The Two Sams

GLEN HIRSHBERG

What wakes me isn’t a sound. At first, I have no idea what it is, an earthquake, maybe, a vibration in the ground, a 2 am truck shuddering along the switchback road that snakes up from the beach, past the ruins of the Baths, past the Cliff House and the automatons and coin-machines chattering in the Musée Mécanique and our apartment building until it reaches the flatter stretch of the Great Highway, which will return it to the saner neighbourhoods of San Francisco. the still, holding my breath without knowing why. With the moon gone, the watery light rippling over the chipping bas-relief curlicues on our wall and the scuffed, tilted hardwood floor makes the room seem insubstantial, a projected reflection from the camera obscura perched on the cliffs a quarter-mile away.

Then I feel it again, and I realise it’s in the bed, not the ground. Right beside me. Instantly, I’m smiling. I can’t help it. You’re playing on your own, aren’t you? That’s what I’m thinking. Our first game. He sticks up a tiny fist, a twitching foot, a butt cheek, pressing against the soft roof and walls of his world, and I lay my palm against him, and he shoots off across the womb, curls in a far corner, waits. Sticks out a foot again.

The game terrified me at first. I kept thinking about signs in aquariums warning against tapping on glass, giving fish heart attacks. But he kept playing. And tonight, the thrum of his life is like magic fingers in the mattress, shooting straight up my spine into my shoulders, settling me, squeezing the terror out. Shifting the sheets softly, wanting Lizzie to sleep, I lean closer, and know, all at once, that this isn’t what woke me.

For a split second, I’m frozen. I want to whip my arms around my head, ward them off like mosquitoes or bees, but I can’t hear anything, not this time. There’s just that creeping damp, the heaviness in the air, like a fogbank forming. Abruptly, I dive forward, drop my head against the hot, round dome of Lizzie’s stomach. Maybe I’m wrong, I think. I could be wrong. I press my ear against her skin, hold my breath, and for one horrible moment, I hear nothing at all, a sea of silent, amniotic fluid. I’m thinking about that couple, the Super Jews from our Bradley class who started coming when they were already seven months along. They came five straight weeks, and the woman would reach out, sometimes, tug her husband’s prayer-curls, and we all smiled, imagining their daughter doing that, and then they weren’t there any more. The woman woke up one day and felt strange, empty; she walked around for hours that way and finally just got in her car and drove to the hospital and had her child, knowing it was dead.

But under my ear, something is moving now. I can hear it inside my wife. Faint, unconcerned, unmistakable. Beat. Beat.

‘ “Get out Tom’s old records. . .”‘ I sing, so softly, into Lizzie’s skin. It isn’t the song I used to use. Before, I mean. It’s a new song. We do everything new, now. ‘“And he’ll come dance around.’” It occurs to me that this song might not be the best choice, either. There are lines in it that could come back to haunt me, just the way the others have, the ones I never want to hear again, never even used to notice when I sang that song. They come creeping into my ears now, as though they’re playing very quietly in a neighbour’s room, ‘ “I dreamed I held you. In my arms. When I awoke dear. I was mistaken. And so I hung my head and I cried.’” But then, I’ve found, that’s the first great lesson of pregnancy: it all comes back to haunt you.

I haven’t thought of this song, though, since the last time, I realise. Maybe they bring it with them.

Amidst the riot of thoughts in my head, a new one spins to the surface. Was it there the very first time? Did I feel the damp then? Hear the song? Because if I did, and I’m wrong . . .

I can’t remember. I remember Lizzie screaming. The bathtub, and Lizzie screaming.

Sliding slowly back, I ease away towards my edge of the bed, then sit up, holding my breath. Lizzie doesn’t stir, just lies there like the gutshot creature she is, arms wrapped tight and low around her stomach, as though she could hold this one in, hold herself in, just a few days more. Her chin is tucked tight to her chest, dark hair wild on the pillow, bloated legs clamped around the giant, blue pillow between them. Tip her upright, I think, and she’d look like a little girl on a hoppity horse. Then her kindergarten students would laugh at her again, clap and laugh when they saw her, the way they used to. Before.

For the thousandth time in the past few weeks, I have to squash an urge to lift her black-framed, square glasses from around her ears. She has insisted on sleeping with them since March, since the day the life inside her became - in the words of Dr Seger, the woman Lizzie believes will save us - ‘viable’, and the ridge in her nose is red and deep, now, and her eyes, always strangely small, seem to have slipped back in their sockets, as though cringing away from the unaccustomed closeness of the world, its unblurred edges. ‘The second I’m awake,’ Lizzie tells me, savagely, the way she says everything these days, ‘I want to see.’

