Within minutes the equipment had been wheeled in and Taina lay with one arm behind her head looking at the screen as the doctor ran the scanner over her stomach. “There’s nothing there, doctor. I told you.” She turned her head to Daidan whose eyes were firmly on the screen. “Daidan, this is a waste of time. Let’s go home.” Then Daidan’s eyes opened wide. “There’s nothing there, I tell you,” she insisted.
He nodded. “Look, Taina, just look.”
She didn’t dare. Fear seized her and she continued to look at Daidan. She felt herself beginning to shake. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t.” She wiped away a tear as it tracked down her face, but more followed. “I can’t,” she repeated, her voice suddenly hoarse.
Daidan squeezed her hand. “Yes, you can. Look, Taina, look.”
Slowly Taina turned to face the screen. There the flowing, moving contours suddenly stopped to reveal a tiny form. She didn’t have to see its shape, its features, to know what she was seeing. She’d seen the same thing a year ago—larger, more clear, but the same and she remembered how she’d felt with vivid clarity. How she’d hated the vision, how she’d wished it dead.
With tears streaming down her face, she looked up at Daidan and shook her head. “I wished her dead,” she whispered between sobs.
He took hold of her, his gaze no longer on the screen, but on Taina. “What? What did you say?”
“I wished her dead.” She gulped. “When I saw her like this. It was my fault. My fault that she died.”
“What are you talking about?”
But Taina had to get out of there and pushed away the scanner, the other stuff and stood up, pulling down her top. “I’ve got to go, Daidan. I have to go, now.”
The doctor frowned and spoke briefly to Daidan. Taina couldn’t hear what he said because she was out of there. Pushing open the door, as if in slow motion, walking outside, breathing deeply, trying to control the grief that threatened to overwhelm her.
She got in the car and waited, gasping as she tried to catch her breath between sobs. Then Daidan got in the driver’s seat and watched her. “Here, the doctor gave me some pills to help you calm down.” She swallowed them and rested her head back against the seat with a shuddering breath.
“I’m okay. Let’s go home.”
He nodded and drove to the port where he helped her onto the waiting boat. It was only when they’d reached the island, that the staff had been dismissed, that there was only the two of them, that he asked her the question she’d been waiting for.
“Why did you wish your child to be dead, Taina? Why? I don’t understand.”
She was lulled by the pills the doctor had given her. She felt dreamy, unreal. She rolled her head on the back of the sofa to face him. His face seemed to come into and out of focus. But his words hammered home with deathly clarity.
“Why?”
“Because…” She closed her eyes. It could have been for a second or minutes. But when she opened them he was still looking at her intently. She struggled to sit up and took a drink of water that had miraculously appeared beside her. “Because I didn’t want her.”
“Why?”
The word came to her like a breath of wind, barely felt, hardly heard. “Why? Because she reminded me of something I wanted to forget.”
This time there was no prompting question. But she heard his unspoken question nevertheless, like it was a command she wanted to answer.
She sighed and lay back again, looking straight at one of her mother’s paintings. “How she began. The violence of her… conception…” She closed her eyes again and when she opened them, again she wondered if she’d been asleep for moments only or minutes. “Or not so violent. Apparently the drug I’d been given in my drink had knocked me out so that I could see and feel everything, I just couldn’t respond. So no violence required. Just…” She rubbed her wrists but didn’t elaborate. There was a long pause. “I was raped, Daidan. My child was a product of a rape. That is why I wished her dead.”
Daidan didn’t think he’d ever forget the look of numb grief on her face. And he’d certainly never forget how he felt. No matter that he didn’t let it surface. There was time later for that. But he knew what he needed to do. He simply held her. She didn’t cry again, the drugs had dulled her emotional pain. But he knew it would be different the next day.
Lulled by his reassurance and the numbing of the sedative she soon fell asleep. He carried her over to the bed. Deliberately and carefully he pulled off her shoes and brought the covers over her. Then he stood back and looked at her and his heart ached. He’d wanted to protect Taina from the whole world. He’d wanted her never to be hurt. He’d wanted to always care for her, to love her with a simple, strong love that would survive everything. Instead, he’d driven her away, into the arms of a rapist. And it had been his fault.