Chris Adrian - The New World

“Now you’re being cruel,” she said.

“Well, you were cruel first,” Jim said, and put his face in his hands. And that was how the chaplain found them. Later, Jim imagined what they must have looked like, him hiding his face, Jane turned away in bitter anger and hurt, and the purple-faced, half-swaddled baby neglected between them on her chest.

“May I come in?” the stranger asked. “I’m Dick Carver, the chaplain on call.”

“All right,” Jim said.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said to them.

“Thanks,” Jane said flatly. “It’s okay, though. We did some crafts.”

“Oh,” Dick said. “May I?” He picked up the certificate and frowned at it.

“You can have it, if you want.”

“No, thank you,” Dick said. “But I think I hear you. It’s too much, isn’t it? And not enough, at the same time.” He was a little hobbit of a man, shaggy-haired and hairy-handed. Jim was sure his feet must be covered with fur.

“Sure,” Jane said. When Jim took her hand she didn’t pull away, but she didn’t look at him, either.

“Would you like to do something else? I could do something else, if you’d like me to.”

“What do you mean?” Jim asked.

“A ceremony. Something small. But sometimes it’s…” He waved the certificate. “Often it’s more than this . Would you like to?”

“Sure,” Jim said right away. Jane rolled her eyes. “Her mother is a pastor,” Jim said, as if he needed to explain why his wife wasn’t being more polite. But Jane didn’t take away her hand.

“My father was a pastor too,” said Dick, and then put the certificate aside and got started. Much later, he and Jim would have debates about the nature and use of pastoral authority, because Jim objected, in theory, to Dick’s habit of boldly taking control of emotional horror shows in the hospital. But in practice, that early morning, it made all the difference in the world for this little man to boss them around for five minutes. He didn’t take away Jim’s grief, or lessen it by a single iota, but he took control of it for a few moments, which felt like enough time for Jim to get a toe back into the world.

Dick sang a psalm in Hebrew, then recited a Yeats poem about a child stolen by fairies, gently bludgeoning them with the refrain until Jane and Jim were both freely in tears. Then he asked what name they would like for the baptism.

“Baptism?” Jane said. “Like a Catholic?”

“Not into a church,” Dick said. “Into your lives.”

“Ralph,” said Jim.

“Ralph?” Jane asked. That hadn’t even been on their list of possible names.

“I don’t want to use any of those names,” Jim said, not saying to her (and barely saying to himself) that he wanted to save them all for the other babies, the ones they might still have.

Dick took a splash from a plastic water bottle and put it on the baby’s tiny head. “Ralph,” he said. “With water as pure as your spirit I baptize you son to your father, Jim, and son to your mother, Jane. Love created you. Love will sustain them through the loss of you. You will always be remembered.” Then he asked Jim and Jane if they wanted to say something.

“Did you hear that, Ralph?” Jim sobbed. “It doesn’t matter that you’re dead. We love you anyway.”

“Yes, it does,” Jane said quietly. “Yes, it does matter. But we love you. That part’s true.”

Before the two of them could argue the point, Dick closed them down with another sung Hebrew prayer. He must have withdrawn sometime very soon after that, but Jim had no memory of him leaving. Jim didn’t remember anything of the hour or so that followed except that when someone finally came to take the baby away, Jane held it to her chest and said, barely intelligible through her tears, “I never want to see another baby again as long as I live.”

“You don’t have to,” Jim said. “You never do.” But he of course wasn’t able to protect her, in the weeks and months afterward, from the random child who pulled on her skirt in the supermarket line and said, Hey, lady, you have pretty hair , or the trick-or-treaters who ignored his no candy tonight sign and rang insistently at the doorbell, or even, eventually, the sight of her patients, whose faces at least were hidden from her as they lay opened before her, half dead and half alive, on the operating table.

He couldn’t even protect her from his own (deeply considered but still totally unwise) overtures toward adoption, the brochures from agencies that he left about as if by accident, or the disastrous Christmas gift of an African orphan sponsorship. He was trying so hard, and none of it helped.

“She doesn’t even notice,” he said eventually to Dick, after Dick had become his supervisor. Jim had enrolled in Clinical Pastoral Education courses — partly to give Jane space, partly to keep himself busy. “Or maybe she doesn’t even care.”

“Or maybe she doesn’t understand,” Dick said. “You’re speaking a different language now. She’s a surgeon, after all.”

“So am I,” Jim said.

“Not anymore,” Dick said, leaning forward and staring at him in the way he had during their first week of instruction, when he said, “I am bringing all of my attention to bear on you. Your job is to be fully present for my attention.” Jim laughed at him the first few times, but he found that as he learned to actually be more present, as he learned that presence was actually a skill you could practice, he found he had to cover his face with his hands after only a moment or two. It was a year before he could ever stare Dick down.

He looked away. “Now you’re one of us,” Dick said.

“I’m getting there, anyway,” Jim said. He hadn’t yet been tested in the way he knew would make him or break him. He failed the first few times, calling Dick in the middle of the night and asking him to go to the hospital in his stead, because he just wasn’t ready to face those parents yet. And then, once he had gathered the courage to go into the room, he failed again, muttering uselessly at them about how they would find a way to be happy again. He cried out his tears in the hospital bathroom, so Jane wouldn’t have to see them.

“But are we parents ?” the poor father asked him, the night Jim passed the test. I was answering for all of us , he tried to tell Jane, who seemed too tired to listen to him, when he rushed home to let her know what had finally happened.

“Of course you are,” Jim said, crying, but not out of control; overwhelmed, but not crushed, believing it for all of them in the room and for Jane, too, believing it for every stillborn parent in the world. “And now, just like for any of us who’ve had a child, nothing is ever going to be the same for you.”

“That’s lovely,” Sondra said, leaning on one arm in her bed with one hand in her curls and one on her heart, “in a really terrible way.”

“But really I had nothing to do with it,” Jim said. “Everything helpful or true about the moment was in them . I was just the stick for the rock candy, you know?”

“I hate rock candy,” Sondra said. “But I probably know what you mean. People were always telling me their troubles, in the shop. People are so stupid, most of the time.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “So all you have to do is listen to them and then when they ask you what they should do, you say, ‘Don’t be so stupid .’ ”

“Did you and Joe ever want to have children?” Jim asked.