The last time I was pregnant, it was like the baby was speaking to me. Last time my senses were heightened. I wanted bananas, cottage cheese, a pile of greens. I could smell fragrances like the odor given off by different weeds, some spicy, some sweet, even a smell I determined as "sticky". I was offended by certain scents, like morning breath, the first slinking odor wafting from the rubbish bin, and morning pee. An odor could bring me to heaven or make me want to die on the spot; I could smell precisely what my husband had eaten and calculate the amount of time since consumption if we spoke from within three feet.
Not so this time.
For three months it was as if the child was mute to the world, and dumb to it too, but my middle enlarged, I was moodier and tired. That was my only sense that I was growing a baby. This time I was not infused with a sense of my own living increasing exponentially, and I had no awareness, as I had before, of the deftness of my senses connecting me, and thus the baby, to everything. Rather, I was concerned about the silence that I felt.
Maybe I was protecting myself. Maybe the pain of the first loss prepared me to wait for test results, to be realistic. All of this is rational and likely.
But I was right in my concern.
At 13 weeks the ultrasound showed that the baby was packed in her own fluid, caught in a swelling sack of her own skin, alive, but unlikely to survive. The doctor suggested, half-pronounced "Turner's Syndrome." If this was the case, and it most likely was, the child was missing a chromosome, was an X without a Y or another X to complete it, carrying half of its sexual genetic code, but only half. Fetuses, he informed us, gently, kindly, with this syndrome, don't usually make it to birth. If they are born they are usually stillborn. If they are not stillborn, then they are cognitively and physically impaired, sometimes unable to speak, often suffering from heart defects and other abnormalities resulting from having just half of a sexual chromosomal code. There is a spectrum, we were told, but with the severity of our case it was difficult to foresee a positive outcome for us or for the child.
If you look up Turner's Syndrome, the list of maladies is long. I studied it, but I already knew.
I am out of the hospital now and already my waist has shrunk noticeably due to the amount of extra fluid that was around the baby. My mind is quiet, but not mute. I am not devastated, nor am I relieved.
It is the middle of the night and I am thinking of the silence of a child unable to speak, an X with no Y or X to complete it; thinking of the three months of silence into which I listened and heard nothing discernible; I am haunted by unfinished sentences and halting grammar, sequences that are abbreviated, DNA strands with broken chords, a stranded chorus stripped of sound, lost tunes, afterthoughts, recollections that play at the periphery of the mind, half-formed. I imagine half a child, a fetus packed in fluid: a floating clause, nonsequitar of a life, a living phrase ending in ellipses...
