You Were Made for This

by Michelle Sacks

  She has been desperate to watch a birth, Elsa explained, nodding to Freja.

  The stables smelled of rust and hay and blood, animal smells and human. It reminded me of something from childhood, which I pushed away.

  The horse reared up suddenly onto her legs. She stood a few moments, then eased herself gently back to the ground, this time rolling onto her back. She was groaning now, a low moan of pain. Inside the membrane, blood and liquid and a dark shadow of a foal’s hoof.

  Freja was riveted to the spot, neither particularly afraid or repulsed. My stomach churned. Ebba was stiff, waiting. From her udders, milk trickled slowly out. More of the membrane had pushed through, two forelegs now. One had pierced its white covering.

  Nilssen had done this many times before. He moved behind Ebba and put his hands gently to the encased foal, pulling at the legs. His overalls were slicked already with the secretions of birth and suffering.

  Out, out it came. Human and animal, up close it’s all the same. Merry giving birth was primal and monstrous, crying and grunting. But out of her stormed life. My son. Mine, harbored inside like a secret that grows and moves until it takes on a life of its own.

  Freja gasped, a little cry that echoed against the concrete walls of the stables. The foal was born. Limp and murky, a pile of bones and flesh blanketed under the remains of the white membrane.

  Nilssen observed, waited for signs of breath or life. He touched a hand to the foal’s body, felt for something, muttered in Swedish, tried again.

  Elsa had tears in her eyes. Karl took Freja’s hand in his. All was quiet.

  Ebba turned her head to look, to nudge at the body of her newborn foal.

  A nagging question popped into my mind just as Nilssen pronounced it.

  The foal was stillborn.

  Frank

  I folded the letter I’d written to Sam and slipped it into an envelope, which I wedged between the pages of a book beside my bed. There, something for the final day. I’ve written down everything I know. How Merry deliberately hurts Conor. How she leaves him alone in the middle of the woods while she runs off. I’ve warned him as best I can. What happens next is a matter for him, not me.

  I am glad to be leaving soon. We are all relieved, and me most of all. I let myself get carried away. I lost myself for a while, didn’t I, in shimmering, silly mirages. From far away they look like what you want, but up close it’s only a trick of light and water. Nothing is real.

  Merry’s life, she can believe in it perhaps, but I know the truth. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s all I need. I will wish her well. I will wish her happiness. But I will leave.

  Earlier, I spoke to my father on the phone. It’s about that time; he’s worked through the last of the money I sent him a few months ago.

  You’re a good girl, Frances, he said. Your mother would have been proud.

  He only says this to make me more generous with the amounts I transfer to his account. Well, I’ve never needed much from him. Hardly the father figure a girl hopes for. But he did teach me a few tricks.

  Merry in the hallway was tying her shoelaces, getting ready for her hike. She’s been attached to Conor for several days now, keeping him to herself. Putting on a great show for us all. Every time I reach for him she sweeps him up and says, No no, Mama needs her hugs. She really is too much sometimes. I ache for him, the feel of his plump skin, smooth and soft, his smell, the way he smiles and melts all of my insides.

  Well. I’ll get used to it. I’ll fill the empty space with other things. Italy will be a glorious start. And from there—the whole world awaits. What more could I ask for?

  We’ll be off now, Merry said.

  She was in a peculiar mood suddenly, quite distracted.

  Or nervous. Maybe that was it.

  Sam, off today in Stockholm, he seemed preoccupied too. I didn’t dare ask why.

  I must give up trying to understand them. I must leave them to their uneasy universe of make-believe and find my way in another.

  Some hours later, packing the last of my things into my suitcase, I heard the scream as it shattered the silence and sent the birds scattering into the heavens. The sound of unimaginable despair. Relentless as it echoed back and forth, back and forth, a reverberation of horror, a cry without end.

  I ran to the front door. There was Merry, charging wildly out through the trees.

  Frank, she screamed, Frank, oh God, Frank, something has happened.

  Something terrible has happened.

  Sam

  I left my appointment and went straight to the nearest bar.

  Double, I said.

  I held in my hands the page that had been printed out for me. Looked like ink blotches from a faulty printer.

  This is accurate.

  Yes, sir. It’s pretty definitive.

  Same again, I said to the barman.

  It took the edge off but nothing more. Still it raged.

  I’d lied and said I was going to be in Stockholm today for a pitch presentation. I’d kissed Merry goodbye and said it. I love you.

  Looking into her eyes, trying to see behind them.

  I love you, Sam, she said. I love you more than anything.

  Love. What is love but the prelude to betrayal?

  I told you so, my mother will hiss. And she’s the worst of them all.

  Son, son, you’re all I have. You’re the only man I need.

  Lying on her bed in her negligee, everything visible, everything outlined in the soft light, curves and peaks, all the mysterious parts you only know in two dimensions, from screens and pages, and now here before your eyes. A teenage boy, confused and lost.

  Come here. She’d pat the blanket. Come here and comfort your mother.

  Bile is the taste in my mouth, the smell and the feeling all over. Just bile. Revulsion. I’d picked up the prescription, those little yellow portals to success. And then.

  I’d thought about it for a few days and called the doctor back.

