Holding Silvan (3 page)

Beside me, David seems suddenly unable to sit still. He scratches his neck, his shin, he frowns, he sighs. I touch his arm: “Do you need this meeting to be over?” Though I want to press on, though I want to ply them with questions and force them in this way to tell me more than anyone can ever know about the future, though I'd rather keep pushing forward intellectually than let emotion overwhelm me, David says, “We need to be alone right now.” He is about to explode with tears.

They are instantly on their feet and filing swiftly out. Their relief at having fulfilled this part of their job is palpable.

As soon as we are alone, we hug. We sob.

“Promise me, whatever happens, this won't ruin our marriage,” I say, pulling away from him; and at the same time, David says, “Let's try to have another child someday, okay?” These seem like loving words; but as I record them here, I grow uncomfortable wondering if there is love enough in them for Silvan.

ONE AFTERNOON AROUND THE TIME DAVID AND I DECIDED we were ready for children, we went for a hike in the redwoods. We'd taken our time coming to this decision. In fact, it had been my doctor who tipped the balance, bringing out statistics and showing me that if I didn't choose one way or other soon, nature would choose for me. I was already thirty-six and had been with David for nine years, married to him for two. And so we decided to try; and that afternoon after sex, we went for a hike. It was a hot, sunny day and the cool, sweet-smelling woods matched the afterglow of sex so that, as we hiked, our coupling seemed to extend and fill the day. Yellow sunlight fingered the red trunks of the trees and the spongy, decaying forest floor. We didn't expect to get pregnant, but we were ready to be pregnant when it happened.

“We should remember this day,” I called to David further up the trail, “in case the day we actually conceive is less lovely.” After all, we knew many couples who'd worked hard to have children. We were hiking uphill, panting with the effort. A plane passed overhead, birds rustled in the undergrowth. Now we descended, the fecund silence deepening as our breathing slowed.

“We could,” David said with bemused affection.

A month later, we conceived Silvan, though I do not know exactly when. Those days have been lost in ordinary repetition. What I remember instead is sunshine filtering through trees and
catching on a cloud of gnats, on swirling wood dust, the air always glittering a few steps ahead.

 

LONG BEFORE THAT sunny day in the woods with David, I used to tell myself another story, a story about the boy I 'd someday marry. I spotted him – this future husband of mine – for the first time when I was twelve and on a pilgrimage to Lourdes that my family undertook one summer as a daytrip while we were already in France visiting my mother's relatives. The day was golden hot and a scruffy, pale boy with straight, tawny hair stood at a fountain drinking. “Drink,” his parents said each time he stopped. When they heard us speaking English, they turned and asked, “Do you have aspirin? He has a headache.” Never having known a child to suffer a headache before, I studied him with curiosity, his pale strained face, his flat hair. But we didn't carry aspirin and as we walked away, my mother said softly, “I didn't know children suffered headaches.” She said it as if in disbelief or awe.

We were headed to the grotto, that circle of rock where the Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Bernadette. Though my parents were liberal intellectuals who would've traveled farther for a good museum, they were also solid Catholics who believed in saints and miracles. As I stood looking up at the rows of crutches from cripples who'd been miraculously healed at Lourdes, I told myself not to forget the tawny-headed boy. Someday he might become my husband. It wasn't that he was cute, or funny, or interesting. I was drawn to him solely because of his suffering.

Back home, I kept watch for future husbands. These were never boys I found attractive, only needy in some way. Loneliness especially moved me, including the loneliness of dolls left at home while I was off at school, or flies trapped on windowsills. There was one fly I kept company in the bathroom all afternoon until my mother rushed in – the wooden soles of her sandals clacking on the tiles – and swatted it. There my friend lay, six black legs up in the air, while I cried over it. “But you didn't tell
me he was your friend!” my mother said before rushing off to tend to other children.

