Elizabeth McCracken - An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination - A Memoir

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.

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.”