Christmas Eve

• The Thanksgiving Mission
• Iwan and the Krampus

J carter

Our due date was Christmas Day. Then, all at once, it wasn't anymore.

As the mother--as the woman who was meant to be the mother--you would think I would be more involved in the process that built from there, but they talked over my head, the obstetricians to my husband when I made clear that I wasn't able to have this conversation.

Some particulars would need dealing with. My body was not home to a living child for reasons that no one seemed to know for sure. A nurse told me that this is one of those things that happens. One in every two hundred pregnancies ends this way. Like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, only the fetus didn't make it that long. She made it a while, though. Close.

There could be tests after to tell us more about why this happened so that it might not happen again. But there was even money that the tests would be for nothing, that they still wouldn't know why my baby had died within me.

I had picked out these little outfits. The whole maternity industry is keen on Christmas clothes, even down to newborns. You could get a baby a Christmas onesie for a premie.

Christmas or a little sooner. My sister told me that you want to leave the baby in there as long as possible unless there is a problem. I could have scheduled a caesarian, ensuring I had a Christmas baby, but I wanted her birth to be natural.

Just one of those things that happen. You go to sleep, dreaming of holding this tiny elf to you, and you wake up to a room decorated for someone who won't ever come.

I was going to name her Eve. My husband suggested Christine. The baby was meant to be born on that day, as though these things are anything but guesses. She would be Eve because I made her within me. I got the final say.

Holding my hand in the obstetrician's office as they figured out the next step, my husband told me that it wasn't my fault.

"Did I suggest that it was?"

He was startled and began making apologies, but I was genuinely asking. At that moment, it did not occur to me that anyone might think it was my fault. I had done all I was supposed to: prenatal vitamins, mother-to-be yoga, Lamaze. I ate the healthy food that I wanted Eve to crave, the lean chicken and broccoli that built her cell-by-cell until she was almost--but not quite--a baby. I didn't pour rum in my eggnog and had barely half a glass of that from Thanksgiving to now. I was a good momma to her.

I thought, sitting there, that I could feel Eve moving within me. I tried to tell the obstetrician that the ultrasounds must have been wrong, both of them, but he gently corrected me. That was just her body moving in the fluid of my womb. I shouldn't let it torture me.

The obstetrician offered sympathy. It was almost genuine, but he couldn't understand what it was to go through this. He had broken this news to other women over his tenure, but every tragedy must be personal. He made all the right sounds and gestures, but they were more for my husband's benefit than mine. They could reach my husband, but they were so abstract as to be another language.

They kept using the word delivery. I couldn't help thinking of presents, some gift in Santa's sack that would arrive under my tree in a few weeks. It wouldn't be a delivery, though. Was it an abortion if the baby was already dead? I felt sure there was a euphemism meant to couch the calamity of a dead fetus, of carrying the corpse of a beloved child in your womb.

Eve turned from this vital force within me to a burden that needed to be lifted from my belly before she made me sick. If it meant I could keep her inside of me a little longer, I wanted that sickness, but it would do no good. There would be dilatation and curettage--that's what the obstetrician called it--and then this would be over. Only it wouldn't. This had happened, and I couldn't see how the echoes of it would ever stop happening. There would not be a Christmas that didn't belong to Eve a little.

The obstetrician wanted to check me for infection, preeclampsia, and I waved it away. Do what you want to my body. I no longer had any love of it.

It was decided--or I agreed--that I would take a pill. In two days, I would return for the procedure. It would be easier on me, the doctor said. I was healthy (was I healthy?). It would not be a physically trying process. They could even prescribe me pills so that I would not lactate. My body was so stupid that it couldn't tell medical waste from a daughter.

If I waited, my body would naturally go into labor, but Eve would come out worse. Less like the baby I had seen in sonograms, more like something that my body was trying to destroy.

We'd have a funeral, I decided. Not on Christmas, her presumptive birthday, though I considered it for a moment. Soon, before the holidays, if we could. There would come New Year's Day, and it would be new, only it wouldn't. It would be another day, and I would be mourning. Eve, yes. I would mourn her a long time, but I would mourn too who I was going to be. I should have started the new year with a baby at my breast, an occupied crib in a new room with red and green accents.

She had gifts waiting under the tree, little boxes wrapped and rewrapped. I took everything I didn't need in advance from my baby shower and covered it again in snowflake paper. Eve couldn't have opened it, wouldn't even know I had done it. If I had birthed her on Christmas, I wouldn't have had the chance to open them for days or more. But I had spent months imagining how it would be to unwrap them again and pretend at surprise.

I bought her toys, too, because a child should have toys on Christmas.

I didn't know what would happen to these gifts now. No, I did. My husband would make them disappear somehow. They would go someplace I would not have to see them in hopes that I could open them when I became pregnant again.

If. I'd tried so long. Both of us did for years. This was the first time my belly had quickened. The obstetrician told us, even before this, that our getting pregnant once made it a good bet that we could do it again.

I did not want to do it again. Not then, picturing my perfect daughter and not feeling the need to bless her with siblings. It had been a hard pregnancy, Eve fighting me for every day of it, and I felt ragged. Not now because I couldn't survive this heartbreak twice.

"Would you like to hold your baby after the procedure?" the doctor asked. "You don't have to decide now, but it is something you should consider."

"What baby?" I asked. "I don't have a baby. She died." I began crying without meaning, hearing these words out of my mouth. My husband squeezed my hand.

"You don't have to decide now," the doctor repeated.

They could take mementos of Eve. Hair, if she had any. Handprints and footprints. Pictures. They would give me a box with these things--a gift. I didn't have to take them. They would hold onto them until I decided.

"And you didn't know what to get me for Christmas," I whispered to my husband. I wanted to hurt him, and this did. I wanted to cause him pain because this was all his fault suddenly. He put this baby in me. He encouraged me toward motherhood when I didn't much want to. Now Eve was dead, and I was ruined. It was all his fault, and I hated him.

Then I didn't and was sorry that I had hurt him. He was in pain, though not close to my pain. I was allowed to be vicious, but I didn't want to be toward him anymore. He was not who I hated in all this.

He scooted his chair closer so that he could put an arm around me. I pulled away from the sounds he was making, the shaking of his body. Sobbing. From my joke? How could he be crying so much harder than I was? How was that fair?

I eased back toward him, allowing the comfort, mine or his.

"I think that I will want to hold her," I said.