A GURNEY HAS APPEARED, magically, in the hall outside the bathroom, accompanied by two ambulance attendants. All I’ve ever wanted is to lie down. The attendants insert an IV. I am wheeled into the elevator, then out onto the street, where I blink in the bright sun. Passersby turn their heads as I’m lifted into the ambulance. From somewhere far away, I hear Degan saying he’ll drive the car and meet me at the hospital. A siren starts up, announcing our procession. I’m a queen being carried through the streets on horseback. Traffic parts around us.
For the second time in a week, my ears are wet, filling up with tears.
At the hospital, morphine. Oxygen tubes in my nose. A male nurse with a ring through his eyebrow says, “You’ve lost a lot of blood. Your blood pressure is still very low. Without that IV you would have needed a transfusion.”
“What IV?”
I look down at the line into my arm.
Through a thin curtain, a man’s gravelly voice: “I normally drink three bottles of wine a day. But I went cold turkey on Monday.”
His doctor asks, “Do you ever hear voices? On the TV, say, talking to you?”
A woman chimes in: “He’s paranoid about his bosses at work.”
To my right, another woman, who took all her husband’s heart medication. She keeps repeating, “It’s okay. It’s fine. You don’t need to help me. I don’t want to live.”
I’m moved to a different room. The nurse with the eyebrow ring appears again, asks, “How are you feeling?” I roll onto my side, wipe the tears from my cheeks.
“We need to know your blood type,” he says. “But your father gave us the rest of the info.”
“The info?”
“Your address and birthday. Those things.”
Should I correct him? “I think you mean my husband,” I say.
“No, I mean your father. He’s in the waiting room.”
“That’s my husband.”
“It’s your father,” he says.
“My father lives in another city.”
The nurse shrugs.
“How much morphine did you give me?” I ask.
The man in the waiting room is in fact my father. He came into Toronto for an errand earlier in the day. But bad news travels like dominoes falling, and now he’s here with me. Not an angel, not exactly. But close.
Dad smoothes the hair back from my forehead. “Hi, sweetie,” he says. I have a sudden visceral memory of the lily of the valley he would bring to my bedside when I was a girl, a small vase on my dresser. The lush, heady fragrance announcing itself in the long spring evenings: Beauty is here. Beauty survives.
Later—hours, or days: time has gone elastic—Degan appears with a wheelchair. He pushes me down into the basement of the hospital. We are shown into a dark room where an ultrasound technician is tutoring his trainee. He mumbles something; there’s a long silence, and I realize he’s talking to me.
“Pardon me?”
“Get on the table,” the technician says.
Degan corrects him under his breath: “Get on the table, please.”
He helps me up tenderly, as a mother might help her child. I arrange my hospital gown over my legs, but the technician yanks it back up. He squirts a glob of jelly on my stomach and moves the wand across my flesh. The screen appears grey, an undifferentiated stretch of snow. This time there is no blinking beacon.
I flush with the ignominy of what my body has done.
Degan’s eyebrows are up, though, and he’s smiling. “I think I see something,” he says.
I can hardly stand his hope. He has been waiting for this moment, for his first glimpse of our child, and now his heart imagines what his mind knows isn’t there. Because, of course, this is not the ultrasound he’s been looking forward to. This is something different altogether.
A doctor arrives with the results. The fetus, the egg sac, all the “products of the pregnancy” are gone. We gather up my blood-soaked clothes in a plastic bag. I am given a skirt from the hospital’s lost-and-found, and a new shirt: some other woman’s clothes. Degan drives us home. Along Spadina, night has fallen swiftly. Street lights and pizza joints. Two of us, where this morning there were three.
I sleep the whole next day. When Degan gets home from work, he tidies the bedroom while I cook rice and cut vegetables. There is a mushroom that has a smaller mushroom fused into its side. I chop the mother and baby apart without mercy. Tears in my eyes while I stir-fry.
Friday morning we make raspberry smoothies, and French toast with last week’s leftover challah. I move around the kitchen, my head in and out of the fridge, with no nausea whatsoever. After having sworn I would never again—never again—drink coffee, I brew a pot and guzzle it with relish. The pregnancy hormones are draining out of me like liquid through a sieve, my body giving up the task it has been performing so diligently for the past thirteen weeks.
I go into the bathroom and find Degan staring at himself in the mirror.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“No, really.”
“Can I see the ultrasound photo?”
I go into the bedroom and pull it out of its thin envelope. Degan cradles it, slight as a moth’s wing, in his palm. We peer at the charcoal smudge against the field of darker grey. Who was she? Who would she have become? Someone. A person. We’ll never know.
In the evening we bring candles into the bedroom and lie together in the low flicker. When it’s time to go to sleep, Degan wants to blow them out. He’s nothing if not aware of a fire hazard. But I see him linger a little longer over the third light, for our lost child, before snuffing it out.
He eventually falls asleep, but I’m awake and alert, a hole in my chest the wind is whistling through.
I understand for the first time—really understand—the thin membrane between death and life. Everyone will die. Everyone I love. It’s banal, and obvious, and earth-shattering.
I push back the covers and pad through the dark apartment. A sliver of moon just visible through the kitchen window. The quiet hum of the dishwasher finishing its work. In my study, I reach for the ultrasound picture; it is not on the table where we left it. I look beneath papers, between pages of books. When I still can’t find it, I panic, ripping through drawers and turning out pockets. If I can’t see the photo, I will die.
It’s there, all at once, in full view on my desk. I cry with relief and despair. The little grey blur. The inkling. All I’ll ever know of my daughter.
On Saturday morning Shayna picks me up early, takes me to a Shabbat service held in someone’s home. There are maybe twenty others, mostly strangers to me. We chant single lines of liturgy, weaving them through the morning like strands of golden thread. The last chant is from the Song of Songs: zeh dodi v’zeh rayee—“this is my beloved; this is my friend.” As we sing, we circle around each other, looking each other in the eye. Seeing, being seen. Such raw power.
After, the leader asks, “Does anyone need to say Kaddish?” Kaddish is recited when someone has died, and therefore, by The Mourner’s definition, been alive. So my baby doesn’t count.
The circle is quiet. Shayna reaches for my hand; I hold tight to her thin fingers. The leader looks around at us all, his eyes falling for a long moment on me. “I’ll say it for us all,” he decides. And he begins: “Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name …”