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I remember almost nothing about that first pregnancy except the way that it ended. I remember a walk along the grassy trails of Sea Ranch, the wild wind, my bursting energy. I was wearing my husband John’s blue jeans because mine didn’t fit anymore.

In August, a trip to the beach with his brother’s family. I swelled in the humidity like a sponge, my breasts enormous, my face squishy with fluid. “Look at me,” I said, frowning in the mirror. “You look wonderful,” he said. It wasn’t what I was talking about.

John, a doctor, went from that family vacation to El Salvador, heading a medical delegation to the war zone of Guazapa, under the volcano. My father-in-law disapproved, told me outright that John was abandoning me. But I was proud. While he was in Central America, I drove to Davis to help load a containerful of wheelchairs, crutches, and medicine bound for Nicaragua. On the way home, I couldn’t lace my sneakers. My feet were the size of small footballs.

I picked him up at the airport, saying, “Don’t you think I look fat?”

“You’re pregnant, sweetheart,” he said. “That’s how you’re supposed to look.”

Sunday morning. September 17, 1989. I had gained thirteen pounds in a week. I pulled out the pregnancy book. In red print, it said, Call the doctor if you gain more than three pounds in one week. If your face or hands or feet are swollen. If. If. If. I checked them off. While John was in the shower, I called my obstetrician and friend, Lisa. I whispered under the sound of running water, “I think something is wrong.”

Lisa’s voice was so smooth, so calm. “Swelling is very common,” she said, “but it would be a good idea to get a blood pressure check. Can John do it?”

We stopped by his office, two blocks from the restaurant we had decided on for dinner. We were planning a movie, a bookstore, our usual date. I hopped onto the exam table, held out my arm. I couldn’t wait to get to la Méditerranée . My mouth had been dreaming spanakopita all day.

I heard the Velcro tearing open on the cuff, felt its smooth blue band wrapping around me. I swung my feet and smiled up at John, the stethoscope around his neck, loved this small gesture of taking care of me. I felt the cuff tightening, the pounding of my heart echoing up and down my fingers, through my elbow.

The expression on his face I will never forget, the change in color from pink to ash, as if he had died standing at my side. “Lie down,” he said quietly. “Lie down on your left side. Now.”

The numbers were all wrong, two hundred plus, over and over again, his eyes darkening as he watched the mercury climb on the wall. He shook his head. “What’s Lisa’s phone number?”

His voice was grim on the phone—numbers, questions, ideas. He told me to go into the tiny bathroom and pee into a cup. “We’ve got to dipstick your urine, see if there’s any protein.”

I sat on the toilet and listened to him crash through the cupboards, knocking over samples of ulcer pills, brochures about stomach cancer, looking for a container of thin paper tabs. I gave him the paper cup, the gold liquid cloudy and dense. The dipstick changed color the way his face did, from white to powdery blue to sky to deep indigo. “No,” he whispered. “No, no, goddammit, no.”

I asked what, over and over, not believing, as he pulled me out the door, across the street to the hospital. He pounded the buttons of the elevator, pulled me flying to the nurses’ station, spat numbers at them. I thought, Don’t be a bully, nurses hate doctors who are bullies; but they scattered like quail, one of them on the phone, another pushing me, stumbling, into a room. There were three of them, pulling at my clothes, my shoes; the blood pressure cuff again; the shades were drawn; they moved so swiftly, with such seriousness.

I had a new doctor now. Lisa, obstetrician of the normal, was off my case, and I was assigned a neonatologist named Weiss. He was perfectly bald, with thick glasses, and wooden clogs, a soft voice.
A squirt of blue gel on my belly for the fetal monitor, the galloping sound of hoofbeats, the baby riding a wild pony inside me. What a relief to hear that sound, although I didn’t need the monitor, I could feel the baby punching at my liver.

There was a name for what I had. Preeclampsia. Ahh. Well, preeclampsia was certainly better than eclampsia, and as long as it was pre-, then they could stop it. And what was eclampsia? An explosion of blood pressure, a flood of protein poisoning the blood, kidney failure, the vessels in spasm, a stroke, seizures, blindness, death. But I didn’t have any of those things. I had pre-eclampsia. It felt safe.