  But how did it happen the first time? I asked.

  You weren’t on medication then?

  An awkward silence on the other end.

  I’m sure there’s an explanation, he said, to fill the space.

  Suddenly it was obvious. How could it be anything else?

  In my hands, I balled the doctor’s printout into my fist.

  I ran to the bathroom and vomited out my insides; other men’s piss wetting my knees. My phone fell out of my pocket onto the tiles. I wiped it. Sixteen missed calls. All from Merry.

  I vomited twice more and drove home. As I approached, I saw the flashing lights. Ambulance. Two police cars.

  The front door was open. Merry on the sofa, a policewoman opposite her, taking notes. Frank was in the kitchen, making coffee for the police.

  Merry held a hand over her mouth when she saw me. She stood up, came toward me, her face stricken and white. I saw her register my state, my smell—vomit and booze, but she just shook her head.

  He’s gone, Sam, he’s gone.

  In the bedroom, Conor was on the bed. Pale and small.

  Blue. Cold. Dead.

  Death makes humans small, babies smaller still. Doll-like and otherworldly, the humanness all but vanished. I was reminded of the death masks of the Middle Ages, of the cabinet of shrunken heads I’d seen as a student at the British Museum, the collector Henry Wellcome’s personal stash of morbid and grotesque curiosities from around the world. I’d gone to the museum on a date. The girl was called Sinead—she came from Cork and played the bodhrán.

  Jesus. Jesus Christ.

  Conor, I said, like he might wake up. Conor.

  Merry was on the bed, dazed, unable to focus. Her eyes were glazed; her words made no sense.

  She had taken him for a hike, she said. Just like always. Somewhere on the way back, she had stopped; she noticed that Bear had dropped. She had picked him up. She had looked inside and seen Conor. Then she knew that something was wrong, that he was not breathing or moving.
r />   But, but, she stammered. I tried to resuscitate him, I tried to—I tried to revive him, but.

  I think he was already dead, she said. Dead. He was cold. He was—his skin was weird, like wax. I—I ran home and called the ambulance, but. I don’t know, I don’t know what’s happening.

  I looked at the baby on the bed and had the urge to throw up again. I held my mouth.

  In the living room, the police or paramedics. Frederick and Linda, their names marked on little badges pinned to their red uniforms. Linda smelled of eucalyptus and old coffee. She had copper hair tied in two braids.

  We are very sorry for your loss, she said.

  Yes. Frederick nodded. It is hard to understand something like this. As we were discussing with your wife, it is very possible that it is sudden infant death syndrome. This is unfortunately quite common. Or, even a fever is a serious thing for a baby, a virus of some kind. These are the most likely scenarios, but of course we will need to investigate this further.

  Linda nodded. To rule out all possibilities for the death.

  She looked at all three of us and tucked her notebook away into her jacket pocket.

  I was still drunk or stone cold sober, I couldn’t tell. All the voices were a blur, all the actions, too, moving parts but nothing in a way that made any sense.

  Son, my son.

  I was only numb.

  Frank

  I am broken.

  All of us are. I am trying to make myself invisible, trying to offer tea and food and tissues and otherwise stay out of sight. I am afraid to make too much noise, afraid to take up space here, when the house is so full of grief. Terrible, unthinkable grief.

  I am inconsolable. I cannot stop the tears.

  Conor is gone. Conor is dead.

  Merry is strangely silent—numb, I’m sure, although…well. She is how she is. She has always been strange around emotion. Disconnected from it. Now she is trancelike. Mostly just sitting cross-legged on the couch or curled in a ball on the bed in her room, motionless and staring into the abyss. I brought her a cup of mint tea and set it down. She hardly flinched.

  I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I said.

  Nothing.

  Sam’s outside, he’s pacing back and forth, smoking in full view, taking a swig of whiskey from the bottle. Letting all his secrets out. What does it matter now? What could possibly matter.

  I took him a black coffee, how he likes it. I didn’t say anything and neither did he. He drank from the cup and stared out at the lake where we had swum not too many weeks ago. There is no more sun. No more warmth.

  Everyone else has left the house. The paramedics took the baby, little Conor—the worst thing I’ve ever seen—they wrapped him in a blanket and walked him to the ambulance parked outside. They opened the back doors but we did not see anything more. Whether they strapped him to something or set him in a bed or a box. I shudder to think, but they hurried him away, vanished him into thin air as though he might have only ever been a dream.

  Oh, that beautiful, dear little boy. Light and love, the purest incarnation of joy. How I loved him. How I loved him so.

  My hands, my hands will not stop trembling.

  Merry

  The house is silent, every day, nothing but silence. The inside of the house the same as when you lie floating on your back in the ocean, ears under and eyes open; nothing to hear but the sound of breath and cold hearts beating. Empty and bereft. There’s been a heat wave, a few strange days of baking sticky heat, cooking us inside the walls, sweating out the juices and the tears. The glass traps the heat, the sunlight floods into the rooms but the feeling isn’t lightness, it’s dark. The worst dark you can imagine.

  All is numb. Dead inside, dead out.

  It is done.

  The baby is gone.

  How is it possible.

