Bed Rest Read online

  Bed Rest

  Sarah Bilston

  For Daniel and Maisie

  Contents

  1

  I haven’t written a diary since I was twelve. Wait, that’s not true.

  2

  It’s now been seven hours since we left the doctor’s office.

  3

  This is the first morning of my first full day on bed rest.

  4

  Rereading yesterday’s diary entry, it strikes me I am not…

  5

  Day three of bed rest. I woke up this morning and thought…

  6

  Why is no one coming to see me? I’ve had at least a dozen…

  7

  Tom’s been at work for over three hours already, but so far…

  8

  I can’t bear it, I don’t think I can bear it. This morning I awoke…

  9

  Slept all day, watched TV.

  10

  Slept, watched TV, slept some more.

  11

  Tom working. Watched TV. Cried. Ate cookies.

  12

  Tom working again. Cried hysterically. Ate cookies.

  13

  Several important things happened this morning…

  14

  Just as I was about to devour my lunchtime smoked…

  15

  Jeanie is coming tomorrow—I can’t wait. Only thirty-three hours to go…

  16

  I didn’t sleep last night—maybe I’m still preoccupied with Brianna’s crisis…

  17

  Best things about having Jeanie here…

  18

  Jeanie’s gone to have drinks with a school friend who recently moved to…

  19

  We just got back from the doctor’s office—Jeanie took me this week…

  20

  Jeanie left at four o’clock yesterday afternoon for JFK. In the evening…

  21

  I’ve had twenty minutes’ sleep so far tonight.

  22

  In the darkness I listen to his heartbeat. Lub-dup. Lub-dup. Lub-dup.

  23

  Less than twenty-four hours ago I was at home. Thirty-six hours ago Jeanie…

  24

  I’ve just had a nightmare. I dreamed I was in the hospital, in serious…

  25

  Achingly tired but can’t sleep. I’ve been thinking a lot about…

  26

  It’s a bright sunny day today; the sky is clear, cloudless, endlessly blue.

  27

  Mrs. Gianopoulou came to visit this morning, bringing spicy sausage, red…

  28

  I woke up at 3 A.M. in a vast, sweaty panic. I have just…

  29

  Diapering…

  30

  Alexis and Mrs. G have just been here to read the letter I drafted…

  31

  I’ve just been checking the status of my packages, and according to…

  32

  My first memory of Alison is from the day my mother brought…

  33

  I remember reading, in a class on feminist theory at university, a book…

  34

  My party starts in an hour. The caterers are in the sitting room…

  35

  The party was quite an event. My failures were numerous and varied.

  36

  Tom and I met on a warm late-September Sunday afternoon four years ago…

  37

  “What are your dreams, Q?” This from Alison, over dinner last evening…

  38

  It’s not true that I don’t think about work. Brianna keeps me…

  39

  It’s incredibly windy today, and the sky is heavy and overcast.

  40

  Tom left for Tucson in the early hours of the morning; he’s going to…

  41

  At least the baby responded well to the nonstress test and ultrasound today.

  42

  I woke up this morning and glanced over at the empty place beside me…

  43

  I’m thirty-three weeks’ pregnant today. Tom has been gone for four days.

  44

  Alison’s flight departs from JFK at 9 P.M. this evening. She left here…

  45

  I took PPE at university, but I had always wanted to study literature.

  46

  I was watching an elderly couple eating dinner together in the building…

  47

  This morning I went to Dr. Weinberg’s office for another ultrasound.

  48

  Lottie, an old friend of mine from London, recently sent us a fairy-tale…

  49

  My stomach is scored with purplish stretch marks. I seem to have developed…

  50

  “There’s something I need to discuss with you,” Tom said to me…

  51

  I stumbled into the kitchen an hour ago to find a note propped up…

  52

  But there are other ways to pursue my ends. I’ve spent the morning drafting…

  53

  I perched illicitly (and precariously) on the window bench for twenty minutes…

  54

  A delighted phone call from Brianna this morning. She spent the weekend…

  55

  “My dear girl, should you be eating quite so many tarts?”

  56

  Thank God, she’s launched herself into the streets of Manhattan armed with…

  57

  I’m thirty-five weeks pregnant today, a huge milestone, a day I’ve been…

  58

  A phone call from Jeanie this morning, just after breakfast. My mother was…

  59

  The ultrasound this morning showed another fluid level dip, which is upsetting.

