and more each day, and I pretended that I was anywhere but here.
My baby was eight inches long. He could smile. He had eyebrows and eyelashes; he sucked his thuv›‹ D‡mb. He had his own set of fingerprints and footprints. His eyes were still closed, heavy-lidded, waiting to see.
I knew everything I could about this baby. I read so many books on pregnancy and birth that I memorized certain sections. I knew what the signs of false labor were. I learned the terms “bloody show” and “effacement and dilatation.” Sometimes I actually believed that studying every possible fact about pregnancy might make up for the shortcomings I would have as a mother.
My third month had been the hardest. After those first few episodes, I was never sick, but the things I learned cramped my gut and took my breath away. At twelve weeks, my baby had been one and a half inches long. He weighed one twenty-eighth of an ounce. He had five webbed fingers, hair follicles. He could kick and move. He had a tiny brain, one that could send and receive messages. I spent much of that month with my hands spread over my abdomen, as if I could hold him in. Because once, a long long time ago, I had had another baby twelve weeks old. I tried not to compare, but that was inevitable. I told myself to be happy I did not know the facts about it then, as I did now.
The reason I had had an abortion was that I wasn’t ready to be a mother; I couldn’t have given a child the kind of life it deserved to have. Adoption wasn’t an alternative, either, since that would have meant I’d be pregnant full term-I couldn’t bring that kind of shame to my father. Seven years later, I had almost convinced myself that these were good excuses. But sometimes I would sit in my Barely White kitchen, run my fingers over the cool, smooth travel photos, and I would wonder if things were so different. Yes, I now had the means to support a baby. I could afford to buy the beautiful blond Scandinavian nursery furniture, the bright googly-eyed fish mobile. But I had two strikes against me: I still had no mother of my own as a model. I had killed my first child.
I went to stand and ground my belly into the edge of the kitchen table, wincing at the pain. My stomach was round but rock hard, and it seemed to have a million nerve endings. My body, curved in places where it never had been, was a hazard. I found myself stuck in tight spots-backed against walls, caught between closely placed restaurant chairs, trapped in the aisles of buses. I couldn’t judge the space I needed anymore, and I willed myself to believe that this would change in time.
Restless, I pulled on my boots and went to stand on the porch. It was raining, but I didn’t particularly care. It was my only day off all week, Nicholas was at the hospital, and I had to go somewhere-anywhere-even if it wasn’t to Borneo or Java. These days, I seemed always to want to be moving. I twitched all night in bed, never staying asleep for a full eight hours. I paced behind the receptionist’s desk at work. When I sat down to read, my fingers fluttered at my sides.
I pulled on my coat without bothering to button it and headed down the street. I kept walking until I reached the heart of Cambridge. I stood under the plexiglass hood of the T station, beside a black woman with three children. She placed her hands on my stomach, the way everyone did these days. A pregnant woman, I had discovered, was public property. “You been sick?” the woman asked, and I shook my head. “Then it’s a boy.” She pulled her children out into the rain, and they walked toward Mass. Ave., jumping in puddles.
I wrapped my scarf around my head and moved into the rain again. I walked down Brattle, stopping at a tiny fenced-in play yard attached to a church. It was wet and empty, the slide still coated with last week’s snow. I turned away and kept moving down the street until the storefronts and brick buildings faded into residential clapboard mansions with spotty naked trees. I walked until I realized I was going to the graveyard.
It was a famous one, full of Revolutionary soldiers and startling tombstones. My favorite was a thin slate, jagged and broken, that announced the body of Sarah Edwards, who died of a bullet wound given by a man not her husband. The graves, placed irregularly and close together, looked like crooked teeth. Some of the markers had fallen onto their sides and were strewn with vines and brambles. Here and there a footprint was pressed into the frozen ground, making me wonder who, other than me, came to a place like this.
As a child, I had gone to graveyards with my mother. “It’s the only place I can think,” she once told me. Sometimes she went just to sit. Sometimes she went to pay her respects to near strangers. Often we went together and sat on the smooth hot stones, worn down by praying hands, and we spread between us a picnic.
My mother wrote obituaries for the
My mother took dozens of these calls every day, and she told me over and over again how she never failed to be surprised by the number of deaths in Chicago. She would come home and reel off the names of the deceased to me, which she had a knack for remembering the way some people have a thing for telephone numbers. She never went to the cemetery to see these people-the “classifieds”-at least not intentionally. But from time to time her editor let her write one of the real obituaries, the ones for semifamous people, set in skinny columns like news articles. HERBERT R. QUASHNER, the headline would read. WAS ARMY LAB FOREMAN. My mother liked doing those best. “You get to tell a story,” she’d say. “This guy used to be a member of the Destroyer Escort Sailors Association. He was in World War II, on a submarine chaser. He belonged to the Elks.”
My mother wrote these obituaries at home, sitting at the kitchen table. She used to complain about deadlines, which she said was pretty funny, given her business. When the articles were printed, she clipped them neatly and stored them in a photo album. I used to wonder what would happen to that album if we all died in a fire; whether the police would think my mother had been a sick serial killer. But my mother insisted on keeping a record of her work, which she left behind, anyway, the day she disappeared.
My mother would make a weekly list of the important names she wrote about. Then on Saturday, her day off, we’d go to the closest cemeteries, looking for the freshly turned earthssiNturned ea that marked the newest interments. My mother would kneel in front of the graves of these people she hardly knew, still without headstones. She would sift the fine brown dirt through her fingers like a sieve. “Paige,” she’d say, throwing back her shoulders, “take a deep breath. What can you smell?”
I would look around and see the lilac bushes and the forsythia, but I wouldn’t take a deep breath. There was something about being in the cemetery that made me monitor my breathing, as if without warning I might find that I’d run out of air.
Once, my mother and I sat under the red shade of a Japanese maple, having visited the former Mary T. French, a public librarian. We had eaten barbecued chicken and potato salad and had wiped our fingers on our skirts, devil-may-care. Then my mother had stretched out across an old grassy grave, resting her head on a flat marker. She patted her thighs, encouraging me to lie down as well.
“You’re going to crush him,” I said, very serious, and my mother obligingly moved to the side. I sat down beside her and put my head in her lap and let the sun wash over my closed eyes and my smile. My mother’s skirt blew about, whipping the edge of my neck. “Mommy,” I said, “where do you go when you’re dead?”
My mother took a deep breath, one that made her body puff like a cushion. “I don’t know, Paige,” she said. “Where do you think you go?”
I ran my hand over the cool grass to my right. “Maybe they’re all underground, looking up at us.”
“Maybe they’re in heaven, looking down,” my mother said.
I opened my eyes and stared at the sun until bursts of color exploded, orange and yellow and red, like fireworks. “What’s heaven like?” I said.
My mother had rolled to her side, sliding me off her lap. “After sticking out life,” she had said, “I hope it’s whatever you want it to be.”
It struck me as I moved through this Cambridge graveyard that my own mother could be in heaven now. If there was a heaven; if she had died. I wondered if she was buried in a state where it never snowed, if she was in a different country. I wondered who came to lay lilies at her grave and who had commissioned the inscription. I wondered if her obituary would mention that she was the devoted mother of Paige O’Toole.
I used to ask my father why my mother left, and he told me over and over the same thing: “Because she wanted to.” As the years went by he said it with less bitterness, but that didn’t make the words any easier to believe. The mother I imagined over the years, the one with the shy smile and the full skirts, who had the power to heal scrapes and bruises with a kiss and who could tell bedtime stories like Scheherazade, would not have left. I
