Save Her

Natalie - Chapter 7

Natalie - Chapter 7

Natalie stares at the empty metal tray in front of her. She ate just under an hour ago, and already she’s famished. The baby eats so much. The baby is always hungry.

She imagines the hefty amount of food she desires and builds the empty tray with her cravings: a family-sized salad with spinach and mixed greens decorated haphazardly with the various colors of a multitude of vegetables, a banana — no, make that two bananas — an apple, eight chicken strips that she can bite at in between bites of her salad, a big bowl of edamame, a tall glass of whole milk, a glass of orange juice, and some chocolate ice cream. Devouring all of it would be child’s play. It would satisfy her for another hour and then she would crave something different.

Her baby wants so much from her. Its demands are unabating. Natalie starves for her baby, then exhausts from it, then feels her baby’s joy when it’s satisfied for a short time between meals. Natalie worries that the baby isn’t sleeping, which gives her more concern that the baby is more like Drayden or at least may have some of his powers. If that’s true, and her baby does indeed have Drayden’s ‘characteristics,’ then this organization would be that much more reluctant to consider ever letting either of them go, which is a ridiculous thought anyway, she keeps reminding herself, and one that is completely unhealthy to think about, because she knows there’s no chance of a future outside these heavy cement walls unless she made a go at getting the both of them out. Even if her baby is born without Drayden’s powers, it is still his baby, and will, therefore, have value until Drayden is captured.

The baby turns in her belly as if she too is trying to figure out a way to escape. The baby is big now, and seemingly healthy as far as Natalie can tell from the male nurses’ reactions after taking her vitals so frequently throughout the days. By Natalie’s calculations, she has a maximum of one month before she gets so large that she won’t be able to move around at all. But even that timeframe seems extended and impossible because she’s already so gigantic, and is already too tired to function like a normal expectant soon-to-be mother. She doesn’t have very much to go on as far as what a ‘normal pregnancy’ should be like since she was always too polite to ask any of her mother’s socialite friends, and they were always too polite to explain their changing bodies, their emotions, and their eating and excreting schedules. Her mother never divulged anything from her two pregnancies. Natalie has no books to tell her if she is any different, but she knows she is. Things have to be very different. The baby inside her is too active. It rarely stops moving. It rarely lets her sleep soundly anymore. Natalie would have been more concerned about her baby’s health if not for the mild reactions from the men who checked the baby’s heartbeat and hers. If not for their steady manner, Natalie would have not been able to think things were alright. Surely they would grimace or raise an eyebrow or break their facial mold in some other way if something with her baby was not the way it should be. After all, in the end, the baby is all they care about. All the healthy food and close medical monitoring are not really for her, it’s for Drayden’s offspring growing inside her.

Natalie sits down on the edge of the bed. She hunches over and looks down at her belly. “Baby,” Natalie says tiredly. “Hi, Baby.”

The baby turns excitedly. It doesn’t hurt Natalie, but the immediate reaction surprises her enough to jolt her upright. She looks down at her belly.

“You doing okay in there? You sure eat a lot. And, you poor thing, you’re not much of a sleeper, are you?” She rubs her belly all around. “I hope you’re not too bored. Your father, your daddy, has gotten used to not sleeping, but he’s an adult and can read, and he has fully grown legs so he can walk around if he gets antsy. But you, you can only roll and kick and punch and things like that.” The baby presses gently against her. “I’m sorry if I’ve been boring to you, but I’m so tired lately. Being pregnant is more work than I thought it would be.” The baby moves. “Oh no, I’m not complaining. I love having you inside me. It’s just a ton of work, but it’s the good kind of work where you know there’s a purpose. A beautiful purpose.” Natalie sighs. She’s tired. She’s more than tired, but she will not let any other weakness in. “It’s just tiring. Just a little. I’m managing. Don’t worry about Momma. You keep doing what you need to do, and I’ll do the same for you. I’ll take care of you. I’ll make everything right. Momma will make everything alright.” Natalie lowers her voice to the quietest of whispers. “Momma’s going to get us out of here.”

The baby moves excitedly. Natalie looks down at the movement she can see through her belly and thinks a crazy thought: the baby understood her. She quickly battles the idea away because she knows that’s not possible. There’s no possible way the baby inside of her could see that they’re prisoners.

Exhaustion hits Natalie like a stone. Sleep is something she has very little willpower to fight anymore. It’s winning the war because the times she’s able to close her eyes and dream are typically more like naps. They’re powerful naps, brought on like a heavy fog that drifts in suddenly, like a dense cloud falling from the sky. During her naps, her dreams are fitful. They are active. Things happen quickly. There is never anybody chasing her, nor is she ever running after anybody, but the events in her mind’s eye raced nevertheless, and when she wakes — usually as suddenly as she had fallen asleep — her mind is sometimes still going, until she’s able to forcibly calm it by thinking about her baby, and by thinking about Drayden. Lately, she remembers most of what she had been dreaming about. Drayden is in the majority of her dreams, but sometimes they’re with her mother when she was younger, sometimes with her father and her sister, and sometimes it’s about school and a test she was studying for, or a test she needed to wake up for.

