Ben found us in the car, wheels spinning out in the snow. I’d gotten stuck on the turn from the back roads to the highway, aiming for the hospital, driving wildly, my only thought saving my child. My ankle was swollen, bruising a mottled purple, possibly broken. Clara seemed unharmed—just very cold, so cold that her fingers were bloodless and white.
Luckily we were only sitting for about half an hour before Ben pulled up in a rented off-roader, its massive wheels salt-streaked and angry. I had my blinkers on, and I was, as always, nursing Clara. I’d been watching the highway for headlights, listening for a motor, waiting for some rural soul to pass so I could lean hard on my horn. If that didn’t work, I was preparing myself to double Clara’s blankets, grit my teeth and walk into town even though it was ten miles away. When I saw Ben, the stupidity of either plan unraveled. The stupidity of all of it unraveled, and I felt myself awash with self-disgust, mortified and afraid and suspicious and silent on the way to the Wisconsin ER.
Ben didn’t seem mad at me, then. He said, “I’m mad at myself for not knowing.” Even when they had to cut off the tip of Clara’s frostbitten left pinkie, he said, “I’m not mad at you, Megan.”
THEY LET CLARA stay with me at first, when I transferred to the mother-baby unit in Chicago, because I was nursing. The doctors thought it was better to keep us together, both for the breast milk and to minimize the immediate trauma. We had a nurse beside us constantly, observing, but I didn’t mind the company. I didn’t trust myself alone.
The doctors talked to me about my symptoms. They talked to me about my moods. They made a plan for me, which included a prescribed course of pills and spending time apart from Clara. I couldn’t nurse her anymore because of the chemicals. They wanted me to focus on myself. They said they took her away so that I could sleep, so I could begin my recovery. The prognosis was good, and if I kept taking the pills, they said she soon would be returned to me, but a minute is an hour is a day when she is still so young, and though it was only forty-eight hours of sustained separation, I calculated that I’d be missing one percent of her life thus far. I lay at night with my eyes open—the city below me, around me—remembering when I lay at night with my eyes open in a different wing of this same hospital complex, watching Clara’s first outside-my-body sleep. I could take the pills, but I couldn’t get better until she was back with me. I said that to the doctor, and he nodded and told me that was good.
At first I couldn’t understand why this had happened to me, or even whether this had happened to me. What had happened to me? Margaret and Michael, according to my doctors, had not. I’d been in a fugue state, broken psychotic, experienced a “flight of ideas.” This wasn’t necessarily common, postpartum, but all assured me it wasn’t totally unusual.
It had been me, and not Michael or Margaret, who’d hurt Clara. I didn’t think I’d wanted to hurt her; I was also sure I hadn’t done all that I could have done to keep her safe. I was angry at my ineptitude, my warped instincts. I felt profoundly ashamed.
This wasn’t what my life was supposed to look like. This wasn’t what motherhood was supposed to look like. I wasn’t supposed to need so much: not doctors, not medications, not Clara, not Ben. I wasn’t supposed to cause so much trouble.
I wasn’t supposed to be Michael, or Margaret.
Eventually the pills dulled my delusions, and along with them my feelings about my delusions. My feelings about my behavior, about other mothers who hadn’t been broken, about my own mother. Once I was dull enough, they gave Clara back to me.
I still had thoughts. I still had needs. But these were thought and needed under the new, thin, hazy layer of my treatment—a growing scar tissue of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers that would thicken.
I went to the group therapy sessions in the common room at the end of the hall, and felt impossibly lonely. The explanation for my postpartum behavior was hormones, and genetic predispositions, and stress. None of these other women knew me, and none of them knew about Michael or Margaret. One had tried to drown her baby, another was severely depressed, and then there were three empty seats for whoever might next be made mentally unstable by motherhood. Apparently we were in one of only three hospitals in the country to provide this level of postpartum psychological care.
When the pills made my heart race, they gave me lithium and ECT—knocked me out and rewired me with electrical currents. They told me I might experience memory loss or temporary confusion, but I remembered everything.
MARGARET ONCE SAID that she felt her whole life was spent falling “deeper and deeper into the illusion that one is separate and so far away from others that only by playing a part could one meet one’s fellows.” Accounts of her by friends, all given after her death, seemed to corroborate this worldview. Many said they loved her, but felt they didn’t really know her. Everyone thought maybe the others knew her better, but it turned out that nobody did.
Maybe Michael had been the one to know her. Or maybe it was Pebble, the boatbuilding Rockefeller heir she’d been engaged to when she died. But he’d never shown up for me anywhere—not in the cabin or the condo, not in my dreams.
BEN CAME TO visit, at first without his laptop, then with it. He would answer emails in the corner while I cuddled Clara, or watched TV, or slept. He’d come with us to the hospital’s baby massage sessions or splash play. I was trying, with the help of the pills and the therapy, to be the person I’d been when Ben first married me. From the way he looked at me—approving, relieved—it seemed like maybe I’d succeed. Annie came to visit with magazines and stories about her dates with Garbage Greg. Seth and Linda brought a ficus, and some chocolates, and more sympathy than I had expected. My father didn’t come, of course, and neither did my stepmother or Kelsey.
I was an inpatient for six weeks, and only at the very end of my hospital stay did my mother come to visit. I was packing up the cards I had pinned to the wall, and throwing away the dead flowers, and she walked in just as the credits were rolling on a Golden Girls rerun.
“I want to apologize,” she said, and I laughed. I couldn’t remember a time in which my mother had uttered those words in that order: more often it was “Young lady, come apologize to me at once.” I left Annie’s hydrangeas to make wet stem-prints on the paper tablecloth and sat down at the edge of the bed. Clara was cooing in the hospital bassinet, the same wood and clear plastic as the one they’d given her at birth. Her left hand was still wrapped in gauze, which she was busy trying to get off. I sat looking at her, waiting for what my mother would tell us.
“For?” I said finally. But that was it. That was all we were getting, me and Clara, as our maternal family legacy.
I didn’t think about my mother’s mother much—I’d never met her. She died when my mother was ten, and no one ever bothered to tell me and Annie how. I’d assumed something like cancer; now I wasn’t so sure.
“What a shame,” my mother said, stroking Clara’s forehead and removing a wet strip of gauze from Clara’s mouth, “that she won’t ever be able to play the piano.”
WE DIDN’T TALK about the things that were difficult to talk about. We, meaning my family—Annie, my mother, my father, myself—and we, meaning me and Ben. I would like to say that my reticence changed after Michael and Margaret. I would like to say I left the hospital emboldened, but I didn’t. As it had been with my mother, so it was with me: some time away, a regime of medication, a finger stuck back in the dike.
But evolution is a slow climb, trekking eons of the same until finally, something different. And Clara was now missing a finger.