An Exact Replica Of A Figment Of My Imagination Part 2

"I'm going to say, I just hope no one is ever this cruel to your wife, or your child."

"I think you should."

"I'll say, How would you you feel - " feel - "

But he sent over a single hired hand to do the work, and I was spared the pleasure.

At night when I'm tired I still write him angry letters in my head before I fall asleep.

We didn't want to go back to Bordeaux after Pudding died, but we had to: the autopsy took three days, and only then could we pick up Pudding's body, to accompany it to the crematorium. On the way to the morgue we had to stop at a pharmacy so poor Edward could negotiate a tube of hemorrhoid cream for me. (Sometimes, when I think back on those days I forget that I wasn't just a woman who had lost a child, I had given birth to one, too, and was recovering.) This was the last of Bordeaux. We hated the place. It was ruined for us worse than the rest of France was. Edward had mentioned to his parents that we'd like to spend the summer in North Norfolk, near the sea, and within forty-eight hours they had found a cottage for rent in a small town called Holt. It wasn't free for three weeks, but it felt like a miracle: we had somewhere to go.

The morgue was just by the hospital. It felt - well, dead, but dead in an early-morning dentist's-office way, clean and deserted. The waiting room was large and spa.r.s.ely furnished, with a coffee vending machine by the plate gla.s.s windows at the front and a windowless double door into the back. We rang a bell; a woman came to see what we wanted; we gave the name in its mangled aitchless French version: R-Vay.

You may see the child again, she said.

We'd been warned by the funeral director that we'd be asked this. No thank you, we told her.

Well then, she said. Please wait.

We sat. It was very sunny out, but the room was so big that the light from all those windows at the front stalled out at the coffee machine. It was in no danger of getting anywhere near us. I remember craning my head to look at the outside. At first there was nothing, and then the most funereal person I have ever seen in my life walked by, a Gallic Boris Karloff. He wore a white dress shirt. His shoulders had a sorrowful hunch. His dark overhanging eyebrows looked carved from granite, like tombstones, monuments to worry. Of course he had something to do with the morgue: he couldn't have gone into anything but a funerary profession. Maybe this was the family face, and the family business, and who could say whether it was evolution or destiny or an acceptance that one's face is one's fortune, or misfortune.

"That's the screws," said Edward.

"What?"

"That's the sound of them s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the lid down," and then I could hear the dim sound of a turning power tool. That was good. It meant we didn't have to wait much longer.

Of course Boris Karloff turned out to be the hea.r.s.e driver. I couldn't understand a single word of his French, he mumbled so apologetically. The hea.r.s.e was a plainish station wagon. He gave directions to the cemetery. Edward seemed to understand him.

We followed the car, a threadbare funeral procession. At every rotary the cemetery was marked, but we checked the map anyhow. What could be worse than to lose sight of our boy now?

In the middle of the cemetery, Boris Karloff pulled up in front of a building that housed both the crematorium and a few chapels for funerals. He shook our hands and directed us inside. The building had the timeless feel of an inst.i.tutional edifice constructed in good taste, with no heart. It might have been erected in 1952 or 1977 or 2005. The funeral director greeted us. We said our name, we said we were the R-Vays, and he indicated with his hand the direction to walk.

At every turn of the hallway was a sign with the international line drawing of a martini gla.s.s, the kind that indicates airport c.o.c.ktail lounges, underscored with an arrow, though if you followed them you got only as far as a vending machine for bottled water. There was another funeral going on that day, for a grown-up, and we walked against the current of mourners who seemed to be taking it all very well.

The director brought us into our chapel.

I am sorry, he said, for the size of the room, but it is all we have.

The size of the room was vast, appropriate for the service of someone very famous, or very friendly, or very old, someone who could attract mourner after mourner. Surely they should have put the other funeral here, I thought, but maybe they weighed the possibilities and decided: to put fifty people in a room meant for two hundred is sadder than putting two people there.

This way, said the funeral director, and he brought us to the front, where the casket had been set on a cabinet. We had seen the casket only in a catalog at the funeral home by the hospital. The director said, I will leave you for a moment.

"It's too big," I said when he'd gone.

"I know," said Edward, looking at the room yawning out behind us. It upset him. "If I were my father, I'd complain - "

But I'd meant the casket. A bra.s.s plate had been fixed to the top: Pudding Harvey, 2006 Pudding Harvey, 2006. I wondered how caskets came. I mean how they were sized. We'd chosen the cheapest casket, the cheapest urn. Now we touched the wood very tentatively. What age was this meant for? For a child, surely, not a baby, and it made me sad that he, who had so little to his name, was lying inside such a big, empty, dark s.p.a.ce. I didn't like to think of where he was in there, at the top, at the bottom, but I wondered. It should have fit him.

