Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

It occurs to us now this is the last piece of unfinished business of Greta’s death. She needs a resting place before Harrison arrives.

  That night, we face the ashes. We both get dressed up; this is a ceremony, after all, and we want to greet it formally. I put on some quiet music, then I turn it off. It doesn’t feel right. We stand facing each other, dressed as if for a date night around our living room table. Then we fetch the bag. Unzipping it feels like cracking open a crypt; this bag has been holding shut some of the only remaining secrets of Greta’s death. Some part of me is shocked to find the stuffed dog, the muslin blanket from the hospital. I pick up the blanket and set it aside carefully, aware of its few brown spots of blood. I feel their existence without seeing them.

  There is a clear plastic sack in here, sealed tight. The bottom of it bulges with weight. I do not want my trembling hands to hold this bag, to tear a hole in its corner, to tip forth its unsteady contents. Stacy, calm and sure, snips the edge with a pair of kitchen shears, exposing what is inside to air.

  I have placed a cheap plastic funnel atop her urn, and I stand ready with it. I bought the funnel months ago, for a few dollars, at a kitchen store, for this purpose. I had to ask the woman at the front desk where they were kept. Stacy tips the bag, and the grey ash begins to stream out in wisps. I watch the little bone chips go down. Some of the slightly bigger pieces get stuck. I shake the funnel. We have to turn our heads away to keep from inhaling too much of her. We reserve some of her for our mothers, who have their own empty urns, and zip the bag up. Stacy picks up the urn, now heavier, and sets it on the table, testing it.

  It does not rest completely flat. It wobbles, barely perceptibly. It lists. Stacy’s face reddens and her crying opens up into wailing, finally. For her, it is not the fact of the ashes’ existence that sends her over the edge; that is an awful, awesome fact, so large it cannot be measured. Faced with the unknowable, there is comfort, there is mystery; there can even be meaning. However, the slight unsteadiness of the urn is hurtful, all the way to the very core, just another reminder that the world itself is pitifully inadequate.

  Nonetheless, she carries it to the shelf. She sets it down carefully next to the photo of Greta from the funeral service, behind the dove wings. We stand for a moment. Once on the shelf, the urn stands steady, beautiful once more. I look at Stacy’s face, which is somehow flushed and drained at the same moment. There it is; we have done yet another visceral, ghastly thing together as a couple. This was our last act of parenting for Greta’s body.

  We cry hard; we sob on the couch. I clutch at my head with angry, helpless, balled-up fists. Then we clean up, wash our faces, and behold ourselves in the mirror. Our eyes are blotchy, but otherwise we look unchanged. The act of grieving our daughter continues on, and on, and on. We have held our firstborn child’s corpse in our arms, and now there is no limit to what we can endure.

  * * *

  When it finally begins—at twelve p.m. on a Thursday, twelve days after Harrison’s due date—it is not exalted. There is no subtle pressure, no slowly widening eyes. We do not clasp hands and inhale deeply together. When it finally begins, it is with a shot of castor oil mixed with orange juice. The oil is our midwife’s reluctant suggestion, who warns us: “We’re going to induce that baby one way or the other on Friday, hon. So if you want to have tried absolutely everything…”

  Stacy downs the first dose without incident. I watch her nervously as she tips out a tablespoon with a sickening glug, shaking the Tropicana into a scummy froth. She pinches her nose like a little kid, and I wait.

  “That wasn’t too horrible,” she says after a moment. “Now let’s wait an hour. If nothing happens, I’ll take the rest.”

  We have whispered and shouted, we have lain down in dirt before a full moon, danced and knelt, prayed and not prayed, lain awake and slept. Now, we watch television, awaiting the stirring of intestines. I sneak a look at Stacy out of the corner of my eye.

  “I don’t feel anything,” she says finally, so I hit “pause” while she mixes up the rest.

  Half an hour later, Stacy’s contractions have not begun. We resign ourselves: the castor oil did nothing, and tomorrow there will be an induction. Stacy will not go into labor naturally this time. We will not be delivering our baby in the hospital’s birthing center, where I would be able to spend the night in the bed with the two of them. Different baby, different pregnancy. Maybe there will be a C-section. Maybe we will shell out for one of those private rooms. We tell each other it makes more sense this way; like everything else about this process, we have been relieved of control. One way or another, Harrison will be with us tomorrow.

