Between Gods: A Memoir (29 page)

In the week after, he will replay my messages and cry.

Degan arrives home early. He tucks me in and phones our midwife, Hedrey. She tells us to come in to her office the next morning. We’ll see if we can still hear the baby’s heartbeat.

That night I have a fever, low at first but rising. I toss in my sweat-soaked sheets, holding my cramping stomach. I get up to pee and am not surprised to see I have started to bleed again. I fall back into a fitful sleep and wake up just twenty minutes before we’re due at the midwife’s. “Why did you let me sleep so late?” I snap, but I see from Degan’s face it was because he is worried about me; he wanted to let me rest as much as possible.

At the clinic, brimming with toddlers and breastfeeding pillows and women in overalls, Degan checks a book on morning sickness out of the lending library. It has a single, sad-looking soda cracker on the cover.

Maybe I just have really bad morning sickness.

Hedrey greets us with a sombre smile. I lie down in her examining room, decorated to resemble a bedroom with brightly patterned curtains and photos of newborn babies on the walls, so animal in their pink hairless helplessness. Sun slants hotly through the windows. I lift my shirt; Hedrey places her Doppler on my belly.

I wait for the sound of the heartbeat, but there’s nothing. Only the eerie
whoosh
of my own blood through my veins.

Hedrey averts her eyes, concentrating. She moves the instrument lower, just above my pubic bone, where my stomach, in the last week, has started to protrude. I can now actually feel the knot of a human there, inside me.

Still nothing from the Doppler. I crumple the edges of my skirt in my wet palms.

Then, suddenly, there it is. The galloping hoofbeats, fast and steady.
Da-dun, da-dun, da-dun
.

Hedrey beams. “Hello, baby!” And then: “The baby is fine!”

We’re all silent, listening to the heartbeat, relief washing over us. I look over at Degan, his blue eyes wide, full of tears.

The baby is fine. The baby is fine
. I repeat this to myself as Degan drives up Bathurst Street.
The baby is fine
. But such a high fever isn’t good for her. We need to try to bring my temperature down. Hedrey has instructed me to go see Dr. Singh.

Degan stops at a red light, and I call Mum on my cell and give her the update: “The baby is fine!”

But I’m still feeling awful.

I hang up the phone and a paroxysm of pain overwhelms me: jagged little claws grabbing at me from the inside. I hunch over in the passenger seat, my knees tucked up to my chest. A
sound escapes my lips, a sound I don’t at first recognize as coming from my own mouth. Degan reaches for me, holds my shoulder awkwardly with one arm while turning the car onto Eglinton with the other. The jabs are sharpening, converging. I cry out again and pull my knees in closer.

In the elevator on the way up to the doctor’s office, I double over involuntarily. The elevator door dings open and I run down the hall to the bathroom, my whole body clenching and squeezing. I throw myself into a stall and slam the door behind me.

When I pull down my pants, my underwear is soaked with blood. In the crotch, a cylinder of thick red jelly.

I crouch over the toilet. Cramps, then a river of shit, then more intense cramps. Not cramps.
Contractions
. My insides are falling out, big chunks of red splashing beneath me. I bend over with my head between my knees, sweat pouring off me, my body finishing its task of its own accord. I finally manage to stand, minutes or hours later, rising on wobbly legs as though I’ve just been born. The toilet bowl is full of blood, and feces, and something else, which my eyes flinch from. I force myself to look back. I
want
to see my baby, all thirteen weeks of her—her eyelids, her fingerprints, her ears. But from beneath me there’s a roar: the automatic toilet flushing.

My little baby. Oh! My little baby
.

Every bit of her gone, swallowed away.

four

A
GURNEY HAS APPEARED
, magically, in the hall outside the bathroom, accompanied by two ambulance attendants. All I’ve ever wanted is to lie down. The attendants insert an IV. I am wheeled into the elevator, then out onto the street, where I blink in the bright sun. Passersby turn their heads as I’m lifted into the ambulance. From somewhere far away, I hear Degan saying he’ll drive the car and meet me at the hospital. A siren starts up, announcing our procession. I’m a queen being carried through the streets on horseback. Traffic parts around us.

For the second time in a week, my ears are wet, filling up with tears.

At the hospital, morphine. Oxygen tubes in my nose. A male nurse with a ring through his eyebrow says, “You’ve lost a lot
of blood. Your blood pressure is still very low. Without that IV you would have needed a transfusion.”

“What IV?”

I look down at the line into my arm.

Through a thin curtain, a man’s gravelly voice: “I normally drink three bottles of wine a day. But I went cold turkey on Monday.”

His doctor asks, “Do you ever hear voices? On the TV, say, talking to you?”

A woman chimes in: “He’s paranoid about his bosses at work.”

To my right, another woman, who took all her husband’s heart medication. She keeps repeating, “It’s okay. It’s fine. You don’t need to help me. I don’t want to live.”

I’m moved to a different room. The nurse with the eyebrow ring appears again, asks, “How are you feeling?” I roll onto my side, wipe the tears from my cheeks.

“We need to know your blood type,” he says. “But your father gave us the rest of the info.”

“The info?”

“Your address and birthday. Those things.”

Should I correct him? “I think you mean my husband,” I say.

“No, I mean your father. He’s in the waiting room.”

“That’s my husband.”

“It’s your father,” he says.

“My father lives in another city.”

The nurse shrugs.

“How much morphine did you give me?” I ask.

The man in the waiting room is in fact my father. He came into Toronto for an errand earlier in the day. But bad news travels like dominoes falling, and now he’s here with me. Not an angel, not exactly. But close.

