A Field Sown with Grief Mines

CW: Child loss.

I shifted my weight a little to straighten an uncomfortable fold in the plastic against my skin. With my fingertip I could feel where it left a crease in the skin at the meeting of my thigh and private regions. Thinking the words “private regions” pushed a mirthless snicker through my nose: as if anything is private.

“What is it?” Jacob asked, pulling back a little and tilting the laptop to a dangerous angle. If the nurse came in, she’d tell him to get off the bed, but we had to get this done and side-by-side looking at the choices really was the most efficient way.

“Nothing,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Why not the square one?” He was scrolling back through the pictures when a knock on the door sent him in a rush to sit up, so we already looked like we were caught at something when the door opened on a tall man in a coat and tie. 

“I’m detective Kelley, ma’am,” he said as he stepped toward my bed. “I’m here to take your statement.” Jacob got to his feet and reached forward to shake his hand, closing the laptop and tucking it under his arm with the other hand. 

“Jacob Pantera. I’m her husband.”

“Presumed father, then?” Detective Kelley asked. He was youngish and handsomeish with a thick head of shiny brown hair but the way his chin rolled as he looked down at the notepad predicted a meaty face lurking in his future. 

“Yes, of course,” I replied testily.

“Please don’t be offended, ma’am. These are just standard questions that we have to ask in every case like this, to establish who might have a motive and who might have rights violated.”

“Rights violated?” I stammered, likely more aggressively than was wise.

“Fathers sue for damages, you know, if it’s negligence.” He used his pauses and eye contact in a genial way, as if to say that the three of us understood these things even though some other people could be offended.

Jacob tried to move things along, “what else can we answer for you, Officer?”

He looked down at his note pad. “When was the date of your last menstrual period?”

There was a tightness in my eyes, and I had to blink several times in disbelief. Jacob gave him the answer. He knew because he had been with me at all my check ups, and he looked up a due-date calculator just to be sure the doctor hadn’t given us an early date in order to push us into Cesarean later. I had scoffed at him. Yes, it was true that had happened to a couple of our friends in Casablanca, but better medical care was why we moved home. 

I shifted again. The plastic diaper cut into my skin again. Jacob tried to shield me from the officer’s questions by stepping closer to him and lowering his voice. But I heard it anyway.

“And you are certain that you had sexual intercourse in the weeks following that date?” 

“Yes. Certainly.” Jacob answered flatly, as if it were a reasonable question. As if it didn’t take the worst moment of our lives and ask if it wasn’t maybe at least a little bit my fault.

A fist clenched around my guts and I could feel the sudden hardness of my belly with my hand. The pain registered on my face and sweat beaded on my forehead.

“I’m sorry, Officer, my wife is not really in good shape to talk right now.” 

Kelley looked over at me and nodded. “Can you come outside with me to continue? There are certain red flags about this case.”

Jacob turned, startled. “Red flags?” 

“Well, sir, looking at your social media.”

“You looked at our social media?”

“Yes, sir. It’s standard practice in these cases.”

Jacob was flabbergasted. “We’ve only known this was happening for six hours.”

“Yes, sir, the warrants are really a formality. Social media review for every child death.”

“Child death? She was only four and a half months along.”

“Yes sir, and we just need to ask you why you and your wife have not made any announcements about this pregnancy, if you intended to be parents. Surely your friends and family need to know about it. We don’t find any baby-related purchases on your cards.”

“We aren’t available for any more questions, right now,” I declared, and then took a panting pause as the invisible hand clenched again, wringing me out like a wet towel. When it eased, I managed, “Jacob, don’t answer anything without a lawyer.” He looked so lost, torn between the need to care for me in my pain and grief and the need to take care of all this business, and even within all that, for just a second he thinks I mean that I did it, that I need a lawyer because I’m guilty.

I thought of my mother, trying to tell me that it didn’t matter how much I disapproved of elective abortion, morals and laws were separate codes. She had told me to pick a different state.

“Think honey. Think what’s the answer to his question.” Realization loosens all the confusion in his face and his mouth opens a little. 

When I lost the first baby, everyone knew. It had taken us a year of trying, and we were so buoyant about it. Everything we thought of was baby connected. We re-homed our cat for fear of toxoplasmosis and if our friends wanted to see us, they had to come over and sit while we moved boxes and painted the baby room or assembled shelves. I joined online breastfeeding groups, determined that I was not going to fail where so many of my friends had. 

