Sincere Apology

Warning: The following story contains graphic descriptions of miscarriages, violence, and self-mutilation.

Sincere Apology

**********

Lawson

I looked down at the bloody lump of tissue that was to be my fourth child and something my grandfather used to say came to mind.

You can't fix a broken thing so it's new again.

You can only tie the ends together and hope for the best.

My wife sat sprawled on the bathroom floor. A crimson trail led from between her spread legs across the brilliant white tiles.

Her sheer nightgown glistened red at the bottom. She stared at what had come out of her in horrified fascination.

My cheerful happy wife, who talked bulls out of their fury, the tall and muscular woman whose water had broken once in the middle of an alfalfa field and had walked two miles while stopping periodically, doubled over with contractions, to get back to her truck and drive into town to deliver our middle child, the strong remarkable woman who ran our ranch and managed our family with boundless energy -- sat helplessly next to what her body had rejected.

I laid a towel carefully over the dead fetus. I wanted her eyes go somewhere else.

Then I gathered my love in my arms and drove her to the hospital.

It was a bad day. The months that followed were not much better.

And this isn't even my story. This is about my friends Noah and Mia.

**********

Noah

Practice makes perfect. Except when it comes to losing a child. Then practice just fucks your life up.

It had started out so well. Mia and I had a goal of bringing the store to a certain level of profitability for one full year before we started trying to get pregnant.

The single most romantic moment of our lives was the afternoon I met her at the door with a spreadsheet in my hand.

As I opened the door, my petite jewel looked up at me with those large brown eyes, questioning. Then she saw the paper and instantly knew what it meant. She dropped a shopping bag and jumped into my arms. A hundred-pound woman sounds insubstantial, but when she launches herself at you propelled by the long pent-up excitement of motherhood -- she becomes a irresistible force of nature.

I barely kept my feet, staggering backwards and turning to maintain my balance. I began to lose the battle and aimed for the couch as a safe landing. She ended up beside me, her arms still tight around my neck. With a strength I would not have thought her capable of she rolled me bodily over on top of her.

She managed to pull up her dress and pull down her panties. I got the hint and unbuckled my belt and shoved my pants down to mid-thigh. All this while maintaining lip contact in furious haste like we were still in high school and the parents were on their way home.

She was sopping and I was rigid. She teetered on the edge of the chasm. An edge was crumbling beneath her, so amped was she. My woman wanted desperately to carry our baby. Her whole heart and soul had been dammed up, and at that moment on the couch in our front room -- with the door still wide open -- all those emotions flooded through.

I pushed into her and she cried out. Her hips thrust furiously at me. My cock plunged in and out of her sopping cunt, squelching like rubber boots dancing in a rain puddle.

I had no will. I released myself into her and shouted something the neighbors on the next block must have heard.

That was how we made our first baby.

The one that ended up in a stainless-steel pan in a doctor's examination room.

**********

Lawson

"Bets--"

It was all I had to say, and she started to cry.

We lay naked on our bed, side by side, sweaty. Unsatisfied.

It wasn't always this way. Before we lost the baby, we had great sex. Betsy was a loud and enthusiastic lover. She had orgasms on my tongue, on my fingers, and on my cock.

Since that day, she had not cum with me once.

I should regret agreeing to try for more children. We had three already, but I think that Betsy was thinking ahead to the day when they would go off to college or the service or where ever. I saw the signs before she did, I believe. The fawning just too hard over babies in their strollers. Getting out old stuffed animals and carrying them around under the pretext of organizing. Endless hours of arranging flowers. The anxious way she pretended to enjoy her fortieth birthday.

Finally, I had said to her, "Bets, do you want to have another kid?"

She melted. I swear, if a human being could melt.

"Two." She said quietly.

Well, of course you always get pets in twos to keep each other company. I knew that.

**********

Mia

I wish this town had a tattoo parlor. I would pay them to ink a big skull on my chest, with giant black wings hovering over my tits. Under the skull on a flowing ribbon would be its name: Hubris.