‘Sleep,’ I mouth, and it comes out a prayer.

Gingerly, I put my bare feet on the cold ground and stand. Always, it takes just a moment to adjust to the room. Because of the tilt of the floor - caused by the earthquake in ‘89 - and the play of light over the walls and the sound of the surf and, sometimes, the seals out on Seal Rock and the litter of woodscraps and sawdust and half-built toys and menorahs and disembowelled clocks on every tabletop, walking through our apartment at night is like floating through a shipwreck.

Where are you? I think to the room, the shadows, turning in multiple directions as though my thoughts were a lighthouse beam. If they are, I need to switch them off. The last thing I want to provide, at this moment, for them, is a lure. Sweat breaks out on my back, my legs, as though I’ve been wrung. I don’t want to breathe, don’t want this infected air in my lungs, but I force myself. I’m ready. I have prepared, this time. I’ll do what I must, if it’s not too late, and I get the chance.

‘Where are you?’ I whisper aloud, and something happens in the hall, in the doorway. Not movement. Not anything I can explain. But I start over there, fast. It’s much better if they’re out there. ‘I’m coming,’ I say, and I’m out of the bedroom, pulling the door closed behind me as if that will help, and when I reach the living room, I consider snapping on the light, but don’t.

On the wall over the square, dark couch - we bought it dark, we were anticipating stains - the Pinocchio clock, first one I ever built, at age fourteen, makes its steady, hollow tock. It’s all nose, that clock, which seems like such a bad idea, in retrospect. What was I saying, and to whom? The hour is a lie. The room is a lie. Time is a lie. ‘Gepetto,’ Lizzie used to call me before we were married, then after we were married, for a while, back when I used to show up outside her classroom door to watch her weaving between desks, balancing hamsters and construction paper and graham crackers and half-pint milk cartons in her arms while kindergartners nipped between and around her legs like ducklings.

Gepetto. Who tried so hard to make a living boy.

Tock.

‘Stop,’ I snap to myself, to the leaning walls. There is less damp here.

They’re somewhere else.

The first tremble comes as I return to the hall. I clench my knees, my shoulders, willing myself still. As always, the worst thing about the trembling and the sweating is the confusion that causes them. I can never decide if I’m terrified or elated. Even before I realised what was happening, there was a kind of elation.

Five steps down the hall, I stop at the door to what was once our workshop, housing my building area and Lizzie’s cut-and-paste table for classroom decorations. It has not been a workshop for almost four years now. For four years, it has been nothing at all. The knob is just a little wet when I slide my hand around it, the hinges silent as I push open the door.

‘Okay,’ I half-think, half-say, trembling, sliding into the room and shutting the door behind me. ‘It’s okay.’ Tears leap out of my lashes as though they’ve been hiding there. It doesn’t feel like I actually cried them. I sit down on the bare floor, breathe, stare around the walls, also bare. One week more. Two weeks, tops. Then, just maybe, the crib, fully assembled, will burst from the closet, the dog-cat carpet will unroll itself like a torah scroll over the hardwood, the mobiles Lizzie and I made together will spring from the ceiling like streamers. Surprise!

The tears feel cold on my face, uncomfortable, but I don’t wipe them. What would be the point? I try to smile. There’s a part of me, a small sad part that feels like smiling. ‘Should I tell you a bedtime story?’

I could tell about the possum. We’d lost just the one, then, and more than a year had gone by, and Lizzie still had moments, seizures, almost, where she ripped her glasses off her face in the middle of dinner and hurled them across the apartment and jammed herself into the kitchen corner behind the stacked washer-dryer unit. I’d stand over her and say, ‘Lizzie, no,’ and try to fight what I was feeling, because I didn’t like that I was feeling it. But the more often this happened, and it happened a lot, the angrier I got. Which made me feel like such a shit.

‘Come on,’ I’d say, extra-gentle, to compensate, but of course I didn’t fool her. That’s the thing about Lizzie. I knew it when I married her, even loved it in her: she recognises the worst in people. She can’t help it. And she’s never wrong about it.

‘You don’t even care,’ she’d hiss, her hands snarled in her twisting brown hair as though she was going to rip it out like weeds.

‘Fuck you, of course I care.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything to you.’

‘It means what it means. It means we tried, and it didn’t work, and it’s awful, and the doctors say it happens all the time, and we need to try again. It’s awful but we have to deal with it, we have no choice if we want—’

‘It means we lost a child. It means our child died. You asshole.’

