The contractions kept coming. Not close enough together yet to become a rhythm I could count, but real enough to turn fear into something more exact. There is a particular terror in pain when you know it is not yours alone. Every spasm that bent me made me think of the babies. Their bodies. Their lungs. The terrible impossible geography of where we were. My children were not supposed to be fighting for life in a commercial freezer. They were supposed to be protected by me, carried in warmth, in blood, in ordinary time. Instead they were trapped inside the body of a woman their father had decided to turn into paperwork.
I put both arms around my stomach and walked faster.
The white lights overhead blurred and sharpened and blurred again. My breath kept pouring out in clouds. My thighs had begun to ache with cold so deep it no longer felt located in one place. My feet hurt too, but distantly, as if the pain belonged to somebody else standing a little farther away than my skin.
I tried the door again.
The handle burned this time.
The freezing metal kissed my palm so hard it felt like flame.
I jerked back and looked down. My hand came away red and mottled, and for 1 wild second I thought some part of it might have stayed on the handle. I could no longer trust what I was seeing. The cold was starting to bend the edges of things. The silver walls looked too bright. The corners too sharp. The space itself seemed to pulse in and out slightly with each breath, as though the freezer were not a room but a lung inhaling me.
“Help!” I screamed.
Then louder.
“HELP ME!”
I hit the door with both fists.
The sound was ugly and small.
Not because I wasn’t trying hard enough, but because the room was built to contain everything that happened in it. Temperature. Air. Noise. Life. The more I pounded, the more I understood that the room itself was part of Derek’s plan. Not just the temperature. The isolation. The certainty that even if I fought, even if I shouted until my throat tore open, what I was inside would hold me in.
Another contraction slammed through me and I folded, gasping, my forehead almost hitting the steel door.
“No no no…”
I had stopped saying please by then.
There was no one in the room to beg.
I slid one hand under my belly as if I could support the babies physically from the outside, as if I could brace us all at once against whatever was trying to take us apart. My back pressed against the door, and I let myself sink for half a second before terror shot through me. If I sat down, I might not get up. If I curled inward, the cold would win faster.
I pushed myself back upright and started pacing again.
It was absurd, those little steps. 4 paces one way. Turn. 4 back. Turn. The room was too small for proper movement, but I did it anyway because motion was all that separated me from surrender. I rubbed my arms again. I blew into my fists, though the air from my mouth was already cold before it reached them. I tried to think about anything that wasn’t the freezer and failed.
Memory came anyway.
Not in a useful order. Not as a story.
Just flashes.
Derek smiling at me over burned pancakes the first morning after our honeymoon.
His hand on the small of my back in grocery store aisles.
The way he used to say my name when he wanted to soften an argument.
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