Noah and I worked our asses off for three years getting the store going. The town where we both grew up is tiny, but there is a sizeable population living on ranches and farms in the valley. Our stock is hardware, tools, automotive supplies, cleaning supplies, feed, furniture, paint, plumbing.... You get the picture. We are an independent shop, which means we have to do our own advertising and our own ordering. It also means we do not have to pay a franchise fee or take orders from above. We can carry the products we think the community needs, not what some distant middle manager thinks it needs. We decided the town deserved a store like this. And it worked.

Noah managed. I kept the books, stocked shelves, cut fencing, weighed nails -- anything that needed to be done. In addition, I did the accounting for an auto repair shop to supplement our income until the store could support us.

The magic day came. The numbers said make a baby, and we did. I was three months along and feeling great. We had bought a crib and a stroller. We had two car seats, boxes of clothes, mountains of toys. Both sets of grandparents were lined up to provide care for the baby. Aunts and uncles stood by to welcome another to the extended family. Cousins awaited a new playmate. My husband was bouncing with anticipation.

Smooth sailing.

I was just putting cans of tennis balls on a shelf. Yellow fuzzy tennis balls. The most innocuous things in the world.

I felt moisture in my panties.

I put a hand to the crotch of my jeans and it came away wet. Clear liquid.

I ran to the car. Noah was driving our flatbed to Conner City, 80 miles away. My calls to his cell went to voice mail. He was in that stretch where service was spotty.

I didn't leave him a message. We had promised a shipment of shake shingles to a contractor today.

This was probably nothing.

Dr. Campbell disagreed.

She stripped me down and had a look. The clear discharge was now mixed with brown solids like coffee grounds. I started to cramp, worse than any period I had ever had.

The doctor pressed down gently on my abdomen and I felt something pass out of me.

I froze. The world slowed down. I felt like headphones had been slipped over my ears. Static played.

Dr. Campbell held a shiny pan, one of those things that is shaped like a kidney for some reason. She looked amazed. In the bottom was a tadpole. Odd. It had perfect little arms covering its face and a cute round ear.

She gasped and threw a cloth over the pan as she whisked it from my sight.

**********

Betsy

Law saw right through my fakes. He had always known when an orgasm took me. I am pretty vocal.... I was pretty vocal.

I tried to imitate my cumming noises. Turns out not to be that easy. The ones I made up were not authentic. Not to me, not to Law.

For some reason imitation thrashing around was the same as the real thing. It was the sounds that gave me away.

For a while Law ignored the change. He came the way he always did, with a long grunt and appreciative sighs, well after making sure I was seen to. Or he pretended to think I was.

It isn't his fault. Not at all, and I have tried to keep sex the same for him.

I failed.

Too soon he began to try and extend himself, thinking that something was holding me back. Something that could be overcome by exertion and patience. He reached a point after a while where he could not finish. To his credit, he did not try to pretend to.

"I'm sorry, Law," I cried into his neck. "It's not you."

He held me and stroked my hair. I hoped he believed me.

It really was me. When I entered that deep back of the brain place where orgasms gather to organize their bust out, it was normal. I felt my body respond, my nerves begin to channel down in preparation for the bloom. The door opened -- and I saw the baby. Our baby, the little person I had betrayed, and it was saying to me: You do not deserve this pleasure.

The feelings died away.

I could not get out that door.

**********

Noah

I was devastated when I finally found out that Mia had lost our baby.

I was driving back to town when my cell found a signal and began to bleep. I pulled off the road and checked my messages.

There were no text messages from Mia. Just a short one from Dr. Campbell's office asking me to come as soon as I could.

There were no voice messages from Mia. Just a terse one from Dr. Campbell's nurse telling me that my wife was in the office and I should come as soon as possible.

The lack of communication from my wife sent me into a panic. I had the flatbed up over 90 on the road into town and skidded it to a rubber-burning stop in the parking lot between the hospital and the office building. I sprinted inside.

Mia lay on a table in an examination room. The doctor was taking her blood pressure. My immediate impression as I opened the door was that the doctor looked concerned and maybe even a little stressed.

My wife looked perfectly at ease.

I rushed to her side and took her hand. She looked up at me coolly and said, "Hello, dear. Did you get the shake to them on time?"

