I'll See You Again Part 45

I had expected that the sounds of a baby in the house would be a welcome relief after the defining silence of the last two years, but my subconscious mind began playing strange tricks. The new noise of Kasey crying in her crib echoed the haunting sound I still heard of Emma crying in Diane's car.

Kasey and Emma. Both crying. I couldn't stop either of them. In my tired, hurting, befuddled postpartum state, I didn't even know which of my children I was hearing. The first cries of Kasey seemed as poignant and terrible as the last cries of Emma.

On that first night home, Kasey slept several hours at a stretch, but I stayed up, wanting to be at her side if she woke and started whimpering again. By the next morning, I was exhausted and shaken to the core.

"Why did we do this?" I asked Warren as I sat cross-legged on the bed and rocked back and forth. "What were we thinking bringing this baby into the world? We were fine before."

"We weren't fine before, Jackie."

"Yes, we were."

"We were getting through each day, but we weren't dealing with life. Kasey is going to make us start living again."

"Is that good?"

"I think so," Warrren said, though his voice faltered with uncertainty.

Quite possibly, the very concept of living again had us both paralyzed with fear. Kasey was like a spotlight shining on all we had lost. Before this, we-and particularly Warren-had been able to sustain days of denial, putting the misery aside and just going about daily life. Work, eat, watch TV, go to bed. Don't think, don't feel. But now Warren had to come home from work and help me take care of the baby. He had to be a father in real life, not just in memory.

For the last two years, I had been a mother to three girls who weren't here. I would never stop being their mother. But now I had another daughter whose needs were more urgent.

Warren called Isabelle to say that he didn't know what we had been thinking, but we really did need help, after all. Just as she had after the accident, she made a schedule for people to sleep over so I could get some rest and support. During the day, the house was already packed with people stopping by. I had no confidence in myself and was almost scared to touch my baby. I watched other people take care of her and love her.

I can't do that, I thought. Let them do it.

Kasey's fussy time seemed to be in the evening, between six and eight o'clock, when she was tired but not yet ready to go to sleep. She'd cry unless someone held her. Gina and Sal from across the street came by one evening, and when Sal held her, she immediately calmed down. Maybe that's what Kasey needed-a strong, confident cop to hold her, rather than a tremulous mother. I stood back and watched as my friends kissed her and hugged her and handled her effortlessly. Would that ever be me? Being a mom had seemed so natural to me once, and now I could barely remember what to do. I felt awkward around the baby, stiff and unsure of how to behave.

For three days straight, I didn't eat or sleep, and I sobbed far more than Kasey did. By Tuesday, I looked gray and could barely move. I'd never felt worse in my life. I'd lost the fifteen pounds I'd gained in pregnancy plus another seven or so on top of that. I couldn't swallow, and even I could see that I was thin as a rail. Warren kept urging me to eat, but I felt like my throat had closed up and nothing could possibly get through. Karen came to take me back to the doctor.

"This must be what death feels like," I told her, almost too exhausted to get to the car.

Dr. Rothstein ran some tests and quickly discovered that I was anemic, which could partly explain why I felt so bad. She gave me a prescription to treat the iron deficiency, along with a warning: "If you don't start eating, I'm going to have to put you in the hospital," she said, after examining me.

She sent me to my psychiatrist, who put me on Prozac and clonazepam and said it wasn't a surprise that postpartum depression had hit me hard. I felt like I had been plummeted right back to the weeks after the accident, that nightmarish time when I felt total devastation twenty-four hours a day. Although I hadn't realized it, I had gotten so much better since then, being back in that condition was a shock. As had happened the very first night at home, hearing Kasey cry plunged me into some anomalous form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Like a soldier coming home from war who hears a car backfire and experiences the horrors of war all over again, I heard Kasey whimper and relived again and again the last conversation I ever had with Emma.

I found myself afraid to be alone with the baby. I imagined getting so unnerved by her cries that I would just walk out the front door and leave her. It didn't require Sigmund Freud to interpret that as an emotional metaphor for the guilt I felt about Emma, Alyson, and Katie. I had abandoned them when they needed me. I hadn't taken care of them. Nothing could relieve me of my secret shame. If I stopped to think about it, I understood that the car accident was an inexplicable incident, a one-in-a-million or -billion or -trillion occurrence that n.o.body could have foreseen. How different for Kasey, whose little cries foretold only that she needed a simple diaper change, a bottle, or to be gently and lovingly rocked.

