She got me sitting in the passenger seat of her SUV with the air conditioning on and her teenage son standing nearby with a phone in his hand while she crouched beside the open door and kept talking to me in a low, steady voice, asking my name and how far along I was and whether I could tell her what happened. I answered her questions. I did not tell her everything, but I told her enough. Her son called 911. The pain kept coming, closer together now, and my dress was damp across my back and my hands would not stop trembling no matter how deliberately I held them still.
Dana asked whether my husband was coming back. I heard myself make a sound that was not quite a laugh. “No,” I said. “He left.”
She did not say anything to that. But she put her hand over mine and kept it there until the ambulance arrived.
The paramedics took me to St. Andrew’s Medical Center. A nurse helped me call my sister Megan because my phone was still in Eric’s car and I had no bag, no wallet, no water bottle, nothing except the clothes I was wearing and the appointment card I had tucked into my pocket that morning. Megan arrived within forty minutes, which meant she had driven faster than she should have. She came through the door and saw me in the hospital bed with monitors attached and started crying before she even reached me, which made me cry too, not from pain this time but from the particular relief of being seen by someone who already understood.
The doctors were efficient and calm in that way that is more frightening than panic because it tells you they are taking things seriously. One of them explained that I was showing early labor signs along with indicators of placental stress. They needed to observe me closely and were not prepared to call the situation stable yet. I lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the sound of my baby’s heartbeat on the monitor and tried very hard not to think about what might have happened if Dana had not looked up from her grocery bags at the right moment.
