Handle With Care Read online

  You stared at her. 'Why does Amelia have cotton candy on her head?'

  I sucked in my breath. 'I can't do this now,' I said, 'I just can't.' And I walked up the stairs as if each step was made of glass.

  During the last eight weeks of my pregnancy, there were three seconds every morning that were perfect. I'd float to the surface of consciousness, and for those few blissful moments, I would have forgotten. I'd feel the slow roll of you, the snare drum of your kicks, and I'd think everything was going to be fine.

  Reality always dropped like a curtain: that kick might have fractured your leg yet again. That turn you'd completed inside me could have hurt you. I'd lie very still on my pillow and wonder if you would die during delivery, or moments after. Or whether we would be lucky enough to win the jackpot: you'd survive, and be severely disabled. It was no small irony, I thought, that if your bones broke, so did my heart.

  Once, I had a nightmare. I had given birth and no one would talk to me, tell me what was going on. Instead, the obstetrician and the anesthesiologist and the nurses all turned their backs on me. 'Where's my baby?' I demanded, and even Sean shook his head and backed away. I struggled to a sitting position until I could look down between my legs and see it: what should have been a baby was just a pile of shattered crystal; between the shards I could see your tiny fingernails, a bloom of brain, an ear, a loop of intestine.

  I had woken up, screaming; it took hours to fall back asleep. That next morning, when Sean woke me up, I said I could not get out of bed. And I meant it: I was certain that the very act of living, for me, would be a threat to your survival. With every step I took you might be jarred; by contrast, with care, I might keep you from breaking apart.

  Sean had called Piper, who showed up at the house and talked to me about the logistics of pregnancy the way she'd describe them to a small child: the amniotic sac, the fluid, the cushion between my body and yours. I knew all this, of course, but then again, I thought I'd known other things that had turned out to be wrong: that bones grew stronger, not weaker; that a fetus not having Down syndrome must mean it was otherwise healthy. She told Sean maybe I just needed a day to sleep this off, and she'd check back in with me later. But Sean was still worried, and after calling in sick to work, he phoned our priest.

  Father Grady, apparently, made house calls. He sat down on a chair that Sean brought into the bedroom. 'I hear you're a little worried.'

  'That's an understatement,' I said.

  'God doesn't give people burdens they can't handle,' Father Grady pointed out.

  That was all very well and good, but what had my baby done to piss Him off? Why would she have to prove herself by being hurt, before she even got here?

  'I've always believed that He saves truly special babies for parents He trusts,' Father Grady said.

  'My baby might die,' I said flatly.

  'Your baby might not stay in this world,' he corrected. 'Instead, she'll get to be with Jesus.'

  I felt tears in my eyes. 'Well, let Him have someone else's baby.'

  'Charlotte!' Sean said.

  Father Grady looked down at me with wide, warm eyes. 'Sean thought maybe it would help if I came over to bless the baby. Do you mind?' He lifted his hand, left it hovering over my abdomen.

  I nodded; I was not about to turn down a blessing. But as he prayed over the hill of my belly, I silently said my own prayer: Let me keep her, and you can take everything else I have.

  He left me with a holy card propped on my nightstand and promised to pray for us. Sean walked him back downstairs, and I stared at that card. Jesus was stretched across the crucifix. He had suffered pain, I realized. He knew what it was like to feel a nail breaking through your skin, shattering the bone.

  Twenty minutes later, dressed and showered, I found Sean sitting at the kitchen table cradling his head in his hands. He looked so beaten, so helpless. I was so busy worrying about this baby myself, I had not seen what he was going through. Imagine making a career out of protecting people, and then not being able to rescue your own unborn child. 'You're up,' he said the obvious.

  'I thought maybe I'd go for a little walk.'

  'Good. Fresh air. I'll come with you.' He stood too quickly, rattling the table.

  'You know,' I said, trying to smile, 'I need to be by myself.'

  'Oh - right. No problem,' he said, but he looked a little wounded. I could not understand the physics of this situation: we were in the thickest, most suffocating mess together; how could we possibly feel so far apart?

  Sean assumed I needed to clear my head, think, reflect. But Father Grady's visit had gotten me wondering about a woman who'd stopped going to our church a year ago. She lived a half mile down the street, and from time to time I saw her putting out her garbage. Her name was Annie, and all I knew about her was that she'd been pregnant, and then one day she wasn't, and after that, she never came to Mass again. The rumor was that she'd had an abortion.

  I had grown up Catholic. I had been taught by nuns. There were girls who'd gotten pregnant, but they either disappeared from the class rosters or left for a semester abroad, returning quieter and skittish. But in spite of this, I'd voted Democratic ever since I turned eighteen. It might not be my personal choice, but I thought women ought to have one.

  These days, though, I was wondering if it wasn't my personal choice because I was Catholic, or simply because I had never been forced to make it in practice, instead of theory.

  Annie's house was yellow, with fairy-tale trim and gardens that were full of day lilies in the summertime. I walked up to the front door and knocked, wondering what I would say to her if she answered. Hi, I'm Charlotte. Why did you do it?

  It was a relief when no one answered; this was feeling more and more like a stupid idea. I'd started back down the driveway when suddenly I heard a voice behind me. 'Oh, hi. I thought I heard someone on the porch.' Annie was wearing jeans, a sleeveless red shirt, and gardening gloves. Her hair was caught up in a knot on the back of her head, and she was smiling. 'You live up the road, don't you?'

  I looked at her. 'There's something wrong with my baby,' I blurted.

  She folded her arms across her chest, and the smile vanished from her face. 'I'm sorry,' she said woodenly.

  'The doctors told me that if she lives - if - she's going to be so sick. So, so sick. And I'm not supposed to think about it, but I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.' I wiped my face with my sleeve. 'I can't tell my husband. I can't tell him I've even thought about this.'

  She scuffed at the ground with her sneaker. 'My baby would have been two years, six months, and four days old today,' she said. 'There was something wrong with her, something genetic. If she lived, she would have been profoundly retarded. Like a six-month-old, forever.' She took a deep breath. 'It was my mother who talked me into it. She said, Annie, you can barely take care of yourself. How are you going to take care of a baby like that? She said, You're young. You'll have another one. So I gave in, and my doctor induced me at twenty-two weeks.' Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.'

  There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.

  'They gave me a choice,' Annie said, 'and even now, I wish they hadn't.'

  Amelia

  T

  hat night, I let you brush my hair and stick scrunchies all over it. Usually, you just made massive knots and a