He had me on my feet, steering me toward the bathroom, but I was sobbing, stumbling. My body felt like it was made of quartz. People came. Lights were turned on. A mask of heavy makeup was applied to my face. A cream-colored suit was put on me.
This must be what it feels like, I thought, when they pretty up a corpse in a funeral parlor.
While I was being prepared, my husband took Oprah on a tour of Paisley Park, and her mission was clear. She’d come to find out if our child was dead or deformed like people were saying, and in retrospect, this would have been a good way to share the truth in a dignified way. Later on, with not much else to fall back on, the producers cut in screenshots of ugly tabloid headlines:
DELIVERY ROOM TRAGEDY FOR PRINCE
Rock star’s baby has horrible birth defect
I think Oprah could have handled it better if we’d let her. God knows she tried, gently prodding my husband for some kind of information as they toured Paisley Park without me. In Studio B, he tried to steer her toward the album that had just dropped, but she said, “‘Sex in the Summer’… the song featured the ultrasound heartbeat of your baby.”
“Yeah,” he said, and he smiled at the memory of that intensely happy day. “What we did was take a microphone and place it on Mayte’s stomach and move it around with the gel till we get the right sound and…” He beat-boxed the sound of Amiir’s chugging little heart. “You know, you start to hear that, and then we put the drums around that.” He played a little snippet from the cassette tape. “That’s the baby.”
“When you heard that sound for the first time,” she said, “what did you think or feel inside yourself?”
“I was pretty much speechless. It really grounds you, makes you realize that things you thought are important aren’t really.”
While I was in the hospital, he had installed a lavishly equipped nursery and playroom at Paisley Park. I hadn’t seen it yet. In fact, I didn’t know anything about that or the huge playground that had been installed outside. He wanted all this to be a surprise for me when we brought Amiir home from the hospital. Oprah saw it before I did. I have to wonder why he took her in there. I suppose it’s possible that on some level he wanted to tell her the truth or at least hoped she’d figure it out on her own and understand why he didn’t want to make a direct statement. They stood in the middle of this colorful paradise of toys and ramps and murals. It had everything a perfect nursery needs, except for the only thing a perfect nursery needs.
“Oh… wow,” she said. “Wow.”
“Here’s my favorite room.”
“For the children to be… the children to come…”
He nodded with great certainty. “Yes, ma’am.”
“The child in you? Or just the children?”
“Oh, the children, yeah.”
“It’s been rumored that your baby boy was born with health problems,” said Oprah. “The reports have fans concerned.”
It was a tactful way to phrase it. Respectful. Compassionate. He just couldn’t go there.
“It’s all good,” he said woodenly. “Never mind what you hear.”
A journalist at heart, she finally asked him directly, “What’s the status of your baby?”
“Our family exists. We’re just beginning it.”
A cryptic answer, but he wasn’t lying. This is what we believed to be true. Believing that was the only thing keeping us going.
I sat on a sofa at Paisley Park, smiling a pretty ballerina smile.
Lights. Camera.
Oprah smiled, too. We both knew our choreography. I sensed her frustration; she had a show to do, but I’d been instructed by my husband: “Say nothing about Amiir.”
She asked about when we met, and my husband told her how he said to Rosie, “There’s my future wife.” That’s such a good story, isn’t it? I giggled and nodded and kept my eyes away from Oprah’s. The woman is no fool. I was clearly no longer pregnant. There was no baby in my arms. The obvious questions seemed to hang in the air, but she was patient. She asked me how I had felt when we met.
“I felt calm. I felt at peace,” I said, and I tried to feel that again in the moment with his arm like a steel safety rail behind my back.
I was surprised to hear him say something about how we’d known each other in past lives—that I was his sister or possibly the same person. These were things I’d said to him while I was in his arms, under his hypnosis.
“Isn’t this all kind of weird?” Oprah said.
I giggled and shrugged, thinking, Girl, you don’t even know.
“Well, it depends on how you look at life,” he said.
She looked at me and said, “When he talks about you, there’s a thing that happens in his eyes.”
I smiled and looked at my hands.
My husband said, “I do feel like I’ve come closer to who I aspire to be by being with her.”
“Really?” said Oprah. “And what does she do for you that you didn’t—that you didn’t have alone?”
“She makes it easier to talk to God.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”