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. 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.
35
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.
36
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.
37
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.