Abigail Grace

Two in the morning. I’m in my gaming chair, controller in-hand. I want to sleep, but that ain’t happening. Haven’t managed more than a twenty minute power nap in the past six days. Cold, discarded half-filled bins of Chinese food grew stale on the dinner table in the nook near the kitchen in the small, 2-bedroom apartment.

I can still hear her. She’ll sleep for an hour, maybe two, and then wake up crying. She’ll sob for twenty, thirty minutes and then go back to sleep. I went out and got her favorite take-out thinking maybe she would put something on her stomach, I mean, she is eating for…

She’s still not hungry.

I caught her yesterday crying in her sleep. It was wrenching for me. She slept, mumble-mumble, and then sobbed. She built it up until she screamed, so desperate and hopeless. I woke her up and she jarred awake, still screaming. I held her for twenty minutes as she wept like she’d lost a limb. A sweating mess, and then again, tumultuous sleep.

Moments like this, her crying softly in the darkness as I murdered 12-year-olds on a virtual battlefield praying that I might be able to muster an hour of sleep before sunrise… these moments were the best we could ask for these past few weeks. Since we came back from the doctor. Since the tests. Since the waiting began.

I had planned on proposing to her. I was saving up for a ring. She moved in and split the rent with me, and I kept putting the savings into a fund for the diamond. I was one week away from taking that next big step when she broke the news to me.

Six weeks pregnant.

She was scared, and I don’t blame her. We’re both young, working, barely scraping by a living in the big city, but I just smiled. I knew she was the one. I knew that I was going to be with her for the rest of my life. I was planning on giving her a ring and making things forever, but wouldn’t a baby do the same?

I told her I was in. Completely. You could see the anxiety melt off of her face into that beautiful smile I fell in love with. I told her about the savings, about my plans to propose, and I promised her that, whether it was now or after the baby was born, that I was committed to her. Nursery first, then we’ll work on that ring.

That was months ago. Now, things were different. Now her sobs came in mumbled words and I couldn’t tell through the thin walls if she was awake or if she was talking in her sleep. Nobody talks about the purgatory that your life becomes when dealing with tragedy. I knew the tears were coming, but this? This is Hell. The waiting. The anxiety. The staring at walls waiting for her to say something that isn’t just pure twisting of heartstrings. The saying things in a lighthearted tone hoping that you can fool her or even fool yourself into thinking that something good is happening, that something is taking your mind off of things. All we can do is live here in this frozen moment hoping for the sun to shine again. I blitz my digital soldier through war-torn battlegrounds evading gunfire and listening to a stream of irreverent obscenities being hurled my way. As I machine-gun down these kids, I remember when things like this brought me joy. Now they’re just momentary distractions.

The appointment is Thursday morning, 8 AM. Two days. Two days of waiting with bated breath. They did so many tests, took so much blood. They said so many things, something about the brain stem not showing up on the ultrasound. Something about brain development. They gave us numbers. Percentages.

Chances.

They wouldn’t be sure until the test results came back. Until Thursday. And they sent us home. Silent. Frozen.

My game finished. I thought about turning it off, about laying in bed with her and staring at the ceiling until dawn, when my phone dinged. It was two in the morning; who in the world would be texting me at this time of night? I flickered the screen on and saw it was an email. From the hospital, an automatic message notifying me that the tests had been completed early. They were ready for viewing. I didn’t even know we had signed up for this, but I remember she insisted, anything to get the news faster.

I threw my controller down and walked to the kitchen table. Hit the latch, raise the screen. The laptop hums alive. Through the lock screen. To my email. To the one marked “medical portal.”

Click here for a summary of your test results. I click.

Enter email and password.

What the hell is the password? She set this up. I know she put my email on the portal form. But password? Nothing. She has all the passwords I use for most of my accounts, but she might be the most forgetful woman I’ve ever met. She always asks me for reminders when she needs to check the bank accounts or the credit card statements. Heck, most of the time I have to remind her of the lock-screen code on my laptop. I try it anyway.

Incorrect email or password. Try again.

I know my email is correct, because she almost exclusively uses my email (she only uses hers for her night classes). So it must be the password. I tried the email password again, only with no capital letters.

Incorrect email or password. Try again.

