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Some days I still think this is all just a sad story I'll tell Simone one day.
That when the crying nurse brought her to me, brought her body to me, still in the hospital bed, an epidural and an IV and a catheter still inside me and a blood pressure monitor still Velcroed around my right bicep, I'd just taken a bite of a banana.
That it was the first solid food I'd eaten in twenty hours, the obstetrician having been uncertain whether I'd need an emergency cesarean section, in which case I couldn't have anything in my stomach. I hadn't needed a cesarean, and now everything was over, and I was hungry.
That when I saw the bundle of white cloth in the nurse's arms, I instinctively handed the half-eaten banana to my husband, so I could reach out my arms for her. She was even more heavily swaddled than most newborns because the doctors and nurses hadn't wanted me to see the swelling that had accumulated around her head and back, inside her abdomen, underneath her skin. "Are you sure you want to see her?" the obstetrician, Doctor R, had asked after pulling Simone from my body, stillborn and breech, at twenty-two weeks' gestation. Her voice was gentle and deep, and she held both of my hands in hers. "There is a lot of swelling."
I understood she was only trying to prepare me, this mother of daughters-"I have a Lauren at home too," she'd told my mother the previous morning, when we'd met for the first time in her creaky Upper East Side office. I understood that she only needed to hear me say it: There was nothing in the world that could keep me from her. I was not afraid to see my child.
It was just like everyone had said it would be, and it was nothing like that. Seeing her face-the only part of her I could see, underneath a white cotton hat with a little pom-pom on it, an impossibly small hat that was so big on her it threatened to swallow her whole head-felt like coming home to a loved one after a long trip, lonely and exhausting, somewhere far away. Oh, it's you.
Of course, her face was familiar in a more literal sense too. The wide, high brow bones, the soft lips upturned slightly at the edges, the angular little nose: She looked, entirely and miraculously, like her dad.
I kissed her forehead and cheek, put my nose to her skin and breathed her in. She smelled, perhaps unsurprisingly, like me. She felt weightless in my arms-her little hospital bracelet read one pound, two ounces, thirty centimeters-and I imagined continuing to carry her around with me, physically I mean, for the rest of my life: to work, to dinner with my friends, to weddings and vacations and funerals and the grocery store and my deathbed. I could do it, I thought. It would take no effort at all.
I passed her to Gabe, and he walked around the room staring at her, bouncing her a little as if she needed soothing, as if she needed anything at all from us now. She looked even smaller against his chest, a tiny, endangered bird he'd found and rescued, cradling her until he returned her safely to the nest.
You were still warm, I'll tell her one day. Your eyes were closed; you did not cry. You were peaceful. You were the only perfect thing I have ever done.
Later, I would try to imagine how Simone would have looked in a year, in five, in forty; what her voice would have sounded like, her laugh, her cry. But in those few minutes I had with her, I took her in just as she was. Her father and I passed her gently between us, again and again, not just smiling but beaming. "One more time, I just want to hold her one more time," we said, until the nurse took her away, and our arms were empty.
Somehow, this memory is still the happiest of my life.
I will never get to tell Simone this story; the person I most need to hear it never will. It is an intolerable reality that I have outlived my only child, that what cells remain of her are collected in an oppressively small porcelain urn on the dresser beside our bed, a frail vessel painted white with a bird and branches on it, the lid sealed only with Scotch tape because the funeral home wasn't sure, we weren't sure, whether we'd planned to scatter her ashes or preserve them. That no matter what we do with them, those cells will never develop or multiply enough to comprehend such things as fear or urns or sadness or stories. Stories like this one are for the rest of us, the ones left behind.
Simone was the fourth generation of women in my family. I have no photo of her, because I didn't want to take one, but these are the photos I do have. In the earlier image, the grandmother is not yet a grandmother; she has only just become a mother. It is September 1958, and her first child, a girl, is three days old. They are together in a bed and in black-and-white, at their small apartment in Toronto, the infant's head making the wrinkled pillow behind it look comically, almost menacingly large, a parody of a pillow, how could a head ever need so much pillow?
This head, the center of the frame, turns toward her mother's smiling face gazing down at her from the top-left corner, looking for her milk, maybe, a flower turning toward the sun.
Thirty-one years later, there is a new photo. The original is in color, it is late August 1989, and the baby girl from before now has her own. This new baby is jaundiced but healthy, seven pounds and seven ounces, round-faced and hairy. The mother is wearing a hospital-issued gown with a bunch of Ns on it for some reason (the hospital is called Pacific Presbyterian), and her shoulder-length black hair is swept across her forehead. In this photo, a rare one taken of the mother without makeup, she is peaceful, enamored, exhausted, and so, so tan. Her beauty is undeniable, particularly in this moment. She too stares straight down at her daughter.
This baby's hands are in small fists held right up at her chin, and her dark, wrinkled eyes are not looking toward her mother. They stare straight at the camera, maybe at whoever is behind it-the father? The grandmother?
There is no photo after this one. Where is this daughter's daughter? Whom does she have to look at?
This baby is the mother's second. The first time around, she marveled at how much easier pregnancy had turned out to be than she'd been led to expect. At how fortunate she was to feel so well all the time, so exempt from the bone-deep exhaustion and roiling nausea all her less fortunate friends complained about while carrying. It eventually became clear that she, this mother, was the unlucky one. That baby, a boy, died inside of her at nearly six months' gestation. When she found out his heart had stopped, the mother felt like hers did too.
