It is three in
the morning when the pains come, but her water doesn’t break right away. I awake to her screaming, and for a fast second, I think it is Pa.
“Carmine, Carmine, something is happening, something has changed.” She tells me this as she holds her stomach tightly, and when we stand up, we can see that he’s dropped significantly and that he is ready, even if we are not.
“Just hold on, baby, just hold on. It’s going to be okay.” I turn on the bedroom light and throw on some clothes. She sits on the edge of the bed breathing heavily. I sit beside her and hold her hand.
“Where’s your bag? Is it in the hall closet?”
She nods. Her face is so pale, I feel adrenaline pulse through my body.
I rush out of the room and look for her bag, turning on all the lights in the house in a panic. When I get back, she’s laying on her side.
“Baby, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I remember scenes from movies, women in labor, the regularity of contractions; I can’t place any of it now. Z’s face is covered in sweat.
“It hurts so much, Carmine, so bad. Worse than anything I’ve ever felt, and something doesn’t feel right… I don’t know if…” She’s crying so hard she loses her breath, begins to hyperventilate and scream.
That is the last that I remember, other than bits and pieces of ambulance lights and paramedics pushing into our bedroom, the big pool of blood on our baby blue sheets. The rest is a big red blur that stretches across my mind in vibrant circles that I try to catch with my hands because I think if I can catch them, I can change their shape, change history.
* * *
I am sitting in the waiting room with its pale walls and difficult furniture and lonely air when the doctor comes in to talk to me. He is older and gray, and his mustache stretches to the edge of his lips in black and gray; I am afraid of him in a way that fear has not shown me.
I know what he’ll tell me. I was there, of course, for the biggest part of it. I watched her writhe and twist as Samuel tried to leave her body. I saw the beautiful brown leave her face in blotches, and I felt her grip loosen on my hand. The part that won’t leave my mind is all the red, all the bleeding, all the crying, all the helplessness—and then the cries of my son as he left her womb. He didn’t want to go.
I sit in that stale waiting room and I wait for him to tell me how we’ve lost her, and I want to scream how can that be because I had just found her and life couldn’t possibly be that rotten and how am I supposed to raise a colored son with only white memories? I think about what Pastor Stanley’s told me just a few days before, how I need to believe, keep my eye on the prize, and I want to scream.
“It’s a rare bleeding disorder that we couldn’t have known about before, son.” He’s talking and I hear the words, but they refuse to stick in my head; they’re pounding on me, trying to get in. I feel as though I will explode.
“Your boy is healthy and strong, there’s nothing you need to worry about there,” he continues, and now he’s sitting beside me on the pale sofa and his hand burns on my shoulder. I get up and walk around the small room. Overhead I hear people being paged on the intercom system.
“How could this have happened today? You could have done something, you should have done something!” I am screaming and my hands are on top of my head, and I am nearly running around the small room now in small, crazy circles.
“The problem is that her blood wouldn’t clot and there was nothing…” I kick the small television stand in the corner and yell for him to shut up. He’s telling me to calm down. I want to go back to the edge of our bed and hold her hand again and we’ll rewrite it from there. Instead of driving to the hospital in Eton, we’ll go to the big one in Atlanta and we’ll pray; we’d forgotten to pray, and there, everything will be okay and we’ll raise our son the way she wanted. And we’ll teach him to honor both the light and dark within him, the way she’d taught me, and when we grow old together, our color will merge the way old paint does in a room of an old house.
I sit down and the doctor keeps watching me. In his eyes, there is pity, and it is looming and so sad that I have to look away.
“Where is she? Where is she right now?”
He tells me that she’s still in her room, the one where she’d labored and delivered just moments before.
When I get back to the bright room, there is a curtain drawn around her bed and her hands have been folded on her empty stomach; there’s a slight smile on her face, and I can’t understand who put it there. She is a shade lighter, and the red of struggle has left her face. I fold both of her hands in mine, and they are still warm. Outside the day goes on as though nothing in the world has changed; I don’t understand how the earth keeps on spinning.
It takes all my effort to keep breathing, in and out—I can’t do it. I lay my head on her chest and beg her to come back. Z… my darling… baby, I can’t do any of this without you. Baby, come back for me; we’ll leave this world together, baby. I think I hear her heart beating beneath her skin, and I sit up straight and look at her. Her eyes are closed and she is so still, and I can’t believe how something so big can pass so quietly.
