A Night to Remember by Victor McConnell

Remember that night, my son?  The world – whatever that is – was altogether different.  You were altogether different.  I was there with you.  I felt your still heart and saw flashes of everything you would’ve run to and from, everyone you would’ve loved and hated.  

That is what he wrote in his journal after he held his son for the first time.  His wife slept, and the nurses had left, telling him that they’d be back for the boy in the morning.  So, this was their night.  

He had never planned to have children, for he’d always believed that he would die young.  When his wife had gotten pregnant, though, it rewired how his brain felt about existence.  It was then that he began journaling, as much out of fear as anything else.  He thought he could prevent certain things from being lost.  

The body weighed something.  The nurses had told him how much, but he’d forgotten.  It was enough, though, that his elbow ached as the hours went by and he held the boy against his chest.  

They hadn’t named him.  They were close, having narrowed their list to three when the doctor told them, a few days before the due date, that the baby was dead.  He’d watched his wife struggle through labor in full knowledge of what awaited.  She had refused an epidural, and she made sounds that seemed like cries from the bottom of a well, resonant but dark, borne from beneath the surface of the earth.  Her eyes were open, but she was looking past him at something that he couldn’t see or didn’t understand.  He tried to offer some comfort, but his words sounded foolish.

He stood as he held the child, staring out the window.  He’d never held something dead for so long, and, though the room was cool, a slight dampness built up between him and the boy.  He had an urge to shed his shirt and feel the boy’s skin pressed against his own bare chest.  He felt a crazed feeling that the boy would be revived.

She had held him first, screaming then whimpering then finally sleeping, and he had taken the boy from her as she slept, feeling as though he were committing a great crime.  He talked to the boy.  Told him things about his own father.  About how his father liked turtles, about how he sliced up tomatoes in the summer and fed the pieces to the red eared sliders that crawled up into their yard from the creek behind the house.  When he was a child, he and his father would crouch and watch them move along their path as if on an ancient pilgrimage, as if they’d been feeding on tomatoes for a thousand years.  

He told the boy of his own mother, of how she would call him inside during the summer at midday, how she’d sit cross legged on the cool kitchen floor while he ate lunch and would look at him and ask him what he’d seen in the backyard that morning.  She sometimes fed the turtles with him, too, though she seemed perplexed at the little creatures nibbling at piles of red tomato flesh.

He leaned against the window above the city lights.  The maternity ward was on a high floor in the hospital, and the glimmer of the city below was peaceful and silent.  He thought of all the lives down there amongst all those lights.  He wondered how many newborns were sleeping safely in their cribs, parents unaware of what was looking down at them.

The body was limp, and he pressed it harder against his chest, feeling the thumping warmth of his own heart.  He looked back at his wife.  She slept the sleep of exhaustion and loss, immobile but not restful.  He wondered of what she dreamt.  Near dawn, he lifted her arm up off her chest and placed the boy there and walked out of the room, nodding at the night nurse, who smiled at him from her station.  He shuffled through the maternity ward to the break room.  It was empty.  He sat down in a chair and let his head fall forward into his hands.  He drifted momentarily into semi-sleep and then woke, confused and with wet eyes.  He stood and poured himself a coffee, staring down at the liquid and feeling sick at the thought of the rising sun shining in through the hospital room window.

Victor McConnell grew up in a small town in Texas and graduated from Dartmouth’s creative writing program in 2004.  He spent a year in and out of a wheelchair in 2005-2006, and, after a long dormant period, resumed writing fiction in 2020.  He has an 11-year-old son.  

10 June 2022