An Exact Replica Of A Figment Of My Imagination Part 3

But I felt like that gothic character. At least, I felt like people looked at me as though I were, whenever I did mention the baby or his death or my pregnancy. I could almost see myself with my uncombed hair and filthy nightgown, the tiny corpse in a winding sheet in my arms, walking down a nineteenth-century street as I knocked on doors. I could hear my voice: Would you like to see my baby? Would you like to see my baby?

This for the merest reference to what had happened to me.

I was a character from an opera who might at any moment let loose with an aria, and generally people tried to cover it up with conversational ragtime. People changed the subject. They smiled uncomfortably. Some tried extraordinary juggling acts, with flung torches of chitchat and spinning scimitars of small talk.

They didn't mention it. They did not say, I am so sorry I am so sorry or or How are you? How are you?

I felt in those first weeks, meeting people I knew, like the most terrifying object on earth.

Who knows what other people think? Not me, and especially not then. Still it surprised me, every time I saw someone who didn't mention it. I am writing this and trying to remember how it felt at the time, and trying to imagine what people were thinking. I am trying to remember what I have thought when I've done the same thing, all those times I I didn't mention some great sadness upon seeing someone for the first time. Did I really think that by not saying words of consolation aloud, I was doing people a favor? As though to mention sadness I was "reminding" them of the terrible thing? didn't mention some great sadness upon seeing someone for the first time. Did I really think that by not saying words of consolation aloud, I was doing people a favor? As though to mention sadness I was "reminding" them of the terrible thing?

As though the grieving have forgotten their grief?

I remember one lunch with people who loved us in London early on, two of the most excruciating hours of my life. Nothing but that endless juggling: Other people's jobs and boyfriends. What kind of wine to order. This was two weeks after Pudding died. I might have been something like that gothic character one step short of total ruin: I wanted to rock and sing lullabies and hold out my torn, b.l.o.o.d.y nightgown and run my hands through my wild hair, and yet I knew you weren't supposed to do such things in polite society. My hair was was uncombed, and my face was puffy from lack of sleep and crying and too much wine, and my clothes were what I'd salvaged from the middle of my pregnancy, because of course even though people might pretend nothing was out of the ordinary I had the body of a woman two weeks postpartum, soft and wide around the middle, and if I'd been one step worse off I might have lifted my shirt up to display my still livid stretch marks. uncombed, and my face was puffy from lack of sleep and crying and too much wine, and my clothes were what I'd salvaged from the middle of my pregnancy, because of course even though people might pretend nothing was out of the ordinary I had the body of a woman two weeks postpartum, soft and wide around the middle, and if I'd been one step worse off I might have lifted my shirt up to display my still livid stretch marks.

But I didn't. I could feel how uncomfortable my mere presence made people feel, and I couldn't bear it. So I sat in this Indian restaurant and listened. Sometimes a piece of palaver came loose and shot straight toward me, and somehow I caught it and tossed it back.

All the while, all I could think was: Dead baby dead baby dead baby Dead baby dead baby dead baby.

And I know everyone around that table was thinking the same thing, every single person.

I've never gotten over my discomfort at other people's discomfort. When people say, What have you been up to, I hesitate. I will tell myself, Now, if this were a husband or father or sister who died, you wouldn't simply omit the fact Now, if this were a husband or father or sister who died, you wouldn't simply omit the fact. If I say anything, people mostly change the subject anyway, and I can't say that I blame them.

I've done it myself, when meeting the grief-struck. It's as though the sad news is Rumpelstiltskin in reverse. To mention it by name is to conjure it up, not the grief but the experience itself: the mother's suicide, the brother's overdose, the multiple miscarriages. The sadder the news, the less likely people are to mention it. The moment I lost my innocence about such things, I saw how careless I'd been myself.

I don't even know what I would have wanted someone to say. Not: It will be better. Not: You don't think you'll live through this, but you will. Maybe: Tomorrow you will spontaneously combust. Tomorrow, finally, your misery will turn to wax and heat and you will burn and melt till nothing is left in your chair but a greasy, childless smudge. That might have comforted me.

