38
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 stool, 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.