It would be burned too, of course, with the bra.s.s plate.

Again we had to nod at a French stranger and say, Yes, that's fine, you may carry him away now. The cremation itself would take some time. We sat outside at a distance from the building and smoked cigarettes. After a while we realized we were sitting in the patch of land reserved for the scattering of remains, and we moved. At another time in our lives we might have been horrified. Now we just slapped the dust off the seat of our pants and moved on.

Who would scatter ashes here? The lazy? The unambitious? You stumble from the crematorium, and say, Well, here's as good a place as any? We were having Pudding cremated because we wanted to take him out of France, and it was easier to do so in an urn than in a coffin, and we didn't know where we'd bury him. My father had suggested the graveyard outside the church at the bottom of Edward's parents' driveway, where we'd been married, but when I thought about it I didn't want to feel sad every time we drove past. We'd scatter them somewhere beautiful, once we'd come up with the right place. Surely that was the point of cremation: you could take your beloved anywhere, let him rest anywhere, not just walk out the door and chuck. I didn't understand.

Maybe you just couldn't afford a burial: the embalming, the plot, the stone.

Maybe you just wanted to be done with the whole sad business, you'd attended to your dying relative for months or years, or you'd had a long life with him, too long, in fact. You wanted to fling your sorrow over your shoulder and never look back.

We didn't want to get it over with; it would take months for us to scatter his ashes. For now we found some clean gra.s.s and sat and smoked and flicked those lighter ashes into the air. After half an hour, we walked back in. The funeral director demonstrated our new possessions: the ashes, which were inside an urn with another plaque underneath that said Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006, Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006, which slipped into an innocuous blue nylon bag, and a certificate explaining to suspicious customs agents what the substance was. We thanked him. which slipped into an innocuous blue nylon bag, and a certificate explaining to suspicious customs agents what the substance was. We thanked him.

"I want to pry that plaque off with a knife," said Edward as we left. "I don't want the word Bordeaux Bordeaux anywhere near him." anywhere near him."

We got in a car and headed for the rocade, rocade, the highway that girdled the city, for the last time in our lives. the highway that girdled the city, for the last time in our lives.

When I was a teenager in Boston, a man on the subway handed me a card printed with tiny pictures of hands spelling out the alphabet in sign language. I AM DEAF, said the card. You were supposed to give the man some money in exchange.

I have thought of that card ever since, during difficult times, mine or someone else's: surely when tragedy has struck you dumb, you should be given a stack of cards that explain it for you. When Pudding died, I wanted my stack. I still want it. My first child was stillborn, My first child was stillborn, it would say on the front. It remains the hardest thing for me to explain, even now, or maybe I mean especially now - now that his death feels like a non sequitur. it would say on the front. It remains the hardest thing for me to explain, even now, or maybe I mean especially now - now that his death feels like a non sequitur. My first child was stillborn My first child was stillborn. I want people to know but I don't want to say it aloud. People don't like to hear it but I think they might not mind reading it on a card.

I could have taken my cards, translated into French, to the stores of Duras, where the baker, the butcher, the dry cleaner, the grocery store ladies, had seen me growing bigger and bigger over the months: I couldn't bear the idea of them seeing me deflated and asking after the baby. "Voila," I'd say, and hand over a card. I could have given a card to the imperious man at immigration in Portsmouth who almost denied me entry into England. To the waiter at the curry house that summer who was always mean to us. To the receptionist at the ob-gyn practice in Saratoga Springs at my first visit. To the nurses who asked me why I was scheduled for such close prenatal monitoring.

To every single person who noticed I was pregnant the second time, and said, "Congratulations! Is this your first?"

To every person who peeks into the stroller now and says the same thing.

Every day of my life, I think, I'll meet someone and be struck dumb, and all I'll have to do is reach in my pocket.

This book, I am just thinking now, is that card.

