Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  It had been Pierre’s idea to start our family in the first place. Imagine how beautiful and brilliant our child would be! Pierre had traced a line on my bare shoulder with his finger, and in an instant I had seen it, too, this imaginary, luminescent child of ours. That had been enough to believe I wanted what he wanted. Besides, Bronia has two children now, and she is still practicing medicine. Pregnancy had agreed with her, too. A few years ago, she’d even helped me move into my first room alone in Paris: eight months along and she was pushing a handcart of my things down rue Flatters. I’m angry with my condition, with my own body for its betrayal, for its inability to succeed at its most base biological function.

  “Mon amour, you need a break,” Pierre insists, but I am not about to give up my work, my research. Then Papa writes that he is returning to France on vacation, and Pierre says it would upset Papa were I to not go see him for a few weeks. Deep down I know the two of them have perhaps conspired on this plan to take care of me: poor, mad Marie, refusing to take some time for herself. But I am so tired, and I truly do need a break, so I go off to Port-Blanc without much argument.

  Papa and I spend most of July at the Hotel of the Grey Rocks. The sunshine and the sea are glorious and rejuvenating. As I breathe the country air and take my meals with Papa in the hotel dining room, my nausea subsides more than it has in months.

  “You are getting color in your cheeks,” Papa says, with a slow smile. He is older than I picture him in my head; his voice is gravelly and his hands shake a little as he cuts up his meat. I feel both guilt at not living near him in Poland, and a moment of gratefulness to have this time with him, that being so ill forced me here, now. And maybe it is the sunshine, or being with Papa, or maybe it is that away from the lab and the city, my body understands how to perform its biological functions, but I do actually feel better.

  Pierre stays behind in Paris, as his mother, Sophie-Claire, is very ill with incurable cancer of the breast, and we’d both agreed before I left that he could not leave her. But this is the first time I’ve been away from him for more than a few hours since we got married, and I am shocked by how desperately I miss him. We write each other daily, but it is not the same as being together, and when after three whole weeks apart, he shows up one morning at the hotel, surprises me, I cannot contain my glee. I reach up and touch his beautiful face, trailing my fingers softly through his beard.

  “Mon amour, the sea air agrees with you,” he tells me. “Your eyes have light again.”

  He’s right. I feel so happy, so much like my old self, that I suggest a bicycle ride. Pierre worries it will be too much for me, but I push away his concern. I feel so much better here. We borrow two bicycles from the hotel, and go out and ride all afternoon. I forget it all: feeling ill and about the baby coming so soon. And there is nothing but the wind in my hair and my husband pedaling behind me. I am too fast for him, even with the weight of pregnancy. He still cannot catch me, or perhaps he is letting me ride ahead to make me feel good again. His laughter trails in my dust, and he calls out that our baby might be born riding.

  When we get back to the hotel that night, I get off the bicycle, and suddenly I am unsteady, shaky and weak. The nausea hits me, worse than before. I lean over the side of the bicycle, heaving.

  “Marie?” Pierre’s voice is alarmed, and I look up, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. He points to my shoe. I look down, and it is dotted with red. “Are you bleeding?”

  IN THE DEEPEST, HOTTEST HOUR OF AUGUST, I LIE IN MY BED back in our apartment on rue de la Glacière, heavy and restless. Pierre and I rushed back to Paris, those drops of blood on my shoe enough to turn me cold with terror. Pierre had summoned his father, Dr. Curie, who’d examined me, ordered me to stay in bed for the remainder of my pregnancy, stay as still as I possibly can. He has been checking on me and the baby twice a day, looking for more signs of overexertion or distress. But so far, there have been none. And now that I have lain here for two whole weeks, I believe I will either have this baby soon or I will die of boredom and despair.

  Pierre brings me breakfast of toast and tea this morning before leaving for the lab.

  “Pierre, I can’t.” I push the plate away, and he sets it gingerly on my night table.

  “You need to eat, mon amour.” He bends down, brushes his lips gently across my forehead. “It is simple science. The baby needs nutrients from you.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I say. Then the baby kicks inside of me, as if in protest. My stomach swells again with more nausea.

