by Mira Ptacin
I pay attention a little bit, drifting in and out of the priest’s remarks, then come back in when a river of legs and arms and faces, a chain of people, slowly starts circling the hole in the earth. They lean down and pinch specks of soil and grass, opening their fingers and dropping pebbles into the hole before walking away. Then my sister stands up, turns to face me, and I tense up with a feeling of being caught, like I’m in trouble, or have done something wrong. Bean’s eyes are swollen, her face is ashen. She nods her head, motioning me to follow her lead. I understand after watching what she does that it is my turn to walk over and look at the casket for the very last time. I take one stride over to the hole in the ground, look down, and then I stop. In an instant, everything goes blank. I become frozen in time, strangled by a moment that will never quite make it into a memory.
But I do remember this: the mass is over, it is time to leave the funeral, but no one knows how. No one wants to be the one to take the lead. So everybody’s eyes are concentrating on the grave, absorbed, staring hard, when in my periphery, I see Ken stand up. He rises slowly, steadily, with intent. And then, he starts buzzing. Buzzing like a hummingbird.
Shit, I think, oh shit, and Sabina grips my arm in terror. “What the hell is he doing?”
He’s vibrating. The man is clearly vibrating. Purring, practically, and the noise he’s making is beginning to increase in volume.
Slow motion. I’m paralyzed. My lungs freeze. Like I’m smothered, like I’m trying to breathe through a flannel blanket. And then, fast motion. An assembly of heads, lost in thoughts, shoots up, baffled, and darts around like a collective arrow in the direction of the unexpected, odd sound. It’s getting louder and louder; Ken’s crescendo of buzzing. What is he doing? He’s engulfed in it now, there’s no stopping what has just started. This is my brother’s funeral. What is this man doing?
Then Ken starts up with the words.
I look at Mom. She is staring at the grave; she’s unreachable. I look at Dad. His eyes are closed and soft. Has he not heard the sound? Doesn’t he realize that his friend has just completely snapped? My father’s chin is pointing up in the direction of the sky and his mouth is just a little bit open. He looks peaceful, continuing to sit effortlessly still and his lips are parted in an O shape. I lean toward him.
“Dad?” I whisper.
Listening, I watch his lips and wait for a response until his mouth starts moving, slowly, just a little, like a dog in a dream, but he’s not saying anything, and he’s not answering me.
“Dad?” I ask again, keeping my eyes on him, on his mouth. Again, I see his lips shaping and fitting, and I start to see he’s mouthing his lips over the words and sounds that are buzzing from Ken.
A song. Ken is singing, and Dad knows this song. By now, the volume of Ken’s buzzing has grown strong enough that it’s able to latch onto a key. It’s a song, with a key, and Dad knows the words. “Tuba mirum spargens sonum.”
The priest joins in.
“Per sepulcra regionum, Coget omnes ante thronum.” An eerie chant in a minor key, a requiem now coming from deep inside Ken’s stomach. A warbling of long, flat, melancholic pitches, his chant sounds ancient and sad, like rain. The priest can barely keep with Ken’s depth, his grief, so he switches over to the harmony. It grows and grows so loud, covers all of us like a warm wind, and somehow, everyone understands what he is singing. Then, the song reaches its last, long note, which Ken holds up for us for a very long time. Then he stops, steps back into his seat, and folds his arms. He looks at the tomb and smiles, and then clicks together his front teeth two or three times as if nothing has just happened.
Down the way, the two lost geese have hoisted their bodies up into the air. They wave faster and harder in order to catch up to the rest of their platoon. Completely numb, mind reset and totally void of any understanding of anything, I watch the geese swoop over a caravan of mobile homes, minivans, and station wagons headed to Tallahassee, Florida, and Yuma, Arizona; the Texaco stations, the cloverleaf interchanges, the McDonald’s, the Cinnabon stations, the Cracker Barrels. We call these people “snowbirds”—Midwesterners who pack up and head south before the cold winter months arrive. But unlike humans, the geese are unbound. They carry no emotional baggage with them, just the purposeful intensity that will get them to the kinder, warmer part of the hemisphere on time.
nine
“I want to know the sex of this baby.”