Dr. Campbell cleared her throat. "Mr. Goodwin, your wife miscarried. She is okay. There is no bleeding. An ultrasound showed some residual material in her uterus. I scheduled her for a D&C at 5 pm to clean it out and prevent infection."

All I heard was that our child was gone. I wondered where it was. I was suddenly numb. Yet relieved that my wife was unharmed. Surprised that she seemed unconcerned by the loss.

It should have been a warning, but I missed it entirely.

**********

Mia

It's been three months since... that day, and I don't know who I am.

I think the perfect little being in the pan ate me, grew around me, assumed my shape, filled my skin.

The things I used to believe in, I am not sure about. The things I used to love, I am not sure of. The people I used to know... I am not sure they are real.

At first, Noah was in pieces. Ten times a day he asked me if I wanted to talk about it.

I did not.

I walked in on him sobbing by himself several times. He confessed that the loss made him ache like never before. Then he stopped letting me see it. He would stand up and leave the room, his tears still dropping on the carpet. He quit asking me.

Yesterday, he found me in the back yard, sitting on the grass, staring down at the blades. He asked me if I wanted to talk about it.

"I don't want to think about it," I said.

But I did think about it.

All the damn time.

**********

Lawson

I was one of the first customers through the door when Goodwin's opened four years ago. I always had a list going in my pocket of random items to acquire for the ranch, our house, the kids, the pets.... Noah and Mia had a good idea, probably because they had grown up here. If you needed a washer for a faucet, or a gallon of latex, or birdfeed, you could order it online and wait two or three days for the truck to come out from Conner City. Or you could drive to one of the chain lumber yards or hardware stores in that metropolis and spend ten time as much on gas as the part you needed right that darn minute. Plus waste most of the day doing it. Or you could -- now -- go to the new store and get what you needed from Mia and Noah. Sure, you paid a small markup. But you got to talk to the owners and hobnob with the other customers and suck on a cold Coke from the machine in the vestibule.

I had known Noah and Mia since they were in elementary school. They were about ten years younger than Betsy and me. Betsy had babysat for Mia several times in her final years of high school. When I came back to the valley after college to work on the family ranch in preparation to take it over so my parents could retire, I reconnected with Betsy. We had been friends in high school but never dated. I was always working. Harvesting, baling, and stacking hay. Cleaning the feed lot. Driving herds to winter pasture and then back six months later. Cutting out calves, branding, neutering. Repairing tractors, grain augers, balers, combines. Yeah, I never had a lot of time for after school activities.

We met again watching our alma mater play our old rival under the Friday night lights. She and two friends sat down next to me on the cold aluminum bleachers. The last time I had seen her she had been almost beautiful. Now she had blossomed. The last time I had seen her I was not brave enough to ask her outright if she was taken. That night I was.

We married almost a year later. The first baby a year after that.

We made time to go to football games. Old friends who had not fled the town congregated in the bleachers and visited. It was a weekly reunion, with the introduction of new faces and new spouses.

Noah was a linebacker. And a halfback. In a school with a small enrollment, some kids had to play both ways, just like in the old days. It would have been very American if Mia had been a cheerleader, but she played clarinet in the small pep band that traipsed around the field during halftime.

"Hey, Noah," I called from across the store. "Got any twine? You know, real biodegradable twine? Not plastic...."

He didn't hear me. I knew he could hear me.

I went up to him and touched his arm. He jumped.

"Oh! Sorry -- what?" He said.

"Twine?"

He pointed. "Aisle four, down about halfway."

We looked at each other. Since that horrible day in our bathroom, I had tried to educate myself. I found that support for women who miscarried was still to this modern day dwarfed by the support available to women who lost a baby or child. And the support for men whose women miscarried was thin and ragged.

Just suck it up. Be a man.

**********

Betsy

Law got a message at 3 in the morning. Something wrong at the feedlot. I got up at 4 and made a pot of coffee for his return, but he texted me that he would not be home until at least lunch. I had made a point of buying a good coffee maker for the feed lot office, so I knew he would get his morning cup. The sun rose clear and crisp and cold. I drank my coffee and looked out the window at the old house and the grounds for a very long time.