We'd chosen North Norfolk because Edward had grown up there. We'd rented the smallest four-bedroom house in the world: three of the bedrooms held only a single bed and a table. Edward shimmied a desk into one of the rooms; I wrote sitting up in bed in another. One of the ways in which we felt - not lucky, not that that word again - word again - Let me say we were glad we were free agents and could go somewhere neutral for several months, neither the place we'd lived while waiting for our child, nor the place we would spend the rest of our lives without him.

In that small Norfolk town, we spent one week drinking heavily and smoking, and then we gave ourselves a shake, switched to a fish diet, daily exercise, and work. We had time to kill; until the U.S. government sorted out Edward's immigration application, he was not strictly speaking supposed to travel to the States. We were writers: we wrote. Edward worked on his enormous Parisian novel; I went back to a novel beginning I'd been fiddling around with before I was pregnant, which (I'd forgotten) featured a dead infant. Strangely enough, I was glad for that fictional baby who I'd in all innocence murdered (drowned in a bathtub) a year before: I couldn't have made him up in my grief, but I could pour my grief into him. I wrote a hundred pages of the book and two new short stories; I worked harder and faster than I had in years. At night we watched movies, straight out of the care packages Ann sent me: all of Carole Lombard, all of Mae West, enough silly distraction to last the summer.

Some days were worse than others. For about a week I got the opening line of an Auden poem that I'd memorized in high school stuck in my head: About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters . . . The poem describes the Breughel painting . . . The poem describes the Breughel painting The Fall of Icarus, The Fall of Icarus, in which (as Auden explains) life goes on despite the tiny white legs kicking up in the corner of a harbor, Icarus sunk. My high school English teacher had explained that the myth was about hubris, ignoring the good advice of your wise father, but for me that summer the painting, the poem, everything, was about lost boys and the parents who'd failed them. One of the BBC channels was showing Steven Spielberg movies, mother after mother failing to protect her son: in which (as Auden explains) life goes on despite the tiny white legs kicking up in the corner of a harbor, Icarus sunk. My high school English teacher had explained that the myth was about hubris, ignoring the good advice of your wise father, but for me that summer the painting, the poem, everything, was about lost boys and the parents who'd failed them. One of the BBC channels was showing Steven Spielberg movies, mother after mother failing to protect her son: AI AI is bad, is bad, Empire of the Sun Empire of the Sun is worse, and is worse, and E.T. E.T. the worst of all: I sobbed on the sofa at the end of it. the worst of all: I sobbed on the sofa at the end of it.

We ate local crab and local seaweed. We swam at Holkham Beach, an amazing stretch of sand that Edward remembered from his boyhood. We went to pubs. We saw children everywhere, of course, and babies. And Edward would always say, "I hope we can have another child," and I would answer, "Me, too."

Work, walks, wine. Our life as usual, having moved to a new place. We got to know our fishmonger and butcher and greengrocer, picked out our restaurants, opened a bottle of wine at 6:00 p.m. if we were cooking at home. On the one hand it was comforting and even lovely, especially the long walks we took along the Norfolk coast, and on the other hand the very usualness, the loveliness, the freedom to do what we wanted, was a kind of torture: look at your unenc.u.mbered selves. After most deaths, I imagine, the awfulness lies in how everything's changed: you no longer recognize the form of your days. There's a hole. It's person-shaped and it follows you everywhere, to bed, to the dinner table, in the car.

For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We'd been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.

Years before I'd given away an antique postcard that said, beneath a drawing of a pine branch: For thee I pine.

For thee I balsam.

(I regretted giving away that postcard almost immediately. The recipient didn't deserve it. Me in a nutsh.e.l.l: I don't regret a single instance of giving away my heart, but a novelty postcard with a really good pun? I still still wish I hadn't.) wish I hadn't.) Now I pined, and pined. I pictured myself: a pine tree. The trail of the lonesome pine. I saw myself green and leaning on the beach, inclined toward my unreachable darling. To be deciduous would be better. I could stand brown and brittle, and then naked, and then in the spring I would start over again.

