An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [47]
A year later, when we spoke of the anniversary of Pudding’s death, it was hard to know how to measure it. It felt like something biblical, though not out of the Testament I know anything about. He died, and then two days later he was born. Where was he in the meantime?
Since he died, I’ve never had a dream of him alive.
In the morning the ward midwife came to get us. We’d been awake for hours. I went down the hall first, to the showers, five tiny cabins on a narrow corridor. I barely fit. It was the first shower I’d taken since Pudding had died. I soaped myself without looking, dried myself with the sad French institutional towel, and put on the hospital gown.
What is there to say of the labor, the delivery? The midwives, one in her thirties and one in her early twenties, were sweet and attentive. The oddball anesthesiologist came back and gave a long lecture in English about epidurals, how they blocked both pain and the ability to sense temperature. He tested his work by running an ice cube down my leg. This epidural, he said, taking a seat next to my bed and crossing his legs in a jaunty manner, was self-administered. I would have a button to press for more relief. It still might run out, and I should say if it did. It did run out. They fed more medication into the machine, which fed into me. In that dry patch of no pain relief, I twisted Edward’s hand and said in a panicked voice, “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this!” but I gather plenty of women in labor say the same thing.
Edward and I had discussed it: I told him to leave the room for the actual delivery. It was a horrible thing to go through, and I wanted to spare him. That is, the watching seemed horrible to me. The delivery did not seem nearly so bad. Really, it felt like the last thing I could do for Pudding.
Edward had shouldered a great deal in the past few days, he had pushed his enormous pain aside to tend to me, and this seemed like one piece of pain I could keep him from. Pudding’s death was something the two of us went through together. The delivery wasn’t, couldn’t be. In the end, it didn’t even seem like something I went through. Those midwives in their French politeness called me Mrs. Harvey, Madame Harvey. They addressed me in the formal manner: Poussez, Madame Harvey, très bien, Madame Harvey, and that’s who it was happening to, someone else, someone differently named, worthy of respect. The epidural did its job and I felt nothing and in the end it wasn’t something Edward and I went through together and it wasn’t something that I went through by myself. It was something that Pudding had to go through. We three women in the room did our best to help him but in the end he was alone.
They took him immediately from the room to clean him up and got Edward. He looked so sad, my poor husband. I don’t know how long he’d been out of the room. Twenty minutes, I think. Everyone had told us that it was very important to see our child no matter what. Now we waited dutifully for Pudding. The nurses brought him in and set him on the delivery table, in front of where I sat cross-legged in my gown.
“He looks like an old man,” Edward whispered, stroking his arm. A medium-sized baby, just over seven pounds. We touched him very tenderly. He wore a diaper and a knit yellow hat. The hair beneath the hat was dark, like mine. His cheeks were plump and his legs were skinny, and yellow, and undeniably dead. From the waist up he was rosy, and his lips were very, very red, very defined in his face. They were his father’s lips.
We stroked him and told him we were sorry. Later Edward said, “I didn’t know what it was I was feeling. Then I realized it was seeing someone and knowing immediately that you love him.”
“We’re ready,” we told the midwives, and they took him away. My great regret is that I didn’t pick him up.
For a long time when I looked at Edward, the first place my eyes stopped at was his