Half Life

time I felt a kick, the small angle of an elbow, I closed my eyes and silently thanked this God that the doctor, and my husband, and probably all the rest of Poland, thought I should believe in.
For an entire week I lay there, my mind numb and blank, my body a useless and terrible vessel. Every kick, I tried so hard to believe.
But then the kicking stopped. My stomach grew hard and still and tight.
And later that night, Kaz summoned the doctor again, and the baby came. She was too early. Everything was wrong.
She left my body still and quiet, her skin icy cold and blue.

Marie
Paris, 1897
My body is not built to carry a baby.
I am ill and tired, nauseated for months on end, and suddenly instead of my haven, the lab becomes my purgatory. The smells of the fire and metal I used to love incite my nausea so that I often have to run outside and vomit out back.
It had been Pierre’s idea to start our family in the first place. Imagine how beautiful and brilliant our child would be! Pierre had traced a line on my bare shoulder with his finger, and in an instant I had seen it, too, this imaginary, luminescent child of ours. That had been enough to believe I wanted what he wanted. Besides, Bronia has two children now, and she is still practicing medicine. Pregnancy had agreed with her, too. A few years ago, she’d even helped me move into my first room alone in Paris: eight months along and she was pushing a handcart of my things down rue Flatters. I’m angry with my condition, with my own body for its betrayal, for its inability to succeed at its most base biological function.
“Mon amour, you need a break,” Pierre insists, but I am not about to give up my work, my research. Then Papa writes that he is returning to France on vacation, and Pierre says it would upset Papa were I to not go see him for a few weeks. Deep down I know the two of them have perhaps conspired on this plan to take care of me: poor, mad Marie, refusing to take some time for herself. But I am so tired, and I truly do need a break, so I go off to Port-Blanc without much argument.
Papa and I spend most of July at the Hotel of the Grey Rocks. The sunshine and the sea are glorious and rejuvenating. As I breathe the country air and take my meals with Papa in the hotel dining room, my nausea subsides more than it has in months.
“You are getting color in your cheeks,” Papa says, with a slow smile. He is older than I picture him in my head; his voice is gravelly and his hands shake a little as he cuts up his meat. I feel both guilt at not living near him in Poland, and a moment of gratefulness to have this time with him, that being so ill forced me here, now. And maybe it is the sunshine, or being with Papa, or maybe it is that away from the lab and the city, my body understands how to perform its biological functions, but I do actually feel better.
Pierre stays behind in Paris, as his mother, Sophie-Claire, is very ill with incurable cancer of the breast, and we’d both agreed before I left that he could not leave her. But this is the first time I’ve been away from him for more than a few hours since we got married, and I am shocked by how desperately I miss him. We write each other daily, but it is not the same as being together, and when after three whole weeks apart, he shows up one morning at the hotel, surprises me, I cannot contain my glee. I reach up and touch his beautiful face, trailing my fingers softly through his beard.
“Mon amour, the sea air agrees with you,” he tells me. “Your eyes have light again.”
He’s right. I feel so happy, so much like my old self, that I suggest a bicycle ride. Pierre worries it will be too much for me, but I push away his concern. I feel so much better here. We borrow two bicycles from the hotel, and go out and ride all afternoon. I forget it all: feeling ill and about the baby coming so soon. And there is nothing but the wind in my hair and my husband pedaling behind me. I am too fast for him, even with the weight of pregnancy. He still cannot catch me, or perhaps he is letting me ride ahead to make me feel good again. His laughter trails in my dust, and he calls out that our baby might be born riding.
When we get back to the hotel that night, I get off the bicycle, and suddenly I am unsteady, shaky and weak. The nausea hits me, worse than before. I lean over the side of the bicycle, heaving.
“Marie?” Pierre’s voice is alarmed, and I look up, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. He points to my shoe. I look down, and it is dotted with red. “Are you bleeding?”
IN THE DEEPEST, HOTTEST HOUR OF AUGUST, I LIE IN MY BED back in our apartment on rue de la Glacière, heavy and restless. Pierre and I rushed back to Paris, those drops of blood on my shoe enough to turn me cold with terror. Pierre had summoned his father, Dr. Curie, who’d examined me, ordered me to stay in bed for the remainder of my pregnancy, stay as still as I possibly can. He has been checking on me and the baby twice a day, looking for more signs of overexertion or distress. But so far, there have been none. And now that I have lain here for two whole weeks, I believe I will either have this baby soon or I will die of boredom and