Actually, that's sort of what happened.

At the end of August we packed up the few things we'd brought with us to Holt. For the first time in our lives, we had not acc.u.mulated a single thing in a new country. We spent a few days in Suffolk, with Edward's family, then a few days in London, then a few days in Boston. On September 5 we paid movers to clear out my vast storage s.p.a.ce in Boston, all the things I hadn't seen in four years, and we drove to Saratoga Springs. The rented house we'd arranged by e-mail months before (when Pudding was still alive) was in a bad state, with cigarette b.u.t.ts and condom wrappers and a fly-infested garbage can. The previous tenants had been smokers, and someone had tried to cover the smell with a quant.i.ty of Febreze, and then, when that failed, several spilled boxes of mothb.a.l.l.s. Up until then we'd had good luck renting places sight unseen, so odds were it was time for us to land hard, but it felt like ominous luck. Moreover, the house belonged to a retired professor from the English Department who lived out of state, and I saw how quickly I could become a villain if I broke the lease. The movers arrived and unloaded our stuff into the house; we couldn't figure out what else to do. When they finally left, I went upstairs to the bathroom and took the pregnancy test I'd been carrying around in my purse all day, and brought it down to the kitchen as it developed to show Edward.

Well, what do you know. This baby would be due in May.

But before this: The day we left Holt we got up at 5:00 a.m. and drove to Holkham, the wide, bowl-shaped beach of Edward's childhood and of our summer. On the way there, hares jumped along the side of the roads - early risers? going home to their burrows after a night of h.e.l.l-raising? - and I prayed I wouldn't hit one, that this wouldn't be the first day I struck something living with a car. I didn't believe in omens anymore, but still. We worried that someone else would have beat us to the beach. In England there's always some preposterous superannuated sweetheart with a dog tramping along. But we walked through the scrub pines to the sand and then over the great expanse of sand to the water's edge all alone.

The sky was peach and gold, a teacup of a morning, just enough clouds so as not to mock us. Why isn't there a dawnish equivalent for the word dusky dusky? That's what the light was, beautiful and dawnish. We found a spit created by the receding tide. A spit curl, really: it spiraled around. We walked to the end of it. Edward had already removed the screw that kept the wooden urn shut. He took off the lid. The ashes were in a small white container like a film canister. We opened it up, and then we cast the ashes upon the water, hoping they would . . . what? He wouldn't return to us, but we hoped someone would. It was tremendously comforting. Fingertip after fingertip, we let him fly.

It probably sounds ridiculous to observe that I was at that moment already a day or two pregnant, as nearly as I can reckon it. If this morning appeared in a movie, I would spit on it for its nauseating symbolism, the author taking liberties with probability to Give Hope to the Audience. I'm a cynic. I've had to go back to the e-mails I wrote that afternoon, to Ann and Lib and my parents, to make sure that it all really happened.

So: I will report now that when it was done we turned back and walked to the car and pa.s.sed by the first birder of the morning, a man in his sixties, and his grizzled dog. And that we got in the car and then decided to drive through the miles of parkland around Holkham Hall. We drove through the gates, past the pub we'd liked, and into the grounds.

Then Edward said, "Look!"

Huddled together under a nearby tree were about thirty does. In my memory they look slightly worried, twisting their heads over their shoulders - to look at us? wondering where everyone else had gone to? All our married life, Edward will say, Look, Look, and point, and it will take me several moments: he has spotted the heron, the big brown hare, the cardinal so red it can only be called cardinal red. He grew up in the country. He sees the wildlife. I reflected on this truth as I watched the beautiful kaffeeklatsch of does worry beneath their tree. Then I looked to my right. and point, and it will take me several moments: he has spotted the heron, the big brown hare, the cardinal so red it can only be called cardinal red. He grew up in the country. He sees the wildlife. I reflected on this truth as I watched the beautiful kaffeeklatsch of does worry beneath their tree. Then I looked to my right.

My G.o.d.

