Art Doll, Blue

I bought a toy “art doll.” The baby doll is a light shade of blue. It is supposed to be a fairy doll. It has white spots speckled along its face and arms and legs. The doll reminded me of Rivers. Was China trying to tell me something?

Rivers was born with Infant ALL Leukemia, the worst kind of it. He had it the whole time I was pregnant with him. Gestational leukemia. The doctors had never seen anything like it. It was progressive and relentless. His internal organs were misshapen and ruined. His pancreas, his liver—even if he could survive it (he could not survive it) he would need a liver transplant, a new pancreas. The cancer in his blood had wreaked havoc on his body. When they pulled him out of my belly through an emergency c-section, he was purple, blue, and splotchy red.

What is wrong with him? I asked when he did not cry.

When they wheeled me to the hospital room where I was meant to meet my newborn baby, there was no baby in the room, just a grave doctor who looked concerned and said, your baby is extremely sick. He might not survive the next hour.

I cried more than I ever had before. The nurse wheeled me down the hall to see my son in the intensive care ward. He was on life support. They made plans to airlift him to MUSC—the teaching hospital in Charleston. We were at The Strand—the hospital at Myrtle Beach, and they did not have the capabilities to help my baby.

There were women in the hospital holding their newborn babies. All of them healthy and happy and perfectly well. The mothers with their balloons and flowers and their healthy babies. And me with my empty arms.

I was shocked when they said it was nothing that I had done wrong. My whole pregnancy had been wrong. The baby hardly moved at all. I knew something was wrong.

In the early days, I did all the wrong things. I went tanning before I knew I was pregnant. I wondered if that had hurt the baby. Then my aunt bought me prenatal massage and reiki from a reiki master because I was in chronic pain. I went to my prenatal massage once a week and Casey, the massage therapist and reiki master said, your baby boy has such good energy. He is powerful.

When Rivers was born sick, I called Casey to tell her the horrific news. She was distant and aloof, indifferent.

Oh.

I do not remember what exactly she said beyond that oh, I am sorry to hear that.

The implication being, well what did you expect would happen?

I had been guilty of taking Effexor XR—an antidepressant—which I was told was of greater benefit than cost even though it was a category C medication. Category C i.e., we do not know if it could harm a developing fetus. Caution required.

I had not wanted to take it, knowing that. But I had taken it anyway. The night before Rivers was born by emergency C-section, I looked up Effexor and pregnancy on the internet. Pages and pages of “Effexor Babies”—babies born deformed to mothers taking the antidepressant Effexor. Venlafaxine. Even the word looked wrong to me, then.

What if something happens? What if he is born deformed? I asked my fiancé, Eric, the babies father.

If he is born deformed or sick, then I will never forgive you! He snapped.

It would be my fault, after all. Then there were the other medicines I took while pregnant with Rivers. There was the anti nausea medicine Promethazine, also a category C. There were the pain pills I took with the Tylenol in them. I tried to get the doctor to prescribe me something without Tylenol in it, but they would not even though the ones with out Tylenol were category B—safe use in pregnancy.

I took too many pain pills when I was pregnant because I was in so much pain. The hospital never asked me about it. They never accused me of killing my son with toxic chemicals, drugs, substances. Why didn’t they come right out and accuse me? Eric certainly did. Even though we were told that leukemia was passed on through the fathers DNA.

Okay, so what if God made it so that it was not my fault? I was grateful for that large kindness. Because it was my fault. We all knew it was. The mother is supposed to be the safe place for the baby to grow and thrive.

I remembered what I would eat when I was hungry. How I waited in the drive through line for McDonalds cheeseburgers even though I was already too fat for it. I drank caffeine drinks instead of water. One day at a checkup the nurse saw me holding an energy drink.

What are you doing? Don’t you know this baby isn’t thriving? You need water! Not an energy drink! Bah! And she shook her head violently and was disgusted with me.

But I didn’t know better. I was in a cycle of toxic stuff. I knew it—the surface stuff was all illusion, but I could not escape from the clutches of its hold on me.

All these years later. Eric moved on and had two healthy boys with his beloved wife. I stayed single, alone. I went through a string of bad relationships that never worked out and wasted a decade of my life chasing a feeling of euphoria from whatever I could find. I tried to bury Rivers in the past, but now I have this weird blue fairy baby doll from China, and I don’t know why. The company I bought it from gave me 30$ in free coupons and all I had to do was pay 10 of my own dollars, and the blue baby doll that looks strangely like a sleeping (and dead) Rivers, was mine.

