Chris Adrian - The New World

“Well, of course Jim’s thinking about a baby now ,” her mother had told her, when Jane had gone up to Northampton alone to fetch the cat back, after a two-week trip to Puerto Rico to celebrate Jim getting off anticoagulants. “It’s like he’s finally all better. And he nearly died, didn’t he? Never mind that it was nearly two years ago to you and me. To him, it was probably yesterday. A little fender bender or ten pages of Camus was always enough to make your father come at me like a Mormon . Just give him some time. He’ll settle down. And he can’t be a surgeon anymore. He’s just looking for something to do with his life, isn’t he?”

“But did you want one?”

“One what, dear?”

Jane rolled her eyes. “A little Mormon.”

“Well, no,” her mother said, looking searchingly into her tea. “Not at first. And that’s all right, you know. It’s just two entirely different states of existence, the before and the after of it. Neither can understand the other, but one is also not inferior to the other.”

“I have no idea what you’re saying,” Jane told her. “But you know what I would never tell my child? I didn’t want to have a baby. ”

“Jane,” her mother said. “You’re not a teenager. If you want me to help you in your discernment, you have to let me be honest with you.”

“But I don’t want your help,” Jane said. “I don’t even want to talk about this anymore. I just came here to get my cat!”

“Of course,” her mother said. “When have you ever needed anybody’s help?” She clapped her hands and called for Millicent, who did all the actual work of cat-sitting when Jane left Feathers at the house. Millicent brought the cat in, dressed up like a baby, of course, which Jane would have accused her mother of setting up somehow, if this hadn’t been their first conversation about a baby, and if Millicent wasn’t always dressing the animal up and emailing photos of Librarian Cat, Housewife Cat, or Junkie Cat. Baby Cat was just a stupid coincidence. “Oh, Millicent,” Jane’s mother said. “That’s Jane’s christening dress.”

Millicent frowned and handed Jane the cat, a floppy overweight Maine coon, who lay placidly in her arms with its eyes half-closed. Jane scowled at all of them.

“She’s very pretty, though,” her mother said, to Millicent’s quivering lip. And to Jane she said, “Doesn’t it feel nice? That’s all I meant, dear. You’ll never really know what it means to want one, until you’re actually holding it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said to her mother. And she didn’t throw away her birth-control pills when she got home, but she did put them away someplace where they’d stay out of sight, a bathroom drawer full of old shampoo that she hadn’t used in years. “Well,” she said to Jim in bed that night. “Here we go, I guess.”

She got pregnant right away, and lost it right away, which she saw as a punishment for not wanting it enough, for feigning interest for Jim’s sake. Soon, though, as a baby became the only thing she wanted, she grew convinced that she had in fact been feigning disinterest to herself, but this deception deserved a punishment of its own. Intellectually, that chain of reasoning was hard to sustain, but she had no trouble at all feeling the truth of it, through two more miscarriages and the trying and trying and trying in between.

Later she wondered if she ought to have consulted somebody before trying the first time, if she might have managed some kind of preemptive hormonal redecoration to make her body more hospitable to the little speck. She was forty-one when they started, after all. But when she asked her ob (a woman as blunt as a punch in the face) about it, she told Jane not to be stupid. “Nice try,” she said, “but you can’t make this your fault.” How very like an ob , Jane thought, that brusque attacking kindness, catty and paranoid and defensive all at once. Jane liked it. As the losses (and the expense) mounted, people came crawling out of the woodwork, reeking of baby , to recommend their own doctors or fertility centers, but Jane would never have dreamed of leaving hers. Though she pretended to be comforted by Jim, her own doctor was the only person who could make her feel better about what was happening.

Of course, the doctor’s awesome crankiness eventually failed her. When she gave Jane the news that the baby was dead inside her at thirty weeks, and would have to be delivered in some grotesque mockery of childbirth, it would have been so much better if she had said, You are a useless lady, a waste of space as a body, a bad idea, even, and I hate you through and through — but none of that has anything to do with why you lost this baby. But she was all sad sweetness during the delivery. “You’re going to get through this,” she kept saying confidently.

“Okay,” Jane replied. “But then what?”

“Then we just do whatever comes next,” Jim said. He held her hand and told her, like everybody else in that strange, subdued room, to push or not push. None of them seemed to understand that Jane might actually be giving birth to the sadness that would claim the rest of her life. You don’t even have to put me under, she wanted to say, but just cut it out. Don’t make me participate in this.

When the baby was out, somebody wrapped it up and put it on her chest. She wasn’t entirely there for that part. One of her baby books had told her about the rush of relief and joy she would feel when the baby was born, that she should get ready for the most indescribable feeling you will ever have . That part held true — the terrible feeling, with the shape of elation but the substance of regret, was so hard to describe she thought it would kill her to try, so she stayed quiet and still, half out of her mind. When she awoke to the world, a nurse was there, stamping the baby’s little hands and feet, performing the whole operation upon Jane’s body like she was a crafts table. “What are you doing?” Jane said. “Are you booking it for a crime? Are you booking it for being dead?”

“It’s just handprints and footprints,” the nurse said, wincing slightly. “For the memory box.”

“I said it was okay,” Jim said.

“A memory box? Does it seal the memories in and keep them there forever and never let them out?”

“If you want it to,” the nurse said without looking at Jane. To Jim, she said, “I’ve asked the chaplain to come.”

“Okay,” Jim said.

“Why not?” Jane asked. “Maybe he can take a picture of us with his phone.”

“Jane,” Jim said. “Jesus.”

“Sure,” she said. “He can come too. As long as the chaplain is coming. Why is this on me? Did somebody ask me before they put it there?”

“I wanted…” Jim said. “I thought you would…”

“What am I supposed to do with it? Feed it?”

“It’s a boy,” he said.

“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to find out about that.” She turned away from him as much as she could without spilling the baby off her chest.

“Not before it was born,” Jim said stupidly, but Jane only sighed.

“So what are we going to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” Jim said. “They’ll release him to us. Or cremate him.”

“Like medical waste,” Jane said. “Maybe we should just put him in a coffee tin and bury it in the yard.”

“Or we could have him stuffed,” Jim said. “How about that? Stuffed and poseable? We could dress him up for holidays. Hell, we could put him on top of the Christmas tree!”

“Stop,” she said.

“Stop what?” Jim asked. “I’m just being funny. Now we’re both comedians. How’s that? Maybe if we’re funny enough, the baby will laugh .”