My mother had four of us to tend to, not counting the occasional foster child; I was the oldest, followed by Mark, Katya, and Kim. Though my parents had traveled far to meet each other – my father, orphaned by high school, had escaped his factory job in Wisconsin for a Ph.D. in physics; my mother, a child of the blitzkrieg of London, had escaped for her own Ph.D. in the States – in Berkeley they were determined to raise a family as Catholic as their own. In such a family, sainthood seemed a worthy occupation and so I continued to aspire to it, lying in bed, both longing for and dreading the moment when God would appear across the yellow shag of my bedroom rug. Perhaps He would ask for something so big I couldn't handle it, like lead an army, or something so small I couldn't bear it. I feared, for example, the life of Saint Monica. My mother said she was a lovely saint to have been named after, but hers sounded like no life to me. She spent it praying for the soul of her son.

While waiting for divine directive, I also practiced “good” deeds. These deeds made other people's suffering bearable to me. One day I arranged a race for a boy named Leo. Leo was two years younger than me, a boy in Mark's class. Leo was too chubby to play easily with the other kids and at recess often stood at the edges of games watching, while I sat farther out watching him watching. I assumed he was lonely; I assumed that winning a race would bring him friends. In this race, I arranged for Mark to pretend to trip so that Leo could win. Mark must have had the same deluded sense of pity as I did, a child's pity not yet developed into true compassion. The day of the race came. Though a crowd gathered when Mark fell, though I kept yelling, “Run, Leo, run,” thinking his victory would be all the more satisfying for having an audience, Leo only looked confused, then went back to help Mark up. And when I crowed, “You won, you won!” anyway he did not break into a smile. He went back to his
own life and I went back to mine, each of us learning to manage on our own.

When David and I first met in Berkeley, I'd long since given up my vision of marrying to assuage someone else's loneliness. And David clearly was not my tawny-haired youth at the fountain. No, David was Jewish, darkly handsome, and he'd never been to Lourdes. Not only that, he wasn't a tortured artist either, the mate I'd since imagined for myself. Instead, he was my competent superior at work; and at twenty-four, he seemed as burdened with a sense of responsibility as a middle-aged man. David for his part had always pictured a woman with a solid job. Instead, I was a twenty-eight-year-old temporary worker and aspiring writer who'd just moved back in with her parents to save money. In other words, David was as unlike all the pale, wounded, wild men I'd loved before as I was unlike all the well-groomed, well-padded women he'd dated before, and neither of us expected much from that first date.

There he stood on my parents' front porch, too eager to please, too cautious about standing out; even his curly hair was combed flat the way he'd done it throughout his New Jersey adolescence; in contrast, I wore a fluorescent paisley headscarf cut from the hem of a floor-length skirt my mother had worn during my Berkeley childhood. That scarf was so bright you could direct traffic with it and my wild hair stood up in a halo around it. After taking in my stoplight head, David came inside the house where my father was sitting in the living room. David tried to bullshit my father by pretending to know more about the writer in the movie we were going to see than he really did. He flubbed it by suggesting that my father must know the work of this writer himself, but my father said he didn't and asked David to tell him more, which David couldn't. I was embarrassed. I'd been raised to believe that the only way to learn was to admit what one doesn't know. Honesty as the path to truth.

My father was already ill by then, but he'd hauled himself up from his armchair to meet the young man taking me out on a
date, and once it became clear that David was going in circles just to please him, my father sat back down heavily, told us to have a good time, and went back to staring out the window.

After the movie, I continued to be frustrated. I wanted to talk deeply about the movie and David wanted to show me the first place he'd worked on campus. So why was I falling in love? For I was falling in love. The story of our union as we tell it is one of feeling absolutely comfortable. As if we'd known each other for a long time. As we walked around town together, though I could not get him to talk about movies and books and art the way I wanted, I could get him to talk about things that mattered on a deeper level. Though he had bullshitted my father about what facts he knew, he was absolutely honest about his feelings. There was a comfortable familiarity and safety in his honesty. For example, when pressed he said he didn't find my headscarf flattering.

We also got into a conversation about God, whom David didn't believe in. Never had. He'd never believed in fairies, either, or in the lives of his sister's dolls. When I tried to explain how I'd come to understand God over time – my sense that matter is all connected, that there is more in our brains than we can understand, that we need to be humble in the face of this mystery – he said, “Why call that God?”

