They took him immediately from the room to clean him up and got Edward. He looked so sad, my poor husband. I don’t know how long he’d been out of the room. Twenty minutes, I think. Everyone had told us that it was very important to see our child no matter what. Now we waited dutifully for Pudding. The nurses brought him in and set him on the delivery table, in front of where I sat cross-legged in my gown.
“He looks like an old man,” Edward whispered, stroking his arm. A medium-sized baby, just over seven pounds. We touched him very tenderly. He wore a diaper and a knit yellow hat. The hair beneath the hat was dark, like mine. His cheeks were plump and his legs were skinny, and yellow, and undeniably dead. From the waist up he was rosy, and his lips were very, very red, very defined in his face. They were his father’s lips.
We stroked him and told him we were sorry. Later Edward said, “I didn’t know what it was I was feeling. Then I realized it was seeing someone and knowing immediately that you love him.”
“We’re ready,” we told the midwives, and they took him away. My great regret is that I didn’t pick him up.
For a long time when I looked at Edward, the first place my eyes stopped at was his mouth.
Faces famously fade from memory, and yet I swear I remember exactly what Pudding looked like. I’m glad I don’t have a picture to contradict me. The lips and the rosiness were the result of blood and gravity. His lips were lovely because he was dead, and because he’d been upside down inside of me, and because he was dead.
39
All day long I wondered where Sylvie was. She had told me she would be there for the delivery. She finally showed up in the hospital room at five. The first thing she said was, Elizabeth, you were careful about what you ate, weren’t you?
I was in bed, holding very still, but even so I froze. I said in my bad French, I thought I was, but maybe. .
That’s not it, said Edward.
She got a frightened look on her face and began to pat my frozen arms. Your baby, she said in French, your poor baby. She’s trying to make me cry, I thought, and I still think that’s what she was doing: she was worried that we blamed her, and so she tried to push the blame off onto me, and then she realized it was perhaps not the right time for such a transfer and tried to distract us from what she’d just said. She patted my arms harder. It’s very sad, she said.
I wanted her to leave, but I could not ask, because of course this was all my fault. I still believed that, a conviction so awful and unshakable that I didn’t say it aloud. If I’d said it to Edward, he would have tried to dissuade me, and my belief was an inoperable cancer, dangerous where it was but more dangerous to move. I could not put my finger on what I had done wrong. Eaten something. Failed to eat something. Rested too much or exercised too much. Got pregnant too old. Was smug. He died inside of me: Of course it was my fault. It happened on my watch.
I think, said Edward in a firm voice, Elizabeth would like it if you’d leave now. At the time it seemed like an astonishing piece of mind reading. Sylvie nodded and got up. Call me before you leave Bordeaux, she said, but we never did.
The midwife on the ward the next day was the kindest of all of them, in her forties, with dark hair gathered back and a careworn face. She gave me a sponge bath, and then she said, How are you?
Not good, I said.
But how, she asked me seriously, is your morale?
I smiled. I said, still smiling, not good. Not terrible but not good.
Of all the people who attended to me over those days, she was the only one who seemed to know that a sad thing had happened.
As she left I said, You’re very kind.
She shrugged. Then she said, “C’est normal,” it’s normal, which means, of course, Who wouldn’t be kind to you? But she said it in a voice that suggested that she knew: it wasn’t normal after all.
40
I have mostly forgiven myself, and on good days I can say, What else could I have done?
I find myself thankful for large and small things, in the way of people who’ve lost two limbs and are glad not to have lost four. Labor and delivery took four hours altogether; that was a mercy. They gave me medication that prevented my milk from coming in, which worked: that, too. We were thankful for the midwives who’d delivered Pudding. The young one said, À bientôt, when she left, See you soon. We were thankful that we could leave France, thankful that we could live near the sea for a few months, extraordinarily thankful that I got pregnant again so soon, and that the pregnancy held. I am not sure what sort of person I would be if that hadn’t happened.
Even now I feel a scalding, pleasureless relief that I pressed Claudelle to see me that morning. I wish I had pressed her more; I wish I had alarmed her into sending me immediately to the hospital — the one in Bordeaux, or the more terrifying one five minutes away from her office. But in the absence of that, I am relieved that when she said, Come at five, I’d said no. If I’d gone at five, Pudding would have been dead already. I wouldn’t have known when it had happened, and I don’t know how I would have gone forward in the world.
41
A year and three days after the morning I checked out of the hospital, Edward and I woke up in our second rented house in Saratoga Springs, an enormous Victorian we’d moved to a month before. The grubby rental house was around the corner. We might have stayed, but the owners decided to put it on the market, and so we ended up a block away, in a place that, it would turn out, had bats. We ate a small breakfast and wondered what the day would be like. We still weren’t people who could say under such circumstances, “By this time tomorrow, we’ll have a baby!”
I got dressed in a pair of stretchy black pants and a stretchy black top and put on lipstick and asked Edward to take my photograph: I hadn’t posed for a single picture for all of this pregnancy. I stood on the porch and smiled. It was a lovely spring day. Then we walked to the hospital.
Nurses are like anyone else when it comes to small talk, and while they went about their work they asked the usual questions. Boy or girl? Have you picked out a name? Are you wearing lipstick? To deliver a baby? At one point I had nurses on both arms looking for a likely vein for the IV. “You have very slender veins,” said one, pulling out a failed line.
“Shall we call for Marilyn?” another asked.
No, I thought, I wouldn’t name a baby Marilyn.
The mention of Marilyn, legendarily good at IVs, roused the competitive spirit of the first nurse. “Let me try again,” she said, and moved up my arm. This time when she failed she left behind an enormous amethyst bruise.
“Shall we call for anesthesia?” said the nurse who’d suggested calling for Marilyn, and I thought dreamily, Anesthesia. That’s a nice name.
The anesthesiologist came to put in the IV. He thought we looked familiar, and realized he’d seen us the night before at the DMV. That was somehow unnerving.
The nurse started the Pitocin drip. Dr. Knoeller came by.
“What are you thinking for names?” she asked.