What We Have by Amy Boesky Read Free Book Online Page A

think—”
    “What is it?” Jacques was ashen-faced.
    I shook my head. I figured it out as I answered him, as if the words themselves gave this meaning. “I think the baby—moved.”
    Here, of all improbable places. And now .
    We like to think life and death are opposites. Sometimes it’s hard to fathom how close they are. Two sides of the hourglass, sand thickening at the bottom, running down to nothing from above.
    Emily was born at four in the morning, nineteen weeks old. A grief counselor came. They offered Julie and Jon the chance to hold her. They made a print with her heel in cement and told them they’d found it helps to have some tangible memento of the baby to “commemorate the loss.” Most of this I heard later through my mother, who arrived the next day, shell-shocked, tight-lipped, unspeakably sad, shuttling back and forth in taxis between Julie and Jon’s house and ours. I found out some things right away, some things later, after Julie and Jon learned Emily had something terribly wrong—a missing chromosome at number thirteen, a condition so anathema to life she would have died at birth or just after if Julie had lasted to term.
    Jacques lay next to me at night, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s really mysterious, making a baby,” he said. “You think you can map it all out, you can plan all of this, but you can’t, really. You just can’t.”
    I nodded in the dark. I couldn’t answer.
     
    M Y MOTHER STAYED THREE DAYS. We felt awkward and uncomfortable around each other, both of us trying hard not to say the wrong thing. I called Julie over and over again, but Jon just kept saying she couldn’t talk.
    Julie and Jon had lost Emily. And for a while, I felt like I’d lost Julie.
    In the first days after she got back from the hospital, Julie was surrounded by a sad flurry of activity. Jon was there with her. There were phone calls, flowers, people reaching out. Sara and Geoff called from Olympia. My father called between patients. Friends and colleagues sent flowers. But at the heart of it all, there was an almost unbearable silence: all the plans gone, doctors’ visits canceled, the door to the baby’s room closed. Jacques and I came over and tried to keep them company, but it was clear they wanted to be alone. They bought a tiny Japanese maple and planted it in their garden.
    “I’ll call you when I can,” Julie said, barely looking at me.
    Every day I stared at the phone, willing it to life, willing her to call, but, “You understand,” she’d say when I tried calling her, or, “I can’t, hon, I just can’t.” My mother, back in Michigan, called every afternoon, filling me in. She told me Julie was thinking about taking a leave of absence from work. In August, she and Jon went to Maine together to spend some time alone, away from DC. Time just to be on the beach, to be together.
    They loved Maine, my mother reported, once they were back home in Virginia again. It reminded Julie of Charlevoix, the place in northern Michigan we always went on vacation in the summers. “It was such a relief for her, being away from DC,” my mother added.
    I held the phone away from my ear, staring at the wall.
    Julie and I were going to do this together, I kept thinking. We were going to have the babies at the same time! I missed her constantly. I went to see Dr. Weiss. August, September. I got bigger. Fall came, I started teaching again. In my new course, Writing the Self in Early Modern England, we started by reading The Return of Martin Guerre , the story of a peasant in sixteenth-century France who leaves an unhappy marriage, joins the army, and disappears. When he comes back, his marriage is much better, the community loves him. He’s a kinder, much more likeable man. But events unfold, and it turns out he isn’t who he claims to be after all—he’s an imposter. The real Martin Guerre died at war, and a soldier who knew him came back to the village assuming his identity. How can someone