The New World: A Novel

by Chris Adrian

  Jane sat on the floor and poked absently at Flanagan’s button. Her mother kept trying to send her to bed, since she and Millicent had the project totally under control, but Jane wouldn’t go. It felt more and more like being at the funeral again—watching other people bustle about on Jim’s behalf while she just sat there and watched, suspecting that none of it was any more real than a dream she kept having, in which she sat on their stoop watching a boy-size Jim licking a popsicle that was an exact replica of his head. Every night she watched him, and he watched her back with a dull, lazy look, exactly the way some wary, bored child might look at you over his ice cream. And always, eventually, he held the stick out to her, and without any hesitation at all she took a long lick up the side of the nose. It tasted like peaches.

  “Look what I’ve found, Jane. You don’t want to give this away.” Her mother was holding a piece of heavy paper in her hands while Millicent looked over her shoulder and made a sad purr. Jane hadn’t known that was in here. She thought Jim would have put it in the safe. “Do you remember this?” her mother asked stupidly. It was not a birth certificate or a death certificate, or even a baptismal certificate. It was more like a little crafts project, something one of the nurses had led them through after the stillbirth, the hands and feet recorded forever (or as long as paper might last) in blue-black ink.

  “Oh, that . . .” Jane said, pressing her button furiously as she got up to go lie down on her bed. “You can just throw it away.”

  She lay facedown on the bed with her arms out beside her, utterly still except for the spasmodic clicking of her thumb, and even that died away as she remembered that Polaris had nothing to do with this particular anguish. Her mother didn’t have to step out of the closet for Jane to hear her in her head: One death recalls another, and whenever somebody dies on you, everyone you’ve ever lost dies again. But it wasn’t as simple as that.

  That last almost-baby, all the almost-babies (not so fully formed as the last one, in his delicate and excruciating little nose and fingers and cheeks and toes, but not much less real for that) and also the hosts of theoretical babies, the ones they might have had or might yet have been trying for, had gathered together into a single entity, a confederated accuser who had prosecuted vigorously against the meaning of Jane’s life. She and Jim had eventually, on the other side of her stupid affair, found a way to live a defense together, though Jim always had his crazy chaplain ways of thinking about it, and she had her own ways. But they hadn’t had to agree on everything to make the defense work. The question now—and she started clicking vigorously again as she understood this—was how she was ever going to win this new case, when Jim, her partner, her chief counsel, her only real friend, had gone over to join the prosecution. This has nothing to do with the baby! she wanted to shout at her mother, who, worse than being right all the time, was always just barely wrong.

  “Well, of course Jim’s thinking about a baby now,” her mother had told her, when Jane had gone up to Northampton alone to fetch the cat back, after a two-week trip to Puerto Rico to celebrate Jim getting off anticoagulants. “It’s like he’s finally all better. And he nearly died, didn’t he? Never mind that it was nearly two years ago to you and me. To him, it was probably yesterday. A little fender bender or ten pages of Camus was always enough to make your father come at me like a Mormon. Just give him some time. He’ll settle down. And he can’t be a surgeon anymore. He’s just looking for something to do with his life, isn’t he?”

  “But did you want one?”

  “One what, dear?”

  Jane rolled her eyes. “A little Mormon.”

  “Well, no,” her mother said, looking searchingly into her tea. “Not at first. And that’s all right, you know. It’s just two entirely different states of existence, the before and the after of it. Neither can understand the other, but one is also not inferior to the other.”

  “I have no idea what you’re saying,” Jane told her. “But you know what I would never tell my child? I didn’t want to have a baby.”

  “Jane,” her mother said. “You’re not a teenager. If you want me to help you in your discernment, you have to let me be honest with you.”

  “But I don’t want your help,” Jane said. “I don’t even want to talk about this anymore. I just came here to get my cat!”

