by Mira Ptacin
“Do you want kids?” I asked her, and she said yeah, maybe. “If it happens, you know?” And then my hope started to sink and I started to feel foolish. You were pregnant and your baby died and you’re smoking and you seem just fine.
“I’m prolly movin’ back home, movin’ back with my parents,” she said and tapped the ash off her cigarette. She seemed proud, not traumatized. I didn’t like it.
I’ve been told that sometimes when a person is exposed to trauma, that person’s basic assumptions get dislodged and shaken up. For one instant, right after the shake, everything stands still, in midair. Life. Just. Stops. For just that one second, there is clarity. And when the pieces drop back into place, nothing feels quite right. You pick up your feet to trudge forward, but the ground has shifted. You can’t get back into the invisible rhythm, that way you felt you’d been moving your whole life up until then. Walking forward now feels like walking sideways. It’s only then when you realize that you were really just at the mercy of time. Like sands through the hourglass.
Biologically speaking, there’s a certain branch of science (it’s called phylogenetics, “tribe” + “relative to birth” in Greek) that studies this kind of thing at the molecular level: the cavity-filled, lasagna-looking brain. How well equipped one is to handle traumatic events depends on how much corticotrophin-releasing hormone one has lining the brain walls. Some studies have suggested the possibility of physical shrinkage in the hippocampus and amygdala when trauma persists. In other words, you see a dead body, your brain shrinks and you act funny.
Therapists call such responses “post-something trauma.” It’s listed in their thick, slick DSMs as a type of disorder that can occur after an exposure to a terrifying event, and there are all kinds of post-traumas: post-cult trauma (intense emotional problems that some members of cults and new religious movements experience upon disaffection and disaffiliation); post-betrayal trauma (institutions we depend on for survival violate us in some way . . . may increase the likelihood of psychogenic amnesia). For more post-traumas, see: post-penetrating trauma. See also: post-blunt force trauma. See also: psychological trauma. See also: Nicole.
We have trauma, and we have grief. People die, and we find it baffling. Painful. Inexplicable. Grief is baffling. There are theories on how we react to loss and death, how we cope, how we handle loss. Some believe the range of emotions mourners experience is predictable, that grief can be monitored, as if mourners are following a checklist. But sorrow is less of a checklist, more like water. It’s fluid, it has no set shape, never disappears, never ends. It doesn’t go away. It just changes. It changes us.
About a year after she lost her baby, Nicole came back to my dad’s office to announce she had gotten pregnant again, and that she had given birth to a healthy baby. Mom thought it’d be nice to round up a roomful of baby goods—diapers, a stroller, a crib, and a bunch of barely used onesies from the Salvation Army—and throw Nicole a belated baby shower. She thought Nicole needed support—maybe she was projecting—but she wanted to make her feel good. Celebrate life. Be there for another woman. Mom invited some nurses, some of her own friends (a couple of doctors’ wives who happened to be immigrants, too), and Al Schipper, who led her first baby’s funeral, to celebrate Nicole’s new life.
See, look, I thought, there is a reason for everything. God knows what he’s doing. He will always make you happy again. Then the day of the party came. The guests arrived, ready to shower Nicole with their streamers and white-frosting baby cake. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, then Nicole never showed up. Dad tried to call her and got a droning signal at the other end of the line, a recorded robot voice saying the phone number was no longer in service and had been disconnected. He checked the hospital records, which revealed she had had a baby boy, and that’s it.
With wet eyes, Mom donated all the baby goods back to the Salvation Army and took the stroller to Kids “R” Us, bringing me along for the ride. In the car, I tried to be the optimist and come up with excuses for Nicole’s absence, but it didn’t fly.
“Maybe her baby got sick,” I said, but my mother ignored me and my sugarcoating. “I’m sure Nicole is being a good mommy, Mom. Really, she probably just had to work,” I insisted, even though I knew that I was doing what my mother had done before, too: latch on to Nicole in a fitful search for faith and hope. My mother needed to know that, as confusing as everything was, this was all part of the plan. Jules was dead, and Mom needed comfort, and maybe by giving this girl comfort, she might have received a little comfort of her own, too.