  “I must have intestines of steel,” Stacy declares.

  “I mean, I’m not surprised, weirdly,” I say. “Nothing else worked, so why would this? OK, baby boy, tomorrow it is. One way or another, they’re gonna get you—”

  “Ooohhhh,” Stacy says suddenly, fiercely. She stares at me, and her brow crumples. She stands up and bends over at the waist in the same motion, resting a hand on the couch. She says it again, twice as loud for emphasis: “Oohhhhhh.” She hobbles, bent over, to the bathroom, but she stops halfway there, bending farther over and expelling a breath like a blown-out tire. I ask her what she feels, and she reaches a hand over the back of her head to swat at me: No voices, no talking, not now. She disappears behind the door.

  As I watch it shut, I hear her moan again, in a deeper register. I wait helplessly outside the door for a few minutes, listening to her breathing. “Ohhhhhhhh,” she says. I am not ready. Oh my god, somehow we are not ready. How could we have waited until the end of time and not be ready? Life becomes a blur of viscera; I feel only blood coursing through a network of muscles, hear it thundering in my ears.

  Some minutes later, Stacy is on the bed, and the timeline seems entirely backward. Weren’t we already at the hospital last time when she moaned this loudly? Dimly I recall the subtle progress of Greta’s labor, the patient buildup over hours, the contractions arriving in comfortingly spaced fifteen-minute intervals.

  This is nothing like that. This is jagged, chaotic, insane. Stacy seems to be drowning. She can barely open her eyes between contractions. We need to be at the hospital. The message arrives from my rational brain into the heaving sea of my lower brain and nearly disappears before surfacing again. We need to be at the hospital.

  Our doula, Marianne, has appeared by our side somehow; apparently I have summoned her. I hear her talking to me. She is telling me there’s an Uber waiting outside. I’m standing in the doorway of my bedroom, gazing at the spilled-open contents of our go bag. Stacy is still screaming. “Why can’t I catch my breath?” she pleads in a piteous voice, in the tiny merciful crack separating two walloping contractions.

  I am in the front seat of the car, which is moving, and I hear myself making some sort of joke to the Uber driver, something about getting more than he bargained for. Marianne speaks in a bright, conversational voice, as if we are all just children en route to a playdate. Stacy is on all fours in the backseat next to her, rocking and moaning. She cannot talk to me, and I am like a bug that hit a window, dazed and uncomprehending. My hand reaches back to touch some part of her, and my fingers graze her flank as we exit the tunnel. She is alone in her body; I am alone in my mind. We are animals again, and within this pinhole moment, it feels as if we have never known each other, have forgotten that the world could even possibly contain the other.

  As we exit the tunnel into lower Manhattan, everything doubles up and begins rhyming with itself—we have done this before, the drive to a hospital, the screaming, the urgency. Suddenly I’m near the ripped-open place again, watching the curtain flutter between our world and Greta’s. Everything in here is exactly as I remember it—the trees’ spring leaves the day after she was born, the same leaves catching my eye the week she died. I can feel the air on my arms and on my cheeks, even sitting shotgun in this
Uber. So this is where you both are.

  The car pulls up to the ER entrance. The three of us, Stacy and the doula and I, hobble to the door, a malfunctioning six-legged organism with a backpack swinging off it. Nurses swarm Stacy and put her down in a wheelchair. I trail behind. My legs are concrete, her voice distant. I send a discordantly calm, clear, rational text message to Elizabeth: “Stacy is in labor, and I have gone into shock.”

  Sending this message into the universe, I feel a measure of my numbness recede. I notice we are in the birthing center room now; Rita is monitoring Harrison’s heartbeat while Stacy bends over the bed. Out of muscle memory, I press down hard with flat palms on the small of her back as the contraction takes hold. Reality reassembles itself, a few shreds at a time. It has been less than two hours since labor began. Stacy’s contractions have been less than a minute apart for at least forty-five minutes.