Once - one time - I handled that moment right. I looked down at my wife, my playmate since junior high, the perpetually sad person I made happy, sometimes, and who made everyone around her happy even though she was sad, and I saw her hands twist harder in her hair, and I saw her shoulders cave in towards her knees, and I just blurted it out.

‘You look like a lint ball,’ I told her.

Her face flew off her chest, and she glared at me. Then she threw her arms out, not smiling, not free of anything, but wanting me with her. Down I came. We were lint balls together.

Every single other time, I blew it. I stalked away. Or I started to cry. Or I fought back.

‘Let’s say that’s true,’ I’d say. ‘We lost a child. I’ll admit it, I can see how one could choose to see it that way. But I don’t feel that. By the grace of God, it doesn’t quite feel like that to me.’

‘That’s because it wasn’t inside you.’

‘That’s such . . .’ I’d start, then stop, because I didn’t really think it was. And it wasn’t what I was trying to say, anyway. ‘Lizzie. God. I’m just...I’m trying to do this well. I’m trying to get us to the place where we can try again. Where we can have a child. One that lives. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the ultimate goal?’

‘Honey, this one just wasn’t meant to be,’ Lizzie would sneer, imitating her mom, or maybe my mom, or any one of a dozen people we knew. ‘Is that what you want to say next?’

‘You know it isn’t.’

‘How about, ‘The body knows. Something just wasn’t right. These things do happen for a reason.”‘

‘Lizzie, stop.’

‘Or, Years from now, you’ll look at your child, your living, breathing, beautiful child, and you‘ll realise that you wouldn‘t have had him or her if the first one had survived. There’d be a completely different creature there. How about that one?’

‘Lizzie, goddamnit. Just shut up. I’m saying none of those things, and you know it. I’m saying I wish this had never happened. And now that it has happened, I want it to be something that happened in the past. Because I still want to have a baby with you.’

Usually, most nights, she’d sit up then. I’d hand her her glasses and she’d fix them on her face, and her small, green-grey eyes would blink as the world rushed forward. She’d look at me, not unkindly. More than once, I’d thought she was going to touch my face, my hand.

Instead, what she said was, ‘Jake. You have to understand.’ Looking through her lenses at those moments was like peering through a storm window, something I would never again get open, and through it I could see the shadows of everything Lizzie carried with her and could not bury, didn’t seem to want to. ‘Of all the things that have happened to me. All of them. You’re probably the best. And this is the worst.’

Then she’d get up, step around me and go to bed. And I’d go out to walk, past the Cliff House, past the Musée, sometimes all the way down to the ruins of the Baths, where I’d stroll along the crumbling concrete walls which once had framed the largest public bathing pool in the United States, and now framed nothing, marsh-grass and drain-water and echo. Sometimes the fog would roll over me, a long, grey ghost-tide, and I’d float off on it, in it, just another trail of living vapour combing the earth in search of a world we’d all got the idea was here somewhere. Where, I wonder, had that idea come from, and how did so many of us get it?

‘But that isn’t what you want to hear,’ I say suddenly to the not-quite-empty workroom, the cribless floor, ‘Is it?’ For a second, I panic, fight down the urge to leap to my feet and race for Lizzie. If they’ve gone back in there, then I’m too late anyway. And if they haven’t, my leaping about just might scare them in that direction. In my head, I’m casting around for something to say that will hold them while I swing my gaze back and forth, up to the ceiling and down again. I feel like a carnival barker. Hold on, there, kiddies. Step right up.

‘I was going to tell you about the possum, right? One night, maybe eight months or so after you were...’ The word curls on my tongue like a dead caterpillar. I say it anyway. ‘Born.’ Nothing screams in my face or flies at me, and my voice doesn’t break. And I think something might have fluttered across the room from me, something other than the curtains. I have to believe it did. And the damp is still in here.

‘It was pretty amazing,’ I say, fast, staring at where the flutter was as though I could pin it there. ‘Lizzie kicked me and woke me up. “You hear that” she asked. And of course, I did. Fast, hard scrabbling, click-click-click. From right in here. We came running and saw a tail disappear behind the dresser. There was a dresser, then, I made it myself, the drawers came out sideways and the handles formed kind of a pumpkin-face, just for fun, you know? Anyway, I got down on my hands and knees and found this huge, white possum staring right at me. I didn’t even know there were possums here. This one took a single look at me and keeled over with its feet in the air. Playing dead.’

I throw myself on the ground with my feet in the air. It’s like a memory, a dream, a memory of a dream, but I half-believe I feel a weight on the soles of my feet, as though something has climbed onto them. For a ride, maybe. Tears, again.