When I called my friend Ann the first time after Pudding died, she immediately asked what she could do, and then did everything, and then kept asking, and she sent out an e-mail to tell people I hadn't told that was so beautiful - though I have never read it - that I got the most beautiful condolence notes in response. Wendy burst into hysterical tears at the sound of my voice and asked me questions until I'd told the whole story. "Was he a beautiful baby?" she wanted to know, and I wondered how she knew to ask: she was the only one who did. Margi said, "Oh, Elizabeth, please know that if any of us could absorb your pain for you, we would," and then laughed at all my dark jokes. Bruce, remembering something just as terrible that had happened to him decades before, wrote, "There is no way for such an event to leave you who you are." Patti, who has seen as much sorrow as anyone I know, was an extraordinary combination of complete sympathy and complete comprehension. My brother said, at the end of a long conversation, "Well, I guess as a family we've been pretty lucky that we haven't had something awful happen before." My sister-in-law Catherine texted, Poor poor darling you Poor poor darling you.

Somehow every one of these things happened at exactly the right time for me. This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It's what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it's better to say nothing than something clumsy.

I needed all of it, direct comfort, hearsay grief. Edward's great friend Claudia's husband, Arno, a stage manager and perhaps the calmest man I've ever met, burst into tears on the phone when Edward called, and when Ann called my friends Jonathan and Lib, Jonathan did, too. "Oh," Ann said to me, "to hear that big man cry." I couldn't have borne listening myself, to him or Arno, but to know that they did - it felt as though they had taken part of the weeping weight from my shoulders. Of course I cried an awful lot, but I also regretted every stupid time I'd ever cried in my life before over nothing, nothing, days as a teenager I'd wept myself sick and couldn't exactly remember why, when I should have saved up. Now, in Tipperary and near Harvard Square, big men were crying for us. Before this I'd imagined that professional mourners, people hired to cry at funerals, were always little old ethnic grandmothers, maybe because the first funeral I'd been to was for a fifth-grade cla.s.smate named Paula Leone, and her Italian aunts had howled at the graveside. days as a teenager I'd wept myself sick and couldn't exactly remember why, when I should have saved up. Now, in Tipperary and near Harvard Square, big men were crying for us. Before this I'd imagined that professional mourners, people hired to cry at funerals, were always little old ethnic grandmothers, maybe because the first funeral I'd been to was for a fifth-grade cla.s.smate named Paula Leone, and her Italian aunts had howled at the graveside.

"They shouldn't be old women," I told Edward in Bordeaux. "They should be big men, a whole line of them, crying."

Idon't know what to say, people wrote, or, people wrote, or, Words fail. Words fail.

What amazed me about all the notes I got - mostly through e-mail, because who knew how to find me? - was how people did did know what to say, how words know what to say, how words didn't didn't fail. Even the words fail. Even the words words fail words fail comforted me. Before Pudding died, I'd thought condolence notes were simply small bits of old-fashioned etiquette, important but universally acknowledged as inadequate gestures. Now they felt like oxygen, and only now do I fully understand why: to know that other people were sad made Pudding more real. My friend Rob e-mailed me first, a beautiful and straightforward vow to do anything he could to help me. Some people apologized for sending sympathy through the ether; some overnighted notes; it made no difference to me. I read them, and reread them. They made me cry, which helped. They comforted me. Before Pudding died, I'd thought condolence notes were simply small bits of old-fashioned etiquette, important but universally acknowledged as inadequate gestures. Now they felt like oxygen, and only now do I fully understand why: to know that other people were sad made Pudding more real. My friend Rob e-mailed me first, a beautiful and straightforward vow to do anything he could to help me. Some people apologized for sending sympathy through the ether; some overnighted notes; it made no difference to me. I read them, and reread them. They made me cry, which helped. They moved moved me, that is to say, they felt physical, they budged me from the sodden self-disintegrating lump I otherwise was. As I was going mad from grief, the worst of it was that sometimes I believed I was making it all up. Here was some proof that I wasn't. me, that is to say, they felt physical, they budged me from the sodden self-disintegrating lump I otherwise was. As I was going mad from grief, the worst of it was that sometimes I believed I was making it all up. Here was some proof that I wasn't.

One day Ann wrote to say that people, even people who didn't know me, had asked what they could do for me.

"They could write," I told her. I considered this a sign of my essential mental health, that I could both think of something that would make me feel better and ask for it.

The English Department head at Skidmore, Linda Simon, was one of the people who'd asked, and soon enough my e-mail box filled up with messages from my future colleagues. I'd met some but not others, and every single message meant the world. One, from a famous writer who taught in the department, was so eloquent that it inspired in me the only moment of true denial I remember from that terrible time: I thought, I'll save this, and show it to Pudding when he's older: it'll really mean something to him I'll save this, and show it to Pudding when he's older: it'll really mean something to him.

