What We Have (6 page)

Their baby had been dead for a week, and they hadn’t known. None of us had known.

I tried to work my way back through the past week, remembering what we’d been doing. A few days earlier, Saturday morning, at her kitchen table, Julie and I had been bent over pictures of nurseries in one of those articles we derided, “Making Your Spare Room Ready for Baby.” Scorning the bunnies and the sheep.

I thought,
We will never go back to that again.
Uneventful
is over
.

We were back to grief and worry. To bodies that betrayed us. I remember how I’d been convinced being pregnant gives you immunity from grief.
What had I been thinking?

She got back on the phone, her voice like a stranger’s.

“I have to go to the hospital. Dr Weiss says I still have to go through labor.”

It was like we’d changed genres—sitcom to tragedy. I called Jacques, but I was crying so hard he could barely understand what I was saying. I kept stumbling around, picking things up and putting them down again, like a parody of a woman in labor who doesn’t know what to take to the hospital. Finally I stuffed something to read and a stray roll of Tums in my book bag.

Jacques met me at Columbia Hospital for Women. Not in one of the peach-and-celadon rooms we visited later with New Age music piped in, not even in Labor and Delivery, but on a surgical floor, a beige, no-nonsense hallway with closed doors where we found Julie propped up in bed wearing a hospital gown, her face white as the sheet behind her, Pitocin dripping into a line in one hand, monitors bleating. My breath felt ragged. Jacques kept rubbing my arm and telling me I had to stay calm.
Stay calm
—a funny phrase, when you think about it, since I wasn’t calm in the first place. I’m never calm. We were in and out of the room, Dr. Weiss was there, stricken and grave, a sober-faced nurse with her, and they both kept telling us,
go home
. They said it would be hours before Julie gave birth. “You need to go home and rest,” the nurse kept saying.

“Go home, hon,” Julie said, her eyes lifeless. “
Please
.”

I looked at Jacques, and he nodded. “They need some privacy right now,” he told me in the hallway. Just before we got to the main exit I grabbed on to him.

It was the most inexplicable feeling, like something inside of me the size of a stitch had just pulled taut and released. A spider unspooling its first strand of web. A match catching and holding.

“The baby,” I said, my mouth opening. “I think—”

“What is it?” Jacques was ashen-faced.

I shook my head. I figured it out as I answered him, as if the words themselves gave this meaning. “I think the baby—moved.”

Here, of all improbable places. And
now
.

We like to think life and death are opposites. Sometimes it’s hard to fathom how close they are. Two sides of the hourglass, sand thickening at the bottom, running down to nothing from above.

Emily was born at four in the morning, nineteen weeks old. A grief counselor came. They offered Julie and Jon the chance to hold her. They made a print with her heel in cement and told them they’d found it helps to have some tangible memento of the baby to “commemorate the loss.” Most of this I heard later through my mother, who arrived the next day, shell-shocked, tight-lipped, unspeakably sad, shuttling back and forth in taxis between Julie and Jon’s house and ours. I found out some things right away, some things later, after Julie and Jon learned Emily had something terribly wrong—a missing chromosome at number thirteen, a condition so anathema to life she would have died at birth or just after if Julie had lasted to term.

Jacques lay next to me at night, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s really mysterious, making a baby,” he said. “You think you can map it all out, you can plan all of this, but you can’t, really. You just can’t.”

I nodded in the dark. I couldn’t answer.

 

M Y MOTHER STAYED THREE DAYS.
We felt awkward and uncomfortable around each other, both of us trying hard not to say the wrong thing. I called Julie over and over again, but Jon just kept saying she couldn’t talk.

Julie and Jon had lost Emily. And for a while, I felt like I’d lost Julie.

