Holding Silvan (20 page)

“Would you like to see the baby we lost?” I ask, holding out a picture of Silvan.

“No,” he says loudly, flinging up his arms. But it's too late, there he is, Silvan, angelic in the sunlight, and the doctor sees him, sidelong; then he turns a portrait on his desk so we can see his daughter. He smiles.

So I ask him. “What do you think our chances are?”

The smiles goes away. He looks grim. “I can't promise anything.”

I am stunned. I'm not asking for a
promise
. I'm not asking for empty hope. Even I know, since I've already carried a healthy baby to term, that I have a chance. I want that chance, that basis for hope, broken down statistically. I get a second referral. This doctor is known nationally for his work in both hematology and obstetrics. I say to him, “I've never had a blood clot, nor have either of my parents. My mother carried three children to term. I carried Silvan to term. Where's the proof that this condition is a problem for me?” I'm thinking of the family tree hanging outside my grandfather's nursing home room in Bromley, Kent, a tree that goes back hundreds of years and wondering how many of those women lost babies. I'm also thinking of the bird couple David and I saw, trilling and hopping before the body of their dead fledgling as though grieving. I'm thinking
of my friend who said she admired birds who abandon fledglings for the sake of their species. I feel strangely liberated from myself; I feel like an animal determined to reproduce.

And to my surprise, the doctor smiles. He says, “So far, we have only been able to study women who are symptomatic.” In fact, what happened to Silvan probably has nothing to do with my “condition,” he says. What happened to Silvan remains a mystery, just something that happens in labor sometimes. He asks only that I consider, if I don't want to be on blood thinners all through my next pregnancy, to give myself subcutaneous shots for six weeks after the baby is born since this is a peak time for clotting. In this way, he gives his blessing to go ahead and try. “Because you're right, of course. We have no idea how many women like you there are out there.”

On the way home, David tells me he is definitely ready to try again. He believes we will be able to have more children. But after my heady moment in the doctor's office, the reality of pregnancy overwhelms me. I say, “I'm not sure I can handle being pregnant.” Suddenly, the weight and anxiety of nurturing a baby inside of me, of being the only one who can keep it alive, of facing the possibility of another death seems too much again. “But you won't even know at first that you're pregnant,” David says; and I say, “But I will.” And then, in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of five lanes of traffic, the strength returns. Babies die, I think. Mothers die. These things
still happen
and women
like me
still go ahead and try.

WE TRY IN AUGUST; AND WITHIN DAYS I FEEL MY NIPPLES tingle in the shower. I know I should be grateful, but within the first flush of pregnancy, there is bitterness. Silvan has only been gone since June. Back in April, I was still pregnant with him. With only four months between pregnancies, I feel like a mother whale who must gestate for eighteen months just to produce one child. I feel disloyal to both babies. My morning sickness extends for months beyond what's considered normal. My back is already giving out as if I've never stopped carrying a baby. In the classroom teaching writing once more, I feel like a fraud; whenever I try to write a word beyond my diary, my mind goes blank. I find half my students know what happened, half don't. Those who don't must think I 'm strangely reticent about what's obviously happening inside my body. I feel as if a nail is being driven into the top of my head.

That fall, I endure various tests to determine if the baby is developing fine. That fall, crows also move into the neighborhood, fat ominous crows. If one flies over my head alone, I am all right. One seems a symbol of Silvan. But if two fly overhead, I worry that this means two babies will die, Silvan and another. If three, I think perhaps David and I will have one more, to make us a family of three. Or perhaps three babies will die. I take almost as much stock in superstition as in tests.

At the drugstore, a week before the amniocentesis, a clerk asks the sex of the baby, and when I say I don't yet know, she
tells me to visualize whatever sex I want. “It worked for my sister,” she says, “three times.” Back home, I rant against the clerk and her arrogant assumption of power over the randomness of nature, and David teases me. “You should have told her you used to picture giving birth without actually having to raise the baby and how that worked, too.” How I love the darkness of his humor.

