Six months disappeared in an instant. First came recognition, then came shock. Then he looked away from my eyes down to my belly in my loose scrubs and I saw him go pale for a totally different reason than concerning Sophie.
“Adelaide,” he whispered.
Not doctor. Not a polite title. My name. The name he used to whisper in the dark when I still thought he might be brave enough to love me one day.
I was the first to look away.
“Vitals, neurological checks and imaging for the left forearm,” I stated to the nurse. “Keep her talking.”
The team worked diligently and expertly. I checked Sophie’s pupils, then examined her collarbone and finally checked for swelling. Everything I did was with deliberate calm and gentleness. And yet I felt the intensity of Elias’ gaze on me throughout all of it.
I knew what he was reading into.
I was six months pregnant.We had just entered the rainy Tuesday marked six months prior, when I stood in my thick blue dress, mascara running down my cheeks, while I asked him if he actually loved me or if he simply needed me and at that moment in time stood silent and overwhelmed by the enormity of the past. He ultimately told me he didn’t know how to raise a family.
That’s when I walked out into the rain.
Three weeks after, as I sat alone on the edge of the bathtub in my bathroom, I learned that I had not left my life there, where I was now sitting.
“Is this Doctor Adelaide?” I heard Sophie’s voice draw me back again.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“You’re beautiful. Are you having a baby?”
I couldn’t help but smile, even though my chest felt heavy. “I am with child and she will arrive here in approximately two months.”
“That’s rad!” Sophie exclaimed. “I always wanted a little sister.”
From somewhere behind me I heard Elias mumble, though his sound was so low only I could hear him.
By about ten o’clock that same night Sophie had been placed in a room upstairs where she was resting, had had a small cast placed on her arm and had received a clean scan of her arm. It was from there I went to find Elias sitting in a low lit consultation room, with both hands gripping the window ledge so tightly his knuckles were white.
“Sophie has been stabilized,” I said to Elias. “She should be able to go home tomorrow morning.”
He turned and looked at me slowly. “Is this baby a product of me?”
He asked me the question in a way that was unconventional, stripped of most of the bravado and display of emotion he usually also presented when he talked to me.
I put my hand on my stomach. “This child is going to need her father immediately, Elias.”
“Adelaide, please,” he mumbled.
“No,” I told him. “You don’t get to ask for answers now after being in silence for 180 days.”
“I didn’t know,” he replied.
“You didn’t care,” I told him.”You were supposed to fight for us, Elias – you allowed me to leave.”
His expression tensed as if I had stabbed him in the heart.
“I was a coward.”
“Yes,” I replied softly. “You were.”
I turned away before he could see my tears.
When I arrived home at two o’clock the next morning, exhausted and drained, I found an elegant box sitting on my doorstep. There was no return address on it, just a cream-colored card under a black ribbon.
Adelaide, some battles cannot be won without help; especially those concerning him. Open it.
Inside the box was a hand-knitted seafoam-green baby blanket and some rare vintage pediatric medical books. They were both beautiful and very expensive and absolutely impossible to ignore.
But this gift had not come from Elias.
All that weekend, I spent my time wondering who had sent me the gift.
On Sunday afternoon, the doorbell rang. I answered the door and saw Elias standing there, looking out of place in my small apartment building. Next to him was Sophie, her arm in a white cast.
“Hi Doctor Adelaide!” said Sophie cheerfully while she held up a container. “Dad and I made cookies! He burned the first batch, but these are really good.”
I laughed without meaning to.
Elias appeared to be embarrassed. “We are trying to bribe you into forgiving us with cookies. Would it be alright for us to come in?”
Despite my better judgment, I stepped aside to let them in.
Sophie, the first to notice the ultrasound picture on my refrigerator, said, “Is that the baby? It looks like a little bean.”
“Yes, and it gets bigger every day,” I responded.