Andrew and I are on our way to our twenty-week ultrasound appointment when I realize, rather strongly, that I need to know. It’s more than impatience; it’s a need. I need to see little baby hands and baby feet, to finally pick a name. I need for this pregnancy to start feeling real, to start feeling delightful. I want to feel what real moms, good moms, feel. Giddy, pretty, glowing, strong, attached.
We are on the 6 train, the metal meatloaf hauling itself through the undergrounds of Manhattan. The engineering and purpose of the New York subway system both fascinates and frightens me: earth blasted away by dynamite to make way for tubes and tracks; a mechanism that delivers nearly five million people a day—New Yorkers reading newspapers, New Yorkers begging for change, New Yorkers looking away and displaying themselves as preoccupied; foreigners, tourists, commuters, live mariachi bands, all shooting forty-five miles per hour through bedrock and soil (soil!) to get to their desired location.
I am lucky to get a seat on the train during this particular time of the day—morning rush hour. If you are disabled, you deserve a seat. If you are blind, geriatric, pregnant, or wounded, you have your grounds, but mostly people just look away. If you smell like old piss, then the plastic chairs around you grudgingly unload themselves. I put on my woe-and-weary Ellis Island face and stuck out my belly until someone finally scooched over. That’s how I got my seat.
I want to know the sex of this baby, and we have some time before we reach Beth Israel, so I take the opportunity to convince Andrew to let go of the stupid element of surprise.
“No more surprises,” I say.
Gripping a subway pole, Andrew crouches down until his face is level with mine. “Oh come on, Boo,” he says. “Let’s just wait to find out when you deliver.” He taps my belly twice. “The surprise will be exciting.” An optimist.
I reach out and slide my fingertips over Andrew’s eyebrows. His face looks pretty. He always looks so pure, so charmed, unscathed. He has lived a charmed life, his face says. Long, giraffe eyelashes fluttering over ardent, brown eyes, the heat making his forehead sweat then shimmer. I am Medium Boo. You are Papa Boo. Maybe is Miniature Boo. This leaves room for what? What will we call our baby? Baby Boo? “Everything already is exciting,” I say. “It is not humanly possible for me to be any more surprised.”
“All right, all right,” he says. “Let’s make a bet. Boy or girl?”
I look around. Across from me is a woman, maybe twice my age. She’s gnawing on an ear of corn. She reaches the end, then slides her mouth back to a new row like she’s a typewriter in a cartoon. I watch as she takes one last chomp on the cob and then reaches into her left pocket and pulls out another ear. She puts this fresh one on her lap, dips her hand back into her pocket, pulls out a square of Saran Wrap, carefully unwraps it, sets the empty cob in the center of the plastic, wraps it up like a present, tucks it back into her pocket, then starts on the new cob of corn. Everyone is just trying to survive as best they can.
I slip out of my trance just as the train screeches to a halt and an invisible voice mumbles over the PA system: “Fourteenth-Street–Union Square.” And we exit the tunnel with the rest of the swarm and reenter the swarm.
We arrive at Beth Israel Medical Center on First and 16th, just as the summer heat is beginning to liquefy the gum on the sidewalks. “It’s locked,” Andrew says, pulling on the handle of the door to the building. Our appointment is right now, and we’ve been shut out of the place where we need to be. “Looks like you need a card.”
“Since when do you need a card to get into a fucking hospital?” I ask and let out an impressive sigh as a security guard from inside looks up and ignores us.
When I was researching radiology clinics that my Medicaid would cover, I read that a hundred years ago, Beth Israel had dedicated itself to serving Jewish immigrants living in the tenement slums of the Lower East Side. At the time, Manhattan hospitals weren’t treating patients who had been in the city for less than a year, so a group of Orthodox Jews paid twenty-five cents apiece and set up a medical facility to serve immigrants, particularly newcomers. I didn’t find this information just interesting—I found it baffling. A hospital denying the sick treatment? What was the purpose of that? In fact, since moving from Maine, nearly everything I’d encountered in the city was difficult for me to comprehend: the transportation systems, the isolation, the gentrification, the garbage, and now, the health care system. It was all so hairy, so ridiculous, so free fall.