From the amnio, we learn the baby is a boy. That is a relief, that I'm carrying something familiar. At the gym, a woman rushes up and puts her hands on my belly. “Don't I sometimes wish my children were still inside. They're so much less work there.” I glare at her, scarcely able to contain myself from telling her how much work it is to carry a baby you fear may not survive.

A neighbor overflows with empathy. “I've been thinking,” she says, “of you back at the gym, going to your dance class. That must be hard, going back to a place where everyone watches each others' bodies, where everyone must think you already have a baby at home.”

How grateful I am to anyone who knows, to anyone who understands.

Right after Silvan died, I sent a friend ahead to show a picture of me and Silvan to my dance teacher, so she would know. I hadn't wanted her to rush over to congratulate me before class. Instead, she'd hugged me long and hard after class, our bodies touching in the space where I had danced Silvan as a fetus around the room, even in my final week, the two of us born aloft on my certain hope.

As I get bigger this time, I still dance. I dance my grief, my fear through my body and I avoid the eager eyes of strangers. No public revelry over my fecund dancing for me this time, thank you. “Your first?” strangers inevitably ask. I stumble over the answer. “Not exactly,” or “Kind of,” I say, allowing them to fill in the mystery however they like. I am still grieving; I am not yet rejoicing. How hard it is to prepare for both everything and nothing to change. I refuse to say when I expect my baby to be born without adding humbly, “I hope.”

 

TWICE A WEEK starting in the third trimester, I drive to the hospital to lie on a bed with a monitor strapped to me, listening to the heartbeat, because my doctor wants to make sure this new baby doesn't die inside. Though I feel confident, I know he could die. The nurses are also confident, and they also know he could die. On the other side of the country, Eve is also pregnant with her second; she wants her midwife to tell the truth about labor this time, that sometimes even healthy babies die in labor and the midwife admits, “It's true. It can happen to anyone; it has even happened to babies I have delivered.” I lie on the bed strapped to the monitor, counting his kicks, waiting for the nurses to say everything is fine.

This time my obstetrician makes a commitment to me. No matter what, she will be the one to deliver this baby. To ensure this, her family bends their vacation schedules to the softening of my cervix, to the descent of my baby. She waits until she thinks my body is ready, and then she breaks my water because she wants the labor to begin in the hospital where she can monitor it. She is right about my body being ready. Within a minute, the pains start, as they did with Silvan, and my labor progresses naturally once more. I've made a note for my chart that I plan to labor without drugs, but that I'm also ready for any intervention to save this baby.

The nurses who surround me are handpicked by my doctor and they are soothing and efficient. This time, I wear a wireless fetal monitor that is much in demand by other patients because it's portable. With the portable monitor, I can wander the halls while the nurses continue hearing the baby's heartbeat. My doctor wants me monitored for every second of the labor, but she doesn't want me to feel burdened by my monitor. She doesn't want me to keep asking to take it off the way I did with Silvan.

My new doula is everything she should be, attentive, patient and calm. A help to the nurses but not a replacement for them. She has been a doula for thirty years and has seen babies die, has seen mothers go ahead and give birth again. This is why we have
picked her. Because she can deal. She can even adjust the belt of the monitor in a way that hardly bothers me. We have made her promise not to suggest a shower. There is still no explanation for what happened to Silvan, but it's enough that I am here in the same hospital without having to step into the same shower. So she never suggests a shower, she rubs my legs for hours, she marvels that I can labor without drugs while preserving my sense of humor. We laugh and everything seems manageable and fine until my doctor walks in and notices the heartbeat.

It is half the speed it should be.

How long has this been happening? Who has failed to notice?

They all go into action, the nurses adjusting my body, preparing equipment, my doctor reaching inside me to screw a different monitor to the baby's head…and then there is a new sound, higher, faster.

“Is that him?” I ask.

No one hears me. They are busying themselves with more instruments.

“Is he damaged?” I ask again. “Is that him?”

Finally, my doctor hears. She says, “Yes, that's him. He sounds fine. He's just too far down the birth canal for the other monitor to work. We were hearing your heart instead, but you need to push now.”