From here, when the air was clear like it was now and the sun was bright like it was now, I could see the tiny white marker.

Law came home looking beat, kissed me, and went to lie down while I started lunch.

I found him asleep, clothes on, boots off, on top of the covers. He was on his back, breathing lightly. The man never snored. It was one of the things I loved about him and I never knew exactly why.

He was in a deep sleep and I should have let him keep on. Instead, I knelt by the bed and slowly worked his zipper down. As I reached inside, my fingers felt both the warm softness of his briefs and the metallic bite of the open zipper and I winced thinking about those teeth against his shaft. I slipped his belt free and unbuttoned him.

I had his fly fully opened into a wide V and my hand under his underwear elastic when he woke. He started to sit up, but I put my free hand on his chest and pushed down.

"Please, Law?" I begged.

He relaxed. I pushed down on his pants, with him assisting silently by raising his butt, until jeans and briefs were around his thighs. My hands went back to his cock. It was stiff, elevated, pulsing. I took it into my mouth gently, my own teeth well away from it. It was hot and velvety soft on my tongue.

I knew he would not last long. I stroked him with one hand and sucked up and down in tempo with my fist. He uttered soft words that made no sense.

I did to him what he often did to my clit. I closed my lips around his glans and sucked hard, not touching it with any part of my mouth. He moaned. I closed around him, touching it fully, wetly, tongue and lip and the inside of my cheeks. He groaned.

Three times and he grabbed at my torso and silently squeezed a fistful of skin and shirt as his cock jetted his load into the back of my throat. All salt and egg white and vanilla pudding. Sweet, like him.

I crawled up onto the bed and hugged him.

"I love you, Mr. Riley," I whispered.

He laughed. "I love you too, Mrs. Riley."

He fell back asleep while I clung onto him.

That horrible day, they had admitted me overnight to clean me out and make sure my bleeding stopped. They gave me some Jello and some antibiotics that ruined my digestive system for days.

Law drove me home. He stopped the truck beside what we call the old house, the first structure his great-grandparents built when they developed the ranch. It was a tiny one-bedroom place, long in the tooth, that we used for a guest cottage and general storage. We kept it for sentimental value. And for the burial ground.

We called it the grounds. It held a dozen Rileys. Dates on the stones told their stories. Rileys dead in their prime, Rileys surviving until a very old age. Rileys taken in their infancy.

There was a new hole. It was small but deep, behind a pile of dirt and stones into which a shovel was thrust.

Beside the hole was a wooden box. I recognized it. Our daughter's antique toy box. Not valuable, just something sturdy and useful passed down through a couple generations of young Rileys. Until today.

We got out and stood by the box. Law did not have to speak. I knew what he had done. I helped him lower the box into the hole and we took turns filling the dirt back in.

He had made a small white cross out of leftover trim boards. It bore no lettering. We had never decided on a name.

Our hands on it, side by side, we pushed it into the earth.

**********

Noah

Sex with Mia changed after we lost the baby. It's bizarre, actually. An outside observer might say the fucking was better.

See, Mia always had fun in bed. She laughed when I caressed her. She cooed when I licked her. She giggled when I was thrusting inside her. The telling of it makes it sound less enjoyable than it was. Her happy sounds came from deep in her throat, forced out of her by my efforts. Incredibly stimulating. A video of her enjoying the act would have gotten a million views.

After that day, once we had waited six weeks as recommended to let Mia's internals sort themselves out, heal where needed, and just generally return to normal, we climbed cautiously into bed.

It didn't return to normal.

She was serious. She watched my movements on her body like she was committing them to memory. The sounds she made seemed sincere, without a trace of frivolity. Her body moved in appreciation, and she rode me and licked me with passion.

It just wasn't her.

It was more intense, more demanding.

I lay next to her sleeping naked body, exhausted. Hoping this was part of the recovery.

I wanted my Mia back.

**********

Dr. Susan Campbell

Monday I examined Mia Goodwin. It was six months since her miscarriage. I had scheduled her in every other month since then to follow up on her health. Her anxiety level had not decreased over time. She sat on the examination table and tried to make small talk. Their store, the weather, traffic on Main Street. I noticed her hand shaking.