The first time I woke up at three in the morning and found my husband sitting on the bathroom floor with the faucet running, I was five weeks pregnant.
I’d rolled over to tell him I needed to pee again, which was all I seemed to do those days, and his side of the bed was empty. The sheets were cold. Down the hall, under the bathroom door, there was a thin line of light. And the sound of water. Running. Steady. Like somebody washing their hands and forgetting to stop.
I knocked.
“Ben?”
The water kept running.
“Ben, are you okay?”
The faucet shut off. A moment later, the door opened.
He was sitting on the floor. On the white tile, with his back against the bathtub and his knees pulled up. He was wearing his gray T-shirt and his flannel pajama pants. His face was pale. His eyes were red.
“Hey,” he said. He tried to smile. “Sorry. Did I wake you?”
“What are you doing on the floor?”
“Stomach’s been bothering me,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you. I ran the water so you wouldn’t hear me throwing up.” He laughed a little. “Very romantic, I know.”
I sat down on the edge of the bathtub next to him. I put my hand on his hair.
“You should see a doctor,” I said.
“I will,” he said. “It’s probably just stress. Work’s been crazy.” He leaned his head against my knee. “Go back to bed, Luce. You need your sleep. You’re growing a person.”
I went back to bed.
I believed him.
Why wouldn’t I have?
My name is Lucy. Ben and I had been married for nine years. We’d been trying for a baby for six of them.
I want to tell you about those six years, because they matter. Because everything that came after only makes sense if you understand what it cost us to get there.
We started trying when I was twenty-nine. We thought it would be easy. Everybody thinks it will be easy. Our friends were having babies by accident. My sister got pregnant on her honeymoon. We figured we’d have one by Christmas.
We didn’t.
After a year, we went to a doctor. After two years, we went to a specialist. There were tests. So many tests. Blood work and ultrasounds and procedures with long names I learned to pronounce. They couldn’t find a reason. Unexplained infertility, they called it. Which is a doctor’s way of saying we don’t know.
We did three rounds of IUI. Nothing.
We did IVF. The first round, I got pregnant. I lost it at nine weeks. The second round, I got pregnant again. I lost it at seven. The third round didn’t work at all.
Every round cost about fifteen thousand dollars. Our insurance covered none of it.
Ben is an electrician. He had his own small business. Morrison Electric. Him and two guys, Danny and Rico, in a white van with a lightning bolt painted on the side. He worked hard. He was good at it. People in our town called him first when their power went out.
I was a baker. Or I used to be. When I was little, I spent every summer in my grandmother’s bakery on Main Street. Rosie’s. My grandmother’s name was Rose. She made bread every morning at four, and cinnamon rolls the size of your head, and pies that people drove two towns over to buy. I stood on a step stool next to her and learned to knead dough before I learned to ride a bike.
When I was twenty-three, Grandma Rose died. The bakery closed. The building sat empty on Main Street, with paper over the windows and a faded FOR SALE sign that never went away.
I always said I’d reopen it someday. Ben used to tease me about it. Someday, when you’re the bread queen of Riverside.
But someday cost money. And all our money went to doctors.
Somewhere around year four, after the second miscarriage, we stopped saying when we have a baby.
We started saying if.
I’ll never forget the night it changed. We were lying in bed. I’d just gotten my period again. I was crying into my pillow. Ben was holding me.
“If it doesn’t happen,” he said quietly, “we’ll still be okay. Right? You and me?”
“If,” I said. “You said if.“
He was quiet for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No,” I said. “You’re right. It’s if now.”
We tried one more round of IVF. The last one. We told ourselves it was the last one. We’d taken out a second mortgage to pay for it. If it didn’t work, we’d stop. We’d adopt. Or we’d just be the two of us. We’d travel. We’d get a dog.
It didn’t work. The test was negative.
We stopped.
And then, four months later, on a Tuesday morning in March, without any doctors or needles or fifteen thousand dollars, I took a pregnancy test because my period was eight days late and I felt sick in the mornings and I thought maybe I had the flu.
Two pink lines.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub and stared at it. I took another one. Two pink lines. I took a third one. Two pink lines.
Ben was in the kitchen making coffee. I walked out holding all three tests. My hands were shaking.
He looked at me. He looked at the tests in my hand.
He put down the coffee pot.
