One day she came in and the baby had hydrops—fluid collection under his skin. She stayed with us for a week, and then her doctor tried to induce, but the baby couldn’t tolerate it. Jiao had a C-section. The baby had pulmonary hypoplasia—the lungs just didn’t function. He died in her arms quickly after birth, puffy, swollen, as if he were jointed of marshmallows.
Jiao was put in the Kangaroo Suite, and like many mothers who had to come to terms with the fact that their babies had not survived, she was robotic, numb. But unlike other mothers, she did not cry, and she refused to see the baby. It was as if she had this image in her mind for a perfect little boy, and she could not reconcile anything less than that. Her husband tried to get her to hold the baby; her mother tried to get her to hold the baby; her doctor tried to get her to hold the baby. Finally, when she was on her eighth hour of catatonia, I wrapped the baby in warm blankets and put a tiny hat on his head. I carried him back into Jiao’s room. “Jiao,” I said, “would you like to help me give him a bath?”
Jiao didn’t respond. I looked at her husband, her poor husband, who nodded, encouraging.
I filled a basin with warm water and took a stack of wipes. Gently, at the foot of Jiao’s bed, I unwrapped her baby. I dipped a cloth in warm water and ran it over her baby’s sausage legs, his blue arms. I wiped his swollen face, his stiff fingers.
Then I handed Jiao a damp cloth. I pressed it into her palm.
I don’t know if the water shocked her into awareness, or if it was the baby. But with my hand guiding her she washed every fold and curve of her baby. She wrapped him in the blanket. She held him to her breast. Finally, with a sob that sounded like she was tearing a piece of herself away, she offered the body of her child back to me.
I managed to hold it together while I carried her infant out of the Kangaroo Suite. And then, as she collapsed in her husband’s arms, I lost it. I just lost it. I sobbed over that baby the whole way to the morgue, and when I got there, I couldn’t let him go any easier than his mother had.
Now, the key turns in the lock, and Edison slips inside. His eyes are adjusting to the darkness; he is creeping because he expects me to be asleep. Instead, in a clear voice, I say his name from my spot at the kitchen table.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asks.
“Why weren’t you home?”
I can see him clearly, a shadow among shadows. “I was alone. I was out walking.”
“For six hours?” I blurt.
“Yes. For six hours,” Edison challenges. “Why don’t you just put a GPS chip on me, if you don’t trust me?”
“I do trust you,” I say carefully. “It’s the rest of the world I’m not so sure about.”
I stand so that we are only inches apart. All mothers worry, but Black mothers, we have to worry a little bit more. “Even walking can be dangerous. Just being can be dangerous, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I’m not stupid,” Edison says.
“I know that better than anyone. That’s the problem. You are smart enough to make excuses for people who aren’t. You give the benefit of the doubt when other people don’t. That is what makes you you, and that is what makes you remarkable. But you need to start being more careful. Because I may not be here much longer to…” My sentence snaps, unravels. “I may have to leave you.”
I see his Adam’s apple jerk down, and then back, and I know what he has been thinking about all this time. I imagine him walking the streets of New Haven, trying to outdistance himself from the fact that this trial is coming to an end. And that when it does, everything will be different.
“Mama,” he says, his voice small. “What am I supposed to do?”
For a moment, I try to decide how to sum up a life’s worth of lessons in my response. Then I look at him, my eyes shining. “Thrive,” I say.
Edison wrenches away from me. A moment later, the door to his bedroom slams shut. Music whitewashes all the other sounds I try in vain to discern.
I think I know now why it is called the Kangaroo Suite. It’s because even when you no longer have a child, you carry him forever.
It’s the same when a parent is ripped away from the child, but the suite is the size of the world. At Mama’s funeral, I put a handful of cold dirt from her grave in the pocket of my good wool coat. Some days I wear that coat inside the house, just because. I sift through the soil, hold it tight in my fist.
I wonder what Edison will keep of me.
I PUT MY HANDS ON both sides of Brit’s face and touch my forehead to hers. “Breathe,” I tell her. “Think of Vienna.”
Neither of us has ever been to Vienna, but Brit found an old picture in an antique shop once that she hung on the wall of our bedroom. It shows the fancy city hall building, the plaza in front of it filled with pedestrians and mothers towing children by the hand—all of them white. We always thought that we could save up for a vacation there, one day. When Brit was putting together a birthing plan, Vienna was one of the words I was supposed to use to help her focus.