Half Life

despair.
Pierre brings me breakfast of toast and tea this morning before leaving for the lab.
“Pierre, I can’t.” I push the plate away, and he sets it gingerly on my night table.
“You need to eat, mon amour.” He bends down, brushes his lips gently across my forehead. “It is simple science. The baby needs nutrients from you.”
“I’m not hungry,” I say. Then the baby kicks inside of me, as if in protest. My stomach swells again with more nausea.
Pierre rests his hand gently on my belly, then on my forehead. He strokes his thumb softly across my temple. “If I could trade places with you, you know I would.”
He’s said this so many times these past few weeks, I actually believe him. But biology, science, prevents this, of course, and it is the angriest I have ever felt at something so scientific. “I will have the toast in a bit,” I relent. “Go, get to the lab. Go ahead. I’ll be fine.”
Pierre hesitates before standing, following my directions. He walks out of our bedroom, and I bite back tears as I imagine him walking the short path to our lab without me.
I’m glad he can continue our work, in spite of my miserable condition. I can’t imagine how much worse I’d feel if I did not have Pierre now, if all progress had to stop while I am forced to lie here. It just seems so endlessly unfair, the inequity that comes to the woman when a married couple decides to have a child. That isn’t Pierre’s fault of course.
The baby kicks again, and I take the toast from the plate on the nightstand, where Pierre left it, forcing myself to nibble lightly on the edges, swallow it down, and take a sip of tea.
I put my hand across my stomach, stroke it lightly, hoping to calm both my nausea and the baby’s kicks. “You will come out soon,” I say to no one, to the empty room, to the being inside of me who does not yet have a fully developed sense of intellect. Rationally I know all this, but spending days on end with nothing to stimulate the mind but books and articles is turning me mad. “You will come out soon,” I say. “And your papa will teach you all there is to know about science.”
Once this child is outside of me, it will be Pierre’s turn to carry him or her. I plan to return to the lab as soon as I give birth.
FINALLY, I AWAKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT ON SEPTEMBER 12th, my stomach clenched with labor pains, the bedsheet wet beneath me. I wake Pierre, tell him to send for his father. It is time. It is finally time!
“Are you all right, mon amour?” The nervousness in his voice cuts through the darkness.
“Yes,” I lie. “The pains aren’t that bad.” They’re worse than any pain I have ever felt, hitting every nerve of my body. But they are such a relief, too. I welcome them. These long sick months, these endless days in bed, they will be over soon.
Bronia had told me to remember to breathe in and out slowly to manage the contractions. But breathing doesn’t help at all, and each time the pain grips me, I begin equations in my head, focusing on calculating the kinetic energy I might be expending, with a variety of integers. I hold my focus on the numbers, on the mathematical probability. And then the pain subsides, and I leave off the equation and think, soon the baby will be outside of me, my life and my body my own again. Everything back the way it was. Tomorrow, or certainly the next day, I’ll get out of bed and I’ll walk to the lab again, and life and science will resume. I cling to that thought now as I push, as I push again.
Just one last push, Dr. Curie finally says. I look at the window and night has fallen, again. Through the haze of pain, the equations of my contractions, I have lost an entire day.
Pierre squeezes my hand, and I do as Dr. Curie says, muster up all my strength, push again. The pressure in my abdomen eases, and then with a gush, the baby is outside of me. I wait for it, the flood of relief I’ve been expecting, wanting, for months now. But my chest is tight. My legs are numb, and it is hard to breathe.
“It’s a girl,” Dr. Curie cries. He whisks her away, wraps her in a towel, and rubs her skin until she lets out a small cry, then a long wail. And suddenly, Pierre’s shoulders shake and tears flood his face. “She’s so small,” he cries out. “I did not think she would be this small.”
Dr. Curie hands me the baby, still wrapped in the towel, and I examine her: she is perfectly the right size for a newborn. She has ten fingers and ten toes, Pierre’s eyes, and my nose, a symmetrical face, and the softest flesh I’ve ever felt. This baby that Pierre and I have created, that my body grew and nourished and tortured me with over months and months, she is more perfect than anything we’ve ever done together in the lab.
I FINALLY DO GET OUT OF THE BED THE NEXT MORNING, BUT not to go to the lab. All that time spent in bed and it had never occurred to me how much the baby would need me once she came. Irène cries for me and then suckles me endlessly, leaving my body more tired, more sore, more nauseated than ever before. I go through weeks in a daze, my mind too numb and exhausted to even think in equations. Or about what I’m missing in the lab.
Irène begins to lose weight, and then all I do is worry over her. My mind is so consumed that I don’t even notice Pierre is gone all day or wonder about the work he