“No, that’s okay,” I said. “I have to go meet Magalie at Mercatto.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was just a routine exam.”
As I hurried across University Avenue, I glanced back through the corner of my eye at Mount Sinai, looming like a bunker. The air had suddenly grown chilly. A few weeks earlier, Toronto was in the midst of a heat wave; now everything seemed ready to die to make way for autumn. I was underdressed and shivered as I made my way to the restaurant. My discomfort seemed appropriate, just like the cramps that had run through my kidneys since the labour. The pain was reassuring, matching my state of mind.
Magalie stood up abruptly when she saw me through the front window of Mercatto. She was as dark as I was blond, as bright as I was pale. And yet, we were often mistaken for sisters. We had, it’s true, the same slender frame, the same triangular face.
Since moving to Toronto, we’d established a whole new circle of friends. It largely revolved around Gregory, but Magalie was the exception. She wasn’t in design; she was the administrative assistant at a French immersion school. I met her because her boyfriend at the time was an intern at our office. We became friends primarily because she spoke French. She’d since married a software architect, and they had a one-year-old son.
The hostess at Mercatto smiled warmly at me when she saw my belly. I still looked about six months pregnant. Magalie shot her a dirty look, and hurried to take my arm as she led me to the table, like I was an old lady.
“Emma! How are you?”
I sighed and tried to come up with a response that would please her. I felt empty. Alone. Such clichés. The truth was that I wanted to torture myself, to punish myself. I wanted to destroy the body that had failed to give me a baby; to cut open my useless belly, plunge my hands into my innards and devour my own guilty uterus, the way mothers eat their own placentas. As far as I was concerned, my system was dead.
That was not the picture Magalie wanted me to paint.
For her sake, I forced a sad smile and said that it would get better, that I was happy she was there. As I spoke, I fingered the scars on my arm.
“I know you think I don’t understand, but it’s not true,” she said. “You have the right not to be okay. You have the right to not want to talk about it, to not want to put yourself back there. Your pain is what’s left of him.”
My son, my pain. She understood after all.
In the following weeks, I thought often of that conversation with Magalie. It took me a long time to allow myself the right to feel better. Then one night, Gregory came home from work and I was sitting in the living room, petting the cat. He put down his bag in the entryway and came to join me. With his hand on my knee, he asked how my day had been.
“I dismantled the nursery,” I said.
He pulled his hand back.
“I gave everything away.”
Gregory gave his hair a nervous tousle. “To whom?” he asked.
“To the Salvation Army,” I said.
The Egg cradle, the Stokke dresser, the Surya rug. Thousands of dollars spent at Ella + Elliot. He briefly opened his mouth and ran his tongue along his teeth.
“And you feel better?” he said.
“Yes. Much,” I said confidently. “Also, I’ve decided we’re going to demolish the room. I want to expand the bathroom.”
Today was the day. I was becoming a mother. In a few hours, Daniil and Vanya would be my sons. They existed. They were real. There was no risk of them disappearing. I could already see us, Gregory and me, leaving the orphanage with our boys in their brand-new stroller. Our twins, who would fly home with us to Canada. Today.
I was just doing the latches on the suitcases, putting our things in impeccable order. The speed of events no longer worried me. I’d made my peace and adjusted. I felt strong. Two children were now counting on me. I moved gracefully through the room, shoulders straight, hips forward, paying special attention to my posture. I mustn’t forget anything. Gregory had arranged for the hotel to let us store our bags at reception while we went to pick up the children, and the taxi had been ordered. We would circle back for our bags, then go straight to the airport. It was a tight schedule, but our planning seemed flawless.
Gregory enjoyed assembling the double stroller, joking about the complexity of the design.
“Honestly,” he said, “it would have been easier just to carry them in our arms for such a short distance.”
But I wanted them to be comfortable, preparing for the possibility that they might not want us to carry them in our arms. They didn’t really know us, after all.
Its wheels pristine, the stroller rolled for the first time down the streets of Saint Petersburg. A fine rain refused to fall, hanging instead in a thick fog. I pulled down the visors so the seats wouldn’t get wet and closed the flaps of my trench coat. When we arrived, a group of children were playing in the muddy courtyard. They scratched at the layer of sandy snow, climbing on the structure of the swing set. Excited by our arrival, the pack pressed themselves against the chain-link fence, waving and shouting joyfully in their clipped tones.
Neither the director nor her assistant was there. An employee, Irina, seated us in the office. She handed me a yellow and blue BIC pen and a form and began pointing out the pages for us to sign, one at a time, passing the single pen back and forth. Gregory handed her the document. She
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