Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.
Summer
The summer crept in subtly, from warm days to oppressive heat relieved only temporarily by afternoon thunderstorms. In that part of the state, few houses were equipped with air conditioning, and the truly hot days were spent miserably in front of a box fan willing away the relentless humidity.
As the temperature climbed in early July, Rebecca ballooned in the final weeks of pregnancy. She took Jack to a pond to swim in the morning while Brian rushed to finish a manuscript meant to secure his future at the college. A tentative position had been secured for the fall, but their assurance of staying was not certain.
Nights were worst. Although the summer was usually not hot, this year sent heatwave after heatwave crashing over Rebecca’s enlarged body, aching veins, and pounding head in what felt like endless fire. Already prone to insomnia in pregnancy, the summer nights dragged.
One midnight, weeks ahead of her daughter’s expected arrival, Rebecca slept soundly for what felt like the first time in weeks. Exhausted, she fell into a dream. She was swimming. The pool was warm but it offered relief, finally a break from the heat. She kept swimming, trying to enjoy the new sensation, a hint of fear lurking in her conscious mind just off stage.
She awoke to find herself damp with sweat, the bed soaked. Making her way to the bathroom, she flicked on the light to see she was covered not only with sweat but crimson blood. Panicked, Rebecca turned on the bedroom lights, shocking Brian out of sleep. The sheets were soaked.
Forgetting to inform Brian of anything, Rebecca fumbled for a phone, calling the midwives in a numb panic. The midwife she liked least picked up, sounding groggy. Though Rebecca kept trying to convey how much blood there was and the terror coursing through her, the midwife mistook her for a hysterical woman and dismissed her concerns. “It should be fine, honey. Just come down to the hospital if you’re really worried and we’ll check things out, but you’re full-term at this point. There’s often a lot of blood,” she said with a knowing tone that did nothing to reassure Rebecca.
“Get in the car!” Rebecca barked to Brian.
Brian, still struggling to regain consciousness from a heavy sleep stumbled about bewildered. “We’re going to the hospital? Who’s going to watch Jack?”
“We don’t have time! Put him in the car!”
Jack was momentarily roused while Brian hurriedly buckled him in, but after a few minutes of whimpering he fell back to sleep and there was silence. The early morning air felt cooler than it had in recent weeks, almost refreshing. Rebecca sat tense and unmoving in the passenger seat, a bundle of towels under her. “It’ll be okay, sweetheart,” Brian said reaching over to grasp her hand gripping the center console. Rebecca bristled at his touch and said nothing.
Once they reached the hospital, Brian dropped her off at the emergency room entrance and went to park the car. Rebecca blinked at the blaring lights, searching for a friendly face to help her, to ease the panic that was still gripping her chest.
After several minutes of bustling and confusion the disliked midwife appeared, chipper as usual. She breezed through the curtains around Rebecca and confidently picked up the wand for the ultrasound machine. Even her bubbly face turned ashen as the minutes ticked by and she kept probing, searching, slowly starting to panic.
The next hours were for Rebecca a dreamlike state. She knew there was pain. The midwife cooed and stroked her arm when what she longed for was silence and the absence of touch. Brian paced the hall holding an over-tired two-year-old, too long and lanky to be carried comfortably, his pajama shirt out of place in the sterile hospital hallway.
Finally, hours after the sun had broken over the tree line, Rebecca’s body strained to bring forth her dead daughter. What she had wanted was a healing, natural experience to cleanse the harsh medicalized birth with Jack. What she received was profoundly unnatural: the struggle of expelling an unresponsive baby, one no longer capable of moving and cooperating in the miracle of birth. She beheld her child with quiet fear, uncertain of how she should feel, let alone how she really did feel.
A nurse had taken Jack down to the end of the hall for crackers and juice boxes so Brian could come into the room alone. He looked shaken, desperately searching Rebecca’s face for a cue. She offered none. Finally, he ventured tentatively, a hand on the cold, gray little form draped across Rebecca’s chest, “Should we bring Jack in to meet her?”
“No,” Rebecca responded with an unwarranted fierceness, “He’s too young!”
For Brian, a man who studied poetry as an occupation, the poetry of life and death colliding in the mysterious liminal space unfolding in the hospital room was more than he could bear. The living presence of the emotions he methodically noted in verse were of a blistering intensity that forced him to avert his gaze, relying on Rebecca to experience the moment itself; he only participated through her at a distance.
