The Winter Vault (20 page)

She heard a small splash. Something, some knowledge that fear gives us, suddenly made her look up and a little farther downstream. She saw the glow of his white clothing first, a dome of swollen cloth in the dark water. She ran toward it and then saw the undulating edges of soaked hair floating, and she grabbed at him, pulling his shirt, then finding his arms and pulling with all her strength. She was screaming; she heard herself screeching almost apart from herself, as if a terror she had always carried in her, unknowing, had at last come to its moment. She pulled until his dark head came out of the water, she could see it in her mind, could see herself pulling him out and pressing his belly until the water spurted from his lungs, she could see him opening his eyes as she pulled with all the animal power in her. Finally there were voices far away. She kept pulling, but the boy was weirdly heavy, as if someone were holding his feet and pulling him back into the water. She felt the strength suddenly go out of her arms and, weeping, she saw the child's head sink below the surface. So heavy. His lips over his teeth as if he had a mouthful of stones. Then the voices were right behind her and their arms plunged into the water and Monkey was pulled out of the river, long dead.

In the dream, it was clear that the boy had died even before he was in the water. And that Jean had been trying to save his corpse.

But what she also saw in the dream – the vision of his head rising from the water and of herself pulling him onto the bank – and the water pouring from his mouth and his eyes opening – this image was so vivid her mind could not put it away.

A few days later, Monkey was found at the bottom of the quarry. He had been goading fate for many weeks, swinging from a blondin across the chasm. Only after the grave was dug did they realize that no one knew his name.

Avery and Jean sat on the deck in lamplight, wrapped in blankets, reading – a bond of such stillness between them that Daub almost walked away without stopping to impart the news of Monkey's death. He stayed only a few moments, and afterwards, Jean pulled her chair close to Avery's, facing him.

– The boy died in my dream, whispered Jean.

Avery looked up from his work and saw her face.

– It's not your fault!

Jean stood up, a strange look in her eyes.

– Because you dreamed it, repeated Avery, does not make it your fault.

– Then what is prescience for.

Avery had no answer to this. He gathered her toward him.

– It's not my fault, but maybe I could have prevented it. Maybe both things are true.

Jean's logic hovered in the lamplight, and remained in the darkness as she lay in bed, and was still there the next morning and the next; many days afterwards, her first thought upon waking: maybe both things are true.

– It is not the heat, the doctor in the camp told Jean several days later. Sometimes, something goes wrong and the baby is not meant to be born. That is all.

Some mothers say they feel the exact moment the child stops living. Some sense something wrong, or dream of death without knowing why; others notice only later, when the movement stops – although even this is only a feeling, for when the baby is this large, it no longer has room anyway to move in the womb.

There is no safe way to induce the birth. It is best to let the body make its own decision, though this is a danger if labour waits too long. You may have to carry the still-baby for some weeks, perhaps even as long as a month.

Avery put his hand on her taut skin where he had felt movement for so many weeks and now felt nothing.

– Sometimes, the doctor said, it is simply not meant to be.

Avery could not help himself thinking: All the water inside her and our child dead.

– It is time to go to Cairo, the doctor said.

The young Nubian woman who had offered to bless the child in the Nile dipped palm leaves in river water and wrapped the cool greenness over Jean's distended belly. The leaves drew the heat from her skin. Again and again the woman did this for her, until Jean fell asleep.

No need of a translator between the two women now.

Jean understood that she must leave; await her time at the hospital in Cairo. But instead, for days, she remained in the darkness of the houseboat. And Avery, though anxious and afraid, could not deny her this right.

She did not know how to grieve; she could not separate the baby's body from her own. What had been a vulnerable ripeness, her shape, she now felt as deformity. The earth-weight, now a child cast in stone.

She remembered a middle-aged woman from her neighbourhood in Montreal who walked everywhere backwards, her elderly mother always beside her, watching out for her. The resigned love in the mother's face as she looked eternally into the damaged face of her daughter. When Jean was a girl, this sight had frightened her. Now, twenty years later, a welt of pity rose in her heart.

She sat in the dark cabin and could not make out the difference between soul and ghost.

She remembered the young girl from Faras, on the train travelling on forever without her mother's satchel.

For hours working on deck, Avery heard nothing beneath him. But when he went below, he found it had not been the silence of sleep, but of a disappearance. Jean sitting up in bed, staring into the dark; a vigil. When he tried to come near, he felt it, her invisible shrivelling from touch. As if she had spoken aloud: My body is a grave.

The pilot stood some way off, waiting.

– Are you sure you must go alone? asked Avery.

–Yes, said Jean. Her face was stony, the tears leaking out. We don't know how long we'll have to wait.

He moved toward her.