People speak of losing friends when someone dear to them dies, but we were lucky. I lost only one friend, and possibly she doesn't even know it yet, and probably I'd lost her long before. Her mother had died when this friend was a teenager, her father died when she was in her thirties. Frankly, I'd been good to her after her father's death, though by the time Pudding died we were no longer as close as we'd been. One of my best friends called to tell her my bad news and then e-mailed to say that he had done so.

I waited to hear from her. And waited.

It took three months. That would have been all right if she'd said, I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what to say, or or I'm sorry, I've been trying to find the words I'm sorry, I've been trying to find the words.

"I was hoping to speak to you," she wrote, "or be able to send a paper letter, but I don't have a number or address for you, and I simply couldn't wait any longer."

It's hard to explain the rage I felt at reading this, at her attempt to turn her silence into something n.o.ble, when all of my other friends had turned themselves inside out to help me months before. The entire note was full of plat.i.tudes. "Losing a child is the worst pain one can experience, I think," she wrote, and I hated her for that I think, I think, as though she wanted to make it seem as though my pain was her original thought, a theory she'd honed in social work school. Even now I realize how petty I'm being, how the only problem was that she'd waited too long to write the note. Her shock and sympathy were no longer fresh, and her language reflected that. But my grief was still fresh, grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving, and the distance between what I felt and what she wrote infuriated me. as though she wanted to make it seem as though my pain was her original thought, a theory she'd honed in social work school. Even now I realize how petty I'm being, how the only problem was that she'd waited too long to write the note. Her shock and sympathy were no longer fresh, and her language reflected that. But my grief was still fresh, grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving, and the distance between what I felt and what she wrote infuriated me.

She's written to me since. I have never written back.

Oh, Elizabeth," my friend Lib wrote, "these past ten months did happen, Pudding did happen, we won't forget him. He's part of our family, one of those cousins or great-aunts that not everyone has met but is still part of the whole d.a.m.n sweet sad picture."

My friend Lib is a baby freak. I hadn't realized that before, though we've known each other for twenty years now, ever since we were little library workers together at the Newton Free Library in Newton, Ma.s.sachusetts. All through my pregnancy with Pudding, she hovered over me through the phone wires, asking questions and giving sound advice on matters ranging from education to what sort of underpants one might need postpartum. Edward and I stay with Lib and Jonathan and their daughters, Sophie and Nora, when we're in Boston: it's a sweet house full of snacks and nice girls and good books, and we'd been looking forward to introducing Pudding to it.

Lib e-mailed me all the time, after Pudding died. We spoke for hours on the phone, too, but the phone conversations have gone wherever conversations go, up in a mist of white wine, and the French sun, and the smoke off a ferry headed to England, and the English seaside. She was not normally a writer of e-mails - her daughters were eleven and five, and the computer was on the third floor of their house - but she wrote to me then. She still writes to me about Pudding. She misses him like a person too, I think.

I want to explain to her daughters what their mother did for me. I think in some ways she saved my life.

But I can't explain, I can only give examples.

She wrote, "We spent the evening with Adam, all crying softly into his birthday bourbon, it may not be strictly Kubler-Ross but h.e.l.l we really don't have a vocabulary for this kind of loss. I think I'll take Nora's lead on this one. When she learned that Pudding died she clamped her hands over her ears, stamped her feet and yelled no more people dying. Now, she carries him around and sleeps with him, his name is Owen Alexander Green and she says Elizabeth and Edward don't have to worry because she is taking care of him. Nora's world is a beautiful place."

She wrote, "I woke up today thinking of you. It's Mother's Day, Elizabeth. Of course I'm thinking of how I desperately wish circ.u.mstances were different. But I'm also thinking about how connected we all are, all us mothers. The old ones, the new ones, the sad, the crazy, Natalie, Cornelia and we Elizabeths. I'm thinking I feel very close to you, to Pudding, to your grief and to mine. I looked forward to seeing his face, the combining of you two dear people. The image I hold of him now is of a chubby baby at the water in his mother's arms, she's trying to get him to touch the water but he pulls up his little fat legs, retracts them in an 'I'd rather not' sort of a way. Deborah, my midwife friend, says that of the women she's known whose babies have died, of course all of them wish life had unfolded differently, but none wished that they hadn't carried, loved, and birthed those children. Those are some amazing mothers. You are one amazing mother. I love you very much this day."

