Born With Wings
Author’s Note: As the husband of a doctor, I hear a lot of stories, both happy and sad. Here’s one that is both. Though I’ve changed names and shaped the story into fiction, it’s essentially true.
Lying on her back and staring at the white ceiling, Mary felt the scanner sliding around in the warm goo smeared over the mound of her tummy. The screen of the ultrasound swarmed with shadowy shapes, like pieces of a puzzle that wouldn’t quite fit together. Then she saw it: the tiny head, the feet, the hands. All moving.
“Look!” she cried. “He’s waving at us!”
Jim, shaking his head in wonder, said, “It’s like a picture transmitted from Mars. Like the little guy is calling out to us, ‘Won’t be long now, Mom and Dad! The rocket’s on its way and I’ll soon be home!’”
The technician, talkative until then, was staring intently at the screen.
“This must be such a lovely job,” said Mary. “Meeting new moms, watching them see their babies for the first time. You must just love it.”
The technician did not respond.
“I mean,” said Mary, “isn’t it just grand?”
The scanner slid back and forth, the image swam. Finally the technician replied, in a voice strangely remote, “Every job has its hard parts.”
With these words, a different feeling crept into the room, like a breath out of the Martian atmosphere.
“Is something wrong?” asked Mary.
Having intended to stay in the city and do some shopping, the Barretts changed their plans. They’d been told nothing, except that they were to see their own doctor, Sharon Walker, that same day.
It was a long drive home that morning through the blaze of fall colors that looked shocked, unnatural.
* * *
Dr. Sharon made room for them as soon as they appeared in the office. Andrew, their two-year-old, sat in the corner working on a gigantic sucker. On this occasion Sharon did not sit behind her desk but brought her chair around to the front so that she could hold Mary’s hand.
She had to tell the Barretts that their baby, according to the ultrasound, appeared to have no kidneys. Renal agenesis, she called it, or Potter Syndrome. The condition was very rare; Sharon had never seen it before. And of course, a second scan would have to be done to confirm the diagnosis. But it meant, among other things, that no amniotic fluid could be produced, and therefore the lungs would not develop properly. It meant that the baby would not survive outside of the womb.
It was quite a while before anyone noticed that Andrew was getting grape sucker all over the place. To Jim it seemed bizarre to be vexedly cleaning up the sticky mess of one child while choking back tears over another, not yet born.
* * *
Dr. Phelps, the obstetrician, peered at the grainy, motile form on the ultrasound screen and said, “I’m looking for two little shapes, Jim and Mary, about this size, but I’m not seeing them. They should be right here, but I’m not seeing them.”
The Barretts, still not quite sure what they were looking at, nodded. With a magic marker you could draw those shapes onto the screen, thought Mary. Then they would be there.
Dr. Phelps outlined their options, which basically came down to three: induce premature labor now; wait and hope for an early delivery; or carry to term. In the last case the baby might be born alive, but would die soon after.
“What’s the point in that?” asked Jim. “Why wait at all?”
“Only to be absolutely certain,” answered Dr. Phelps. “I don’t know, but some people believe in miracles. Another thing to consider is that right now the baby isn’t suffering. This is a healthy, comfortable child, right up to the point of birth. I just want you to be fully aware of your choices. Immediate induction is an obvious route, but it’s up to you.”
“Does induction mean abortion?” asked Mary.
“In this case, I don’t think so,” said Dr. Phelps. “No, I wouldn’t call this abortion at all.”
In the end the Barretts decided to wait another month, just to see. Who could tell what might happen in a month?
“Just say the word,” assured Dr. Phelps, “and we’ll proceed.”
* * *
“I don’t want it, Jim,” cried Mary. “I want it out, out, out!” The deformed thing felt like a foreign body inside her, a sliver.
“Well, dear, we’ll just pull the plug,” said Jim. “Simple as that.” He stroked his wife’s hair but he would no longer touch her tummy. Even Mary shrank from touching herself. And certainly there was no more talking to it. What was there to say?
Yet still the nausea continued (even worse than with Andrew), and the wakeful nights, and on top of this Mary developed a series of bladder infections. And all for what? It was worse than just being sick. Much worse.
At the same time Mary kept thinking: The doctors are wrong. The machine is wrong. Everything is all right.
* * *
So they hung on for the month, somehow, not knowing why. And then something changed.
On Dr. Sharon’s advice Mary attended a support group meeting of mothers who had lost their babies. The women sat around in a circle drinking coffee in a church basement. As Mary walked in, every eye was on the bulge of her pregnancy.
