Between Gods

by Alison Pick

  My little baby. Oh! My little baby.

  Every bit of her gone, swallowed away.

  four

  A GURNEY HAS APPEARED, magically, in the hall outside the bathroom, accompanied by two ambulance attendants. All I’ve ever wanted is to lie down. The attendants insert an IV. I am wheeled into the elevator, then out onto the street, where I blink in the bright sun. Passersby turn their heads as I’m lifted into the ambulance. From somewhere far away, I hear Degan saying he’ll drive the car and meet me at the hospital. A siren starts up, announcing our procession. I’m a queen being carried through the streets on horseback. Traffic parts around us.

  For the second time in a week, my ears are wet, filling up with tears.

  At the hospital, morphine. Oxygen tubes in my nose. A male nurse with a ring through his eyebrow says, “You’ve lost a lot of blood. Your blood pressure is still very low. Without that IV you would have needed a transfusion.”

  “What IV?”

  I look down at the line into my arm.

  Through a thin curtain, a man’s gravelly voice: “I normally drink three bottles of wine a day. But I went cold turkey on Monday.”

  His doctor asks, “Do you ever hear voices? On the TV, say, talking to you?”

  A woman chimes in: “He’s paranoid about his bosses at work.”

  To my right, another woman, who took all her husband’s heart medication. She keeps repeating, “It’s okay. It’s fine. You don’t need to help me. I don’t want to live.”

  I’m moved to a different room. The nurse with the eyebrow ring appears again, asks, “How are you feeling?” I roll onto my side, wipe the tears from my cheeks.

  “We need to know your blood type,” he says. “But your father gave us the rest of the info.”

  “The info?”

  “Your address and birthday. Those things.”

  Should I correct him? “I think you mean my husband,” I say.

  “No, I mean your father. He’s in the waiting room.”

  “That’s my husband.”

  “It’s your father,” he says.

  “My father lives in another city.”

  The nurse shrugs.

  “How much morphine did you give me?” I ask.

  The man in the waiting room is in fact my father. He came into Toronto for an errand earlier in the day. But bad news travels like dominoes falling, and now he’s here with me. Not an angel, not exactly. But close.

  Dad smoothes the hair back from my forehead. “Hi, sweetie,” he says. I have a sudden visceral memory of the lily of the valley he would bring to my bedside when I was a girl, a small vase on my dresser. The lush, heady fragrance announcing itself in the long spring evenings: Beauty is here. Beauty survives.

  Later—hours, or days: time has gone elastic—Degan appears with a wheelchair. He pushes me down into the basement of the hospital. We are shown into a dark room where an ultrasound technician is tutoring his trainee. He mumbles something; there’s a long silence, and I realize he’s talking to me.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Get on the table,” the technician says.

  Degan corrects him under his breath: “Get on the table, please.”

  He helps me up tenderly, as a mother might help her child. I arrange my hospital gown over my legs, but the technician yanks it back up. He squirts a glob of jelly on my stomach and moves the wand across my flesh. The screen appears grey, an undifferentiated stretch of snow. This time there is no blinking beacon.

  I flush with the ignominy of what my body has done.

  Degan’s eyebrows are up, though, and he’s smiling. “I think I see something,” he says.

  I can hardly stand his hope. He has been waiting for this moment, for his first glimpse of our child, and now his heart imagines what his mind knows isn’t there. Because, of course, this is not the ultrasound he’s been looking forward to. This is something different altogether.

  A doctor arrives with the results. The fetus, the egg sac, all the “products of the pregnancy” are gone. We gather up my blood-soaked clothes in a plastic bag. I am given a skirt from the hospital’s lost-and-found, and a new shirt: some other woman’s clothes. Degan drives us home. Along Spadina, night has fallen swiftly. Street lights and pizza joints. Two of us, where this morning there were three.

  I sleep the whole next day. When Degan gets home from work, he tidies the bedroom while I cook rice and cut vegetables. There is a mushroom that has a smaller mushroom fused into its side. I chop the mother and baby apart without mercy. Tears in my eyes while I stir-fry.