  Pierre rests his hand gently on my belly, then on my forehead. He strokes his thumb softly across my temple. “If I could trade places with you, you know I would.”

  He’s said this so many times these past few weeks, I actually believe him. But biology, science, prevents this, of course, and it is the angriest I have ever felt at something so scientific. “I will have the toast in a bit,” I relent. “Go, get to the lab. Go ahead. I’ll be fine.”

  Pierre hesitates before standing, following my directions. He walks out of our bedroom, and I bite back tears as I imagine him walking the short path to our lab without me.

  I’m glad he can continue our work, in spite of my miserable condition. I can’t imagine how much worse I’d feel if I did not have Pierre now, if all progress had to stop while I am forced to lie here. It just seems so endlessly unfair, the inequity that comes to the woman when a married couple decides to have a child. That isn’t Pierre’s fault of course.

  The baby kicks again, and I take the toast from the plate on the nightstand, where Pierre left it, forcing myself to nibble lightly on the edges, swallow it down, and take a sip of tea.

  I put my hand across my stomach, stroke it lightly, hoping to calm both my nausea and the baby’s kicks. “You will come out soon,” I say to no one, to the empty room, to the being inside of me who does not yet have a fully developed sense of intellect. Rationally I know all this, but spending days on end with nothing to stimulate the mind but books and articles is turning me mad. “You will come out soon,” I say. “And your papa will teach you all there is to know about science.”

  Once this child is outside of me, it will be Pierre’s turn to carry him or her. I plan to return to the lab as soon as I give birth.

  FINALLY, I AWAKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT ON SEPTEMBER 12th, my stomach clenched with labor pains, the bedsheet wet beneath me. I wake Pierre, tell him to send for his father. It is time. It is finally time!

  “Are you all right, mon amour?” The nervousness in his voice cuts through the darkness.

  “Yes,” I lie. “The pains aren’t that bad.” They’re worse than any pain I have ever felt, hitting every nerve of my body. But they are such a relief, too. I welcome them. These long sick months, these endless days in bed, they will be over soon.

  Bronia had told me to remember to breathe in and out slowly to manage the contractions. But breathing doesn’t help at all, and each time the pain grips me, I begin equations in my head, focusing on calculating the kinetic energy I might be expending, with a variety of integers. I hold my focus on the numbers, on the mathematical probability. And then the pain subsides, and I leave off the equation and think, soon the baby will be outside of me, my life and my body my own again. Everything back the way it was. Tomorrow, or certainly the next day, I’ll get out of bed and I’ll walk to the lab again, and life and science will resume. I cling to that thought now as I push, as I push again.

  Just one last push, Dr. Curie finally says. I look at the window and night has fallen, again. Through the haze of pain, the equations of my contractions, I have lost an entire day.

  Pierre squeezes my hand, and I do as Dr. Curie says, muster up all my strength, push again. The pressure in my abdomen eases, and then with a gush, the baby is outside of me. I wait for it, the flood of relief I’ve been expecting, wanting, for months now. But my chest is tight. My legs are numb, and it is hard to breathe.

  “It’s a girl,” Dr. Curie cries. He whisks her away, wraps h
er in a towel, and rubs her skin until she lets out a small cry, then a long wail. And suddenly, Pierre’s shoulders shake and tears flood his face. “She’s so small,” he cries out. “I did not think she would be this small.”

  Dr. Curie hands me the baby, still wrapped in the towel, and I examine her: she is perfectly the right size for a newborn. She has ten fingers and ten toes, Pierre’s eyes, and my nose, a symmetrical face, and the softest flesh I’ve ever felt. This baby that Pierre and I have created, that my body grew and nourished and tortured me with over months and months, she is more perfect than anything we’ve ever done together in the lab.

  I FINALLY DO GET OUT OF THE BED THE NEXT MORNING, BUT not to go to the lab. All that time spent in bed and it had never occurred to me how much the baby would need me once she came. Irène cries for me and then suckles me endlessly, leaving my body more tired, more sore, more nauseated than ever before. I go through weeks in a daze, my mind too numb and exhausted to even think in equations. Or about what I’m missing in the lab.

