Sing You Home: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  I peer over her shoulder. “Don’t you think you should mention me on the site?” I say. “On account of the fact that I’m your primary qualification for this job?”

  “Imagine how ridiculous it will look if your name is on the site and there isn’t a link to your profile. But”—she sighs—“that’s only for people who’ve accepted my friend invitation . . .”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” I lean down and type, my hands between hers, this baby pressed to her back. I log in to my profile. The live feed that fills the screen contains the thoughts and actions of people I went to high school with or other music therapists or former professors; a former college roommate named Darci I haven’t spoken with in months. I should call her, I think, and at the same time I know I won’t. She has twins who are just going to preschool; their smiling faces are her profile photo.

  I accept my mother’s pending friend request, even though it feels like a new low in social networking. “There,” I say. “Happy?”

  “Very. Now at least I know I’ll be able to see new pictures of my grandchild when I log in.”

  “As opposed to driving a mile to my apartment to see her in person?”

  “It’s the principle, Zoe,” my mother says. “I’m just glad you finally got off your high horse.”

  “No horses,” I say. “I’m just not in the mood to fight until it’s time to leave for my baby shower.”

  My mother opens her mouth to respond, then snaps it shut. For a half second, she contemplates going along with the ruse, and, just as quickly, she gives up. “Who told you?”

  “I think the pregnancy is bringing out a sixth sense in me,” I confide.

  She considers this, impressed. “Really?”

  I walk into her kitchen to raid the fridge—there are three tubs of hummus and a bag of carrots, plus various indistinguishable clots in Tupperware containers. “Some mornings I wake up and I just know Max is going to say he wants Cap’n Crunch for breakfast. Or I’ll hear the phone ring and I know it’s you before I even pick up.”

  “I used to be able to predict rain when I was pregnant with you,” my mother says. “I was more accurate than the weatherman on the ABC news.”

  I dip my finger into the hummus. “When I woke up this morning, the whole bedroom smelled like eggplant parmigiana—you know, the really good kind that they make at Bolonisi’s?”

  “That’s where the shower’s being held!” she gasps, amazed. “When did all this start?”

  “About the same time I found a Kinko’s receipt for the invitations in Max’s jacket.”

  It takes my mother a moment, and then she starts to laugh. “And here I was planning the cruise I was going to take after I won the lottery with your number picks.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  She rubs her hand over my belly. “Zoe,” my mother says, “you couldn’t if you tried.”

  Some cognitive scientists believe human response to music provides evidence that we are more than just flesh and blood—that we also have souls. Their thinking is as follows:

  All reactions to external stimuli can be traced back to an evolutionary rationale. You pull your hand away from fire to avoid physical harm. You get butterflies before an important speech because the adrenaline running through your veins has caused a physiological fight-or-flight response. But there is no evolutionary context within which people’s response to music makes sense—the tapping of a foot, the urge to sing along or get up and dance, there’s just no survival benefit to these activities. For this reason, some believe that our response to music is proof that there’s more to us than just biological and physiological mechanics—that the only way to be moved by the spirit, so to speak, is to have one in the first place.

  There are games. Estimate Zoe’s Belly Size, a purse scavenger hunt (who would have guessed that my mother had an overdue utility bill in her bag?), a baby-sock-matching relay, and, now, a particularly disgusting foray in which baby diapers filled with melted chocolate are passed around for identification by candy bar brand.

  Even though this isn’t really my cup of tea, I play along. My part-time bookkeeper, Alexa, has organized the whole event—and has even gone to the trouble of rounding up guests: my mother, my cousin Isobel, Wanda from Shady Acres and another nurse from the burn unit of the hospital where I work, and a school counselor named Vanessa who contracted me to do music therapy earlier this year with a profoundly autistic ninth grader.

  It’s sort of depressing that these women, acquaintances at best, are being substituted for close friends. Then again, if I’m not working, I’m with Max. And Max would rather be run over by his own lawn-mowing machines than identify chocolate feces in a diaper. For this reason alone, he is really the only friend I need.

  I watch Wanda peer into the Pampers. “Snickers?” she guesses incorrectly.

  Vanessa gets the diaper next. She’s tall, with short platinum blond hair and piercingly blue eyes. The first time I met her she invited me into her office and gave me a blistering lecture on how the SATs were a conspiracy by the College Board to take over the world eighty dollars at a time. Well? she said when she finally stopped for a breath. What do you have to say for yourself?

  I’m the new music therapist, I told her.

  She blinked at me, and then looked down at her calendar and flipped the page backward. Ah, she said. Guess the rep from Kaplan is coming tomorrow.

  Vanessa doesn’t even glance down at the diaper. “They look like Mounds to me,” she says drily. “Two, to be exact.”

  I burst out laughing, but I’m the only one who seems to get Vanessa’s joke. Alexa looks devastated because her party games aren’t being taken seriously. My mother intervenes, collecting the diaper from Vanessa’s place mat. “How about Name That Baby?” she suggests.

  I feel a twinge in my side and absently rub my hand over the spot.

  My mother reads from a paper Alexa has printed off the Internet. “A baby lion is a . . .”