“Give me break,” Mom said. “That girl was hussy and we both know it. She probably dump her baby wit de parents and is out tail chasing dis minute.”
“Mom, maybe she had amnesia,” I said, and that’s when I started doubting my sense of the truth.
eleven
I am in California and I have just ridden a gondola into the Ice Age.
I bought the expensive cable car ticket because I wanted to catch a glimpse of the two-million-year-old lake everyone has been talking about. The lift carried me up two thousand vertical feet, over gray-green conifers, over brush fields with crunchy, thirsty-looking plants and gravel cliffs with caramel-colored soil. Steadily, I got higher and higher until suddenly, and only for about five or six seconds, I got to see the lake.
Lake Tahoe was giant, and startling, and still. The huge, blue mass came out of nowhere; it was as if the trees had briefly parted to reveal a secret brontosaurus stealing a nap. But the car kept moving up and on until we reached the nosebleed section of the mountain. The gondola stopped. I got out. And here I am.
Below me is the Squaw Valley USA ski resort. I didn’t come to Squaw Valley to ski. It’s August, and there’s no snow. The reason I am here on the West Coast—at the opposite end of the country from my home, and high up in the Sierras—is because I am participating in a summer writer’s conference. A week ago, shortly after the damning ultrasound, I left Manhattan and Andrew and Maybe for a literary retreat. I’d been planning on it, regardless. Now, it’s an escape. I have three days left before I am to leave and resume my life back on East 32nd Street, but for the remainder of today, I will be hiking around Squaw Valley’s High Camp. In doing this, I plan on appreciating nature. And by appreciating nature, I hope to make my mind clear and stable and make sense out of things, reach some sort of conclusion, some final decision. Our instructors gave us the whole afternoon off.
Squaw Valley’s red-white-and-blue-colored pamphlet tells me that Lake Tahoe is subterranean; she’s almost five hundred meters deep. Her waters are so still and unmoving that people flock from all over the planet just to bear witness to her clarity. The lake’s creation was incidental and completely natural: millions of years ago, rain, melting snow, and runoff filled the lower basin. After eruptions from a now-extinct volcano called Mount Pluto, a dam was formed on the north side, and scouring glaciers from the Ice Age shaped the rest of the lake.
As I skim through the glossy brochure’s scientific explanations, I see the words on the page as metaphors for my current situation: formed by a series of large faults, capable of large magnitude earthquakes, located within Desolation Wilderness, the youngest deformation belt. I smack the pamphlet with the backside of my hand, folding it up three times before tossing it into a nearby garbage can. “Shut up,” I tell it. Just shut up.
I am in California and I am the only thing keeping the life inside me alive. Without me, the baby is powerless.
Once, I called her a parasite. “This thing is a fucking parasite,” is what I said. I was about three months pregnant. It was weeks before the ultrasound. I felt so sick. I was so angry. I had spent the entire afternoon sprawled out on the tiled bathroom floor of our apartment like a piece of roadkill, stationed alongside the toilet. The moisture from the toilet’s cool porcelain base had apprehended tiny pubic hairs and lavender-colored lint. The floor stank like ten-day-old urine. And the fact that the urine pr
obably wasn’t even mine made me feel even worse, and irrelevant. Besides the point. A means to an end.
For hours my brain and stomach had been churning like I had just stepped off a Tilt-A-Whirl. I couldn’t get a grip. I couldn’t control my vomiting. All I could get myself to do was moan. I was all alone in the apartment, all by myself, but I could hear the sounds of thousands of lives right next to me, lives right on my periphery, not even fifteen feet away, kept separate only by a piece of drywall, or a glass window. Traces of people were everywhere—voices of strangers reverberating in the hallway, Segundo cleaning the alleyway with a leaf blower, UPS trucks, honks and sirens. Eventually, I fell asleep and awoke to the sound of Maybe barking as Andrew arrived home, turned his key, and walked into the apartment.
When he called out for me, I pressed my shoulder blades against the bathtub and pushed my swollen feet against the bathroom door. “Go away!” I shouted. From behind the hollow door, Andrew laughed, told me I was adorable, but I refused to let him in.
“Can I come hang out with you in there, Medium Boo, please?” Andrew’s words sounded muffled, as if his lips were pressing upon the tiny gap where the stile met the frame.