In the first days after she got back from the hospital, Julie was surrounded by a sad flurry of activity. Jon was there with her. There were phone calls, flowers, people reaching out. Sara and Geoff called from Olympia. My father called between patients. Friends and colleagues sent flowers. But at the heart of it all, there was an almost unbearable silence: all the plans gone, doctors’ visits canceled, the door to the baby’s room closed. Jacques and I came over and tried to keep them company, but it was clear they wanted to be alone. They bought a tiny Japanese maple and planted it in their garden.

“I’ll call you when I can,” Julie said, barely looking at me.

Every day I stared at the phone, willing it to life, willing her to call, but, “You understand,” she’d say when I tried calling her, or, “I can’t, hon, I just can’t.” My mother, back in Michigan, called every afternoon, filling me in. She told me Julie was thinking about taking a leave of absence from work. In August, she and Jon went to Maine together to spend some time alone, away from DC. Time just to be on the beach, to be together.

They loved Maine, my mother reported, once they were back home in Virginia again. It reminded Julie of Charlevoix, the place in northern Michigan we always went on vacation in the summers. “It was such a relief for her, being away from DC,” my mother added.

I held the phone away from my ear, staring at the wall.

Julie and I were going to do this together, I kept thinking. We were going to have the babies at the same time! I missed her constantly. I went to see Dr. Weiss. August, September. I got bigger. Fall came, I started teaching again. In my new course, Writing the Self in Early Modern England, we started by reading
The Return of Martin Guerre
, the story of a peasant in sixteenth-century France who leaves an unhappy marriage, joins the army, and disappears. When he comes back, his marriage is much better, the community loves him. He’s a kinder, much more likeable man. But events unfold, and it turns out he isn’t who he claims to be after all—he’s an imposter. The real Martin Guerre died at war, and a soldier who knew him came back to the village assuming his identity. How can someone walk away from his life and someone else just take his place? How is such a thing possible?

“Didn’t they know it wasn’t him?” one student objected. “How could he just pretend to be someone he wasn’t?”

“We don’t always get to choose,” I told her. “We like to think we always stays the same. That we’re the same person, all our lives. But it doesn’t always work that way. Some things are beyond our control.”

 

LIFE GOES ON. WHEN YOU’RE
pregnant, that fact is doubly true. I was getting bigger by the week. I could mark the passage of time by my outgrown maternity clothes—
that was August, when the blue jumper still fit. That was September, when I wore those black leggings every day
. The baby moved now and I could feel it all the time. I could see it moving when I looked in the mirror. We were getting ready. In October, Jacques and I started working on the nursery. We were moving on—we had to. But with each thing we did, each plan we made, I thought about Emily.

The tree they planted for her was less than two feet tall, with only the slightest furring of leaves. They had to stake it on all sides so the wind wouldn’t blow it over. They made an appointment with a geneticist at Johns Hopkins—an expert. They were “moving forward,” my mother said, and she made that sound like a good thing. Better than moving backward, I guess, but
back
was what I missed. Every morning, around the time Julie and I always talked, I tried to stay busy so I wouldn’t listen for the phone to ring. My mother took it on herself to keep me up-to-date. She told me I needed to understand that Julie was “wrecked.”

“It’s life-changing for them,” my mother said. “They’re rethinking everything. Why they live where they live. Why they work where they work.”

Everything
.

I felt a little like Martin Guerre, pacing around in a life that no longer felt completely like mine.

 

IN LATE OCTOBER, JACQUES AND
I started prenatal classes. We learned how to pant during labor and how to choose a focal point to stare at during contractions. Jacques tried rolling a tennis ball, hard, into the lower part of my back. We sat in a circle with people we didn’t know and practiced diapering a plastic doll. “Parenthood,” our teacher told us, “is a journey. As with every journey, you have to start with one small step.” I couldn’t believe she could say that with a straight face. I took a deep breath, passing the doll to the lobbyist on my right. When he stared at me, I realized I was holding it by its ankle.

