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

  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.

  We went out to lunch at an Indian restaurant close by. Edward’s parents swore that really hot curries induced labor. In those days we drove miles and miles to find the curry houses of southwest France.

  “Oh!” I said to Edward as we sat. “He just moved.”

  “Jolly good,” he said.

  I put my hand on top of my stomach and felt what I thought of as Pudding’s rolling-over-in-bed move. “God, I feel better,” I said. I exhaled. “All right. Well done, Pudding.”

  Later I found out that this was a Braxton Hicks contraction, my uterus puttering around, maybe getting ready for labor, maybe not. I found out, you see, because I continued to have them even after he was irrefutably dead.

  We went back to Savary. I ate some cookies. At four we got in the car with my hospital bag — my clothes, Pudding’s coming-home outfit, the books that Edward was going to read to me, the books I would read to myself. We always had great plans to read Dickens to each other, but we only ever got a chapter in at a time. Now it was Great Expectations — if we were only to get one chapter in, that was fine. We both know the book nearly by heart, and the first chapter is glorious, if, at this remove, a little overpopulated with dead children.

  Again to Bordeaux in the rented car. We listened to Round the Horne, an old English radio program that Edward had bought me for Christmas. We had a CD of Mozart chosen especially for children for the three of us to listen to on the way back.

  “I hate this,” I said to Edward.

  “I know,” he answered.

  “I hate this,” I clarified.

  He nodded.

  Sylvie was not there when we arrived. We were taken to an examination room, where a very young male sage-femme — not very sage, not at all femme — shook our hands. He wore a pair of bright rubber clogs. I thought then that I would never forget what color they were, red or green or yellow, but I have no idea, I just remember that they were unusual.

  He put the straps around my stomach and turned on the monitor. Nothing. He shifted them around.

  He said, in French, I am going to go get my colleague. She is better at this than I am.

  He disappeared and instead came back and brightly told us that we would go have a sonogram. Good, I thought. Enough messing around. Let’s see the kid.

  He led us into the hall and then out a side door. The sonographer’s office was in a separate cottagey building, covered in lilacs, just outside the hospital. I had been there less than a week before, for a diagnostic scan, which led to a diagnostic X-ray: the doctor had thought there was something a little funny about my pelvis, an odd angle to my pubic bone. An X-ray after all! He had made it very clear: if the X-ray suggested that my pelvis was in fact a little funny, I would have to check into the hospital immediately for a C-section: he wouldn’t want to risk me going into labor. But my pubic bone passed muster — I’d nervously told the technician I was pregnant, just in case it wasn’t glaringly obvious — and so I’d gone home that day. “Thank God,” I said to Edward on the car ride home. “I’m really glad I’m not having an impromptu caesarean.” It felt like a narrow escape. Instead we went home to wait some more.

  You cannot.

  So. It was a week later. The lilacs outside the entrance to the sonography cottage were still in bloom. We were led by the little male midwife past all the other people in the waiting room and into the two-room office. There was a desk and two chairs in the front room, which is where you sat and talked to the doctor when you weren’t in a hurry. We didn’t stop. Last week’s doctor was fortyish and spoke some English. This week’s was in his sixties, and didn’t. I lay down on the examining table. Edward sat in the husband’s chair in the corner of the room.

  The doctor worked the paddle around my stomach. He didn’t pause. He searched and searched. If he stops I know there’s hope. But he doesn’t stop.

  I say, “Non?”

  He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t stop. But he says to the screen, “Non.”

  I understand immediately and begin to sob.

  Grief is a waterfall, and just like that I’m over it, no barrel needed, I’m barrel-shaped.

  Edward doesn’t understand at first. “Comment?” he asks from his s
tool, and the male midwife says, “C’est fini.” It’s finished.

  Here is exactly how I remember it.

  The midwife threw himself into my arms. We embraced as the sonographer continued searching with his paddle, though what was he looking for, why wouldn’t he leave me alone? (He was a diagnostician. He was looking for clues.) I submitted myself to the hug. I held still for the paddle. I tried to weep only from the chest up. Suddenly Edward had knocked aside the male midwife to take his place. He stroked my hair and told me that it was all right, it was all right, “Oh, sweetheart,” he kept saying, “oh, sweetheart. It’s going to be OK.”