And then, unbelievably, we had to tell everyone that there was not going to be a baby. The midwife who did the ultrasound when I’d started bleeding described it as an empty sack, the baby hadn’t developed at all past seven weeks. I didn’t think that could be medically accurate, but neither of us was really articulate in French and her advice was clear: go home and deliver the sack. If I didn’t pass a lot of blood and real chunks of substance, come back for more help. She gave me a pill, and I left to spend a night with gripping abdominal pain, stained sheets and despair. 

Jacob was disappointed, but his body wasn’t coursing with hormones attaching him to this hope of a child. His attachment was more theoretical, the knife of his grief not honed by physical pain. 

I wrote a private message to my closest friends, asking them to tell anyone else so I didn’t have to explain and reexplain, each new person making that phony remark about how I was glowing and then me having to explain that no, in fact, I was not. And then somehow I would end up apologizing for their awkwardness at having said something so wildly inapt. It would not be survivable.

Even so, they still lay strewn across the terrain, these scattered grief mines. A person who was not a friend, just an acquaintance who had just happened to come along the day I told my Sunday brunch friends about the baby set one off two months later. Click. “Oh! Look at you! Still not showing at all!” she’d said as we kissed each other on the cheeks Moroccan style when we bumped into each other at the Carrefour where all the Western expats shopped. Boom.

“Oh,” I said crestfallen, dodging the shrapnel, “Janice didn’t tell you. Oh, no. I lost that baby.” Her husband approached the other end of her cart with an armload of fruit in clear plastic sacks with printed labels sticking them closed. She held her jaw with the firmness of a soldier hearing a deployment order, meeting her husband’s look with shining eyes and an almost imperceptible shake of the head to let him know not to say anything asinine about me glowing. We didn’t say anything else at all, just shared a glance over a weak smile, and I saw a tear spill over as she turned to go: collateral damage from the grief mine.

I watched her walk away and with her the chance that we would ever become actual friends. The intensity of this fraught moment would forever be the first thing she thought about when she heard my name. More collateral damage.

There were others. At my end-of-year performance review, I had to explain myself about several student comments regarding classes canceled without notice. Click. I had canceled only two days of classes the whole year. One for the invisible hand to wring a bloody clot of dream stuff out of my body and one to cry beside the toilet in a nightgown and panties--the adhesive from my askew maxi pad wing sticking to my leg--trying to reconcile myself to flushing it down. How could the director with his important-man mustache and his benevolent sexism even process that as information? He would flinch, clear his throat and pat papers. Boom. I apologized for the miscommunication and let him recommend the minimum salary adjustment. Teachable moment: students may also have excuses they can’t face telling me.

After that I found out everyone I knew had a miscarriage story. Sandi had miscarried her third and could never tell her husband how relieved she’d been. Zahra’s sister, Salma’s mom, twice. Halima told me that her son was her best comfort through her miscarriage, not only because he wrapped her in his little sweet toddler arms and told her he would always love her and his little lost sister, but because he was proof that she could carry a child to term, and she just needed to try again. Click. It took her a moment to register. Boom. “I’m sorry. I know it will happen for you.” Genevieve was different: her daughter had been born alive. I could practically see the wounds torn in her flesh from the subject. And yet, there was the sound of her twins giggling in the playroom knitting the edges of the gashes together.

I talked to my mother on the phone, told her how astonished I was to find that all these women that I knew had all of these experiences they had never mentioned. 

“Of course they don’t talk about them. They don’t tell you about their rapes or their abortions or how they shit the bed when their babies were born either. This is not a world for talking about women’s problems.” She had gotten so much blunter as she got older. There was no decorous professional image to keep up anymore, and as she had let her hair grow in gray, she’d also let the words Southern ladies could not say grow into her speech.

“I’ve been telling you this since you were in high school, but your daddy wasn’t a sexist so you thought it wasn’t a problem anymore. Women will have to keep fighting to be people instead of stuff. We fought for that, but if you take your eyes off the fight, you’ll go back to where we started.” She told me to talk to women. And exercise my protest against abortion by not having one.

After another year of trying again, we’d finally gotten a follicle-stimulating prescription, but that period of endless gynecologist visits in Casa had convinced us it was best to come home for pregnancy care. And this time we didn’t tell anyone except my sister Bonnie. Surely any possible mines would be easier to clear from just our apartment.

