A doctor’s office can be a cell, somewhere you’re put by yourself to think through the worst news about how your future is, in mere seconds, over. The last time I was on the table in the RE’s office, the sonogram showed a sac but nothing within it—a little, empty girl’s purse. Not even a single penny to rattle around in it. Nothing.
The sac would collapse onto itself by the next day and then loose itself from my body. All those happenings, that terrible news—I carried those images of the sac and its disappointment, the doctor’s soothed voice telling me the terrible news, the nurse’s arms around me when I cried harder than I knew I could. It was all right there with me when my husband and I walked into the office on Wednesday to come face to face with the machine I’d come to hate, that monstrous bit of electricity that seemed to hold no good news for me, ever.
My legs were shaking I was so scared. I think I took every last drop of blood out of my husband’s hand as I held onto him when the transducer went into my body. I could hardly watch the screen. I wanted to shut my eyes so tight that the only blank I’d see was not a sac or an abdomen empty of anything, but the hollow of darkness when you’re refusing to see at all.
And then, a finger pointed to the screen, the cursor stretching its measurement of the sac, the crosshatching of what the doctor tells me is, indeed, a fetus. Like stars, little white shimmers in the center of what he has marked, and I swallow hard to find myself guessing at what I’m seeing. There it is, and he enlarges the view, so that we can see it, the sweetest glimmer up from the screen: a heartbeat. He points to the bottom of the screen, where the wave lengths jump and shorten to show its pattern. And with a few more keystrokes, we hear it. The most miraculous sound that has ever come upon my ears. Incredible, I think, because I cannot believe that this is happening to me, because I could not in a hundred thousand lifetimes have imagined myself into this moment, how real it is, how impossible, how perfect. 161.84 beats per minute. It is the sound of life, right there, within me. Has there ever been a more tender, insistent song?
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