Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 12

On the fourth day of a record heat wave in August, I met our first child, a six-pound girl with coal-black eyes. Clementine.

Caleb thought she was my clone. I thought she looked nothing like me. In fact, I didn’t think she looked like any baby I’d ever seen. Her eyes were so dark they appeared aquatic, and even when she was crying, her lips remained frozen in a perfect O, so that she almost looked like a wax doll with a sound machine buried inside. And what could I say about the way she looked at me when I was holding her in my arms? How else could I describe the expression of this child, if not malevolent?

Of course, I didn’t say this to anyone. In front of my mother and my husband and my in-laws and the nurses, I cooed and cried and said, Isn’t she perfect? But when I was alone with the baby, I held her at arm’s length. I whispered, “Who are you?”

It didn’t help that I was exhausted. It didn’t help that I had wanted a home birth, then panicked from the pain at the last minute and told Caleb to call an ambulance, even though I was already on all fours in a pink inflatable pool, my midwife begging me to reconsider. It didn’t help that I’d never really thought about giving birth in any practical sense, in the same way I’d never thought hard about any of the parts of my life I was predestined for: motherhood, marriage, the afterlife. Why worry over inevitability? All my life, I’d understood and accepted that I was brought into this world for the explicit purpose of eventually bringing other lives into this world, like a never-ending baton pass, an infinite relay of God’s glory. I’d assumed I would step into the role naturally since the role itself was natural, was nature. But nothing felt natural about this.

“I feel like an experiment,” I told my mother. “I can’t stand all this beeping and poking and prodding.”

It was the closest I could get to telling her how I felt; the closest I could get to saying, You’re sure this one is mine?

“You’ll feel better when you get home,” my mother said airily. “Childbirth takes the wind right out of you.”

It was midmorning, the second day.

My mother was fluttering around the room, rearranging the half dozen flower arrangements I had received, fluffing the one decorative pillow on the hospital chair. “No one said childbirth was easy, honey,” she said over her shoulder while she fiddled with the window blinds. “They just said it would be worth it.”

I stared moodily at nothing. No one had said either of those things to me—and no one, certainly no one, had mentioned how ugly childbirth could be, how gruesome and messy. If I was three ounces stupider, I might have expected the stork to drop a baby off at my doorstep, baked to perfection. Of course I’d known, in some rough practical sense, that my body would have to split open for a child to leave it, but I hadn’t been remotely prepared for the bald terror of it; hadn’t known that my softest and most private patch of skin would rip a full inch; hadn’t known the delivery room would smell like iron from all the blood loss, not to mention literal human excrement. I felt like one of those teenage boys shipped off to Normandy for D-Day. From my position in the hospital bed, I kept staring wildly around with bright unseeing eyes, one half of my brain certain someone was going to swoop in and save me, heal me, wake me up from this terrible dream, and the other half certain I was already dead.

“I don’t want to go home.” I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but there it was. My true thoughts, floating in the air-conditioned space between us.

My mother stopped fiddling with the blinds. Her eyes flashed to me, suddenly watchful. “Is it Caleb?”

The nurse in the corner was suddenly very busy with her clipboard.

The only warning my mother had given me for this period of my life had been that Caleb might not find me attractive after the baby was born. “It’s only natural,” she added, “it’ll pass.” This was the latest iteration of a piece of advice she’d given to my sister and me for years. Men are like babies—their needs are not negotiable.

“It has nothing to do with Caleb,” I said. “It’s just—the thing is, I think there’s been—a mistake.”

My mother cocked her head. When she spoke again, her voice was artificially bright. “What kind of mistake?”

The nurse set her clipboard down.

“The baby doesn’t look like me, Mama. Do you honestly think she looks like me? And the way she watches me…” I would never say it aloud, the word I wanted to use to describe the feeling I got around my baby: evil. It wasn’t a term we bandied around in my family. But I felt it clearly when I was with her, a deep, dark sensation, like all the joy had been sucked from the world.

My mother was staring at me now.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I snapped. “I’m perfectly aware of how disgusting I am.” I’d gained twenty-six pounds throughout my pregnancy. Ten of them were now outside me. Those sixteen lingering pounds felt like a second suit of skin. Itchy and ill-fitting.

“You’re going to be back to feeling like yourself in no time,” my mother said. She sat down on the hospital bed and patted my blanketed legs. “You know what might make you feel better? What if you went on a little jog around the hospital? Get your endorphins up? You never were one to enjoy lying around.”

The suggestion struck me simultaneously as completely insane, and also as the first rational thing a person had said to me in days. The old me did love to jog. The old me did hate lying around.

The nurse was looking at my mother now. “She absolutely cannot go on a jog right now.”

My mother made a tsk noise, like she’d forgotten to mention the most important part. “She ran track in high school.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that she needs time to heal.” The nurse gave my mother a meaningful look. “And if you ask me, it sounds like she needs to see a psycholo—”

“You know,” I said, ignoring the nurse entirely, “I do think a jog would be nice.”

My mother gave me a look of thoughtful surprise, like she hadn’t just essentially told me to do it. Now there’s an interesting idea!

“You are not going on a jog right now,” the nurse said firmly.

My mother rolled her eyes behind the nurse’s back. For the first time in days, I smiled.

It took ten minutes to wait for the next nursing shift change to take advantage of the commotion and sneak down the hallway wearing nothing but a hospital gown and my mother’s sneakers. It took another fifteen minutes to jog/walk around the perimeter of the emergency room parking lot. By the time I closed the loop at the hospital entrance, it felt like I was experiencing the early stages of organ failure. My heart was thwapping wildly in my chest, my appendix screaming its threats to rupture, and with each step forward, I could feel, literally feel, the precious stretch of skin down there as it ripped open again, the doctor’s stitches no match for my mother’s voice in my head.

Thatta girl, Natalie, get those endorphins up, up, up!

Blood ran in slick rivers down my thighs. I collapsed into a nurse while I was walking back through the hospital entrance. The nurse half carried me back to my room, helping me fall into my mother’s arms.

“What’s all this about?” my mother said lovingly while I cried into her lap. Like I was a family dog coming home from some neighborhood walkabout with a coat full of burs.

“I can’t do it, Mama,” I sobbed. “I can’t do this.” It was hard to breathe through the sheer panic coursing through my veins.

“Oh, Nattie.” My mother rubbed my back in great, sweeping circles. “Of course you can.”

“How do you know?” I wailed.

“I know you can,” she said softly, “because you have to.”

She kept rubbing my back, whistling a cheery hymn about His love and glory while I shuddered and sobbed in her lap. When that song was over, she sang another. She moved through a whole church service’s worth of music while my body slowly went still.

Right as I was about to drift into unsettled sleep, Clementine began to cry. My mother leaned over and whispered into my ear, “Get up.”