In the seemingly unforgiveable cruelty of the world, time continued to pass. At some point, Brian left with Jack to return to the house. Rebecca felt immense relief to be left alone and was annoyed to discover that she would be regularly interrupted to have her temperature taken, blood pressure checked, abdomen prodded and pushed. She took the pills offered to her eagerly, wanting only to escape to sleep before hearing another cry of a live birth down the hall. They had planned to name her Lydia.
The loss of the baby left Rebecca stunned. She moved quietly through the world, observing herself as if she were someone else. She looked on apathetically as her body continued to develop, seeking to nourish a child who was being prepared for burial. Weeks passed in a haze of relatives visiting, plans being made, an excruciating drive to Connecticut to place Lydia in the ground next to great-grandparents. Never having breathed air with the living, she now slept with the dead.
Weeks after the cataclysm, mid-August, the air had the cool golden quality unique to New England at that time of year. Rebecca stood before her closet vexed at finding nothing to wear. The flowing linen dresses of pregnancy hung, sack-like from her deflated body. But the clothes she had worn last summer dug painfully into folds of flesh that had not been there before pregnancy. Quietly, the numbness she had so carefully cultivated over the first few weeks of grief began to crack.
Brian had already left the house, glancing at Rebecca with sad eyes. He seemed afraid to touch her though he seemed to desire nothing more. He fixated on the manuscript, close to completion, a lifeline for a family in crisis, the possibility stable position and adequate salary to pay a mortgage. Rebecca saw none of this drive, only a silent man who vanished early in the morning and appeared, ragged and frayed, late at night.
Rebecca descended the stairs soundlessly to discover Jack methodically destroying a vase of artificial flowers. Oblivious to the dishes mounting in the sink, the dirt and sand collecting along the edges of the floor, Rebecca began another endless day waiting for the time when she could sleep again.
No longer staying light until after nine, the evening had turned dark and chill, the Milky Way splashed between the towering pines on either side of the yard. The headlights from Brian’s car illuminated the side of the house, the stonewall, the trees, and the tires ground to a halt on the gravel of the driveway.
In the house, Rebecca was not alone. Across the table from her, obscured by a hefty vase overflowing with delicate blooms carefully selected by Beverly, was Gene. He had arrived hours earlier as Rebecca hummed and patted Jack’s back to get him to drift off to sleep. Until recently, Jack had gone to sleep by himself, but a maternal impulse drove Rebecca to baby him, rocking and humming, swaying to comfort imagined cries.
Gene had come only to drop off the flowers, clearly pained to be there but also agonized at having stayed away. Mutely, Rebecca had gestured for him to come in. With surprising ease, they fell to discussing the changing weather, the approaching semester, and then books they would like to read. Softened by half an hour of pleasant conversation, they turned to the unacknowledged wound.
“I suppose you know what it’s like to lose a child,” Rebecca said, glancing toward the window where the sun sank lower in the sky.
“Not really. She wasn’t my child to lose.” Rebecca looked up, surprised, drawn out of herself for the first time in weeks.
Gene continued, “Oh, I raised Jessica as my daughter, and, of course, I loved her. But she wasn’t mine.” With a faint smile, he explained, “Beverly and I grew up together in a town not far from here. I always assumed we’d marry. Then I was drafted for Vietnam and left without making any firm promises. I returned ready to marry her and found her living at her mother’s house with her new husband, married just six months before. Beverly has always been independent, never waited for anyone to give her permission.”
“What happened?” Rebecca asked, enthralled.
“Within a year, they had a baby, Jessica. Then her husband got cancer. Died within months. He was only 26. Maybe just blinded by grief, Beverly agreed to marry me. The rest, as they say, is history.”
“Did you want more children?”
“No, it never seemed important. I think we both thought it would happen someday. But Beverly needed time. She was pregnant when Dave was diagnosed, Jessica not yet six-months-old. She considered traveling to New York for what they called in those days a ‘therapeutic’ abortion. Before she could make the trip, she miscarried. She was always ambivalent about children.”
Rebecca pressed Gene for more, curiosity tugging at her attention, “And what about you?”
“I thought we had plenty of time. I was busy with a career. By the time we thought seriously about having a baby, it had been 10 years, and it just didn’t work out. Jessica was a beautiful little girl, sweet by nature. But she was never mine. She was Dave’s. Beverly was always Dave’s. In a sense, one of the best things that happened in my life was the death of good man.”
Rebecca sat silently, wondering. She saw Gene’s attentive affection for her in a new light, the adoration of a man who had never possessed anyone, always moved singly through the world. Gene shrugged off her concerned look, asking, “What about you?”
