joy. I am only sitting in the cold of the night with my son at my side, but he is breathing.
“Where have you been?” I ask.
“I’ve been right here.” The words come from him, but he doesn’t so much speak them to me as into me, and his hand moves to rest over his heart. “I’ve been near you this whole time.”
“Do you know how much I love you?” I brush his hair up off his forehead.
A smile spreads across his face, revealing a single dimple on his left cheek, like mine.
I NEVER KNOW when I’ll sense Reid’s presence. It isn’t in a toothbrush left behind or a frequently worn item of clothing. It’s in the absences that I feel him most. It’s everywhere that I had imagined he’d one day be.
For me, he is more than his body. I knew the soul, not the flesh. When I look at photos of him, I miss him, but not in the same way I miss him when I look at photos of myself pregnant.
He is a feeling. He is a feeling more than anything because of the simple fact that he died before he was born. Because he was stillborn. He is not defined by this, but the definition matters. I was meant to be his portal, the one that would lead him from his world into ours, but he left for another world, one altogether foreign to me. His life was supposed to start with his birth, but I have learned that his story began long before then, just as I have learned that it will continue long after. They were gifts, his life and his death. I never really lived before either.
1
IT IS A TUESDAY, the last one of my pregnancy. March is rounding the corner into April, and the transition from winter to spring has begun. My mother and I are out for lunch on West Fourth Avenue after a walk by the ocean, with the city on the other side of the bay, lambent in the soft northern sun and decorated by the earliest signs of cherry blossoms. In the restaurant, we sit in a narrow booth—my belly pressed up against the table edge, not quite able to fit in the space provided—and wait for our food to arrive. I shift uncomfortably in my seat but don’t have the energy to bother suggesting we move.
My mother has two speeds: racehorse fast or complete standstill. There is no in-between. Most of my childhood memories of her are of her back, with me toddling behind, trying to match her pace. My father, by contrast, has only one setting: always moving, yet somehow always late. I inherited that trait from him.
It’s nice to catch my mom at a slower pace than usual, and I relish the new ease our relationship has gained during my pregnancy. We were never especially close when I was growing up. Desperate for my independence, I spent most of my adolescent years trying to push her away, until I moved to New York after high school. Living under the same roof was never good for either of us. Living abroad had helped, but this baby is helping the most.
“Are you nervous?” she asks, putting her phone facedown on the table.
“What, about the birth?” I think about it for a moment. “Actually, no,” I answer honestly. I’m really not all that nervous. During our birthing classes, we’ve gone over things as thoroughly as I figure is possible and I know what to expect. “We don’t have much of a birth plan,” I continue. “I’m pretty open to whatever is needed.”
She nods, “That’s a good way to go into it.” Then, tucking a wayward strand of red hair behind her ear, she muses, “I wonder if he’ll come this weekend? Near his due date?”
“Wouldn’t that be something?” Imagining it then, I smile. My due date is this Saturday, and early deliveries run in the family. I’m already further along in my pregnancy than my mother or grandmother had ever been in theirs.
The waiter arrives with our salads, and we continue to talk and laugh and wonder about all that is to come.
After our meal, my mom and I plan to meet up again on Friday for another walk along the ocean. She’ll call me after her hair appointment. I’ll call her sooner if there are any signs of impending labor. I return home to take a nap and fold the laundry in the nursery. Little clothes in neutral colors lie spread across the floor: a onesie that wraps around and ties at the side; mittens made to look like the paws of a bear; a sun hat that seems enormous in comparison, meant for the summer months when he’ll be older. I imagine the stains of milk and mud and berries these bits of fabric will collect, and all the things we’ll do together fill my mind—these tiny clothes from the growing pile before me seeming to come to life in my daydreams of what’s ahead.
Aaron comes home later in the afternoon to find me at the computer. I’m writing a post titled “Pregnancy-Approved Smoothies” on the blog I started last year, as a way to fill the gaps between my modeling jobs when we were still living in New York. He kisses me hello as I hit publish.
“How about mushroom risotto for dinner?” he asks, heading to the kitchen.
“I was going to make a salad,” I reply. If it were up to me, we’d eat salad every night. It’s why Aaron often does the cooking.
“Sure, salad is an important part of a meal,” he teases, and I throw a pillow at him. He laughs sweetly, then peers into the nursery I’ve finished organizing, taking in the car seat, the stroller, the storage unit full of children’s books and folded swaddles and toys.
“Wow.” He beams. “We’re really ready for him!”
I’ll never tire of his passion. The way he is all in when something excites him. Like the time he came home to our New York apartment saying, “You’ll never guess what I found!” then proudly revealed the pile of wood he had rescued from a construction site dump, which he proceeded to transform into beautiful hand-built seating for our patio. Or when he announced, “I’ve learned another language!” and pointed at the cryptic type on his computer screen, patiently explaining how he had taught himself the software coding that would become his career. Aaron is a living, breathing database full of information. If there is anything I ever wonder, I don’t need to look it up—he will know. It was one of the things that first made me fall in love with him.
I go to the doorway and wrap my arms around him as we gaze into the nursery together. I think back to nine months ago, and my anxious tears when those two pink lines first appeared on the pregnancy test. We hadn’t been trying to avoid pregnancy, but at twenty-four and twenty-six, it wasn’t exactly part of our plan to have kids this young. But Aaron was all in for this too.
“We can do this,” he reassured me after I’d given him the big news. “I’m excited.”
And I believed him. And I’m excited too.
That evening, Aaron and I head out to our appointment with the local community birth program. We chose the program, run by a team of doctors, midwives, and doulas, at the end of my first trimester. Being young and healthy, I didn’t feel the need to be under the care of an obstetrician, but being cautious, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of a home birth either. This program seemed like the perfect medium. We like their philosophy of restoring pregnancy and birth to the community-oriented experiences they had been traditionally.
The way the program works, our prenatal appointments are piggybacked onto a two-hour group lesson with other couples who are due around the same time as us. We are the youngest couple there by nearly a decade. The first day we walked in, we both felt shy about our youth. But we quickly realized that everyone else was just as lost
