Of course it all felt like an emergency to us, something to be taken care of immediately. Who would make a woman spend one more moment on this earth than is necessary with a dead child in her body? I thought I’d be induced instantly, I would deliver instantly, and then we could talk about leaving.
No. They would give me some medication to soften my cervix. The next day nothing would happen other than some blood tests to see if they could find an explanation. It’s very important, the doctor on the ward explained. The day after that, they would induce, and le travail would commence when it commenced. We could only hope for the best.
The hospital room was no more picturesque for being French. They had found a folding cot for Edward, a miserable mid-1980s-ish polyester-sheeted appliance that meant he could sleep next to me, though at a considerable drop from the high hospital bed. There’s a peculiar kind of loneliness, sleeping in a room near but not next to the person whose body you most require. He felt too far away. I’d wanted to trail my foot off the bed, dip it into his. Whenever I got up in the night to go to the bathroom — because there was still a weight pressing down on my bladder, the same as there had been the night before (before the baby had died) — Edward woke up at the slightest rustling of the sheets and took me there.
In the morning he folded the bed back up, and we asked the midwife if we could leave and go into Bordeaux. The morning’s blood had already been taken. They had no more plans for me that day. She spoke to the doctor, and we were given a two-hour pass, as though I were a patient on a mental ward.
We left the car where it was and took the streetcar downtown and found one of Bordeaux’s hidden backstreet plazas. As we turned the corner, a black cat suddenly ran in front of us.
“You’re too late, mate,” Edward told it.
We bought a pack of cigarettes without discussing it and sat down at a café, and I ordered an enormous glass of strong beer and lit up. We were in France. In the United States a heavily pregnant woman would be lynched for less, but here nobody seemed to notice.
The weather was horribly good.
That morning at 6:00 French time I had finally gotten hold of my parents. That is, my mother had answered the phone and I’d told her. It was not quite midnight in America. It was still the day before. Dark there, dawn in Bordeaux. My parents had been out at a party. I pictured my mother sitting on the edge of their bed. “Here,” she said, “your father’s just coming in, do you want — ” Then she said in a certain voice, almost to herself, “I’ll tell him.” I was absurdly grateful that she’d made the decision for me. I could bear almost anything but breaking the news and wanted to do it as few times as possible.
(This is still true. There are friends, not close ones of course, who knew I was pregnant but did not hear what happened, and when they’ve written and said, “How’s motherhood? Your son must be a year old by now!” I have simply never answered.)
At the café I called my parents again. My father answered, and when he heard my voice he said, “Oh, my darling, what can I say but that I love you with all of my heart.”
I called my friend Ann. I could hear her excitement at my voice — she’d been waiting for her happy phone call — and I told her my news and said that I needed a favor. Anything, she said, getting ahold of her tears. The sun at the café was quite bright.
I asked her to phone my friend Wendy and to split the calls to my other friends between them. I read aloud telephone numbers.
Why am I finding this harder to write about than anything?
There was no oxygen in the little plaza in Bordeaux. Edward and I both felt it. I could not look people in the eye, lest they smile and ask me about my baby.
“This was a mistake,” said Edward. “We don’t belong here.”
Meaning, Out in the world. We’d escaped, but where could we go, with me in my condition?
Time had bent again. Time had developed a serious kink. Our old life — the one where we planned our existence around the son we were expecting — had ended, but our new life — the one where we tried to figure out how to live without him — couldn’t start yet. We were stuck in a chronological bubble.
He was there, after all, still. He rode with us on the streetcar. He sat at the café table with us. He appeared in the shop windows we passed, though I didn’t look to the side to see. We just pretended that he didn’t.
Here’s my question: was I pregnant then?
I was in the shape of a pregnant woman. I’m sure I walked like one, though my arms floated away from the fact of my stomach (no rubbing, no resting, no thoughtless, fond tapping). Really, what was I? Was I pregnant? There should be a different word for it, for someone who hasn’t yet delivered a dead child. Maybe there is and I don’t know it, but I’m not about to ask.
My child had died. The next day I would see him for the first time. But until then, what was I? A figure common in old paintings and poetry. The bereaved carrying the remains of my beloved dead. Not out of bravery. Not out of devotion. Not out of hope that God had gotten it wrong and would change His mind.
Because I had to.
We went back to the hospital, where we could smoke on the park benches outside the building like the mental patients we were. Hard cases, not to be trusted with privileges.
A year later, when we spoke of the anniversary of Pudding’s death, it was hard to know how to measure it. It felt like something biblical, though not out of the Testament I know anything about. He died, and then two days later he was born. Where was he in the meantime?
Since he died, I’ve never had a dream of him alive.
In the morning the ward midwife came to get us. We’d been awake for hours. I went down the hall first, to the showers, five tiny cabins on a narrow corridor. I barely fit. It was the first shower I’d taken since Pudding had died. I soaped myself without looking, dried myself with the sad French institutional towel, and put on the hospital gown.
What is there to say of the labor, the delivery? The midwives, one in her thirties and one in her early twenties, were sweet and attentive. The oddball anesthesiologist came back and gave a long lecture in English about epidurals, how they blocked both pain and the ability to sense temperature. He tested his work by running an ice cube down my leg. This epidural, he said, taking a seat next to my bed and crossing his legs in a jaunty manner, was self-administered. I would have a button to press for more relief. It still might run out, and I should say if it did. It did run out. They fed more medication into the machine, which fed into me. In that dry patch of no pain relief, I twisted Edward’s hand and said in a panicked voice, “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this!” but I gather plenty of women in labor say the same thing.
Edward and I had discussed it: I told him to leave the room for the actual delivery. It was a horrible thing to go through, and I wanted to spare him. That is, the watching seemed horrible to me. The delivery did not seem nearly so bad. Really, it felt like the last thing I could do for Pudding.
Edward had shouldered a great deal in the past few days, he had pushed his enormous pain aside to tend to me, and this seemed like one piece of pain I could keep him from. Pudding’s death was something the two of us went through together. The delivery wasn’t, couldn’t be. In the end, it didn’t even seem like something I went through. Those midwives in their French politeness called me Mrs. Harvey, Madame Harvey. They addressed me in the formal manner: Poussez, Madame Harvey, très bien, Madame Harvey, and that’s who it was happening to, someone else, someone differently named, worthy of respect. The epidural did its job and I felt nothing and in the end it wasn’t something Edward and I went through together and it wasn’t something that I went through by myself. It was something that Pudding had to go through. We three women in the room did our best to help him but in the end he was alone.