The blue silicon baby doll came in a large cardboard box. It came wearing a shirt and shorts with a dinosaur on the front. The baby doll came with a plastic bottle, a diaper, and a birth certificate that said on it: DOLL with an inky baby footprint printed on the card stock. The baby doll even has black hair on top of its head like Rivers did. The baby doll has a beautiful face with closed eyes. Sleeping or dead? I don’t know what compelled me to buy it except that I saw it and wanted it. What adult woman wants a blue silicon baby doll? It looks so very real, except for all the white dots.

Rivers had too many white blood cells. Toxic levels of potassium. They tried to give him chemo, and it made his delicate black hair fall out onto the pillow. They gave him dialysis and were able to clean his blood. They gave him steroids and all the cancer in his blood disappeared. I did not know what to do. I should have said STOP right then. But the radiologist assured me that his internal organs were hardly functioning and misshapen.

I didn’t know to tell them to stop the treatment. That he had been cured. So, they kept going. Gave him a list a mile long of all kinds of strange things. E-coli was on the list posted at the edge of his room.

I didn’t know what it meant.

They gave him a spinal tap and port for medicine in his spine. When they gave him that (the needle was huge) his eyes opened wide and I could see that he was in pain. How could we do this to a newborn baby? Everything happening to Rivers was wrong. He never cried like a newborn baby. Instead, he was silently wise beyond his days like a serious old man.

We had a meeting in a shitty beige room in the hospital with a box of tissues in the middle of the table.

If we are doing all this to keep him alive…, isn’t it unkind? Isn’t it like he isn’t alive, I mean if we must do all this to keep him alive? I asked, while dabbing at my tear flooded eyes.

I was alone in that room even though my family was there too. I do not remember them being there with me. It was me and the hematologist—a blonde angel woman who glowed incessantly no matter what the light was or where she was standing. I could envision her halo floating atop her crown of perfect blonde hair. She spoke softly and walked deliberately. And she was, a sort of angel, I suppose. Maybe even an angel of death. But no, she has saved so many lives. That’s not fair.

That is the more compassionate outlook. I am so sorry. We will tell you when there is no hope left. But today, we still have some hope that your baby boy will be able to survive and recover. It will be a long road; I am not going to sugar coat it. We are looking at at least three years in the hospital until he is all clear. And even then, it could come back down the road. And don’t forget, the chemo makes him sterile so he can never have children. It will be a long road, but we feel it is not over yet, Dr. Angel said.

We sat by his bedside and sang to him. We called him Rivers the Fighter. But in my heart, I knew God had given me some time to say goodbye. Had Rivers been a stillborn, I might never have found the closure so necessary or the ability to forgive myself the situation. It would have been a case closed and so final and cruel.

But God let us have time to wrap our heads around saying goodbye. And, of meeting him. And of failing him. There were days when I went shopping or out to eat, I could not always bear the hospital.

A nurse once said, he will fight for you if you fight for him.

Did I fight for him? No. I told him, whispered to him, that he was free to go. I could not bear to see him in such pain. I wanted him to be well, not dying. I could barely walk across the street to the hospital from the Ronald McDonald House where we were staying.

I met a woman there whose nineteen-year-old son was in a motorcycle accident and was brain dead. Another woman’s baby was in the NICU and when I told her my baby was going to die, I could see she finally understood her own predicament. There was so much grief in that place. But everyone was trying to be strong and put on a cheerful face despite the horrible hands that had been dealt by destiny and fate and freewill and all the pain coming from depths of origins unknown to us all. But in those moments of meeting one another, we were able to process a bit of shock, a piece of grief and we were not alone in our suffering. I was not alone.

A woman confided in me that her baby was not doing well in the NICU, had been born prematurely, and that her baby daddy was so mad at her because she had smoked cigarettes her entire pregnancy.

It has been impossible for me to quit. I know I am the one who did this. But I cannot quit. I still smoke. He does not know. Please do not tell him.

And she whipped out a cigarette and lit it up and took a deep drag and exhaled like she was relieved while at the same time so guilty, powerless.

I told her I would not tell him. I knew her baby was going to be fine.