  “Of course,” her mother said. “When have you ever needed anybody’s help?” She clapped her hands and called for Millicent, who did all the actual work of cat-sitting when Jane left Feathers at the house. Millicent brought the cat in, dressed up like a baby, of course, which Jane would have accused her mother of setting up somehow, if this hadn’t been their first conversation about a baby, and if Millicent wasn’t always dressing the animal up and emailing photos of Librarian Cat, Housewife Cat, or Junkie Cat. Baby Cat was just a stupid coincidence. “Oh, Millicent,” Jane’s mother said. “That’s Jane’s christening dress.”

  Millicent frowned and handed Jane the cat, a floppy overweight Maine coon, who lay placidly in her arms with its eyes half-closed. Jane scowled at all of them.

  “She’s very pretty, though,” her mother said, to Millicent’s quivering lip. And to Jane she said, “Doesn’t it feel nice? That’s all I meant, dear. You’ll never really know what it means to want one, until you’re actually holding it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said to her mother. And she didn’t throw away her birth-control pills when she got home, but she did put them away someplace where they’d stay out of sight, a bathroom drawer full of old shampoo that she hadn’t used in years. “Well,” she said to Jim in bed that night. “Here we go, I guess.”

  She got pregnant right away, and lost it right away, which she saw as a punishment for not wanting it enough, for feigning interest for Jim’s sake. Soon, though, as a baby became the only thing she wanted, she grew convinced that she had in fact been feigning disinterest to herself, but this deception deserved a punishment of its own. Intellectually, that chain of reasoning was hard to sustain, but she had no trouble at all feeling the truth of it, through two more miscarriages and the trying and trying and trying in between.

  Later she wondered if she ought to have consulted somebody before trying the first time, if she might have managed some kind of preemptive hormonal redecoration to make her body more hospitable to the little speck. She was forty-one when they started, after all. But when she asked her ob (a woman as blunt as a punch in the face) about it, she told Jane not to be stupid. “Nice try,” she said, “but you can’t make this your fault.” How very like an ob, Jane thought, that brusque attacking kindness, catty and paranoid and defensive all at once. Jane liked it. As the losses (and the expense) mounted, people came crawling out of the woodwork, reeking of baby, to recommend their own doctors or fertility centers, but Jane would never have dreamed of leaving hers. Though she pretended to be comforted by Jim, her own doctor was the only person who could make her feel better about what was happening.

  Of course, the doctor’s awesome crankiness eventually failed her. When she gave Jane the news that the baby was dead inside her at thirty weeks, and would have to be delivered in some grotesque mockery of childbirth, it would have been so much better if she had said, You are a useless lady, a waste of space as a body, a bad idea, even, and I hate you through and through—but none of that has anything to do with why you lost this baby. But she was all sad sweetness during the delivery. “You’re going to get through this,” she kept saying confidently.

  “Okay,” Jane replied. “But then what?”

  “Then we just do whatever comes next,” Jim said. He held her hand and told her, like everybody else in that strange, subdued room, to push or not push. None of them seemed to understand that Jane might actually be giving birth to the sadness that would claim the rest of her life. You don’t even have to put me under, she wanted to say, but just cut it out. Don’t make me participate in this.

  When the baby was out, somebody wrapped it up and put it on her chest. She wasn’t entirely t
here for that part. One of her baby books had told her about the rush of relief and joy she would feel when the baby was born, that she should get ready for the most indescribable feeling you will ever have. That part held true—the terrible feeling, with the shape of elation but the substance of regret, was so hard to describe she thought it would kill her to try, so she stayed quiet and still, half out of her mind. When she awoke to the world, a nurse was there, stamping the baby’s little hands and feet, performing the whole operation upon Jane’s body like she was a crafts table. “What are you doing?” Jane said. “Are you booking it for a crime? Are you booking it for being dead?”

  “It’s just handprints and footprints,” the nurse said, wincing slightly. “For the memory box.”

  “I said it was okay,” Jim said.

  “A memory box? Does it seal the memories in and keep them there forever and never let them out?”

