An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir (12 page)

But a baby. Who’s to say? Babies are born needing everything. They’re a state of emergency. That’s what they’re for. Dead, there’s nothing we can do for them, and we don’t know what they’d want, we can’t even guess. I can pretend that I knew Pudding. No, I did know him, not with my brain but with my body, and yet I know nothing about him, not even the simplest thing: I have no idea of what he’d want. And so in my grief I understand that mourning is a kind of ventriloquism; we put words into the mouths of our bereavers, but of course it’s all entirely about us, our wants, our needs, the dead are satisfied, we are greedy, greedy, greedy, unseemly, self-obsessed. If your child did not survive his birth, everyone can see that clearly. I want. I need. Not him. No pretending.

I thought stillbirth was a thing of history, and then it happened to me, and yet now when I hear of a baby dying I’m just as incredulous.
You mean they
still
haven’t figured this out?
I want to hear about every dead baby, everywhere in the world. I want to know their names, Christopher, Strick, Jonathan. I want their mothers to know about Pudding.

The dead don’t need anything. The rest of us could use some company.

W
hen I was about thirty-six weeks pregnant the second time, Edward mentioned that his grandmother had been named Mabel. I’d known this, of course, but forgotten.

“Mabel,” I said. “Mabel. Mabel!”

We’d scarcely discussed names at all. In the back of our heads, we remembered the boy names we’d come up with for Pudding, both of us leaning toward the names we’d rejected early in the process, like Moses and George. For five minutes we’d discussed girl names and come up with Lucy, Beatrix, and Penelope. That was all we could manage. We didn’t joke about names the way we had the first time — Fatty Harvey, Phineas T. Harvey, Charles Laughton Harvey. We didn’t joke much at all. All of the jokes we’d made when I was pregnant with Pudding had to be retired, and it was hard to come up with new ones.

But now
Mabel
was in my head, and I was a little in love with it. I called Ann and Lib and got their reactions. (They loved it, or at least said they did. Lib declared that she would call our baby Mabel no matter the gender.)
Mabel,
I thought. I pictured a little girl named Mabel — not necessarily our little girl named Mabel, but an ordinary everyday Mabel. You had to love a little girl named Mabel. I hadn’t felt this way about any of the other little-girl names. I’d never felt this about any of the little-boy names of a year before, not even my favorite of the lot: Oscar. Sometimes I said to Edward, in a voice full of meaning, “Mabel.”

“Maybe,” he said.

I rubbed my stomach. “Mabel?” I said. “Do I love ‘Mabel’ because you’re a Mabel?”

Thump thump, went the obliging, enigmatic baby.

O
ver the past year and over my second pregnancy, of course I thought about Pudding all the time, every day, possibly every waking hour. (It’s possible I still do think of him every waking hour, and if I were the kind of new mother who kept track of things — diapers, feedings, naps — I could mark down
thoughts of first child
as well.) But mostly I didn’t think about the details of his death. If I climbed into that pit, I’d never crawl out, I’d have been at the ob-gyn practice every single day, begging Dr. Knoeller for an ultrasound, a sedative, an emergency C-section. I wasn’t counting my chickens, this one chicken, this essential chicken — but I wasn’t imagining heart-stopping scenarios, either.

Then it was early April.

Then it was mid-April.

I’m not a fool. I could see the end of April coming toward me. We’d known all along I’d be induced, and I’d said that I wanted to avoid the end of April, particularly April 27, not for my own sake but for the kid’s: it seemed like a too weighty fact to have in your biography, being born a year to the day after your brother who didn’t survive, the sort of thing I wouldn’t countenance in a modern novel. And then I said, Who cares, I don’t care, whatever happens, I’ll accept it. Dr. Knoeller had already suggested May 2, when I would be thirty-eight weeks and two days pregnant and she would be on call. But as she pointed out, I could go into labor before that.

Is it melodramatic to say that for the month of April, I was heavy with two children? There was the child in front of me, of course. Twice a week I went for monitoring, first fetal heartbeat and responsiveness, then amniotic fluid. Once a week we went to see Dr. Knoeller. All the signs looked very good.