  60

  Today my mother told me the most extraordinary story. She was chatting…

  61

  Lara called early this morning to say that Mark has packed up all his…

  62

  Since breakfast, I’ve been doing fetal kick counts, the other bit of…

  63

  I am having a baby in a week.

  64

  Tom left at 5:30 this morning, slamming the door viciously behind him.

  65

  My father was a short man, not much more than five feet eight. He had…

  66

  I have another nonstress test, ultrasound, and fetal growth check scheduled…

  67

  Where’s a paper bag when you need one? I’m in the hospital again…

  68

  Last night I was allowed out of bed for the first time in eleven weeks.

  69

  A visit this afternoon from Brianna and Mark.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  I haven’t written a diary since I was twelve. Wait, that’s not true. I kept one for about six months when I started dating Mike Novak. I still have the notebook somewhere, a scruffy green ring-binder half filled with teenage angst about Mike and his terrible kissing and his lamentable desire for a student nurse named Susie.

  Writing a diary seems like an admission you have nothing better to do. It’s the life story of a person who doesn’t have a life. And frankly, I’m not sure that anybody’s existence is worth recording for posterity, unless you’re a world leader or a Theatrical Great or something. Maybe not even then. I read my grandmother’s diary once, it was all about the weather and her trips to the Women’s Institute and the progress of her runner beans. I’d rather leave no record of my existence than that. I’d rather my life was a big blank page, so my future gran
ddaughter can imagine me as a toothsome lovely whose youth was one long succession of olive-skinned, silk-shirted men.

  On the other hand, when you really don’t have anything better to do, writing a diary is as good a way of passing the time as any other. It makes the hours and minutes seem less of a vacuum—I thought, I felt. I existed. I suppose I’ll just have to hide this book from any future granddaughters.

  This afternoon, I left my office early, just before three. I work at—wait, why am I telling myself this? I know where I work.

  Time for the first admission. I’m an anxious obsessive. I hate gaps and omissions; I have to record everything. That green ringbinder started out normally enough (“Mike Novak has a tanned chest and nipples that flush brown when I pull them with my teeth”) but by page five it was more like a scrapbook, filled with lists of the important people in my life (1. Mum. 2. Mike. 3. Our cat) and terrible poetry (“Mike has gone and my life is / A dark page / A black night / A bottomless sea / Of / Unequalled Misery”). As soon as I get a pen in my hand, or a computer keyboard beneath my fingers, I can’t stop myself, there it is, the contents of my brain in black and white, facts and fictions, thoughts, details, imaginings, everything.

  And anyway, if I’m reading this in fifty years, I’ll probably have forgotten things like the name of my law firm. My memory will be going, and it’ll be really irritating to find that my younger self failed to record the nitpicky details of her life. So here goes.

  I work at the law firm of Schuster & Marks, in New York City, on Fifty-fifth and Fifth. Today I locked my office door just before three, leaving the printer spewing out the pages of a brief I need to proofread before tomorrow morning. I flung myself through the heated revolving doors at the front of my building and out into an arctic February afternoon. Fifteen yellow cabs tooled past, their snug passengers watching, emotionlessly, the heavy pregnant woman in a sodden camel coat dancing up and down on the sparkling cold sidewalk (I forgot the important bit, I was twenty-six weeks’ enceinte on Monday, yesterday). Nothing for it, I thought helplessly, as icy water prickled at my eyelashes. I pulled up my collar, clasped my hands around my enormous belly, and ran the eleven blocks uptown to my obstetrician’s office through crowds of scurrying pedestrians, their faces stretched taut against the freezing wind.

  Dr. Weinberg’s office is as elegant as a Chelsea art gallery. Abstract lithographs in hushed silver frames decorate the waiting room. The receptionist peers out from behind a tall, slender glass vase stocked with impossible-looking South American orchids, pearly white with a faint pink flush and deep, jaundiced yellow throats. The doctor herself is an inordinately well-preserved fifty-something with high cheekbones, a narrow, burgundy mouth, and hair that seems to have suffered a serious shock mid-fluff.

  After a few preliminary questions she set about prodding my stomach, pushing hard under my ribs and diaphragm. She produced a coiled fabric tape measure and measured from my pubes to just above my navel. Then she slid across the floor on her wheelie stool, leafed through the pages of a large pink file, and finally looked at me over the rim of her rectangular steel spectacles. “You’re measuring small,” she said.

