to keep them from shaking.
“Well, he did look a lot like Jessie -- they would have been cousins, you know. They’re only a couple of months apart. She didn’t mean anything by it.”
“It was still hard,” she said, sniffling. She couldn’t believe that he was being so casual about it -- wasn’t it hard for him too? “Do you have the pictures?” She clutched the couch pillow tightly, squeezing the piping on its edge.
“Yes, but I don’t think you should have them right now.” He stood up, feeling his shirt pocket. She thought he was going to take the pictures out of it, but he removed his cigarettes instead. “They’ll just upset you.”
“No, they won’t,” she protested. “How could I be any more upset? Eric, please give them to me. Please.”
The expression on his face was a mixture of pity, unease, and resignation. He started walking toward the door to go outside for a smoke and then retraced his steps back to her. He reached into his pocket and took out the two nearly square photographs. He dropped them on top of the pillow she was holding in her lap. “Just promise you won’t go crazy on me.” With that he left the room.
Annie grasped the two precious pieces of paper and plastic in her hands. She didn’t look at them right away, but closed her eyes and tenderly felt the edges and the smooth, flat surfaces with her fingertips. Ever so slowly, holding her breath, she opened her eyes to look, only to realize that she had them upside down. Shaking her head and smiling a little in embarrassment, she turned them over. Her smile grew even bigger when she laid her eyes upon her little boy. He was even more perfect than she’d remembered -- he was beautiful -- and he didn’t look anything like his cousin.
The top picture was a close up of Dillon. Eric had unwrapped the blanket he’d been bundled in, so that his entire body was visible. At the time she’d thought it a little strange and voyeuristic but now she was glad she could see so much of him. It was good to be able to see his little feet and hands, his tummy and his chest. She remembered holding his tiny feet, one at a time, in her left hand -- counting his toes. She’d lifted his fingers to count them as well and had given each of them a kiss in the process. The memory made her smile. How could this be bad for her? How could she not be ready?
The second picture made her heart take an unexpected leap and then break into a million pieces. It was a picture of her holding Dillon right after the nurse had given him to her. He was wrapped in the white receiving blanket with blue and pink stripes on each end. It was shocking to see herself holding her child. She looked like someone else -- someone too young to be going through something so tragic. The expression on her face was serious but serene. What had she been thinking at that moment? What had she been feeling? It struck her how incredibly sad the picture was, especially for someone from the outside looking in. It was heartbreaking. And it was her.
Tears streamed down her face and dripped from her chin onto the pillow. She moved the pictures so that they wouldn’t get wet but didn’t even try to wipe the tears away. In the last two minutes, these had become her most prized possessions. If anything happened to them, she didn’t know what she’d do.
“Oh, my sweet little Dillon,” she sobbed, “I’m so sorry I didn’t take better care of you. I’m so sorry.” She kissed her fingertips and then placed them softly on his cheek.
The Blue Daisies
Each of them went about the business of living and healing, of pretending that things were getting back to normal, whatever that was. Eric never wanted to talk about Dillon, which frustrated Annie, because that’s all she could think about. So she wrote in her journal endlessly, devoured books written by other bereaved parents and started reading not only the obituaries but the birth announcements in the newspaper every day. If there was a birth announcement for a baby weighing close to what Dillon had weighed, that validated his existence. If there was an obituary for an infant close to his age, that validated his premature death. One of her books said that mothers and fathers grieve in different ways -- that fathers weren’t as close as mothers were to the unborn baby -- that they pictured themselves as the father of an older child, playing catch or shooting baskets, rather than changing diapers or nuzzling a baby’s head, luxuriating in the newborn smell. So she did her best to leave him alone and taught herself not to expect too much. If he was hurting, he didn’t want to share it with her. She was hurting, but kept it to herself, because of her love for Eric. He was doing the best he could; at least that’s what she kept telling herself. Things wouldn’t always be this way; it had to get better.
Annie had also begun to go to the cemetery every week. She needed to feel as though she was taking care of her baby, and bringing him blue daisies every Friday filled that need. It had been two weeks since the funeral when she had first decided to go. Eric had insisted that the headstone wouldn’t be there yet, and that she should wait, but she wanted to go anyway.
She’d been shopping that morning and saw some baby blue daisies in the floral department at the grocery store. The idea of bringing them to Dillon immediately popped into her head. It was a beautiful, sunny Friday. While most new mothers would be excited to take their baby on an outing to the park, she couldn’t wait to get her groceries home and put away so that she could go to visit her baby at the cemetery. She couldn’t dwell on the cruel irony of it. This was her life now and there was nothing she could do about it.
When she pulled into the driveway, she was surprised to see Eric’s car in the garage. He must have decided to take the afternoon off. Maybe he’ll want to come with me, she thought hopefully. She parked her car in the garage next to his. In a hurry, she got out, opened the hatch and grabbed a bag of groceries to carry into the house. There were five bags in all, but this one was the heaviest. The others she could carry two at a time, or she’d ask Eric to help her.
“Hello!” she called in a singsong voice. “Yoo-hoo! I’m home!” She plopped the bag of food down on the counter. She knew she should get the frozen items into the freezer, but first pulled a vase from the cupboard and plopped the daisies into it with a flourish. She felt a little woozy and weak, but ignored it. Dr. Hayes had cautioned her to take it easy for a few weeks; she was on maternity leave, not vacation; but with no baby to care for, it was hard to take his warning seriously. She could sleep whenever she wanted to uninterrupted, so she shouldn’t have been suffering from sleep deprivation as so many new mothers did, but sleep did not come easily.
What no one knew, however, was that every night at 1:30 a.m., the time that Dillon had been born, she awoke in a cold sweat and couldn’t fall back to sleep because all she could see when she closed her eyes, was his face. This gave her some comfort at first, but after a few nights, just when she was drifting back to sleep, she’d see his face and he’d open his eyes and begin to cry. It haunted her because there was nothing she could do to help him. Night after night he’d cry and night after night she’d cry herself back to sleep because she couldn’t make him stop. The first time he opened his eyes in her dream, she shook Eric awake, trembling and frightened.
“What is it?” he muttered as he forced an eye open to look at her.
“I had a bad dream,” she told him. He’d reached out his arm and pulled her closer to him. It felt good to be held, to be comforted by him.
“You’ll be fine,” he assured her sleepily as he patted her arm. “Just close your eyes and go back to sleep.” In seconds, he was sound asleep again, snoring gently.
She’d laid there for the longest time, next to him but so far away. She never told him what her dream had been about because he’d never asked her. She never told anyone, because there was no one to tell. After a while she got used to the dreams and while they disturbed her, the thought of them ending was even more disturbing because that meant that Dillon was really gone.
Shaking the thoughts from her head, she decided that she’d better ask Eric to help after all.
“Eric,” she called, “can you help me with the rest of the groceries?” There was no response, no sounds from his office or from the family room where she thought he might be watching T.V. “Eric?”