  “When’s the last time you ate something, love?” Rita asks, fetal heart monitor still in hand, pressed to Stacy. It’s an alarming question, and I search her eyes but find I cannot pry them from the monitor screen. Stacy’s normal voice immediately reemerges from within her, clear and pinched with worry: “About four hours ago? Why?”

  Rita doesn’t answer, just kneels down on one knee to reposition the heart monitor. “Doooon’t worry,” she murmurs absently, pressing harder and gazing more intently.

  “Rita?” Stacy lifts her head, her labor suddenly forgotten. Her voice is pleading. “Rita, why…?”

  “There he is!” Rita says triumphantly. “We just need to get him moving. His heart rate was lagging.” She looks up at me, laughing: “He was asleep. He just woke up, the little bugger. Thanks for joining us, Harrison!”

  Stacy and I laugh weakly, and then a contraction catches her and her voice plunges downward a full octave. Rita and Marianne help her into the bathroom while I follow. Harry, I think fondly, and I am surprised to hear the nickname, which I’d assumed I would hate, in my mind. “People will call him Harry” was my principal objection to “Harrison,” but now I find this endearment floating easily, naturally, in my mind. Sleepy Prince Harry. You aren’t too impressed by any of this, are you?

  Someone turns on the faucet for the huge tub, which takes forty-five minutes to fill up properly. In the meantime, Stacy and I huddle in the shower. Her legs are shaking, and she is standing barefoot on the tile floor; in the moment, her body seems as wet, denuded, and vulnerable as the baby she’s trying to deliver. The contractions have swallowed her again, so we cannot talk; instead, I train a showerhead at her lower back. But I feel that the three of us are together—the four of us, Greta’s presence like a breath on my neck. I am standing guard while Stacy disappears beneath the rip in the curtain. Somewhere inside there, a little hand will take hers and lead her back to me. I love you, I think at her, a message for later. I love you. When you resurface, I will be here.

  The contractions blur into one long gasping wail. Stacy is being dragged backward now, and I feel in my stomach again that I am losing her. Everyone is behind there: my son, my daughter, my wife. I am seized by a sudden panic that I will somehow not be able to find them or join them, that the curtain will settle and close without me.

  “I need to lie down on the bed!” Stacy cries, her voice cutting through the grey room. We spring into action, lifting and negotiating and coaxing. She crawls onto the bed, crouching instinctively on all fours before shaking her head and flipping, just as instinctively, to her back. I feel the tingle in the air now, just as I did with Greta. Now as then, I clamber up onto the bed, nuzzle my head into Stacy’s shoulder as she grips my hair. I close my eyes. As I do, the smell of the gauze from Greta’s deathbed comes to me. I see Greta, her skull stapled and broken, her brow sweating saline. She opens her eyes and she winks at me. It’s OK, Daddy, she whispers. It’s OK. Harrison descends, Stacy pushes, and all three of us disappear behind the rip, each clinging to the other.

  Inside here, the knots in my chest vanish. The pumping gallbladder of hatred I’ve acquired since Greta’s death falls silent. I feel everything hard and intractable in me break up and disappear like something dissolving in solution. I can see for light-years in all directions. I look up, and I’m surprised to see a version of myself wandering up a street near my old apartment. It is—what—eight days after the accident? Five? Three? I do not know, but it was the last time I felt so close to the border of life and death. The memory plays out in front of me at a comfortable distance, and I watch myself with fascination, wondering if this scene has been playing on a loop in here until I could come observe it.

  “I’m so sorry, baby girl,” I am blubbering. “I have to stay here for a long time. That means—that means I’m going to have to forget you a little, baby girl. It’s the only way I can stay here. I’m going to have to let go of you a little bit.” The distance closes between the two versions of me and I am back in that day, sidewalk beneath my feet, the wind picking up in the big trees. I lift my face toward the branches and glory in their quiet wildness. “But it will only be for a little while, I promise.” I wipe away at my streaming face. “Where you are now, it will only be a moment.”