They slipped a needle into my wrist, hung a bag of magnesium sulfate. This is to prevent seizures, they said. You may feel a little hot. As the first drops of the drug slipped into my bloodstream, I felt a flash of electricity inside my mouth. My tongue was baking. My scalp prickled, burning, and I threw up onto the sheets. I felt as if I was being microwaved.

I was wheeled down to radiology. Pictures of the baby onscreen, waving, treading water. A real child, not a pony or a fish. The x-ray tech, a woman with curly brown hair and a red Coca-Cola t-shirt, asked, “Do you want to know the sex?” I sat up. “There you go.” She pointed. A flash between the legs, like a finger. A boy. I nearly leapt off the gurney. “John! Did you see? A boy! It’s Samuel!” Sahm-well, the Spanish pronunciation, named after our surrogate father in Nicaragua, the most dignified man we knew.

He didn’t want to look, couldn’t celebrate having a son. He knew so much more than I did.

Weiss came to stand next to my bed. Recited numbers slowly. Baby needs two more weeks for viability. He’s already too small, way too small. “But you . . .” He looked at me sadly, shook his head.

“You can’t survive two weeks without stroke, seizures, worse.” He meant I could die.

“What are the chances . . . ?” Doctors are always talking percentages.

“Less than 10 percent, less than 5 percent.” The space between his fingers shrunk into nothing.

This is how they said it. I was toxemic, poisoned by pregnancy. My only cure was to not be pregnant anymore. The baby needed two more weeks, just fourteen days.

I looked at John hopefully. “I can wait. It will be all right.”

“Honey. Your blood pressure is through the roof. Your kidneys are shutting down. You are on the verge of having a stroke.”

I actually smiled at him. I actually said that having a stroke at twenty-nine would not be a big deal. I was a physical therapist; I knew about rehab. I could rehabilitate myself. I could walk with a cane. Lots of people do it. I had a bizarre image of leaning on the baby’s carriage, supporting myself the way elderly people use a walker.

We battled back and forth through the night. “I’m not going to lose this baby,” I said.

“I’m not going to lose you.”

He won.

I lay with my hands on my belly all night, feeling Samuelito’s limbs turning this way and that. There was nothing inside me that could even think of saying goodbye.

September 18, 1989. Another day of magnesium sulfate, the cuff that inflated every five minutes, the fetal monitor booming through the room. No change in status for either of us.

I signed papers of consent, my hand moving numbly across the paper, my mind screaming, I do not consent, I do not, I do not.

In the evening, Weiss’s associate entered with a tray, a syringe, a nurse with mournful eyes.
“It’s just going to be a bee sting”, he said.

And it was, a small tingle, quick pricking bubbles, under my navel; and then a thing like a tiny drinking straw that went in and out with a barely audible pop. It was so fast. I thought, I love you, I love you, you must be hearing this, please hear me. And then a Band-Aid was unwrapped, with its plastic smell of childhood, and spread onto my belly.

“All done”, he said. All done.

My child was inside swallowing the fizzy drink, and it bubbled against his tiny tongue like a bud, the deadly soda pop.

This is what it was. A drug, injected into my womb, a drug to stop his heart. To lay him down to sleep, so he wouldn’t feel what would happen the next day, the terrible terrible thing that would happen. Evacuation is what it is called in medical journals.

Evacuees are what the Japanese Americans were called when they were ripped from their homes, tagged like animals, flung into the desert. Evacuated, exiled, thrown away.

I lay on my side pinching the pillowcase. I wondered if he would be startled by the drug’s taste, if it was bitter, or strange, or just different from the salt water he was used to. I prayed that it wouldn’t be noxious, not like the magnesium sulfate, that it wouldn’t hurt. That it would be fast.

John sat next to the bed and held one hand as I pressed the other against my belly. I looked over his shoulder into the dark slice of night between the heavy curtains. Samuel, Samuelito, jumped against my hand once. He leaped through the space into the darkness and then was gone.