“Looks like you’re in the wrong place, honey,” said an icy voice.
Mary was prepared to be ashamed, but not ostracized.
“No, no,” she choked, “you don’t understand …”
As she spilled her story, the women surrounded her with tears and hugs. Every one of them wanted to touch her tummy. And suddenly there was another person in the room. It was as though her baby had just been born.
Explaining it later to Jim, Mary said that the other women had made her feel lucky, even blessed. Their babies had all died unexpectedly, without warning. But Mary knew. And now in the time remaining she and Jim had something that none of the other parents had had: the profound privilege of getting to know this child, and of saying goodbye.
* * *
The pain now was different: before, like a black hole; now, a star excruciatingly bright.
They named their baby Chris. It was a name that would fit either a boy or a girl, so they could start using it right now. Chris was twenty-three weeks old and the Barretts began behaving like a family of four.
As it happened, they were living in a trailer parked in a friend’s driveway, waiting for their new house to be finished. Curiously, the close quarters were no strain; in fact, since facing the news about Chris, they got along better than ever. Love was something they really needed now. It was not that they felt closer, exactly; but they talked more. About everything.
Naturally they talked to Chris too. Often they talked to him as though he were as old as themselves, or older. As though he could understand things that they could not, even explain them.
One of the best things about the trailer was the kitchen window, which looked out over acres of flat stubbled fields ending in a distant line of purple hills. In December the fields were the loveliest pale blond, turning to silver at dusk. It was quite the best and longest view that Mary had ever had from any house she had lived in. Sometimes she thought that she did not want to move anywhere else at all.
* * *
They told all their family and closest friends. And one Sunday they got up in front of their church to ask for prayer. Yet there remained the problem of how to handle the many others. Women on the street would come up to Mary and coo over her pregnant tummy like doves. She learned to smile sweetly and say, “Yes, he’s gaining nicely.”
One day Dawna Sutherland came for coffee. She was thirty-five, a few years older than Mary, and a widow. Everyone knew that Dawna had nursed her husband through two years of cancer, but what Mary did not know was that she had also suffered a stillbirth. Her mother, too, had died of cancer, and a sister had been killed in a car accident. Everyone, sooner or later, had to pass through the valley of the shadow, but Dawna seemed to live there. She had a look in her eyes. It was the look of a wounded bird as you pick it up in your hands, and at the same time it was the look of an eagle. Dawna had no use for funeral parlors and the modern way of death. She herself had washed and dressed her husband’s body.
“He was mine,” she said simply. “My own flesh.”
Dawna grew to be a good friend of the Barretts. Listening to their darkest thoughts, she could pronounce them utterly normal. Neither Jim nor Mary had had anything to do with death. Now it was as if they were being initiated into some secret society. Or was it, rather, that all their lives they had been sworn to a conspiracy from which now, at long last, they were being released?
Many of the same feelings still swamped them: despair, disgust, anger with God. And there was the same treadmill of questions: Why? What had they done? What kind of people were they, that the fruit of their loins should be cursed? More and more, however, it seemed that even all this was contained within something larger, as if they, too, were being held in a womb. Desolation took on a kind of aura. Mary really did feel, in spite of everything, like a woman expecting.
* * *
They had never had a real Christmas tree. It seemed crazy to get one now, with barely room for it in the tiny living room, but Mary wanted one. They decorated it entirely with angels: straw ones, quilted ones, crystal ones that made rainbows when the sun hit them. For the topmost ornament, a friend of Jim’s, a metalworker, had welded a rather fierce, apocalyptic-looking angel that gave Mary a strange comfort.
It was while gazing at the tree one evening that she felt the first labor pains. Chris was just thirty-three weeks old, still premature, and to Mary this came as an act of extraordinary mercy. After all the agony of whether or not to end this pregnancy, finally the decision was made for her. After all the weeks of wrestling with the dark, finally Mary would get to see her anguish, would hold him in her arms and look into his eyes and say how much she loved him. And when she did this, who could tell what miracle might occur? This was the thought that kept her going through a long night and an even longer day of preparing to give birth to death.
Often she had fantasized about a Caesarian: being knocked out cold and waking up when it was all over, as from a dream. Yet afterwards Mary would be glad for the pain of this labor, glad for every stab of it. For it was the pain that made everything real. She really did have a baby.
