by Jodi Picoult
A nurse steps into the room with Max at her heels. “Look,” he says, handing me a photo of our son. It looks as if it were snapped while he was asleep in a bassinet. His hands are curled on either side of his head. His chin has a tiny dimple.
Beneath the photo are a handprint and a footprint, too tiny to look real.
“Mrs. Baxter,” she says softly, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Why are you whispering?” I ask. “Why are you all whispering? Where the hell is my baby?”
As if I have summoned him, a second nurse enters, carrying my son. He is dressed now, in clothes that are swimming on him. I reach for him.
For a single day, I worked in an NICU unit. I was playing guitar with the preemies, and singing to them, as part of developmental care—babies who are exposed to music therapy show increased oxygen saturation and decreased heart rate, and some studies have even shown preemies doubling their daily weight gain when music therapy is part of their routine. I’d been working with one mother, singing a lullaby in Spanish to her baby, when a social worker came in and asked for my help.
“The Rodriguez baby died this morning,” she told me. “The family’s waiting for their favorite nurse to come in and do the last bath.”
“The last bath?”
“It helps, sometimes,” the social worker said. “The thing is, it’s a big family, and I think they could use a hand in there.”
When I walked into the private room where the family was waiting, I understood why. The mother was sitting in a rocking chair with the dead infant in her arms. Her face looked as if it had been carved from stone. The father was hovering behind her. There were aunts and uncles and grandparents milling in silence, a direct counterpoint to the nieces and nephews, who were shrieking and chasing each other around the hospital bed.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Zoe. Would it be all right if I played?” I gestured at the guitar hanging by its strap across my back.
When the mother didn’t answer, I knelt down in front of the chair. “Your daughter was beautiful,” I said.
She didn’t answer, nor did anyone else, so I pulled my guitar around and began to sing—the same Spanish lullaby I’d been singing minutes before:
Duérmete, mi niña
Duérmete, mi sol
Duérmete, pedazo
De mi corazón.
For a moment, the kids who were running in circles paused. The adults in the room stared at me. I became the focal point, the center of all their energy, instead of that poor infant. As soon as the nurse arrived and undressed the baby for its last bath, I slipped out of the room and went to the administrative offices of the hospital and quit.
I had played at the bedsides of children who were dying dozens of times; I had always considered it a privilege to swing them from this world into the next with a string of notes, a sweet refrain. But this had been different. I just couldn’t play Orpheus for a dead baby, not when Max and I were trying so hard to get pregnant.
My own son is cold to the touch. I lay him down between my legs on the hospital mattress and unsnap the blue pajamas in which some kind nurse has dressed him. I cover his torso with my hand, but there’s no heartbeat.
Duérmete, mi niño, I whisper.
“Would you like to keep him here for a while?” asks the nurse who was carrying him.
I look up at her. “I can do that?”
“You can keep him as long as you like,” she says. “Well . . .” She doesn’t finish the rest of the thought.
“Where does he stay?” I say.
“I beg your pardon?”
“When he’s not here. Where does he stay?” I look at the nurse. “In the morgue?”
“No. He stays with us.”
She’s lying to me. I know she’s lying. If he had been in a bassinet with the other babies, his skin wouldn’t have a chill to it, like an autumn morning. “I want to see.”
“I’m afraid we can’t—”
“Do it.” My mother’s voice crackles with authority. “If that’s what she needs to see, let her.”
The two nurses look at each other. Then one of them steps outside and brings in a wheelchair. They help me swing my legs off the bed and sit down. The whole time I am holding the baby.
Max wheels me down the hallway. Behind one door I hear the grunt of a woman in labor. He pushes me a little faster.
“Mrs. Baxter would like to see where her son has been,” the nurse says to a colleague behind the desk, as if this is the kind of request she fields daily. She leads me past the nurses’ station to a row of shelving units stuffed with plastic-wrapped tubing and stacks of swaddling blankets and diapers. Beside it is a small, stainless steel refrigerator, the kind I used to have in my dorm room at college.
