150 bpm

Afterward, I impulse-buy an off-season package deal. Just one ticket. No companion fare. A round-trip flight plus four weeknights in a two-star hotel on a foreign coast. The building resembles a Soviet prison and the sheets are gray but it is just two blocks from the beach.

Pain wakes me early. I change my sanitary pad and dress before sunrise in my two-piece, sweatshirt, and wrap skirt. That my shrinking breasts no longer ache is one meager comfort. I stuff a bleach-stiff towel and self-help book in my canvas bag. Precious Lives, Painful Choices: even the title makes me gag, but I carried it like a talisman through the city and the airport, held it like a life preserver six miles above the sea. In the cafe on the ground floor a hotel employee with gelled black bangs is watching television in the pre-dawn light, smoking a cigarette, one foot in and one foot outside a sliding patio door. I load up on small boxes of cereal, a plastic bottle of unpasteurized milk, a carton of thick juice, coffee. That she does not acknowledge me I take as a small kindness.

I walk the empty streets to a swath of gravel and the steel-gray sea. Lay down my towel and my complimentary breakfast. The horizon pales but I cannot bring myself to read my book. I watch the palm trees crane, fronds tossing, I watch the moody sky.

It’s the heartbeat that I can’t forget. When the sonogram technician held her transducer to my abdomen and turned up the sound I was surprised by its rapidity. 150 bpm. That’s your baby! She articulated baby like a charm. She referred to me as expecting—me!—a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist who’d never expected much. She showed me a caterpillar in woolly black and white and I almost saw a child. Pointed at its nubs and blobs and called them limbs and eyes. Said baby and I felt a baby’s weight and warmth, a baby’s little hand around my thumb. She was in the business of fantasy, and I bought in.

At home my husband and I waltzed together in the dark. We played make-you-laugh with absurdist baby names. We promised each other never to repeat the mistakes our parents made. The origins of our story had always extended back generations, but now its end would not be written until long past our respective deaths. Expecting made us giddy, and it made time long.

Then, weeks after initial testing, the doctor called us in. My husband left work in the middle of the day to sweat beside me, gripping his phone, as she showed us pictures of chromosomes on a laminated sheet like so many pairs of mealworms. In the healthy pairs, the doctor said, the worms were the same length. In the cluster of cells growing inside me, one worm was stunted. Not what we were hoping for, she said. Short life expectancy. High risk. Low quality of life.

That’s when everyone stopped using the magic word. They referred to my cluster as the pregnancy, to the procedure as a termination. They told me it might hurt a little. It hurt a lot. I lay on the examination table while they vacuumed it out, feet in stirrups, naked under a paper sheet, and cried like a you-know-what. It was the heartbeat that I could not forget. I believed that it was just a cluster, just nubs and blobs and clots, but I couldn’t help but picture it lying among the bloody sheets and needles in the biohazard waste disposal, shapeless but beating, 150 bpm, 140, until slowing to a stop.

The beach is more populated now. I am a stranger among strangers. An old man walks a dog. A young man in a tattered jacket pans for gold. The numb cloud-cover tears open and our old dying sun shines through the gash. The dog, having found a crab, barks, urgent and joyful, announcing another scurrying lifeform on this living earth. I am emptier and more alone.

The hope with which I saw a baby in a blood clot has been replaced with the worry—irrational, I know—that I may never stop bleeding; the rapture of expecting with the worry—not irrational—that I’ll never again waltz with my husband in the dark. My future is a stunted shadow: just three more weeknights on this foreign coast. Tonight I’ll dine on crudo and sweet wine. Tomorrow I’ll lunch on cigarettes. For now I’ll sit. I’ll watch the strangers and the waves. I’ll try to lose the memory of that hurried heartbeat in the slower, grander rhythm of the tide.

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