At First Sight - Nicholas Sparks [106]
“I had her moved here, so you could have some privacy,” the doctor said. His face was grim, and he placed a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. “Take all the time you need. I’m so very sorry.”
Jeremy ignored the doctor’s words. His hand trembled as he reached for the door. It weighed a ton, ten tons, a hundred, but somehow he was able to open it. His eyes were drawn to the figure in the bed. She lay unmoving, with no equipment hooked up, no monitors, no IVs. She’d looked this way a hundred times in the mornings. She was sleeping, her hair spread over the pillow . . . but strangely, her arms were at her sides. Straight, as if they’d been placed in that position by someone who didn’t know her.
His throat clenched and his vision became a tunnel, everything black except her. She was the only thing he could see, but he didn’t want to see her like this. Not this way. Not with her arms like that. She had to be okay. She was only thirty-two. She was healthy and strong and a fighter. She loved him. She was his life.
But those arms . . . those arms were wrong . . . they should have been bent at the elbows, one hand over her head or on her belly. . . .
He couldn’t breathe.
His wife was gone . . .
His wife . . .
It wasn’t a dream. He knew that now, and he let the tears flow unchecked, sure they would never stop.
Sometime later, Doris came in to say good-bye as well, and Jeremy left her alone with her granddaughter. He moved through the hallway in a trance, only vaguely noticing the nurses he passed in the hallway and the volunteer who was pushing a cart past him. They seemed to ignore him completely, and he didn’t know whether they avoided looking his way because they knew what happened or because they didn’t.
He returned to the room where he’d met the doctor, feeling drained and weak. He couldn’t cry anymore. There was nothing left, and he simply didn’t have the energy. It was all he could do not to collapse. He replayed the images from the delivery room countless times, trying to figure out the exact instant the embolism had been triggered, thinking he might have seen something to warn him of what was coming. Had it been when she gasped? Had it happened a moment later? He couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt, as if he should have convinced her to have a cesarean section, or at least not to strain as much as she had, as if her strenuous efforts had triggered it. He was angry with himself, angry with God, angry with the doctor. And he was angry with the baby.
He didn’t even want to see the baby, believing that somehow, in the act of receiving life, the baby had taken one in exchange. If it weren’t for the baby, Lexie would still be with him. If it weren’t for the baby, their last months together would have been devoid of stress. If it weren’t for the baby, he might have been able to make love to his wife. But all that was gone now. The baby had taken all of it. Because of the baby, his wife was dead. And Jeremy felt dead as well.
How could he ever love her? How could he ever forgive her? How could he see her or hold her and forget that she’d taken Lexie’s life in exchange for her own? How was he not supposed to hate her for what she had done to the woman he loved?
He recognized the irrationality of his feelings and sensed their insidious, evil character. It was wrong, it went against everything a parent was supposed to feel, but how could he silence his heart? How could he possibly say good-bye to Lexie in one moment and say hello to the baby in the next? And how was he supposed to act? Was he supposed to scoop her in his arms and coo sweetly, as other fathers would be doing? As if nothing at all had happened to Lexie?
And then what? After she came home from the hospital? At the moment, he couldn’t imagine having to take care of someone else; it was everything he could do not to curl up on the floor right now. He knew nothing about infants, and the only thing he was certain about was that they were supposed to be with their mothers. It was Lexie who had read all the books; it was Lexie who’d baby-sat as a child. Throughout the pregnancy,