She wrote, "It's hard to be with grief. We all so want to help and there is really nothing to do. My crazy adored aunt Pauline's catchphrase was 'offer it up.' Those words were a curse, a joke, a prayer and a balm to us cousins over the years. Whack your funny bone, lose your engagement ring, catch your boyfriend cheating, lower your mother's body into the ground and offer it up. I catch myself these days offering it up, driving around saying out loud 'Pudding, what the f.u.c.k?' An infant in the ice cream shop almost brought me to my knees yesterday. I breathed her in and tenderly offered it up."

She wrote, "At security in Copenhagen on the return trip an extended Middle Eastern family were bidding tearful good-byes to the ancient mother and father. The old lady from ethnic-old-lady central casting, bless her heart, kissed everyone soundly on the cheeks. The babes she held tight, kissed on the cheeks, and planted a big wet one right on their hearts. Well, that did it for me, started bawling quietly and discreetly on the chaotic airport spot. How's your heart old friend. I'm thinking of you a lot and sending many heart kisses."

It's the last days in Savary where my memory starts to get oceanic: it shifts, it suddenly dips, it drops out of view and then comes over my head in a wave. I splutter, my mouth full of the stuff. We drank a lot of wine on the patio. We cried a lot. We watched every meaningless video in our collection. I checked my e-mail all the time. I needed to know who was worried about me. I've reread some of the e-mails I wrote back to friends recently, and I'm astounded by how chipper I sound; I even find them slightly creepy, and I wonder if my friends did, too. I remember one long phone conversation with my brother during which I walked around and around the L-shaped dining room table in the L-shaped dining room (diners at one end wouldn't be able to see diners at the other end) touching the back of each chair; I hung up the phone loving my brother even more than I had before, but now I can't recall a word that either of us said. My parents arrived a few days later - they'd scheduled the trip months before to meet Pudding - and I remember almost nothing of that visit other than one day we had a great deal to drink at lunch, and then we all took very long naps, and then Edward made Ovaltine and toast for dinner.

The day my parents left, we left Savary for good and began traveling.

But before this, we had one day - this is very strange, it's the last day I remember really clearly - when somehow everything was slightly better. Not all right at all, but one day we made jokes and actually laughed at them. A day of grace. We knew that something very, very terrible had happened, but it seemed to have happened to someone else, perhaps to someone very dear to people dear to us, a friend of a friend we'd always heard stories about. There was sadness in the house, but it didn't have us by the throat. Even as it happened, I wondered what it meant. Was it possible that already we were returning to ourselves?

Things got much worse after that.

The journey from Duras to Holt - from the farmhouse by a vineyard in France to a four-bedroom cottage not too far from the North Sea - was Odyssean. That felt right. It felt good to do hard physical travel away from . . . away from everything. First we drove north to a small village near Angouleme, where we spent two nights with old friends of Edward's - dear friends of mine now, too - and where I was very poor company.

Then we drove to Nantes, to drop off our rented Peugeot. Then we caught a train, and then a bus, to Roscoff, where we spent the night in a hotel looking over the harbor and wandered around all day until it was time to catch the overnight ferry to England. We got off at Portsmouth and took the train to Penzance, where Edward's parents picked us up. We spent three nights at their time-share in Cornwall, where I continued to be poor company, rode with them to London, two nights there, took the train to Suffolk, where we met up with Edward's parents again at their house. Three days later, in my mother-in-law's loaned VW, we drove to Holt.

Somewhere in there was Mother's Day. We were with the friends near Angouleme. I lurked in a far doorway and smoked and drank wine by myself. My parents were still in France, and I had to call my mother to wish her a happy day, but I didn't want to. Was I a mother, I asked myself, and despite Lib's beautiful e-mail I still don't know the answer. I want to tell that sad version of myself, Of course you're a mother, just one who's learned a hard lesson Of course you're a mother, just one who's learned a hard lesson. I want to tell that sad version of myself, I'm sorry, no, it's tough luck, he died before you met him, people keep track of such things, and if we call you a mother, then where does it stop? I'm sorry, no, it's tough luck, he died before you met him, people keep track of such things, and if we call you a mother, then where does it stop? It was the uncertainty that seemed unbearable to me. Even now. This year I had a very glorious baby with me, but was it my first Mother's Day, or my second? It was the uncertainty that seemed unbearable to me. Even now. This year I had a very glorious baby with me, but was it my first Mother's Day, or my second?

Those weeks were miserable with company and travel, with luggage and making conversation, but they were forward movement. One step farther, one step farther.

We almost had to take one mammoth step back. Immigration at the ferry terminal in Portsmouth was a single thin man behind a single thin podium. His days must have been dull, waving on one EU pa.s.sport after another, the French coming to England, the English returning home, an occasional intrepid German, none of whom could be stopped and questioned. When he saw my U.S. pa.s.sport, he perked up.