“Okay,” I say as if this is simple; and I push.

“Now wait,” she says. She unwinds the cord that happens to be around his neck. “Now push,” she says and I push and David catches the baby, cuts the cord, and lays him on my chest. I'm watching myself from a distance, as if this baby lying on my chest is miles away. “Terminal meconium,” I hear the doctor reporting to the nurse. Seeing my face, my doctor says, “By ‘terminal' I mean ‘at the end,' I mean the kind that's okay because it only happened at the very end of his birth. I mean, he's fine.”

I lie there, baby on my chest, waiting to see if I can love him.
THE BABY IS asleep in his bassinet in the living room. We have not named him yet. We can't name him yet. We don't know who he is or how long he will be here.

I sit on the toilet and weep: I want Silvan back.

That's the first week after birth.

 

THEN AGAIN, THERE is his first bath. We fill the tub in the sink, he squirms and turns pink, and when we get him out and dry him, he moves his eyes from side to side, alert and eager and exquisite, and then he sneezes. David catches the sneeze on video, and we watch the video over and over. “He's so cute,” I say every time.

 

WE TAKE A week to do it, but at last we name him Miles in public acknowledgement of Miles Davis and in private memory of my brother Mark.

 

WHEN MILES IS one month old, my mother retires, my sister returns from Brazil for good, and my brother Kim gets married. I wear my orange silk wedding shawl and hide Miles under it to nurse during the special ceremony Kim's wife has secretly prepared as part of the reception. Having changed from her white wedding dress, Gretel dresses as a Korean bride and comes to serve us tea in a ceremony that signifies the joining of our families. How random, how agonizingly beautiful is the making of families, Kim's birth mother giving him up, Silvan dying, Kim becoming ours, Miles arriving, Gretel joining us to her family. Even David's family is represented at the wedding. His mother has just returned to New Jersey after a visit, but his father and stepmother are there, his sister and her boyfriend. There are pictures of us all on the dance floor, expanding.

 

THREE MONTHS LATER, once I've stopped giving myself subcutaneous shots against blood clotting and it seems both Miles and I are really here to stay, Eve flies out with her husband and two daughters to go camping with us. We have a briefcase-sized bed
for Miles that we lay between our sleeping bags, but we are unprepared for a night in the Sierra. Each time I touch Miles, his nose and hands seem cooler. I already have him in three layers of clothes and under two blankets and then I add my down vest as a blanket. This is exactly what you are told not to do, I think, bury him in blankets. Though I am trying to become an ordinary parent who can go camping easily with her child, I decide I must just stay up to watch him breathe in the moonlight. To make sure he doesn't stop. But then I drift off, and when I next wake, I reach out to touch him. His hand is frozen stiff.

“Miles,” I shout into the night.

He stirs.

Three times that night, I wake and shake him.

“Leave him alone,” David finally counsels.

At dawn, I awaken again, disbelieving that Miles can still be asleep, that he will ever be awake again. I am heaved up onto my elbow, watching his face, when the sun rises over the hills. It pierces the canopy of live oak leaves overhead and filters softly down onto his face. His eyes spring open. He stares up at the leaves. I see their lacey patterns on his eyes. He beams. I sit up to nurse him and listen to the brook murmuring past. I feel both Miles' warm weight in my arms and the absence of Silvan, amazed I can feel both extremes at once.

 

“THERE'S NOTHING LIKE the joy of parents,” our hospice social worker says back in Berkeley, “at the birth of a subsequent child.” Having exceeded her limit of one year, she comes a final time just to bring a gift for Miles.

How moved I am to know that Miles is as special as Silvan.

In fact, as if the world knows of our grief and how special Miles is because of it, stranger after stranger comes up to us. Even in front of other women's babies, they say crazy, exuberant things: “I'm not a baby person usually, but your child is perfect…” or “Your baby seems unusually wise …” or “always cheerful” or “Here's the card for my talent agent.” It's as if Miles is a reflection,
a distillation of our joy. Or perhaps he's got charisma in his own right. It certainly seems that way.