"This is possibility." Bristol cups my jaw and lays her head against my  face. Her damp lashes blink on my cheek. "I can't terminate this  pregnancy. I can't make myself do it, and I need to feel that it's not  in vain."

I get it. I feel the same way, and this route feels like the only thing  close to possibility in this scenario, but it will carry a heavy price,  one we can't even begin to calculate.