Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,129

it died. Then there’s the list, like a rosary: “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I don’t get to know you. I’m so sorry for wishing this was over, now, for wanting the bleeding to stop. I’m so sorry that I will never have the chance to be your mother. I’m so sorry you will never have the chance to be in our family. I’m so sorry that you are gone.”

I recite the next page, too, without even turning to it. The I-don’t-wants: “a D & C; a phone call from someone who doesn’t know, to ask how I’m feeling; a phone call from someone who does, to ask how I am; to forget this, ever; to forget you.”

And then, at the bottom of the page: “I love fog. I love seals. I love the ghosts of Sutro Heights. I love my mother, even though. I love Jake. I love having known you. I love having known you. I love having known you.”

With one, long shuddering breath, as though I’m trying to slip out from under a sleeping cat, I straighten my legs, lay the notebook to sleep in its box, tuck the flaps around it, and stand. It’s time. Not past time, just time. I return to the freezer, flip the heavy white lid.

The thing is, even after I looked in here, the same day I brought my grandfather out and wound up poking around the garage, lifting box tops, touching old, unused bicycles and cross-country skis, I would never have realized. If she’d done the wrapping in waxed paper, laid it in the bottom of the freezer, I would have assumed it was meat, and I would have left it there. But Lizzie is Lizzie, and instead of waxed paper, she’d used red and blue construction paper from her classroom, folded the paper into perfect squares with perfect corners, and put a single star on each of them. So I lifted them out, just as I’m doing now.

They’re so cold cradled against me. The red package. The blue one. So light. The most astounding thing about the wrapping, really, is that she managed it all. How do you get paper and tape around nothing and get it to hold its shape? From another nearby box, I lift a gold and green blanket. I had it on my bottom bunk when I was a kid. The first time Lizzie lay on my bed—without me in it, she was just lying there—she wrapped herself in this. I spread it now on the cold, cement floor, and gently lay the packages down.

In Hebrew, the word for miscarriage translates, literally, as something dropped. It’s no more accurate a term than any of the others humans have generated for the whole, apparently incomprehensible process of reproduction, right down to conception. Is that what we do? Conceive? Do we literally dream our children? Is it possible that miscarriage, finally, is just waking up to the reality of the world a few months too soon?

Gently, with the tip of my thumbnail, I slit the top of the red package, fold it open. It comes apart like origami, so perfect, arching back against the blanket. I slit the blue package, pull back its flaps, widening the opening. One last parody of birth.

How did she do it, I wonder? The first time, we were home, she was in the bathroom. She had me bring Ziploc baggies and ice. For testing, she’d said. They’ll need it for testing. But they’d taken it for testing. How had she gotten it back? And the second one had happened—finished happening—in a gas-station bathroom somewhere between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Muir Woods. And she’d said nothing, asked for nothing.

“Where did she keep you?” I murmur, staring down at the formless red and gray spatters, the bunched-up tissue that might have been tendon one day, skin one day. Sam, one day. In the red package, there is more, a hump of frozen something with strings of red spiraling out from it, sticking to the paper, like the rays of an imploding sun. In the blue package, there are some red dots, a few strands of filament. Virtually nothing.

The song comes, and the tears with them. You’ll never know. Dear. How much I love you. Please don’t take. Please don’t take. I think of my wife upstairs in our life, sleeping with her arms around her child. The one that won’t be Sam, but just might live.

The matches slide from my pocket.