  My cousin’s hand shoots up. “Cub!” she yells out.

  “Right! A baby fish is a . . . ?”

  “Caviar?” Vanessa suggests.

  “Fry,” Wanda says.

  “That’s a verb,” Isobel argues.

  “I’m telling you, I saw it on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire—”

  Suddenly I am seized by a cramp so intense that all the breath rushes out of my body.

  “Zoe?” My mother’s voice seems far away. I struggle to my feet.

  Twenty-eight weeks, I think. Too soon.

  Another current rips through me. As I fall against my mother, I feel a warm gush between my legs. “My water,” I whisper. “I think it just broke.”

  But when I glance down, I am standing in a pool of blood. Last night was the first night Max and I ever talked about baby names.

  “Johanna,” I whispered, after he turned out the light.

  “Sorry to disappoint,” Max said. “But it’s just me.”

  In the dark, I could see his smile. Max is the sort of man I never imagined would be attracted to me—big, broad, a surfer with a shock of blond hair and enough wattage in his smile to make grocery clerks drop his change and soccer moms slow down near our driveway. I was always considered smart, but by no stretch of the imagination am I a looker. I am the girl next door, the wallflower, the one whose features you cannot recall. The first time he talked to me—at his brother’s wedding, where I was filling in for the lead vocalist in the band, who’d developed a kidney stone—I turned around, certain that he was speaking to someone else. Years later he told me that he never knew what to say to girls but that my voice was like a drug; it had seeped into his veins and given him the courage to come up to me during the band’s fifteen-minute break.

  He didn’t think a woman with a master’s degree in musicology would want anything to do with a college dropout / surf rat who was scraping together a landscaping business.

  I didn’t think a man who could have taken home his pick of anyone with two X chromosome
s would find me even remotely attractive.

  Last night he put his gentle hand over our baby, an umbrella. “I thought talking about the baby was bad luck.”

  It was. Or, at least, it always had been, to me. But we were so close to making it to the finish line. This was so real. What could possibly go wrong? “Well,” I said, “I changed my mind.”

  “Okay, then. Elspeth,” Max said. “After my favorite aunt.”

  “Please tell me you’re making that up . . .”

  He laughed. “I have another aunt named Ermintrude—”

  “Hannah,” I countered. “Stella. Sage.”

  “That’s a spice,” Max said.

  “Yeah, but not like Ground Cloves. It’s pretty.”

  He leaned over my belly and pressed his ear against it. “Let’s ask her what she wants to be called,” Max suggested. “I think . . . wait . . . no, hang on, she’s coming in loud and clear.” He looked up at me, his cheek still against our baby. “Bertha,” he pronounced.

  The baby, as if to comment, gave his jaw a swift kick; and I was sure at the time that this meant she was fine. That it hadn’t been bad luck at all.

  I am being turned inside out; I am falling through blades. I have never felt so much agony, as if the pain is trapped under my skin, and trying desperately to slice its way out.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Max says, clasping my hand as if we are about to arm-wrestle. I wonder when he arrived. I wonder why he is lying to me.

  His face is as white as a midnight moon, and, even though he’s only inches away, I can barely see him. Instead, there is a blur of doctors and nurses crowded into the tiny delivery room. An IV is fed into my arm. A band is wrapped around my belly and hooked up to a fetal monitor.

  “I’m only twenty-eight weeks,” I pant.

  “We know, honey,” a nurse says, and she turns her attention to the medical personnel. “I’m not getting anything on the monitor . . .”

  “Try it again—”

  I grab the nurse’s sleeve. “Is she . . . is she too little?”

  “Zoe,” the nurse says, “we’re doing everything we can.” She fiddles with a knob on the monitor and readjusts the band around my belly. “I’m still not getting a heartbeat—”

  “What?” I struggle to a sitting position as Max tries to hold me back. “Why not?”

  “Get the ultrasound,” Dr. Gelman snaps, and a moment later one is wheeled in. Cold gel squirts onto my abdomen as I am twisted by another cramp. The doctor’s eyes are trained on the ultrasound monitor. “There’s the head,” she says calmly. “And there’s the heart.”

  I look frantically, but I see only shifting sands of gray and black. “What do you see?”

  “Zoe, I need you to relax for a moment,” Dr. Gelman says.

  So I bite my lip. I listen to the blood pounding in my ears. A minute passes, and then another. There is no sound in the room except for the quiet beeps of machines.

  And then Dr. Gelman says what I’ve known she’ll say all along. “I’m not seeing a heartbeat, Zoe.” She looks me in the eye. “I’m afraid your baby is dead.”

  Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max’s hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It’s a note I have never heard—this chord of pure pain—and it takes a moment to realize it is coming from me.

  This is what I have packed in my hospital bag for delivery:

  A nightgown with tiny blue flowers printed all over it, although I haven’t worn a nightgown since I was twelve.

  Three pairs of maternity underwear.

  A change of clothes.

  A small gift pack of cocoa butter lotion and soap leaves for a new mom, given to me by the mother of one of my recently discharged burn victims at the hospital.

  An incredibly soft stuffed pig, which Max and I bought years ago, during my first pregnancy, before the miscarriage, when we were still capable of hope.

