Though having even one baby, thought Clara, seemed extravagant. She considered what it must be like to have two children, as many babies—or more—as one had arms to hold them. Such juggling would be required. A kind of a dance, she imagined it, requiring fluency, balance. (When she thought of Jess, Clara had visions of spinning plates in the air. And also of bathtubs and frogs.)
At home alone, Clara took up her place in the doorway, watching the marks on the wall, although they began to seem like less of a promise as seasons went by and no baby came.For the first time, Clara envied her sisters, how easily their babies had arrived, and this became just another reason to keep her distance from her family, from everyone. She knew her sisters would try to talk sense into her, broaching fostering and adoption, listing all the reasons why fertility treatments were against God’s will. No thank you, she didn’t need to be around her sisters, especially because being around her nieces and nephews only made her heart ache. She got enough of that at work with the children she taught, their lisps, pigtails, knobby knees, and tiny noses, and their certainty about their futures: they were all going to be paleontologists and archeologists, celebrity zoologists and butterfly scientists. When she told them that butterfly scientists were called lepidopterists, they looked at her as though she were stupid. Of course they already knew that. They stood for everything Clara had ever wanted and had become so far out of reach.
—
When it happened, after so long—years—she thought they were kidding, that there had been a mix-up. She made the nurse—not Donna, she’d retired—double-check, triple-check. But there it was on the ultrasound screen, in her womb—herwomb! Three weeks along—most people wouldn’t know this early, but the fortune they’d forked over came with benefits. It was all still early, the nurse said, but the baby was just fine.
Those early weeks crept by slowly, and Clara tried not to hope, steeled herself, because she’d been here before. As the first trimester progressed, she made excuses at work for her pallor, her regular exits to throw up in the bathroom, the days she couldn’t come in because she couldn’t get out of bed. She was so sick.
“This is a good sign,” Nick told her, parroting something she’d told him after reading it in a book—that morningsickness was a sign of a healthy pregnancy. Clara hadn’t been ill at all with the baby she miscarried. But hearing her words in his mouth only made her realize how desperate she was for any assurance, how flimsy the foundation of any hope was.
It was September but still so hot outside, and she’d come home from work to collapse into the chaise longue in their backyard, desperate for some semblance of a breeze. Since she’d been pregnant, she couldn’t stand thinking about food, so she hadn’t been cooking, although she would eat whatever Nick delivered—barbecued meats and vegetables, corn on the cob, asparagus slathered with butter.
She was counting the days, the hours, every square on the wall calendar with an X through it, another day she’d made it through, although she wouldn’t allow herself to feel relief until morning because things could go wrong in the night, Clara knew that now. At twelve weeks, she passed the day that had been furiously circled in red in her mind, the day she’d miscarried during her previous pregnancy. She said nothing to Nick because she didn’t want to curse it, because she was still waiting for something terrible to arrive.
That night Clara had enough energy to sit upright at the table in the backyard and she was actually hungry for dinner, burgers and grilled tomatoes. It would be the last night before the heat broke. The apples on the tree looked ripe and almost ready to eat, and it was as though fall was waiting, just like she was. The giant pitcher of ice water on the table was drenched in condensation. Clara drew a heart with her index finger, then wiped the moisture on her face, which felt cooling for about a quarter of a second.
Nick commented on how different she seemed, how there was colour in her cheeks again.
“It’s because I’m sitting in a chair,” she said. “It’s an optical illusion.” She told him this rare burst of energy was probably due to the nap she’d taken at her desk that afternoon.
He said, “You won’t be sitting at that desk too much longer—” but she made him stop. Let’s not tempt fate. Let’s not mention this date, or the future, or all her crazy superstitions, the frog head around her neck or the avocado stones. It had to remain unspoken, how much she wanted this baby.
And then one day around thirteen weeks, Clara woke up in the morning and felt like getting out of bed, as though seven hours of sleep had been sufficient. She sat up and stretched, and her head didn’t feel fuzzy. She headed to the kitchen to make breakfast, poached eggs and kale with buttered toast, her appetite remarkable in its specificity.
