Tears cascaded down her face as she tossed and turned. Her long, golden hair whipping around her shoulders, splashed across her sleeping husband’s face. Rubbing the crust from his eyes, he leaned on one elbow. This was the third time this week she had woke him up in the middle of the night. Gently, he laid his tan hand down on her shoulder and shook.
“Belle, wake up. Honey… honey.” She jolted up, her eyes scrambling around the room to find out where she was.
“Oh Gary, it was awful.” She leaned into his comforting arms and sobbed.
“Shhhh, it was just a nightmare. You’re okay. It’s okay,” Gary said, rubbing her back.
No it’s not just a dream. Our baby died. The baby I was carrying to save our marriage died.
Isabella fell back into a restless sleep, as her husband tried to comfort her, but every time sleep came her dreams were filled with blood and a pain you would never wish on your worst enemy. The nastiest part of it all: every drop of it was true. Here in dream land the truths of your past that no one had ever heard came to greet you again. They laugh and torment you down to your soul until your sobbing, and your husband has to shake you to wake up. Isabella was lured down to sleep by the crying of a baby she never met. As she swirled down the black hole behind her eyelids, the calendars ripped back to twenty years ago.
A scared and shaken teenage girl had just found out she was pregnant. With no where to run the girl grabs scissors and rips at her stomach which is now growing by the second. Blood spills all around her, seeping into the white, porcelain carpet. No one was there to hear her dying screams or to witness the murder of an unborn child. Once again Isabella wakes up screaming and in cold sweats, but this time her husband wasn’t at her bed side. He had gone to work a few short hours ago.
Isabella slinked out of her damp teddy and started the shower in their adjoining master bathroom. The sound of the scolding water soothed her shivers and trembles. She opened the shower door and drifted into the hot steam that was plowing at her. Her mind kept wandering back to the baby she had lost just days before. She knew it was all her fault, but Gary had persisted that it wasn’t, that it was just an accident. Little did he know, the doctor had, in fact, informed her that a decision she had made twenty years earlier had cost her baby’s life, and she would probably never be able to have any other children. Not unless, she got a risky surgery to clean out all of the scar tissue sweltering in her ovaries.
The steaming shower wasn’t enough to take her mind off of the death of two untimely deaths. She stepped out of the shower and dressed casually in a tank top and skinny, dark jeans. Her appointment with her therapist was only in thirty minutes, minus the twenty it took to get to the office, so Isabella grabbed a pastry on her way out of the door.
Doctor Amber Rose was waiting for Isabella in her penthouse office. Isabella saunters in, gives a half hearted greeting, and sits down on the overstuffed leather couch.
“Last week we had just uncovered the pain you were feeling about being pregnant a second time. Do you want to continue to talk about that?” Dr. Rose crossed her legs, intently watching Isabella.
“No… I lost my… my baby.” Isabella’s tears threatened to come down her cheeks as she whispered the last part of the sentence.
“Isabella, I am deeply sorry for your lost. What would you like to talk about?” Dr. Rose asked as she jotted some things down on her yellow, legal notepad.
Isabella had this part of the visit all planned out she was finally going to tell someone what had happened that warm, late spring night, but as her mind raced around the memories, her mouth forgot how to form words. She closed her eyes and furrowed her brow as her mind traveled to that perfect shell of a house her mother worked so hard to make a home.
As the sun blasted through the blinds revealing a green and purple Tinkerbelle comforter, you could hear the air circulating through the house. With two growing teenagers, Mike and Chrystal Hawley needed all the money they could get, so they had already left for work in the wee hours of the morning. You would think there was no one left in the house because both Isabella and Jonah were suppose to be at school by eight, but in the back of the house, at the top of the stairs, at the end of the long hallway was a sobbing Isabella, drowning in her blankets.
She was playing hooky from school, but maybe hooky was too joyful of a word. Isabella was suffering from an emotional sickness, ripping apart her insides and causing her head to explode in torment. Just the day before she had felt complete comfort and relief, like the world had been lifted off of her shoulders so she could breathe again, but it was crashing down around her faster than it took her mind to wake up. There was a buddle of fear that seemed to suffocate her, and by getting rid of it, she felt like she had lynched the rope around her neck.
The sobs came out in tiny chokes; there would be no way to find her baby again. No adoption agency could help you find a baby that you got rid of in such a gruesome fashion; no one even knew she had been carrying a child in her womb. Too shameful to spend money at a real clinic, Isabella risked her life by looking up online ways to abort your own fetus. A coat hanger and massive amounts of blood later, she was sure she had succeeded in destroying the life within her.
When Isabella opened her eyes she was gasping for air, and said “Dr. Rose can you up my medication, please?”
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