"Are you traveling alone?"

"No," I said. I gestured to Edward, who'd gone ahead. "With my husband, who's an English citizen."

This is, by the way, not a useful thing to say, and it's not the first time I've gotten in trouble with Her Majesty's Border Guards: three and a half years before, a woman at Heathrow asked me the purpose of my visit, and I had said, cheerily, "I'm getting married!" The English are as suspicious of undoc.u.mented spouses of citizens as the Americans are: they worry you will a.s.sume a certain level of privilege and never get around to sorting yourself out legally. At Heathrow the woman made me sit down on a bench for a long time, next to an athlete from Ghana who was likewise waiting for clearance, and let me through only after a long lecture about not overstaying my six-month tourist allowance. In Portsmouth, the thin border guard perked up further, in the manner of a dog who, already sitting up straight, sits up straighter to show that he's obeying a command and deserves a biscuit. In fact he looked like a Jack Russell terrier with dreams of being promoted to bloodhound. He began to leaf through my pa.s.sport.

"It looks to me as though you've spent most of the last two years in the United Kingdom," he said with a certain joy. I couldn't figure out how he'd arrived at this theory.

"No," I answered truthfully. "Three weeks a year, at the most."

"Well, that's not what it looks like to me," he said.

We went back and forth. My years as a librarian always help me in such situations: I am very good at keeping my cool with officious, insistent strangers, though my training is on the other side of the desk. I was miraculously polite. Even so it seemed for a while that he might put me on the next ferry back to France. What will I do? What will I do? I wondered. I pictured myself alone on the ferry, having been manhandled on board by some as yet unseen immigration thug. I tried to explain myself, I tried to remember the exact dates and circ.u.mstances of my handful of visits to England. Again and again he told me that it seemed that I'd been illegally living in the United Kingdom. I shifted from foot to foot for forty-five minutes as he did his best to catch me in an inconsistency. I wondered. I pictured myself alone on the ferry, having been manhandled on board by some as yet unseen immigration thug. I tried to explain myself, I tried to remember the exact dates and circ.u.mstances of my handful of visits to England. Again and again he told me that it seemed that I'd been illegally living in the United Kingdom. I shifted from foot to foot for forty-five minutes as he did his best to catch me in an inconsistency.

When, exactly, might we be moved to unpack the shoulder bag, show him the death certificate of very recent vintage, open the tiny blue nylon sack, and pull out the wooden urn of ashes with the bra.s.s plaque underneath that said, Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006 Pudding Harvey, Bordeaux, 2006? Look, we might have said, something terrible has happened to us. Grant us a tiny bit of grace no matter what you think.

Two things saved us. First, I explained that Edward planned to immigrate to the United States at the end of the summer.

"Have you begun that process?" he said.

I reeled off the name and number of every single form I'd filled out.

Then he asked us what we did for a living, and I said tiredly, "We're writers."

He perked up again, like a Jack Russell terrier who dreams of being a famous Jack Russell terrier. I'd seen that look before: As it happens, I fancy myself a writer. As it happens, I fancy myself a writer.

"Books?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "I've published three, and my husband has published two."

That seemed to do the trick. He took down the particulars of my pa.s.sport, stamped it, wrote down a code, and waved us through. We were almost free when he called out - "Would I find your books in a bookstore?"

"Yes," I said as pleasantly as I could, backing away from him. I could smile for only so long. I was worried I'd wasted my year's supply on this man.

Here is a character from a gothic novel: the woman with the stillborn child. Her hair is matted and black. Ghosts nest in it. Her white nightgown is mottled with blood. In her hands is an awful bundle: the corpse she cannot bear to put down. She sings lullabies to it, rocks it in her arms. She says in a pleasant but tremulous voice, Would you like to see my baby? He's such a nice little baby. Such a little, little baby. Shh: he's sleeping Would you like to see my baby? He's such a nice little baby. Such a little, little baby. Shh: he's sleeping.

Maybe she's a ghost, dead in childbirth herself. Better hope for that. Ghosts are terrifying but not so bad as a woman ruined by the death of her child.

I was not that woman in the months after Pudding's death. I didn't weep in company. I mostly didn't mention the fact that I had been pregnant, that everything in my life was supposed to be different. I felt bad that I made people feel bad for me. I was corseted by politeness: I could feel my organs, rearranged by pregnancy, squeezed now in completely different directions.