The sea grass carpeting in my consulting room reverted to its native state, reabsorbing moisture despite the daylong heat of radiators and space heaters. The wall beside the couch, backing onto a wheat field, was ice-cold.  The windows were silvered with condensation inside and blurred with sheets of water outside.

On these bleak days, I would leave the warmth of my kitchen, run across the driveway, and enter the converted garage, which housed my office and consulting room. The first soaked umbrella of the day in the waiting room was always mine. I turned on the lights in the morning and kept them on them all day. Here I spent endless hours cocooned with patients under low gray skies.

As I sat in my chair, patients came and went, their feet wiped carefully or carelessly or not at all; umbrellas up, down, up; flush of the loo; snap of the door. Days drifted slowly by, dark to gray to dark again. And always the rain.

Voicemails accumulated on my phone. Gazing out of the window onto the sodden back field, I would listen to patients’ anxious messages: “tree blocking road,” late, “ground floor flooded,” cancellation.

At the end of one long week, Dr. Merritt left a message suggesting a referral: the mother of a young woman might call, in deep shock and distress. I had read about the accident on the front page of the Post. Early morning frost had made the road slick with black ice. The young woman’s car slid over a bank and onto its side in a swollen stream. The paper made much of the freakish nature of the tragedy: the woman’s baby, strapped into her child seat, was elevated above the water; the young mother, unconscious in the lower side of the car, drowned in less than a foot of water. Her mother might call. Patients who had been referred months before sometimes walked around with my number in their pockets, waiting until they could wait no longer.

But the phone call came that afternoon.  She seemed taken aback to reach me directly: “Dr. Merritt gave me your name…”   I gave her an appointment on Monday.

At the start of another flooded week, I answered the consulting room bell. I could see her through the rain-streaked glass of the door, standing, skin glimmering fish-white in the gloom, younger than I had expected. She arrived without an umbrella, and when she came into the waiting room, she stood, bewildered, soaking the doorway, as if she had just washed ashore, pale hair plastered to her forehead, cheeks, and neck. Did she leave her car on the road and walk down the drive? “You can park your car in the drive next to the consulting room.”

She hunched her left shoulder in some kind of reply, stepped out of shoes swimming with water, and left them on the mat. I showed her into the consulting room and indicated the patients’ chair. She sat, teeth chattering, long arms tightly wrapped round her thin torso. I motioned to the thick blue wool blanket folded at the end of the couch, “Would you like to use the rug?” She shook her head. I watched the water run down her forehead, dripping from the tip of her long nose.

“Dr. Merritt let me know you might be ringing me,” I began, “Perhaps you’d like to tell me a bit about yourself.” She exhaled a hollow sigh.

I waited for the way her story would come—organized and rehearsed, or in a rush; painfully pushed out, or a tumbled torrent. The silence stuck between us, no sounds but her tattered breath, my clock counting the passing of the session, and the rain.

I helped. “It must be very difficult to talk about it. I know there’s been an accident…” There was a long pause. A slow sound gathered down in her gut, held in by her arms, then rolled out in a raw howl: “I have lost my daughter.” She looked frantically around the consulting room, as if her daughter might be hiding behind the filing cabinet, bookshelves, or the office door. “You can drown in just six inches of water.”  The wind rose and heaved rain like a bucketful of stones against the wall of northern windows.

She left, agreeing to return for a session the following day. I waited in the consulting room for the snap of the outer door, and when none came, I looked out to find the waiting room empty and the door left slightly ajar, rain soaking the mat. I shut the door, returned to the consulting room to prepare for the next patient, and noticed that the cushion on the chair where she sat was soaked. With no time to dry it, I flipped it over, only to find that it was wet through.

That night I dreamed I lay alone in my double bed, watching water rise past the first-floor windows and close over the house. I felt I was sinking, weighted and inert, though it was the water that was rising. The house walls withstood the pressure of the water, like an aquarium in reverse, the house a tank of air. I could see the world outside my bedroom windows, as if from a submarine, the vines and climbers waving like waterweed in the green aquatic light.

She appeared at the door on time for her next session looking lost, and still streaming in the rain. Again, as I ushered her into the consulting room, I offered her the blanket, which she declined with a hunch of her shoulder. She sat in the chair, hugging herself, and said,

“My daughter’s birth almost killed us both.”

She had started at the very beginning.

“Her heart was distressed. They broke my water, and when it flooded out, I was possessed with pain. I could not stop screaming. The room filled with doctors. They told me to stop, to be quiet. Did they not think I would stop if I could? They were in a panic. My daughter had no oxygen. Her shoulder was wedged inside me. They cut me to free her. No one told me there could be so much blood. Afterwards, on that linoleum floor, it looked like a murder had been done.”

At the end of that session, she stood and slowly made her way to the door, where she turned to me and said regretfully, “I had wanted a water birth.”

Once again, she left the chair cushion soaked with rain.