I threw myself into teaching. In November, Lori and Dave gave Jacques and me a baby shower. Even though I knew Julie wouldn’t come—she’d called, choked up, to apologize in advance for not being there—I couldn’t help looking around for her, the whole time I was opening boxes with tiny outfits and ingenious baby devices. Once the doorbell rang and I looked up, hopeful. But it was only one of the twins from next door.

 

AFTER THANKSGIVING, JACQUES AND I
went back to the hospital to take a tour of the prenatal wing.

“Has your pregnancy been uneventful?” the form asked. All I could do was check a box for Yes or No. There was no space to write about Emily.

I checked the box for Yes—
uneventful
. But I knew it wasn’t true. There had been these things: This tiny lost cousin. This danger skirted, this ineluctable will to survive.

THE LAST STAGE OF PREGNANCY,
according to my
What to Expect
book, is a time to think and plan ahead. But you shouldn’t forget to “reinforce romance.” The authors recommended going out at least once a week together to do something “special (and unexpected)”—like miniature golf. Or hitting the flea market. You weren’t supposed to forget your partner. “At dinner,” they advised, “spend at least some time asking about his day, talking about yours, discussing the day’s headlines . . .”

 

THIS SOUNDED LIKE GOOD ADVICE,
but in our case, it wasn’t happening. Jacques was working late most nights, trying to finish up a project before the baby came. He thought this was a good time to squeeze in a few extra loops to Boston. So instead of discussing the day’s headlines with him or doing something unplanned or unexpected, I lay alone on the couch eating Stoned Wheat Thins and watching the Weather Channel. Between crackers, I worried.

Here were my worries, in order of intensity:

The baby wasn’t growing the way it was supposed to
. I had reason to worry. After Julie and Jon lost Emily, one of my tests came back outside the normal range. It was too late for an amnio, so we did what Dr. Weiss advised, which was to sit tight and try to stay calm. By my thirtieth week, there was another problem. According to the ultrasounds, the baby looked too small. Dr. Weiss, her voice taking on a new edge, told me I had what is known as “an inhospitable womb.” At each visit, she measured me, frowned at the ultrasound, and clicked away with her computer mouse.
Click click click
. The baby wasn’t thriving the way it should, she told us. It wasn’t a crisis, but we needed to be aware of it. There were several possible reasons for this, but the question was what to do. One option would be to deliver the baby early and let an incubator finish things up.

I tried to work through the phrase “inhospitable womb.” I was a Midwesterner. I used to bake my teachers cookies in middle school. I joined a sorority in college where we learned how to greet people at the door and serve chocolate fondue with the right-size napkins. How could my womb be
inhospitable
? It wasn’t fair, I complained to Jacques. It was bad enough coming from a family with doomed ovaries. I didn’t need an unfriendly womb on top of that.

Jacques told Dr. Weiss we would prefer to avoid the incubator option, and Dr. Weiss nodded, as if we were talking about room reservations at an overcrowded hotel.
OK, fine, we’ll stick with the cramped single
.
Click click click
. “Also, the baby is still breech,” she reminded me. “If it doesn’t turn on its own—”

Worry number two. The baby, in addition to being small, was breech
: right side up, instead of upside down, the position that’s supposed to happen naturally by thirty weeks or so. What if the baby wouldn’t turn upside down on its own and I needed a C-section and either the baby or I or
both
the baby and I hemorrhaged and died, like on an episode I’d seen once on
ER
? If it were just me who died, what would I have left behind for the baby? In the early modern period, women sometimes wrote journals to their unborn children, the likelihood of dying in childbirth was so great. Usually these journals were filled with elaborate instructions on how to lead a life of Christian devotion. I had no idea what wisdom I hoped to impart to our baby.
Be like Jacques. Live your life. Stay informed, be smart, but don’t obsess. But don’t be
only
like Jacques, not if you want time to return the rental car and still make the plane. Don’t be like me
or
like Jacques. Be like yourself. Keep a sense of humor. Stay out of dark alleys. Brush your teeth, read good novels, use protection. Take a class in self-defense.