Dropped Threads 3 (29 page)

Together we examine her minute body, marvelling over every inch. At 20 weeks, her skin is so thin you can see the veins and arteries beneath it. A bloodless umbilical cord bejewels her tummy. Her eyes are sealed shut. She looks strangely peaceful. And although her tiny ears and elfin features—the classic characteristics of trisomy-18 babies—confirm what the test results predicted, to us she is perfect, a wonder of vulnerability, blessed with the long, lean legs of my husband, her whole length a cooling presence barely bigger than my outstretched hand.

When the nurse asks if she can take her away for a few minutes, it’s hard to let go. In one brief moment our daughter has charmed us completely: a being tender with newness, reminiscent of an exposed human heart.

When she comes back, the nurse has dressed her in a tiny woollen cap and pink nightgown. Although intended to acknowledge our baby’s realness, this dressing up does not bring comfort; the minuscule clothes seem only to diminish her. Her body, fragile to begin with, without firm skin or fat, is not the body of a living full-term child but something more mysterious, something as soft as a chamois glove.

Oh, Grace
, I say, stroking her torso tenderly. This is the name we have chosen for her—or rather she has chosen for herself. It arrived in me unexpectedly one afternoon this past week, while I was sitting, crying, at the kitchen table.
You chose well
, I say to her.

Eventually we’re asked if we’re ready to leave. Time is advancing, and there are questions to answer. Would we like an autopsy? Should the hospital mortuary arrange cremation, or will we? Throughout the process of letting go—the showering and dressing, the signing of papers, the choosing of a box, painted by volunteers, in which to store our baby’s keepsakes—it’s her name, Grace, that holds me together:
hopeful, respectable and slightly old-fashioned, like a cameo brooch or a pearl pin.

JANUARY 23, 2003

When we arrive at the crematorium it’s raining. Nervously, we step into the empty chapel, where our daughter’s casket, plain white and only a foot long, has been placed before the altar. In the absence of an audience it’s hard to know what to do. Weep? Pray? I feel slightly embarrassed, as if my husband and I are overreacting by cremating and mourning a child who never actually was. Wayne and I caress the textured surface of the casket, while I suppress the desire to rip it open and look once again at the body that emerged from me.

Eventually a young man in a crisp white button-down shirt appears. He carries Gracie’s casket down some steps and into a room we can see only through a pane of glass. Wordless, we watch him place her casket in the mouth of the oven, and close the door.

FEBRUARY 3, 2003

Gracie’s ashes have arrived. What’s left of our daughter is now just a plastic bag of grey-brown ash, no more than a couple of tablespoons, held together with a wire twist-tie and labelled with a circular metal tag.

We don’t feel ready to scatter them. Instead we decide to put them in a cedar box I bought last November, intending to give it as a Christmas present. It’s good to have a container, something firm to hold on to now that I feel skinless, without edges.

I’m still bleeding from the delivery, and my breasts have been leaking milk. These are not the only changes. It’s as if, since my world shifted on its axis, a new law of gravity has set
in, pulling some people toward me, pushing others away. Some friends will examine photos of Gracie, while others meticulously avoid using her name. I’ve realized that, although my daughter definitely existed, to some she will never be a person. Compared to living, breathing children, she is merely a lacuna, an absence, an unfortunate mistake.

I’ve also unearthed secrets. One of my friends has had several miscarriages, both my aunts had babies who died shortly after delivery, and my sister-in-law had a twin who died in utero. It seems these ghost babies are everywhere.

And I can’t stop seeing live ones—giggling, snoozing, babbling, wailing—casually parked in strollers or backpacks. How can their parents ignore these precious live beings, even for a second? I have to restrain myself from rushing up to them shouting,
Wake up and look at your babies!
Desperate, demented, I walk on by with my mouth clamped shut and arms tightly folded.

Wayne and I line the cedar box with eagle down collected from Jericho Park and a handful of sheep’s wool from England. Then we wrap up the bag of ashes in a fresh green Tibetan prayer flag. It feels good to swaddle Gracie.

We hold hands and gaze at our daughter, silently. We’ve become closer because of her, and I’m glad of this. Whatever anyone else thinks, we’re Gracie’s parents. And as her mother, there’s an emptiness in me I want to savour. It’s all I have left that holds her shape.

There’s something feral
about this street. Rambling, once-grand homes now carved up into cheap boarding houses jostle for sidewalk space with immaculately restored Victorians, boasting topiaries and fierce wrought-iron gates. The tension makes the spring air snappish, and I tug at my old coat, trying to close it over my newly swollen belly. The crackheads huddled in the slushy laneway north of Dundas turn to watch me as I pass. I pick up the pace, looking straight ahead and walking briskly in what I imagine is a purposeful way. I have to work harder at this than usual since I have taken on the unmistakable sway of pregnancy; it makes me feel unbalanced, vulnerable.

I turn in at a large three-storey brick house dripping with ornate blue gingerbread trim. There are two women dressed in puffy black jackets talking at the front gate. They watch me as I buzz the door. I can hear shuffling inside, then a pause while someone looks through the peephole.

“I’m here for the writing group,” I say to the door, with as much conviction as I can muster. A staff member lets me in. She looks me up and down as if I’m a stranger, though I’ve been coming to this women’s shelter to lead the Writers’ Circle nearly every Thursday for three years. When I began volunteering here, I imagined I could share my passion for writing fiction and its therapeutic sidekick, journalling, with
women who, perhaps more than most, need the release it can offer. I’ve stayed because their stories have stuck in my head.

I turn to my left and lean into a large room filled with people sprawled on mismatched couches and chairs, a television blaring the latest news about Michael Jackson. A few women look up and nod languidly at me.

