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"Our baby dead," she said, in a broken English I'd never heard her use before. She was usually very careful with her verbs.

"Our baby dead," she said, coming out onto the balcony where Ivan and I were wasting the morning drinking coffee and talking about the stock market. She had come straight home from the doctor's office and hadn't yet removed her motorcycle helmet or John Lennon sunglasses.

"Our baby dead," she said and Ivan left, showing a lot of sensitivity for an Australian male, left us there on the balcony, his half-finished cup of coffee on the railing. The tears rolled down her fat cheeks, wetting the front of the maternity smock made from Batik she designed herself, the one she'd worn for the first time today.

"Our baby dead," she said and Ivan's truck peeled out of the driveway below the balcony, below my balcony, where I do my best thinking, my sanctuary when my wife and her friends are eating durian in the living room, where I knew I'd never again be able to sit and watch the birds hunt geckoes in the bamboo without thinking of this moment.

"Our baby dead," she said and I knew that within an hour every farang on the island would know. Ivan's not a gossip, but Phuket is a small rock and not a soul on it can keep a secret. Folks would come into Julie's bookshop for a mystery novel and leave with the news, yachties would tell each other at Latitude 8 and the word would spread boat to boat over Chalong Bay like an oil slick. People waiting in line at Thai Farmers Bank would pass the time speculating about the details, but nobody would ever say a word to me about it. The news would also go around the island from hotel to hotel by fax, out from my wife's secretary's desk on Karon Bay and up the West side beaches, from Karon to Patong to Kamala to Surin to Nai Yang at the speed of light, and down from Karon to Kata to Nai Harn and around the bend to Cape Panwa, slim brown fingers on keyboards and fax buttons, tapping out the news. Her girlfriends in the Public Relations Sisterhood would cry for her and light some incense on the lobby shrines and start showing up at our door by sundown bearing trays of over-ripe fruit and chicken soup and genuine sympathy.

"Our baby dead," she said and I knew I'd have to write my mother. It would be two weeks before she'd get the letter. I'd be 14 days into the grieving process already, through rage and denial and negotiating, on the road to acceptance, and she'd be alone in the big old house buried in snow, left alone to cope with the news of her first grandchild's demise. She would tell the family, in Los Angeles and Iowa and New Jersey, and a month from now we would receive the condolence cards, if Hallmark makes a card to mourn the end of a life not begun yet, and we would have to respond and it would be well into the next rainy season before the repercussions stopped bouncing around the world's mail services. My wife would make one phone call to her sister in Ranong and within an hour every Sophonrat in three provinces would know and they would all grieve together.

"Our baby dead," she said and I thought of the new crib, purchased yesterday and still in its carton, of the music box that played "Brahms' Lullaby" that she held to her stomach every night before we slept, the stack of baby care books piled up next to the sofa, and all the new baby clothes in the spare room closet. What would I do with it all?

"Our baby dead," she said and I thought of the day we heard of the proclamation by the Anand administration, a government so brief that historians would record its passing in days and hours, but one which immortalized itself when it declared that the children of Thai mothers and farang fathers could enjoy all the rights of Thai citizenship that my wife had surrendered by marrying me. That was the day she went off the pill and I started looking at life insurance brochures.

"Our baby dead," she said and I thought about how in five months she had never put on as much weight as all the books said she should, how the baby had never kicked like it should have. I thought about how the morning sickness had never left her, about the headaches and painful joints. I thought about all the offerings we'd made to the spirit house at the end of the yard, to the big icons at Wat Chalong, to the small brass Buddha that sits on a shelf high on the wall of our front hall, wasted candles, wasted incense. At least the flies and ants had enjoyed the fruit. I thought about my wife making merit for the baby by giving rice to the monks who walk down our lane each morning, me taking pictures to show the kid years from now, when he would look at them with almond-shaped Thai eyes over a big Lithuanian nose. Wasted film. I thought about the hours I spent learning Thai so I'd be able to talk to my kid, how hard it was to remember the monosyllabic words in all their tones, but how important it was that he not be embarrassed of his old man, as my mother was of her father with his thick Yiddish accent. I'd learn new Thai words now, words I'll never forget, complicated words that mean "encephalocele" and "genetic disorder" and "non-viable fetus." I won't forget those words, though I'll go years without saying them out loud.

"Our baby dead," she said and I remembered how she had asked me to go with her to the clinic this morning, but I had begged off to do some work, when all I really intended to do was hang out on the balcony with Ivan. She said she was going to pick up vitamins; she must have already been planning to have the ultrasound, to surprise me with the baby's gender so we could start picking out a name. Instead she had to ride her little motorcycle back from town alone with the truth, the horrible knowledge that what was in her womb had no sex, no arms, no legs, just a gross lump of tissue hanging out the back of a featureless head, an image caught forever in her mind's eye and on a slip of paper that came out a slot in the sonogram machine, irrelevantly marked with the date, exact time down to one one-hundredth of a second, and the technician's I.D. number.

"Our baby dead," she said and I thought this is where religion comes from, from the death of an innocent, when the most jaded cynic turns his face to the sky and says, "Help me Jesus, help me Buddha, Jaweh, Allah and Tonka Wakon, please help me." If the blind albino centipedes that live in my septic tank could save us I would happily worship them, build them a cathedral, a sump 100 feet high all of marble, with a ton of shit in the nave where I would kneel to sing their praises. But they can't save us and neither can any other gods, and this is where religion dies, right where it was born, with its brain hanging out of its skull.

"Our baby dead," she said and the cat came out to beg for attention by rubbing against our ankles while we stood clutching each other and leaning on the balcony railing like a couple of doomed sailors on the deck of a sinking ship. Every detail of the moment was painfully sharp and clear: The cheap plastic motorcycle helmet butting me under the chin, the cherished sunglasses, which were a gift from a Thai rock star who stayed at her hotel last year, crushed beyond repair against my chest, the sunlight hot on my back and the smell of smoke in the air, a line of ants crawling up the cracked green paint of the railing to Ivan's cold coffee cup.

"Our baby dead," she said.

"I know, Babe," I said, "I know."

 

 

 

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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If you enjoyed this short story of Steve Rosse's  you can easily purchase his book 'Thai Vignettes' online here at Bangkok Books.com: http://www.bangkokbooks.com/php/product/product.php?product_id=000025&sub_cate_name=&sub_cate_id=

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