Andrew keeps tugging on the door to the hospital, so I start knocking on the glass windows. Just as I’m about to give up and ask the universe what the hell is wrong with people, a woman in scrubs approaches from the inside. She exits the building, supplying Andrew with the opportunity to stick his foot in and hold the door open. She pounds a pack of cigarettes against her wrist, and I ask her which floor the radiology department is on. Sixth. We get in the elevator and press the button. It’s a Tuesday, middle of the morning on July 31, 2008.
The waiting room is threadbare and grim: linty floors, lackadaisical service, lack of reading materials, and an empty water cooler. Thirty minutes pass. This is nothing like my father’s office. He would never allow this to happen in his waiting room. I try to counter my growing cynicism by reminding myself that things used to be, or could be, worse. Think: at least this is an appointment made for happy reasons. Think: at least you’ve got Medicaid. Think: at least you’re insured. We skim through old magazines. Forty minutes, forty-five minutes, then the double door leading to the exam rooms swings open and a large, pregnant woman and her male counterpart exit. I try not to spy, but the woman looks horrible. Weeping, pink faced, distraught. Andrew nudges me and we look at one another. “That sucks,” I mouth, thinking sick baby. As they exit the waiting room, I try not to watch. How bad could it be? I wonder. Stillborn? I can’t imagine what could be worse. Another five minutes makes our wait fifty minutes, fifty-five, sixty. Finally, over an hour later, my name is called and a young Latina technician leads Andrew and me into a small, dim room.
The exam room is shadowy and baby blue, smells cold and sterile. I crawl onto a paper-topped table, lean back, and stare at the pockmarked ceiling. Next, I feel Andrew’s warm hand grab mine. I’m jumpy. The technician lifts my blouse and, abruptly, a cool gel is squirted onto my stomach, and I let out a nervous laugh. The next thing I know, the woman is rubbing a wand over my belly.
A few days ago, a stranger—a peddler selling origami key chains from a sidewalk table in Chinatown—stopped me on the street to congratulate me on my baby bump. I pulled together a gracious, close-mouthed smile as the peddler continued to predict the sex, quickly deciding on a male. She said she could tell by the curves of my face; its cashew shape and durable cheekbones supposedly gave it away. Although I hadn’t felt any kicking yet or identified any of the wives’ tale indications (green urine, a craving for heels of bread), I went ahead and agreed with her. But deep, deep down, and although it didn’t matter much either way, a barely audible voice somewhere in my mind was telling me the opposite: my baby was going to be a girl.
Perched in the left corner of the room, just where the ceiling meets the wall, a black-and-white screen displays what the scanner is picking up under my skin. The image is completely indecipherable. Sonar swirls of hurricanes on a weather map. A strange submarine radar. Andrew points to the round mass and shows me what he thinks is the head. Is that what it is? I wonder. Not a cloud? The ghost of a raisin? An X-ray? Am I seeing the head? Hands? A spine? Are those feet? Funny, they’re facing inward, like a loose-stringed marionette.
The probing continues while the room remains hushed and blooms with awkwardness. I imagine the technician is bored with her job, and as usual, I take it personally. Beyond my feet and backed up against the wall is a young woman, a soft brunette in a white lab coat, observing. It is her job to watch and record; she is a medical resident. But she isn’t taking notes anymore. She’s pressed her clipboard against her chest and appears rather uncomfortable, almost as though she doesn’t want to be here.
“Would you please explain to us what we’re looking at?” Andrew asks, but our technician remains silent and continues to roll the wand over me, as if she’s casting some kind of spell. “What do you see?” I ask, but to no avail. Abruptly, she stops probing. We ask her to go back and point things out to us, cute things. Cute baby things like little fingers. A button nose. A tiny penis, even. She doesn’t respond. We ask her, then, to just please explain the images. She tightens her lip. We begin to panic. “Is it a boy or a girl?” we ask. “Just tell us.” She says she cannot. Instead, our technician prints some pictures, dryly mumbles that the doctor will be coming in momentarily, then scurries away.
