Buying baby socks and three onesies and one newborn outfit on the way to the appointment where the fetal doppler told us you were dead, the same newborn outfit I now see in the box on the closet floor every day when I drag out a sweater. My parents driving across five states to stay with our four-year-old who would have been your sibling, his hand waving out the car window when they drove him to preschool the morning we left for the hospital, as if waving you goodbye. Canceling the baby books and the teething ring but not catching the gray stuffed bunny that still arrived and that your father hid in his closet so I wouldn’t see it but still did, clutching it to my chest and hearing the howl. Telling our four-year-old there would be no sibling. Giving him the bunny that would have been yours that eight months later he still holds to his own chest in his sleep. Seeing just this morning the last item I placed on the registry for you, a package of pacifiers three days before you died inside me. Letting go of your father’s hand and your aunt’s hand when the doctors wheeled me back for surgery. Selecting an urn at the funeral home, one shelf of infant-sized vessels. Filling out the cremation forms, never married, birth and death the same date. Standing on the driveway the night before the funeral home told us you would be cremated, half-sane beneath the midnight stars, your father and sibling long asleep inside the house, the only place I knew to go to still look for you, your last night on the sear of this earth. Our child hugging the stuffed bear that the funeral home sent with the urn, zipped inside something we could still hold. Sharing the same room, however many brief minutes, when the doctor pulled you from me in the surgical theater, the exact number of seconds I will never know, my brain fuzzed out into anesthetized unconsciousness. The doctor capturing your footprints, what your father and I opened on the day you should have been born, ink-blue and perfect. Inking the songbird after which you were named into my arm, measured to the exact size you were, the tattoo artist’s needle never digging deep enough, a pain I wanted to feel bleed down into bone. Reading the post-loss notes in my medical record, a detailed and clinical description of your removal from my body that concluded nonetheless in an entire paragraph on grief, containing your name, that I should carry your legacy forward by telling your story. Hearing your name in our child’s mouth, what we never told him, what he must have still heard. He said your name at bedtime last month and the breath stopped in my lungs and I asked if he meant the gray bunny beside him on the pillow and he shook his head, he said the bear, he said the stuffed bear, he said, we’ll take care of Wren.
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Anne Valente is the author of two novels, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2016) and The Desert Sky Before Us (William Morrow, 2019), as well as the short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names (Dzanc Prize, 2014). Her fiction appears in American Short Fiction, One Story, The Kenyon Review and The Chicago Tribune, and her essays appear in Guernica, Literary Hub, The Believer and The Washington Post.
Artwork by Dinty W. Moore