* * *
He was born on Christmas Eve, at nightfall. Right up until the end things were easier than they had been with Andrew, but since Chris was a breech presentation, the final pushes were horrendous. Who could blame him for not wanting to come out? Dr. Sharon had particular trouble delivering the head, and for a few panicky moments it seemed for all the world as if this were a perfectly normal baby who suddenly was in danger of being lost.
But he was not lost; he was right here, right now, with them in the room, a boy, alive. Tiny and silent yet big as life. And so beautiful! There was no doubt about that. Jim and Mary had been fully prepared for a thing from Mars. Often they had pictured the external marks of Potter Syndrome described in the book: the wide-set eyes and large ears, the “parrot-beak” nose, “spade-like” hands, wrinkled skin. But really he wasn’t like that at all––not to them. He was just their child, a gorgeous baby boy. And how warm he was! How could something so tiny and doomed have so much life in him?
His only problem was that he could not breathe. He kept trying to take breaths, but his undeveloped lungs would not receive the air. “Breathe, you sucker!” chanted his parents in urgent whispers. “Breathe!” But he did not. He was not made for this world. There was no miracle.
Except for this: Jim and Mary had been so afraid of a ghastly death, and it wasn’t that way. A beautiful baby, Chris died beautifully. Full of kicks in the womb, and even during delivery, now he did not kick or struggle. Just once he moved: shivered all over, as though shaking something loose. Otherwise he lay peacefully on his mother’s breast, with his tiny mouth opening now and then in a perfect 0 like a choirboy’s, as if about to pronounce one of the names of God. No gags or gasps or ugly noises. No noise at all. Just once he made a sound, a faint coo in his throat that sounded, amazingly, like “Mom.”
Mary kept thinking about something Dr. Sharon had told her. Just before leaving for the hospital, Sharon had tried to explain to her own daughter, four years old, why this would be such a difficult birth. God wanted Chris for an angel, she said, and so He planned to take him right now.
“Mommy?” the little girl asked. “Does that mean Chris will be born with wings?”
* * *
He lived for about half an hour. They knew because Sharon showed them where to feel the heartbeat in the umbilical cord. When it stopped, Chris’s parents were left alone with him.
They cried, cuddled him, kissed him, talked to him, sang, said how they loved him and how proud of him they were. They told him all about themselves, and about his big brother Andy, and all about the great wide world. They told him everything, everything they could think of, including all the things he was going to miss: riding a bike, first day at school, holding hands with a girl, marriage, children of his own. But never mind. You didn’t have to be here for ninety years to have a life. Had he not lived, in half an hour, as much as anyone? In the blink of an eye you could have it all: all light, all truth, everything that mattered. This was what they told him and they knew it was so. Just looking at him they knew him to be wiser than they were, because he was so obviously full of love. He was like some unimaginably ancient sage, like someone who had always been, and now was, and always would be.
They stayed with him like that for several hours. A nurse brought a basin and Mary gave him a bath. He smelled so fresh and good, just like a newborn. They marveled at his tiny fingers and toes, his perfect body. Gradually his skin, at first wrinkled as an old man’s, grew smoother and cool to the touch. If anything, he was yet more lovely in death. He swam in the newborn sleeper they put on him, and then Sharon brought in a camera and took pictures.
Later Jim and Mary would pore over every detail of these images, so steeped in love and pity and mystery. There they were, smiling away just like any normal family in the garish light of the flash, their own faces so wan and haggard that Chris actually looked better than they did.
Said Sharon as she left that night, “It’s been like having Christmas and Good Friday all in one. Now may you have your Easter too.”
* * *
The head nurse, Pat O’Hara, was an imposing woman who normally ran a tight ship. Particularly in the obstetrics ward, her special domain, she was a stickler for the hospital’s rather traditional regulations. In the case of the Barretts, however, from the moment they arrived Pat told her staff, “Bend or break any rule for them. It’s going to be tough enough.”
The Barretts asked for a private room where they could spend more time with Chris. So this was done. Only well after midnight, when it was clear that Mary needed some sleep, was he taken downstairs to the morgue.
The moment Mary awoke on Christmas morning she wanted to hold him again. Some of the nurses clucked their tongues and would have stopped her, but Pat barked at them to bring the lady her baby.
“Are you sure this is what you want, Mrs. Barrett?” inquired the nurse in the doorway who held the cold, stiff little bundle. “He’s not like he was last night …”
But yes, this was definitely what Mary wanted. It was all she wanted for Christmas. She wanted him hungrily, more than anything else in the world, more than her own life. She really felt that if she could not hold her baby again she would die. Or was she dead already and only his touch could bring her back?
