After four daughters, my husband finally got the son he’d been begging for — but when he held our newborn boy for the first time, his words made my stomach drop.
My husband, Gideon, and I had been together for eight years, and we had always dreamed of a big family.
But there was one thing that Gideon wanted more than anything in the world, and it was a son.
He had talked about it before we were even engaged. He would say it in the car, or in the kitchen, or at someone else’s christening, with his arm round my shoulder and his eyes on the baby: that he could not imagine a house with only girls in it. He wanted a boy. He wanted a boy to carry on the Fenn name.
I thought it was sweet. I thought it was old-fashioned and a little silly, like a man who wishes he had a dog. At our wedding, his father, a big grim silent man called Reuben, had stood up with a glass and said, to the last of the Fenns, and the whole garden had laughed, and Gideon had not. I thought that he was shy. I want you to know that. It will matter later.
DELIVERY ROOM 4. 4:51 A.M.
“It’s a boy,” said the doctor.
I was lying on my back, with a wet cloth across my forehead, and my legs like two pieces of wet rope, and I had been in labor for nineteen hours. I do not remember hearing it. I remember that the room went very quiet, and then that it filled with a strange high noise, thin and furious and perfectly clear, which was my fifth child announcing that she, he, that he had arrived.
“A perfectly healthy baby boy,” said the doctor, and she was smiling. “Eight pounds one. Congratulations, both of you.”
I looked at my husband.
I have never in my life seen anyone so happy. He was standing at the head of the bed in his creased green scrubs, holding my left hand in both of his, and his whole face had come apart. He was laughing. He was crying. He was saying something under his breath, again and again, and I think that it was thank you.
He was practically glowing when the nurse came round the bed with the small blue bundle and laid it, so carefully, as though it were a full glass, in his arms.
I watched them together.
I was waiting for him to weep, or to whoop, or to say something about finally, finally, getting his wish. I had my face ready. I had been rehearsing it for eight years.
But he did not.
THE FIRST.
I should go back.
We were married in June, on a hot, bright, windy day, in my father’s garden, and by August I was pregnant. Gideon was over the moon. He walked round the house for days with a particular, heavy, secret grin, like a man who has won a raffle and not yet told his wife. He bought a small blue blanket from a shop in town. He did not ask me whether I wanted it. He just put it in the drawer.
“It’s a boy,” he said. “I can feel it.”
It was a girl.
She was born in the spring, a red, cross, wrinkled thing with a great deal of dark hair, and we named her Hattie. Gideon held her for an hour. He was gentle. I had never seen his big careful hands so still. And I watched his face, that first hour, and I saw something go across it that I did not like, a sort of shadow, like a cloud over a field. It was there for about half a second.
Then he kissed her forehead, and said, in a perfectly warm voice, “Look at her. Look at that chin.”
I told myself he was tired.
“Don’t worry,” he said to me, that night, in the dark. He was stroking my hair. “We’ll give her a little brother someday.”
I laughed. I want to be honest about that, because it is the first of the things that I am ashamed of. I lay in a hospital bed with my first child asleep in a plastic cot beside me, and my husband promised me, in a gentle and affectionate voice, that I would give her a brother, and I laughed.
DELIVERY ROOM 4. 4:53 A.M.
He was staring at the baby.
He was looking down into the small, creased, flushed face, with the knitted hat that the nurse had put on it, a blue-and-white striped one, slightly too big. The baby had stopped crying. It was looking back, with the dark, unfocused, opaque stare that they have, as of someone who has just got off a very long plane.
Gideon’s smile began to fade.
It did not drop. It went slowly, like a tide going out. I saw the corners of his mouth lose their grip. I saw something in his face, in the eyes, change, as if a light had been switched off somewhere deep in a house.
“Gideon?” I said.
He did not seem to hear.
“Gid.” The nurse, a young woman with a long braid, had put out a hand. “Are you okay? You’ve gone a funny color.”
He lifted the baby’s hat. He did it gently, with the tip of one finger, and drew it back off the small damp skull.
There was a whorl of dark hair at the crown. It curled, anticlockwise, like a tiny shell.
His breath stopped.
THE SECOND.
By the second pregnancy I knew the look.
It was a Tuesday morning. The sonographer was a bored, kind, blonde woman with a cardigan. She moved the wand across my stomach, in a smear of cold blue gel, and said, in the flat bright voice of the profession, “And here we can see, yes, that’s a, I’m fairly sure that’s a little girl.”
I turned my head. Gideon was sitting on a plastic chair at the end of the couch.
