An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir by Elizabeth McCracken Page B

round-trip ticket that would take him back to England after ninety days. We flew across the ocean, white-knuckled, hoping for a female agent. Or a sympathetic agent. Or anyone who was not the American equivalent of the man in Portsmouth. At Logan Airport in Boston, I flew through the U.S. Citizens line, then lurked against a wall, watching to see whose booth Edward would end up directed to: the blond man with the brush cut, the dark-haired woman closest to me. He bounced into the woman’s lane, and I saw him begin to talk, his shoulders up, his hands explaining. Don’t talk so much! I thought worriedly, but she had already picked up the stamp that would give him ninety days in the country, and minutes later he was next to me. We grinned and walked to baggage claim as though we didn’t care, as though we were being watched and assessed on closed-circuit TV. Now we could start worrying about the next step.

O ur first night in the grubby rental house, we lay on an old futon and stared at the acoustic tiles in the ceiling. They reminded me of elementary school classrooms from my 1970s childhood. The combination of Febreze, mothballs, and old cigarette smoke seemed to fill my entire head: I could feel the chemicals muscle their way up my nose and into my skull, which got more packed with every inhalation.
    “This can’t be good,” I said.
    I had known I was pregnant again for eight hours. The world felt perilous. In France I’d been kept busy ducking pathogens in food. All raw vegetables are contraindicated by doctors in France, because of the high rate of toxoplasmosis in French soil; nothing is cooked through; you can’t count on milk being pasteurized; you are tormented by excellent but forbidden pâtés. Now I was scared of air. Our landlords were elderly and absentee, and when we told the woman they’d hired to look over the house that we needed to hire cleaners, she was dubious. “They had the place professionally cleaned in May,” she explained, though it was September. I had taken her on a tour of the filth, and though she couldn’t disagree of course she felt accused. “I don’t think they’ll go for it again.”
    The next day I took myself to the head of the English Department to ask for advice on what to do about the house.
    “You see,” I said to Linda, “I’m pregnant again — ”
    “Oh, Elizabeth!” she burst out. “That’s the best possible news!”
    I teared up and laughed at the same time. The best possible news! Of course it was! In my state over the house and my general fear, I’d forgotten. For a few months, Linda was the only person besides us who knew I was pregnant. I’d lean into her office and wink, or give the thumbs-up, to tell her that everything was fine. Even after I’d told a few friends, and then our families (we waited till we saw them in person), I didn’t go out of my way to tell people. My fantasy was that I’d turn up in a handful of months with a baby. “Oh, this?” I’d say. “This is what I’ve been working on in my spare time.”

A ll summer long we’d waited for the autopsy results. I wanted to read them and I didn’t want to read them: I was terrified that the verdict would say, essentially, Cause of death: maternal oblivion .
    The report had finally shown up after a small international dance of paperwork. Using the Internet I could decipher the conclusion: chorioamniotitis, with no known histological cause. Lib knew a French-speaking doctor who spent an hour with me on the phone. The report had two halves. The first was about me, the blood tests they’d run, the umbilical cord and placenta and uterus. Olivier went through in a very calm voice, translating and then explaining the medical terms. There was some inflammation to the cord, and some dead spots on the placenta, but it was impossible to know whether these had caused Pudding’s death, or whether his death had resulted in them. I’d scanned the second half, which was entirely about his body,