The Void

Maegan Poland

We moved to southern Louisiana during a record heat wave. For nearly two weeks the air sweltered above one hundred degrees. One day the news declared another record: 110 degrees Fahrenheit. A pecan tree stood tall and dying in the backyard. One small limb with a smattering of green leaves persisted. The rest of the branches were barren, cankerous, or full of webworm nests grown thick like cotton candy and full of decaying leaves and casings. We knew it was only a matter of time. Our two little dogs were dying too—one from kidney disease and the other from an intestinal tumor. The webworms hatched and writhed until they baked to death in the hot sun. As the last leaves fell, we took our dogs to the vet—one right after the other—to say our final goodbyes. It felt like an omen, watching the tree gasp its last breath not long after our arrival.

We had rented the midcentury cottage sight unseen after I’d accepted a new job teaching at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. My husband and I were living in Philadelphia, and we couldn’t justify an in-person apartment search: I was recovering from a flare of Crohn’s disease while working full time and we were new parents, tending to our infant son. On Zillow, the photos were bright. The overexposed images did not reveal the stains on the white walls or the peeling linoleum covering the particle board of the kitchen counter. They could not reveal the foul odor of the fickle HVAC system. Before signing the lease, we did not think to demand proof of life for the towering tree in the backyard. We wanted a lawn for our elderly dogs to roam. A place for a kiddie pool. After pandemic years spent without any green space, we imagined blowing bubbles with our son and watching him toddle through a sprinkler.

 

After we moved in, each time a storm rolled through, a large branch would fall from the dead pecan tree. I worried that the taller branches would reach the house and crush the walls of my baby’s room. My son never was a good sleeper, so I eventually succumbed to sleeping beside him on a floor mattress. During storms, I imagined how my body might save him. How I might cushion him from the crumbling walls without smothering him. When lightning flickered through the blinds at night, I stared at him—the dark crescents of his lashes, the little hand resting on me, the rhythmic puckering of his lips when perhaps he dreamed of milk. He can’t be real, I often still think. I’ve slipped into a parallel dimension where someone granted my wish. I fear being sucked back into the old world without him in it.

 

A new town meant new doctors. When I set up my gynecologist appointment, the nurse called me back to gather my medical history. She asked me how many pregnancies I’d had. “One,” I said before my brain caught up to my mouth. “I mean, one that made it. One that . . .”

“One live birth,” she said helpfully.

“Yes.”

“And how many pregnancies?”

“Six. If you count chemical pregnancies or early, early losses,” I said. “They were all very early.” I always feel like I need to emphasize the very. My latest loss didn’t quite make it to six weeks. I worry about misrepresenting the degree of tragedy. I didn’t have a medical procedure to finish the miscarriage. There weren’t any long-term physical effects. At six weeks, the embryo would be, at best, a fetal pole with a yolk sac.

“So five miscarriages then,” the nurse said, and my chest tightened at the word.

I was offered an ultrasound after one of my miscarriages. I remember deciding there wouldn’t be much point to it. But later, when I was pregnant with my son, I had an early ultrasound, and I saw the gestational sac and a hint of what might be the yolk sac forming. Suddenly, the pregnancy felt more real.

Now I wish I’d had that ultrasound that was offered after my loss. I wish I could picture the space my body might have already begun to form for the life that never was.

 

We did so many tests. Some were painful. At first, all had normal results. But after the fifth pregnancy, we discovered my FSH was prematurely skyrocketing. I was quickly approaching forty, yes, but my hormones were much worse than expected even for that advanced maternal age. The doctors said I was not a good candidate for IVF. It was highly unlikely that I would have a genetic child.

“So it’s game over,” I said to a nurse when she gave me the lab results.

“We don’t like to use that phrase,” she said, “but it usually is time to look at other options.”

Since we had insurance coverage for an IVF cycle, we said we wanted to proceed anyway. I expected it to fail. We expected to pursue other options—maybe an egg donor or maybe adoption—only not yet.

A few days before I was to begin injections, I found out I was pregnant.

My husband was kneeling on the floor, scooping dog kibble when I plunked the positive test on the kitchen counter. We laughed at the lack of ceremony. Privately, I was beyond sanctifying such moments when I knew where they would likely lead. We spoke to the nurse about how this would delay the IVF and calculated when we could get back on track if this pregnancy did not stick. When this pregnancy did not stick, we all seemed to be saying with our hypotheticals and careful tones.

Sometimes I bled. Between classes, I would duck into a bathroom stall and check my underwear. A few times I saw what I feared and cried before returning to the classroom to teach.

But the bleeding stopped. The pregnancy continued.

In the early days, we were too scared to name him. Upon seeing the gestational sac on the monitor, I called him the void. We put sonogram pictures of the void on our fridge. We read the emails about his fruit-sized stages of growth and would declare, “The void is a kumquat! The void is a fig!”

I went to the dermatologist and asked what pregnancy-safe medications I could take for my worsening acne.