He did not say anything. He did what he always did: he smiled. He smiled so broadly, and so quickly, that I felt a little cold. He squeezed my foot through the blanket. He said, “Another princess.”
But his hand had gone slack.
She was born in November. We called her Josie. He loved her. I want you to understand that; I have said it many times and I will go on saying it, in this account, because it is true. He was a loving father. He did the night feeds. He changed diapers with a sort of anxious, tender precision, humming under his breath. He built a swing set on the back lawn with six people’s worth of instructions and a great deal of language.
But when we got home, I found him in the nursery at two in the morning, standing over the cot, in the dark, in his pajamas.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” said Gideon. “Checking.”
“Checking what?”
“That she’s breathing.”
It was the first time that I noticed it. It would not be the last. I did not know what I was looking at.
DELIVERY ROOM 4. 4:55 A.M.
“Take him,” said Gideon.
I thought that I had misheard.
“What?”
“Take him.” He held the baby out at arm’s length, in both hands, stiffly, with his elbows locked, as a man might hold out something very hot or very breakable. His voice was a thin, odd, unfamiliar thread. “Please. I can’t. I can’t hold him. I can’t.”
The nurse took him. She was too startled to do anything else. She tucked the little bundle against her shoulder, with her eyes wide over its head, and looked at the doctor, and the doctor looked at me.
My stomach dropped.
I do not know how to tell you what that was. It was like a lift going down very fast. I lay there, in the hot, bright, ringing room, with the sheets sticky round my legs, and I thought: he doesn’t want him. I thought: he’s got what he wanted for eight years, and it’s all been a lie, it was never about the child, it was only a picture of a boy. I thought of my four daughters at home, asleep in their beds, and I thought, with a surge of pure, cold, protective fury that I have not felt before or since, I will not let him do this to this baby either.
“Gideon,” I said. “What is wrong with you?”
He had backed up against the wall. He had one hand flat on the tiles behind him and the other pressed against his mouth, and his chest was going in and out. He was looking at the baby, in the nurse’s arms, with an expression of the most naked and complete terror that I have ever seen on a human face.
Then he looked at me, and he opened his mouth, and the words came out in a whisper.
“He looks just like Danny.”
THE THIRD.
I want to tell you about the cookies.
It was the sixth Christmas. We had gone to Gideon’s mother’s house, in the village where he grew up, for the afternoon. His mother is a small, spare, very quiet woman of sixty-eight, called Agnes, who lives alone in a brick cottage with a clock that ticks too loudly. She has a long kitchen table, and a dresser full of blue-and-white plates, and a mantelpiece.
On the mantelpiece, between a brass candlestick and a china dog, there was a photograph.
It was a very small, old, colored one, in a silver frame. It showed a baby. It was a baby of about three months in a blue knitted cap, lying on its back on a quilt, with its fists up and its eyes very wide, looking at something that the camera had not caught. It was a plump, solemn, wondering baby, with a dimple in its chin.
I knew who he was. I had known since the beginning. Gideon had had a brother, a younger brother called Danny, who had died as an infant, long before I knew either of them. He never talked about it. I did not push.
I want you to notice that. I did not push.
On the sixth Christmas, the girls, who were then five and three, with the baby on Agnes’s hip, baked cookies with Agnes in the long kitchen. They were oatmeal raisin. They came out of the oven in golden trays, and the whole house smelled of cinnamon and burned sugar.
Gideon left the room.
He did not say a word. He simply got up from the table, with his coffee cup, as the first tray came out, and went through the back door into the garden, and stood in the cold, in his shirt sleeves, with his back to the house. He was there for twenty minutes.
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked Agnes.
She was at the oven, in her apron, with a spatula. She did not turn her head.
“He doesn’t care for oatmeal,” said Agnes.
But I saw her hand. It had gone quite white round the handle.
I thought: he’s on a diet. I did not think another thing.
DELIVERY ROOM 4. 5:02 A.M. THE CORRIDOR.
I do not remember getting out of bed.
I remember that I was in the corridor, in a hospital gown, with a blanket round my shoulders and my feet bare on the cold linoleum, holding on to the rail. I remember that the doctor had said something sharp and professional about rest, and that I had said something sharper. I remember that Gideon was sitting on the floor.
He was sitting with his back against the wall, under a poster about hand-washing, with his knees up and his scrubs crushed, and his head between his arms. He was shaking.
I got down beside him. I do not know how. I think that it was the single most painful thing that I have ever done, to lower myself, so soon after, onto a hard floor.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“Gideon.”
“I killed him.”
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