  Rita’s voice reaches my ears, and the branches release me and begin to dissolve as the scene fades. “Yes, that’s the way, you’re doing great, Mama, you’re doing great. You’ve got a beautiful baby coming right on down. Push that pressure away. Let him come.” Stacy goes silent with each push, bearing down, slackening and gasping, and then going completely taut again. She reaches again for me, and I lean all the way in, our foreheads touching, our lips close. I smell her breath, hot and slightly fruity and filling my nostrils and my mouth. I remember the pile of bloody blankets wadded up and thrown away from beneath us after Greta was born, wailing, and I remember the stray smear of meconium on her leg even as they took her to the cold metal scale to weigh her. Stacy and I are plunging down a chute now, slick with fluid. We cling to each other, two people made into one compound animal and sliding, sliding. We have waded right into the mess together again, my love, I think.

  “One more big one, Stacy, I think you’ve got it,” Rita says, and then Stacy’s scream fills my ears and I hear Rita and Marianne crying out, laughing. Suddenly all three of us hit bottom, the curtain fluttering behind us and Stacy clutching him, a white soapy lather of a boy, all arms and legs and a big, ropy grey umbilical cord. He completely covers Stacy’s chest, big and rude and squirming and alive, with matted hair and closed eyes that, as I lie on my side weeping, open slightly to meet mine.

  He beholds me: his expression is calm, a little bewildered. There is something liquid and dreamy in his eyes in that moment, and he is completely silent. Stacy cannot see us. In that moment, he is still of the void, smuggled whole from eternity, and in those two seconds I feel like I am watching consciousness fill his eyes like fluid. In that eternal, silent moment, he makes his decision—a cry works its way up through his waterlogged lungs and burbles out, his face reddening. Stacy clutches him to her chest and weeps. I am here.

  He screams louder while I crouch, shears in hand, and sever the cord, spattering blood on the hospital sheets. As I watch his face, his senses awaken and are flooded from all angles—blaring lights enter his eyes, harsh and unmuffled noises pierce his ears. Blood pumps into his face and turns it scarlet as he screams around and through the liquid in his system. I lean in, smelling the birth on him and kissing the top of his head. His voice resounds in my skull, and in a low croon, I sing quietly to him, my face resting inches from his.

  Finding a new song for Harrison felt like a theological problem, beyond the range of human capacity. Not “Between the Bars”—it had to be something tinged with grief but still hopeful. Something true. Early in the pregnancy, I tried “Here Comes the Sun” (“Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter”). When he was overdue and we were waiting, I sang him “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (“When are you gonna come down? / When are
you going to land?”).

  I finally settle on “In Spite of Ourselves” by John Prine, a country singer whom both Stacy’s parents loved. It’s a duet between Prine, who was diagnosed with throat cancer the year before recording the song, and Iris DeMent. He is wry, croaky, and barely tuneful; she sounds like someone’s loopy aunt. “In spite of ourselves / We’ll end up a’sittin’ on a rainbow,” the chorus goes. “Against all odds / Honey, we’re the big door prize.” The last line is the kind of promise that you can’t technically keep, more prayer than promise: “There won’t be nothin’ but big old hearts / Dancin’ in our eyes.”

  As I shakily finish singing it, Harrison’s screams quiet into whimpers. His long, aristocratic fingers emerge from beneath the hem of the hospital blanket the doula has placed on him, stretch open to the webbing, and close, slowly, into a fist on top of Stacy’s breast. The hill of her breast meets the pudge of his cheeks, swollen with absorbed fluid from his extra time in the womb, pushing his bee-stung lips into an involuntary kiss.

  I pick up Harrison, so very stout and solid, and place him directly on my chest, in the exact spot I first placed his sister. The moment carries a comet trail of recognition to it, but he is no ghost. My chest rises and falls with his weight on it. I am whole, I realize, with some astonishment. My heart was ripped straight from my chest and placed glistening on the pavement, and yet somehow it beats inside of me still.

  Back in the game, I hear in my head, in a voice I do not recognize: a wry sportscaster’s voice, someone who has called a thousand plays and still never seen things quite like this before.

  * * *

  Rita informs us that he had a nuchal cord and a true knot. “ ‘Nuchal’ means it was wrapped around his neck. And this”—she reaches down and lifts the cord, rubbery and pale grey and wet, snaking down around Stacy’s leg—“is what a true knot looks like.”