He came across the kitchen and dropped to his knees on the floor. Right there. He wrapped his arms around my hips and put his face against my stomach and cried. Big, shaking sobs. Into my shirt.
“We actually did it,” he kept saying. “Luce. We actually did it.”
I stood in my kitchen with my husband on his knees, holding me, crying into my shirt, and I put my hands in his hair and cried too.
Four weeks later, he sat alone in a doctor’s office and learned that he was dying.
I didn’t know that then. I found out later. Much later. From his mother.
He’d been having stomach pain for months. Before the pregnancy, even. He’d been losing weight. He’d been tired. He thought it was stress. Everybody thought it was stress. We’d been through six years of fertility treatments. Of course he was stressed.
But the pain got worse. And after I got pregnant, after he cried on the kitchen floor, he finally went to the doctor. Alone. On a Thursday. He told me he had a job in Greenville.
They did a scan. They called him back the next week.
Pancreatic cancer. Stage four. It had already spread to his liver.
The doctor told him the truth. With treatment, he might have a year. Maybe a little more. Without treatment, less.
He sat in that doctor’s office. He was thirty-seven years old. His wife was nine weeks pregnant with the baby they’d been trying to have for six years.
He didn’t tell me.
Not that evening. Not the following month. Not once.
I noticed things. Of course I noticed things.
He was getting thinner. His jeans hung off him. He had to punch a new hole in his belt. I told him he was working too hard and not eating. I made him lasagna and meatloaf and big pots of chili. He ate a little and said he was full.
I’d wake up in the middle of the night and his side of the bed would be cold. He’d come back twenty minutes later and say his stomach was bothering him again. He’d say it was the chili. He’d laugh.
The second time I found him on the bathroom floor with the faucet running, I was seven months pregnant. It was three in the morning again. I knocked. The water shut off. He opened the door.
He’d been crying. I could see it. His eyes were swollen.
“Ben,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Stomach.”
“You’ve been crying.”
He looked at me for a long time. Something moved in his face. Something huge. I thought, for a second, that he was going to tell me something.
Then he looked down. At my belly. At our daughter, kicking under my nightgown.
“I’m just scared,” he said. “About being a dad. That’s all. I’m scared I’m going to mess it up.”
I believed him. I knelt down on the bathroom floor, slowly, with my huge belly, and I put my arms around him.
“You’re going to be the best dad in the world,” I said.
He held on to me so hard it almost hurt.
“I hope so,” he said into my shoulder. “I really hope so.”
He was working longer hours too. Much longer. Leaving at six in the morning. Coming home at nine at night. Working Saturdays. Some Sundays. He said Morrison Electric had gotten a huge contract. A whole office building over in Clayton. They needed to finish before the baby came.
“I want to have money saved up,” he said. “So I can take time off when she’s born. So I can be home with you.”
His mother started coming around more. Marian. She was sixty-four, a retired school librarian. A small, quiet woman with silver hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain. She’d always been kind to me. But she’d never been the type to drop by.
Now she came every week. Sometimes twice. She brought casseroles. She folded laundry. She sat with me on the couch and rubbed my feet when they swelled up.
She looked at Ben sometimes in a way I didn’t understand. Like she was memorizing him.
Once, I caught her crying in our kitchen. She was standing at the sink with her back to me. Her shoulders were shaking.
“Marian? Are you okay?”
She turned around fast. She wiped her eyes.
“Hormones,” she said. She laughed. “Isn’t that supposed to be your line?”
I laughed too. I didn’t think about it again.
Eight months.
He carried it alone for eight months. While I chose a crib. While I painted the nursery a soft yellow. While I read baby books and made lists of names and went to every prenatal appointment with him holding my hand in the waiting room.
He held my hand in that waiting room every month. In the same hospital where he was getting his own scans on the floor above.
I didn’t know.
Our daughter was born on a Saturday in November.
Hazel Rose Morrison. Seven pounds, two ounces. A full head of dark hair, like Ben’s. A loud, furious cry that filled the whole delivery room.
Ben cut the cord. His hands were shaking so badly the nurse had to steady them.
They put her on my chest. Then, a few minutes later, they put her in Ben’s arms.
He sat down in the chair next to my bed with our daughter. He looked at her for a long time. He touched her tiny fingers. Her tiny nose. Her ears.
“Hi, Hazel,” he whispered. “Hi, baby girl. I’m your dad.”
Then he put his face down against her little head, and his shoulders started shaking.