She kept him all morning, first in bed with her, and later in a bassinet beside the bed. He seemed to be merely sleeping; at times she could almost see him breathing. When Jim returned, again they talked and talked with Chris, telling him what a hero he was, telling him the whole history of the world, telling him things they hadn’t even known they knew. Now was their time with their son, and with savage love they redeemed every scrap of it like people holding back a flood.
Andrew spent that morning opening gifts with his grandparents. When he came to the hospital, as soon as he saw his little brother he began to jabber excitedly, ecstatically, like a seer speaking in tongues. He cuddled Chris, kissed him again and again, tickled him, even beeped his nose. Like his parents he could not get enough of him, could not get enough touch, hug, chatter, gaze. For all of them it was less like a first meeting that like a reunion. They had been through a long, long war and now were met again.
* * *
In the afternoon the visitors began arriving. First family and a few close friends, and then, as word got around, others came. All day long they came, practically standing in line to get in. If anyone expected to see something weird, a sideshow, that changed the moment they entered the room and saw the mother and baby.
“He’s so beautiful,” said one person after another.
And because it was Christmas they all brought gifts: frames for baby pictures, a book of remembrance, even stuffed toys. It was as if the whole town decided to have Christmas in the Barretts’ hospital room.
In their wildest dreams Jim and Mary had not imagined such an event. Before, they had had no idea they would even want to touch this baby, let alone show him off the the world. Now, inexplicably, they were as filled with pride as any new parents. They seemed caught up in the unfolding of something too large to resist, something with a mind and will of its own, as though Chris himself had taken charge. Could even such a waif as he dictate a last will and testament? Sway history and change the world?
When Dr. Sharon arrived to make rounds, she found Pat standing in the middle of the hall directing traffic. For a normally stone-faced woman, the head nurse was fairly beaming.
“Sharon,” she crowed, “we’re having ourselves a regular old-fashioned Irish wake.” She looked as if this were the greatest party she had ever attended.
* * *
On Boxing day, following a second night in the morgue, Chris was brought to Mary again, still dressed like a newborn. He looked darker now, grayer, and Mary tucked the blanket more tightly around him so he wouldn’t catch cold. Then Jim came and took him away, to drive him to the city for the required autopsy.
Most of that day Mary lay in bed, staring out the window. A few starveling snowflakes drifted down out of a leaden sky, turning later to drizzle. The flood was nearer now, yet still Mary held it back. Things were still okay. Last night, awake at three, she had thought: “He’s just down in the morgue. I could go and see him right now.” Soon he would be in a lab in the city, and she could go and see him there, too, if she wanted. Then the next day Jim would bring him back, and she would hold him again.
Dawna, watching her wonderingly as she said this, responded, “I’m not sure you know what you’re saying, Mary. It will be three days by then, and they’ll have cut Chris open …”
But Mary knew what she knew, and what she wanted. With death’s glory resting upon her like a halo, there was nothing she did not know.
* * *
But she did not get to hold him again. A carpenter friend of Jim’s made a coffin and painted it white, and Dawna lined it, not with white satin but with a cotton baby print.
This was how Mary saw him next, asleep in his little coffin-cradle in the church sanctuary just before the funeral. She had been right about one thing: it was amazing how good Chris looked, even without the attentions of a mortician. Was this a miracle?
Once again Andrew, the moment he set eyes on his brother, launched into ecstatic jabbering. This time, however, it was unnerving, and when finally he had to be pulled away, he fell to wailing. Guests were arriving and the decorum of death was settling over the family, gripping them in a kind of social rigor mortis.
The funeral was a nightmare. Jim and Mary had no idea how they got through it. All that week there had been the strange sense of a pattern, of steps to be followed, a ritual unfolding in an almost orderly manner. But now the pattern was breaking down, falling to bits like a rotten piece of lace. All of a sudden the Barretts were way over their heads, engulfed in chaos. Christmas was gone and now came the slaughter of innocents.
Somehow they held on, no longer in their own bodies but watching everything from above, from far, far away, from Mars perhaps, and that was how they were able to stand the lid being closed on baby Chris, and that was how they made it out to the cemetery and stepped from the car as onto another planet, as entering some utterly alien world in which not one thing was the least familiar. Jim carried the casket all by himself to the grave side, so appallingly light it was, so much lighter even than the bassinet or car-seat it should have been, and he looked so desolate, so all alone, as if there were not one other human being, not even Mary, in all the universe save for himself and the contents of this box.