In the semi-darkness, I sit up on my elbows. “Do you think everything is okay?” I ask.
Squeezing my hand, Andrew tells me of course everything is okay, but his optimism is whisper thin. “You have Medicaid, Boo,” he reminds me. “You know what kind of care that means.”
After a long moment, Dr. Stein enters the room. “Our technician believes she may have found some abnormalities,” she tells us, “so I’m going to go ahead and have a look.” Her voice sounds less alarmed than it does unswerving, and at first I’m calmed by this. She’s just correcting the technician’s mistake, that’s what she’s doing. Go ahead, doctor. Go ahead and have a look. We watch her roll up her sleeves, wash her hands, sit down, adjust her chair, pick up the probe.
Dr. Stein loops the wand around my belly, pushing with just the right amount of pressure that feels not hard but not gentle, either. I’ve stopped watching the radar. Finally, she speaks to us. “Yes, I am definitely seeing some abnormalities here,” Dr. Stein says, her eyes still watching the screen. “A constellation of birth defects.”
When we purchased the pregnancy test at a Second Avenue Rite Aid store down the street from his apartment, to get a rise out of me, Andrew asked the checkout girl if she thought its results would be positive or negative. The clerk was uninterested, but as she shrugged him off Andrew kept pushing. “I hope it’s positive,” he told her. “But I hope it’s not ugly.”
“What are you talking about?” Andrew now asks as I roll back onto the table. “Exactly what are you seeing?” He’s getting upset and I don’t know where to look, so I press his hand over my face as Dr. Stein begins firing off a list of what she sees:
“Here is the irregular heart structure.”
“There is almost zero brain development.”
“Here is the spina bifida.”
“There are the clubbed feet.”
Dr. Stein flips off the screen and turns on the lights, and before leaving us alone, asks, “Mira, would you still like to know the sex of the baby?”
All is lost. All is not lost. All is lost. All is not lost.
This is what I repeat in my head as the nurse writes down female on a piece of paper for Andrew, who will show me when we get home. Right now, I don’t want to know the sex; Andrew does.
All is not lost. This is what I repeat in my head as the genetic counselor, Dr. Iglesias, explains to us the scientific facts of what may have gone wrong during the fetus’s development. Lost. Not lost. The mantra makes me feel hopeful yet realistic at the same time, but mostly it helps me feel as if I’m underwater, dulling things to the point that they’re blurry, like when your head is submerged and you open your eyes. The poor baby. Never had a chance.
A few minutes ago, Dr. Ig
lesias refused to talk to us. He made some fuss about the number of allowable visits Medicaid will cover in a single day; we told him we didn’t know anything about the rule, asked who cared, this is a baby we’re talking about here, but he would barely budge until the resident who witnessed the ultrasound, our new guardian angel, stepped in and took care of things. Somehow she convinced him to set aside regulations and rules, so now we are in the library of a genetic counselor and it smells like lettuce and mayonnaise and the rest of the lunch he just ate.
Lost, not lost. Dr. Iglesias sketches the twenty-three chromosomes. They look like Cheetos. I clutch my handbag. Andrew will speak for us. I’ve asked him to. Next, Dr. Iglesias outlines some possible theories of what happened.
“It could have been chromosome number three, or seven, or twenty-one, or twenty-three,” he states, then asks for our family medical histories, and our own medical histories. He hands us pens. We are confused, shaken, tired.
“If it doesn’t die before you deliver it, the baby will have very serious problems,” he tells us. It will likely not achieve consciousness, and certainly will not live without some kind of extraordinary intervention.”
I want to ask him if the baby ever was alive, alive on her own, if she was real, if she had what we all call, now generically, “a soul.” As if there were an answer. He says he will have to do further testing on an amniotic fluid sample to try to understand the genetic issues of why it didn’t work. He uses the word “it.”
Andrew excuses himself to call into work to let them know he’ll be out for the rest of the day.
“Unviable outside the womb,” is what Dr. Iglesias says as he explains the results of the ultrasound. “It is sick with zero chance of survival.”
“But I am still pregnant,” I tell him.
