the filmy, flimsy layer, the peritoneum, the actual lining of the abdominal cavity; it, too, was opened, with sharp, thin scissors. Then a small cut through her retroperitoneal. She heard “Retractor,” and pictured her bladder pulled down toward her feet, away from the rest of the surgery, sparing it injury. A final incision across the lower portion of her womb, her uterus easily tilted up and laid on her belly, revealing the baby only to the doctor and nurses busy working. There were pictures of it all in Martin’s book and a sentence that read: Pulling gently on the head will allow the rest of the delivery. She heard “Clamping umbilical cord,” and then she heard no more.
She woke in a hospital room and wondered why she was there, wondered when someone would come to explain why she felt nothing below her waist, nothing at all. She knew she should be afraid, but something in her bloodstream was lifting her up, up, up, out of the bed, and she was floating just below the ceiling. Looking down, she was at the old dining-room table she used as a desk, the wood floor of her East Village apartment sloped under her feet, pages crawling with words flying through the air, stacking up next to the typewriter, there was a title on the tip of her tongue, that slid right off, and she, too, slid away.
She woke again, and knew she was in her hospital room, that there was, or had been, a baby. Martin was on the bed, carefully balanced, tenderly looking at her. She heard him say, “That was all unexpected,” then ask how she was feeling, but she couldn’t respond, couldn’t keep her eyes open, they were like windows slamming shut, and her last thought, It’s all unexpected, reverberated then faded away.
She woke again and Martin was in the armchair next to the bed, the baby hidden in a blue blanket. So the operation had been successful, the baby alive. “He emerged with bravado and his eyes clenched tight. He has all of his parts,” Martin said, and Joan wanted to say, “Turn down the painkillers, I can’t stay awake,” but she was gone before the words left her mouth.
She was awake and alone in her hospital room. She felt wrecked and sore and the clock hands were elongated snails inching around the black markings of the day, but perhaps it was night, and late, because she couldn’t hear the nurses laughing at their station, couldn’t hear the shush of their foam-soled shoes.
She woke and knew it was morning from the slant of the sun lighting up her hands, the veins standing out, needles inserted and taped down, and then the heavy door pushed open, and there was Martin, smiling and cradling the new baby, sitting down on the bed, transferring the infant into her arms. “Your first glimpse of your mommy,” Martin said, and Joan saw a cap of jet-black hair, skin white as alabaster, the combination giving him the look of a baby ghoul or a vampire, something medieval, potentially poisonous. But everything was where it belonged. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he,” Martin said, and Joan thought the pain meds were affecting her sight, for the baby looked so white, as if he were bloodless, when Daniel had been golden and rosy.
You’ve been in and out,” Martin said as he untied her hospital gown, pushed it down past her breasts. She hadn’t said a word yet, her throat still clenched tight, but he understood she wanted the baby’s flesh on hers. She had been right, with Daniel, about the essentialness of that first connection, not wasting it on anyone else’s baby. She was overheating, but the infant was cool and dry, not damp and sticky as Daniel had been, and even though they were skin-to-skin, the way this one looked up at her, she thought she had to be wrong, that it wasn’t an arrogant stare, a smirk on his pale lips. He blinked, then turned his head away, already his own person.
She tried feeding him. He latched on. She felt the suction between his pursed mouth and her nipple, but suckling did not interest him, he was content to lie there, just like that, before tucking back into himself. Four times she tried, before Martin paged their ob-gyn.
Dr. Hinton lifted the baby from Joan’s arms and said that because of the C-section and the meds coursing through her, he hadn’t been allowed to suck after being liberated from her womb. Dr. Hinton actually said, When he was born, and Joan revised his words because liberated from her womb expressed the gravitas she thought this birth deserved. “The suck reflex is strongest then, right after birth. Delayed gratification sometimes makes it more difficult later on. But it’s only the third day.” Joan hadn’t realized she had been out for so long. The doctor stroked the baby’s lips. “To evoke and test the rooting reflex,” he said, and the baby pulled the doctor’s pinky into his mouth. “He’s gone into full reflex, pulling my finger in, wrapping the lateral sides of his tongue around it, creating a medial trough, starting the peristaltic motion from front to back toward the soft palate and pharynx. Nothing’s wrong with the short frenulum, because his tongue’s moving forward easily. His airway is all clear, no mucous. So everything looks fine. He’s got a powerful suck, see how he’s moving his whole head, his face wrinkling and dimpling?” Joan and Martin nodded. “I’ll send in the lactation specialist. She’ll be able to help.”
But the baby had made his decision. He would not partake in such intimate nurturing, was disinterested in receiving nourishment direct from Joan’s body. At her request, his bassinet was moved out of the nursery and into her hospital room. On a frequent schedule, the nurses had her pump, then returned with bottles of her milk wrapped in white cloths, as if mother and son were about to embark together on a fine dining experience. But he did not want Joan as the source of his sustenance, his tongue touched the plastic nipple, held on, sucked once, then he turned away, closing his eyes as if to say, I’ve made it clear, haven’t I, that I don’t want what comes from her? He was fed bottles of formula instead. Her milk was donated to a baby down the hall whose mother could not nurse at all.
At least Joan could keep him tightly grooved to her body, and she held their new child for hours, letting him go only when he was solidly asleep. It had been so different with Daniel, the way love had bubbled up, until the stream was an ocean, too large to ever spring a leak. Every day in the hospital, Joan waited for this new one to grab hold of her heart, to adhere to her beat, but a cool river ran between them that neither seemed capable of fording.
She and Martin had learned its sex ahead of time, no need for mystery with the second. And they had chosen a name. But only sometimes did Joan remember that fact, to use it when she spoke to him quietly. His birth certificate read Eric, Norse for ever or eternal ruler. Neither she nor Martin had any connection to that Nordic world, but it sounded strong, as strong as Daniel Manning. Just days old, and it seemed to Joan that Eric was indeed already ruling over his world. The kisses she gave him often felt premeditated.
Years later, Joan would wonder if she had already known everything, about him, but not just about him, about all that was to come, seeing the future while still in her hospital bed, clutching the baby to her heart, hoping the separation between them would close and heal, looking into his unfathomable eyes.
Perhaps it was the epidural she had been given, with its local anesthetic and narcotics, or the general anesthesia during the C-section, or the painkillers she was swallowing every four hours, but future events tumbled through her mind during those days and nights in the hospital, whipping past her eyes so quickly they could not be called visions, a kaleidoscope of images, mere flashes immediately forgotten. Through the years, certain situations would feel familiar, the feelings too, that sense of recollection, a déjà vu she could not place, not remembering that her mind once overflowed with an abundance of vital information. There would be no sense of that déjà vu, however, when the family she had never wanted twisted down into unknown depths, into a different kind of abyss, from which a roaring animal would race, up through dank tunnels, to tear into tender flesh. None of that was captured in those frenzied images. Did a broken heart reveal itself in X-rays, or was an autopsy required to see the fracture lines running through the four chambers, where ventricles and atria had shattered?
But in those earliest days, when nurses flitted in and out, checking her incision, rubbing her down with lotion to abate the itching, forcing her to cough, and to take short walks, as she tried mothering Eric, what Joan saw clearly