The nurse opens up the refrigerator. I don’t understand at first, and then when I look inside and see the empty white walls and the single rack, I do.
I grab the baby closer, but he is so small that it’s hard to feel as if I’ve got him soundly. I might as well be holding a bag of feathers, a breath, a wish. I stand up without a plan in my head—just knowing that I cannot look at that refrigerator anymore—and suddenly I cannot breathe, and the world is spinning, and my chest is being crushed in a vise. All I can think, before I fall to the ground, is that I won’t drop my son. That a good mother wouldn’t let go.
“What you’re saying,” I tell Dr. Gelman, my OB, “is that I’m a ticking time bomb.”
After I fainted, was revived, and told the doctors my symptoms, I was put on heparin. A spiral CT scan showed a blood clot that had traveled to my lung—a pulmonary embolism. Now, my doctor’s told me that my blood tests showed a clotting disorder. That this could happen again and again.
“Not necessarily. Now that we know you’ve got AT III, we can put you on Coumadin. It’s treatable, Zoe.”
I am a little afraid to move, certain that I will jar the clot and send it right to my brain and have an aneurysm. Dr. Gelman assures me that the shots of heparin I’ve had will keep that from happening.
There’s a part of me, the part that feels like I’ve swallowed a stone, that is disappointed.
“How come you didn’t test for it before?” Max asks. “You tested for everything else.”
Dr. Gelman turns to him. “Antithrombin three deficiency isn’t pregnancy-related. It’s something you’re born with, and this thrombophilia tends to show up in younger people. We often can’t diagnose a clotting disorder until someone’s aggravated it. A broken leg can do that. Or, in Zoe’s case, labor and delivery.”
“It’s not pregnancy-related,” I repeat, grabbing on to that statement with all my might. “So technically I could still have a baby?”
The obstetrician hesitates. “The two conditions are not mutually exclusive,” she says, “but why don’t we talk about this in a few weeks?”
We both turn at the sound of the door closing behind Max, who’s left the room.
When I am discharged from the hospital, I am wheeled to the bank of elevators by an orderly, with Max carrying my overnight bag. I notice something I didn’t notice during the two days I’ve been there—a single buttercup in a little glass vase that is suctioned to my hospital room door. My room is the only one in the hallway that has a vase. I realize this is some kind of sign, a cue for the phlebotomists and the residents and the candy stripers entering the room that this is not a zone of happiness, that, unlike in every other new mother’s room, here something terrible has happened.
As we are waiting for the doors to open, another woman is wheeled up beside me. She has a newborn in her arms, and attached to the arm of her wheelchair is a CONGRATULATIONS balloon. Her husband follows, his arms full of flowers. “Is that Daddy?” the woman coos, as the baby stirs. “Are you waving?”
A bell dings, and the elevator doors open. It is empty, plenty of room for two. The woman is wheeled inside first, and then my orderly begins to pivot the wheelchair, so that I can be wheeled in beside her.
Max, howeve
r, blocks his way. “We’ll take the next one,” he says.
We drive home in Max’s truck, which smells of loam and freshly cut grass, even though there are no mowers or weed cutters in the flatbed. I wonder who is covering the business. Max turns on the radio and sets it to a music station. This is a big deal—usually we argue over the programming. He will listen to Car Talk on NPR, Wait Wait. . . Don’t Tell Me! and just about any news show . . . but he doesn’t like music playing while he’s driving. Me, I can’t imagine even a half-mile trip without singing along to a song.
“It’s supposed to be nice this weekend,” Max says. “Hot.”
I look out the window. We’re at a red light, and in the car beside us is a mother with two children, who are eating animal crackers in the backseat.
“I thought we could take a ride down to the beach, maybe.”
Max surfs; these are the last days of summer. It’s what he’d normally do. Except nothing is normal. “Maybe,” I say.
“I thought,” Max continues, “that might be a good place for, you know.” He swallows. “The ashes.”
