An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [17]
Maud had a little girl last September, named Mia. That’s all I know.
The first thing we did back at Savary was dismantle the future. That is, Edward broke down the portable crib that had been waiting for a few weeks on my side of the bed. I threw out all my maternity clothes, just threw them away, along with the single package of diapers I’d obediently bought (my baby book warned me that you could never be really sure how big your newborn would be). We tossed out the stuffed hippopotamus from Edward’s sister and any other toylike object. For a month I’d fallen asleep looking at an old artist’s palette that had been painted to look like a grinning face, like Punch in profile. Another flea market find, we’d hung it over the crib. That we burned in a bonfire out back, along with the baby books.
But not the baby clothes.
The baby clothes had crowded out mine in my chest of drawers. There were the silly things I’d bought him, ludicrous, adorable, irreplaceable. A pair of plaid plus fours. A striped turtleneck with a picture of Babar. A thick blue and brown coat with toggle closures. Those leather baby shoes. An Iowa Hawkeyes onesie, his first present, which our friends Tim and Wendy had brought when they came to visit. A Union Jack hat from Catherine, my sister-in-law, along with a 1940s-style cloth coat. Two beautiful tiny sweaters knit by Edward’s mother. Bibs. Socks. About half the clothes were hand-me-downs from a little boy named Owen who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was outgrowing things faster than his mother could keep up.
Who can separate practicality from hope from lingering superstition? We wanted another child. We wanted to fill those clothes.
And so, without even looking, we packed them away, three boxes full. We could throw them out later, if we had to.
That afternoon we called the movers, who were going to take our boxes to Edward’s parents’ house in England. They were supposed to come in five days, but we hadn’t settled on an actual time. The owner of the business, an English guy in his thirties, had been over to the house two weeks before to give us an estimate. A lifetime ago. We’d talked about babies. His son had been born in Bordeaux, too, with kidney problems. The hospital was good, he’d said. Now Edward left a message with the receptionist at the moving company explaining what had happened.
“It doesn’t need to be mentioned again,” said Edward. “I just wanted him to know ahead of time so he won’t ask.”
The owner called back later that day, all business, to say that he’d be over the next morning to take our stuff.
“I thought Monday,” said Edward.
No, said the mover, this was it, their one trip for the month.
“You do understand what we’ve gone through,” said Edward cautiously.
Yes, he did.
It was Thursday. I checked the voicemail, sure that he’d said Monday. He had.
Edward called back.
Well, said the mover, then that was a mistake, but that’s how it is.
It seemed too much to bear. How could we be expected to buy packing tape when our child had died? To pack in eighteen hours what we’d thought we’d had three days to do? To stay up all night sealing up cartons, for someone else’s mistake? I was furious, insane at the injustice of having to deal with anything even mildly difficult in the face of the hardest thing in the world. “When,” I asked Edward, as we drove to buy more tape, “did we become characters in a Raymond