  The midwife in his sorrow threw himself on Edward. Who knocked him aside again, saying, “Pas maintenant.” Not now. My nice husband, who could not say simply, Stop, or No, or nothing at all. Poor midwife, who needed such comfort. Like anyone else in the profession he’d become a midwife for the babies, for the quotidian miracle of human reproduction. He was very young. This was probably his first death.

  “Sweetheart,” Edward kept saying. “It will be all right. We’re going to be OK.”

  And I thought what a good man he was, that he was so understanding, because, and this made me weep harder, because I knew, I knew, that this was all my fault. My essential reaction was grief, but somehow the words that floated to the surface of my brain were: people are going to be mad at me.

  Then the male midwife’s head floated away from his body like a balloon and traveled up my torso. It said, “Ce n’est pas ta faute!”

  It’s not your fault.

  It was my fault.

  Edward turned to the doctor. “Et maintenant?” he asked.

  The doctor shrugged, and spoke his second two words.

  He said, “Le travail.”

  The work.

  I would have to go through labor. I knew that already, the minute the doctor had shaken his head and said Non. The baby was dead, but he still had to be born. I knew this because my friend Wendy’s sister had lost two late-term children to placenta previa. Before Wendy explained it, stillbirth to me was what happened in black-and-white engravings, in iron beds with nearby pitchers, and it was always a grim surprise. The baby was born. The attending physician shook his head. When Wendy explained it to me, I was shocked. I don’t know how I supposed you got a late-term baby out.

  “That’s the worst thing in the world,” I said to Wendy when she told me about her sister.

  Now I understand. Of course it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world had already happened. He was dead. Everything else was easy.

  I leaned on Edward. On the other side of the door was a waiting room full of pregnant women and their partners. On my side of the door, I thought, Don’t catch anyone’s eye.

  I was not in shock. I was certainly not in denial. I was thinking quite clearly. I could remember what it was like to be pregnant and hopeful. That was minutes ago, though already in the remotest past. I had been shot out of a cannon since then, I was gone, but I knew: the women outside didn’t deserve to see me, but they would. I had been hustled past them; I had disappeared and wailed; whenever a door opens into a waiting room, all eyes go to see who’s behind it. In this case, me, the intact ruin. From the neck down I looked, like any heavily pregnant woman, like a monument to life. I knew where I was and what I was: bad luck for any pregnant woman to see. I was thirteen black cats. I was all the spilled salt in the world, a thousand smashed mirrors —

  No. I was a dropped and dropping mirror. Look at me and see your reflection, for one clear instant before the disaster.

  I unfocused my eyes and leaned harder on Edward and let him take me through the waiting room, past the lilacs, and back to the hospital proper.

  The little midwife asked if I wanted a tranquilizer. Yes, please. He went running out of the room. We never saw him again.

  A while later Sylvie, the delivering midwife, appeared in the room, and said —

  Edward and I disagree about what she said. In a little while she would do something we couldn’t forgive her for, but at that moment I still loved her. Even now, I don’t hate her with the hot passion that Edward does, though I don’t remember her with fondness. At any rate: I might in my confusion and sorrow have misheard her; Edward, in his sorrow and anger, might misremember. Everything, of course, is shrouded by our lack of fluency, since she spoke only French.

  I thought she said, Elizabeth, what has happened to your baby?

  Edward remembers, Elizabeth, what have you done to your baby?

  I burst into tears.

  You may add that detail into the description of the next five days approximately every four sentences. I burst into tears. I got up. I pulled on my robe. I began to feel around in the dark. What do you need, what can I do? Edward asked me. I burst into tears.

  Et cetera.

  She hugged me as I cried, and whatever the question was, she asked again, and I loved her. It was so early on, but here was another angle on my grief, and I was glad to get it. She had known Pudding in her way. She had listened to his heartbeat and pronounced it excellent; she had mapped its accelerations and decelerations. Now she said my name over and over, in the French way, Eeliza-bett, Eeliza-bett, and she seemed to understand that her hugging me made me cry harder, and that making me cry harder was something I’d be grateful for. The little male midwife had disappeared; the stern sonographer was back investigating the pregnancies of the lucky. Sylvie was here. She would help us get through all the very terrible things that came next.

