The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

(Antfer) #1

28 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022


work out and we could find our way
home. I wanted her to be engaged with
the world, so I aimed to help her see
that there is wonder in everything. “The
light around us was on the surface of
the sun just over eight minutes ago,” I
planned to tell her.
I wanted to set up the nursery. The
baby was due in October, and my mother,
who was too anxious to be optimistic,
said to wait till August to buy anything.
Christine has suffered many trage-
dies, and she has a sense that almost any-
thing good in her life can be taken away.
She said, “Let’s wait till September.”
In the middle of May, at around five
in the morning, Christine woke me.
“Akhil! Akhil!” she said, shaking me.
She was wearing a T-shirt and under-
pants. “I’m bleeding.”
“O.K.,” I said, and got up. I knew
that we had to go to a hospital. I had
no idea which one to go to. I went to
the bathroom to brush my teeth. When
Christine had woken me, her voice had
sounded exactly like my mother’s when-
ever my brother had had a medical emer-
gency in the middle of the night and
my parents had had to follow an am-
bulance to the hospital. Looking in the
mirror, I began to feel faint.
I went back into the bedroom. Chris-
tine was still standing by the bed. “I feel
like I’m going to pass out,” I said. “I
have to lie down.” I slumped on the bed
with my feet on the floor. I lay like that
for a minute.
We drove to the hospital. It was four-
teen minutes away. The sun was just ris-
ing. I thought, How do I cancel my pa-
ternity leave at the university? I thought,
Perhaps we shouldn’t have told anyone
about the pregnancy. I thought, If the
baby dies, how will we bear to be near
each other? I thought, Should we try to
implant the other embryo? When should
we try it?
The staff at the hospital were won-
derful. Christine was in a hospital bed,
and I was standing beside her, my arm
angled awkwardly over the bed’s rail-
ing so that I could hold her hand. A
doctor came in, saw our anxiety about
touching any equipment, and lowered
the railing.
There was a sonogram and a cervi-
cal exam. The fetus was healthy and
the cervix closed. The doctor could not
tell why Christine had had bleeding.


He said that, when bleeding like this
happens, a little less than half the time
there is a miscarriage. He warned us
that when his medical notes were posted
online they might be frightening to
read, and said that Christine shouldn’t
be alarmed.
When we returned home, the out-
door lights that I had turned on as we
left were still burning.
During the next few days, we were so
scared that Christine tried to avoid going
to the bathroom. And, when she did, I
waited nervously for her to come out.
A week passed, and then two. It now
felt hard to make up stories about our
future with the child. Doing so felt like
bringing on bad luck. When my wife
and I lay in bed and talked to Ziggy, all
we said was “Hold tight. We love you.”

J


uly came. I turned fifty. “Ziggy, you
will have an old man for a father,”
I said.
In the sonogram images, our daugh-
ter became more and more person-like.
There is one series of images in which
she is looking out, white and ghostly,
through the frame, and these resemble
paparazzi photos taken through a lim-
ousine window.
In August, we ordered nursery fur-
niture. Because of Christine’s age, her
doctor wanted to induce her in her
thirty-ninth week, and in September
he set a date for this.
When Christine was a child, she was
very badly scalded. Over the years, she
has had multiple skin grafts. For her,
going into the hospital came with a set
of specific awful memories. The idea of
having to go again frightened her so
much that she began to have a hard
time sleeping.
I, too, was afraid of going to the hos-
pital. I, too, had spent many months in
hospitals. We tried to calm each other
down. “Maybe if we get to have Ziggy,
we won’t mind hospitals as much,”
Christine said.
We arrived at the hospital around
midnight. Perhaps because of COVID
and the absence of visitors, the hallways
were quiet. Christine was admitted to
her room. The nurses assigned to her
asked if she would like to donate her
placenta. There is a layer inside the pla-
centa which is used to help burn vic-
tims with skin grafts. “Isn’t this the most

wonderful thing?” Christine said, smil-
ing and looking ecstatic. At that mo-
ment, she felt that her childhood suf-
fering was being overcome.
Soon after we arrived, a balloon was
inserted in Christine to open her cer-
vix. And, a few hours later, she was ad-
ministered medicines intravenously to
further open the cervix. She lay on the
hospital bed and tried to sleep, and,
when she could not, we watched mov-
ies on a laptop. Periodically, the nurses
came in to see how the cervix was re-
sponding. Almost twenty-four hours
after we had checked into the hospital,
Christine’s doctor said that she should
have a C-section, that it was not smart
to wait. Christine was rolled away to
an operating room. I put on my shoes
to follow. My hands shook so much
that I had a hard time tying my shoe-
laces. A nurse took me to the operat-
ing room and had me stand outside and
put on scrubs. As I tugged them on, I
wondered how I might be able to com-
fort Christine.
I was led into the bright, cold oper-
ating room. The nurse walking by my
side told me to keep my head turned to
the right. The operating table was on
the left, and she did not want me to see
what was occurring. She guided me to
a chair beside Christine’s head. A blue
curtain hid everything below her neck.
“Do you remember when we got to
touch the owl?” I said, referring to a va-
cation we had taken. “We’ll do that with
Ziggy.” She gave me a strained smile.
“Do you remember when we had the
Japanese shaved ice? What was it called?”
“Kakigori.”
And then suddenly there was the
sound of a baby crying.
“She’s here! She’s here!” I yelled.
The nurse told me to get up. She led
me to an infant warmer, where a dark-
haired purple baby was lying and squall-
ing and kicking her legs. “Do you want
to cut the cord?” someone asked, hand-
ing me scissors. The baby was crying
and crying. Her mouth was twisted, and
she appeared so unhappy that she al-
ready seemed a full person, with all her
own wants and preferences. I leaned
down to look at her. When I bent, my
soul fell out. I was in love with this pur-
ple crying child, who, even if I had had
a million years, I would not have been
able to imagine. 
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