– If you come close, she said, I won't be able to go.

A moment passes; with all its possibilities. All that love allows us, and does not allow.

Avery ached when he saw the pilot's hand touching her arm, helping her board the plane.

No one knows what triggers labour. Finally, simply, the wild hormones are released.

Clutching the hands of a stranger – a nurse she'd never met and would never see again – suddenly Jean did not believe the child was dead. She rushed toward the pain, each contraction proof that the child was struggling to be born. Within the pain Jean felt an unbearable purpose, almost an ecstasy. But the baby would not come out. All through the labour, Jean would not give up this new knowledge, the feeling that the child was alive. She felt the presence of a soul returned to her, overwhelming, feasting on the oxygen in her blood. Hour after hour she focused her belief directly into the pain – an animal force of will. She wept with gratitude and joy. And then an almost preternatural, shivering attention, a kind of praying. The child's presence filled the room, she could feel the certainty of the child's heart beating into her own blood.

The next morning, they opened her. The scalpel made a red seam beneath her belly, and they squeezed the dead child out. Now the nurses swaddled the child, a daughter, as if she were alive, in sweet-smelling cotton blankets, and waited for Avery's arrival. Jean held the sunken head against her own face, she clutched the now weightless baby and would not let go; the embrace that no nurse or midwife dared to tear apart. With infinite tenderness, Jean cradled the perfect cheeks that death had pressed with its thumbs.

The nurses would not forcibly take the baby from her. They stood by – the nurses, Avery – in the face of Jean's suffering. They could not spare her; for different reasons, they could not fully share it. There was a hair, a thread of terror in their empathy.

The nurses came and went, impatient to take the child away. The room grew dark; they came in to turn on the light, still waiting.

Avery sat in a chair next to the bed. When at last Jean fell asleep, he took their daughter from her arms.

The moment Jean woke, she called desperately for a nurse to bring back her child, the child who had died twice. Then she saw the guilt, the wretchedness, the betrayal, in Avery's face.

Afterwards, Jean could not take care of herself; she remained in the hospital, so listless she could not brush her teeth. Her milk came in. Her breasts went hard. The baby was sent to Montreal, where Marina received her, burying her granddaughter, Elisabeth Willa Escher, near Jean's parents, in the graveyard at St. Jerome. Jean was no longer in the ward with expectant mothers bulging with life. Now she was in a room with women waiting, at various distances from death; heart disease, kidney failure. In Cairo, the heat pounded against the windows of the crowded hospital ward. In Montreal, the dark, cold, spring rain. Marina wrote and asked if she could come. No, answered Jean, don't come.

For months after birth, a child remains in the mother's body; moon and tide. Before the child cries, the mother flashes wet with milk. Before the child wakes and cries out in the night, the mother wakes. Deep in the child's cranial vault, the mother's gaze knits up the dangling synapses.

And when the child is spirit, it is exactly the same.

For several days Jean had noticed an old man sitting on the steps as she came back from her slow walk around the hospital garden. Then, one day, she did not look away quickly enough to avoid his gaze.

– You're walking a little better today, he said. Please sit with me and rest for a few minutes.

Jean hesitated. Then she sat down on the step below him.

– No, here, beside me.

Jean sat beside him. They leaned over their knees to their feet, as one leans over a railing to look down into an abyss.

– I know about your child, he said. I asked about you and the nurse told me. But now I am speaking of that young boy, that Monkey. I couldn't help but overhear you, with your husband. I didn't mean to listen, but people always talk freely next to me, even though the old have the greatest need for eavesdropping.

Jean could feel the tremble in the old man's arms and shoulders as he sat beside her.

– Let us imagine you are right, he continued, and his life was somehow in your hands. You were sent to him and this was your purpose in coming to this country. Perhaps your whole life, every choice, was meant to lead you to the very moment of meeting the boy in order to save him. But, if that were so, do you think that after so many years of living in preparation, your destiny would have failed you, or that you would have failed your destiny? And of your own child? Perhaps what you live now is still your destiny. And you do not know the meaning yet.

– I did fail, said Jean. I feel it inside, in the very core of me.

She began to weep.

The old man continued to look down at his feet.

– Emptiness is not failure, he said. His voice was so paternal, Jean could not subdue her tears.

Very gently, he said, you feel you have been punished for his death. You must decide: were you punished for your fear or for your faith?

He looked at Jean.

– I was punished once, for my fear, he said, and it destroyed me.

He leaned forward, frail and unsteady, on his stick. But she didn't see frailty, she saw obstinate strength; almost courage.

– You don't seem destroyed, said Jean at last.

– Some banishment is so deep, it seems like calm.

Jean felt pain in the core of her, as if he had laid his hand on her belly.