‘I got a broom. Your . . . Lizzie got a trashcan. And for the next, I don’t know, three hours, probably, we chased this thing around and around the room. We had the windows wide open, all it had to do was hop up and out. Instead, it just hid behind the dresser, playing dead, until I poked it with the broom, and then it would race along the baseboard or into the middle of the room and flip on its back again, as if to say, okay, now I’m really dead, and we couldn’t get it to go up and out. We couldn’t get it to do anything but die. Over and over and over. And . . .’

I stop, lower my legs abruptly, sit up. I don’t say the rest. How, at 3:45 in the morning, Lizzie dropped the trashcan to the floor, looked at me and burst out crying. Threw her glasses at the wall and broke one of the lenses and wept while I just stood there, so tired, with this possum belly-up at my feet and the sea air flooding the room. I’d loved the laughing. I could hardly stand up for exhaustion, and I’d loved laughing with Lizzie so goddamn much.

‘Lizzie,’ I’d said. ‘I mean, fuck. Not everything has to relate to that. Does it? Does everything we ever think or do, for the rest of our lives . . .’ But of course, it does. I think I even knew that then. And that was after only one.

‘Would you like to go for a walk?’ I say carefully. Clearly. Because this is it. The only thing I can think of, and therefore the only chance we have. How does one get a child to listen, really? I wouldn’t know. ‘We’ll go for a stroll, okay? Get nice and sleepy?’ I still can’t see anything. Most of the other times, I’ve caught half a glimpse, at some point, a trail of shadow. Turning, leaving the door cracked open behind me, I head for the living room. I slide my trenchcoat over my boxers and Green Apple T-shirt, slip my tennis shoes onto my bare feet. My ankles will be freezing. In the pocket of my coat, I feel the matchbook Heft there, the single, tiny, silver key. It has been two months, at least, since the last time they came, or at least since they let me know it. But I have stayed ready.

As I step onto our stoop, wait a few seconds, pull the door closed, I am flooded with sensory memory - it’s like being dunked - of the day I first became aware. Over two years ago, now. Over a year after the first one. That woody, tarry taste of echinacea-tea in the back of my throat, because I had a cold. Tiny strip-bandage in the webbing between my second and third fingers where I’d carved the latest six-inch splinter out of my skin the night before with the sterilised sewing needles I kept in a cup on my work bench. Smell of varnish, and seals, and salt-water. Halfway to dreaming, all but asleep, I was overcome by an overwhelming urge to put my ear to Lizzie’s womb, to sing to the new tenant in there. Almost six weeks old, at that point. I imagined seeing through my wife’s skin, watching toe- and finger-shapes forming in the red, waving wet like lines on an etch-a-sketch.

‘‘You are my sun—’’ I started, and knew, just like that, that something else was with me. There was the damp, for one thing. And an extra soundlessness in the room, right beside me. I can’t explain it. The sound of someone else listening.

I reacted on instinct, shot upright and accidentally yanked all the blankets off Lizzie and shoved out my arms at where the presence seemed to be, and Lizzie blinked awake and narrowed her spectacle-less eyes at the shape of me, the covers twisted on the bed.

‘There’s something here,’ I babbled, pushing with both hands at the empty air.

Lizzie just squinted, coolly. Finally, after a few seconds, she snatched one of my waving hands out of the air and dropped it against her belly. Her skin felt smooth, warm. My forefinger slipped into her bellybutton, felt the familiar knot of it, and I found myself aroused. Terrified, confused, ridiculous, and aroused.

‘It’s just Sam,’ she said, stunning me. It seemed impossible that she was going to let me win that fight. Then she smiled, pressed my hand to the second creature we had created together. ‘You and me and Sam.’ She pushed harder on my hand, slid it down her belly towards the centre of her.

We made love, held each other, sang to her stomach. Not until long after Lizzie had fallen asleep, just as I was dropping off at last, did it occur to me that she could have been more right than she knew. Maybe it was just us, and Sam. The first Sam, the one we lost, returning to greet his successor with us.

Of course, he hadn’t come just to listen, or to watch. But how could I have known that, then? And how did I know that that was what the presence was, anyway? I didn’t. And when it came back late the next night, with Lizzie this time sound asleep and me less startled, I slid aside to make room for it, so we could both hear. Both whisper.

Are both of you with me now, I wonder? I’m standing on my stoop and listening, feeling, as hard as I can. Please, God, let them be with me. Not with Lizzie. Not with the new one. That’s the only name we have allowed ourselves this time. The new one.

‘Come on,’ I say to my own front door, the filigrees of fog that float forever on the air of Sutro Heights, as though the atmosphere itself has gone Art Deco. ‘Please. I’ll tell you a story about the day you were born.’

