The New Girl by Harriet Walker

The New Girl by Harriet Walker

Author:Harriet Walker [Walker, Harriet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-19T00:00:00+00:00


1

A world without children is a world with no future.

And given how hard I have worked to forget the past, where does that leave me?

These are the thoughts on repeat in my brain, in time with my steps as I pace the streets trying to forget. No, not forget—I won’t allow the image of my son to fade, yet I can already feel the details of him escaping me.

The scent of him, rust and caramel, is evaporating as if on a breeze. The noises he made, the soft rasping snuffles before the harsher noises began, are fading as the days whiz by without him in them. The humbling sense of completeness that Charles and I felt as we held him—that won’t go. But I worry that the profound emptiness that hangs like a weight in my arms never will, either.

I walk the streets trying to numb myself, not to forget. To take the remorseless edge off what has happened to me. As if by putting one foot in front of the other over and over I can somehow wear down the razor’s edge of my feelings.

During the week, I get up at dawn to catch the train with the city crowd. Chancery Lane, St. Paul’s, Aldgate, Bank, Canary Wharf. Gray streets lined with gray buildings where gray people walk to work. I go there just to exist. In the office districts, you aren’t assaulted by prams and the women who wheel them around every corner. A pedestrian in London’s pinstripe postcodes is just that—not a man or a woman or a wife. Not a mother.

In these childless streets, I seek to remember myself. The feeling never goes, even if I can banish the visuals for a short time. There’s no room for anything else, for everything else. For things I used to think I needed. For people I used to think I cared about. For the mistakes I’ve made and the secrets I’ve kept.

Maybe that’s why I feel them bubbling toward the surface again after all this time.

On the weekend, I can’t escape as easily. I risk bumping into people—families, fortunate and whole—heading for the shops, the museums, the theaters. Places you go when life is something to be enjoyed rather than endured.

Sometimes I walk near our house, but that’s difficult when you live, deliberately, in a part of town that people move to, deliberately, when they want to start a family. I never for an instant thought that we’d be any different from the rest of them, the ones who come home with a car seat full of bundle topped off with a little white hat. We brought ours back with us too, only Charles had stuffed his bloodstained shirt into it. That was what we carried over our threshold.

I can’t say it is getting easier. I can’t even say it is getting less hard. The physical signs have gone now. My breasts were taut with milk that went undrunk for nearly two weeks; the pain of it,



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