  “If you want it to,” the nurse said without looking at Jane. To Jim, she said, “I’ve asked the chaplain to come.”

  “Okay,” Jim said.

  “Why not?” Jane asked. “Maybe he can take a picture of us with his phone.”

  “Jane,” Jim said. “Jesus.”

  “Sure,” she said. “He can come too. As long as the chaplain is coming. Why is this on me? Did somebody ask me before they put it there?”

  “I wanted . . .” Jim said. “I thought you would . . .”

  “What am I supposed to do with it? Feed it?”

  “It’s a boy,” he said.

  “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to find out about that.” She turned away from him as much as she could without spilling the baby off her chest.

  “Not before it was born,” Jim said stupidly, but Jane only sighed.

  “So what are we going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know,” Jim said. “They’ll release him to us. Or cremate him.”

  “Like medical waste,” Jane said. “Maybe we should just put him in a coffee tin and bury it in the yard.”

  “Or we could have him stuffed,” Jim said. “How about that? Stuffed and poseable? We could dress him up for holidays. Hell, we could put him on top of the Christmas tree!”

  “Stop,” she said.

  “Stop what?” Jim asked. “I’m just being funny. Now we’re both comedians. How’s that? Maybe if we’re funny enough, the baby will laugh.”

  “Now you’re being cruel,” she said.

  “Well, you were cruel first,” Jim said, and put his face in his hands. And that was how the chaplain found them. Later, Jim imagined what they must have looked like, him hiding his face, Jane turned away in bitter anger and hurt, and the purple-faced, half-swaddled baby neglected between them on her chest.

  “May I come in?” the stranger asked. “I’m Dick Carver, the chaplain on call.”

  “All right,” Jim said.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said to them.

  “Thanks,” Jane said flatly. “It’s okay, though. We did some crafts.”

  “Oh,” Dick said. “May I?” He picked up the certificate and frowned at it.

  “You can have it, if you want.”

  “No, thank you,” Dick said. “But I think I hear you. It’s too much, isn’t it? And not enough, at the same time.” He was a little hobbit of a man, shaggy-haired and hairy-handed. Jim was sure his feet must be covered with fur.

  “Sure,” Jane said. When Jim took her hand she didn’t pull away, but she didn’t look at him, either.

  “Would you like to do something else? I could do something else, if you’d like me to.”

  “What do you mean?” Jim asked.

  “A ceremony. Something small. But sometimes it’s . . .” He waved the certificate. “Often it’s more than this. Would you like to?”

  “Sure,” Jim said right away. Jane rolled her eyes. “Her mother is a pastor,” Jim said, as if he needed to explain why his wife wasn’t being more polite. But Jane didn’t take away her hand.

  “My father was a pastor too,” said Dick, and then put the certificate aside and got started. Much later, he and Jim would have debates about the nature and use of pastoral authority, because Jim objected, in theory, to Dick’s habit of boldly taking control of emotional horror shows in the hospital. But in practice, that early morning, it made all the difference in the world for this little man to boss them around for five minutes. He didn’t take away Jim’s grief, or lessen it by a single iota, but he took control of it for a few moments, which felt like enough time for Jim to get a toe back into the world.

  Dick sang a psalm in Hebrew, then recited a Yeats poem about a child stolen by fairies, gently bludgeoning them with the refrain until Jane and Jim were both freely in tears. Then he asked what name they would like for the baptism.

  “Baptism?” Jane said. “Like a Catholic?”

  “Not into a church,” Dick said. “Into your lives.”

  “Ralph,” said Jim.

  “Ralph?” Jane asked. That hadn’t even been on their list of possible names.

  “I don’t want to use any of those names,” Jim said, not saying to her (and barely saying to himself) that he wanted to save them all for the other babies, the ones they might still have.

  Dick took a splash from a plastic water bottle and put it on the baby’s tiny head. “Ralph,” he said. “With water as pure as your spirit I baptize you son to your father, Jim, and son to your mother, Jane. Love created you. Love will sustain them through the loss of you. You will always be remembered.” Then he asked Jim and Jane if they wanted to say something.

