A Line of Blood by Ben McPherson Page B

Where are you?
     
    This looks bad, I know. This looks like grounds for divorce, with automatic custody awarded to the father. Believe me, it isn’t that straightforward.
     
    Max was three. Millicent was pregnant again. Six months.
    We had devoted the pregnancy to a propaganda offensive. We talked about how much fun it would be for Max to have a new brother or sister, how much that child would look up to Max, how it would adore him and come to him for help and advice throughout its life. Max, we told him, was going to be a great older brother. He would love the baby, and the baby would love him.
    Max and I used to lie beside Millicent on the living-room floor, each with an ear to her belly, listening, exploring with our hands, feeling for the tiny kicks and punches. We talked about the ultrasound pictures, about where the baby was lying inside Millicent, how its hands and feet were arranged, how it was fully formed now, how it looked like a proper baby now, how all it had to do was get a little bigger now. Just a little bigger.
    Max wanted a sister, he told us, but a brother would probably be OK too. Guess what, we said, you’re in luck: it’s not a brother, it’s a sister.
    Max had marched around the house chanting ‘baby sister, baby sister, baby sister’, until he collapsed exhausted on the living-room floor and had to be carried to bed. He began to make his own preparations: he gave up drinking milk from a bottle, decided he no longer needed a nappy at night.
    We bought him a baby of his own, an anatomically correct girl doll that he used to carry around the house by one arm. He would fall asleep with the doll cradled to his chest.
    We had done our job well; his baby sister had become a reality for him.
    One day the baby’s heart stopped beating. There was no warning, and we never found out the reason; it just died there in Millicent’s womb in the small hours of a Wednesday morning. Millicent woke early, felt an absence, dressed without waking me, and took a minicab to the hospital.
    At seven thirty she rang me. She was talking so quietly I could barely make out what she was saying. There was no detectable heartbeat. Our little girl was gone. The hospital was going to induce a delivery. A birth that wasn’t a birth.
    ‘I’ll come.’
    ‘Don’t, Alex.’
    ‘Millicent …’
    ‘To have you here would be unbearable to me, Alex. It’s a parody of what it should have been.’
    ‘I love you, Millicent …’
    ‘I have to go.’
    I left Max with Fab5. I bought flowers and fruit and chocolates; I bought a cream silk dressing gown; I bought a mountain of books.
    I went to the hospital. I sat at my wife’s side until she woke. I held her hand, wanting the first words she heard to be mine.
    ‘I love you, Millicent … I love you so very much.’
    My words brought her no comfort. She sat silently for over an hour. Babies screamed in nearby wards. She sent me away.
    She came home two days later looking drawn and stricken. I had done what I could to prepare Max, had tried to explain what had happened, but when Millicent came through the door he looked confused. He didn’t greet her, but stood watching her suspiciously.
    ‘Where’s the baby?’
    ‘The baby isn’t coming, Max,’ said Millicent.
    ‘Where’s the baby?’
    ‘Honey, sweetheart, the baby died. I’m so sorry, Max.’
    Max stood for a very long time, the doll in his arms, rocking it gently back and forth. That evening he refused to speak to Millicent and insisted I put him to bed. And the next evening. The evening after that he screamed when Millicent picked him up.
    It got worse. Max would run from the room if Millicent appeared. I would find him in his bedroom, hyperventilating. Once when he seemed to have disappeared completely from our tiny house I found him under the sofa in the living room, his face streaked with snot, shaking and sobbing silently. At night he would cry for hours on end until, despairing, Millicent and I decided that I