My next appointment was at eleven weeks. My husband and I both took the day off from work. The appointment was early in the morning; we figured we could go out to lunch afterwards, hang out in Manhattan for a bit, maybe check out the Yayoi Kusama show downtown. I was feeling strangely optimistic - I'd made it to eleven weeks, I wasn't bleeding or spotting, and I could feel my uterus beginning to pop up through my pelvic bones. I was nervous, sure, but I honestly expected good news.

We waited for the doctor forever. I joked with my husband that if he didn't get back soon, I'd just turn on the ultrasound machine myself and take a peek. He laughed. It would have been his first time seeing the baby live on the screen, and I was excited to show him how amazing it was.

The doctor came in, finally. He was in a good mood. "Let's say hello to the baby again," he said. I laid back on the table as the nurse dimmed the lights. My husband stood near my head and we all watched the screen together, holding our breath.

We saw the baby right away. It wasn't moving. The little flicker that had been there before wasn't there. The doctor fiddled with the instruments, and we waited for something to happen. It had taken a few moments to find the heartbeat at the last scan, and I prayed that the doctor was just having trouble finding the right angle to see it. We were all quiet.

Finally, I said, "There's no heartbeat, is there?" Even asking that, I was still optimistic. I was sure that he would tell me to just be patient, we were getting there, not to worry and so on. Instead he said, "No, there isn't. I'm sorry." My husband stroked my hair and we looked at each other. I was grateful for him in a way that I had never been before.

We went back upstairs to the big machines for a second opinion. I texted two of my best friends. My husband called his mom. They took us into another dark room, did a vaginal scan, then an abdominal one. The ultrasound tech brought in the radiologist, who looked over the images and then said to me, in the kindest voice, "I just want you to know that I'm so sorry, and that this isn't your fault. There is nothing you could have done differently."

They left us alone for a few minutes so we could be sad in privacy. A dark room, illuminated mostly by the pictures of our fetus-who-was-no-longer. I sobbed and grabbed onto my husband like we were on a sinking ship. I remember thinking, at least I still have you.

We went back downstairs to wait for the doctor in his office. It was full of pictures of babies he had delivered. Someone's birth plan was on his desk, full of demands for their perfect delivery. Fuck you, I thought. They could have sliced me open from head to toe if I got to take my baby home afterwards. And fuck them for making us wait in this baby-filled office. 

After we'd scheduled the d&c for five days later and I'd collected all of the paperwork and prescriptions and notes for work and condolences from the doctor and his assistants, we left the hospital in a sort of daze. Wine and food, we said. Wine and food will make it better. We walked downtown and stopped at Dylan's Candy Bar, where I filled up a couple of bags with enough chocolate to ride out the next few days in a cocoa-induced coma. Then we went to my favorite restaurant in midtown and ordered some expensive Sauvignon blanc and huge, rare, bloody roast beef sandwiches: all of the things I'd craved and couldn't have over the last couple of months. We mostly sat in silence. There was very little to say, and of course the worst was still yet to come. I still had to figure out how to go home, how to tell the people we still had left to tell and how to get through the night without falling apart entirely.

My best friend came over to sit with me after my husband fell asleep that night, exhausted. I told him that I was afraid of having the surgery, mostly because it would mean my baby was no longer with me. I knew he wasn't alive, but just knowing that his teeny little body was still inside of me gave me some strange comfort. The d&c would be the beginning of the road to recovery, but the end of the link between my body and my child's. I wasn't sure I was ready for it. But of course, it had to happen anyway.