“What about me?” Rebecca echoed wryly. “I don’t feel as though I lost a child. We never met her. She was never really here. Just a dream it seems.”
“And what happens next?”
“I’m thinking of staying here. Brian keeps pushing to move somewhere else. Start over. I couldn’t bear it. The only connection I have to my daughter who never lived is this place, the land, the weather.”
“That would be a mistake,” Gene replied bluntly.
Rebecca looked up, their eyes meeting over the vase of large, late-summer blooms. “What do you mean?”
“You have a lot of life to live. I can tell you, if you stay here, you may never get over it.”
Rebecca said pathetically, “I’d like to stay with you.”
“I’m no longer with the living. I’ve written my last book. I know my heart is bad, and I won’t be going for surgery again. When the time comes, next week or next year, and I feel my heart failing, I’m not going to go anywhere, no racing to Boston to try to cheat death. I’m going to lay down right here, in the woods. I’ve lived enough life.
Rebecca stared, shocked fully beyond her personal pain and grief. Gene looked calm and resolute, and Rebecca could see there was little chance of convincing him of anything, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to try. After this realization, she felt a fresh wave of grief, a different agony of loss. With Gene’s pronouncement a hope she had not known she was nurturing died. His admiration of her was not enough to make him want to stay in the world. Their meeting of minds and lonely hearts was not a passionate romance budding between late youth and old wisdom. They were merely neighbors shrouded in personal pain, briefly entwined by pleasant companionship.
Moments later, Rebecca heard the gravel move under Brian’s car.
Brian looked surprised to see Gene sitting at their kitchen table. He seemed eager for him to go. As Gene left, Rebecca fought back the feeling of fresh loss and greater deprivation. Brian pushed forward, sitting her back down at the table. He moved Jack’s chair, a booster seat strapped to a regular chair, crusted with the remains of applesauce and macaroni and cheese. He placed the chair Gene had used next to Rebecca and took her hand in his.
Feeling singed by the unwanted touch, Rebecca delicately withdrew her hand, looking down.
“I can’t pretend to know what you’ve gone through,” Brian began tentatively. “I’ve got some good news, though. Something has finally come through.” Rebecca looked at him, clearly not registering what he was talking about, emotions starting to churn inside her.
Unfazed, Brian continued, “With a good position. There’s been a last-minute opening in New Orleans. We can move for the fall semester with a good chance of a tenure-track opening in the spring. This is exactly what we need. A chance to start over. Begin again. Have another baby. This could be great for our family.”
At the words “another baby,” the tears that had been swelling in her eyes spilled over her lashes and splashed down cheeks flushed with an intensity of conflicted feeling. To Brian, the tears were only a mother’s pain. But they were also the anguish of a lonely woman relinquishing control of her life. “I thought you said you didn’t want any more children,” Rebecca spat bitterly.
“Well, that was before I knew it would die,” Brian said helplessly. Rebecca noticed with anguish that Brian had reverted to calling their child “it,” though she herself had done the same. “Well, we can talk about that later. But we should move. You can’t possibly want to stay here.”
Pummeled by Gene’s parting and Brian’s plans, Rebecca was too exhausted to respond.
Gently, Brian said, “You can think about it,” adding, “But we have to make a decision by the weekend. This could be a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
He left her sitting at the kitchen table as he went wearily to bed. She fingered the flowers on the table as Jack might, picking apart the delicate blossoms into their constituent parts as she brooded. Although she had longed all day to go to bed and enter the temporary oblivion of dreamless sleep, now that the time had come, she could not convince herself to rise from the table. Trapped with her thoughts, she circled wearily around the jagged edge of bitterness that had gripped her with the death of her unborn daughter. In truth, that unhappiness had existed in seed form long before that painful day, gradually taking root, only bursting to the surface when the opportunity for grief presented itself. She had carefully watered that despair with her tears, and Gene’s admission of loneliness and pain had fertilized it.
Against what seemed to her the screaming resistance of every fiber of her being, she gave up picking at the festering wound, at least for this one night. She rose heavily from the table, flicking off the kitchen light and ascending the stairs. She could hear Brian snoring lightly, already asleep under a flood of exhaustion. With no desire or comfort in her heart, she rearranged the tangled sheets on her side of the bed and lay down. Grateful for the cool of the August night, Rebecca relaxed and waited patiently for the night to creep by, inching all but unnoticeably toward another dawn.
