Holding Silvan Read online

  Indeed, on our return that day from the deli, we find ourselves holding the doors of the elevator for a baby on a gurney. We stand back against the walls, one on each side of the elevator while the baby’s bed is wheeled between us. I hardly want to look. My own misfortune is enough to bear. But David says, “Look, it’s Silvan.”

  “No it’s not,” I say, almost scornful, for how can he know better than me?

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No it’s not,” I say with certainty, talking over the baby’s bed, for when they first wheeled Silvan away after birth – “just for a few minutes” – they’d stopped to show him to me, the very baby I’d hoped for, looking not at all like me but like his handsome father: a head of dark hair, eyes ringed with heavy lashes, broad pink cheeks tapering down to fat red lips etched against the olive of his skin. When we first came to this second hospital, wasn’t I the one – bursting with pride – who found him in his bassinet while David said, “But how do you know that’s him?” Surely David is confused because newborns all have the same strange, squashed faces, the same upturned noses. Is it even possible for a baby who was just inside of me to be out here, unrecognizable?

  “Excuse me,” David says to the hospital staff who have been ignoring us, looking straight ahead. “That’s Baby Boy Wesolowska, isn’t it?”

  They agree, but warily, as if we might be baby snatchers, or as if we’ve caught them wheeling our baby around the hospital for fun, or as if they’ve learned bad news. I can see this last possibility now, because that is how the next technician behaves a few hours later. At first she seems glad to see us arrive. Silvan is in bed, electrodes stuck all over his head, asleep. She assures us the EEG will not hurt him. She says we can help. She’s very friendly, telling us how cute he is, cooing over his calm, cute body. I assume he’s so quiet because of the phenobarbital he’s been given since the seizures of his first night. He’s always asleep. She opens her laptop. She herself grows quiet as she studies the patterns she reads there.

  “Okay,” she says pleasantly, “would you mind stroking him a little?”

  With pleasure, I rub his chest, his arms.

  “Okay,” she says, “a little harder.”

  Still, I stroke him softly.

  “Could you pinch him?”

  David pinches him.

  “A little harder,” she says. And then, “Did you really pinch him?”

  Suddenly, she closes her laptop. She refuses to make eye contact. She leaves saying nothing at all.

  DESPITE OUR HOPES, the news grows worse. By the third day, we know the seizures are due to more than hematomas; they will not just go away with time. There is evidence now that Silvan has suffered some greater “insult” to his brain. We want to point out to the doctors that they are being inconsistent. We want to hold them to an earlier diagnosis, as if to a better deal advertised in that morning’s paper. We want to go back to those first few minutes after birth when we thought the only thing wrong was a slight distress, a slight lethargy. We want our only disappointment to be that he could not lie on my chest right away. We want to be relieved that, after wheeling him off for those “few minutes” to aspirate his lungs, they were able to bring him back lusty and strong enough to nurse.

  We would settle for that.

  Instead, we have a baby who was born, who nursed and cried, but who is now in a coma – this word has been used at last – and who may die before we even know what’s wrong with him. Though he seems simply, sweetly asleep, he may never revive. We wake on our third morning at home to the ringing phone. My heart hammers as David answers. But no, I can tell from his end of the conversation that the worst has not happened. Silvan has not died before I could get dressed for the day and see him again. But what David says is scary enough.

  “A meeting with a neurologist?”

  And, “At one o’clock?”

  And then, “Can’t you tell me now?”

  I’m out of bed, packing a bag to take to the hospital, sanitary pads, the squirt bottle for my healing stitches. When David gets off the phone, he says, “The EEG did not look good.”

  “But what does that mean?” I ask.

  “Brain damage?” David says as if posing a question.

  I’m facing him but now my head turns away, then my torso; I am falling on the bed and all I see is a grey kaleidoscope, slowly closing on the last spot of light at the end of the tunnel: “I can’t go on,” I say. This is what my mother felt, I think, lying at the bottom of the basement stairs after hearing that Mark’s body had been found. But, even as I have this thought, the sensation passes because I am not my mother, my son has not killed himself, my husband is not about to die, and already I can see myself from the outside, already I’m mocking myself for melodrama, because I have lived through tragedies before, and this is not a tragedy. After all, my baby is waiting.