This time she awakens with a start. She had dreamed of her new Bentley. Her last image before waking was looking to her right at her father who sat in the passenger seat and then into the rearview mirror at Livia in the backseat. Livia smiled nervously at her , and that’s the moment Natalie woke. She lies in bed and feels the same wave of nerves she felt when driving the Bentley. She relives the moment exactly, and she realizes that the dream wasn’t a scenario conjured by the deep recesses of her mind, the dream was something that had really happened just after her parents had gifted her the car. It was a real memory, and she had just run it through her brain precisely in the order it had happened, and felt the same emotions as when she had actually been sitting there in the driver’s seat, looking into the mirror at her best friend, and reenacting the same emotional sensations she had from the original experience.

Her baby is hungry, and she is hungry, but she can’t let this dream go quite yet. There is something. Something nags at her. She stands up to get out of her groggy, sleep-deprived mind. She paces so as not to focus on the hunger that pulls at her relentlessly. The dreams are real. They’re actual events that had actually happened. They had been real for some time. Pure memories. She just hadn’t noticed until now. They were fast. Always fast. Getting faster. Ripples of memories strung together from one to the next, complete with the original emotions. Natalie holds onto her belly as she walks from one end of the small room to the other end and then back to the other side. She focuses on remembering some of her other recent dreams. Distinguishing between what she had dreamed and what she had remembered while awake is difficult. In such quarters and in such a situation there is not much else to do but to think about the past, to relive those happier times. She suddenly stops pacing and wonders if she’s making too much out of this? This is what imprisonment must do to everybody, Natalie thinks. It boards you up and makes you replay things you had forgotten about, she thinks. But then, no. She paces again. The real emotions had never played before, and her dreams before pregnancy were a scattered amalgamation of the made-up mixed with the possibility of reality, not reality itself. It’s the emotions that separated these dreams. They are different — she’s entirely sure. They feel different. They are different because of the way they feel. Yes, that’s it! It’s the rush of heat after being cold, or the curling of toes from a long kiss from Drayden, or the beautiful bliss of a bar of chocolate on a rainy day. But it isn’t just what she is feeling. It’s not as simplistic as that. Natalie wonders what more it could possibly be? There’s another level of emotion. She stops. The baby? Is it the baby? What the baby’s feeling? She talks in a barely audible whisper: “Like baby’s serotonin levels are connected with mine. What I feel, the baby also—”

She’s onto something, she knows and begins a faster pace around the room in a predictable circle, avoiding the metal frame of the bed, the legs from her small eating table, and the door and the walls by narrow margins. Her hunger increases along with her pace. She tries to push the thought away. “Stop it,” she says to herself. “No food.” The food is not yet delivered so baby will have to wait until it arrives. Natalie knows they’ll be in shortly. She can’t let the distraction of the sight of food keep her from completing this thought process. The sight of food will only make this exercise come to a screeching halt since the thought of food is already pulling her away. “Stop it!” she says. “Think about your dreams,” she says. “You dreamed about Mom,” she says, only half-worried that the microphones in the room are picking up every word she mutters. “Earlier this morning. It was about Mom, and you were younger. You were at Aunt Margaret’s funeral. Mom looked at you and smiled and said your posture was outstanding.” Natalie stopped walking. It was a memory from so long ago. She had been only eight. She remembered the black dress she wore. It was beautiful. The most beautiful thing she had ever worn, picked out by her mother along with a clothing designer whose name she had never learned. It had lace that dropped from the back of the collar down past her shoulder blades. It tapered at her narrow child’s waist and then opened ever so slightly for her legs, just enough to take a normal eight-year-old step, but no more than that, she remembered. It was so long and restricting, she recalled, but Natalie didn’t care about that because of how proud her mother had been at the fitting. Natalie remembers now how she had felt like a woman for the first time that day, which eclipsed in her young mind the entire ceremony of death. These memories, as far as she knew, had never replayed later in her life. She had moved on from that day but now relived it as if had just happened. The memory was fresh again. Aunt Margaret, her mom’s sister, laid in the open casket. They stood in front of Aunt Margaret while the rest of the memorial service watched. Natalie remembers how she had never seen Aunt Margaret look so beautiful. She had always been the one who stayed indoors, whose skin was paler than everyone else Natalie had ever met. She remembered Aunt Margaret’s small voice, and the gentle hug she always gave to Natalie as if she were afraid of touching her. Now, in the casket, she looked slightly tan, healthy, and almost beautiful. That was when her mother leaned down and whispered to her what no one else could hear: “Chin up, Natalie. You look beautiful. Your posture is outstanding.”

The door opens and two men enter. One carries a large metal tray overloaded with food while the other stands guard. The food is glorious in smell and sight.

That was it. The spell had been broken. Natalie sits down at the table and tears a big piece of bread from a loaf and puts it in her mouth. The guards exit. She’ll finish thinking about her dreams after she eats, she thinks. The food has to come first. She’s so very hungry.