The hours before come back to me, and I crawl over them inch by inch, looking for a reason, a way to change things, a clue. The labor pains were hard and they came fast and close together as we drove the few miles to the hospital. I’d even forgot to turn on the headlights, the night so dark, the cab of the truck so hot with our breathing.
“Carmine, make it stop; it hurts so much.” She’s holding her stomach, and I have her hand in mine and I drive as fast as the old truck will allow me.
I rush her into the front doors of the hospital, and I am nearly carrying her. “Make it stop hurting,” I yell through the hallways. “Give her something now; she’s hurting too much. Now, people, now!” The urgency reminds me of sailors on sinking ships, trying to ward off their fate and the water and the fear of their fellow men.
Once we are settled into her room, we are both calmer, but the medicine is not working and the labor is coming faster than expected and our baby is inching down the birth canal. The screams begin when the pills wear off, and they tell us it’s too late for an epidural and that she’ll have to continue natural because he’s coming too fast. She screams into the early morning hours, and I cry and I sweat but I never stop holding her. And then the doctors realize she’s bleeding too much and that her body isn’t stopping it and our baby is almost here but she is growing weaker.
By the time they use the big metal forceps to pull him from her, she has lost consciousness and the room is so eerily quiet before his cries come. There is life. When I look at him, I see Z’s black hair in large curls all over his head. They take him away, she stops breathing, and they make me leave the room.
* * *
I remember life in fragments after that: the way her hand gradually went from warm to cold, the way I gripped it in an effort to keep her from going to the other side, and finally, the way my baby boy looked from the outside of the nursery glass. He is swollen, tender, already so full of his mother’s light, his skin the faintest of browns, his eyes wide-open while all the other babies cry with closed eyes. I watch him from the glass for hours, don’t take him when the nurses offer him bundled to me, cry when I think about going home alone. Ma came up to the hospital after Z had been gone for hours. I don’t know who called her, but someone did.
“Carmine, show me your son. She’s gone, I know, but your son is here. He’s here and waiting.” I take her to the edge of the nursery glass, to my post, and I watch as the nurses feed him and change him and place a soft blue hat on his round head. I won’t let Ma go in to him. I don’t want to jar anything out of place, make it permanent; if I hold still long enough, things can go back to the way they were.
* * *
When midnight comes and Samuel enters his second day of life, Z’s second day of death, I go back to her room and stare out the window at the moon. My son has been alive twelve hours, and I haven’t put him in my arms or allowed my mother to do so. I am so afraid the St. Clairs will curse him, ruin him with our touch.
I leave the hospital the next morning and go back to our small, country house. When I come through the front door, I fall to my knees: she is there, I can feel it. The house smells of her, contains her, contains us; and without her, I know it is on its way to decay. I cry into my hands as I walk from room to room, taking her all in: the nursery she’d prepared in blues and yellows, the books that line the hallway: African literature and Victorian novels and long hardbacks of poetry and sonnets and songs she’d sing to me in the night.
For the first few minutes, it is easy for me to forget about our baby boy, to forget that my beloved is laying in a dark, cold room in the basement of the hospital, to not realize anything has changed at all. The sun still reaches into the tall windows of our house and stretches across the sofa and the hardwood floors; the coffee, set to brew the night before, is cold in its full carafe; snapshots are still in magnets on the refrigerator. Nothing has changed at all. Z would be coming back in from her walk any moment now that she’d quit jogging, and she’d bring fruit from the old man’s stand: pineapple and mangos and avocados for lunch, and all of this would let me forget that the past I’d lived didn’t matter at all now that I had a future with her.
My son’s face comes back to me as I caress her dress that is stretched across the bed in a patch of sunlight. My baby’s skin, the very perfect nuance of color, the big round circles so perfectly formed in his hair, the puffiness of my nose on his face, her chin, the almond of her eyes, my forehead, and the creation that couldn’t have been completed without us. I want to hold him, to love him, but I don’t know that it’s possible without her; I don’t know that life can go forward without her, without her love, without Pa to hate, without something to have and to hold, to cherish or despise.
I leave the house and start walking until I get to Main Street. I find a café next to the old bank building and go in and sit down. I order a grilled cheese and watch people as they pass the large window in front. The world looks so very different to me, all of it, the lines and the morphing, even the way my sandwich, the bread and the cheese, are melted together; everything is suddenly so separate and so isolated. I feel alone, so alone, so heavy, and I try to forget my boy for just a few moments at a time because seeing him, realizing him, is knowing that she is gone, and I refuse to accept it.