The nurse smiled at me. “They always cry,” she said. “The dads. Every single one.”
I smiled back.
I didn’t know he wasn’t crying because he was happy. Or not only because he was happy.
He was crying because he’d made it. He’d made it long enough to hold her.
He told me when Hazel was six weeks old.
He couldn’t hide it anymore. He’d lost forty pounds. His skin had started to turn yellow. His eyes too. I’d been pushing him to see a doctor for weeks. He finally said yes. He said he’d go on Monday.
On Sunday night, after Hazel was asleep in her bassinet, he sat down next to me on the couch.
He took both my hands.
“Luce,” he said. “I need to tell you something. And I need you to let me get through the whole thing before you say anything.”
I knew. I don’t know how. But I knew. The second he took my hands.
He told me.
Pancreatic cancer. Stage four. The diagnosis in April. Four weeks after the positive test. The doctor’s office on the Thursday he said he was in Greenville. The prognosis. A year, maybe. With treatment.
The chemotherapy he’d been getting every other week for six months. On the days he said he had early jobs. At the hospital. On the floor above my obstetrician.
The bathroom floor at three in the morning. The faucet running so I wouldn’t hear him being sick from the chemo.
The crying. Not about being a dad.
About knowing he’d never really get to be one.
He told me all of it. Holding my hands on our couch. In the yellow lamplight. With our six-week-old daughter asleep in the next room.
When he was done, I didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then I pulled my hands away.
“You lied to me,” I said. “For eight months. Every single day.”
“Yes.”
“I asked you. I asked you over and over. I found you on the bathroom floor. Twice. And you lied to my face.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He looked at me. His eyes were wet. Yellow at the edges.
“Because you’d lost two babies, Luce,” he said. “Two. At seven weeks and nine weeks. Dr. Hammond told us. Remember? After the second one. She said stress was a factor. She said if you got pregnant again, the first trimester would be high-risk. She said to keep things as calm as possible.”
I remembered.
“I sat in that office,” Ben said. “In April. And they told me I had a year. And all I could think about was you. Nine weeks pregnant. With the baby we tried six years to have. And Dr. Hammond saying keep things calm.” His voice broke. “How was I supposed to tell you? How was I supposed to come home and say, Honey, I’m dying, and also please don’t lose the baby?“
“You don’t get to decide that for me,” I said. “That was my decision. That was my body. My husband.”
“I know.”
“You let me paint a nursery,” I said. My voice was rising. “You let me pick out a crib. You let me sit in that waiting room and hold your hand and talk about next summer and her first Christmas. You let me plan a whole future that you knew you weren’t going to be in.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“You stole eight months from me,” I said. “Eight months I could have had with you. Knowing. Being with you. Taking care of you. Saying everything. You took them.”
He didn’t argue. He just sat there and let me say it.
“I’d do it again,” he said finally. Very quietly. “I’m sorry. I know that’s not what you want to hear. But I would. Because she’s here.” He looked toward the bedroom door. “She’s here, Luce. She’s healthy. She’s perfect. And you didn’t spend your whole pregnancy crying in a hospital chair next to me. You spent it painting a yellow nursery.” He swallowed. “That was the only thing I had left to give you. So I gave it.”
I hated him for that. For about an hour.
Then I crawled across the couch and put my arms around him and held on, and we cried until Hazel woke up and needed to be fed.
He had ten more weeks.
They were the best ten weeks and the worst ten weeks of my life. Both at once. I don’t know how to explain that. You’d have to live it.
He stopped working. He was too sick by then. But on the days he felt okay, he did everything with Hazel. He changed her diapers. He gave her bottles of pumped milk at two in the morning so I could sleep. He sang to her. Off-key. Johnny Cash songs. I Walk the Line. She stared up at him like he was the most fascinating thing in the world.
He took about four thousand pictures of her. Hazel sleeping. Hazel yawning. Hazel sneezing. Hazel in a onesie that said DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL that his mother bought.
On the bad days, he lay in our bed and I put Hazel on his chest, and she slept there, rising and falling with his breathing.
He was there for four months of her life. Four months.
He was there for her first real smile. It was at him. Of course it was at him. He was making a stupid face, puffing his cheeks out like a blowfish, and she just broke into this huge gummy grin. He started crying. He cried at everything by then.
He was there when she laughed for the first time. He was there when she grabbed his finger and wouldn’t let go.