  Irène begins to lose weight, and then all I do is worry over her. My mind is so consumed that I don’t even notice Pierre is gone all day or wonder about the work he is doing without me. He comes and goes with a kiss to me and Irène, and I say to him, “Should we call your father to examine her again? Maybe she’s sick?”

  My love and worry for her is like nothing I can explain through any logical reasoning. It is an orchid, delicate and fragile. Beautiful and breakable. If anything happens to Irène, it will be my undoing.

  Pierre summons his father, three evenings in a row. Irène cries and cries, and she is much too thin.

  “Perhaps you should try a bottle instead,” Dr. Curie finally suggests gently, with the detachment of a doctor, not the attachment of a grand-père, who leans down to kiss Irène’s hollowing cheek after he examines her. “She is healthy, Marie, but I don’t believe she’s getting enough milk from you.”

  As soon as I switch her to the bottle to feed, she begins to grow again, plumping up in days. Apparently, my body is not made for motherhood, the way it was not made for pregnancy. Once I accept this, a fact, the worry lifts, hovers above me, like lithium on water. My mind is open again.

  “What a shame,” Bronia says, when she comes by to visit her niece and check up on us. “Feeding by breast is so much more convenient.”

  But my breasts are also a tether, and once Irène only requires a bottle, which can be given just as easily by Grand-Père or Papa as by Maman, I begin to feel it so strongly: my deep and abiding love for science.

  Then, when I awake each morning at dawn, it is the lab calling to me again—its cries now louder, more pressing than Irène’s.

  Marya

  Zoppot, Poland, 1897

  In early February the Baltic was sparkling and cold: a cerulean gem. I stared at it from the upstairs guest bedroom window in the Zorawskis’ resort house, mesmerized by its breadth and depth and color, the deception of its beauty. Just before Kaz and I had arrived last week, a man drowned in the tug of the undercurrent. Or maybe it was that he froze to death—the water much too cold for swimming this time of year. Pani Zorawska had recounted it all to us with sheer horror and excitement upon our arrival, but I was exhausted from the long train ride, and I hadn’t really been listening. Her words buzzed above my head like flies, the way so much had these past few months.

  It was remarkable the way my body returned to normal in such short time. Seven months had passed, and now my baby girl, my Zosia as I had named her in my own mind, had been deceased longer than she had been alive inside of me. My stomach was concave, empty. To look at me, one would never know that I’d carried a baby in my womb, then lost her. To look at me one would not see the emptiness I felt, nor the way, now, my body was a shell and I was a fragment of a real woman. Or that I could not stand any longer for my husband to touch me.

  Pani Zorawska had disappeared again from our lives for a few months after my loss, and Kazimierz and I had gone back to at least the appearance of what we had been before. He returned to his studies with Hipolit, and if it was possible, was home even less than before. I returned to work at the Kaminskis and my Wednesday evening classes as a student, though I had not been able to teach again yet, which both Agata and Leokadia remarked on with concern. I told them I just needed time; I just needed to heal. But now months had passed; everything appeared to be as it once was. It was only inside that I felt the constant hollow, that I felt my friends’ and my husband’s voices buzzing around me all the time like flies, the conversations too hard to follow, too much to understand.

  Then, Pani Zorawska had sent a letter: the Zorawski family would be going on a retreat to the Baltic for a week in February, when Kaz’s younger brothers and sisters had a break from school and university, and would we like to join them?

  This is exactly what we need, Kaz had said. His eyes had lit up, and he’d clutched his mother’s letter to his chest. He’d kissed the top of my head. The sea air! Reuniting with my family at last, kochanie.

  I smiled at him, but inwardly worried about why she had invited us now, when we were broken. But Kaz had not been with his family in so long. I could not deny him that. I bit back my doubts and agreed with him out loud: Yes, this is exactly what we need.