  No.

  What did I do.

  What did I do to our boy?

  I am sick with it. The guilt. The awfulness.

  I don’t deserve to live.

  The first time I held him, I felt certain it could not be human. Dark, withered little thing, pink and wriggling and scaled.

  He’s beautiful, Sam said, but he wasn’t. Newborns are terrifying, feral and squirming, animal-like, eyeless creatures in search of a teat. He came early, charging his way out of my body, cutting and tearing as he went. The violence is unthinkable, but they refuse to call it anything but a miracle. The midwife pulled him headfirst from my split-open self and placed him on my breast. He was tiny, held in two cupped hands; sum of all our parts. Life the miracle and then death, the end of it all.

  He is lost. We have lost him.

  The thoughts float but won’t settle. Why won’t they? Why can’t I remember? The last days morph into shapes and colors, smiles and winks; the feeling of happiness and certainty—a way forward, a plan—but now. This. Only this.

  But did I? Could I? Was it possible? The statement I gave to the police officer and watched her scratch into her notepad. Written in blood, sins of the flesh, secrets and lies. Lies, so many lies.

  I had no choice. I willed it and made it happen.

  Did I. Didn’t I.

  The baby, the baby. Warm and then cold. Here and then not. Alive and then vanished. As if by magic, as if by some dark magic. Witches in the forest, a curse upon your head, a hex to make you suffer. A split second, and the scene is changed, forever and irrevocably.

  I was outside myself.

  I am always there, it seems.

  Parts displaced. A broken woman.

  Now I am broken all the way through. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Merry together again.

  I did it. I did it.

  Please, no, I begged the dead body. I screamed, but the trees stood stiff and unmoved. In my body, an ache, profound and guttural; something is missing. Something is lost. Something will undo me. It will all come crashing down.

  Sam! Sam! Everything holding me together is gone.

  I can hardly breathe. I cannot stop throwing up, nothing there but yellow and air, but out it comes, every time I think of it. Every time I think of the moment.

  Sam will not touch me. He is in shock, literally, as if it is electricity in his veins. He is an animal. Pacing, furious, waiting to attack, to set his grief in motion.

  I don’t get it, he says, I don’t.

  Fever, he says. Could he have had a cold? That you didn’t notice. A temperature. Should he have been outside in the— Was it too cold? Too hot? Was the— Did he get jolted somehow too violently, over the path while you— His voice breaks and he shakes his head. He bites his fist.

  Me, I bite down on my lip. I taste the blood. I suck it back in.

  We won’t know anything for a few days, that’s all they said, that’s all we know. We can only wait. Exist in the hollow space.

  We will always be here now.

  Sam

  Karl visited today. Elsa, too. They brought a basket of food: a roasted chicken, a loaf of fresh bread, a bag of red grapes from the market. They’d seen the ambulance, the police cars. Someone must have broken the news.

  Mr. Nilssen dropped by with a small spruce tree in a green plastic bucket.

  Perhaps you could plant this for the baby, he said. It is what I did for my wife, when she passed.

  I invited him to have a coffee with me and we sat together in silence, the tree in my lap where Conor once might have sat.

  We were married fifty-two years, he said sadly.

  The house is a tomb for the dead. The doors are closed. The curtains drawn. No light let in or out. I can’t think. Can’t feel. He’s gone, but I don’t know if what this is counts as grief. Devastating loss. Or something else.

  Loss. It’s loss, because all is lost. Everything that was good and right turned unthinkable and horrifying.

  I have been betrayed.

  Frank said she would take the car and shop for our groceries.

  She returned and set a plate in front of me, cleared it
again hours later, mostly untouched. She brought coffee. She set out sleeping pills in little dishes I didn’t know we owned, and drew shut the curtains when it turned dark.

  I can’t eat. Can’t sleep. Can’t cry. Sometimes I lie still long enough for the exhaustion to wash over me, something between sleep and waking. I see in this fog Conor, Conor calling for me, Da da da, and me running to find his crib empty, his body stiff on the shelf above the bed; a taxidermy baby next to the stuffed giraffe and a sad-looking Bear and Biscuit.

  Worse yet, the waking dream that is no dream at all. An empty crib. A pile of diapers on the changing table, folded and forever to remain unused. Son. Child. Gone.

  All of it voided.

  I feel robbed. Of everything that was supposed to be ahead.

  Love. Family. A perfect Swedish childhood for my son, enveloped in goodness and shine. Tricycles and then bicycles and fishing in the lake, Legos, and playing ball and licking ice-cream cones by the cold gray Baltic Sea. Boat trips around the archipelago, island hopping and dips into the cool water from the sunbaked rocks. Campfires and ski trips and sledding in the winter snow, popcorn at the movies and dinosaur collections lining the windowsill of his room, and midsummer picnics in the park, dancing around a maypole with fair-headed friends whose sisters he would later love. Three Christmas stockings, or maybe four, filled with knickknacks, initialed and identical and hanging in a row; Easter egg hunts and first teeth kept in a little box and exchanged for coins. Grazed knees and first dates and first kisses, boys’ trips and fishing trips and always and forever the solidness of that one unbreakable thing. Father and son.