  Friday morning we make raspberry smoothies, and French toast with last week’s leftover challah. I move around the kitchen, my head in and out of the fridge, with no nausea whatsoever. After having sworn I would never again—never again—drink coffee, I brew a pot and guzzle it with relish. The pregnancy hormones are draining out of me like liquid through a sieve, my body giving up the task it has been performing so diligently for the past thirteen weeks.

  I go into the bathroom and find Degan staring at himself in the mirror.

  “What are you thinking?” I ask.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, really.”

  “Can I see the ultrasound photo?”

  I go into the bedroom and pull it out of its thin envelope. Degan cradles it, slight as a moth’s wing, in his palm. We peer at the charcoal smudge against the field of darker grey. Who was she? Who would she have become? Someone. A person. We’ll never know.

  In the evening we bring candles into the bedroom and lie together in the low flicker. When it’s time to go to sleep, Degan wants to blow them out. He’s nothing if not aware of a fire hazard. But I see him linger a little longer over the third light, for our lost child, before snuffing it out.

  He eventually falls asleep, but I’m awake and alert, a hole in my chest the wind is whistling through.

  I understand for the first time—really understand—the thin membrane between death and life. Everyone will die. Everyone I love. It’s banal, and obvious, and earth-shattering.

  I push back the covers and pad through the dark apartment. A sliver of moon just visible through the kitchen window. The quiet hum of the dishwasher finishing its work. In my study, I reach for the ultrasound picture; it is not on the table where we left it. I look beneath papers, between pages of books. When I still can’t find it, I panic, ripping through drawers and turning out pockets. If I can’t see the photo, I will die.

  It’s there, all at once, in full view on my desk. I cry with relief and despair. The little grey blur. The inkling. All I’ll ever know of my daughter.

  On Saturday morning Shayna picks me up early, takes me to a Shabbat service held in someone’s home. There are maybe twenty others, mostly strangers to me. We chant single lines of liturgy, weaving them through the morning like strands of golden thread. The last chant is from the Song of Songs: zeh dodi v’zeh rayee—“this is my beloved; this is my friend.” As we sing, we circle around each other, looking each other in the eye. Seeing, being seen. Such raw power.

  After, the leader asks, “Does anyone need to say Kaddish?” Kaddish is recited when someone has died, and therefore, by The Mourner’s definition, been alive. So my baby doesn’t count.

  The circle is quiet. Shayna reaches for my hand; I hold tight to her thin fingers. The leader looks around at us all, his eyes falling for a long moment on me. “I’ll say it for us all,” he decides. And he begins: “Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name …”

  five

  ROSH HASHANAH ARRIVES without fanfare. It’s Jewish custom to dunk apples in honey and make wishes for the New Year. Degan and I wish for world peace, for Obama to win.

  “I wish to have our baby back,” I say.

  Degan squeezes my hands. “I wish, God,” he says, “for you to accompany our baby wherever it will be.”

  But where will it be? Who will take care of it after the warmth of my womb? I think of my little dreamer with the big fish eyes. If there is
a heaven—which I don’t think there is—but if there is one, my baby is in the same place as Vera’s lost daughter, little Eva. With Gumper, and Granny’s parents. With Granny herself.

  Maybe my great-grandmother Marianne is taking care of our child. Draping a wing over her little shoulder.

  My heart hurts as I look at the little bowl of honey I’ve set out, the apple pieces slowly going brown. I picture small hands dipping and young voices laughing, the silly wishes a young child would make. I picture Eva, with her halo of wild curls.

  I’m grateful, though, that we have somewhere to go for the first night of the holiday. Last year at this time I did not know the meaning of Rosh Hashanah, let alone have anyone to celebrate with. This year, Aaron and Sylvie’s invitation was so warm that in a fit of boldness, I have asked whether my parents could join us, as well.

  “Do we dress up?” Mum emails to ask.

  I don’t really know.

  “I’ll wear a jacket,” Dad says.