Maybe my banking password?

Try again.

Let me check the requirements. Is it case sensitive? Length requirements? Does it need any special characters?! I click on the button to try again and a different screen pops up. No option to try for a password, just a box for your email address. “Forgot your password?”

Click here to reset your password.

Fine. Whatever. If only life were so easy. I click on it; all I have to do is go back to my email, reset my password, and then I’ll know. I’ll know if my little girl is going to be okay or not.

My little girl.

That’s the only good thing to come out of those tests. A beautiful little girl, an angel, and angel who may not make it through delivery. An angel who, if she did make it into the world, may not have more than minutes in it. Frankly, it made things worse. Bad enough that this thing, this beautiful thing inside of her may not make it through, but now, it isn’t a thing. It’s a girl. She’s real now; no pretending. Now we have something to lose. I hear quiet sobs through the wall behind me, and I’m one password reset away from making this nightmare go away. Or make it real. At this point, it wasn’t the reality that worried me; it was existing for one more second in this purgatory.

The email pops up. I click. Click again. I return to the hospital portal page. Three lines. New password, with a bunch of password requirements. Another line: repeat the password. Last line:

Enter old password.

Are you freakin’ serious?!?! Why would I click on “forgot password,” go through the process of going through my email to the recover password page, only to have to still need my old password in order to get a new one? This is ridiculous! This is red-tapey, redundant, bureaucratic hell! There’s no way this passes the sniff test in any other situation! The most important information I’ve ever needed in my life, and it is held hostage by the most worthless online log-in system I’ve ever seen.

I get up; I pace. I walk to the coffee table. Should I wake her up? Maybe she knows the password? Unlikely, but possible. What if she knows, and the news is bad? At least if I know and the news is bad, I have a few days to brace her for getting the news at the doctor’s. I need to know, now, so I can prepare myself to take care of her. I need that password, and I can’t get it from her. I rummage through all the paperwork sprayed across the coffee table. Is the password on there? Nothing that I can see. Only the copy of her blood work papers that she was scribbling all over while we waited for the doctor to come back into the room.

My heart broke. I never did see what she was scribbling, but I see it now.

Abigail Grace.

Over and over again. Abigail was her grandmother’s name, and I always thought it sounded sweet. She and I loved the idea of using virtues as middle names; there’s some ironic danger in naming your daughter “Chastity,” but we figured “Grace” was safe. But on the bottom right-hand corner, the name is written differently. It was bigger, for one. There was no space between the words, and the “G” was capitalized. It was scribbled over in black, blue, and red ink, carved into the paper. And the “A’s” were asperands, like in email addresses.

@big@ilGr@ce

Dumbfounded, I returned to the laptop. For “new password", I typed in my email password. I repeated it in the second line, making sure to get every character perfect. And in the “old password” line, I typed it.

@big@ilGr@ce

A new screen. Lots of tables and charts, sentences that read like a foreign language to me. I understood only every third word on the page. But the colors of the words, mostly black, were often highlighted, or in green. That felt positive. I scanned to the bottom of the page and found a section marked “Analysis Summary”. I read.

A review of the tests we did a few weeks ago. Some complicated condition names linked with the abnormalities they found on the initial scans. A lot of numbers, a lot of names of the tests and scans they ran, and then, at the bottom: “The current round of tests and scans suggests no present abnormalities. While no guarantees can be assured, there doesn’t seem to be any present concerns outside of the normal. It is advised to continue treating this as a high-risk pregnancy, but presently, nothing suggests anything outside of the ordinary. A healthy baby girl.”

I couldn’t breathe, but I could cry. Tears ran down my face as I choked to force myself to breathe again. Gasping, I swallowed my tongue hard when I felt a hand touch my shoulder and I jumped out of my skin.

“Are you okay? What’s the matter?” she asked.

She saw the fresh tears on my face reflecting the dried tear-stains on her own. I stood and smiled; I regained my composure and I kissed her. I held her close and she held me up. When I pulled back, she looked confused, tiny, and the tears were starting to return. I pulled away from her and motioned her to sit down in front of the laptop. She sat, and looked at me, confused.

“Just read, baby. I’ll heat up the fried rice.” I skirted around the kitchen island and towards the microwave. “You’re eating for two.”