The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [63]
The next morning, they opened her. The scalpel made a red seam beneath her belly, and they squeezed the dead child out. Now the nurses swaddled the child, a daughter, as if she were alive, in sweet-smelling cotton blankets, and waited for Avery's arrival. Jean held the sunken head against her own face, she clutched the now weightless baby and would not let go; the embrace that no nurse or midwife dared to tear apart. With infinite tenderness, Jean cradled the perfect cheeks that death had pressed with its thumbs.
The nurses would not forcibly take the baby from her. They stood by – the nurses, Avery – in the face of Jean's suffering. They could not spare her; for different reasons, they could not fully share it. There was a hair, a thread of terror in their empathy.
The nurses came and went, impatient to take the child away. The room grew dark; they came in to turn on the light, still waiting.
Avery sat in a chair next to the bed. When at last Jean fell asleep, he took their daughter from her arms.
The moment Jean woke, she called desperately for a nurse to bring back her child, the child who had died twice. Then she saw the guilt, the wretchedness, the betrayal, in Avery's face.
Afterwards, Jean could not take care of herself; she remained in the hospital, so listless she could not brush her teeth. Her milk came in. Her breasts went hard. The baby was sent to Montreal, where Marina received her, burying her granddaughter, Elisabeth Willa Escher, near Jean's parents, in the graveyard at St. Jerome. Jean was no longer in the ward with expectant mothers bulging with life. Now she was in a room with women waiting, at various distances from death; heart disease, kidney failure. In Cairo, the heat pounded against the windows of the crowded hospital ward. In Montreal, the dark, cold, spring rain. Marina wrote and asked if she could come. No, answered Jean, don't come.
For months after birth, a child remains in the mother's body; moon and tide. Before the child cries, the mother flashes wet with milk. Before the child wakes and cries out in the night, the mother wakes. Deep in the child's cranial vault, the mother's gaze knits up the dangling synapses.
And when the child is spirit, it is exactly the same.
For several days Jean had noticed an old man sitting on the steps as she came back from her slow walk around the hospital garden. Then, one day, she did not look away quickly enough to avoid his gaze.
– You're walking a little better today, he said. Please sit with me and rest for a few minutes.
Jean hesitated. Then she sat down on the step below him.
– No, here, beside me.
Jean sat beside him. They leaned over their knees to their feet, as one leans over a railing to look down into an abyss.
– I know about your child, he said. I asked about you and the nurse told me. But now I am speaking of that young boy, that Monkey. I couldn't help but overhear you, with your husband. I didn't mean to listen, but people always talk freely next to me, even though the old have the greatest need for eavesdropping.
Jean could feel the tremble in the old man's arms and shoulders as he sat beside her.
– Let us imagine you are right, he continued, and his life was somehow in your hands. You were sent to him and this was your purpose in coming to this country. Perhaps your whole life, every choice, was meant to lead you to the very moment of meeting the boy in order to save him. But, if that were so, do you think that after so many years of living in preparation, your destiny would have failed you, or that you would have failed your destiny? And of your own child? Perhaps what you live now is still your destiny. And you do not know the meaning yet.
– I did fail, said Jean. I feel it inside,