  “Did you hear that, Ralph?” Jim sobbed. “It doesn’t matter that you’re dead. We love you anyway.”

  “Yes, it does,” Jane said quietly. “Yes, it does matter. But we love you. That part’s true.”

  Before the two of them could argue the point, Dick closed them down with another sung Hebrew prayer. He must have withdrawn sometime very soon after that, but Jim had no memory of him leaving. Jim didn’t remember anything of the hour or so that followed except that when someone finally came to take the baby away, Jane held it to her chest and said, barely intelligible through her tears, “I never want to see another baby again as long as I live.”

  “You don’t have to,” Jim said. “You never do.” But he of course wasn’t able to protect her, in the weeks and months afterward, from the random child who pulled on her skirt in the supermarket line and said, Hey, lady, you have pretty hair, or the trick-or-treaters who ignored his no candy tonight sign and rang insistently at the doorbell, or even, eventually, the sight of her patients, whose faces at least were hidden from her as they lay opened before her, half dead and half alive, on the operating table.

  He couldn’t even protect her from his own (deeply considered but still totally unwise) overtures toward adoption, the brochures from agencies that he left about as if by accident, or the disastrous Christmas gift of an African orphan sponsorship. He was trying so hard, and none of it helped.

  “She doesn’t even notice,” he said eventually to Dick, after Dick had become his supervisor. Jim had enrolled in Clinical Pastoral Education courses—partly to give Jane space, partly to keep himself busy. “Or maybe she doesn’t even care.”

  “Or maybe she doesn’t understand,” Dick said. “You’re speaking a different language now. She’s a surgeon, after all.”

  “So am I,” Jim said.

  “Not anymore,” Dick said, leaning forward and staring at him in the way he had during their first week of instruction, when he said, “I am bringing all of my attention to bear on you. Your job is to be fully present for my attention.” Jim laughed at him the first few times, but he found that as he learned to actually be more present, as he learned that presence was actually a skill you could practice, he found he had to cover his face with his hands after only a moment or two. It was a year before he could ever stare Dick down.

  He looked away. “Now you’re one of us,” Dick said.

  “I’m getting there, anyway
,” Jim said. He hadn’t yet been tested in the way he knew would make him or break him. He failed the first few times, calling Dick in the middle of the night and asking him to go to the hospital in his stead, because he just wasn’t ready to face those parents yet. And then, once he had gathered the courage to go into the room, he failed again, muttering uselessly at them about how they would find a way to be happy again. He cried out his tears in the hospital bathroom, so Jane wouldn’t have to see them.

  “But are we parents?” the poor father asked him, the night Jim passed the test. I was answering for all of us, he tried to tell Jane, who seemed too tired to listen to him, when he rushed home to let her know what had finally happened.

  “Of course you are,” Jim said, crying, but not out of control; overwhelmed, but not crushed, believing it for all of them in the room and for Jane, too, believing it for every stillborn parent in the world. “And now, just like for any of us who’ve had a child, nothing is ever going to be the same for you.”

  “That’s lovely,” Sondra said, leaning on one arm in her bed with one hand in her curls and one on her heart, “in a really terrible way.”

  “But really I had nothing to do with it,” Jim said. “Everything helpful or true about the moment was in them. I was just the stick for the rock candy, you know?”

  “I hate rock candy,” Sondra said. “But I probably know what you mean. People were always telling me their troubles, in the shop. People are so stupid, most of the time.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “So all you have to do is listen to them and then when they ask you what they should do, you say, ‘Don’t be so stupid.’ ”

  “Did you and Joe ever want to have children?” Jim asked.

  “Jesus, no,” she said. “Never. We thought we did, at first, but it didn’t take much not getting one before we realized we were upset about not having something other people wanted for us. So I sat us down in the chair, so to speak, and told us to stop being so stupid.”