  ONE O’CLOCK. We sit side-by-side, close but not touching. I can’t touch David. The situation feels too dangerous; I feel my brain crouching down, ready to spring. Intellect is how I deal. Crisis speeds my thinking. We are in an ugly room, narrow as a hallway, with a too-big table shoved inside it, a box of tissues in the middle, a blur of faces. Dr. A is there, a resident, a social worker, a nurse, half a dozen more at least. I’m not looking at them. I am looking only at the new doctor, the specialist, this neurologist, who is now in charge it seems. This is her meeting. She looks twenty-one with her smooth blond hair hanging free. She looks as if she’d been a girl who once was popular and consequently had downplayed her brains until one day it occurred to her that she didn’t have to choose between looks and brains, she had enough of both to conquer the world. Here she comes, ready to conquer ours.

  “The infant was transferred to this hospital after observed seizures. The initial impression was subdural hematomas…” she begins, and then the words keep coming from her, medical terms, “basal ganglia” and “thalami” and “sagittal sinus.”

  I try to stop her. I say, “What does that mean?” but she keeps on talking as if I’ve said nothing. She seems to think she’s addressing a panel of experts and not two parents whose need to understand is urgent. The room feels very bright. She talks about “burst suppression patterns” and “EEGs.” Again, I say, “What does that mean?” but as in a dream where one cannot get the words out, she doesn’t seem to hear me. At last she gets to what really matters to us. The prognosis. She says, “Physical and mental impairment.” She says it unadorned like that and stops.

  “Could you describe what you mean?” I ask.

  For the first time, she looks at me. “It could just mean stiff limbs,” she says stiffly, as if I’m forcing her to speak a language she barely knows.

  “Stiff limbs is fine with me,” I say.

  “… and he won’t be a straight A student.”

  “Well that is not acceptable,” I say. It is my humor, my father’s humor, dark, deadpan, so close to the truth it glances off it like a spear, a humor that sometimes got him into trouble when it rattled to the ground uncaught. No one reacts.

  “But it could be much worse than that,” she says, smooth and unsmiling.

  It’s hard to imagine this woman has suffered. Her children, whom she has not yet had, will, of course, get straight A’s like her and I hate her for it – such is the venom of grief as it begins to spread inside me.

  We go back and forth, asking questions, but she will not commit; she keeps holding out hope like little bits of candy, until I’ve had it. She’s sugar-coating something terrible. I say something to this effect. I say I want to know what one can do for a baby whose life has been saved for a life that is not really life at all. I use the word euthanasia; I know it is illegal, I say, but what else is allowed? There is cold shock in the room. Or perhaps the shock I feel is my own. I feel it in my chest, a flutter of my heart as though I’m in danger of falling, but all I want is to move away from the slippery ice of hope to truth.

  Beside me, David seems suddenly unable to sit still. He scratches his
neck, his shin, he frowns, he sighs. I touch his arm: “Do you need this meeting to be over?” Though I want to press on, though I want to ply them with questions and force them in this way to tell me more than anyone can ever know about the future, though I’d rather keep pushing forward intellectually than let emotion overwhelm me, David says, “We need to be alone right now.” He is about to explode with tears.

  They are instantly on their feet and filing swiftly out. Their relief at having fulfilled this part of their job is palpable.

  As soon as we are alone, we hug. We sob.

  “Promise me, whatever happens, this won’t ruin our marriage,” I say, pulling away from him; and at the same time, David says, “Let’s try to have another child someday, okay?” These seem like loving words; but as I record them here, I grow uncomfortable wondering if there is love enough in them for Silvan.