Premature was not dying of blood cancer. It was underdeveloped with good chances of recovery.

We were all guilty of something.

I killed my baby! I wailed, in my car, hyperventilating and screaming.

I killed Rivers! I screamed, and it felt like the abyss was staring back at me from the chasm that had opened between me and the hospital and his hospital bed.

I had to admit to myself that the nurses loved him more than I did. They took better care of him. They cared about his progress and if he was going to make it. And when that day came, they were devastated too.

The day we found out that Rivers was officially dying and that all hope was lost, it was raining so hard in Charleston that there were frat guys kayaking down the middle of the streets. We marched through the water to get to the hospital. Our feet were soaked, and my dress was stuck wet around my fat legs. We padded soggily down the hallway, careful not to slip.

The rain that day was so heavy, the streets flooded so quickly. The feeling of celebration mixed with terror and sadness did not escape me. Instead, it welled up within me, and I felt both haunted and relieved. I hate to say it. I did feel relief.

They told us the sad truth. Rivers was not going to make it. The damage to his organs was too great. The cancer was too severe. His white blood count was off the charts. His red blood count was so low that he could not breathe.

We are going to take him off life support so you can be with him, hold him, take pictures with him, the doctor told us.

And that was what they did. Then they laid him down in a bed and administered the morphine. Did his pain go away? His heart stopped. Then he was gone. His body left behind and the spirit behind his big eyes gone away from that place of terrible grief, sickness, and pain.

We held him and wept. I had taken him for granted while he was alive. Once he was gone, the terrible weight of grief and the heaviest sadness converged upon me and filled me with its fury, the pain, and absolution.

After Rivers died, I was struck with a terrible shock at the forever and very permanent loss. All my hopes and dreams were shattered. Eric and I started to go our separate ways.

My daughter Adeline suffered from her family breaking apart and the death of her baby brother. She was only four years old and had seen death, a dark and painful experience.

When Rivers died, I died too. I was twenty-seven years old and sought no comfort in naming myself a member of the Forever Twenty-Seven Club. In one moment, the light had gone out of my eyes, and it was only pain that I could see.

We moved back home from the Ronald McDonald House. Back to our rental house in Myrtle Beach on Brenda Street.

B R end a street, I sang, now breaking everything down into consonants and vowels and secret messages from the universe.

I was looking for answers and looking for signs of life. And signs. And deaths final messages. One night I overdosed on pain pills and could feel my heart slow. Then I could barely breathe. I knew I was going to die, again. Only this time my death would be physical instead of only emotional and spiritual.

I wrote a goodbye letter to Adeline. I died with my eyes closed and felt my heart stop and then I simply went to sleep. The next time I woke up I was still fat, mourning, and alone in my suffering.

Rivers died of bad blood. There was so much, I could now see. It surrounded and ran through all of us with our greed, anger, and infidelity and all the toxic emotions that gave way through to our very hearts and souls, poisoning us.

Mom and baby are healthy and doing well.

It was the one sentence that I was deprived of and the only one that I needed to hear aloud. Anything other than that and it was my fault, entirely.

I found some photos on the iPad of me sleeping the night before. Why had Eric bothered to take photos of me sleeping, looking so rough? My eyes were half open and rolled back and the whites of my eyes showing. You are dead, I thought.

I fell asleep. Just slipped off to a black and dreamless sleep.

The next morning Adeline found me and could not wake me up. She screamed and cried as they wheeled me out of the house on a stretcher or was it a black body bag? I was so selfish. I was in so much pain. I only wanted to make the pain go away and to make it all feel better somehow. The numbness and euphoria combined to make me sleep for one more night.

Eric captured my bloated face in the photographs when I was found dead the next morning. I still have the photos.

That night an ambassador was attacked and killed and the news said Benghazi.

I was a “brand ambassador” once. I worked at Justice, the “tween” brand store selling mediocre quality tie dye sweatpants with Justice emblazoned on the leg and Silly Bandz, which were extremely popular at the time. I always sought fairness and equality.

Now it has been fifteen years, and I have this blue “art” baby doll I can hold, and it makes no sense. Except that China knows who I was, once. I have been a customer for so long. I watched Adeline grow up. Now she is a young woman, no longer a kid.

The only ghosts I believe, who creep into this world, are dead young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. —J.M. Barrie