Though the house has been stripped of most of its former grandeur, you can see its past carved in the ornate ceiling, intricate rosettes where crystal chandeliers must once have hung, deeply embossed crown moulding marking the perimeter of the room. There’s a laminate bookshelf stacked with donated detective novels, and some plastic garden chairs. Two girls in low-rise jeans and hoodies are sitting at a coffee table playing cards beside a woman with matted hair who’s rifling loudly through her collection of plastic bags.

I follow the staffer down the narrow hallway, past the pay phone, past a room misty with cigarette smoke, past the showers and staff room to the dining area where the writing group meets. There’s a lingering aroma from the shepherd’s pie that’s just been cleared away and some people drinking coffee and Red Rose tea at the round tables. Behind them on the bulletin board promoting AA meetings and support groups for incest survivors and for women with
AIDS
, there’s the faded poster I made last year to try to get more people out to the Writers’ Circle. It’s hard to know if it worked because the group, like the population of the shelter and this neighbourhood, changes nearly every week. Sometimes two women will show up, other times there will be two tables full. I take comfort in the handful of regulars who try to make it each week though they are no longer living at the shelter: There’s the earnest young woman from Boston who lost her high-paying job at a big corporation and moved to
Canada because she was convinced the government was poisoning the water; the voluptuous forty-year-old with metallic green eye shadow and ruby lips who tells me she’s a movie star, friend to Barbra Streisand; and the domineering girl with a wicked temper and a gaggle of followers who lost her baby to the Children’s Aid. I’ve been rehearsing in my mind how to tell them tonight is the last time I’ll be here.

Each week we write for a little more than half an hour, then we read our work out loud. I come armed with pencils and paper and a general topic intended to spark their creativity (the person who has influenced you most in your life, summer memories and so on). I act as a facilitator, answer spelling questions (despite my protests that it doesn’t matter here), encourage the hesitant and generally try to make sure no one offends anyone else. Mostly the women ignore my topic and write about themselves. They all have stories.

Tonight, an unusually large group has gathered, and we have to pull together three tables to accommodate them all. Passing out the paper and pens I suggest that they write about how they felt today and whether their mood affected their relationship to others. It’s often loud during this postdinner hour, but tonight the only sound is the hum of the fridge and someone clanking dishes in the giant stainless steel sink in the nearby kitchen. As the women settle into their writing, one girl, her eyes like narrow slashes in a grey, drawn face, tells me about the stillborn baby she had two days ago and how tired she is from walking around and crying all day; another, staring vacantly out the window, says she’ll write about how it felt when her husband beat her up.

I write, too. I have always loved the freedom of this hour, my anonymity in this group and their easy acceptance of each other and me. Tonight, maybe because I know it is my last, I find myself writing about things I can barely
admit to my closest friends. How I’m terrified to be having my first child. How the first thing I did when I found out I was pregnant was burst into frightened tears, the weight of responsibility pinning me to the bed. About the way anxiety no longer seems so easy to shake off and how some weeks, I cry about nothing every day. I haven’t told anyone this because I don’t want to acknowledge my ambivalence by releasing it into the world. I worry, too, that my friends and family will think I’m a bad mother if I confess these uncomfortable feelings. Anyway, no one wants to hear about my worries. People steer me away, telling me how happy I must be, how I can’t wait until the baby is born. To admit that the little fish thumping and swooshing inside scares me half to death is to transgress some unwritten social stricture. But here, with these women whose lives are complicated by drugs and deadbeat boyfriends, depression and poverty, my fears seem unremarkable. The words pour out sticky and messy like syrup.

It’s seven-thirty by the time everyone has finished. The young woman with the tired eyes has slept through the last half hour, her cheek pressed against the plastic tabletop. Another girl left to have a smoke and didn’t return. But the rest want to read out loud and a native woman volunteers to be first. She calls her piece “Anxiety.” She’s anxious, she reads from her hesitant script, because she’s just been diagnosed with diabetes and she’s worried about who will care for her and how she’ll cope if it gets bad. She doesn’t know much about the disease except that lots of people from her reserve have it. She’s a former alcoholic and is thinking about quitting smoking, but even the thought of that makes her more anxious.

The others thank her for her story, and then one woman launches into a tale about her sister who has diabetes and is
going blind and might have to have both legs amputated. I wonder momentarily if I should put an end to this story before the anxious woman is in tears, but the storyteller finishes before I can decide. Anyway, the diabetic isn’t fazed. She asks questions and nods as the grim details of her future are catalogued in enthusiastic detail.

A small, neat, grey-haired woman from Finland goes next. In short, abrupt sentences, which she reads as if they were questions, she tells us that she’s happy after a nice day spent wandering the Eaton Centre. I’m sure the other women are also wondering what she left out. They know better than anyone that no one comes here if they’re really that happy. As she finishes I can see the woman beside her breathing deeply with her eyes closed, bracing herself. A striking Trinidadian with a smooth high forehead, she reads of betrayal and violence in a gentle island lilt that makes her story sound like a song. Her husband beat her, she reads. She doesn’t know why because she loves him. She’s been running it over and over in her mind and doesn’t think she can forgive him this time. She’s crying now, though you wouldn’t know it if she hadn’t stopped to swallow the lump in her throat and dab her shining eyes. Now there are tears on cheeks all around the table, nods of recognition. When she finishes everyone claps.

I read next, hoping to slip in while the others are still reeling from this last outpouring. The women listen quietly and nod at my story. I tell them I’m not going to be here for a while because of the baby. And they tell me that they also felt scared when they were pregnant, that I’m right to think that my life will change when I have children. That kids make you see everything differently. The woman who thinks she’s a movie star tells me that what I really need is a good nanny. I laugh. It’s a relief.