  “I guess it’s like Christmas dinner,” I say.

  Mum nods. This she understands.

  I email Sylvie to ask how I can help; she requests we bring a vegetable dish. I cook a sweet potato casserole from the cookbook Shayna gave us for our wedding. The relief at knowing what’s appropriate to bring. My stomach flutters when I picture my parents at home in Kitchener, Mum putting earrings on, Dad straightening his tie.

  I head over early to help Sylvie set up. The hall walls are covered with photos of her father, a famous opera singer, in Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Don Giovanni. I think of Degan’s opera tickets, produced at the same time as the news of the pregnancy, and squeeze my eyes shut against the tide of feeling. The Filipina maid mistakes me for more hired help, tapping me on the shoulder and directing me briskly to where the silverware is kept. When she realizes her mistake, she flushes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Welcome.”

  In the dining room the second life-sized maid, the one made out of papier mâché, has been removed.

  An hour later the doorbell rings. It’s the Hamburger King and his son who dated Monica Lewinsky. We smile, say hello. The bell rings once more and I hear my parents’ voices in the front hall. “Good to see you again,” Aaron says to Dad. “The last time was at your father’s yahrzeit.” Stating this for the benefit of the other guests. I want to run and bury my face in Dad’s chest, to curl up in his arms like a little girl.

  Mum, absent at the yahrzeit, is introduced around. She hands Sylvie a bouquet of irises, a bottle of red wine. “Hi, sweetie,” she says casually as she hugs me hello.

  I can see they have no idea how symbolic the evening feels from my perspective, or how emotionally exhausting the anticipation has been. But she knows, of course, about the miscarriage, and her touch is especially gentle.

  “Well,” Dad says loudly, to the growing gathering, “this is one of the most stressful days of my life.”

  Everyone stops talking; people shift their eyes nervously.

  “Because it’s your first Rosh Hashanah?” I ask tentatively.

  “Haven’t you seen the papers? Congress didn’t approve the bailout plan. The economy is tanking. As we speak. Now! And now! And now!”

  There are murmurs of agreement.

  “You would not believe how much money I’ve lost today,” he says, his forehead in his hands. Then he looks up at the room full of strangers. “We need a fiscally prudent budget,” he booms. “And for that we need a majority government.”

  The election is coming up, and Dad wants everyone to vote for our current prime minister, Stephen Harper, who he believes is our only economic hope.

  I wince at how this might be received, since his politics are so different from my own and so different, I am certain, from everyone else’s in the room, but the moment passes and the chatting guests shift positions. We move to the table, set with cut crystal and white linen tablecloths. There are the usual blessings, the bread and the wine, and a blessing over the honey and apples. And the Shehechiyanu, which is the blessing for firsts, because it’s the New Year. We dig into the meal: the same clear chicken broth in glass bowls, this time with a matzah ball floating in the centre. I watch my father divide his in half with his spoon. He starts telling the Hamburger King about his background. “I was one of those Jews whose parents didn’t tell the kids they were Jewish,” he says.

  “After the war?” the Hamburger King asks.

  Dad nods yes. “We’ve never been to Israel.”

  The King raises his eyebrows. “How would you identify yourself?”

  “Religiously?”

  A nod.

  Dad pauses. “Well,” he says. “I was raised Christian. All my religious experience is with Christianity. But truly? In my heart, I know I’m a Jew.”

  It is as though someone has struck a gong from his corner of the table. My eyes widen. His comment rings in my ears throughout the rest of the meal, so I can barely hear what anyone else is saying. When Degan and I get up to clear the plates, he whispers to me in the kitchen, “Your father is Jewish.”

  “I know,” I say. “Weird.”

  Over dessert, Sylvie confirms again that very few Jews were able to get into Canada in 1941.

  Dad says, “How many? Fifty?”

  Sylvie says, “I’d put it lower.”

  The Lady Boat that brought Granny and Gumper to Canada was torpedoed on its way back to Europe. I am here, in this world, by luck alone.