I start down the warped, wooden steps towards our garage. Inside my pocket, the little silver key darts between my fingers, slippery and cool as a minnow, and I remember a story my father told me once, over a campfire, about young Hiawatha and his first trip into the forest, hunting a bear. He killed the bear with the help of a little talking silver fish he’d originally planned to eat. When the bear had been felled, Hiawatha leapt up, and he was so excited that he forgot his arrow, his bow, and the fish, which slipped silently into the shallows and was not seen or heard of again. My father, the cantor, and his Indian folktales. Coyote stories, especially. Trickster stories. I don’t know why I’m thinking of this now.

In my mouth I taste the fog, and the perpetual garlic smell from the latest building to perch at the jut of the cliffs and call itself the Cliff House - the preceding three all collapsed, or burned to the ground - and something else, too. I realise, finally, what it is, and the tears come flooding back.

What I’m remembering, this time, is Washington DC, the grass brown and dying in the blazing August sun as we raced down the Mall, from museum to museum, in a desperate, headlong hunt for cheese. We were in the ninth day of the ten-day tetracyclene programme Dr Seger had prescribed, and Lizzie just seemed tired, but I swear I could feel the walls of my intestines, raw and sharp and scraped clean, the way teeth feel after a particularly vicious visit to the dentist. I craved milk, and got nauseous just thinking about it. Drained of its germs, its soft, comforting skin of use, my body felt skeletal, a shell without me in it.

That was the point, as Dr Seger explained it to us. We’d done our Tay-Sachs, tested for lead, endured endless blood screenings to check on things like prolactin, lupus anticoagulant, TSH. We would have done more tests, but the doctors didn’t recommend them, and our insurance wouldn’t pay. ‘A couple of miscarriages, it’s really not worth intensive investigation.’ Three different doctors told us that. ‘If it happens a couple more times, we’ll know something’s really wrong.’

Dr Seger had a theory, at least, involving old bacteria lingering in the body for years, decades, tucked up in the fallopian tubes or hidden in the testicles or just adrift in the blood, riding the heart-current in an endless, mindless, circle. ‘The mechanism of creation is so delicate,’ she told us. ‘So efficiently, masterfully created. If anything gets in there that shouldn’t be, well, it’s like a bird in a jet engine. Everything just explodes.’

How comforting, I thought, but didn’t say at that first consultation, because when I glanced at Lizzie, she looked more than comforted. She looked hungry, perched on the edge of her chair with her head half over Dr Seger’s desk, so pale, thin, and hard, like a starved pigeon being teased with crumbs. I wanted to grab her hand. I wanted to weep.

As it turns out, Dr Seger may have been right. Or maybe we got lucky this time. Because that’s the thing about miscarriage: three thousand years of human medical science, and no one knows any fucking thing at all. It just happens, people say, like a bruise, or a cold. And it does, I suppose. Just happen, I mean. But not like a cold. Like dying. Because that’s what it is.

So for ten days, Dr Seger had us drop tetracyclene tablets down our throats like depth-charges, blasting everything living inside us out. And on that day in DC - we were visiting my cousin, the first time I’d managed to coax Lizzie anywhere near extended family since all this started - we’d gone to the Holocaust Museum, searching for anything strong enough to take our minds off our hunger, our desperate hope that we were scoured, healthy, clean. But it didn’t work. So we went to the Smithsonian. And three people from the front of the ticket line, Lizzie suddenly grabbed my hand and I looked at her, and it was the old Lizzie, or the ghost of her, eyes flashing under their black rims, smile instantaneous, shockingly bright.

‘Dairy,’ she said. ‘Right this second.’

It took me a breath to adjust. I hadn’t seen my wife this way in a long, long while and as I stared, the smile slipped on her face. With a visible effort, she pinned it back in place. ‘Jake. Come on.’

We paid admission, went racing past sculptures and animal dioramas and parchment documents to the cafes, where we stared at yoghurt in plastic containers - but we didn’t dare eat yoghurt - and cups of tapioca that winked, in our fevered state, like the iced-over surfaces of Canadian lakes. But none of that was what we wanted. We needed a cheddar wheel, a lasagna we could scrape free of pasta and tomatoes so we could drape our tongues in strings of crusted mozzarella. What we settled for, finally, was four giant bags of generic cheese puffs from a 7-11. We sat together on the edge of a fountain and stuffed each other’s mouths like babies, like lovers.

It wasn’t enough. The hunger didn’t abate in either of us. Sometimes I think it hasn’t since.

