Chapter 6 - Ultrasound Room Quiet
The transport orderly didn't talk on the way down. He just pushed my bed toward the elevator and kept his eyes on the numbers while my hands stayed locked over my belly. I could feel the hospital gown riding up at my knees where they'd cut away nothing but tucked my gray uniform pants into a plastic bag at the foot of the bed. I asked him to leave the bag where I could see it. He nodded and didn't ask why.
My name is Elena Morales. I was thirty-two and twenty-six weeks pregnant when they wheeled me into ultrasound.
The room was cold and dim, just a monitor glowing blue in the corner and a blind half-closed over a window. The tech was a woman about my mom's age, short hair, clean hands. She helped me shift onto my back and tucked a wedge under my right hip.
"I'm Dana," she said. "This gel's gonna be cold."
It was. I sucked in a breath when it hit my skin. She pressed the probe low and turned her eyes to the screen. Then she went quiet.
The silence lasted too long. I could hear her breathing slow and then pause, hear the machine clicking as she measured. The whoosh sound came and went, thin and fast. My own breathing stopped with it. I stared at the ceiling tiles and counted the dots in them so I wouldn't grab her wrist.
"Please," I said. "Just tell me if he's alive."
She didn't look away from the screen. "I need the doctor to read this. Just hold still for me, honey."
She kept moving the probe, pressing a little deeper on my left side. Pain pulled sharp across my back. I bit the inside of my cheek and didn't move. On the monitor, gray shapes shifted. I couldn't read them. I just watched her face for any softening. There wasn't any.
The doctor came in ten minutes later while I was still on the table with gel drying on my stomach. Young guy, tired eyes, a badge that said Patel. He washed his hands, took the probe from Dana, and did it all again in the same quiet.
Then he froze an image and turned to me.
"There's a heartbeat," he said. "Your boy's alive."
My chest dropped. A sound came out of me I didn't mean to make.
"But listen to me," he said. "You've got a strain to the placenta where you took the impact. No full abruption, but there's bleeding behind it. That puts him at risk. You need strict bed rest here for forty-eight hours, continuous monitoring. If that bleed grows, we deliver early."
"Will he —" I started.
"We're going to do everything to keep him inside," he said. "Right now he's holding on. That's the truth we've got."
They moved me up to maternity after that, to a room with a fetal monitor strapped around me and an IV in my arm. A nurse named Carla checked the strip, checked my blood pressure, and asked if I needed anything for pain. I said no. I needed my head clear.
My uniform bag was on the chair. I asked Carla to bring it to the bed.
"I need pictures," I said. "Before they clean anything."
She looked at me, then closed the curtain around us. I pulled the gray top out. The right side seam near the waist was torn open about two inches, threads pulled white. I laid it across my lap. Down near my hip, under the gown tie, a bruise was coming up dark purple where I'd hit the tile at the base of the stairs.
"Can you stand there while I do this?" I asked her. "So someone saw."
Carla nodded. "Go ahead."
My hands shook, but I got my phone, held each shot steady, and took three of the tear and three of the bruise with the hospital bracelet in frame. The shutter clicks sounded too loud. Carla said the date and time out loud for the video I took after.
"October wedding day, two forty-five p.m. arrival, photos taken in maternity," she said. "I witnessed it."
"Thank you," I whispered.
When she left to check another patient, I opened a new voice memo. I kept my voice low under the beeping of the monitor.
"This is Elena Morales," I said. "I'm in County Hospital. This morning at the mansion, I was at the bottom of the marble staircase by the white tile. My hand was on the dark iron railing. Vanessa was two steps above me in her dress and veil. She stepped down toward me and pushed with both hands on my shoulder and chest. I fell backward. I remember the cold of the floor."
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I stopped the recording and played back the first three seconds to make sure it saved. It had.
The monitor beside me kept tracing my boy's heartbeat in a jagged blue line. I put my hand over the belts and didn't take my eyes off it.
