I didn’t call an ambulance. There was no point. They would have just taken him from me. Maybe pierced his soft baby skin with needles. Maybe broken his ribs when he stopped breathing in a show of human force in the face of this disease. Or worse, they would have ignored me. Told me to just watch him die and let them know when he was dead. He deserved better than that.
My boy died in my arms as I told him I loved him over and over again. My precious boy. The baby who made me a mother and made us a family. My last piece of Anthony. I hope they’re together again. I’ve never been religious but I have to hope. I hope that somewhere, my baby is being looked after and loved and cared for.
The hole I dug in the garden was too small. No body is meant to go into a hole that small. He couldn’t possibly fit in there, I thought to myself, but he did. He’s so tiny. I buried him with a blanket and a letter, as though the words I have written will somehow make their way into his life after death. Know that I love you. Know that I would have died for you in a heartbeat but I wasn’t given the opportunity. Know that I am broken without you.
Three days after I buried him I got my period. Genevieve keeps a shotgun in a cupboard for reasons beyond me. I spent four hours sitting at the kitchen table, the cold metal of the gun against my throat. I will never have another baby. I hadn’t thought I was pregnant, there had been no symptoms. But there was a chance. There had been a chance. Anthony and I had slept together enough times around when I ovulated. I thought the world would give me this. I deserved it enough. I wanted it enough. A baby to help me through my grief. A girl after losing Theodore.
But there is no baby, there was never a baby. I am a mother with no child. I will never have another child. The only reason I didn’t pull the trigger was the fear that I would go to hell. I don’t believe in hell but I want Theodore and Anthony to be together in heaven and there’s a chance. I couldn’t take the risk of never seeing them again because I couldn’t bear the pain. It was the most rational reason my brain could come up with. The risk that hell would continue after my death and I would be kept from my family.
A small risk, perhaps, but an insurmountable one.
I took the cartridges out and put the gun back in the cupboard.
That was two months ago. The TV still works but there is no internet here. The world is falling apart and I’m watching it from a safe distance here in this cottage with just a scrawny cat for company. Genevieve called me two days ago. “Oh, darling, I hoped you would be there. How’s Anthony, how’s Theodore?”
I wept in response, unable to form the words. “Oh, Cath, oh no, oh, my darling. No, I’m so . . . Oh God. I’m so sorry.” She started crying and we cried on the phone to each other for I don’t even know how long.
Eventually I managed to ask how her husband is. “He’s gone, darling. We managed to stay holed up for months but eventually we had to leave. We would have starved to death otherwise.”
Genevieve sounded less bothered by her husband’s death than by Anthony’s and Theodore’s. He was her fourth, after all.
“What are you going to do?” asked Genevieve.
“I don’t know. Stay here?”
“You need a project.” I almost cried again at her tone; it made me feel as though I was ten years old again. It was the exact same voice she had used when I wanted to stay inside and watch cartoons in the summer holidays. I would be ushered outside to play swingball or instructed to pick sweet peas or told, with an impatient huff, to just “go for a walk.” “What’s happened is unspeakably awful, darling, and you need to keep busy. Otherwise you’ll never recover. Have you been writing?”
“Lots.”
“Well then, make something of that. How’s work?”
“Societal anthropology specializing in the care of children isn’t a big priority at the moment.”