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.
34
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. .