  AND SO, HERE WE WERE. ZOPPOT. THE BALTIC SEA VILLAGE ON the northern tip of Poland was a playground of the wealthy and Russian royalty. I had never been to such an opulent place in all my life. The Zorawskis’ beach house was twice the size of their manor house in Szczuki, a world away from our small life in Loksow. But even here, especially here, I was as cold and empty as I was at home. Kaz, though—he was full again, alive: his cheeks reddened with excitement as he spoke to his siblings about his work at the supper table.

  I heard the words, Hipolit, analytical geometry, buzzing around my head. I forced a smile and took a sip of the cold water Pani Zorawska had placed in front of me at the table. The voices of Kaz and his siblings rose and grew dim. I cut my meat in tiny pieces, but I did not eat them—I pushed them around on my plate with my fork, and I looked around the table.

  My, had all the children grown since I had been their governess. Even little Maryshna who I had rocked to sleep many nights, a babe in my arms—she was nearly as tall as I was now. She must be ten, or was it eleven? Practically all grown. It was what children did, I supposed, grew up. Except for mine, born too early, born blue.

  “Marya.” Pani Zorawska was saying my name, and I shook my head. If she’d been talking to me, I hadn’t heard what she’d said. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s you and I go out to the porch and talk, shall we?”

  I glanced at Kaz. His cheeks were pink, his eyes beaming, and he was laughing now at something his brother, Stanislaw, was telling him. I rose, and he noticed me again, just briefly. He squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back, then let my fingers trail away. I followed his mother behind the dining room, out onto the covered porch, which had an entire wall of windows that overlooked the cold, reckless sea.

  “It’s so beautiful to look at it, isn’t it? It could almost deceive you.” Pani Zorawska pointed toward the bright blue water, but she stared directly at me, raising her eyebrows. I nodded, uneasy here all alone with her for the first time in so many years. She sighed and patted a rocking chair, gesturing for me to sit down. I did, and then she sat in one next to me. We rocked for a little while, staring at the wild expanse of sea, saying nothing at all.

  Once, I had admired her, back in Szczuki, when I had cared for her younger children for years and she had treated me with kindness. And when Kaz and I first secretly got engaged, I imagined she might come to treat me as a daughter, that I might have a mother again. But that was before I knew what she really thought of me, that I was not worthy of her son. And here I was all these years later, having not yet achieved my university degree, having failed my husband and myself and my baby girl. It bothered me that perhaps she had not been completely wrong.

  “These past years have been unki
nd to you, haven’t they, Marya?” She spoke matter-of-factly now, without sympathy or derision.

  “I don’t know,” I said, feeling a deep need to defend myself, my choices. “I wouldn’t say that.” I had been sad and empty now for months, but somewhere, hovering just behind all that, there had been joy, hadn’t there? Even if I couldn’t quite remember the sweetness of it now—it had been there. She did not know about my Flying University in Loksow, about the way love could supersede hunger, longing, as Kaz and I lay in bed together, holding on to each other so many nights.

  “Wouldn’t you?” She tsked softly with her tongue. “You and my son live like beggars, neither one of you educated as you could be.”

  I wanted to say that she could’ve accepted that her son loved me many years ago, that I loved him, too. She could’ve accepted us, helped him with his tuition at Jagiellonian. Surely, he would’ve finished his course of study by now, and we could’ve moved to Paris. Kaz might’ve taught at the Sorbonne and I could’ve gone to university myself. But I bit my tongue, said none of that to her. “Why did you invite us here?” I asked instead. Surely, there had been many family trips without us in the last five years. So she had summoned a doctor last summer when I’d needed one, when Kaz had begged for her help, but then she had disappeared again without so much as even a letter expressing sorrow for our loss. So what did she really want with us now?

  “Is it so wrong that I would want to see my oldest son? That I would want all my children to be together in one house, after all this time?”

  “Of course not,” I said, feeling just the slightest twinge of compassion for her. Kaz had missed his family, and they had missed him too. I wrote weekly letters to my sisters and Papa, and though I could not see any of them as often as I would like, we stayed in close touch.