In the wide open, in a dip in the land, were hundreds of deer. Hundreds Hundreds. Fawns, does, stags, everyone, in a giant herd, the stags marshaling the edges.

"Look," I said.

The deer moved around one another. They shifted, but they didn't flee. We could see another car stopped on the other side of the pack, and two people on foot. We bipeds held still.

"I've never seen a stag in the wild before," Edward said. I said, "Well, then."

Finally we drove away. We had to get on the road; it was time for the rest of our lives. On the other side of Holkham Hall, the mawkish ent.i.ty orchestrating all of this threw in for good measure a clump of stags, fifteen maybe, standing behind a knoll, and when we pa.s.sed by they ducked down like juvenile delinquents as though to hide. Their antlers still forked up.

I don't believe in omens. Still, it's nice to see Nature try her best to persuade you.

But if you ask me whether this felt like closure, I'll tell you what I've come to believe: Closure is bulls.h.i.t.

We were lucky that Edward was standing in the grubby kitchen of our rental house in Saratoga Springs when I came down the stairs with the pregnancy test: we were lucky he was in the United States at all. I suppose I was aware that generally speaking, immigration to the States is no cakewalk. I have seen the movies about green card marriages, but we had been married three years, with pictures to prove it, no quickie job at the courthouse (cheap secular weddings being more suspect), but in fancy dress, with caterers. When we'd lived in the United States before, Edward had gotten short-term visas from the University of Iowa, first as a fellow and then as a teacher. We a.s.sumed it would be easy.

It turned out to be very complicated, very fraught, and very boring. Suffice it to say that having applied outside of the country, Edward was supposed to wait until the U.S. government agreed to grant him an immigrant visa. This would take at least six months. The U.S. government, recognizing the difficulty of a long separation, had invented a different kind of visa that would allow a citizen to bring a spouse or fiance in the meantime. The wait time for that sort of visa was also six months.

In Norfolk I had written letters explaining our case. I called and e-mailed every number and address I could find, explaining why we couldn't bear to be separated come September, when I would have to go to New York to start my job. My father's boss found a lawyer with connections at the INS who helped us for free, but by summer's end the application had made it through only the first of three governmental offices.

Every time I called the American emba.s.sy in London for advice, using the pound-a-minute help line, I got a different answer. Finally I was told: it was legal for him to come with me to the United States like any tourist as long as he understood that he'd have to come back to England to get the visa to allow him to go back to America to get his green card. Completely legal. Of course, it was also completely legal for the border official to turn him back immediately if he suspected that Edward had no intention of leaving the country to finish the process.

Edward dressed in his best clothing, bought a necktie at Heathrow, organized all his immigration papers, rehea.r.s.ed his explanations, bought the round-trip ticket that would take him back to England after ninety days. We flew across the ocean, white-knuckled, hoping for a female agent. Or a sympathetic agent. Or anyone who was not the American equivalent of the man in Portsmouth. At Logan Airport in Boston, I flew through the U.S. Citizens line, then lurked against a wall, watching to see whose booth Edward would end up directed to: the blond man with the brush cut, the dark-haired woman closest to me. He bounced into the woman's lane, and I saw him begin to talk, his shoulders up, his hands explaining. Don't talk so much! Don't talk so much! I thought worriedly, but she had already picked up the stamp that would give him ninety days in the country, and minutes later he was next to me. We grinned and walked to baggage claim as though we didn't care, as though we were being watched and a.s.sessed on closed-circuit TV. Now we could start worrying about the next step. I thought worriedly, but she had already picked up the stamp that would give him ninety days in the country, and minutes later he was next to me. We grinned and walked to baggage claim as though we didn't care, as though we were being watched and a.s.sessed on closed-circuit TV. Now we could start worrying about the next step.

Our first night in the grubby rental house, we lay on an old futon and stared at the acoustic tiles in the ceiling. They reminded me of elementary school cla.s.srooms from my 1970s childhood. The combination of Febreze, mothb.a.l.l.s, and old cigarette smoke seemed to fill my entire head: I could feel the chemicals muscle their way up my nose and into my skull, which got more packed with every inhalation.

