Work Text:
On August 11th, 1990, Dr. Lucy Carmichael enters the too-bright Lipschitz Maternity Ward and goes to 35C, the room where expectant parents Stu and Didi Pickles are waiting. Didi’s stomach is bulbous, and she’s breathing heavily, sweat beading her forehead as Dr. Carmichael gives a smile, though not reassuring. The feeling is bad and she is wary of voicing it. Stu squeezes Didi’s hand.
The ultrasounds have not been good. The Pickles know this, but still keep on with a despairing hope that has her secretly irate.
Tommy, as he’s already been named, has not been too responsive in the womb. Even Didi’s fingers and cooing is not making him move, and he hasn’t kicked since yesterday morning. It was a weak one, that kick, and a final one – a cry for help, simple as the snap of a finger, but no more helpful.
Dr. Carmichael has had to tell a family what they needed least to hear before. But it is a necessary evil, one she must detach herself from just as she feels the Heavens are detached from earthly suffering and atrocity.
“Didi, I’m sorry, but… Tommy is not alive.”
Didi’s face blanks momentarily, until the phrase not alive reaches her comprehension, and then confusion sets in. Stu lets out the first gasp and outcry. He stands up, indignant. A sick jest?
“No.” He says.
Denial—the first stage. Kubler-Ross Model. Developmental Psychology.
“What… you can’t—you’ve got to be kidding! Tommy—”
“I’m sorry, Stu. Didi.”
“Tommy—”
“I’m sorry,”she says, though her face is marble and her hands are folded over her coat, complacent, unaffected.
“But…” Stu slumps back in his chair, and his eyes redden. Didi is making terrible screeching sounds, like the raking of a finger across a chalkboard. Dr. Carmichael hates hearing these sounds. They haunt her sleep and swirl in her morning coffee.
“I made toys for him.” Stu explains. His hands flatten against his forehead. “I made them for him.”
Dr. Carmichael tells Didi she must be induced and she breaks out in screams again, refusing to let her baby go. Dr. Carmichael decides on a Psych Evaluation after Didi’s given birth, with subsequent check-ups. It takes a while, but Didi composes herself as much as she’s able and lets them stick the needle in. After so much crying, her face is swollen, and a nurse comes in with a Dixie cup full of cold water and rubs her sweaty arm to get her to drink. She does it absently, and some water dribbles from her mouth and onto her hospital gown. She hiccups, and a tear dollops in her eye and rolls down her cheek. Dr. Carmichael reminds Didi that she’s got to breathe.
Stu stopped talking a while ago. He has that same thousand yard stare, as if he’s come back from war or had a vision of the end of the world.
They’re going to be broken up like this for months. Didi has a history of difficult conception, and an experience like this is what the word ‘discouraging’ can’t even begin to describe. Nothing hurts a mother more than carrying a baby to full term only to lose it before it even had a chance in the world. So much work. So much hope. For nothing.
She leaves them there to hold each other helplessly, sobbing into each other’s cheeks. There’s nothing else she can do.
Late that night, Dr. Carmichael leaves the hospital and enters her darkened home. She hangs the keys on the small key rack and tosses her overcoat across the couch. Normally she’d hang it up and dust if off neatly so as not to get any wrinkles in it, but her overcoat, ID tag and stethoscope are now instruments of futility, reminding her of her horrible uselessness despite all her profound knowledge of the body’s inner workings, down to the role of every cell.
She couldn’t help save anyone. And now Stu and Didi’s lives will never be the same.
Dr. Carmichael, who becomes simply Lucy at home, pads up the stairs to the bedrooms of her children. Buster is sleeping soundly, a basketball at the foot of his bed. Edwin’s snoring lightly with an open book face down on his chest. Alisa is snuggled in her covers, but she had taken care to wrap her weave so it wouldn’t muss up by the time she wakes. Lucy tries a smile but doesn’t quite feel it. Finally, she checks Susie’s room, recognizing the little lump on the bed and the braids splayed out over the pillow. She closes the door of Susie’s room and walks back downstairs. Lucy gazes out at her backyard and the neighborhood beyond through the sliding glass doors. The midnight haze is setting in outside, hanging an oppressive darkness over the sky. There are no stars.
Stu never comes out of the basement. Didi has stopped asking, but she wonders.
How many toys has he made for a son who will never get to play with them?