An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir

  I was rushed to the sonogram room. “Yup, there,” said the beautiful sonographer, nodding at the screen. Her name was Barb, and I loved her. The bespectacled doctor (who of course knew my history from my chart) put her hands on her head and walked in the several small circles of relief that Edward would have completed if he were there.

  Poor woman. She’d been panicking as much as I had.

  Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.

  So at the end of February, when I was seven months pregnant, we took the train from Albany to New Orleans, where I’d been invited to give a reading. Saratoga Springs was still packed in graying snow, left over from a Valentine’s Day blizzard, and my pregnancy was no longer a secret from strangers, who cooed over my stomach, and said, “First child? You must be so excited!” We booked a tiny room with folding bunk beds for the train ride — the very definition of hell for some people, I know, but it was fantastic. Our across-the-corridor neighbor was an elderly English Franciscan monk and train buff, exactly the sort of person you can get to know only on a long train trip. We took all of our lousy, happy Amtrak meals with him.

  In Tuscaloosa, at a pause, we stepped onto the platform and sniffed at the sunrise. We were riding into spring. This visit had originally been planned in the innocent April of 2005, for that October, when I would have been three months pregnant with Pudding. In Paris, just after the Gulf Coast’s calamity, I had to explain it to the beautiful woman in the Air France office near the Jardins du Luxembourg: New Orleans was under water. Everything was canceled. She smiled sympathetically but would not refund the ticket. The college asked me again for the spring of 2006, but I had to write back with my regrets: I planned to be heavily pregnant or giving birth for the entire spring.

  What would it be like, postdiluvian us in postdiluvian New Orleans?

  On our first full day our hostess took us on what she called the Devastation Tour of the city: the haunted Lower Ninth Ward, where one woman stood on the porch of the only renovated house for blocks, her moving van parked out front. We saw the house of the filmmaker Helen Hill, who’d been shot to death by an intruder while her husband scooped up their baby and ran to safety; we looked at some levees, which seemed to have been stapled back together and left to rust; we passed by other people on similar tours. Everywhere you could see protoplasmic high-water marks on houses, some low enough that you’d know that only the things in the basement were ruined, some so high you wondered how it was that the entire neighborhood had not been washed away. Other houses still had the international orange tattoos left after the storm: date searched; number of people saved; number of people who, being dead, were merely discovered. We ended up at the new Whole Foods near the studio apartment that had been rented for us, goggle-eyed at all that disorienting bounty. Who would need to buy, in such a world, a precooked vegan meatloaf?

  “I don’t think they’re done finding bodies,” our hostess told us. She’d just gone on antianxiety medication so that she could bear living in the city she loved.

  Spring had arrived just ahead of us, in the form of actual blossoms — magnolias — and the weird kudzu of flung-from-floats Mardi Gras beads in the trees. The city was all blue skies and light breezes and raw nerves and melancholy. Most everyone we met was on edge, some so heartsick we worried, even if we’d never met them before. They seemed frozen. Something had happened. It had been a year and a half, and if you weren’t in the middle of it you might lose patience: New Orleans, why can’t you get over it? We were very sorry for you for a while. Now there are other things to be sad about. It’s not your time anymore. Pull yourself together.

  Of course it felt familiar, as wretchedly presumptuous as that sounds. I’d spent the fall and winter feeling only the most cautious of emotions. A gleam of hope, a spike of fear, slantwise guilty grief. One day’s worth of feeling at a time. Surely grand emotion is more than twenty-four hours’ worth, grief compounded with interest, joy magnified by anticipated returns. In New Orleans, I found it extraordinary to be surrounded by great sadness. The people we saw, old friends and strangers, had left and come back, and now they were waiting for the next disaster, the next murder, the next hurricane, the next levee failure, the loss of their home, the revocation of their homeowner’s insurance, and still of course at the same time they had to hope. Hadn’t they come back for that reason, because they hoped?

  Me, too: same place, remembering the disaster, trying to believe it would not come for me again.

  At a reception that week, I was chatting with the exceptionally lovely, soft-spoken woman who’d donated the money for the program that had brought me there. We sat in folding chairs against a wall, a few feet from the buffet table. Just small talk. She asked me how my pregnancy was going. Then she said, “I was so sorry when I heard about your first child. My first child was stillborn, too.”

  My heart kicked on like a furnace. Suddenly tears were pouring down my face.

  “Oh no!” said the woman. “I didn’t mean for that to happen!”

  I laughed and grabbed some napkins from the table and tried to explain myself, though even now it’s hard to find the words. What came over me was gratitude and an entirely inappropriate love. I didn’t know the woman, but I loved her. I’d felt the same thing meeting another couple on campus, a professor and his wife who’d written me when Pudding died to send condolences and to say that they’d had a daughter who was stillborn nearly thirty years before.

  All I can say is, it’s a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of a sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

  Twice now I have heard the story of someone who knows someone who’s had a stillborn child since Pudding has died, and it’s all I can do not to book a flight immediately, to show up somewhere I’m not wanted, just so that I can say, It happened to me, too, because it meant so much to me to hear it. It happened to me, too, meant: It’s not your fault. And You are not a freak of nature. And This does not have to be a secret.

  That’s how it works. When a baby dies, other dead children become suddenly visible: Daughters and sons. First cousins. The neighbor kid. The first child. The last child. Your older brother. Some of their names have been forgotten; some never had names in the first place. They disappeared under heaps of advice. Don’t dwell. Have another child, a makeup baby. Life is for the living. But then another baby dies, and here they are again, in stories, and you will love them all, and — if you are the mother of a dead child yourself — they will keep coming to you. A couple I know just lost their baby. And you will know that your lost child has appeared somewhere else in the world. I know a couple . . .

  All those dead children. Who knows what they want?

  In our better moments, we surely understand that the dead do not need anything. Afterlife, no afterlife: the dead have their needs taken care of. Oh, but isn’t wanting things something else again, and don’t we talk about it all the time. It’s what he would have wanted. Her last wishes. Thank God for the dead; thank God someone is capable of making a decision in the worst of times: He would have liked it that way.

  But a baby. Who’s to say? Babies are born needing everything. They’re a state of emergency. T
hat’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.

  When 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.

  Over 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.

  On 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 ove
r 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.