“Family Lore,” by Téa Obreht
The New Yorker · Téa Obreht ·
Fiction by Téa Obreht, the author of “Sunrise” and “The Morningside”: Fatal, the internet kept saying. Once symptoms began, the disease was almost always fatal.
The C-section had been in the cards since their twenty-four-week appointment, but the preeclampsia had been a surprise—or a surprise to him, at least. His wife had been insisting for months that she knew, that she felt, something was going to go sideways. She was full of such premonitions. The worst thing about them was that she only ever remembered the ones that bore out, and failed to recall the significantly more numerous ones that did not. An hour or so before the C-section, in a lull between visits from the surgical team, she’d had another one. She had grabbed his arm and said, “Something bad is going to happen.”
For a moment, he’d believed her. He had never seen her so afraid. But his job was to keep the world at bay. “Nothing bad will happen,” he said. “I promise. Everything’s gonna be O.K.” He outlined all the things she had done right: quit drinking, eaten healthily, taken her prenatals and her low-dose aspirin, gone on long walks with the dog, and so on.
His reassurance seemed to work its usual magic. She wiped the tears from her face and began making small talk with the head nurse, who was palpating her pale, swollen arms in search of a vein.
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