  Love Story

  ONE AFTERNOON AROUND THE TIME DAVID AND I DECIDED we were ready for children, we went for a hike in the redwoods. We’d taken our time coming to this decision. In fact, it had been my doctor who tipped the balance, bringing out statistics and showing me that if I didn’t choose one way or other soon, nature would choose for me. I was already thirty-six and had been with David for nine years, married to him for two. And so we decided to try; and that afternoon after sex, we went for a hike. It was a hot, sunny day and the cool, sweet-smelling woods matched the afterglow of sex so that, as we hiked, our coupling seemed to extend and fill the day. Yellow sunlight fingered the red trunks of the trees and the spongy, decaying forest floor. We didn’t expect to get pregnant, but we were ready to be pregnant when it happened.

  “We should remember this day,” I called to David further up the trail, “in case the day we actually conceive is less lovely.” After all, we knew many couples who’d worked hard to have children. We were hiking uphill, panting with the effort. A plane passed overhead, birds rustled in the undergrowth. Now we descended, the fecund silence deepening as our breathing slowed.

  “We could,” David said with bemused affection.

  A month later, we conceived Silvan, though I do not know exactly when. Those days have been lost in ordinary repetition. What I remember instead is sunshine filtering through trees and catching on a cloud of gnats, on swirling wood dust, the air always glittering a few steps ahead.

  LONG BEFORE THAT sunny day in the woods with David, I used to tell myself another story, a story about the boy I ’d someday marry. I spotted him – this future husband of mine – for the first time when I was twelve and on a pilgrimage to Lourdes that my family undertook one summer as a daytrip while we were already in France visiting my mother’s relatives. The day was golden hot and a scruffy, pale boy with straight, tawny hair stood at a fountain drinking. “Drink,” his parents said each time he stopped. When they heard us speaking English, they turned and asked, “Do you have aspirin? He has a headache.” Never having known a child to suffer a headache before, I studied him with curiosity, his pale strained face, his flat hair. But we didn’t carry aspirin and as we walked away, my mother said softly, “I didn’t know children suffered headaches.” She said it as if in disbelief or awe.

  We were headed to the grotto, that circle of rock where the Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Bernadette. Though my parents were liberal intellectuals who would’ve traveled farther for a good museum, they were also solid Catholics who believed in saints and miracles. As I stood looking up at the rows of crutches from cripples who’d been miraculously healed at Lourdes, I told myself not to forget the tawny-headed boy. Someday he might become my husband. It wasn’t that he was cute, or funny, or interesting. I was drawn to him solely because of his suffering.

  Back home, I kept watch for future husbands. These were never boys I found attractive, only needy in some way. Loneliness especially moved me, including the loneliness of dolls left at home while I was off at school, or flies trapped on windowsills. There was one fly I kept company in the bathroom all afternoon until my mother rushed in – the wooden soles of her sandals clacking on the tiles – and swatted it. There my friend lay, six black legs up in the air, while I cried over it. “But you didn’t tell me he was your friend!” my mother said before rushing off to tend to other children.

  My mother had four of us to tend to, not counting the occasional foster child; I was the oldest, followed by Mark, Katya, and Kim. Though my parents had traveled far to meet each other – my father, orphaned by high school, had escaped his factory job in Wisconsin for a Ph.D. in physics; my mother, a child of the blitzkrieg of London, had escaped for her own Ph.D. in the States – in Berkeley they were determined to raise a family as Catholic as their own. In such a family, sainthood seemed a worthy occupation and so I continued to aspire to it, lying in bed, both longing for and dreading the moment when God would appear across the yellow shag of my bedroom rug. Perhaps He would ask for something so big I couldn’t handle it, like lead an army, or something so small I couldn’t bear it. I feared, for example, the life of Saint Monica. My mother said she was a lovely saint to have been named after, but hers sounded like no life to me. She spent it praying for the soul of her son.

  While waiting for divine directive, I also practiced “good” deeds. These deeds made other people’s suffering bearable to me. One day I arranged a race for a boy named Leo. Leo was two years younger than me, a boy in Mark’s class. Leo was too chubby to play easily with the other kids and at recess often stood at the edges of games watching, while I sat farther out watching him watching. I assumed he was lonely; I assumed that winning a race would bring him friends. In this race, I arranged for Mark to pretend to trip so that Leo could win. Mark must have had the same deluded sense of pity as I did, a child’s pity not yet developed into true compassion. The day of the race came. Though a crowd gathered when Mark fell, though I kept yelling, “Run, Leo, run,” thinking his victory would be all the more satisfying for having an audience, Leo only looked confused, then went back to help Mark up. And when I crowed, “You won, you won!” anyway he did not break into a smile. He went back to his own life and I went back to mine, each of us learning to manage on our own.