I thought perhaps we could agree on that point, but then he went on to say that he thought someday we might understand it all, that science was constantly advancing. I wasn't so sure about that. I've never understood the word progress except to mean an apparent forward motion in time. “How can you be so arrogant about being human?” I said.

“No, it's the reverse,” he said. “When something bad happens, I don't see the point in blaming a god. But when something good happens, I do look around in gratitude, wanting to thank someone other than myself.”

With the glib naïveté of youth, I told him I wouldn't want to raise a child but that I'd find giving birth an interesting
experience to have as a writer, and though David didn't understand giving birth except to have a child, he did say that were we to have children and not just give birth to them, he'd want to raise them Jewish, and I said that was okay. We were speaking theoretically. We had time to change our minds. Anyway, I wasn't a practicing Catholic anymore whereas – as David explained it – one can be raised Jewish and atheist because being Jewish is more about culture than religion.

But there was a complicating factor in all of this and if I go right back to the moment when he asked me out for that first date, I can see where I fell for him. When David approached my chair at work that day, my brother Mark was already dead and my father was already feeling ill and David was just a handsome young man who'd only ever lost a grandfather. Still I liked the way, when I said that catching a movie that particular weekend might be difficult because of a memorial mass scheduled for my brother who'd killed himself nine months before, he did not flee. When I told him the mass might be cancelled because we needed the priest to come up to the house to do a “laying on of the hands” to heal my father of cancer, he still did not flee. Instead, he went down on one knee at my swivel chair, and asked me to tell him more. He looked me full in the eyes. He said, “That must be hard.”

He was a rational skeptic, and a young man, but he knew how to listen. He listened as I tried to describe grief. He listened as I tried to describe my sense of something greater than ourselves, a sense of our souls returning to some mysterious whole. He listened as if he understood that it did not matter what I believed about death so long as I believed in something. No, it wasn't that. He listened as if by listening he could make my suffering easier to bear.

“WHAT WILL MAKE THIS EASIER FOR YOU?” DAVID asks.

We are lying in bed on the fourth morning after Silvan's birth. We feel as if we have not stopped moving since my water broke during dinner, and our minds are swirling with diagnoses and prognoses. The doctors now know that Silvan suffered oxygen deprivation. They know this insult to his brain happened during labor or delivery, but they don't know exactly when or how. I wish I could help, but when I think back to my labor, those sixteen hours, everything seemed normal and natural. My water breaking, tickling my legs, the contractions starting within minutes; the drive to the hospital, my water clear, the baby fine; walking the hospital halls, sitting on a birthing ball, picturing the push and pull of ocean waves, dozing between each contraction; and though I'd felt in the grip of something powerful and mysterious, I'd felt confident. Only once did my confidence waver, when I woke to see that David had left his post by my bed. “What are you doing?” I asked in alarm as if I could not survive the next contraction without him.

“I'm just putting on my shoes.”

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere. My feet are cold.”

The nursing notes corroborate this picture: “husband and doula are supportive,” the notes say; and I am laboring “well.”

Now the doctors continue to analyze this simple narrative. I wore a fetal monitor strapped around my belly to monitor the baby's heart rate. This is standard practice, an attempt to catch distress such as Silvan was in. I know that some of my friends who labored at home are skeptical of hospital monitoring. They believe that midwives do a better, more human job of monitoring, and yet one of these friends now remembers a story of a home birth ending in an inexplicable stillbirth. Now the doctors go back to the monitor tracings, but they find nothing unusual. When I admit that I had hated the feel of the monitor belt around my belly so much that I had begged the nurses to take it off—there it is, a gap of two hours in the nursing notes while I stand in the shower—the doctors say that for a normal labor like mine, they usually monitor intermittently anyway. Nor do they know what to say about the last kick I felt in the shower, a big kick as if Silvan were stretching out inside of me with all his strength. A baby's kick is usually a good sign. What's strange to them instead is how the damage doesn't show up anywhere else but in Silvan. We learn about cord blood gasses and placentas, neither of which showed signs of damage. Nor did the tests right after birth show much more than lethargy. All they know for sure is that the damage happened during labor, because the brain swells within twenty-four hours of such an injury. Perhaps this is why, though he nursed, he could not stop crying. Because something unseen was already wrong.