The Break(36)

“I need Gabe to let me see my friends again,” I say to Sylvie, who’s watching me like she can see my camp memories projected above my head. I’m specifically thinking of my friend Kim who lives on the Upper East Side and works in fashion and has eight-year-old twins and a darling towheaded four-year-old. Kim had so much advice for me when we used to meet for tea when I was pregnant, though now I can’t recall much of it. It felt so helpful at the time, but none of my friends ever warned me about how hard breastfeeding was: the nipple and engorgement pain, the worry over the baby not getting enough milk, mastitis. I’m terrified that we’ll go to Lila’s next appointment and the pediatrician will weigh her and tell me she hasn’t gained enough, that something is wrong with her and me and we can’t make this thing that I thought would be so natural work. It’s not natural, at least not for me, but still I want it so badly. I’m sure this is why women used to raise babies among aunts and mothers, so they could spot when there was a problem and help right away and give advice and take care of both the baby and the new mother. But even as I think about it, it feels too simplistic; it’s another era, and it’s not coming back, because now we value different things: independence, autonomy, careers that take off in the right cities. So now we have lactation consultants, and thank God for them, I guess, but there’s nothing like your own mother/aunt/sister. Things could be way worse, I suppose. My mother could be dead.

“And how do you think seeing your friends might help?” Sylvie asks. She taps a finger against the arm of her chair. Her manicured nails are cream colored, and they glisten beneath the overhead lights like pearls. She doesn’t wear a ring and I wonder if she’s married; there aren’t any photos up of kids or a husband, only a lone photo of Sylvie with people who look like they’re probably her parents.

“Because isn’t that what friends always do?” I ask, annoyed by her question. Lila squirms in Gabe’s arms. Take off her freaking snowsuit, I try to telegraph to Gabe. Sylvie stares at me like this is a Jedi mind game. And then she waits. And I guess it works, because I say, “I know you want me to talk about Lila’s birth, but I don’t really remember it.” I’ve said those words so many times it makes me sick to say them again now, but Sylvie only nods, like it’s a starting point. I don’t have the heart to tell her that it’s not a starting point if there’s nowhere to go after it: only darkness, an absence of memory, life lived and forgotten in a posttraumatic fugue. “I was very sedated,” I say.



Gabe finally decides to take off Lila’s snowsuit. I swear I see sweat lining the back of her hair, but I keep my mouth snapped shut. Sylvie’s wall clock keeps on ticking, and I watch the way Gabe flinches when Lila’s zipper creaks. She’s so tiny inside that thing, and then Gabe slips her out like a fish. He props her up on his shoulder and grins when she doesn’t wake up. That grin makes me love him again; it makes it so obvious we’re on the same team, that we love Lila more than we’ve ever loved anyone including each other. It doesn’t hurt the way it should to admit that; it just feels big and expansive, a love I want to live inside.

I exhale.

I need to get better—I need to try this. My memory feels like a porcelain bowl of water: everything and nothing at the same time, and not exactly something you can hold on to or shape the way you’d like, but still—my lips part to make words, something I know how to do better with a pencil but can do well nonetheless. “I remember before the birth, at the sonogram appointments, how Gabe and I used to watch the sonogram screen like it had the answer to everything. I can’t really remember what we saw. It all feels blurry now. I have those pictures somewhere . . .” I sense Gabe turning away from me. In any room his eyes find a window, but there isn’t one inside Sylvie’s office. He busies himself smoothing Lila’s terry cloth pajamas. Wonky yellow ducks on the feet of her jammies gape at us. “And the afternoon of Lila’s birth I remember bleeding and ending up on my back in the street, and the ambulance being so bumpy, and I must have passed out, because the next thing I remember is waking up to see all the blood, the doctors’ faces, how scared they all were. I remember hearing someone say, The baby is out, and I remember they tried to let me hold Lila, but I didn’t feel completely there. I felt like I was underwater and losing touch with what I knew reality to be—I felt like I was holding her, but then still reaching for her somewhere else. I remember seeing a silver table with knives on it and scissors and maybe even the thread they used to stitch me up.” My voice is edging higher. “Why didn’t anyone put that all away?” I ask, my hands sweating against the sofa now. “Lila was so slippery,” I say, sounding way more hysterical than I mean to, but I can’t seem to help it. Those knives. “And I was so scared I’d drop her, and she’d get hurt, and I think that’s why I started screaming. And then they sedated me. And that’s what I remember.”

A flash of memory comes to me: I see myself in a white nightgown with tiny blue flowers, blood on my fingertips. I haven’t thought about the nightgown in years—I used to wear it as a young child. Anxiety floods me—it feels so real, as if I’ve gone back in time and inhabited my tiny helpless body. “There’s this part of me that thinks,” I start, my gaze holding Sylvie’s, “that some of what happened at Lila’s birth reminds me of my dad dying. The knives and the blood, I mean.” After I say it, I freeze up.