God, it was glorious, though. Lizzie’s lips around my orange-stained fingers, that soft, gorgeous crunch as each individual puff popped apart in our mouths, dusting our teeth and throats while spray from the fountain brushed our faces and we dreamed separate, still-hopeful dreams of children.

And that, in the end, is why I have to, you see. My two Sams. My lost, loved ones. Because maybe it’s true. It doesn’t seem like it could be, but maybe it is. Maybe, mostly, it just happens. And then, for most couples, it just stops happening one day. And afterwards - if only because there isn’t time - you start to forget. Not what happened. Not what was lost. But what the loss meant, or at least what it felt like. I’ve come to believe that time alone will not swallow grief or heal a marriage. But perhaps filled time ...

In my pocket, my fingers close over the silver key and I take a deep breath of the damp in the air, which is mostly just Sutro Heights damp now that we’re outside. We have always loved it here, Lizzie and I. In spite of everything, we can’t bring ourselves to flee. ‘Let me show you,’ I say, trying not to plead. I’ve taken too long, I think. They’ve got bored. They’ll go back in the house. I lift the ancient, rusted padlock on our garage door, tilt it so I can see the slot in the moonlight and slide the key home.

It has been months since I’ve been out here - we use the garage for storage, not for our old Nova - and I’ve forgotten how heavy the salt-saturated wooden door is. It comes up with a creak, slides over my head and rocks unsteadily in its runners. How, I’m thinking, did I first realise that the presence in my room was my first, unborn child? The smell, I guess, like an unripe lemon, fresh and sour all at once. Lizzie’s smell. Or maybe it was the song springing unbidden, over and over, to my lips. ‘When I awoke dear. I was mistaken.’ Those things, and the fact that now, these last times, there seem to be two of them.

The first thing I see, once my eyes adjust, is my grandfather glaring out of his portrait at me. I can even remember the man who painted it; he lived next door to my family when I was little and Lizzie lived down the block. My grandfather called him ‘Dolly’, I don’t know why. Or maybe Dali. I don’t think so, though.

Certainly, there’s nothing surreal about the portrait. Just my grandfather, his hair thread-thin and wild on his head like a spiderweb swinging free, his lips flat, crushed together, his ridiculous lumpy potato of a body under his perpetually half-zipped judge’s robes. And there are his eyes, one blue, one green, which he once told me allowed him to see 3-D, before I knew that everyone could. A children’s rights activist before there was a name for such things, a three-time candidate for a state bench seat and three-time loser, he’d made an enemy of his daughter, my mother, by wanting a son so badly. And he’d made a disciple out of me by saving Lizzie’s life: turning her father in to the cops, then making sure that he got thrown in jail, then forcing both him and his whole family into counselling, getting him work when he got out, checking in on him every single night, no matter what, for six years, until Lizzie was away and free. Until eight months ago, on the day Dr Seger confirmed that we were pregnant for the third time, his portrait hung beside the Pinocchio clock on the living room wall. Now it lives here. One more casualty.

‘Your namesake,’ I say to the air, my two ghosts. But I can’t take my eyes off my grandfather. Tonight is the end for him, too, I realise. The real end, where the ripples his life created in the world glide silently to stillness. Could you have seen them, I want to ask, with those 3-D eyes that saw so much? Could you have saved them? Could you have thought of another, better way? Because mine is going to hurt. ‘His name was Nathan, really. But he called us “Sam”. Your mother and me, we were both “Sam”. That’s why . . .’

That’s why Lizzie let me win that argument, I realise. Not because she’d let go of the idea that the first one had to have a name, was a specific, living creature, a child of ours. But because she’d rationalised. Sam was to be the name, male or female. So whatever the first child had been, the second would be the other. Would have been. You see, Lizzie, I think to the air, wanting to punch the walls of the garage, scream to the cliffs, break down in tears. You think I don’t know. But I do.

If we survive this night, and our baby is still with us in the morning, and we get to meet him someday soon, he will not be named Sam. He will not be Nathan, either. My grandfather would have wanted Sam.

‘Goodbye, Grandpa,’ I whisper, and force myself towards the back of the garage. There’s no point in drawing this out, surely. Nothing to be gained. But at the door to the meat-freezer, the one the game-hunter who rented our place before us used to store wax-paper packets of venison and elk, I suddenly stop.