I eat the sandwich and drink the cold coffee and get up again to walk the streets, to notice people’s colors and habits and clothing and how many of them might be dead tomorrow. I want to stop to yell this in their faces: “Don’t get too comfortable, people,” I’d say, “it could all be fucking gone before you know it.” My pace quickens as I think of the confrontation and how resistance comes so easily to me. I walk and walk, past the railroad tracks again, past the restaurant where we ate dinner on our wedding night, and then suddenly I stop walking and look to the sky because I’m so tired and feel as though I don’t know how my legs work anymore or how my heart will continue to pump blood or how my hands will feed my mouth or how I’ll ever be able to see anything again.
I can’t walk hard or long enough. I can’t get away from what is true, no matter how hard I try. I beg the sky for relief: God, I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. I’m not that man.
* * *
When I walk into Ma’s house, she is on the sofa smoking; the smell of the menthol air is comforting to me, and I take two big lungfuls of it before sitting down on my end of the couch. I can feel her looking at me, but I don’t speak. I don’t think I remember how to form words, and I don’t even know if there are really thoughts occupying spaces in my head.
“Where’s your baby, son?” One of her legs rests over the other, and her foot bounces and she takes long drags off her cigarette, the inhale and the exhale, two separate things.
“He’s not my baby, Ma; he was hers. I don’t think I can do it.” Ma comes up beside me. I want Z back.
“You got to let all of that go, boy. Life isn’t fair, honey, and there’s nothing I can say to you about that.” She’s rubbing the small of my back, and I can never remember her doing that. I am her baby again; I don’t want to be a man or a father or a widow, and I don’t want to move.
She brings me a glass of water and a wet rag, which she places on the back of my neck, and it feels so good and so soothing that I put my hand on top of it and push on my neck to feel the coolness even deeper. I lean back on the sofa and blink a few times to clear my eyes, to push the rest of the tears down my face.
“I’m serious, Ma. I don’t know how to be a father. I would hate to fail him. I am nothing without her; I don’t have anything to offer him without her to hold me up. See what I’m saying, Ma?” The feeling is starting to come back to my skin, and I look around at the clean house and how the drapes are wide-open and this room, once so dark, is so alive and my mom’s dress is yellow and not brown.
“Carmine, you have your own light. You always did. For a long while, your pa and I shaded you with our own darkness, and then you did a good job of it yourself, but you have your own light. You do. It’s the only light your son needs to grow. We’ve got to get that baby home. You’ve got to take him to his home, and you’ve got to be his father.” She’s rocking on the sofa a little, remembering something.
“You know son, life is nothing more than a series of choices. If you want to do right by that baby, by your son, you do one right thing at a time. You start by bringing him home, and the stuff you don’t know about him and how to take care of him, you learn, and you get up each day and you start over. You do one right thing at a time, boy, and it’ll be all right.”
Z has some family
in South Carolina that I need to call. I’ve been sitting in our bedroom for hours now, maybe days, the phone ringing off the hook, the hospital’s number popping up, my cell phone ringing with calls from Ma. I feel paralyzed, want to hold the pause button forever, wonder what would happen if I stay like this, in place.
I hear a knock on the door, stop breathing for a second, imagine that it’s the police coming to get me, to finally punish me for all my wrongs, to tell me time has caught up with me, that all of this is really true.
I sit there and the knocking gets louder, becomes a pounding. I stretch my legs and then get up. I hear ringing in my ears, hear the hum of the refrigerator; outside, Z’s wind chimes settle.
When I open the door, a small man stands there, wearing a casual suit, looking straight at me. Behind him, I see the trash truck pass, the mailman across the street, life goes on. How could it?
“Are you Carmine St. Clair?” His face is warm, his eyes tender; he reaches out his hand to shake mine.
“I am,” I say quietly. I feel a chill slide up my spine and then back.
“I’m from Eton Social Services. The hospital has called me because you’ve not held your son or made arrangements to pick him up. Is that true?” He’s holding a folder in his hand, a manila rectangular; a few yellow papers stick out.
I look at him, don’t recognize him, can barely understand the words that escape his mouth.
“Listen, Mr. St. Clair. I know your wife passed in childbirth and you must be in a real state of shock, but we’ve got to make some arrangements here…”
“I need to sit down for a minute. I just need a minute here. Do you want to come in?” I turn around and walk toward the sofa, hear his quiet footsteps behind me.
