The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [62]
Avery had no answer to this. He gathered her toward him.
– It's not my fault, but maybe I could have prevented it. Maybe both things are true.
Jean's logic hovered in the lamplight, and remained in the darkness as she lay in bed, and was still there the next morning and the next; many days afterwards, her first thought upon waking: maybe both things are true.
– It is not the heat, the doctor in the camp told Jean several days later. Sometimes, something goes wrong and the baby is not meant to be born. That is all.
Some mothers say they feel the exact moment the child stops living. Some sense something wrong, or dream of death without knowing why; others notice only later, when the movement stops – although even this is only a feeling, for when the baby is this large, it no longer has room anyway to move in the womb.
There is no safe way to induce the birth. It is best to let the body make its own decision, though this is a danger if labour waits too long. You may have to carry the still-baby for some weeks, perhaps even as long as a month.
Avery put his hand on her taut skin where he had felt movement for so many weeks and now felt nothing.
– Sometimes, the doctor said, it is simply not meant to be.
Avery could not help himself thinking: All the water inside her and our child dead.
– It is time to go to Cairo, the doctor said.
The young Nubian woman who had offered to bless the child in the Nile dipped palm leaves in river water and wrapped the cool greenness over Jean's distended belly. The leaves drew the heat from her skin. Again and again the woman did this for her, until Jean fell asleep.
No need of a translator between the two women now.
Jean understood that she must leave; await her time at the hospital in Cairo. But instead, for days, she remained in the darkness of the houseboat. And Avery, though anxious and afraid, could not deny her this right.
She did not know how to grieve; she could not separate the baby's body from her own. What had been a vulnerable ripeness, her shape, she now felt as deformity. The earth-weight, now a child cast in stone.
She remembered a middle-aged woman from her neighbourhood in Montreal who walked everywhere backwards, her elderly mother always beside her, watching out for her. The resigned love in the mother's face as she looked eternally into the damaged face of her daughter. When Jean was a girl, this sight had frightened her. Now, twenty years later, a welt of pity rose in her heart.
She sat in the dark cabin and could not make out the difference between soul and ghost.
She remembered the young girl from Faras, on the train travelling on forever without her mother's satchel.
For hours working on deck, Avery heard nothing beneath him. But when he went below, he found it had not been the silence of sleep, but of a disappearance. Jean sitting up in bed, staring into the dark; a vigil. When he tried to come near, he felt it, her invisible shrivelling from touch. As if she had spoken aloud: My body is a grave.
The pilot stood some way off, waiting.
– Are you sure you must go alone? asked Avery.
–Yes, said Jean. Her face was stony, the tears leaking out. We don't know how long we'll have to wait.
He moved toward her.
– If you come close, she said, I won't be able to go.
A moment passes; with all its possibilities. All that love allows us, and does not allow.
Avery ached when he saw the pilot's hand touching her arm, helping her board the plane.
No one knows what triggers labour. Finally, simply, the wild hormones are released.
Clutching the hands of a stranger – a nurse she'd never met and would never see again – suddenly Jean did not believe the child was dead. She rushed toward the pain, each contraction proof that the child was struggling to be born. Within the pain Jean felt an unbearable purpose, almost an ecstasy. But the baby would not come out. All through the labour, Jean would not give up this new knowledge, the feeling that the child was alive. She felt the presence of a soul returned to her, overwhelming, feasting