Turn Back Time

Equipment cart rolling into place. I know this sound. I understand the urgency behind the controlled voices of nurses and doctors working to save a life. I’m part of a team in this emergency room. But tonight I’m the patient and I’m terrified. A co-worker holds my hand for a few precious seconds. 

Part of me registers the pain. I know what the team needs to do. But memories are so much more painful, my mind replaying the last year, punishing myself over and over. I want the impossible: I want to turn back time.

If I could turn back time I’d keep walking instead of sheltering under the café awning. I was soaked already, my broken umbrella dumped in the garbage; another few blocks to my car would have made no difference. I wouldn’t accept your offer of a coffee. I wouldn’t agree to go out with you and then go out again. I wouldn’t let you stay over. I wouldn’t let you move “just a few things” in. I wouldn’t realize one day that you had moved yourself in. 

I wouldn’t know you exist. I wouldn’t know what it’s like to hate with every fiber of my being.

But I swallowed your lies under that awning along with the coffee. I ignored Amanda’s warning. “Seems a bit too smooth to me, Nessa. What’s he getting out of this?” she said. “Besides sex and a lot nicer place to live than his parents’ basement? And if he has such a great job, why was he living in his parents’ basement?” 

You were smart, confident, had a great engineering job, easy to talk to, easy on the eyes. “Maybe opposites attract, Amanda,” I said. “Look at me. Good job, but not exactly a beauty queen, am I? Not the most dynamic person around, either.” She told me, as she had other times when a relationship fizzled after only a few dates, that I needed to run a reality check on my self-esteem.

I tamped down seeds of doubt. A bit of a temper, talking about your boss? Maybe the boss was a jerk. And when it was directed at me, it might have been my fault, didn’t every new relationship have bumps? You were a big man, maybe you didn’t know your own strength? “That hurt!” I said once after one of your slaps on my bum that seemed sometimes to be more than playful.

“Aren’t you touchy?” you said. “Can’t take a little love pat?”

The doubts sent down roots when I caught a bad flu and you said you couldn’t risk getting sick because you had an important new project at work. You packed a small suitcase and stayed away for over two weeks—with your parents, you said, but before you left, I thought I heard you talking to someone in that voice I remembered from that day under the awning. I should have taken my chance then. I found your parents’ phone number and address; if I had called, could I have chalked this up as just another failed relationship before it was too late? Instead, I dared to hope I was wrong or that you’d stay with your new conquest. But I guess she was smarter than me; you came back as if nothing had changed.

Turns out, your "great" job in that engineering firm was as a junior staff member. When you were fired for fighting with your manager, I discovered from one of your friends, too late, that the only thing you’d ever engineered was conflict with co-workers and that you could lie your way into jobs but keeping them was a problem.

Reality replaced any shadows of doubts but this was my condo, you had to move. When I said we were through, your name-calling hurt almost as much as the bruises that I covered with long sleeves and turtleneck sweaters. 

I couldn’t risk an ultimatum until I felt safe. I waited and I planned and Amanda checked in often and never said, “I warned you.”

When I realized I was pregnant, already over two months, birth control ineffective because of the flu, I didn’t tell you. Abortion was the sensible option but when the appointment day came, I couldn’t walk into the clinic. I already loved this baby; I couldn’t blame it for who you are. But I couldn’t pass off morning nausea as a recurrence of the flu. When you guessed the truth, you accused me of getting pregnant on purpose and punished me with rape that left more and deeper bruises.

I fled down the hall to Amanda’s that night but when you left for work the next day, I found you’d slashed the pages in a book I’d bought on healthy pregnancy, leaving the knife beside the book. I took the day off work and notified Security to cancel your key fob. I packed your belongings in boxes Amanda had stored for me and dropped everything off at your parents’ house. They seemed resigned—I heard your Dad mutter “Revolving door”—and then apologetic when I showed them the bruises on my arms.

I left text and phone messages and you didn’t respond. Security had your picture and promised to warn me if you tried to enter the building. 

Amanda checked on me almost every evening. A week. Two weeks. Three weeks. I dared to hope. Four weeks. Five weeks. Safe. We must be safe now. I marveled at the first fluttered movements.

Turns out you were good at waiting, too. Was it easy to get past the new evening Security guy? Did you pretend to look for your key and slide in with another resident? Even your knock was deceptive. Quiet. I thought it was Amanda.

The team has no time to deal with my swollen jaw or cracked ribs or the pain of the deep bruises on my belly, already turning purple-black. Those have to wait.

They can’t turn back time but when they’ve done all they can, they give me time and space now to hold her for a few minutes. Not quite one pound but already almost perfectly formed. Tiny hands and feet and the beginnings of silky smooth hair soon wet with my tears, wrapped in a pocket-sized blanket, the heat from my cupped hands powerless to keep her warm.