"This can't be good," I said.

I had known I was pregnant again for eight hours. The world felt perilous. In France I'd been kept busy ducking pathogens in food. All raw vegetables are contraindicated by doctors in France, because of the high rate of toxoplasmosis in French soil; nothing is cooked through; you can't count on milk being pasteurized; you are tormented by excellent but forbidden pates. Now I was scared of air. Our landlords were elderly and absentee, and when we told the woman they'd hired to look over the house that we needed to hire cleaners, she was dubious. "They had the place professionally cleaned in May," she explained, though it was September. I had taken her on a tour of the filth, and though she couldn't disagree of course she felt accused. "I don't think they'll go for it again."

The next day I took myself to the head of the English Department to ask for advice on what to do about the house.

"You see," I said to Linda, "I'm pregnant again - "

"Oh, Elizabeth!" she burst out. "That's the best possible news!"

I teared up and laughed at the same time. The best possible news! Of course it was! In my state over the house and my general fear, I'd forgotten. For a few months, Linda was the only person besides us who knew I was pregnant. I'd lean into her office and wink, or give the thumbs-up, to tell her that everything was fine. Even after I'd told a few friends, and then our families (we waited till we saw them in person), I didn't go out of my way to tell people. My fantasy was that I'd turn up in a handful of months with a baby. "Oh, this?" I'd say. "This is what I've been working on in my spare time."

All summer long we'd waited for the autopsy results. I wanted to read them and I didn't want to read them: I was terrified that the verdict would say, essentially, Cause of death: maternal oblivion Cause of death: maternal oblivion.

The report had finally shown up after a small international dance of paperwork. Using the Internet I could decipher the conclusion: chorioamniot.i.tis, with no known histological cause. Lib knew a French-speaking doctor who spent an hour with me on the phone. The report had two halves. The first was about me, the blood tests they'd run, the umbilical cord and placenta and uterus. Olivier went through in a very calm voice, translating and then explaining the medical terms. There was some inflammation to the cord, and some dead spots on the placenta, but it was impossible to know whether these had caused Pudding's death, or whether his death had resulted in them. I'd scanned the second half, which was entirely about his body, its perfection, its blamelessness. You couldn't blame his kidneys. His heart was faultless.

"It doesn't look like we need to go through that," said Olivier. He'd been wonderful, calm, warm. "We could -"

"No," I said. "Let's not."

"No," he agreed, and I could hear the relief in his voice.

The midwives had said that the umbilical cord was looped around his neck and that the amniotic fluid was low, but we'll never know what happened. I'm fine with that. No one explanation, no one moment I can worry over, rub at in my brain, saying, There. If only I'd done exactly that differently There. If only I'd done exactly that differently.

Still, pregnant for the second time, some days I just imagined that I had done everything wrong, and was doing everything wrong all over again. All chemicals seemed dangerous; ditto substances organic and dirty. Mothb.a.l.l.s, mice, Febreze, mold, lead dust, flies - baby killers, every last one.

Anyhow, one of my kind and eloquent colleagues talked to the landlords, and they agreed to hire professional cleaners, and that was that.

No, I insist: other people's children did not make me sad. But pregnant women did. In the waiting room of a Saratoga Springs ob-gyn practice, for my first visit, I watched the other women. The practice was next to Saratoga Hospital, which we could see from the back windows of the grubby rental house. One woman had brought a toddler boy, who held in his lap a plastic toy that played "The Wheels on the Bus" in a doorbell-to-h.e.l.l electronic chime. A younger woman tugged at her low-slung maternity jeans as she backed into a chair, and then she patted her stomach. "When are you due?" asked the already mother, and the young woman answered, "Friday. I can't wait." I have nothing in common with you, I have nothing in common with you, I thought. That shows I had already forgotten the one lesson I'd vowed to learn: you can never guess at the complicated history of strangers. I thought. That shows I had already forgotten the one lesson I'd vowed to learn: you can never guess at the complicated history of strangers.