A little over a year later, they bring the girl home to a town house in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, a block away from a playground at the top of a steep hill, which the girl will eventually love so much she refuses to leave, where she will wail when her nanny, a short-haired woman who speaks to her only in Mandarin, tries in vain to get her to leave.
The house has a little balcony in the back where the mother makes the father, a lapsed Mormon, go to smoke. He wears big, square, wire-framed glasses, and a well-worn short-sleeved button-down in a kind of geometric vomit of bright turquoises and blues. Still, he is handsome; people say he looks like Christopher Reeve. He is tall and charismatic and speaks with the earnestness of good intention, and the mother fell in love with him after meeting him one time in a stairwell, in 1984. They wrote love letters back and forth across the country for months. He has family money and an MBA; she has neither of these things but a decently paying merchandising job and a mind like a lit match. They were married within a year.
On a windy day in February when the daughter is twenty-eight, the mother will take her back to that house, will ignore the daughter's mortification and knock on the door, ask the new owner if she can come in, she's come from all the way across the country, from New York, to show her daughter her first home. The woman who answers the door will be significantly older than the mother; her husband is the city's former mayor. An American flag will flap out front. She'll look at the mother and daughter, their shin-length felt coats, one black and one pale pink, their sunglasses and large shopping bags. She'll welcome them inside.
Standing uneasily in the long, narrow, mahogany-paneled sitting room on the ground floor, the mother will say to the woman, "Those tiles in the bathroom upstairs toward the back of the house, the ones with the blue trim? Are they still there?"
When she was pregnant the second time, you see, emotional and impulsive and two weeks overdue in the dead of August, the thing she felt she needed to do most urgently was to retile the bathroom that accompanied her unborn child's bedroom. "My baby can't have plain tiles," she'd said to the father. They bought the tiles.
"Those? We haven't changed them," the woman will tell the mother, nearly three decades later. They can't go upstairs, the cleaning ladies are there, the woman apologizes, hopes they don't mind. The daughter will never get to see the tiles, but it won't really matter. Knowing they ever existed, and still exist, despite everything, will be enough. In some ways, the image she will always carry in her mind, of this bathroom, this life, will be truer than the reality anyway.
By then the father will also live far away from that house, in a seaside apartment right off the 5, halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. All three will live in their separate apartments, a molecule atomized, each forming new bonds with new loved ones. As the years pass the mother will think about the father less and less; the daughter will think of him more and more.
Whenever she is sad, for example, or sick, or hurt, she will wonder how he'd react if he knew. As she grows older, that curiosity and longing will calcify into resentment. She will try to imagine one day having a child of her own, and then not even knowing or asking how or where that child is for months, even years at a time. She will wonder if it matters to him that she's safe-in her most ungenerous moments, that she's alive. How long it would take him to find out if she weren't.
It will never be entirely clear to the daughter what happened after the time of the blue-trimmed tiles. Something about the father-who, unlike the mother, grew up with a silver spoon, the mother's mother always said-quitting his consulting job to go on a motorcycle trip around the country, leaving his wife at home to take care of their infant child.
When the mother and daughter are living in Dallas a few years later-these will be some of the daughter's first memories-the mother will meet an older man, a retail CEO who lives in New York City and is everything the father is not: cautious, reliable, present to a fault. The man will visit them and take the three-year-old daughter swimming in the pool at his hotel. Afterward, the girl's arms rubbed raw from her water wings, they'll sit on lounge chairs and order French fries, which the man will call "feijis," an approximation of the Mandarin word for airplane, and when a plane passes overhead he'll point to the sky and say, "Look, a French fry!" The daughter will laugh and laugh and the mother will think, This is what the two of them need: someone to count on.
She'll move to the Upper East Side and marry him; the daughter, makeup covering her chickenpox, will be the flower girl. First there will be the hotel on Sixty-First Street, where the daughter will have two goldfish that will die when the family goes to Florida for a week in March. Then the apartment four blocks north, where the girl will wet her bed and put on a plaid school jumper and sing "Dreamlover" into the mirror and have her first panic attack at six.
Around that time, the father will visit New York for work, and he will take his daughter out to dinner at an expensive Chinese restaurant near her home. They won't have much time together; he'll have to bring the girl back to the only family she knows in just a few hours. When they walk in, the maître d' will recognize the girl, and call her by the stepfather's last name. It will bother the daughter more than it bothers the father. He's not possessive like that, he understands. He'll already know she does not belong to him; what she knows is that she does not belong to the stepfather either. She is her mother's alone, always.
Soon the mother, the daughter, and the stepfather will fly from New York to Baton Rouge to meet the son, a pale and hairless string bean of a baby, just two weeks old, in a foster home in Mamou, Louisiana, where he's lived his two weeks on earth since the fifteen-year-old girl felt she had no choice but to let him go. The daughter, now eight, will be the first to hold her new brother, sitting on that kind foster family's brown couch in her purple chenille sweater over a white cotton turtleneck. She'll continue to hold him in her arms as they both fall asleep on the flight back up to their new life.
Soon that marriage will end too. Lying on her stomach on top of the mother's white embroidered bedspread, the ten-year-old daughter will listen to the mother tell her they'll be leaving this home, this man too. This time, she'll be old enough to remember, to betray her mother by running into the den late at night, where the stepfather is watching television on a black leather armchair, climbing into his lap, and telling him she's sorry for everything the mother has ever done.
