The Push(38)

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? ? ?

I have no memory of what happened next or how we got to the hospital. I don’t remember seeing him or touching him. I hope I pulled him out of his straps and held him on the cold asphalt. I hope I kissed him over and over.

But I think maybe I just stood there. On that curb, staring at the groove.



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? ? ?

A mother was driving the SUV with her two kids in the back, the same ages as ours. She went straight through the green light, as she had every right to, as she’d probably done three thousand times before. The two cars coming the other way slammed on their brakes when they saw the stroller, but she didn’t have time. She didn’t even brake. I’ve always wondered what thoughts had been occupying her mind when it happened. If she was singing songs with her kids or answering their trail of questions. Maybe looking in the rearview mirror, smiling at her baby. Maybe she was daydreaming, thinking about how much she’d rather be anywhere else but in that car, listening to her kids scream.



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    I wish it hurt more. I wish I could still feel it like it happened today. Sometimes I have moments when the pain is gone and I think, My God, I’m dead inside. I’ve died with him. I used to spend every minute of every day staring at his things, willing the pain to flood back. I sobbed because it didn’t hurt enough. And then days later the pain would swell again and the world would become a little more alive in ways I loathed. I would smell banana bread from the house next door and it would paralyze me—that I could smell, that my glands would salivate, that someone on the other side of the wall was having the sort of morning that allowed her to bake banana bread for her children. I had been numb—the cruel lack of pain had been numbness. Later on, I would pray for the numbness to return. Even though I found satisfaction in the pain, I knew I wouldn’t survive it.



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? ? ?

When you met us at the hospital, you pulled Violet in close and held her head to your chest. And then you looked up at me, and you opened your mouth to speak, but nothing came out. We stared at each other and then we cried. Violet wiggled free of your arms and then you came to me. I folded down to the ground and leaned into your legs.

Violet watched us quietly. She came over and put her hand on my head.

“Sammy’s stroller slipped out of Mom’s hands and got hit by a car.”

“I know, sweetheart. I know,” you said.

I couldn’t look at either of you.

The police came back and wanted to talk to you, to explain everything they’d already explained to me. That the driver wouldn’t be charged, that we’d need to make some decisions about our baby’s body. And his organs. They thought three of them would be viable for transplants in other babies, for mothers who had done a better job at keeping their children alive than I had. A nurse gave me a pill to calm me down.

I took Violet down the hall to the water cooler. As she overflowed the cone cup I threw up in a garbage pail full of discarded latex gloves and medical packaging. I listened to you sob down the hall, through the heavy glass door that separated us from the rest of the waiting area. Violet watched me and shifted her weight between her feet. She wouldn’t dare speak to me. I knew she desperately needed to pee, but I wanted to let her wet herself. I watched the denim turn from light to dark as the wetness spread. I didn’t say a thing and neither did she.

I had spoken to the police with the tone of ordering at a drive-through window: My daughter yanked my arm. I was burned by the hot tea. I let go of the stroller. And then she pushed it onto the road.

Anything else, ma’am?

No, that’s all.

I didn’t have the wherewithal to protect her with a lie. They’d asked me to repeat myself a few times, probably looking for signs of shock, inconsistencies. Maybe they found some. I don’t know. I don’t know what they told you when I was gone. But when I got back, the officer crouched down and put his hand on Violet’s little shoulder, and said to her, “Accidents happen, okay, Violet? Accidents happen and it’s nobody’s fault. Mom did nothing wrong.”

“Listen to him, Blythe. You did nothing wrong.” You repeated this to me and held me.

“I think she pushed him,” I said to you quietly as you dabbed ointment on my burned skin. I couldn’t feel a thing. “I think she pushed him into the road. I told the police.”

“Shhh.” Like I was a baby. “Don’t say that. Okay? Don’t say that.”

“I saw her pink mittens on the handle of the stroller.”

“Blythe. Don’t do this. It was an accident. A terrible accident.”

“It must have been pushed. It wouldn’t have rolled over that groove.”

You looked at the police officer and shook your head, wiping the tears from your face. You cleared your throat. The officer’s pale, chapped lips puckered. He nodded at you, an acknowledgment of some sort. The irrational mother. The incapable woman. Look—I have to put her ointment on. I have to shush her.

Violet pretended not to hear what I’d said. She drew flowers on a whiteboard next to a diagram of organs that someone had drawn when I wasn’t there, maybe for my husband to understand what parts of my son they wanted. The diagram looked like a map of the Great Lakes. The police officer said he’d give us time in the room by ourselves.