All of a sudden I missed Savary, missed being the only woman in an unwed mothers' home: I wanted to go away with Edward and not mention anything to anyone until we had an actual baby to show off. If If we had an actual baby to show off. The waiting room end tables were piled high with pregnancy and parenting magazines, every one as sweet and awful and toxic as the Febreze-scented curtains back at the house. And then we had an actual baby to show off. The waiting room end tables were piled high with pregnancy and parenting magazines, every one as sweet and awful and toxic as the Febreze-scented curtains back at the house. And then I I felt toxic, outga.s.sing pessimism, worry, bad luck. felt toxic, outga.s.sing pessimism, worry, bad luck.

Even the paperwork was intolerable. I checked boxes and wrote terse explanations. Previous pregnancies: Previous pregnancies: 1. 1. Living children: Living children: 0. 0. Explanation Explanation . . . The receptionists were being raucous behind the gla.s.s window into their office, but when the young woman took my clipboard and reviewed it she looked up at me, full of sympathy. . . . The receptionists were being raucous behind the gla.s.s window into their office, but when the young woman took my clipboard and reviewed it she looked up at me, full of sympathy.

I sat back down and flipped through the stacks of magazines until I found a copy of O, O, with a cheerful, childless Oprah Winfrey on the front. Then the nurse called me in. with a cheerful, childless Oprah Winfrey on the front. Then the nurse called me in.

First the familiar urine sample. I carried the half-filled cup, as directed, down the hall to a far examining room, which was disconcertingly decorated with wood paneling and pheasant-patterned wallpaper and pheasant-themed prints. The doctor was a man in his fifties; the office was his. It felt like the den of a befuddled father of many daughters, the place he went for a little manly time alone with his pheasantalia, only to discover that no matter what, he was chased by d.a.m.nable women who insisted on offering him cups of urine before dropping their pants. He flipped through my just completed records.

"This is your first pregnancy?" he asked. If I hadn't become pregnant again, I might have gone years without saying it. This was the first time of many; I'd say it every month, then every week, then twice a week. "I had a child who was stillborn."

The doctor was pleasant and kindly, but he seemed unsure of how to respond. Medically, I'm sure he did know, but personally he seemed uncomfortable, and who could blame him? Some things can't be reduced to their medical facts. He cleared his throat. "Any postpartum depression with the last pregnancy?"

"Well," I said. "Well."

He nodded and turned back to his paperwork.

At the end of that first appointment I had to schedule the next. "Who do you want?" the receptionist asked. "Doctor? Midwife?"

"Doctor," I said. "If that's all right." I didn't blame midwifery for Pudding's death, I just couldn't bear the idea of too much warmth from a medical professional. All my romantic notions about collaborating on a birth had gone out the window. I wanted to be told what to do; I swore I would obey.

Besides, what were the chances?

When I returned for every successive appointment, the pregnant women in the waiting room made me sad: there they sat in the present, dreaming of the future. I couldn't bear watching. I wanted a separate waiting room for people like me, with different magazines. No Parenting Parenting or or Wondertime Wondertime or or Pregnancy, Pregnancy, no ads with pink or tawny or pearly smiling infants. I wanted no ads with pink or tawny or pearly smiling infants. I wanted Hold Your Horses Magazine. Don't Count Your Chickens for Women. Pregnant for the Time Being Monthly Hold Your Horses Magazine. Don't Count Your Chickens for Women. Pregnant for the Time Being Monthly. Here I was, only in this second, and then the next, and nothing else. No due dates, no conversations about "the baby" or what life would be like months from now. No "This time will be different" or "Listen, it will all be worth it when you hold your child in your arms." What I wanted, scrawled across my chart in shaky physician's cursive: NOTE: do not blow sunshine up patient's a.s.s NOTE: do not blow sunshine up patient's a.s.s.

I rotated through the doctors, and they all seemed perfectly capable. In the unlikely event (my G.o.d, how we strived to ever lower our expectations) that I actually had a baby, any one of them would be welcome to extract it.

And then I had an appointment with Dr. Knoeller.