I sit on the soft and he sits on the other end, hands me his card.
“As I was saying, your son is healthy, and the hospital normally only holds newborns twenty-four hours. It’s been three days now, and I need to know what your plans are.”
“Did you ever go to a movie, get up to use the bathroom, get popcorn or a drink, and when you came back, you were lost? I mean, you miss one part, one key scene, and lose your grasp on the story? I mean never catch up. So when the end of the movie comes along, you aren’t really sure what happened? I mean, you don’t understand how what you missed changed everything you thought you knew.
“I used to go to matinees in Dallas all the time—that’s where I used to live—and this seemed to happen to me all the time. I’d step away for just a few minutes—to make a phone call or take a piss—and that was all it took for me to lose it, I mean the story. I’d come out of the theater confused, feel ripped off. I mean, how can you miss one thing and lose it all? That’s how I feel now. How did I get here? From there? From bliss? It doesn’t make any sense.”
He looks at me for a long time, like a child, searching my face for some kind of clue.
“I think I know what you mean, sir, I think so. Life is funny like that; it doesn’t always make sense, the why or the what. But the fact remains that I need to know…”
“I need to know, too. I need to know what I am supposed to do with a baby boy and a dead wife? What do you tell people in situations like this?” I rub my hands on the legs of my jeans until they are warm and I am sweating behind my ears.
“I tell them that they’ve got to keep moving forward, that they can’t stop, that they need to focus on what means the most to them and do everything in their power. I need to know that you’ll do that, Carmine. I need to know that you’re going to pick up your baby and take good care of him. And if you’re not going to—well, I need to know that too. That’s why I’m here. What are you going to do?”
* * *
I get up and go to the small telephone table in the hallway. I find the address book with names and numbers of cousins and other relatives Z invited to the wedding. I don’t know these people much, and I have to tell them that they’ve lost a family member and gained one, too. All in the same breath.
I start with A and call Aunt Marla first. When she answers, I can’t speak at first.
“Hello? Hello?” Her voice searches the line.
“Marla. I mean, Aunt Marla. Hello, this is Carmine, Carmine St. Clair. I’m Z’s husband. I’m calling to tell you…”
“Yes, I remember you. Where’s Z? What’s wrong? I’ve been calling her for days now. Did she have the baby?”
“She did, she did, and the baby is fine. He’s fine, he’s good, but Z, Z…” I choke on my words, try to spit them out, push them out of my mouth.
“Speak up. What is it?” She’s yelling into the phone, and I can hear her mouth push against the receiver.
I take a deep breath, try to finish, to complete the one sentence I’ve never spoken aloud.
“Marla, oh god, Marla, I mean Aunt Marla, Z… she started to bleed really bad, I mean, she started to bleed at home and things went so fast and…”
“Spit it out, boy!” She’s screaming into the phone now.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t…”
“Tell me what’s wrong with my niece right now, or I will…”
“She’s dead, Marla, she’s dead. She bled to death on the table while she delivered our son.” I yell it at her, get it out of me as fast as I can.
“You’re lying, you’re lying to me. Z was so healthy and strong and…” I hear her sobbing now, a heavy, bulky kind of cry. It scares me.
“It’s true. It’s true. She’s no longer with us.”
“What did you do to her? How did this happen?” She’s taking short breaths on the other end of the line, hyperventilating. I pace the room and sweat.
“The doctors said there was nothing they could do… that the bleeding disorder is rare and we couldn’t have known…”
“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that. You. If she’d never gotten involved with some hick white man…”
My legs fold beneath me and I fall to the floor. “Don’t say that… don’t say that!”
I hang up the phone and ask Ma to call every third person on the list.
* * *
I leave the house just as the afternoon sun is starting to tuck behind the clouds and retire. I walk, but slowly this time, and I make the right turn and the next thing I know, I’m standing at the nursery window again, watching my son twist and turn in his white sleeper, his fists clenched, his eyes bright, not an ounce of fear in them. I remember that her body is floors beneath us, but I also know that can’t be true of her spirit. “I’m always with you, baby, my love; it’s the only way it can be,” she’d always tell me as she explained that she’d felt we’d always been together, that it just took us awhile to realize that, to come home, and that it just wasn’t possible to leave that state ever. I pull the collar of my shirt up and I smell her so strongly in the fibers that I rest my head on my own shoulder while I watch him. He is so calm and so strong already, but I can’t bring myself to go in there, to stand before him just yet.