I can feel them. They’re still here. They have not gone back to Lizzie. They are not hunched near her navel, whispering their terrible, soundless whispers. That’s how I imagine it happening, only it doesn’t feel like imagining. And it isn’t all terrible. I swear I heard it happen to the second Sam. The first Sam would wait, watching me, hovering near the new life in Lizzie like a hummingbird near nectar, then darting forward when I was through singing, or in between breaths, and singing a different sort of song, of a whole other world, parallel to ours, free of terrors or at least this terror, the one that just plain living breeds in everything alive. Maybe that world we’re all born dreaming really does exist, but the only way to it is through a trapdoor in the womb. Maybe it’s better where my children are. God, I want it to be better.

‘You’re by the notebooks,’ I say, and I almost smile, and my hand slides volitionlessly from the handle of the freezer door, and I stagger towards the boxes stacked up, haphazard, along the back wall. The top one on the nearest stack is open slightly, its cardboard damp and reeking when I peel the flaps all the way back.

There they are. The plain, perfect-bound school composition notebooks Lizzie bought as diaries, to chronicle the lives of her first two children in the 270 or so days before we were to know them. ‘I can’t look in those,’ I say aloud, but I can’t help myself. I lift the top one from the box, place it on my lap, sit down. It’s my imagination, surely, that weight on my knees, as though something else has just slid down against me. Like a child, to look at a photo album. Tell me, Daddy, about the world without me in it. Suddenly, I’m embarrassed. I want to explain. That first notebook, the other one, is almost half my writing, not just Lizzie’s. But this one ... I was away, Sam, on a selling trip, for almost a month. And when I came back ... I couldn’t. Not right away. I couldn’t even watch your mom doing it. And two weeks later . . .

‘The day you were born,’ I murmur, as though it was a lullaby. Goodnight moon. ‘We went to the redwoods, with the Giraffes.’ Whatever it is, that weight on me, shifts a little. Settles. ‘That isn’t really their name, Sam. Their name is Girard. Giraffe is what you would have called them, though. They would have made you. They’re so tall. So funny. They would have put you on their shoulders to touch EXIT signs and ceiling tiles. They would have dropped you upside down from way up high and made you scream.’ Goodnight nobody. That terrifying, stupid, blank page near the end of that book. What’s it doing there, anyway?

‘This was December, freezing cold, but the sun was out. We stopped at a gas station on our way to the woods, and I went to get Bugles, because that’s what Giraffes eat, the ones we know, anyway. Your mom went to the restroom. She was in there a long time. And when she came out, she just looked at me. And I knew.’

My fingers have pushed the notebook open, pulled the pages apart. They’re damp, too. Half of them are ruined, the words, in multicoloured inks, like pressed flowers on the pages, smeared out of shape, though their meaning remains clear.

‘I waited. I stared at your mother. She stared at me. Joseph - Mr Giraffe - came in to see what was taking so long. Your mom just kept on staring. So I said, “Couldn’t find the Bugles.” Then I grabbed two bags of them, turned away, and paid. And your mom got in the van beside me, and the Giraffes put on their bouncy, happy, Giraffe music, and we kept going.

‘When we got to the woods, we found them practically empty, and there was this smell, even though the trees were dead. It wasn’t like spring. You couldn’t smell pollen, or see buds, just sunlight and bare branches and this mist floating up, catching on the branches and forming shapes like the ghosts of leaves. I tried to hold your mother’s hand, and she let me at first, and then she didn’t. She disappeared into the mist. The Giraffes had to go find her in the end, when it was time to go home. It was almost dark as we got in the van, and none of us were speaking. I was the last one in. And all I could think, as I took my last breath of that air, was, Can you see this? Did you see the trees, my sweet son, daughter or son, on your way out of the world? 

Helpless, now, I drop my head, bury it in the wet air as though there were a child’s hair there, and my mouth is moving, chanting the words in the notebook on my lap. I only read them once, on the night Lizzie wrote them, when she finally rolled over, with no tantrum, no more tears, nothing left, closed the book against her chest and went to sleep. But I remember them, still. There’s a sketch, first, what looks like an acorn with a dent in the top. Next to it Lizzie has scrawled, ‘You. Little rice-bean.’ On the day before it died. Then there’s the list, like a rosary: ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I don’t get to know you. I’m so sorry for wishing this was over, now, for wanting the bleeding to stop. I’m so sorry that I will never have the chance to be your mother. I’m so sorry you will never have the chance to be in our family. I’m so sorry that you are gone.’

I recite the next page, too, without even turning to it. The I-don’t-wants: ‘a D & C; a phone call from someone who doesn’t know, to ask how I’m feeling; a phone call from someone who does, to ask how I am; to forget this, ever; to forget you.’

And then, at the bottom of the page: ‘I love fog. I love seals. I love the ghosts of Sutro Heights. I love my mother, even though. I love Jake. I love having known you. I love having known you. I love having known you.’

