The one he picked was gray with a slightly lopsided face. He named it Pim before she was even born.
His reasoning, delivered to me in the car with total seriousness: “Every little sister needs somebody to sleep with.”
I was thirty-five weeks along on the fifteenth of May.
I want to lay the medical part out plainly, once, and then move past it, because I’ve had to explain it about forty times since and I’ve got it down to a paragraph.
I had placenta accreta. Nobody knew. It doesn’t always show. It means the placenta grows into the wall of the uterus instead of sitting on it, and when the baby comes, the placenta doesn’t come away, and you bleed in a way that human beings are not built to survive without help.