We named the baby Daniel and arranged to have him cremated. The ashes would come back in an urn shaped like a tiny ceramic baby shoe with a blue ribbon. We didn’t really discuss what we would do with them once they arrived, but now I realize Max has a point. I don’t want the urn on the kitchen counter. I don’t want to bury it in our backyard the way we buried our canary when it died. I suppose the beach is a pretty place, if not a meaningful one. But then again, what is my other option? It’s not like my baby was conceived in a romantic place like Venice, where I could float the urn down the river Po; or under the stars in Tanzania, where I could open the urn to the wind of the Serengeti. He was conceived in a lab at an IVF clinic, and I can’t really scatter the ashes through its halls.
“Maybe,” I say, which is all I can give Max right now.
When we pull into our driveway, my mother’s car is already there. She is going to be staying with me during the day to make sure I’m all right when Max goes to work. She comes outside to the truck to help me down from my seat. “What can I get you, Zo?” she asks. “A cup of tea? Some chocolate? We could watch the episodes of True Blood you’ve got TiVoed . . .”
“I want to just lie down,” I say, and when she and Max both rush to help me, I hold them off. I walk down the hall slowly, using the wall for support. But instead of entering our bedroom at the end of the hall, I duck into a smaller room on the right.
Up until a month ago, this had been my makeshift office—the place where, once a week, Alexa came to do my books. Then, over the course of one weekend, Max and I painted it a sunny yolk-yellow and lugged in a crib and a changing table we’d scored from a charity shop for a grand total of forty dollars. While Max did the heavy lifting, I organized books—my favorites from when I was little: Where the Wild Things Are, Harry the Dirty Dog, and Caps for Sale—on a shelf.
But now, when I open the door, I draw in my breath. Instead of the crib and changing table, there is the old drafting board I used as a desk. My computer is hooked up and humming again. My files are neatly stacked beside it. And my instruments—djembes and banjos and guitars and chimes—are lined up against the wall.
The only indication that there might ever have been a nursery here are the walls, which are still that sunshine yellow. The color you feel inside you, when you smile.
I lie down on the braided rug in the middle of the floor and curl my knees into my chest. Max’s voice drifts down the hall. “Zoe? Zo? Where are you?” I hear him open the door to the bedroom, make a quick sweep, and leave. He does the same thing in the bathroom. Then he opens the door and sees me. “Zoe,” he says. “What’s wrong?”
I look around this room, this not-nursery, and I think of Mr. Docker, of what it means to become aware of your surroundings. It’s like waking up from the best dream to find a hundred knives at your throat. “Everything,” I whisper.
Max sits down beside me. “We have to talk.”
I don’t face him. I don’t even sit up. I keep staring straight ahead, my eyes level with the radiators. Max forgot to take the safety plugs out of the outlets. They are all still covered with those flat disks of plastic, to make sure no one gets hurt.
Too fucking late.
“Not now,” I say.
You lose keys, your wallet, your glasses. You lose a job. You lose weight.
You lose money. You lose your mind.
You lose hope; you lose faith. You lose your sense of direction.
You lose track of friends.
You lose your head. You lose a tennis match. You lose a bet.
You lose a baby, or so they say.
Except I know exactly where he is.
The next day, I wake up and my breasts have become marble. I can’t even breathe without them aching. I have no newborn, but my body doesn’t seem to know that. The nurses at the hospital had warned me about this. There used to be an injection to dry up breast milk, but there were serious side effects, and so now they could only send me home with fair warning about what would come to pass.
The covers on Max’s side of the mattress are still tucked in. He did not come to bed last night; I don’t know where he slept. By now, he will have left for work.
“Mom,” I call out, but no one comes. I sit up, wincing, and see a note on my nightstand. Gone grocery shopping, my mother has written.
I shuffle through the discharge paperwork I was given at the hospital. But no one thinks to send the woman who’s delivered a stillborn home with the contact information for a lactation expert.