  When David and I first met in Berkeley, I’d long since given up my vision of marrying to assuage someone else’s loneliness. And David clearly was not my tawny-haired youth at the fountain. No, David was Jewish, darkly handsome, and he’d never been to Lourdes. Not only that, he wasn’t a tortured artist either, the mate I’d since imagined for myself. Instead, he was my competent superior at work; and at twenty-four, he seemed as burdened with a sense of responsibility as a middle-aged man. David for his part had always pictured a woman with a solid job. Instead, I was a twenty-eight-year-old temporary worker and aspiring writer who’d just moved back in with her parents to save money. In other words, David was as unlike all the pale, wounded, wild men I’d loved before as I was unlike all the well-groomed, well-padded women he’d dated before, and neither of us expected much from that first date.

  There he stood on my parents’ front porch, too eager to please, too cautious about standing out; even his curly hair was combed flat the way he’d done it throughout his New Jersey adolescence; in contrast, I wore a fluorescent paisley headscarf cut from the hem of a floor-length skirt my mother had worn during my Berkeley childhood. That scarf was so bright you could direct traffic with it and my wild hair stood up in a halo around it. After taking in my stoplight head, David came inside the house where my father was sitting in the living room. David tried to bullshit my father by pretending to know more about the writer in the movie we were going to see than he really did. He flubbed it by suggesting that my father must know the work of this writer himself, but my father said he didn’t and asked David to tell him more, which David couldn’t. I was embarrassed. I’d been raised to believe that the only way to learn was to admit what one doesn’t know. Honesty as the path to truth.

  My father was already ill by then, but he’d hauled himself up from his armchair to meet the young man taking me out on
a date, and once it became clear that David was going in circles just to please him, my father sat back down heavily, told us to have a good time, and went back to staring out the window.

  After the movie, I continued to be frustrated. I wanted to talk deeply about the movie and David wanted to show me the first place he’d worked on campus. So why was I falling in love? For I was falling in love. The story of our union as we tell it is one of feeling absolutely comfortable. As if we’d known each other for a long time. As we walked around town together, though I could not get him to talk about movies and books and art the way I wanted, I could get him to talk about things that mattered on a deeper level. Though he had bullshitted my father about what facts he knew, he was absolutely honest about his feelings. There was a comfortable familiarity and safety in his honesty. For example, when pressed he said he didn’t find my headscarf flattering.

  We also got into a conversation about God, whom David didn’t believe in. Never had. He’d never believed in fairies, either, or in the lives of his sister’s dolls. When I tried to explain how I’d come to understand God over time – my sense that matter is all connected, that there is more in our brains than we can understand, that we need to be humble in the face of this mystery – he said, “Why call that God?”

  I thought perhaps we could agree on that point, but then he went on to say that he thought someday we might understand it all, that science was constantly advancing. I wasn’t so sure about that. I’ve never understood the word progress except to mean an apparent forward motion in time. “How can you be so arrogant about being human?” I said.

  “No, it’s the reverse,” he said. “When something bad happens, I don’t see the point in blaming a god. But when something good happens, I do look around in gratitude, wanting to thank someone other than myself.”

  With the glib naïveté of youth, I told him I wouldn’t want to raise a child but that I’d find giving birth an interesting experience to have as a writer, and though David didn’t understand giving birth except to have a child, he did say that were we to have children and not just give birth to them, he’d want to raise them Jewish, and I said that was okay. We were speaking theoretically. We had time to change our minds. Anyway, I wasn’t a practicing Catholic anymore whereas – as David explained it – one can be raised Jewish and atheist because being Jewish is more about culture than religion.