The brief few words of the service were all swallowed up in the tall bare trees and dispersed into the wind, and then came the hardest part of all. Not until now, as Jim and Mary watched the tiny white coffin actually being lowered into the dark hole, did they experience fully what everyone since the world began has experienced at such a moment. It really was all over now. Their breasts, their whole bodies, imploded like eggshells, and then like two little old people, shriveled husks that might have been picked up and whirled around like dry leaves, they hobbled back to the waiting car that would take them away down the long tree-lined drive with the frozen gravel crunching beneath the black tires like tiny bones breaking.
* * *
For a while the Barretts had a steady stream of visitors. People from the church brought meals, did favors, phoned, asked how they were and really meant it. But after about two weeks of this, the river of kindness mysteriously dried up. Life began to go on as usual, on the outside, while on the inside little had changed for Jim and Mary. They had their ups and downs, but as the holiday season faded and January descended like a gavel, they often found themselves still standing at the lip of the grave and gazing down at the white box, sinking away.
Mary kept having dreams about Chris, dreams of holding him and how wonderful he felt. But then she would awake to find that what she really clung to was a ball of her blankets, all scrunched up, with her curled around them like a foetus. Waking up was hell.
Mary’s mother stayed on after the funeral. In many ways it was good to have her around, though she really wasn’t the sort of person one could talk to. Mary, unable to restrain herself, would say things like, “All I want is to go out there and dig Chris up and just hold him. Just once more.”
“Oh, dear, no,” her mother would say. “You don’t really mean that.”
But of course Mary did really mean exactly that. Not that she would have done it; but she did mean it.
This was when Dawna’s friendship became most vital. She would drop over of an evening and regale Jim and Mary with stories that, in any other setting, could only have been described as grisly. Sometimes the three of them would sit around and laugh until their sides fairly split. Over what? Oh, the fate of Aunt Bessie’s ashes, or the time Uncle Herbert’s coffin slipped off the bier, that sort of thing. It felt so good to laugh, so marvelous to laugh right in the face of death.
And yet, Mary wondered at times, what really was so funny about it all?
* * *
Apart from the cemetery, Mary had three shrines that she visited over and over. One was a lock of Chris’s hair, the only physical piece of her child that she could touch whenever she wanted. Unspeakable soft it was, like something not of this world, fallen from heaven.
Secondly, before leaving the delivery room they had made plaster prints of Chris’s hands and feet. Photocopies of these appeared on the funeral program. As infinitely expressive as they were piteously small, they stood as large and irrefutable evidence that someone had indeed been here, had made his mark on the world.
Finally, among all the plants and flowers delivered to the church, one gift stood out: a stuffed, quilted angel with the face of a baby. Like the lock of hair and the hand- and footprints, this was something solid to see and to touch, even though whenever Mary looked at that face, it dissolved her.
* * *
Then another gift arrived.
One day about a month after the funeral, Mary glanced at the photograph of Chris on the mantel, the best one taken in the hospital, and all at once she seemed to be looking right through the picture, past it. For what she saw was not Chris a few hours old, but Chris a month old, as though he were still alive and had actually grown. Before this she had imagined him at different stages. But this time she saw him.
Recalling then Dr. Sharon’s words about Easter, Mary knew, in a way she could not have guessed at before, that Chris was not really dead at all, but alive, and that he would continue to grow up right before her eyes. He had his own life and he would live it out. She would be working around the house, perhaps, or sitting with a book, and she would glance up and see him. Older now, exactly as he should be. She might see him crawling, sitting up, taking his first steps, opening his first Christmas present. Even years later she might look out the window at boys playing ball across the street, and Chris would be among them––just a normal, healthy kid full of vim and mischief and elemental joy. She would not have to imagine him that way; she would see him. He would come to her.
* * *
That year the Barretts sent out their Christmas cards late. They signed them, “Jim, Mary, and family.”
Not until well into the new year did they feel ready to play the tape of Chris’s funeral that Dawna had made for them. As they listened, what at the time had seemed sheer chaos began to assume an uncanny design, a meaning. The simple words of their friends, as words can, loomed large and portentous as though written in fire across the sky.
What especially touched Mary was a verse from Psalm 139, read by Dr. Sharon: “Thou didst form my inward parts; Thou didst shape me in my mother’s womb; I will give thanks to Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
“Potter Syndrome,” whispered Mary, feeling the great hands around her and her child. “Potter Syndrome.”
Over and over she said the phrase, praying it, as slowly it opened to her like the door of a vault, like the lid of a casket full of radiant jewels.