He wasn’t there when she rolled over. Or sat up. Or said her first word.
He died on a Thursday in March. In our bed. In the afternoon. With the window open, because it was the first warm day of spring, and he said he wanted to hear the birds.
Hazel was asleep on his chest. I was lying next to him. His mother was sitting in the chair by the window.
He was very tired. He’d been sleeping most of the day. Around three o’clock, he woke up for a few minutes. He looked down at Hazel on his chest. He put his hand on her back.
“Hey, baby girl,” he whispered.
Then he looked at me.
“Luce,” he said. “You were right. I’m sorry I stole those months.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I forgive you.”
“Don’t forgive me yet,” he said. And he almost smiled. “Wait until you read the letter.”
“What letter?”
But he’d already closed his eyes.
He didn’t open them again.
The silence afterward was the strangest thing.
Not the grief. I expected the grief. I’d had ten weeks to start expecting it.
The silence.
He was gone, and our house was so quiet. No more Johnny Cash in the nursery at two in the morning. No more stupid jokes at breakfast. No more boots by the back door. No more Morrison Electric van in the driveway.
And under the silence, there was something else. Something I couldn’t put into words.
He’d kept that secret for eight months. From me. And I knew it couldn’t only have been about the baby. It couldn’t only have been about Dr. Hammond saying keep things calm. There was something else. Something I was missing. I could feel it, like a missing tooth you keep touching with your tongue.
The long hours. The big contract in Clayton. The Saturdays. The Sundays. The nights he came home at nine smelling like sawdust and paint.
He’d had stage four cancer and been getting chemotherapy every other week. How had he been working sixty hours a week?
I didn’t understand. I couldn’t make it make sense.
And every time I tried to think about it, Hazel would cry, or someone would bring another casserole, or the funeral home would call about something, and the thought would slip away.
The funeral was on a Monday. The whole town came. Ben had wired half the houses in Riverside. Old men from the VFW stood in the back in their caps. Danny and Rico, his guys from Morrison Electric, were pallbearers. They both cried the whole time. Rico had to stop and lean against the hearse.
Afterward, at the reception at our church, Danny came up to me. He’s a big guy. Bearded. He was holding a paper plate of potato salad he wasn’t eating.
“Lucy,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you, Danny.”
“He was…” Danny stopped. He looked down at his plate. “He talked about you every day. And the baby. Every single day. While we were working. He’d stop in the middle of pulling wire and say, You know what, Danny? I bet Hazel’s going to like blueberry muffins. Lucy’s grandma made the best blueberry muffins.“
I smiled. “He did love my blueberry muffins.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. He looked at me strangely. Like he wanted to say something else. “Yeah, he did.”
Then Rico came up and put his hand on Danny’s shoulder and steered him away.
Four days after the funeral, Marian came to the house.
It was a Friday afternoon. Gray and rainy. Hazel was asleep in her swing in the living room. I was sitting on the couch in Ben’s old sweatshirt, staring at nothing. I’d been doing that a lot.
Marian knocked on the front door and let herself in. She had a key. She’d had a key since the wedding.
She didn’t take off her coat. She came and sat down next to me on the couch. Close. Our knees touching.
She opened her handbag. She took out a thick envelope. A big one. Manila. It was soft and worn at the corners, like it had been carried around for a long time.
She held it for a moment. Then she put it gently in my hands.
On the front, in Ben’s handwriting, it said:
For my little girls. In case I don’t make it.
“He made me promise,” Marian said quietly. “In April. The day he found out. He wrote this and gave it to me and made me promise to keep it. To keep everything. Until after.”
“In April?” I said. “You’ve known since April?”
She nodded. She didn’t look at me.
“You knew,” I said. “The whole time. Eight months. You knew.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t tell me either.”
“He made me promise,” she said again. Her voice cracked. “He’s my son, Lucy. He was dying. He asked me to promise. What was I supposed to do?”
I thought about her crying at my kitchen sink. Hormones. Isn’t that supposed to be your line?
I looked down at the envelope.
I opened it.
Inside, there were pages. A lot of pages. Lined notebook paper, torn from a spiral notebook, the edges still frayed. Ben’s handwriting. Blue ink. Some of it neat. Some of it shaky and slanted, like he’d written it on bad days.
The first page was dated in April. The day after his diagnosis.
Luce,
If you’re reading this, I didn’t make it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
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