  And my iPod, loaded with music. So much music. While doing my undergraduate degree at Berklee in music therapy, I had worked with the professor who first cataloged the effect of music therapy during childbirth. Although studies had been done linking music to breathing, and breathing to the autonomic nervous system, nothing had been done until that point to formally connect Lamaze breathing techniques to self-selected music. The premise was that women who listened to different music at different parts of labor could use that music to breathe properly, to remain relaxed, and to subsequently reduce labor pain.

  At nineteen, I had found it amazing to work with someone whose research had become widespread practice during childbirth. I didn’t realize it would be another twenty-one years before I got the chance to try it myself.

  Because music is so important to me, I selected the pieces to use during labor and delivery very carefully. For early labor, I would relax to Brahms. For active labor, when I needed to stay focused on my breathing, I chose music with a strong tempo and rhythm: Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” For transition, when I knew it would hurt the most, I had gathered a combination of music—from the songs with the strongest positive memories from my childhood—REO Speedwagon and Madonna and Elvis Costello and Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” whose angry lifts and falls would mirror what was going on in my body.

  I wholeheartedly believe that music can alleviate the physical pain of childbirth.

  I just don’t know if it can do anything for the grief.

  While I am delivering the baby, I am already thinking that one day I will not remember this. That I will not remember Dr. Gelman talking about the submucosal fibroids that she had wanted to remove before this IVF cycle—a surgery I declined, because I was in too big a hurry to get pregnant—fibroids which are now so much bigger. I will not remember her telling me that the placenta had sheared away from the uterine wall. I will not feel her checking my cervix and quietly saying that I’m at six centimeters. I will not notice Max hooking up my iPod so that Beethoven fills the room; I will not see the nurses gliding in somber slow motion, so different from every giddy and raucous labor and delivery I’ve ever seen on A Baby Story.

  I will not remember my water being broken, or how so much blood soaked the sheet beneath me. I won’t remember the sad eyes of the anesthesiologist who said he was sorry for my loss before he rolled me onto my side to give me an epidural.

  I won’t remember losing the sensation in my legs and thinking that this was a start, wondering if they could fix it so that I didn’t feel anything at all.

  I won’t recall opening my eyes after a knotted contraction and seeing Max’s face, twisted just as hard as mine with tears.

  I won’t remember telling Max to turn off the Beethoven. And I won’t remember that, when he didn’t do it fast enough, I lashed out with one arm and knocked the iPod dock station to the floor and broke it.

  I won’t remember that, afterward, it was silent.

  I will have to be told by someone else how the baby slipped between my legs like a silver fish, how Dr. Gelman said the baby was a boy.

  But that’s not right, I’ll think, although I won’t have the recollection. Bertha is supposed to be a girl. And how, on the heels of that, I wondered what else the doctor had gotten wrong.

  I won’t remember the nurses wrapping him in a blanket, crowning him with a tiny knit cap.

  I won’t remember holding him: his head, the size of a plum. His blue-veined features. The perfect nose, the pouting mouth, the smooth skin where his eyebrows were still being sketched in. The chest, fragile as a bird’s, and still. The way he nearly fit in the palm of one hand; the way he weighed nothing at all.

  I won’t remember how, until that moment, I really did not believe it was true. In my hazy dream I spin back one month. Max and I are lying in bed after midnight. You awake? I ask.

  Yeah. Just thinking.

  About what?

  He shakes his head. Nothing. You were worrying, I say.

  No. I was wondering
, he says soberly, about olive oil.

  Olive oil?

  Right. What’s it made from?

  Is this a trick question? I ask. Olives.

  And corn oil. What’s that made from?

  Corn?

  So, Max says, how about baby oil?

  For a moment, we are both silent. Then we start laughing. We laugh so hard that tears come to my eyes. In the dark, I reach for Max’s hand, but I miss.

  When I wake up, the shades in the room are drawn but the door is ajar. At first, I cannot remember where I am. There is noise in the hallway, and I see a tangle of family—grandparents, children, teenagers—floating along on the trail of their own laughter. They are carrying a rainbow of balloons.

  I start to cry.

  Max sits down beside me on the bed. He awkwardly puts his arm around me. Playing Florence Nightingale is not his strong suit. One Christmas, we had the flu together. In between my own bouts of vomiting, I would walk to the bathroom and get him cold compresses. “Zo,” he murmurs. “How do you feel?”

  “How do you think I feel?” I am being a bitch. Anger burns the back of my throat. It fills the space inside me that was formerly home to my baby.

  “I want to see him.”

  Max freezes. “I, um . . .”

  “Call the nurse.” My mother’s voice comes from the corner of the room where she’s sitting. Her eyes are red and swollen. “You heard what she wants.”

  Nodding, Max gets up and walks out of the room. My mother folds me into her arms. “It’s not fair,” I say, my face crumpling.

  “I know, Zo.” She strokes my hair, and I lean against her, the way I did when I was four years old and teased for my freckles, or fifteen and getting my heart broken for the first time. I realize I will not have the chance to comfort my own baby this way, and that makes me cry even harder.