“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 over 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 stressfuclass="underline" 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.
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.