The little midwife asked if I wanted a tranquilizer. Yes, please. He went running out of the room. We never saw him again.
A while later Sylvie, the delivering midwife, appeared in the room, and said —
Edward and I disagree about what she said. In a little while she would do something we couldn’t forgive her for, but at that moment I still loved her. Even now, I don’t hate her with the hot passion that Edward does, though I don’t remember her with fondness. At any rate: I might in my confusion and sorrow have misheard her; Edward, in his sorrow and anger, might misremember. Everything, of course, is shrouded by our lack of fluency, since she spoke only French.
I thought she said, Elizabeth, what has happened to your baby?
Edward remembers, Elizabeth, what have you done to your baby?
I burst into tears.
You may add that detail into the description of the next five days approximately every four sentences. I burst into tears. I got up. I pulled on my robe. I began to feel around in the dark. What do you need, what can I do? Edward asked me. I burst into tears.
Et cetera.
She hugged me as I cried, and whatever the question was, she asked again, and I loved her. It was so early on, but here was another angle on my grief, and I was glad to get it. She had known Pudding in her way. She had listened to his heartbeat and pronounced it excellent; she had mapped its accelerations and decelerations. Now she said my name over and over, in the French way, Eeliza-bett, Eeliza-bett, and she seemed to understand that her hugging me made me cry harder, and that making me cry harder was something I’d be grateful for. The little male midwife had disappeared; the stern sonographer was back investigating the pregnancies of the lucky. Sylvie was here. She would help us get through all the very terrible things that came next.
Let’s go get some air, she said, and we went outside.
The hospital we were at was small, one floor, with the aforementioned lilacs. It was decided that we would go to a different, larger hospital for le travail. Sylvie called the doctor who’d administered the sonogram the week before, and he drove over. Five days ago he’d spoken only a little English; suddenly, standing in the parking lot, he seemed fluent, sad but professional. We stood among the cars. He and Sylvie spoke in French and shrugged.
“You must see the baby,” he advised us. It was the only medical advice he had left to give. “After he’s born. You must see so you can understand, This is my baby, he is not a monster. This is very important.”
We nodded. So did Sylvie. She said, “Très important. You muss.”
“Yes,” I said.
I didn’t want to see the baby.
This was garden-variety fear, though I didn’t understand that then. All I wanted was to be on the other side of what was about to happen. Not just on the other side of the next few days, the hospital stay, the terror of the delivery (a parody of the childbirth we’d been planning for and anxious about), calling people (another parody of something we were supposed to do; I was waiting until both of my parents would be home to call with the terrible news), getting the hell out of France. The movers were due to pick up our things and take them to England, and if I could have had any wish granted at that moment — besides the obvious, of course, that the sonograph was wrong, the pregnancy was as uncomplicated as it had seemed to be all along, Pudding was alive and would be born and squalling and confounding us within hours — it would have been to be put under anesthesia, the delivery to be done with. Then the movers could pack me in a crate and send me to England. Maybe by September it would be safe to take the crowbar to the wood and part the excelsior and let me back into the world.
Instead, we got in our car and followed Sylvie to the next place.
The new hospital was a grim collection of urban buildings set about with construction cranes. It was the main hospital in Bordeaux, and the construction made it difficult to find our way into the building. We went to an admitting room. I sat on a table. We met a sympathetic young doctor, and then a strange young anesthesiologist who spoke very good English and seemed delighted to practice it despite the circumstances. I would take the epidural after all. A nurse came around with a clipboard, and we ran into the usual confusion over names. McCracken struck most French medical professionals as unthinkable — so many unwieldy consonants! — and besides, I was married, I said I was married, here was my husband, what was his name?
The nurse said, From now on, here, you are Mrs. Harvey.
I saw on my records a note from the morning, handwritten by Claudelle. It said that I was très inquiète, very worried, as though this were a medical diagnosis.
Sylvie came into the room, her cell phone ringing in her hand. She answered it.
“Ah, Claudelle,” she said. “Le bébé est décédé. Oui. Oui. Le bébé est décédé.”
Then she turned to me and said, It’s Claudelle. You must talk to her.
I was in patient mode and nodded, though I was starting to realize something. I was done with Claudelle. Time on this planet actually ran in only one direction. No matter what, I could not travel backwards to a living baby and an ordinary birth, and I did not want to turn my head a fraction in the direction of the past. Not a second, not for anything. I was done with Claudelle, I was done with the Bordelaise roads I’d driven from the first hospital to this one. I did not want to retrace a thing.
This was a conversion moment for me. Twelve hours before, I’d barely believed in the future. I know that sounds crazy, especially for a pregnant woman. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it existed. At the same time, the flat-earth part of my personality wanted to ask, Where’s the proof? Of course the future kept arriving, of course it did, it arrived second by second, an assembly line of itself. But what I really believed in was the past, which is proven everywhere, and accessible: I’m a librarian, and I could show you where to look. The past is located in microfilm and bound volumes of magazines, in movies, memoirs, ephemera, granite, fluoroscopes in shoe stores; the career of Mamie Van Doren; the never mentioned first marriage and subsequent divorce of my cousin Elizabeth; speeding tickets; the daughters of Akhenaton; the invention of Silly Putty; trilobites. But the future? Let it come, let it age, let it be recorded, I’ll get around to the future eventually.
That’s what I thought until Pudding died, and then, at least for a while, I was like a sinner trembling on the edge of faith, demanding of the future: come, prove yourself, and I will renounce the past and everything I believe in.
In the exam room I did not yet have the courage of my convictions. I took the phone from Sylvie.
“Elizabeth, I am so sorry,” Claudelle said. “Oh. I am so sorry. Please know my heart is with you.”
“Yes,” I said. “OK. Thank you.”
Later I would wonder why Sylvie had made me talk to her. She did it with a kind of medical authority, and I dumbly accepted, thinking that she knew what I needed.
I don’t think it did me a bit of good.
Edward and I clung to each other in the hallway of the Tripod Hospital, waiting for someone to take us to a room upstairs on the ward. The staff would see if they could find a cot for Edward. Otherwise he’d go to a hotel. A midwife passed by, a woman in her early fifties with short hair and a slightly daffy demeanor. She said, in French, Why do you look so sad? You’re going to have a baby!
“Le bébé est décédé,” Edward answered.
There’s a certain French — gesture? moue? — that is ubiquitous and hard to translate. In answer to a question or piece of information, the French person fills his or her mouth with air and then puffs it out, eyebrows raised. It means, It is difficult to say, and it can be the answer to, How do you drive to Lyon? or Do you have this in my size? or, it turns out, The baby is dead.