“I just want to be alone,” I told him, and pulled my knees into to my chest as much as I could and dropped my heavy head into the space between them. That’s right around the time I called the baby a fucking parasite.
“You’re so mad. Why are you always so mad?” Andrew heaved a sigh. “That baby loves you,” he said. “And I love you.”
“It’s just sucking the life right out of me,” I said, and I wasn’t sure if I was kidding or not.
I had been trying very hard to make sense of the new kind of love Andrew was talking about. It was difficult for me to understand because I had never experienced anything quite like it. The new love was completely unfamiliar, almost foreign, but at the same time it felt proverbial and natural. Also, it was fucking frightening. It was frightening because it was the kind of love that required a colossal amount of responsibility and tenderness, buoyancy and endurance, bravery and confidence—traits I wasn’t sure I possessed, or ever would. It was frightening because, from what I understood, in order for it all to be successful, I had to be strong; and I was having difficulty being strong because the new love that was growing inside of me was draining every bit of love juice that I had right out of me. I had control over nothing.
I picked up my head and grimaced at the bathroom door. “The baby is making me feel like shit,” I complained. My brown hair was pinned underneath a red bandanna, and the top button and zipper of my pants were undone. I wasn’t even wearing deodorant, not because I was careless but because I was worried that the chemicals in the gel would get into my bloodstream, and that I would pump the chemicals into the baby. I suspected that deodorant was toxic.
“You did this,” I said. I wanted to say something that would make Andrew feel the way I did—afraid and angry and embarrassed and sad—but there was nothing. It was a greedy notion but I couldn’t dismantle it. I knew Andrew hadn’t planned for this to happen, either. Neither one of us had asked for it, but Andrew was trying his best to make this work. He was confident. He didn’t care what people thought. He didn’t need to placate anyone.
I wasn’t happy. I hadn’t wanted to be a mother just yet, but I did think that once the baby came, my love for it would trump every fear I’d had about being pregnant. Nothing I felt had been simple, black or white. I was lost. And even though I was as unpleasant as a bee sting, Andrew remained happy, and very excited about me, his new love. He was excited about the baby and the new reality of the three of us becoming one family. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t flying through the air or singing with joy. I loved Andrew. I liked babies. So why wasn’t I feeling optimistic? Why was it so hard for me to be happy?
Eventually, I let down my guard, told Andrew he could come in if he still felt like it, and in he stepped, smiling unwaveringly. He sat down next to me on the tiles, reached out his hand, and told me everything was going to be okay. I remember how hesitant I was to accept it.
Now I’m in California, and still, my breath and my blood and my body’s nutrients are sustaining the life inside me. Without me, this baby is helpless. Without me, Lilly will die. I am her lifeline. I am her barrier to her mortality. Once she leaves my body, the pregnancy will end. The baby will disappear. Or, as the doctors told us after the ultrasound, it will die. The medical specialists rapidly fired all of this information and more upon me, so I went ahead and left Manhattan and flew to California.
The specialists bombarded us with genetic details, too. Their facts were incessant. Words I couldn’t pronounce. Holoprosencephaly. Images I cannot forget. Clubbed feet. Deformed spine. Collapsed skull. Broken heart.
“It is sick and cannot survive outside the womb,” they said. Therefore, “sick” was the adjective we used to deliver the prognosis to our friends, colleagues, and everyone else, but we called our baby a “baby,” not an “it.”
But it’s been impossible for me to retain any of the scientific data and medical minutia, so Andrew acts as our secretary, our project manager. He is our ambassador. He’s taken the wheel. While I am away in California gathering my composure, my fiancé is at home in the eye of the hurricane, collecting the explanations and updates, then relaying the data to me, to my parents, to his parents. He is doing more for me than a man I haven’t even known for eight months should ever be expected to do. Over the phone, Andrew updates me with new validating points (amniocentesis test results are showing more neural tube defects); he tells me about more of the things he’s taken care of that I won’t have to worry about when I arrive home (the rent is paid, the apartment is clean, and our roommate will be heading to Long Island to give us a few days of privacy); he shares with me more facts he’s researched on chromosomal flukes and genetic inheritances (coincidence, it’s nobody’s fault). I accept all his words like a soldier, even though no matter how many sentences come out of the telephone’s earpiece, I hear only one single, solitary truth about this warped, colossal calamity: that this baby just ain’t going to be. That this sweet and scary, gigantic and tiny new kind of love growing inside me won’t be developing much more. That the end of the road is right up ahead of us, or so it seems.
