Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (9 page)

“Here, you can’t rely on any one version of history,” our tour guide, Marcus, said, standing among the ruins of a village close to the cliffs. He was Swedish; his blond ponytail flit in the wind like a horse’s tail as we toured the archeology at our feet. He regaled us with theories of how the
mo’ai
statues were once toppled, either by a powerful female spirit or an intense tribal conflict or hostile settlers from afar.
We ducked our heads into caves where whole families might have been born, lived, and died.

“What brought you to Rapa Nui?” I asked him.

He squinted—he’d left his sunglasses in the van. “Love,” he said, as if it was the only answer. “We just had a baby. He’s thirty-five days old today.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Do you have children?” he asked, sounding hopeful to connect.

“No, we don’t.” The words fell flat and false against my tongue. I looked for Ryan, who was stranded in the same isolation I was. He was nearby with the Canadian couple, but out of earshot.

On the way back to Te’Ora, Marcus asked us if we’d like to stop by his home and meet his wife, who was from the island, and their thirty-five-day-old son. We drove up to a single-level, white square house, its windows opened wide. Unruly plants and propped surfboards surrounded the woman who stood on the front porch. Her dark hair was pulled up into the topknot we’d just seen on several
mo’ai
. She held a baby close to her chest, against a strapless cotton dress. Easy for breast-feeding. In the alternate reality, I’d still be breast-feeding Lorenzo.

Marcus made a round of introductions before turning to his wife to say, “Ryan also surfs.”

A smile spread like a hammock hitched to her high cheekbones. “I teach the children here. They pile onto the front of my longboard. I always said that someday I’d teach my own kid,” she said, looking down at the tiny boy.

Ryan had dreamt of teaching Lorenzo, and my heart broke for him next to all this. No one standing on the porch could know our own complicated history just by looking at us. We appeared young and happy, carefree even.

Back in the van, Joanne from Canada said, “Get ready. It’s so tiring when they’re little.”

“Yes, he screams a lot,” Marcus conceded.

I didn’t know Joanne’s history either, but I resented her attempt
to tarnish the new parenthood we’d just seen, for complaining at all about a healthy child. As we bumped over potholes, I sat quietly in the back, dreaming of a screaming baby.

Fertility is central to Rapa Nui’s imagery. On one of the island’s three corners is Orongo, the crater of a massive volcano, filled in with water and moss and reflections of the sky. I stood a few feet from the crest of the remnants of a long-ago eruption in the middle of the ocean and peered into that vast emptiness. It was almost a year after my own body had emptied. I was still standing.

Long ago, Orongo was the site of the annual Bird Man Festival. Each spring, the first tribal member to return from the neighboring islets with an egg of the Manutara bird was named
Tangata Manu
, or Bird Man, and promised a fertile coming year for his tribe. I’d read about this race and wanted to see the stone petroglyph,
Komari
, a symbol of that fertility and creation. According to the map, it was by the edge of the volcano, but the section was cordoned off.

“Hop the fence,” Ryan said, looking at what was little more than a low limbo stick dangling a sign of warning—
PELIGRO
.

I didn’t want to disrespect the sign, the centuries beneath my feet, or the bountiful spirit I was here to conjure. But it was a man-made boundary dividing two sides of the same trail, so I hopped over the limbo stick and took a photo of the rocks, even though the symbols themselves were somewhere on the other side. To my left was a virtual drop-off—right into the crater of the volcano.
Peligro.
To my right were the neighboring islets. And somewhere in front of me were the petroglyphs. Ryan urged me to go further, to reach my hand out to those fertile rocks. We were trying to make a baby, a baby who would survive. But I felt close enough, so I stepped back over the short barrier and kissed my husband. “I think it’s up to us to symbolize the love that’s going to make this happen,” I said.

On our last day, I swam in one of the swimming “bowls” carved out of the rocky cliffs. A sort of womb embraced me as I moved in parallel with a sea turtle, my husband off surfing the same waves that petered out and rolled softly over our backs, our shells, our ancient bodies. We had seen the unfinished
mo’ai
earlier, leaning in stages of incompletion at the quarry. Their eyes were never painted on, their bodies never animated by their spirits. They somehow looked more real that way, rooted in the landscape. They, unlike the others, gazed out over the ocean, a scene so beautiful and spare it could as easily have been from the end of time as the start of the beginning.

And Ryan was right—Lorenzo was there with us, the whole time.

Christina Melendrez

L
ast night, I brought Murray with me for the thirty-yard walk around the house to throw away some trash. A big yellow dog is always good protection against bogeymen, grasshoppers, and exfiancés. I drop the bag in and head back to the house, and notice that Murray is crunching on something that sounds like bone and sinew. I can’t get him away from whatever it is. I run inside to get a flashlight and then proceed to pry my dog off the dead animal. Black beady eyes reflect the light and the long tail wraps through the grass. His mouth is open—sharp little teeth bared in a postmortem snarl. I want to throw up. I want to choke. I want to cry.

By the time I drag my dad from bed and we shovel the critter into a garbage bag, and by the time I walk him to the trash can, my fingers pinched on the edges and the bag held as far away from me as possible, I am exhausted and I have no idea why. It’s just a possum, ugly little beasts too dumb to move for a car. I mull it over and then I realize it might be because he had just been alive. And then he wasn’t. Just like that, with one thrashing shake of the neck, the possum was dead. He was gone and something was then gnawing on his entrails.

