The Green Line on the Empty Screen

At 7:30 PM on a Tuesday in late September, Marisol began to feel a deep ache in her pelvis, low and insistent, like the memory of a cramp she’d had as a teenager. She was twenty weeks pregnant with her second child, a girl they planned to name Lucia, and such pain seemed out of place. She sat on the edge of the bathtub in their small apartment in the city of Cienfuegos, on the south coast of Cuba, breathing through the discomfort. Her husband, Andrés, was at his second job, repairing fishing boats at the marina, and their four-year-old son, Mateo, was sleeping in the next room. She didn’t want to worry Andrés; he was already stretched thin with the new baby coming.

By nine o’clock, Marisol felt a rush of wetness and looked down to see blood spreading across her thighs. The pain doubled her over, and she knew something was terribly wrong. She called the only place that had an emergency room she could reach on foot: the municipal clinic, a six-block walk away. She hurried, clutching her belly, leaving Mateo with their upstairs neighbor, Señora Vega, who was alarmed by the sight of Marisol’s pale face and the blood staining her cotton dress.

The clinic was dimly lit, the fluorescent lights flickering with a dying hum. The admissions nurse, a stout woman named Rebeca, took one look at Marisol’s condition and led her to a small examination room, but she had to stay alone because of an outbreak of viral conjunctivitis that had overwhelmed the already scant staff. A doctor, a tired man with glasses who introduced himself as Dr. Herrera, performed a manual exam and then wheeled an old ultrasound machine to her bedside. Its screen was small, with green lines and distended pixels, like a relic from another decade.

Marisol stared at the fuzzy image, searching for the familiar curve of a head, the flutter of tiny limbs. Dr. Herrera moved the probe slowly, his face unreadable. Then he set the probe down and turned to her, his eyes full of the kind of pity that she knew meant the end of hope. ‘There is no heartbeat,’ he said quietly. ‘The fetus has stopped developing.’ His words were a blur, but the picture on the green-and-black screen was clear: a still, small form, like a curled-up shrimp, unmoving.

Marisol cried out, not with a scream, but with a raw, guttural sob that seemed to come from a place deeper than her chest. She clutched the rail of the gurney, and when the doctor suggested she could try again for another child, the platitude felt like an insult. ‘I wanted this one,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘I wanted her.’ The doctor prescribed a medication to help her body expel the pregnancy, and told her to rest in the clinic overnight for observation.

She stayed in that room, alone, the only sound the ticking of a wall clock that seemed to mark each second of her loss. At some point, the screen of the ultrasound machine had been left on, the image frozen. A thin green line traced a flat path across the darkness, the heartbeat that would never be. Marisol looked at it for hours, imagining a different outcome, a world where that line danced with life.

Just before dawn, as the painkillers began to fade and the first hint of light crept through the shuttered window, Marisol noticed that the green line had begun to move. It was subtle at first, a slight tremor, then a slow, deliberate pulse. She blinked, thinking it was a trick of her exhausted mind. But the line continued to beat, rhythmically, like a distant drum. She called out, but no one came. She reached for the machine, but it was too far away, and when she tried to sit up, a wave of dizziness overwhelmed her.

The line grew stronger, more defined, and for a moment she saw a shape emerge from the static, a tiny hand reaching upward, as if stretching toward her. Marisol’s heart pounded, not with grief, but with a strange, fierce hope that defied all logic. She knew the science, understood the flat line was the end, but her eyes refused to accept it. She whispered the name she had chosen, ‘Lucia,’ and the line seemed to pulse faster in response.

By the time a nurse came to check on her, the sun was fully up, and the green line had returned to its flat, unwavering state. Marisol told the nurse what she had seen, but the nurse dismissed it as a hallucination, a symptom of shock and blood loss. ‘It’s gone, honey,’ the nurse said, her tone gentle but firm. ‘You’re alive. That’s what matters.’

Marisol went home that afternoon, her body hollowed out, her heart a graveyard. She tried to get back into routines, but she couldn’t shake the image of that green line moving. She began to research, visiting the local library, but the old computers had no internet, and she found nothing useful. She started to feel phantom kicks at odd hours, and she knew it was impossible, but she welcomed the pain, for it felt like a secret communication from her lost child.

On the third night after the procedure, Marisol was sitting alone in the darkened living room, sipping bitter coffee, when she noticed the baby monitor – an old audio-only device that Mateo had outgrown – sitting on a shelf. It was switched off, but from its speaker came a faint, rhythmic static, like a heartbeat. She flicked it on, and the static resolved into a low, pulsing beat, perfectly steady. She felt a cold dread creep up her spine, but also a fierce maternal instinct. She whispered, ‘Lucia?’ and the rhythm quickened, then slowed.

From that night on, Marisol became obsessed with finding the source of that heartbeat. She moved the monitor around the apartment, and the sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, but always strongest in the corner of her bedroom, near the trash can where she had thrown away the hospital discharge papers. She began to sleep with the monitor on, listening to that steady, hypnotic beat, and her grief turned into a bizarre, all-consuming vigil.

Andrés was frightened by her behavior. He tried to get her to see a doctor, but she refused. She said she was waiting for Lucia to come back, that she had seen her on the screen, reaching out. On the night of the new moon, when the city was plunged into a power outage, Marisol sat in the absolute darkness, the monitor pressed to her ear. The beat was thundering, so loud she thought it would burst her eardrum. She felt a cold draft, and then a small, soft hand seemed to press against her cheek. She smiled, and tears streamed down her face. ‘I knew you’d come back,’ she whispered.

When the lights flickered back on, Andrés found Marisol slumped over the baby monitor, a serene smile frozen on her lips, her skin cold as marble. The monitor was dead, its battery drained. In the corner of the room, on the floor, he noticed a dark stain shaped vaguely like a curled-up infant. He knelt to wipe it away, but the stain wouldn’t lift. It remained there, even after he scrubbed with bleach.

Years later, when Mateo was grown and had a child of his own, he told his daughter that his mother had once been haunted by a heartbeat. But he never told the whole story. He never told her about the green line on the empty screen that moved, or the phantom touch in the dark, or the stubborn stain that refused to fade. He kept that secret buried, but occasionally, in the dead of night, he would put his ear to the floor of his own apartment, just to see if he could still hear it – a faint, steady pulse, like a promise that never died.