I am standing on a plateau. The air is thin and difficult to breathe. The trees stretch to infinity and the gravel path is as gray as amnesia. I imagine the environment up here probably doesn’t change too much. Pebbles, moss, pines, sky. Timeless and homeless; I could be anywhere right now. Any country, any state. Stable. Set. Fixed. Secure. Ahead of me, an upward-climbing path splits in two different directions. Take a left and I’ll go through a parched meadow spotted with delicate violets and tiny yellow flowers, and white people walking through them, white people clad in expensive outdoor performance gear. Take a right and who knows? A fat jack pine blocks my view to the remainder of the trail. So I go right. And as I turn the bend, a pair of familiar faces emerges, arriving in long, upward lunges.
“Howdy,” the gentleman says, panting. The two hikers lean on luxurious chrome walking sticks and carry CamelBak water packs with clear straws that rest on their shoulders. If they get thirsty, all they have to do is turn their heads to the right, wrap their lips around a plastic nipple, and suck.
I say “hello” back as his counterpart, a woman, begins unzipping the knees of her pants, turning them into shorts. We both watch.
“I’ll bet your baby is going to be a forest ranger,” the man says.
I rub the torso of my cotton T-shirt in a circular motion and force my lips into a discomfited grin. “Yes, maybe so.”
“Or a mountaineer!” the woman adds.
I recognize these two faces from the dining hall. The woman is a playwright. The man is a fiction writer. Neither of them knows that what they’re saying couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Perhaps. We’ll see. Thanks,” I t
ell them.
“You go, girl!” perks the fiction writer.
“Okay. Thanks,” I say and continue on.
The road in front of me morphs into a dried-up channel coated in pebbles and pinecones that may make it tricky for me keep my balance on the way down, but I see there is a reward at the bottom of the descent: nothing. At the bottom there is a big, open, natural plaza of tall grass and glittering soil, and nothingness. Absolute nothingness. Your baby is going to be a mountaineer! I can finally be alone.
Because there is never any escape. In Manhattan, there are nearly 1.7 million people living on a little island of less than twenty-three square miles, which means there are nearly 74,000 residents per square mile, which means there is never any respite. In New York City, you get no rest, no sympathy, no relief. Thousands of bodies constantly envelop you, but you’re always alone in your grief. In New York, you gotta keep up. If you fall, you’ll get left behind. You slow down, you’ll get run over, most likely by a yellow cab.
Here in Northern California, though, it appears to be just the opposite. Here in the sunny, yawning, open state of California, life seems to move at a much slower pace. People have the luxury of space and sun. You can see the sky and you realize what kind of weather is surrounding you. And in California, people ask and people listen. In California, you get asked your story and people are interested in it. This does make sense, I suppose. After all, we are at a writers’ colony.
Even so, I don’t want to tell these strangers my particular story. Before I arrived at Squaw Valley, I decided not to tell anyone there the truth of what’s really going on inside of me, underneath the surface of things. Why should I volunteer that information? I can just imagine the exchange:
Stranger asks: How many months along?
I respond, candidly: About five. But perhaps only six more days left.
I will not tell any of my fellow writers about my misfortune. I won’t be bringing this story into workshop class. If I did, they’d ask me where the story is going. I’d tell them that I don’t know, and they’d explore the possibilities from a writer’s point of view, turn it into some narrative. They’d have to examine the elements of the story. The components: Daughter of respectable Catholic parents gets pregnant out of wedlock. Baby will not live. Here lies the conflict. So whom are we rooting for? The mother? Is she the protagonist? Is she a student, a young woman, a daughter, a mother—what is she? What about the baby? Sorry to be insensitive, but the baby doesn’t really have a brain, much less a working heart. (And by the way, is the dilemma a moral one or a medical one?) So it’s the pregnant woman. Is she a hero or a villain? Is she at fault? For the baby? For her brother? Where did she go wrong?