  Let’s go get some air, she said, and we went outside.

  The hospital we were at was small, one floor, with the aforementioned lilacs. It was decided that we would go to a different, larger hospital for le travail. Sylvie called the doctor who’d administered the sonogram the week before, and he drove over. Five days ago he’d spoken only a little English; suddenly, standing in the parking lot, he seemed fluent, sad but professional. We stood among the cars. He and Sylvie spoke in French and shrugged.

  “You must see the baby,” he advised us. It was the only medical advice he had left to give. “After he’s born. You must see so you can understand, This is my baby, he is not a monster. This is very important.”

  We nodded. So did Sylvie. She said, “Très important. You muss.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I didn’t want to see the baby.

  This was garden-variety fear, though I didn’t understand that then. All I wanted was to be on the other side of what was about to happen. Not just on the other side of the next few days, the hospital stay, the terror of the delivery (a parody of the childbirth we’d been planning for and anxious about), calling people (another parody of something we were supposed to do; I was waiting until both of my parents would be home to call with the terrible news), getting the hell out of France. The movers were due to pick up our things and take them to England, and if I could have had any wish granted at that moment — besides the obvious, of course, that the sonograph was wrong, the pregnancy was as uncomplicated as it had seemed to be all along, Pudding was alive and would be born and squalling and confounding us within hours — it would have been to be put under anesthesia, the delivery to be done with. Then the movers could pack me in a crate and send me to England. Maybe by September it would be safe to take the crowbar to the wood and part the excelsior and let me back into the world.

  Instead, we got in our car and followed Sylvie to the next place.

  The new hospital was a grim collection of urban buildings set about with construction cranes. It was the main hospital in Bordeaux, and the construction made it difficult to find our way into the building. We went to an admitting room. I sat on a table. We met a sympathetic young doctor, and then a strange young anesthesiologist who spoke very good English and seemed delighted to practice it despite the circumstances. I would take the epidural after all. A nurse came around with a clipboard, and we ran into the usual confusion over names. McCracken struck most French medical professionals as unth
inkable — so many unwieldy consonants! — and besides, I was married, I said I was married, here was my husband, what was his name?

  The nurse said, From now on, here, you are Mrs. Harvey.

  I saw on my records a note from the morning, handwritten by Claudelle. It said that I was très inquiète, very worried, as though this were a medical diagnosis.

  Sylvie came into the room, her cell phone ringing in her hand. She answered it.

  “Ah, Claudelle,” she said. “Le bébé est décédé. Oui. Oui. Le bébé est décédé.”

  Then she turned to me and said, It’s Claudelle. You must talk to her.

  I was in patient mode and nodded, though I was starting to realize something. I was done with Claudelle. Time on this planet actually ran in only one direction. No matter what, I could not travel backwards to a living baby and an ordinary birth, and I did not want to turn my head a fraction in the direction of the past. Not a second, not for anything. I was done with Claudelle, I was done with the Bordelaise roads I’d driven from the first hospital to this one. I did not want to retrace a thing.

  This was a conversion moment for me. Twelve hours before, I’d barely believed in the future. I know that sounds crazy, especially for a pregnant woman. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it existed. At the same time, the flat-earth part of my personality wanted to ask, Where’s the proof? Of course the future kept arriving, of course it did, it arrived second by second, an assembly line of itself. But what I really believed in was the past, which is proven everywhere, and accessible: I’m a librarian, and I could show you where to look. The past is located in microfilm and bound volumes of magazines, in movies, memoirs, ephemera, granite, fluoroscopes in shoe stores; the career of Mamie Van Doren; the never mentioned first marriage and subsequent divorce of my cousin Elizabeth; speeding tickets; the daughters of Akhenaton; the invention of Silly Putty; trilobites. But the future? Let it come, let it age, let it be recorded, I’ll get around to the future eventually.