“Please…” Jillian whimpered. “Please.”
She looked down at the pills in her palm and her hand trembled. The fast beating of the fetuses’ hearts seemed. to grown in volume and intensity. Jillian became even more fearful.
“Be quiet,” she begged. “Be quiet, please… He’ll hear you. He’ll come in here.” She had no idea where Spencer was, but she had become convinced that there was some kind of psychic bond between the things in her belly and the man masquerading as her husband.
But the twin hearts only beat louder and faster, and added to the disconcerting noise was the whoosh and whine of the amniotic fluid that surrounded and protected them.
The pills were still in her hand and the glass of water was poised. Jillian was crying, fat tears rolling down her cheeks. “Please, I have to… It’s okay, it’s okay… it’ll be over soon…please ”
But it wouldn’t be. The moment she spoke those words a terrible pain ripped through her body—it seemed to scorch her belly—driving her to her knees. She clutched the pills so tightly in her fist that they might have been ground to powder.
From her knees Jillian gasped, “I’m sorry… I have to. It’ll be better this way. It will be, I promise.” She opened her hands and looked down at the pills.
“I can’t,” she cried. “Oh God, I can’t do it…” Behind her the bathroom door flew open and Spencer charged into the room.
“What were you going to do to them?” When Jillian turned and saw him, she screamed and forced herself to her feet.
“What are those pills? What were you going to do with them?”
“Oh God, you heard them,” Jillian cried, “didn’t you? They called out to you. ”
Spencer forced calm into his voice and tried to take her in his arms. “Jillian…”
“Oh Jesus, you heard them,” she wailed. She backed away from him then ran from the bathroom and through the bedroom. Spencer chased after her.
“Jillian, it’s okay,” he shouted. “Really. It’s okay, Jillian, please stop.”
She was headed for the front door—no idea in her head where she might be going except that she knew she had to get away from him—but when she reached it Spencer stood there, barring her flight.
He put out his hands for her and moved slowly towards her. “Jilly, please,” he said soothingly. “It is going to be all right. You have to try and calm down. That’s all.”
But Jillian wasn’t buying it. She backed away from him, shaking her head, desperate to think of what she might do next.
“Jillian,” said Spencer. Then he reached for her as another spasm of that horrible pain ripped through her. She doubled over and fell hard, tumbling down the steps, hitting the bottom with sickening force. But she managed to stagger to her feet, a dazed and dreamy look on her face as she looked up the stairs at Spencer.
“Jillian, please…” Then he got a very strange look on his face. And even in her dazed and pain-wracked state she noticed it.
“Spencer? What is it?”
Jillian followed the line of his gaze and saw that he was staring at the patch between her legs. The material of her clothing was sodden with blood and a long line of gore had trickled down her leg.
She said, “Spencer?” She saw him coming down the stairs toward her, but she saw him as if in stop-motion, each blink an exposure bringing him a little closer. Then everything went black. And silent.
.
Then everything was noise and bright lights. Jillian had no idea how much time had passed, but she knew she was in a hospital. She could tell by the sound and the smells and the speed of the rolling gurney. There were doctors and, nurses surrounding the moving bed, looking down at her, talking about her. But no one was talking to her.
“You must keep him away from me,” she managed to say. Those few words seem to exhaust her and she felt that terrible weakness of the helpless.
“She’s still hemorrhaging,” a nurse announced.
“Please,” Jillian gasped. “Please…please…”
A doctor spoke, his tone matter-of-fact and dispassionate. “If she’s still hemorrhaging then she’s going to bleed out in a minute or two. Pure and simple.”
Jillian thought she heard herself saying “Please… please…” But she couldn’t be sure if she was saying the words or merely thinking them. She tried to raise her hand to her lips but she cquld not find them. She did not know if she had been sedated or if she was dying. She heard someone say, “Is there an OR free?” Jillian was looking up as a surgical team prepared itself. There were lots of doctors and nurses in those scary green-colored scrubs. Bright lights were shone into her eyes. There seemed to be tons of equipment—monitors, lights, shiny tanks of oxygen and anesthetics. There was lots of noise and clatter.
All faces were obscured by surgical masks; all she could see were their eyes. And there was only one set of eyes she recognized in all of them. Spencer’s.
“Please…” she said. But no one paid any attention to her, the woman they were about to save.
19
Jillian had no idea how much time had passed. She knew she was in a hospital, she was sure of that if nothing else, and as she faded from consciousness to unconsciousness she saw faces she knew—Nan, Shelley McLaren and Spencer, always Spencer, hovering over her bed, his eyes fixed on hers, watching her, evaluating her the way a farmer looks over his brood stock.
A variety of doctors attended her—she didn’t know one of them—and they poked and prodded her, and thrust needles into her arms, then retired to corners to discuss her as if she was not there lying in her bed in her darkened room.
She heard them say things like, “Psychiatric…evaluations…her husband’s care…”
Jillian heard Spencer’s voice and felt him take her hand. “The twins are fine,” he said soothingly. “They are still inside you, safe and sound, right where they should be. We are never going to mention what you tried to do… with those pills. It’s over now. It’s behind us. It didn’t happen, did it, Jilly?”
She wanted to tell him that there had been a reason for those pills. That she was doing the right thing…But her voice…it just would not work. “Spencer…”
“I’m here,” he said. “Don’t try to talk. I love you so much, you know that? You scared me. If anything had happened, I could not have gone on without with you. We have to be together, Jillian, you, me, the babies…we’re all one now. ”
Jillian thrashed in the bed, but she could hardly move. She was tethered by a thicket of intravenous tubes. “No…” she said? “Spencer…”
“Sssshhh,” said Spencer, as if talking to a child. “Don’t try to talk, Jillian. Don’t even try.”
The first thing she noticed was that she was enveloped in a cloud of Chanel Number Five, and then she felt some lips on her cheek. And then Shelley McLaren’s voice in her ear.
“I am so sorry, sweetheart.”
Jillian knew exactly what she was talking about. For some reason, that lunch came back vividly, she remembered every detail, from the muscadet to the uneaten salads.… the waiter’s name had been Charlie, she recalled. And she had not forgotten that the luncheon had been arranged to arrange a pair of abortions.
“I couldn’t do it…” Jillian told Shelley. “They are part of me. I can feel them in there. The blood that runs through my heart runs through their hearts. I couldn’t do it…”
Shelley bent down and smiled at her. “If I had known…if I had known about your past I would never have given you those pills to you… never…” Shelley leaned down a bit more and kissed her cheek. “Let me open the shades in here, you need a little light in here, I think. Don’t you, darling?”