“My daughter is an extraordinary child. A survivor,” she continued her story on Wednesday as if we had not paused for a rain-hammered night. “Her face and neck were swollen and covered in bruises for days after the birth; the whites of her eyes were red with blood. They took her two floors away from me. She was in a plastic box with tubes and needles in her arms and legs. I was alone; all the other mothers on my ward had their babies with them. They celebrated with champagne and shiny balloons and flowers. The lift was broken. I limped up and down the stairs to see my baby in her plastic box. It hurt to walk. A nurse said, ‘Why are you standing here? You should be in bed.’ There were no chairs.

“They wanted to take blood from my baby. They could not find a place in her that had not been pierced. She screamed. I stood there unable to do a thing, unable to do what mothers are supposed to do. And then she collapsed, went silent and limp. As if she had gone away, outside herself. I felt the ground rock beneath my slippers, and I fainted.

“Her heart began to heal. It had been pumping as if my daughter believed she were still in my womb. She now began to accept that she was no longer a creature of the water, that she was now a creature of the air. Her lungs started to harvest the air as they were meant to do.

“The doctors detached the lines and tubes. After seven days, they brought her to me. I did not sleep on the ward, I did not sleep for weeks at home, checking and checking her to be sure she was breathing. I wanted to be a good mother, like the other mothers on the ward, easy when they lifted their babies, bathed and fed them. My daughter was so black and blue. I was afraid that I hurt her when I touched her. A photographer came on the ward to record the beautiful new babies. I said, ‘No, look at her.’ He backed away.”

My patient choked and snorted, and her nose was running.

On Thursday, the day before the funeral, she stood in my doorway, wet and shaking. The drains had blocked and overflowed in the drive, making a black lake that lapped at the foot of the consulting room. She made her way towards the chair and then turned slowly, as if swimming through the air, and took the blue blanket from the couch. She wrapped it round herself and sat.

“For six weeks, I could not ask why my baby was so damaged, why her face was so black and blue and her eyes so red. No one told me in hospital. They told me about the mechanics of her heart and lungs, but not about her face. I was afraid to ask.

“I took my daughter in for our checkup. The doctor was new. She listened to my daughter’s heart and lungs. She looked at my stitches. Finally, I could ask what really happened. The doctor looked surprised. She read the notes again. ‘The cord was wrapped round your baby’s neck. She was strangling. Didn’t you know?’ I had not known. I had not known that it was an accident, nobody’s fault. I had thought that my body had bruised my baby’s face.”

Then my patient, wrapped in the blue wool blanket, laid her head on her knees and rocked and wept. When she finally raised her face, her pale eyes were dry. She stood, leaving the blanket on the chair, and looked intently at me. And then, silently, she left the room.

I retrieved the blanket, wet and streaked with mud, as if she had cried fishes and waterweed. After I draped it over the radiator, the damp smell of wool and the green smell of river water rose and filled the office.

My patient didn’t make the session we’d arranged to have the day of her daughter’s funeral. I waited in the consulting room, gazing at the dry chair cushion still stained with the ghost of a water mark and listening to the pulse of the rain on the roof and windows.

She did leave a voicemail message:  “I’m sorry I didn’t come to the session we arranged last week. I needed to get through my daughter’s funeral and manage the arrangements for my granddaughter’s childcare. I would still like to meet you, if that would be possible, and you still have time…”

A solid middle-aged woman waited uncertainly outside my door, amidst the shrinking puddles in the driveway. There were deep circles under her dark eyes. Her long nose was faintly familiar. Wind had torn the blanket of clouds, allowing strips of blue sky to show through. The odor of stone and iron drifted through the air from the back field.

She sat in the consulting room chair, handbag perched on her knees, “Dr. Merritt must have told you: I have lost my daughter.”

I cannot explain it. I’ve long realized that the living search for their dead in unguarded moments, in visitations, in hallucinations, in dreams.  To truly live, they must say good-bye, must mourn their dead.  I believe now that the dead must also mourn their living, mourn their loss of life and the passing of their own opportunities for constancy and devotion.
 

Eggphrasis

A new collection of poems by Ronnie Hess. Artwork by Mary Sprague.

“Ronnie Hess’s Eggphrasis is a mix of astute and sympathetic observations about her backyard chickens and encounters with wild species, interwoven with her perspectives on life. Her poetry is by turns amusing and poignant, while providing insight into the birds she writes about.” — Anna Pidgeon, Beers-Bascom Professor of Conservation, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison “Throughout this collection, birds are a delight, a cause for concern, a flock, unique individuals, worthy of attention in and of themselves and for what they sometimes suggest about us humans. These insightful poems present for our regard the narrow and the wide earth and all who find a place here to fly, to walk, to write, and to practice their art.” — Margaret Rozga, author of Holding My Selves Together: New & Selected Poems, and 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate For more about the author: https://ronniehess.com/ Available through Amazon or your independent bookstore.

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