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By Root 435 0

— and come back for the follow-up examination. It will be better for our morale, he said in French, and the doctor nodded. Our terrible news had been relayed by my friends Wendy and Ann to the rest of my friends in America, and now I phoned to say — to say what, I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to disappear into France and grief. I called on our cell phone from our hotel room or from sidewalk cafés in the woundingly lovely French spring. Everything hurt. We ordered carafe after carafe of rosé, and I told my friends about the Dwarfs of Grief, and I listened to their loud, shocked, relieved laughter. I felt a strange responsibility to sound as though I were not going mad with sorrow. Maybe I managed it. At that moment I felt so ruined by life that I couldn’t imagine it ever getting worse, which just shows that my sense of humor was slightly more durable than my imagination.

Edward and I made a lot of plans that week; we thought all sorts of things were possible. For instance, we decided as we wept that we would go somewhere we’d never been as soon as we could. We were leaving France anyhow: we’d been there for a year and a half, and I’d landed a teaching job in the United States in the fall. Edward would look after the baby while I was at school. Our plan had been to go straight to the States, to Saratoga Springs, to settle in before my job started in September. Instead, we decided to pack the house and just — go. Barcelona, maybe. We pictured ourselves walking beneath a hot, unfamiliar sun, somewhere where the drinks were plentiful and not made in France. We believed that a short while devoted to oblivion and beauty would make us feel better. We thought that we could feel better. Soon enough the notion seemed ludicrous, and we forgot about our Spanish plans. Instead we spent the summer in England, on the North Norfolk coast, looking at the North Sea and hoping that Edward’s U.S. immigration application would be straightened out by fall.

Maybe Spain was just like my early jokes: I wanted to say something to my friends and family that wasn’t Our child died and our life is over.

Anyhow, for a few days we were stuck in Bordeaux, killing time until my follow-up appointment. I didn’t want to eat, we couldn’t drink forever, the hotel room was claustrophobic. Our second morning, we decided to walk through a flea market in a nearby park just to look at something different. All spring we’d gone to French flea markets, driving hours to look at piles of junk, or preposterously priced Louis XVI armoires, or glorious 1930s French bookends. Over the months we’d bought a handsome old clock and a sign advertising oysters, a pair of vases made of WWII artillery shells and a lampshade hand-painted with sea serpents of the here-be-dragons variety. We’d even been to this very flea market the week before, after an appointment with an anesthesiologist.

(He wanted to look at my back to see if I was a good candidate for an epidural, should I need one; he’d said in English, while thumbing my spine, “You see, I may come across your back in the middle of the night. You say you aren’t going to show up in the middle of the night, but somehow you always do. Three, four in the morning, there you are. Always I see you in the middle of the night.”

“I’ll try my best to avoid it,” I said. I planned on avoiding an epidural altogether.

He said, gravely, “Even so.”)

At the Bordeaux flea market a week later we started down the aisles between vendor tents. Every step I took made me sick. All those flea markets we’d gone to were just a form of daydreaming: we were buying objects for some future house we’d live in with the nice baby we were going to have. The glass light-up globe would go on his bookshelf. The low chair upholstered in old carpet would be perfect for nursing. In the spring we would flea-market as a family, the baby in his sling cuddled up while I leaned over one of those flat cases filled with metal whatnots, jewelry, cutlery, old coins, one hand on his head to protect him, the other pointing, as I said, “Excusez-moi, madame . . .”

You see,