I could do all that. I just didn't know it yet.

"Why can't G.o.d make this easy?" I asked Isabelle.

"What do you want G.o.d to do?"

"Make her a good baby."

"She is a good baby!" Isabelle exclaimed.

In fact, after that first long night, Kasey fussed less than most babies, and everyone marveled at her pretty features and easy temperament. Instead of feeling maternal pride, I shuddered at my disloyalty to her sisters.

Alyson was a happy baby, too. Has everyone forgotten her? Is it only about Kasey now?

After seeing Dr. Rothstein, I tried to get myself to eat, but I had less success with sleep. Each night I stayed awake, wandering around my room, wondering what I had done. Even if friends had stayed in the house to help, I listened for every peep from Kasey and rushed in. Sleep deprivation can cause confusion, hallucinations, and depression, and while international courts have disagreed on whether it's a form of torture, all agree that it is cruel and degrading.

And I was doing it to myself. This was way beyond the normal weariness any new mom feels, which I had experienced three times before. Unlike when the girls were infants, with Kasey, I didn't sleep when she slept. I didn't sleep at all.

At the end of the week after I saw the doctor, a miracle happened. Kasey slept for five hours one night, and I did, too.

I woke up the next morning feeling like a new person. I looked at my baby in the morning light and touched her soft sweet cheek.

I picked her up from her crib, and even as I held her, I felt a strange sense of dislocation. Was my previous life a dream? This baby was real, a tangible, sweet-smelling presence in my arms. But how did she get here? How did I end up in this spot? Trying to put the pieces of my life together was like attempting to solve a jigsaw puzzle that had extra pieces in the box.

A sad mother whose three daughters have died.

A hopeful mother who has a new baby.

Could both of those women be me?

In some ways, it had been easier to be sad every day and let myself think only of a tomorrow when I would see Emma, Alyson, and Katie again. Warren was right-I hadn't been living, I had just been biding time. Now I had to be here-in the moment-for Kasey.

As I started to get some physical strength back, I felt stupid having people sleep over and ended Isabelle's schedule. I could take care of Kasey. But my mental picture of desertion continued to terrify me. One night Warren stayed at a Jets game that went very late and I roamed alone through our dark and quiet house. Kasey slept comfortably in her crib. I suddenly had visions that I would walk out the door and abandon her, leave and not come back. Frightened of my own thoughts, I called Denine to come and be with me.

The escape fantasy scared me-until I started mentioning it aloud. And then nearly every woman who heard it gave me a knowing smile.

"Come on, Jackie, stop thinking you're so special," teased one of my friends, a devoted mother of three. "There are times we'd all like to walk out of our own lives and start again."

I looked at her in shock. "Really?"

"Really," she said. "I think it's part of being a parent. Or maybe just part of being married."

Her nonchalance gave me a new perspective. I thought of Warren's mom, who hadn't just thought about leaving her children-she'd actually done it. Maybe when life got too hard, it was easier to run than stick it out. But there was something heroic about facing down difficulty and pain and uncertainty and standing firm, no matter what.

"I'm going to be here for you," I whispered to Kasey. "I'm not going anywhere. But you know that you have three sisters, don't you?"

I sat down in her room, where all four girls' names were written on the wall. I rocked Kasey and looked at the pictures of her sisters.

Maybe we didn't have too many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. For the first time I realized that maybe we had the right number-and I could figure out how to put them together for a beautiful picture after all.

Twenty-seven

At my six-week checkup, the doctor said she'd clear me to start running again the next time I saw her. I whooped with delight. Running meant getting back to life. After that, everything else would fall into place. It had to. Her news gave me a greater surge of excitement than any Prozac prescription could possibly provide.

My next appointment with her was scheduled for a Monday, but patience has never been one of my virtues. On Sat.u.r.day, I called Bernadette to ask if she'd come for a first run with me.