  Huh? I thought; I’m enormous. Children point at me in the streets. Workmen—oh-so-kindly—tell me the way to the hospital. I wear trousers with huge nylon gusset panels in the front and extra folds of elastic hidden in the waistband, and by the evening I still feel like I’m strapped into an instrument of torture.

  Small? I said to her. Small? In relation to what?

  She explained that the top of my uterus wasn’t where it should be—i.e., halfway to my chin—and sent me for an immediate ultrasound. I called Tom (my husband, in case I develop really galloping Alzheimer’s in the future) in a panic from the waiting area, but before he could leave his meeting at the Federal Courthouse I found myself in a darkened sonography room three doors down from Dr. Weinberg’s office. A heavyset, expressionless woman with short graying ash-blond hair, a white coat, and loose beige trousers glanced up at me as I entered. She looked as if she’d spent most of her life underground. Her pale round face gleamed oddly in the gray-white light of a computer monitor.

  “Onto the table, please,” the woman said, nodding curtly at the examining couch beside her. She turned away and busied herself finding and inserting a disc into the computer, which whirred and clicked respectfully. I heaved myself up and exposed my white whale belly, feeling suddenly vulnerable, longing desperately for a bit of reassuring girly chatter (“Nothing to worry about, I’m sure, I see this all the time, it’s no big deal”). No such luck. The technician squirted half a tube of thick blue sickly warm gel onto my stomach, then picked up a hard, pestle-shaped probe, without saying a word.

  After forty minutes of staring at a flickering black-and-white image she told me tersely that my “fluid level” was low.

  “What does that mean?” I asked the whites of her eyes.

  The woman shrugged as she flicked off the monitor and ejected the disc. “Your amniotic fluid is low,” she said, not entirely helpfully. “Weinberg will discuss it with you, okay?”

  I wasn’t sure if it was “okay” or not, but I was clearly being dismissed; the woman obviously had no intention of explaining things further and disappeared off into the corridor. The oversize door banged shut behind her. Left alone in the darkness, I wiped the slithery blue goo off my stomach with a large wad of scratchy paper from a dispenser above the couch, then pulled up my synthetic maternity trousers. “Low fluid” didn’t actually sound too bad, I thought as I swung my legs carefully off the hard blue examining couch; it wasn’t as if there was anything wrong with the baby. I’d seen him on the ultrasound screen, tiny limbs striking out, the sole of a foot flat for a second against the probe, five white toes in one perfect arc. He looked healthy to me. I returned to the doctor feeling optimistic.

  Usually Dr. Weinberg looks up at me with a vague, only half-interested expression, the sort that medics always seem to wear when greeting their basically healthy patients. But this time I noticed an alertness about her, a sharpness in her face, her eyes, as if she was seeing me properly for the first time. And perhaps I was looking at her properly for the first time myself. There was a pause, and then she cleared her throat.

  It was beginning to dawn on me that things weren’t good.

  Cherise just called me, she said, her voice deliberate and even. The baby needs amniotic fluid to develop properly, and you don’t have enough of it. Either your fluid level has to rise, or we’ll be delivering him fourteen weeks early.

  Tom knocked at the door just in time to administer a brown paper bag. When I stopped hyperventilating, he asked the obvious question. This stuff, this amniotic stuff—how do we make more of it?

  Bed rest, was the answer. Strict bed rest, for the duration of the pregnancy. You can lie on the sofa or in your bed, but I don’t want you walking, or lifting, or even moving more than you need. One shower a day, you can sit up for dinner, come to see me, and that’s it.

  “The good news is, the baby seems fine so far,” Dr. Weinberg said reassuringly, a flush of sympathy suddenly softening her face. “It’s not all bad news, mein bubeleh,” she added (the cover lifted, and for a second I saw the ghost of her real personality, a person at a dinner party, a mother, a sister, a daughter). “Cherise found no signs of a genetic deformity, and the baby’s kidneys look healthy, so I think it’s just your placenta that isn’t working right. Lie on your left side to help the blood flow to the umbilical cord, and hopefully the situation will improve enough to allow him to develop quite normally. Hopefully,” she repeated, with meaningful emphasis. “There are no guarantees here. But you can make a big difference by obeying my directions to the letter. I don’t want to run across you in the spring sale at Bloomingdale’s, versteh?” She shooed us out with kindness. (“Come now children, chins up, you’ll get through this, yes? Yes!”)