The Night Olivia Fell - Christina McDonald

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she said, obeyed everything she told me to do. I’d never thought twice about questioning her.

      But now I felt that trust disappearing like evaporating mist. If she could lie to me about something as fundamental as this, what else had she kept from me?

       ABI

      october

      As the hours bled into each other, I alternated between numbness and sorrow, each as intense and debilitating as the other.

      ‘I need to know what happened,’ I said to Sarah.

      She was so still, barely moving since we’d settled in the family waiting room the doctors gave us. I couldn’t hold still, pacing the floor, counting the ceiling tiles, pouring water from one cup to another. I needed to move, to do something. My analytical brain needed to make sense of things, to question the facts and frame the story, to make the columns align, the numbers add up.

      ‘You should go home. Get some rest,’ she replied.

      I glared at her. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ Olivia and I were linked by birth, by life. I wouldn’t leave her in death.

      More time passed. ‘Why does she have bruises on her arms?’ I asked Sarah, slamming an empty cup to the ground. I sucked my lips over my teeth, trying to steady myself. ‘Do you think somebody hurt her?’

      Sarah looked startled. ‘I don’t know. The police – they’ll investigate.’

      Tears tumbled down my cheeks, sliding into the hollow of my neck. I could barely breathe, whimpers racking my body as I sank into a chair. Sarah came to me, slid her arms around my shoulders. We held each other like that for a long time, our bodies shaking.

      ‘I wanted to keep her safe!’ I sobbed.

      ‘This isn’t your fault, Abi,’ she replied, her voice raw with pain.

      I pulled away and looked into her reddened eyes.

      ‘What if it is?’

      × × ×

      Night washed over Olivia’s room. The hospital lights turned on one by one, and still I didn’t move from my seat next to her bed, the intermittent bleeps and swooshes keeping Olivia connected to this world a bizarre lullaby to my pain. Despair swirled inside me, a relentless fog that made me incapable of anything: eating, drinking, moving.

      I stared, lost, at the bruises circling Olivia’s wrists. They were ringed with blue and purple, as if someone had grabbed her, staining her beautiful skin with the color of anger.

      I laid my forehead on the edge of her bed, grateful to be alone with her. All day the doctors had encouraged me to go home, get some rest. Sarah had brought me a ham sandwich, left untouched and eventually tipped into the garbage, and then relentless cups of coffee. But it just made me need to pee, and I didn’t want to leave Olivia. So I stopped drinking altogether.

      My head pounded from tears and dehydration, but I couldn’t leave. Not yet. I felt like I was living inside a tear in the fabric of time, the real world outside on pause.

      Two days had passed since my dash to Olivia’s broken body, time shuffling past with excruciating slowness. More doctors trundled in, more reports, another CT scan, an ultrasound showing a fetal heartbeat. Cautionary whispers that she might miscarry and more whispers that if her heart held up long enough, they could save the baby.

      Save the baby? I wanted them to save my baby.

      I slept in fits and spurts, my forehead pressed against Olivia’s stomach. Night inched by. Alarm bells rang intermittently, and I imagined the people being told their loved one hadn’t made it. I imagined what would happen when it was Olivia’s turn.

      I awoke with a start when somebody shook my shoulder.

      ‘Mrs Knight?’ Dr Griffith held a cup of water out to me. ‘Why don’t you have a drink?’

      ‘It’s Miss,’ I corrected him. ‘I’m not married.’ My voice rasped, my throat barren of any moisture. But still I refused the water.

      He slid a chair across the room and sat next to me, the cup clasped between both hands. ‘Miss Knight. You need to take care of yourself. You need to eat, drink, get some rest.’

      ‘Why does everyone keep saying that?’ I burst out. Pain ripped through me, undiminished by the passing hours, and I pressed my fingers hard into my temples.

      ‘You have a long road ahead of you.’ He glanced at Olivia. ‘All three of you.’

      I stared at him for a long moment, tried to lick my cracked lips.

      ‘Olivia isn’t coming back,’ he said gently. ‘But there’s a chance your grandchild could survive.’ It hurt him to say this, I could tell by the tightening of his eyes, and it made me like him. Or at least respect him.

      ‘How long?’ I finally said.

      ‘How long what?’

      ‘How long does Olivia have to be on life support for the baby –’ I broke off, the words skewering my heart.

      ‘We’d aim to get her to thirty-two weeks’ gestation.’

      I did the math quickly. Eighteen more weeks on life support.

      ‘Is it possible?’

      Dr Griffith hesitated. ‘As far as I’m aware, it’s never happened before. But I think it’s possible.’

      I tried to breathe, but a solid lump had formed in my chest, squeezing all the oxygen out. I clenched my eyes shut, then opened them.

      ‘Why haven’t the police come? Where are they?’

      Dr Griffith looked surprised. He took his glasses off and polished them on his lab coat.

      ‘The hospital doesn’t report . . . accidents.’

      ‘Accidents? This wasn’t an accident!’ My voice pitched high, anger and pain surging through my body. ‘You’ve seen the bruises on her wrists!’

      ‘My apologies.’ Dr Griffith shook his head vigorously. ‘I just mean that the hospital isn’t legally required to report anything other than gunshot or stab wounds, and this is likely why you haven’t heard anything from them.’

      I pressed my palm to my forehead, a tingle of panic buzzing in my fingertips. But this time I won, pushing the anxiety away. I would report it myself.

      ‘Olivia’s a good girl. What happened?’ I asked.

      I heard myself using the present tense, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want her to slide into the past yet. She was still here.

      His eyes were kind but calculating, the eyes of a lawyer rather than a doctor.

      ‘I don’t know. But I promise you this’ – he held the cup of water out to me – ‘you’ll need your strength to find out.’

      I took the water and gulped down every drop.

      × × ×

      It started raining as soon as I left the hospital. It was almost night, black clouds edging over the horizon.

      I turned onto my street, slowly rolling toward my Victorian-style three-bedroom. Mine was the smallest house on the street, perched at the end of a row of grander ones.

      My neighbors were middle-class professionals, lawyers, doctors. Their wives stayed home and raised chubby-cheeked toddlers. They had playdates and did hot yoga and went for coffee dates. I, a single working mother, pregnant at eighteen, stuck out like a sore thumb.

      I never would’ve been able to afford the house on my own. But everything I did was for Olivia, to give her a better chance in life: middle-class neighbors, a good school, low crime rate, and right by the beach.

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