But her euphoria was cut short by the thought that she might not be pregnant anymore. It was still too early to feel her baby moving, and her belly was only soft, not round. There were no outward signs of what was happening to her, except for the sickness and fatigue, and now that they had dissipated, she was left with nothing.
Hysterical enough on the phone to be alarming, she got in to see the doctor that afternoon—not the crunchy midwife she’d embarked with last time, but now a specialist in high-risk pregnancies. His nurse had taken her blood pressure and apparently it was through the roof, and he came into the room, full of concern. “What brings you here?” he asked her.
And she told him. How she’d woken up that morning feeling totally fine, and the logical conclusion was that the baby was dead.
He pulled out an instrument she hadn’t seen before, a heart monitor. “At thirteen weeks,” he told her, “the baby’s heartbeat is generally audible.”
She lay on the table. He instructed her to lift her shirt and coated her belly in gel, seemingly blasé about the procedure. But then:
So much noise. It was like cruising an FM dial, static and feedback. Like holding a shell up to your ear and listening to the sea. That’s what it sounded like, the same rush of blood.
“Don’t panic,” he said. “I’m getting this.” And indeed, there it was, a steady beat at the centre of all that noise. Like the thunderous gallop of a team of horses that went on and on and on. “Healthy baby with a heartbeat,” said the doctor. And Clara just knew then that the baby would be okay.
She tried to articulate her certainty to Nick later that night as they dug into a cake she’d picked up from the frozen foods aisle at the grocery store. It felt good to give in to a craving, to listen to what her body was telling her, which was mainly,deep and delicious. Her mouth was full, but she was still talking, trying to get to the point, which seemed elusive. Or maybe it was that every time she nearly got there, she realized how flaky she sounded.
“It’s an intuition,” she said. “Even though everything I intuited before turned out to be wrong.” Once she had been sure she’d felt the embryo implant. A kind of pinch. She could have sworn it. But it was all in her head.
“I thought I’d been certain,” she said, “but now I know what certain is. That heartbeat, the way it just kept going and going, and I’ve never heard anything else like it. It was something to believe in, constant and unceasing, and maybe what I figured out is that all this is so much more than me,like it’s up to a higher power and I should just sit back and let it happen.”
“So you’ve turned religious after all,” said Nick.
“No, it’s a different kind of faith.” She’d recorded the heartbeat on her phone and she played it for him, and he admitted that it touched him, but it was too devoid of context. He hadn’t been converted yet. “It’s really going to happen. I can feel it.” Just think of it: to want and to receive. A simple thing, as perfect as a heartbeat. Such extraordinary design.
—
Now that the world had been returned to her, Clara suddenly felt what she’d been missing like a phantom limb: Jess. The ache of it had been lost for years in the pain of everything else she couldn’t have, and now she craved it the same way she was craving orange juice and cartons of sweet-and-sour chicken. She was powerless to resist these urges, especially when they didn’t make sense. She wanted Jess to know this baby, to be part of her life.
But how do you do it, send a message to a friend when you were the one who blew up the bridge between you? How do you begin to rebuild? How do you know you have the right to? Clara didn’t think she had the right, not really. When things had fallen apart five years ago, she was so heartbroken and furious at the injustice of her situation that the opportunity to make Jess feel as terrible as she did was frankly satisfying—when Jess said “I can’t even imagine,” Clara decided, “I’ll show you.” But only for a moment. Afterwards she was immediately delivered back to her darkness, a place so essentially lonely that the loss of Jess barely registered.
But she was feeling it now, the loss, just like she was feeling so much else that had been lying dormant with her life on hold. She’d actually picked up a book again when she wasoff work for the holidays, a novel, the first one she’d tried in such a long time because all those hours she used to spend sitting in doorways and clutching stones had to be filled now. It wasMy Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante, a copy that had been passed around the lunchroom at work. After failing to get through more than a quarter of it after weeks of trying, Clara finally knew what to do.
With a pencil she composed a note on the inside cover:Jess, I hate this book. Everyone promised I’d devour it, but they lied. And I can’t figure out if it hits too close to home or if it doesn’t hit at all. It’s melodramatic, not fun, and way too long. I feel like maybe you’ll understand?