Almost immediately Edward and I took to calling Dr. Knoeller "Bones," because she was a doctor (short for Sawbones, like the doctor on Star Trek Star Trek) and because she was extraordinarily thin, but mostly, I think, because we instantly worshipped the ground she walked on and it helped us to be irreverent about one small thing. The appointment was our last checkup of my first trimester, and she looked at the chart.

"Is this your first child?"

"I had a stillbirth last year," I said.

"I'm so sorry," she said immediately, words I've never tired of hearing. We went over the details a little, and then she said, "You've scheduled an amnio."

"Yes," I said. In France the blond Baltimorean asked us if we were worriers; when we said yes, she made an appointment for an amniocentesis. Even so, I'd been startled when I spoke to the French genetic counselor, who was heavily pregnant herself, and she informed me that if the results came back positive for Down syndrome, they "recommended" that we terminate the pregnancy. Edward and I hadn't discussed what we'd do if it turned out that Pudding had Down syndrome, because we agreed that all the theorizing in the world would probably crumble to dust in the face of a fact.

But this time it was different. We simply wanted to know. It would only be information.

"I mean," I said to Dr. Knoeller, "we figured we might as well. I guess. I don't know. What do you think?"

Well, she said, the real question was, if we had an amnio, and the results were normal, but it was one of the one in two hundred pregnancies that miscarried after the procedure, how would we feel?

We were stunned into silence, because of course that was the question. Even if you rephrased it - as Edward pointed out, one in two hundred sounds worse than one half of one percent because with the former you visualize actual people - we weren't willing to risk it. Once you've been on the losing side of great odds, you never find statistics comforting again.

She said in a manner both businesslike and warm, "Let me just say that I had an amnio myself, but I didn't have your history."

And just like that, our history was in the room, and I had found a doctor I loved.

Another woman might want a doctor who promised things: an optimist, a dreamer. Not me. I wanted exact realism and no promises. On one visit a nurse spoke of the kid as though he or she was a foregone conclusion, and I hated it, I wanted to correct her, I wanted to point out that I'd thought that once, and look what happened.

"Well, very good," Dr. Knoeller said at the end of every visit. "So far, so good. Let's hope it continues that way."

And then I was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, and when Dr. Knoeller walked into the room, I swore you could see Walt Disney bluebirds toying with her stethoscope and bunnies congregating around her heels.

"Twenty-eight weeks!" she said. "Now we can relax."

For my first pregnancy I couldn't imagine not finding out the baby's gender. I'd asked Lib why she'd allowed her two daughters to keep their mystery in utero, and she said, "I didn't want to project who I thought they'd be. I wanted them to be themselves."

This is exactly the kind of thoughtful and maternal answer I'd expected from Lib. Me, I wanted wanted to project. I was impatient to make up stories about whoever Pudding was, kicking about in my midsection, but how could I without that essential piece of information? For our second child we decided to do everything differently - no amnio, no peeking during ultrasounds. Now and then I wondered whether that was wise: should something happen (it won't!), should the worst happen (it's not impossible!), wouldn't we rather know? It's terrible to miss Pudding, of course, no matter what, but - this is a total illusion, I understand, nothing but the sentimentality of expectant parents spinning fairy tales ahead of time, viewed in the rearview mirror - it feels like we to project. I was impatient to make up stories about whoever Pudding was, kicking about in my midsection, but how could I without that essential piece of information? For our second child we decided to do everything differently - no amnio, no peeking during ultrasounds. Now and then I wondered whether that was wise: should something happen (it won't!), should the worst happen (it's not impossible!), wouldn't we rather know? It's terrible to miss Pudding, of course, no matter what, but - this is a total illusion, I understand, nothing but the sentimentality of expectant parents spinning fairy tales ahead of time, viewed in the rearview mirror - it feels like we knew knew him. I can't wrap my brain around losing a child and learning only then whether you'd lost a son or a daughter. Not finding out felt like an odd form of optimism. him. I can't wrap my brain around losing a child and learning only then whether you'd lost a son or a daughter. Not finding out felt like an odd form of optimism.