Feeling stupid, I dial the office number for Dr. Gelman. Her receptionist—a sweet girl I’ve seen monthly now for over half a year—picks up. “Hi,” I say. “This is Zoe Baxter—”
“Zoe!” she says enthusiastically. “I heard you were being admitted on Friday! So? Boy or girl?”
I can tell, from the bubbles in her voice, that she has no idea what happened over the weekend. The words in my throat rustle like leaves. “Boy,” I manage. I can’t say the rest.
Even the fabric of my T-shirt is causing me excruciating pain. “Can I speak to a nurse-midwife?”
“Sure, I’ll put you through . . . ,” the receptionist says, and I hold the line praying that the nurse-midwife, at least, knows what happened.
There is a click on the line. “Zoe,” the nurse says gently, “how are you doing?”
“My milk,” I choke out. “Is there anything I can do to dry it up?”
“Not really—you have to sort of ride it out,” she says. “But you can take some ibuprofen. Try putting refrigerated cabbage leaves inside your bra—we don’t know why, but there’s something in them that helps reduce inflammation. And sage—if you have any, cook with it. Or make a tea. Sage inhibits milk production.”
I thank her and hang up the phone. As I am putting down the handset again, it falls against the clock and inadvertently turns on the radio. I have it tuned to a classical station because it’s somehow easier for me to wake up at 6:00 A.M. to orchestral strains rather than a rock beat.
The flute. The seesaw of the string section. The pumping grunt of the tuba and the horn. Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” wings from wall to ceiling to floor, filling the room with chaos and drive.
This track is on a CD still in a birthing bag I have not unpacked.
This track was never played during my delivery, although I had a baby.
In one quick move I grab the clock radio and yank it out of the electrical socket where it’s plugged in. I hold it high over my head and hurl it across the room so that it smashes onto the wooden floor in a crescendo that would have done Wagner proud.
When there is only silence, I can hear the tatter of my breath. I imagine explaining this to Max. Or my mother, showing up with a grocery bag and stumbling into this scene. “Okay,” I say to myself. “You can do this. You just have to pick up the pieces.”
In the kitchen I find a black trash bag and a dustpa
n and broom. I take the remnants of the radio and clean them up. I sweep all the tiny fragments and the innards into the dustpan.
Pick up the pieces.
It’s that simple, really. For the first time in forty-eight hours I feel a shift, a purpose. I dial Dr. Gelman’s office for the second time in ten minutes. “This is Zoe Baxter again,” I say. “I’d like to schedule an appointment.”
There are several reasons that I went home with Max the first night I met him:
1. He smelled like summer.
2. I was not the kind of girl who went home with guys she just met. Ever.
3. He was bleeding profusely.
Even though it was Max’s brother’s wedding, he spent all his time waiting for me to have my next band break. While the other guys went out for a smoke or to grab a glass of water from the bar, I’d look down and find Max waiting for me with a soft drink. At the time, I assumed that he wasn’t drinking alcohol out of solidarity: I was working, and not allowed to, so neither would Max. I remember thinking that was awfully sweet. Something most guys would not have done.
I didn’t know the happy couple, since I was a last-minute substitute singer, but it was hard to believe that Reid and Max were related. Not just in looks—Reid was tall and athletic in a golf-and-racquetball kind of way, whereas Max was sheer brute size and strength—but also in demeanor. Reid’s friends seemed all to be bankers and lawyers who liked to hear themselves talk; their girlfriends and wives had names like Muffy and Winks. Reid’s new wife, Liddy, came from Mississippi and seemed to thank Jesus a lot—for the weather, the wine, and the fact that her grammy Kate had lived long enough to see a ring on Liddy’s finger. Compared to the rest of the wedding party, Max was much more refreshing: what you saw was what you got. By midnight, when we were scheduled to stop playing, I knew that Max ran his own landscaping business, that he plowed snow in the winter, that his older brother was responsible for the silver scar on his cheek (line drive with a baseball), and that he was allergic to shellfish. He knew that I could sing the alphabet backward, that I could play ten instruments, and that I wanted a family. A big family.