With one long, shuddering breath, as though I’m trying to slip out from under a sleeping cat, I straighten my legs, lay the notebook to sleep in its box, tuck the flaps around it and stand. It’s time. Not past time, just time. I return to the freezer, flip the heavy white lid.

The thing is, even after I looked in here, the same day I brought my grandfather out and wound up poking around the garage, lifting boxtops, touching old, unused bicycles and cross-country skis, I would never have realised. If she’d done the wrapping in wax paper, laid it in the bottom of the freezer, I would have assumed it was meat, and I would have left it there. But Lizzie is Lizzie, and instead of wax paper, she’d used red and blue construction paper from her classroom, folded the paper into perfect squares with perfect corners, and put a single star on each of them. So I lifted them out, just as I’m doing now.

They’re so cold, cradled against me. The red package. The blue one. So light. The most astounding thing about the wrapping, really, is that she managed it all. How do you get paper and tape around nothing and get it to hold its shape? From another nearby box, I lift a gold and green blanket. I had it on my bottom bunk when I was a kid. The first time Lizzie lay on my bed - without me in it, she was just lying there - she wrapped herself in this. I spread it on the cold cement floor, and gently lay the packages down.

In Hebrew, the word for miscarriage translates, literally, as something dropped. It’s no more accurate a term than any of the others humans have generated for the whole, apparently incomprehensible, process of reproduction, right down to ‘conception’. Is that what we do? Conceive? Do we literally dream our children? Is it possible that miscarriage, finally, is just waking up to the reality of the world a few months too soon?

Gently, with the tip of my thumbnail, I slit the top of the red package, fold it open. It comes apart like origami, so perfect, arching hack against the blanket. I slit the blue package, pull back its flaps. Widening the opening. One last parody of birth.

How did she do it, I wonder? The first time, we were home, she was in the bathroom. She had me bring Ziplock baggies, ice. For testing, she said. They’ll need it for testing. But they’d taken it for testing. How had she got it back? And the second one had happened - finished happening in a gas station bathroom somewhere between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Muir Woods. And she’d said nothing, asked for nothing. ‘Where did she keep you?’ I murmur, staring down at the formless, red-grey spatters, the bunched-up tissue that might have been tendon one day, skin one day. Sam, one day. In the red package, there is more, a hump of frozen something with strings of red spiralling out from it, sticking to the paper, like the rays of an imploding sun. In the blue package, there are some red dots, a few strands of filament. Virtually nothing at all.

The song comes, and the tears with them. You’ll never know. Dear. How much I love you. Please don’t take. Please don’t take. I think of my wife upstairs in our life, sleeping with her arms around her child. The one that won’t be Sam, but just might live.

The matches slide from my pocket. Pulling one out of the little book is like ripping a blade of grass from the ground. I scrape it to life, and its tiny light warms my hand, floods the room, flickering as it sucks the oxygen out of the damp. Will this work? How do I know? For all I know, I am imagining it all. The miscarriages were bad luck, hormone deficiencies, a virus in the blood, and the grief that got in me was at least as awful as what got in Lizzie, it just lay dormant longer. And now it has made me crazy.

But if it is better where you are, my Sams. And if you’re here to tell the new one about it, to call him out. ..

‘The other night, dear,’ I find myself saying, and then I’m singing it, like a Shabbat blessing, a Hanukkah song, something you offer to the emptiness of a darkened house to keep the dark and the emptiness back one more week, one more day. ‘As I lay sleeping. I dreamed I held you. In my arms.’

I lower the match to the red paper, to the blue, and as my children melt, become dream, once more, I swear I hear them sing to me.

for both of you

* * * *

Glen Hirshberg lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son. His novelette, ‘Mr Dark’s Carnival’, which was first printed in Ash-Tree Press’s Shadows and Silence and later appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Honor: Fourteenth Annual Collection, was nominated for both the International Horror Guild Award and the World Fantasy Award. A second novelette, ‘Struwwelpeter’, appeared originally on SciFi.Com and has been selected for both The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Thirteen. His latest-novelette, ‘Dancing Men’, will appear in Tor’s 2003 anthology, The Dark, and his first novel, The Snowman’s Children, is published in the United States by Carroll & Graf. Currently he is putting the final touches to a collection of ghost stories and working on a new novel. About ‘The Two Sams’, he admits: ‘This is probably the most personal story I have put to paper, and therefore, hopefully, the most self-explanatory. Most of my ghost stories originally were conceived to be told to my students, but I have only tried reading this aloud once. Never again...’