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A steady thump echoes throughout the room, one beat after another in perfect sync, yet somehow faster than the average.
As far as heartbeats go, he has heard a lot of them before— God knows that Dr. Jack Abbot has heard a lot of them. The rise and fall of his patients’ on the monitor in a trauma room, the even rhythm beneath the cool metal of a stethoscope.
He has heard them start after asystole and end on the battlefield. He knows what it’s feels like to hold a heart in his hands, to watch his friends die in combat beneath his fingertips, and he knows what it feels like to watch the woman he that loved — his late wife — flatline until another man in a dark pair of scrubs flipped a switch on a screen.
Time of death.
He has felt his own in his ears, muted and ringing after an explosion and beneath his fingertips as he counted his own breaths to calm a panic attack.
He has seen ultrasounds on screens like this one— the little flash of a beating heart that can’t sustain life outside of another human being, and he tasted heard hers — Samira’s — with his tongue on her chest or her pulse point while tangled up in the sheets on a bed that might as well be considered theirs at this point, away from the sounds and sights of the emergency department.
Dr. Jack Abbot has a lot of experience with heartbeats. But he has never had an experience like this one.
A steady thump echoes throughout the room, one beat after another dancing within the smallest blur he’s ever come to care about.
It’s a heartbeat that he helped create. Half him, but more importantly, half her.
“Measuring right at eight weeks, Samira. Baby looks good,” the sonographer says, finger hovering over the screen as she traces the outline of barely there little white blob. It’s hardly a being, let alone a baby but there’s something about knowing that it’s there because they chose to let it happen that makes his own heart race. “Heart rate of one-sixty-six.”
“That’s fast,” Samira says, raising an eyebrow as she locks eyes with Jack. He knows what she’s getting at— the old wives’ tail of beats per minute indicating the sex of the baby coupled with the fact that he thinks it’s a girl and she is certain that they’re having a boy.
A curly haired little you? I could get used to that.
But what she finds in the look on his face, in the awe embedded in his irises, isn’t an “I told you so.” No, that heartbeat doesn’t mean that he’s right that they’re going to have a daughter, it means that they’ve created a life together and that’s terrifying and exhilarating and everything Jack Abbot never could have known that he wanted.
“Are you okay?” She whispers as she reaches up to touch his face, fingernails trailing his stubble.
Jack’s voice cracks, “Better than okay.”
Maybe it’s the shakiness of his tone or the softness around his eyes, but Samira begins to tear up then too. She’ll deny it, say it’s the hormones already raging through her system but there’s no denying the watery laugh that escapes her nor the wetness that she has to blink away. “This is real.”
“Yeah,” he chuckles in disbelief.
It wasn’t planned, and this certainly wasn’t part of the five year plan that the woman next to him told him about during her days of fellowship applications and handover between day and night shift. She was supposed to go back to New Jersey but suddenly, she wasn’t. She was his subordinate but suddenly, she wasn’t. She was the future of medicine but suddenly, she was the future of… everything. For him, at least. For the rest of the world, she’s the best damn doctor he has ever seen.
So when they’d been too lazy, hurried, eager to reach for a condom on a random Sunday morning about five months into their relationship, they’d let it happen again and again and again, over and over and over. And six months later, when she realized that she’d forgotten to pick up her next round of birth control, they let the prescription lapse as he came inside of her, sat atop the bathroom counter.
It’s more surprising that it took an additional six months to get here than it is that they are here.
So no, this pregnancy wasn’t part of Samira’s five year plan. They’d been stupid — stupid together — but thoughts of New Jersey and fellowships at other hospitals around the country went straight out the window long before every other form of prevention followed suit.
Thump, thump, thump.
The sonographer gives them some space then, leaving the room as Jack brings his lips to Samira’s. He kisses her softly and she chuckles into him, a smile forming against his own as they take in this moment— as they take in the sound that they just heard.
“How do you feel about that?” He asks after a moment, brushing a stray curl from her face. “About this being real.”
Samira glances from him to the monitor, taking in the fuzzy picture before them. They’re both doctors, after all— they can identify her uterus, and the shape. They can see the fetus, the fetal pole, can clock the measurements onscreen and they know that that heartbeat is exactly on par with the first trimester. But seeing it this way… Not clinically, but as the people responsible for that tiny bundle of cells, is different. Different from the positive pregnancy tests piling up on the bathroom counter, different from the morning sickness and the exhaustion.
That little heartbeat makes it real for both of them.
“I think… I think I was in shock. Not that this is all that surprising,” she laughs. “But before now, it was just a piece of plastic telling me that I’m pregnant and now…”
“It has a heartbeat.”
Nodding, Samira finds him again. “It has a heartbeat. And I know that this early, that really only means what we want it to mean but… I feel like our lives have already changed because it has a one.”
“Honey, nothing has to change if you don’t want it to.”
They had this conversation a little over two weeks ago; two pink lines staring back at them at eight in the morning. She had mentioned it the night before, the thought that she was late, but it wasn’t until Samira was hunched over the toilet with his hands holding her hair back before the sun had come up that Jack slipped out to pick up a test.
Whatever you decide, you’ve got me.
“I want it to,” Samira answers honestly. Her dark eyes lock on his and he can see it there, fear and excitement and so much love. It sinks in then that he’s going to have the privilege of watching her become a mom. “I want it to change.”
And then he thinks, their baby has a heartbeat because of her. She’s already a mom.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I want this more than I ever thought I would.”
Jack grins, “Me too.”
Wiping a stray tear from the corner of Samira’s eye, he leans in to capture her lips again but this time, the kiss is interrupted by the door to the exam room opening up.
“Sorry to interrupt,” the nurse that checked them in for their appointment says, walking in with a stack of what seems to be paperwork and a smile. She looks from the two of them to the monitor and back. “Your first, right?”
Samira nods, sharing a look with Jack. “Yeah.”
“Congratulations.” She hands them each a copy of their printed ultrasound pictures, details labeling the length and width of their growing baby along with his or her gestation. And with that are pamphlets— a quick rundown of what to expect, alternative options ranging from abortion to adoption, a list of local support groups and classes. “Everything looks fantastic. We’ve just got some paperwork for you to sign at the front desk, and you’ll want to schedule your next appointment. Before we get you cleaned up and out of here, is there anything else that I can help you with? Any questions you might have?”
“I think we’re okay.”
“Perfe—“
“Actually,” Jack asks, focusing on Samira with a raised eyebrow. “Can we hear it one more time? The heartbeat?”
“Absolutely.”
A steady thump echoes throughout the room, and it just might be the best sound that Jack Abbot has ever heard.