Jodi Picoult: Sing You Home

I won’t remember losing the sensation in my legs and thinking that this was a start, wondering if they could fix it so that I didn’t feel anything at all.

I won’t recall opening my eyes after a knotted contraction and seeing Max’s face, twisted just as hard as mine with tears.

I won’t remember telling Max to turn off the Beethoven. And I won’t remember that, when he didn’t do it fast enough, I lashed out with one arm and knocked the iPod dock station to the floor and broke it.

I won’t remember that, afterward, it was silent.

I will have to be told by someone else how the baby slipped between my legs like a silver fish, how Dr. Gelman said the baby was a boy.

But that’s not right, I’ll think, although I won’t have the recollection. Bertha is supposed to be a girl. And how, on the heels of that, I wondered what else the doctor had gotten wrong.

I won’t remember the nurses wrapping him in a blanket, crowning him with a tiny knit cap.

I won’t remember holding him: his head, the size of a plum. His blue-veined features. The perfect nose, the pouting mouth, the smooth skin where his eyebrows were still being sketched in. The chest, fragile as a bird’s, and still. The way he nearly fit in the palm of one hand; the way he weighed nothing at all.

I won’t remember how, until that moment, I really did not believe it was true. In my hazy dream I spin back one month. Max and I are lying in bed after midnight. You awake? I ask.

Yeah. Just thinking.

About what?

He shakes his head. Nothing. You were worrying, I say.

No. I was wondering, he says soberly, about olive oil.

Olive oil?

Right. What’s it made from?

Is this a trick question? I ask. Olives.

And corn oil. What’s that made from?

Corn?

So, Max says, how about baby oil?

For a moment, we are both silent. Then we start laughing. We laugh so hard that tears come to my eyes. In the dark, I reach for Max’s hand, but I miss.

When I wake up, the shades in the room are drawn but the door is ajar. At first, I cannot remember where I am. There is noise in the hallway, and I see a tangle of family-grandparents, children, teenagers-floating along on the trail of their own laughter. They are carrying a rainbow of balloons.

I start to cry.

Max sits down beside me on the bed. He awkwardly puts his arm around me. Playing Florence Nightingale is not his strong suit. One Christmas, we had the flu together. In between my own bouts of vomiting, I would walk to the bathroom and get him cold compresses. “Zo,” he murmurs. “How do you feel?”

“How do you think I feel?” I am being a bitch. Anger burns the back of my throat. It fills the space inside me that was formerly home to my baby.

“I want to see him.”

Max freezes. “I, um…”

“Call the nurse.” My mother’s voice comes from the corner of the room where she’s sitting. Her eyes are red and swollen. “You heard what she wants.”

Nodding, Max gets up and walks out of the room. My mother folds me into her arms. “It’s not fair,” I say, my face crumpling.

“I know, Zo.” She strokes my hair, and I lean against her, the way I did when I was four years old and teased for my freckles, or fifteen and getting my heart broken for the first time. I realize I will not have the chance to comfort my own baby this way, and that makes me cry even harder.

A nurse steps into the room with Max at her heels. “Look,” he says, handing me a photo of our son. It looks as if it were snapped while he was asleep in a bassinet. His hands are curled on either side of his head. His chin has a tiny dimple.

Beneath the photo are a handprint and a footprint, too tiny to look real.

“Mrs. Baxter,” she says softly, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Why are you whispering?” I ask. “Why are you all whispering? Where the hell is my baby?”

As if I have summoned him, a second nurse enters, carrying my son. He is dressed now, in clothes that are swimming on him. I reach for him.

For a single day, I worked in an NICU unit. I was playing guitar with the preemies, and singing to them, as part of developmental care-babies who are exposed to music therapy show increased oxygen saturation and decreased heart rate, and some studies have even shown preemies doubling their daily weight gain when music therapy is part of their routine. I’d been working with one mother, singing a lullaby in Spanish to her baby, when a social worker came in and asked for my help.

“The Rodriguez baby died this morning,” she told me. “The family’s waiting for their favorite nurse to come in and do the last bath.”

“The last bath?”

“It helps, sometimes,” the social worker said. “The thing is, it’s a big family, and I think they could use a hand in there.”

When I walked into the private room where the family was waiting, I understood why. The mother was sitting in a rocking chair with the dead infant in her arms. Her face looked as if it had been carved from stone. The father was hovering behind her. There were aunts and uncles and grandparents milling in silence, a direct counterpoint to the nieces and nephews, who were shrieking and chasing each other around the hospital bed.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Zoe. Would it be all right if I played?” I gestured at the guitar hanging by its strap across my back.

When the mother didn’t answer, I knelt down in front of the chair. “Your daughter was beautiful,” I said.

She didn’t answer, nor did anyone else, so I pulled my guitar around and began to sing-the same Spanish lullaby I’d been singing minutes before:

Duérmete, mi niña

Duérmete, mi sol

Duérmete, pedazo

De mi corazón.

For a moment, the kids who were running in circles paused. The adults in the room stared at me. I became the focal point, the center of all their energy, instead of that poor infant. As soon as the nurse arrived and undressed the baby for its last bath, I slipped out of the room and went to the administrative offices of the hospital and quit.

I had played at the bedsides of children who were dying dozens of times; I had always considered it a privilege to swing them from this world into the next with a string of notes, a sweet refrain. But this had been different. I just couldn’t play Orpheus for a dead baby, not when Max and I were trying so hard to get pregnant.

My own son is cold to the touch. I lay him down between my legs on the hospital mattress and unsnap the blue pajamas in which some kind nurse has dressed him. I cover his torso with my hand, but there’s no heartbeat.

Duérmete, mi niño, I whisper.

“Would you like to keep him here for a while?” asks the nurse who was carrying him.

I look up at her. “I can do that?”

“You can keep him as long as you like,” she says. “Well…” She doesn’t finish the rest of the thought.

“Where does he stay?” I say.

“I beg your pardon?”

“When he’s not here. Where does he stay?” I look at the nurse. “In the morgue?”

“No. He stays with us.”

She’s lying to me. I know she’s lying. If he had been in a bassinet with the other babies, his skin wouldn’t have a chill to it, like an autumn morning. “I want to see.”

“I’m afraid we can’t-”

“Do it.” My mother’s voice crackles with authority. “If that’s what she needs to see, let her.”

The two nurses look at each other. Then one of them steps outside and brings in a wheelchair. They help me swing my legs off the bed and sit down. The whole time I am holding the baby.