Pardon the intrusion, but could we leave before it gets bad? I might smash up all these windows and set fire to the curtains ...

Yesterday I was pregnant. Or so I thought. But the truth is no one knows how many women walk this earth with dead babies in their wombs. In the movies, that scary word miscarriage means blood and pain and it is oh so obvious something has gone wrong. But no, for me this will be a neatly scheduled medical procedure. Friday at noon they will vacuum the tiny fetus away and I will be free of the baby my body has been harboring, lifeless, for weeks. Maybe my body will finally realize this too. No baby for weeks, but my dutiful body has still been producing placenta. Still making me nauseous and hungry. Still, last night, I woke to eat and pee in the early hours, to nourish placenta for a baby that needs nothing from me now.

Two ultrasounds on the day I was meant to hear the heartbeat for the first time. Two ultrasounds and as I lay on the second table, skirt pulled down and gelatinous humiliation on my still-round belly, the doctor finally wandered in to ask "How are you?". What kind of question is that on a day like this?

Lying on that table, I am reminded of a poem I once wrote.

And you find water pooling in your ears
because you're swimming with dolphins or
crying on your back.

The pictures on the walls of happy babies, safe in their wombs, sucking their thumbs in sweet sepia. Shouldn't they have a special room for women like me? Bare, dark walls, perhaps? And when the sonogram tech leaves the room, how does she not know to take that picture from the screen? The first picture of my baby, where you can even see the head and little limbs. But it will never twitch those limbs and I don't want to look at them a second longer.

It was nothing you did, they say. The resounding refrain of situations such as this. It was nothing you did. But my chromosomes, it seems, or his, or both, have misaligned and created a creature never meant for this earth. Better, I know, to have lost this child now than later. Better, I know, and somehow destined to ensure my baby, the one who grows to term, will have a real chance of survival. You see, they say. The neck is too thick. And look, there's the brain, edema for sure. It was nothing you did, but create a baby, and grow it for months, that never stood a chance. Try again, they say. Like it's the easiest thing in the world. Patience, Andrei says. Maybe that's the lesson in all this. Maybe, but I can't see how to get from here to there.