But Pudding was with me then, and stronger than ever. Fifty-two weeks before, I’d walked the roads near Savary, hoping to trigger labor. Fifty-one weeks before, I’d sat in Bordeaux cafés, crying. I had been sad for nearly a year, but I had
gone forward
. That had been our plan all along. “We can only go forward,” Edward had said a dozen times, two dozen, all through our Holt summer, and every time I made the merest noise of wondering how it might have turned out otherwise, he would say lovingly, firmly, “Sweetheart, don’t.” He was right, of course. Blame is a compulsive behavior, the emotional version of obsessive hand washing, until all you can do is hold your palms out till your hands are full of it, and rub, and rub, and accomplish nothing at all. And so we grieved but looked straight ahead.

And then — did I mention this? — it was April again, and I was pregnant again, and there were so many ways, it seemed, that disaster could strike, and nearly though not quite as many ways it could be averted. My hips ached the way they had the year before. I had trouble turning over in bed the way I had. People said, Any day now! And, Have you had that baby yet? On April 30, I had my first real crisis of faith. “This baby isn’t moving,” I told Edward, and I called the practice, and they told me to come in, and the nurses rushed me into the examination room, and everything was fine.

Dr. Knoeller ran into us in the hall.

“I sort of freaked out,” I said, and she said, “If this is the first time, I think you’ve done very, very well.”

It was almost May. I wanted to get through it, and I wanted to remember.

O
n April 26, 2006, a week after my American due date, Edward asked me, as he often did, “What’s Pudding up to?”

“He’s not moving around so much,” I said. I touched my stomach. I was sitting in Savary’s weird L-shaped dining room, next to the only phone outlet in the entire enormous house, so I could check my e-mail. Every now and then, I felt a dim stirring.

“Really?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. Everything I read said that babies move less when they’re getting ready to be born: they have less room.

“Should we call someone?” he asked.

And there it is: the first moment I can look at and say, we could have changed things. This is the moment that Superman flies in and puts his hand on the fender of the runaway car to let the child in his cloth coat go toddling into the road after the bright kicked ball.

“No,” I said. “Let’s wait till morning.”

The only reason that writing about this moment doesn’t make me weep so hard I can’t type is that it’s just one of a dozen.

The next morning I lay in bed with my hands on my stomach and then phoned the local fox-faced midwife. As usual, I got her cell phone’s voicemail. She called back a few minutes later.

“Could I come in and see you?” I asked. “The baby’s not moving as much as he was.”

Yes, she said, that happened. But all right. She had many appointments, but at about five —

“Claudelle,” I said, “I’m really worried,” and I hadn’t realized until I said it how worried I was. For some women — me, for instance, during my second pregnancy — hyperworry is a side effect, as sure as high blood pressure or high blood sugar. Your body just produces
more,
which means you do what you can to manage it. But back then when the worry flooded in, I believed it was serious, because it was anomalous.

“All right,” she said. “Come now.”

Claudelle’s waiting room was a glassed-in porch at the back of the house, outside of her office. We had waited there for plenty of appointments, looking over the back fence at the house next door. This time we sat on the wicker sofa for a few minutes, fretting.

She pulled back the curtain over the window in the door, saw us, and waved us in. Her office was decorated in the sort of filmy orange and blue color scheme that acknowledges you might wish to be elsewhere. Her examining table was stirrupless, massage-worthy. The only overtly medical object in her room was an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag, the kind carried by Norman Rockwell GPs. From this, that Thursday morning, she extracted a fetal heart monitor, to give me what is called in America a nonstress test.

This is of course a contradiction in terms, because listening to anyone’s heartbeat for half an hour is stressful: it changes, and you want to ask the medical professional, Is that all right? Too fast, too slow? The suspense is terrible. Nonstress just means the heart rate and uterine contractions (if any) are monitored to see how the baby is reacting to normal life in the womb without the added stress of medication to mimic contractions. I’d had a routine nonstress test the week before, when Sylvie, the other midwife, had come to the house.

“There he is!” said Claudelle now, having found the heartbeat.