Dad smoothes the hair back from my forehead. “Hi, sweetie,” he says. I have a sudden visceral memory of the lily of the valley he would bring to my bedside when I was a girl, a small vase on my dresser. The lush, heady fragrance announcing itself in the long spring evenings:
Beauty is here. Beauty survives
.

Later—hours, or days: time has gone elastic—Degan appears with a wheelchair. He pushes me down into the basement of the hospital. We are shown into a dark room where an ultrasound technician is tutoring his trainee. He mumbles something; there’s a long silence, and I realize he’s talking to me.

“Pardon me?”

“Get on the table,” the technician says.

Degan corrects him under his breath: “Get on the table,
please
.”

He helps me up tenderly, as a mother might help her child. I arrange my hospital gown over my legs, but the technician yanks it back up. He squirts a glob of jelly on my stomach and moves the wand across my flesh. The screen appears grey, an undifferentiated stretch of snow. This time there is no blinking beacon.

I flush with the ignominy of what my body has done.

Degan’s eyebrows are up, though, and he’s smiling. “I think I
see
something,” he says.

I can hardly stand his hope. He has been waiting for this moment, for
his
first glimpse of our child, and now his heart
imagines what his mind knows isn’t there. Because, of course, this is not the ultrasound he’s been looking forward to. This is something different altogether.

A doctor arrives with the results. The fetus, the egg sac, all the “products of the pregnancy” are gone. We gather up my blood-soaked clothes in a plastic bag. I am given a skirt from the hospital’s lost-and-found, and a new shirt: some other woman’s clothes. Degan drives us home. Along Spadina, night has fallen swiftly. Street lights and pizza joints. Two of us, where this morning there were three.

I sleep the whole next day. When Degan gets home from work, he tidies the bedroom while I cook rice and cut vegetables. There is a mushroom that has a smaller mushroom fused into its side. I chop the mother and baby apart without mercy. Tears in my eyes while I stir-fry.

Friday morning we make raspberry smoothies, and French toast with last week’s leftover challah. I move around the kitchen, my head in and out of the fridge, with no nausea whatsoever. After having sworn I would never again
—never again—
drink coffee, I brew a pot and guzzle it with relish. The pregnancy hormones are draining out of me like liquid through a sieve, my body giving up the task it has been performing so diligently for the past thirteen weeks.

I go into the bathroom and find Degan staring at himself in the mirror.

“What are you thinking?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

“No, really.”

“Can I see the ultrasound photo?”

I go into the bedroom and pull it out of its thin envelope. Degan cradles it, slight as a moth’s wing, in his palm. We peer at the charcoal smudge against the field of darker grey. Who was she? Who would she have become? Someone. A person. We’ll never know.

In the evening we bring candles into the bedroom and lie together in the low flicker. When it’s time to go to sleep, Degan wants to blow them out. He’s nothing if not aware of a fire hazard. But I see him linger a little longer over the third light, for our lost child, before snuffing it out.

He eventually falls asleep, but I’m awake and alert, a hole in my chest the wind is whistling through.

I understand for the first time—really understand—the thin membrane between death and life. Everyone will die.
Everyone
I love. It’s banal, and obvious, and earth-shattering.

I push back the covers and pad through the dark apartment. A sliver of moon just visible through the kitchen window. The quiet hum of the dishwasher finishing its work. In my study, I reach for the ultrasound picture; it is not on the table where we left it. I look beneath papers, between pages of books. When I still can’t find it, I panic, ripping through drawers and turning out pockets. If I can’t see the photo, I will die.

It’s there, all at once, in full view on my desk. I cry with relief and despair. The little grey blur. The inkling. All I’ll ever know of my daughter.

On Saturday morning Shayna picks me up early, takes me to a Shabbat service held in someone’s home. There are maybe twenty others, mostly strangers to me. We chant single lines of liturgy, weaving them through the morning like strands of golden thread. The last chant is from the Song of Songs:
zeh dodi
v’zeh rayee
—“this is my beloved; this is my friend.” As we sing, we circle around each other, looking each other in the eye. Seeing, being seen. Such raw power.

After, the leader asks, “Does anyone need to say Kaddish?” Kaddish is recited when someone has died, and therefore, by The Mourner’s definition, been alive. So my baby doesn’t count.

The circle is quiet. Shayna reaches for my hand; I hold tight to her thin fingers. The leader looks around at us all, his eyes falling for a long moment on me. “I’ll say it for us all,” he decides. And he begins: “Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name …”

five

R
OSH
H
ASHANAH ARRIVES
without fanfare. It’s Jewish custom to dunk apples in honey and make wishes for the New Year. Degan and I wish for world peace, for Obama to win.

“I wish to have our baby back,” I say.

Degan squeezes my hands. “I wish, God,” he says, “for you to accompany our baby wherever it will be.”

But where
will
it be? Who will take care of it after the warmth of my womb? I think of my little dreamer with the big fish eyes. If there is a heaven—which I don’t think there is—but
if
there is one, my baby is in the same place as Vera’s lost daughter, little Eva. With Gumper, and Granny’s parents. With Granny herself.

Maybe my great-grandmother Marianne is taking care of our child. Draping a wing over her little shoulder.

My heart hurts as I look at the little bowl of honey I’ve set
out, the apple pieces slowly going brown. I picture small hands dipping and young voices laughing, the silly wishes a young child would make. I picture Eva, with her halo of wild curls.

I’m grateful, though, that we have somewhere to go for the first night of the holiday. Last year at this time I did not know the meaning of Rosh Hashanah, let alone have anyone to celebrate with. This year, Aaron and Sylvie’s invitation was so warm that in a fit of boldness, I have asked whether my parents could join us, as well.

“Do we dress up?” Mum emails to ask.

I don’t really know.

“I’ll wear a jacket,” Dad says.

“I guess it’s like Christmas dinner,” I say.