All gone.

I have two other children now, both daughters. I love them with every cell in my body. And yet I do not forget that son, small cowboy, the way he galloped through me. There is still a part of me that believes that I failed the test of motherhood, the law that says your child comes before you, even if it means death. I look at my girls, the life that fills this family, and I think, none of this would be here. But still.

I wonder about our life with a boy, what it would have been. Now John often steps into the tension-filled space between my teenage daughter and me, as we work out our complicated mother-daughter dance. I wonder if he and Sam, Samuel, Samuelito, would have had this flinty hardness between them. I wonder if they would have played sports together, if they would have gone camping and fishing.

I have looked at a thousand boys, from toddlers to young men, since that day in 1989, and none of them have come close to the perfection of that unlived life, that beautiful son who never took a breath. I know how completely unfair it is, and yet I do it, have done it over and over: Our Sam, our Sammy, would never have pointed a stick like a weapon, would never have pulled the legs from an insect. He would have been cheerful, affectionate, bouncy and athletic, but not aggressive. He would have been an avid reader. He would have loved to learn, but not in a nerdy way. He would have been easy with his friends, sweet with his mother, bonded with his father. He would have grown up to be a camp counselor, a scientist, a pediatrician.

How much simpler it is to love a ghost, an angel of a child than one who is troublesomely human and alive.

The night his heart ceased to beat, I had an image of him that I flash to even now. I could see the person he would one day grow into, tousled, with dark, damp almost-curls stuck to his forehead. But he wouldn’t smell bad, no: He would smell alive, human. A slightly torn, stretched-out t-shirt, something faded with a clever, ironic saying on it. He would have just stopped shooting hoops in the brick courtyard, resting at the bottom of the rickety, age-worn stairs. He would be drinking Coke from an old-fashioned green glass bottle like someone from a well-directed commercial. He would stop to look at me, in an instant of unembarrassed sweetness.

None of this is true.

If Samuel had lived, he would have smelled bad. He would have sworn and slammed the door and left his foul socks underneath the couch. He would have had times of sullenness. He would have fought with members of his family. He would have been far from perfect, as we all are. He would have been a complex, living person with qualities that are, at this moment, absolutely unknowable.

There are a million questions that will forever go unanswered. I wonder how I would fare as the mother of a boy. I am innately unathletic, and squeamish around the amphibians and insects that so many boys seem to love. But is that just a stereotype? Thinking that he would have grown up to be an athletic, snake-loving type of boy?

I often wonder how things would be different if he had survived that blast of pre-eclampsia and been born that September in 1989. He would have been miniscule, no larger than a baked potato. There would have been months in a neonatal intensive-care unit; possible (no, probable) complications. He might very well have had disabilities, from mild to unthinkably severe. And what kind of mother would this have made me? Heartbroken? Overwhelmed? Hoveringly protective?

When my daughters were born healthy, I was intensely grateful just that they were alive. It gave me the sense that they had made it through their uterine gauntlet and could thus dodge anything. Instead of becoming the hovering, worrying mother I might have been with a little preemie like Samuel, I became oddly relaxed. I didn’t fret and cling like some other parents I knew. I let them go off to sleep-away circus camp when they were seven years old and most of their classmates hadn’t even mastered one-night sleepovers. Perhaps, knowing that one of my children had already been taken from me, I believed that the powers that be wouldn’t dream of taking another.

I’ve heard so often that parenting boys is utterly different from parenting girls, and I can only imagine the ways in which this might be true in our family. I know that sometimes the concentration of estrogen in the air can be stifling, and that the drama meter around here feels like it is permanently set to high. Would this have been different with a boy, and particularly with a boy named Samuel?

I wonder what kind of brother he would have been. I know that his sisters could not possibly be more different—physically or temperamentally. Would he have been dark and intense like our elder girl, or fair and mellow like the younger?

The questions swirl around and around; they break apart like atoms and produce even more questions. The answers are infinite and untouchable.

In the end, all I can really know about this boy child is that he would have been a boy. And he would have been loved.

originally published in It’s A Boy, Seal Press, 2005