When I awoke from a sedative-induced twelve hour reprieve, the plastic diaper had been removed and I found myself in clean underwear. Jacob was pacing with a washcloth in his hand, obviously eager for me to wake. As soon as he saw my eyes open, he went to the sink and let the water run warm. “The lawyer will be here any minute. I didn’t want to wake you, but I had no idea when I made the arrangement that you would sleep for so long.”

“Is it…finished?” I asked, indicating my own abdomen beneath the blanket.

“Yes. They took the remains for testing and burial prep.” He wiped my face and hairline with the warm cloth. “The doctor will check you out, but she can’t do anything for you until the lab test comes back that the….” He faltered.

“That the baby is already dead,” I finished.  

The lawyer, Tian Wen, was a compact Black Asian woman whose skin shone like wood furniture in a preserved stately home. She was assuring, not comforting, a person who dealt with business rather than emotion. We were right to call her in, given the previous miscarriage, she told us. If we talked about that in the wrong way it could turn the police adversarial. If anybody from the governor’s reelection campaign got ahold of a story that read like ours, it would be a media execution before anybody even ran a test on the remains.

Serial baby murderers who couldn’t obtain abortion drugs abroad come to quietly dispose of the body here. The campaign was looking for a story just like that to take it to the next level of monitoring mail and online activity preemptively. Now that Wen was involved, though, we could rest easier. She could make sure the test results were completed before we talked to any police, and as long as there was no evidence of chemical interference, they wouldn’t have a real case. 

She said this with me nailed to the bed by her gaze. “Are you sure that test won’t show anything?”

I shook my head very uncertainly, “you’re asking if the tissue test will turn up abortion medication? No. We’ve been trying for years to get pregnant.”

“Then, no, I’m not asking about tissue and abortion, I’m asking about the baby’s body and murder drugs. Unless you took the drugs, in which case we want to talk about fetuses and ending pregnancies, so you have to be completely straight with me.”

“We wanted this child,” Jacob said, and I nodded. “We’re devastated by the loss.”

“Okay, then you will almost certainly be cleared. You’re White, you’re married, you have a lawyer. You aren’t their fish.”

I sneered again. Doesn’t that just mean someone else will be? I thought. Wen silenced my derision with her stare alone. She would tolerate no differences between the public and private attitude, there was no secret alliance behind the scenes. I had to start saying the right lines and showing the right attitude now. No sneering.

“When you talk to the police, I will be with you, but remember always to mention how great it is that we have these protections for innocent babies like yours who didn’t make it. Thank the police for inquiring into your child’s death.”

Thank them for accusing me of murder? After Wen’s fees we wouldn’t have the money to try in vitro. We’d have to move back to Casa to start saving again. I imagined our flat on Sraghna Square, modestly sized and hideous on the outside, but impossibly ornate within, tiled walls and molded cornices. It was too stupid to think about, going back there to earn half our salaries because life there cost only a fourth as much. We were treading water, no further along than we had been half a decade ago.

“Are you making funeral plans?” Wen asked. 

We had been. I thought that maybe a small ceremony would help me turn the page a little better, might box up some of the grief mines. People were doing that these days; it seemed like progress that women were talking about these losses. Wen’s eyebrow raised when I said “progress,” then lowered so gently I wasn’t sure it had moved at all.

“You need to. And not a quiet affair. You have to invite your relatives, get a big headstone.”

“What? Why is that important?” Jacob asked. I saw him calculate the expense in his head. “We won’t be able to have a child…”

Wen shook her head, the first crack in her business edifice. “I’m sorry. It’s better than a trial.” She paused while we took it in. “You would win a trial. Maybe you want to put up that fight. It will take a legal challenge to get laws reversed. But it will also cost you everything.” I caught a glimpse of something bright taking flight through the window of her business facade. She wanted to put up that flight.

“We just want a baby,” I said. “We voted for the governor. We support the ban.”

If I hadn’t seen the hope I would have missed slump in her shoulders too. Jacob did. Then she nodded; it was an unassailable choice. “Then you stage the funeral. Give them their evidence of personhood, it helps their narrative almost as much a murder charge and it punishes you enough for them to leave it at that.”

 “Punishes me for what?” I asked.

She moved some things around in her mental scales and took a chance on secret alliance. “For being a woman.”

Once she was gone, the laptop came out and we resumed the plans on a larger scale.

“Okay, we’ll do the scroll headstone, but the coffin can be simple. The coffin won’t be on the news. I still think we should go back to the square one.”