I leave the hospital and the sky turns gray as I walk home, and then to black. When I get inside the door, I don’t turn on any lights or use the bathroom or breathe a lot, but just climb inside our bed, clothes and all, and wrap myself tightly in our sheets. My sleep is a big black envelope that blocks me from the world, from the truth.
When I wake up in the morning, I step into a cold shower and stand still until my body adjusts to the harsh temperature. I stay under the water until my skin takes on a bluish tone and I’ve run the soap all over my face and my neck and I’ve cried and I’ve sat on the bottom of the tub like a child. When I step out, the same heaviness is on me, the same ugly truths, but I’m ready to put on a clean shirt and to tie my shoes one at a time and go to him. To stand up. I have failed at so much in my life, but I can’t fail at this. I cannot run from him.
I load his car seat and I start the car and let it idle in the drive awhile. I try to remember ever holding a baby, ever—I don’t think I have. I’ve seen them in grocery stores and in church pews and on TV, but there has never been a single time that I’ve held one or looked into its small eyes. When Z was pregnant, I tried to imagine everything about my baby’s face: every fold of his skin and every newly formed reflex and the slate of his clean mind. When he began to kick in her womb, I placed my hand near the kick each and every time, taking him all in, letting my love for him, for her, consume me and melt every defense. I wanted to learn him, to study him, to understand the cycle of life, the human body, the essence of God. I’d just never imagined that I’d have to do it alone.
Instead of driving straight to the hospital, I stop at a bookstore and buy every baby and parenting book I can find:
The
Baby
Whisperer
and
Doctor
Spock
and others. Z had grown up with babies, had many nieces and nephews, promised to teach me all I would need to know. I’d planned to follow her lead, to learn by the unfolding of each day. Advertising and martini lunches and salesmanship cannot help me now.
I grow excited as I drive, then angry, then panic takes over. What is this new world? What is this life? I remember Mom telling me about doing one right thing at a time. I feel Z’s voice vibrate in my mind, know she is there in some way. She has to be.
When I get to the hospital, I am out of breath. I’ve spent the last few miles of the drive imagining my boy at various ages: a teenager, a wobbly toddler, an awkward boy of ten. An infant. I am alone.
I park the car and sit in the driver’s seat and watch a couple leaving the hospital. The father. I watch him. I notice his movements. His hand on the small of his wife’s back, his hand firmly on the handle of the baby’s carrier. He sets the baby down by the car, pulls the blanket back from its face, smiles; he pulls from something way down deep. I watch as he leans into the backseat to buckle him into the car seat, how he closes the door gently, picks up the bag, and leads his tired wife to the passenger side, how he looks off into the horizon before getting in the car himself. I want to follow him home. I want to see how it’s done. I want to know it can be as easy as they make it look.
I walk, nearly run, into the hospital, skipping up six flights of stairs when the elevator takes too long. I can feel something take over. I am no longer myself, the man I know; someone else has come to take his place. It’s a strange, hollow feeling, almost euphoric; I’ve got to move, I’ve got to chase it because I can’t lose.
“I’m ready to take my son home. I want to take my son home.” I repeat myself at the first face I see at the nurse’s station. I don’t wait for an answer but run to the nursery glass to set my eyes on him. His bed is empty; adrenaline takes over.
“I want my baby! Where is my goddamn baby?” I am pacing the halls and looking at each uniformed face, demanding to know where he is; everything has hit me at once—I can’t lose him too. I’ll never let him go, never walk away from him again. I start to run back to the nurse’s station, and they tell me to lower my voice, that my baby is fine, but I can’t calm myself; I need him in my arms now. When I pause to take a breath, I see a yellow-haired nurse coming up behind me pushing a small bed on wheels. Samuel is in it. My arms drop to my side.
“Carmine, here is your son. He was being bathed. He’s been waiting for you awhile now.” She smiles and pushes the car toward me. I am standing in the middle of the hallway with my son and my wife is dead and the room begins to spin, so I push the bed to a nearby chair. I sit down and pull him close to me. His eyes are wide, and before I can stop it, he looks right at me. His eyes lock with mine, and I feel something come over me that is at first very frightening, and then calming and soothing, I know in that very instant: I am no longer who I was.
When I take him into my arms, soft skin and all, we both let out a whimper, and I breathe so shallowly and take his small parts into my lungs and put his head and small body against my chest, on my shoulder, and I feel her: she is with us. I lean back in my chair and cry and laugh at the same time, and both hurt.