  Degan and I have a big fight when we get home. I’m sad about the baby and wrung out from the visceral stress of the evening. I ask why he hasn’t returned the emails from the real estate agent. “Can’t you see how hard I’m trying here?” he says, his voice tight.

  “It’s just one tiny email. It would take you two minutes.”

  “I’m doing my best,” he shouts. “This is hard for me, too.”

  “What’s hard for you?”

  He glares at me.

  “Do you think the baby was just yours? That I’m not sad, too?”

  He’s right, but his yelling scares me. I close myself in the bathroom and sit on the toilet with my head between my knees, crying. For the lost baby. For our lost history and rituals. The night was so momentous. My father celebrated Rosh Hashanah and labelled himself Jewish. It seems something more is called for now, some acknowledgement or marking, but I’m lost. I slink upstairs to sleep alone, but Degan follows me. “Don’t be like that,” he says.

  He holds me, and I cry.

  Later, although it’s forbidden due to the chag—“holiday”—I turn on the computer. My cousin Lucy has written “L’Shana Tova” on my Facebook wall. Her message is there for everyone to see. I feel the old terror of being revealed for who I am, or worse, for who I hope to become.

  Dad, for his part, seems unfazed. He has sent an email thanking us for including him in the holiday. “I enjoyed it very much. The people were very warm. There’s just one thing I wish had been different.” A beat. “I wish there had been more reading from the holy texts.”

  six

  THE NEXT MORNING, Dad calls to say that his cousin, my uncle Paul, is dead.

  Last August Paul had a heart aneurism. He was open on the operating table for six hours, but the surgeon could not get the sleeve into his artery. When he woke up and they told him, he cried.

  Now his heart has given up entirely.

  I gather the pieces I know about Uncle Paul’s life like so many blue marbles in the palm of my hand. I think about him as a small boy, sent away to boarding school in England during the war. About his household, where nobody spoke of Judaism. I think of Paul putting his Jewish stepmother into an old-age home. And of my wedding, when Shayna sang in Hebrew and his face crumpled and his chin fell to his chest. I assumed it was shame. Could it have been something sadder? He wouldn’t hug me in the receiving line. Now he is gone from this earth. He is the small boy in the novel I’m writing, put on a train and sent away forever.

  I sit at my desk to do some more writing. My research has led me t
o an article on trauma and memory. Knowing and not knowing, remembering and forgetting, and the psyche’s brilliant dance between the polarities. The article details case studies: a woman who escaped before the war, assimilated, and did not even recognize her own husband and children when they came for her after surviving the camps.

  Her family. She didn’t know who they were.

  I think of Gumper’s Report from England about his nephew Paul: “He knows he is Jewish, of course.” But maybe Uncle Paul had truly forgotten who he was, where he came from.

  The article suggests that in art engaged with trauma “there often is a ‘lie,’ a distortion, covering over the as yet unworked through and unknown aspect of trauma.” The novel I’m writing deals with themes of secrecy and denial. It tells a story very different from my own family’s, a story that depicts characters dying, rather than escaping in the nick of time as my grandparents did. Still, I have chosen to use many of my relatives’ names, spreading them among the fictionalized ones so the two might appear indistinguishable.

  What are the unknown aspects of our family’s trauma? I can see their outlines, but they won’t speak, won’t reveal themselves. They lie scattered around me like bodies on a battlefield.

  Degan finally contacts the real estate agent and we make an appointment to see some houses. There’s nothing remotely within our price range, and I resign myself to spending the rest of my life in an apartment. There are worse things.

  Besides, since losing the baby my nesting instinct has leaked away, too. Back home, we order takeout Thai for our Sabbath meal. The blessings are becoming routine. We make love, and read aloud from the Heschel book The Sabbath. The prose is as rich and dense as honey cake. In the morning we sleep in, read the newspaper in bed. I have a pregnancy test in the medicine cabinet; it flickers at the edge of my awareness. I don’t want to wait for my period to come—or not—to tell me if I’m pregnant. “Just going to the bathroom,” I say to Degan casually.