a surfer with a shock of blond hair and enough wattage in his smile to make grocery clerks drop his change and soccer moms slow down near our driveway. I was always considered smart, but by no stretch of the imagination am I a looker. I am the girl next door, the wallflower, the one whose features you cannot recall. The first time he talked to me-at his brother’s wedding, where I was filling in for the lead vocalist in the band, who’d developed a kidney stone-I turned around, certain that he was speaking to someone else. Years later he told me that he never knew what to say to girls but that my voice was like a drug; it had seeped into his veins and given him the courage to come up to me during the band’s fifteen-minute break.
He didn’t think a woman with a master’s degree in musicology would want anything to do with a college dropout / surf rat who was scraping together a landscaping business.
I didn’t think a man who could have taken home his pick of anyone with two X chromosomes would find me even remotely attractive.
Last night he put his gentle hand over our baby, an umbrella. “I thought talking about the baby was bad luck.”
It was. Or, at least, it always had been, to me. But we were so close to making it to the finish line. This was so real. What could possibly go wrong? “Well,” I said, “I changed my mind.”
“Okay, then. Elspeth,” Max said. “After my favorite aunt.”
He laughed. “I have another aunt named Ermintrude-”
“Hannah,” I countered. “Stella. Sage.”
“That’s a spice,” Max said.
“Yeah, but not like Ground Cloves. It’s pretty.”
He leaned over my belly and pressed his ear against it. “Let’s ask her what she wants to be called,” Max suggested. “I think… wait… no, hang on, she’s coming in loud and clear.” He looked up at me, his cheek still against our baby. “Bertha,” he pronounced.
The baby, as if to comment, gave his jaw a swift kick; and I was sure at the time that this meant she was fine. That it hadn’t been bad luck at all.
I am being turned inside out; I am falling through blades. I have never felt so much agony, as if the pain is trapped under my skin, and trying desperately to slice its way out.
“It’s going to be all right,” Max says, clasping my hand as if we are about to arm-wrestle. I wonder when he arrived. I wonder why he is lying to me.
His face is as white as a midnight moon, and, even though he’s only inches away, I can barely see him. Instead, there is a blur of doctors and nurses crowded into the tiny delivery room. An IV is fed into my arm. A band is wrapped around my belly and hooked up to a fetal monitor.
“I’m only twenty-eight weeks,” I pant.
“We know, honey,” a nurse says, and she turns her attention to the medical personnel. “I’m not getting anything on the monitor…”
“Try it again-”
I grab the nurse’s sleeve. “Is she… is she too little?”
“Zoe,” the nurse says, “we’re doing everything we can.” She fiddles with a knob on the monitor and readjusts the band around my belly. “I’m still not getting a heartbeat-”
“What?” I struggle to a sitting position as Max tries to hold me back. “Why not?”
“Get the ultrasound,” Dr. Gelman snaps, and a moment later one is wheeled in. Cold gel squirts onto my abdomen as I am twisted by another cramp. The doctor’s eyes are trained on the ultrasound monitor. “There’s the head,” she says calmly. “And there’s the heart.”
I look frantically, but I see only shifting sands of gray and black. “What do you see?”
“Zoe, I need you to relax for a moment,” Dr. Gelman says.
So I bite my lip. I listen to the blood pounding in my ears. A minute passes, and then another. There is no sound in the room except for the quiet beeps of machines.
And then Dr. Gelman says what I’ve known she’ll say all along. “I’m not seeing a heartbeat, Zoe.” She looks me in the eye. “I’m afraid your baby is dead.”
Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max’s hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It’s a note I have never heard-this chord of pure pain-and it takes a moment to realize it is coming from me.
This is what I have packed in my hospital bag for delivery:
A nightgown with tiny blue flowers printed all over it, although I haven’t worn a nightgown since I was twelve.
Three pairs of maternity underwear.
A change of clothes.
A small gift pack of cocoa butter lotion and soap leaves for a new mom, given to me by the mother of one of my recently discharged burn victims at the hospital.
An incredibly soft stuffed pig, which Max and I bought years ago, during my first pregnancy, before the miscarriage, when we were still capable of hope.
And my iPod, loaded with music. So much music. While doing my undergraduate degree at Berklee in music therapy, I had worked with the professor who first cataloged the effect of music therapy during childbirth. Although studies had been done linking music to breathing, and breathing to the autonomic nervous system, nothing had been done until that point to formally connect Lamaze breathing techniques to self-selected music. The premise was that women who listened to different music at different parts of labor could use that music to breathe properly, to remain relaxed, and to subsequently reduce labor pain.
At nineteen, I had found it amazing to work with someone whose research had become widespread practice during childbirth. I didn’t realize it would be another twenty-one years before I got the chance to try it myself.
Because music is so important to me, I selected the pieces to use during labor and delivery very carefully. For early labor, I would relax to Brahms. For active labor, when I needed to stay focused on my breathing, I chose music with a strong tempo and rhythm: Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” For transition, when I knew it would hurt the most, I had gathered a combination of music-from the songs with the strongest positive memories from my childhood-REO Speedwagon and Madonna and Elvis Costello and Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” whose angry lifts and falls would mirror what was going on in my body.
I wholeheartedly believe that music can alleviate the physical pain of childbirth.
I just don’t know if it can do anything for the grief.
While I am delivering the baby, I am already thinking that one day I will not remember this. That I will not remember Dr. Gelman talking about the submucosal fibroids that she had wanted to remove before this IVF cycle-a surgery I declined, because I was in too big a hurry to get pregnant-fibroids which are now so much bigger. I will not remember her telling me that the placenta had sheared away from the uterine wall. I will not feel her checking my cervix and quietly saying that I’m at six centimeters. I will not notice Max hooking up my iPod so that Beethoven fills the room; I will not see the nurses gliding in somber slow motion, so different from every giddy and raucous labor and delivery I’ve ever seen on
I will not remember my water being broken, or how so much blood soaked the sheet beneath me. I won’t remember the sad eyes of the anesthesiologist who said he was sorry for my loss before he rolled me onto my side to give me an epidural.
I won’t remember losing the sensation in my legs and thinking that this was a start, wondering if they could fix it so that I didn’t feel anything at all.
I won’t recall opening my eyes after a knotted contraction and seeing Max’s face, twisted just as hard as mine with tears.
I won’t remember telling Max to turn off the Beethoven. And I won’t remember that, when he didn’t do it fast enough, I lashed out with one arm and knocked the iPod dock station to the floor and broke it.
I won’t remember that, afterward, it was silent.
I will have to be told by someone else how the baby slipped between my legs like a silver fish, how Dr. Gelman said the baby was a boy.