I had seen one dead body, that of my grandmother, when I was five. I missed her a whole bunch, but I was equally excited about the fact that it was actually snowing in Hesperia. As I grew up, I went to several funerals, but none of them were open casket. I had never stumbled on a dead body or dissected a dead body or watched
someone die—actually witness that last breath. And I had never touched a dead body.

Until Maddison.

Just like my furry friend, one minute she was alive and kicking, and the next, she wasn’t. I missed that moment. I don’t know how I missed that moment. Did she suffer? Did she know something was wrong? And most importantly, could I have done something? Of course, not at that exact instant when the umbilical cord had been closed off, but maybe I could have demanded another ultrasound. Maybe I should have left him sooner and prevented all of the stress. Maybe I could have grown a heartbeat monitor out of my stomach with the option of busting out an emergency C-section right at my desk. It’s all speculation and nonsense.

I had loved being pregnant. My beautiful body stretched and shaped and blossomed with her life. I was so in tune with the rest of me with this little creature taking over, her needs my body’s only priority. My heart, my blood, my lungs, my stomach—we all worked so hard to get her what she needed, straining to force it through the single artery in her umbilical cord. It wasn’t enough. She barely grew. At birth, she was four pounds, eleven ounces, and seventeen inches long. So perfectly tiny—a miniature baby. I failed her. My only job as a mother was to protect her, and I couldn’t. She slowly starved to death. She was born after a forty-three-hour labor, on November 10, 2011. I was later told that she had been dead for three or four days by the time I was able to deliver her.

There is this supremely surreal quality to life after the loss of a child. This can’t be happening. Shock. Denial. Rage. Anxiety. The belief that now everyone else is going to start dying, too. I sat on my couch, day in and day out, wailing, aching. Alone. Not alone physically, but alone in my pain. Surrounded by love and friendship, but so disconnected. I remember going to Walmart a week after they released me from the hospital. I needed sports bras, Kleenex, and a new journal. And I remember walking through the aisles and thinking, as I dodged a little old lady, these people have
no fucking idea what I’m going through right now. I’m not sobbing uncontrollably, and I’m responding to all of the social cues. I said hi back to the greeter, excused myself when I accidentally bumped into a shelf, and I remembered to look both ways before stepping into the hazardous crosswalk. I even smile occasionally. Yet every part of my body throbs with the pain of losing her. And these people have no clue. They don’t know that I gave birth a week ago, that my daughter was silent and beautiful. They don’t know that my breasts leak through these pitiful bras. They don’t know that I cry when I step in the shower, blood running down my legs, my arms cradling the empty skin of my stomach. No one in this store has access to these intimate moments. My grief is my own, to bear privately.

When she was born, I remember experiencing this overwhelming fear of touching her, because I thought I would tear her skin. It was dark pink and like velvet, like soft suede. They asked me if I wanted to hold her. And I couldn’t do it at first. I couldn’t take my eyes off the umbilical cord that she wore like a backpack. She was so light and small and fragile looking. Delicate. My delicate baby girl. And she didn’t breathe. I couldn’t see her eyes. She made no noise. When finally I held her, she was still warm. She was swaddled, and I placed her right next to me. I wrapped around her on the bed and I wailed. I was empty without my little girl.

I tell myself that I should have known that something was wrong. But how can you know something that you’ve never known before? It’s impossible. I mostly wish that there had been some kind of marker for her death. My little one had moved on, and I didn’t know for two whole days, when my body started shutting down in response. In that one moment, the instant she died, my life changed. Not in a barely imperceptible way, but in an earth-shattering way, and I missed it.

That one moment had crept by quietly. Not like the possum. There was no violent shaking. No terrors in the night. No big yellow dog. She slipped away, stolen from my life.

It’s like hearing a friend gasp and turning too late to see the shooting star. It has already fallen. Whenever I see a shooting star now, I think of you, Maddison. You are my brilliant glimpse of heaven, falling to Earth but then gone in a flash. Beautiful.

At the end of the night
All of the smiles have gone cold
The hugs have gone stale
I lie down on my bed
Just me and my grief
And my love for you.

Jessica Bomarito

It’s like a weight,
or else a jigsaw
puzzle—
pieces everywhere.

It’s like the world
stopped,
and instead of being
thrown by force,

you stuck
right in your place,
everyone else flying
beyond tomorrow.

Jessica S. Baldanzi

M
y yoga teacher is full of shit. I like her, but she’s full of it. She’s perched on her mat at the front of the room, her well-tuned voice telling us to relinquish control, to “practice letting go.”

“I know how hard it is,” she says, but provides no specifics as to what “it” is. Performance anxiety? Messy house? Or something more serious: domestic violence, breast cancer, the death of a parent or friend? Whatever “it” was, it all fell apart. She let go. It all came together. Now she’s a much happier person.

The last time I let go, my baby died.

I was rolling on a gurney from birthing room to operating room, but it was my mantra that was really carrying me: It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. Everything will be okay. I was floating, smiling—a magician’s assistant on cotton-ball clouds. We were heading for the operating room because labor was progressing but the baby wasn’t coming out. No one was worried—my pregnancy had been healthy, and although I had been hoping for natural childbirth, this move to a C-section was common enough, routine even. This was my first baby, but everyone around me had done this hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. We were in a hospital, among professionals, experts. We were safe.