We’d heard plenty of different monitors by then: the wuAHwuAHwuAH of a silver flying saucer sailing to earth in a 1950s sci-fi movie, a ponyish clippety-clop, an expressionless chain of beeps. Claudelle’s usual heart monitor, the one she held to my stomach for uneventful checkups, was horsey, but this one sounded like the forlorn footsteps of a tiny man, walking around a series of corridors, looking for a door. Tok tok tok tok. She pulled at the strap that held the device to try to get closer but couldn’t. In my memory the heartbeat got louder and quieter — the tiny man turned a corner, tried a knob, retraced his steps — but that doesn’t make sense. Pudding was still alive then, but he probably wasn’t moving.

I lay on my side. When Sylvie had tested me the week beforehand, she’d given me a button on a cable to press when I felt Pudding move, but this time I just kept still and listened. The machine spit out a pen-etched tape, like a polygraph result in the movies. Claudelle studied it.

She was perfectly cheerful, she chatted to calm us down. It even worked for a while. Then she put one hand on either side of my stomach and shook. “Hello,” she said. “Bonjour, bébé. Wake up. Come, stop sleeping.”

Tok, tok, tok, tok.

She shook harder. “Wake up, baby,” she said.

After forty-five minutes, she took off the monitor.

“So?” I said.

“So,” she said. “I wish he would respond more, but it is not serious.”

When I was pregnant the second time, I became an old hand at nonstress tests: I had them twice a week, and mostly they passed without incident. To pass the test, you need four heart rate accelerations within twenty minutes, and I usually hit that mark within ten. The nurses praised the kid for being agreeable, for never needing to be yelled at or jolted into action with fruit juice, though one of the nurses did once slap me around the midsection. “Child abuse, and the kid’s not even born,” she said, as the heart rate sped up. “Ah, there he goes.”

At one of my last tests, I asked the nurse on duty, a sweet young woman with a gamine haircut and a two-year-old of her own, what happened if you failed a nonstress test.

“They’d keep you on for forty minutes,” she said, “to make sure the baby’s not just sleeping.”

And then? I asked.

“Well,” she said, “they’d send you to the hospital immediately.”

And then? I wondered, but didn’t ask.

This is the real Superman moment for me, as I sit at my computer, telling this story. I want to reach into the screen. I want to hit Return between
I wish he would respond more
and
but it is not serious
.

I wish he would respond more —

Look at that lovely white space! There’s my laptop screen in front of me. Surely I should be able to touch the space, I am a science-fiction heroine now, touch the space and pull it open. Can’t I stretch time if I just push these paragraphs apart? Above, she is saying,
I wish he would respond more
. In the new bright hole in the computer screen, which is to say, the universe, she then says,

I think you should go to the hospital immediately.

But you cannot. You cannot. You cannot change time. You can’t even know that it would have made any difference: a baby can be born alive and still die. A baby can be born sick, and get sicker, and then die.

Claudelle took the printout from the test and tried to fax it to Sylvie’s office in Bordeaux, but Sylvie’s fax machine wasn’t working. Instead she called the office, and they had a quick conversation in French.

“It’s not serious, I think,” she said to me again. “Go home and relax, have a sleep, and then you will meet Sylvie at the hospital. At five o’clock, yes? But go home and lie down first.”

I really don’t blame Claudelle, though the day I asked the American nurse what they did when babies failed to respond was a very bad day for me. Let me be honest: it was a year to the day after the test with Claudelle, so it was already bad. I wish I hadn’t asked.

Still, I don’t blame Claudelle.

It’s a strange business, turning those days into sentences, and then paragraphs. When I’ve thought of Claudelle since Pudding’s death, it’s been with sympathy:
she must feel terrible
. I’ve never wandered further down that road, wondered whether she feels culpable, whether she worries that she’s the villain in our version of the story. I’ve never wondered whether it’s terrible that we simply disappeared — because we did disappear, soon enough after that day we erased ourselves from that part of the world as completely as we could — or a relief. Maybe it’s a relief. Maybe every day we stayed gone was a relief to her.

Or maybe it was just one of those sad things that happens when you’re in the mostly joyful business of childbirth, and she never thinks of us at all.