“Congratulations!” the nurse said, latching onto the pregnancy news.

“We’ll see,” I said.

The nurse eyed me warily before telling me she would fetch the doctor.

At night, the hormones fueled my OCD and I, an agnostic, would perform incantations. “Stick around void,” I’d say. “Be a happy void. Be a healthy void.” Then I would knock on the wooden floorboard three times. The number of knocks multiplied as my belly grew. I needed more magic. More protection.

 

Picturing hurricanes and counting the fallen branches, we asked if the tree could come down. The landlord said no. We could break our lease and leave, but the tree would stay. We debated moving into a different rental or removing the tree ourselves and putting the expense on our credit card. We reviewed our finances. The move to Louisiana had been more expensive than we were quoted. Our house in Philly wasn’t selling, and we were paying rent on top of a mortgage. We were already in the red on a part-time nanny we’d hired when we couldn’t get into any reputable daycares. Before the move, my intrusive thoughts demanded that I buy an anti-choking device, a breathable crib mattress, and organic produce for my son. I gave up candles and upgraded our air filters. I bought gripper socks because I had daily visions of falling down the stairs with my baby in my arms. But now, financially wrecked by the move and our unsellable house, we decided we would stay with the dead tree. As each storm neared, I fretted that our frugality would harm our baby.

 

The second trimester came, but the void remained the void. After the anatomy scan, when our anxieties were granted a brief reprieve, my bookish husband and I began discussing names in earnest. To our dismay, no literary names would satisfy us. All our favorite books featured flawed protagonists, or the optics were off. Savage Detectives? My husband is primarily descended from Canadian Royalists and Irish Catholics. Ulysses? I love Leopold’s earthy zest for life, but there’s that awkward beach scene.

Feeling like we had failed as devout readers, we turned to embarrassingly basic baby name sites. List after list, we gravitated to Parker. A keeper of the land. Yes, we knew it historically had more to do with tending the hunting grounds for royals but still, a keeper of the land. In the face of devastating climate change, it felt hopeful. A name like a prayer.

 

But still we hesitated to name him until at 28 weeks I went into contractions and had to be admitted into the hospital. There had been gunfire on the street outside, and I slipped while lowering myself to the ground, my belly slamming into the hardwood floor. From my hospital bed, I searched statistics on his odds of survival. Faced with potentially losing him, we found that he was already Parker. Now I named him in my incantations.

 

Stick around Parker. Be a healthy Parker. Be a happy Parker. Knock on wood, knock on wood, knock on wood.

 

He arrived healthy at thirty-nine weeks, but everything still felt perilous. In my last month of pregnancy, the city tore down the rowhouse adjoining ours and damaged the party wall. During repairs, we worried about the sound of construction on his tiny ears. My husband measured the decibels. We rented a nearby Airbnb on particularly loud days. Even after the construction was over, we still worried about the recurring threat of nearby gunfire. We read an article about lead poisoning in an industrial part of Philly. We tested the dust from the windowsills, mopped the floors, and frequently wiped Parker’s hands. During a wave of RSV, flu, and COVID, when Parker was still only six weeks old, we forbid relatives from flying to visit him unless they could mask while traveling and avoid crowds in the week preceding their visit. Then I became sick from Crohn’s disease and had to be hospitalized. We stressed over the effect my medications would have on him while breastfeeding. I lost days to reading articles in medical journals, trying to grasp the expert vocabulary and wrap my mind around the level of risk for drugs that had limited data. I repeatedly asked each of my doctors and the pediatrician about anything and everything. No matter what I read or heard, nothing felt safe.

 

Recently, my husband’s parents visited, and my mother-in-law immediately commented upon the pecan tree. “You have to take care of that,” she said. She echoed my own concerns, telling us it could fall on the house.

I googled statistics about trees falling. Immediately I found a news story that amplified my nightmares. There are multiple reports of stormy nights toppling trees into houses, crushing children in their beds. In Pennsylvania last year, a tree killed a toddler in his backyard. In Indiana, a tree killed two small children in a golf cart after picnicking with their parents in a park. The parents, grief-stricken, coped by trying to prevent this from happening to others. But how to prevent death by falling tree in a world that desperately needs trees to cool the atmosphere? The U.S. Department of Agriculture warns about hazard trees with “broken tops” or “numerous downed limbs, ants, or an abundance of woodpecker holes” as this may indicate “internal rot.”

The pecan tree has a broken top. There are numerous downed limbs. There are no leaves or needles. I think about our wish to let our son finally have a green space where he can roam around blowing bubbles or investigating dandelion fluff. Now I consider the entire backyard a hazard.

 

Maybe in the multiverse, in some other version of this world, I would not have struggled with pregnancy loss and a dead tree in the backyard wouldn’t be a big deal. The stories of losses by fallen trees are grim, but the statistics are extraordinarily rare. One study likened the risk of injury by “tree failure” to that of a shark bite, which is extremely unlikely. I am well aware when I read the news that there are scarier statistics and riskier places and situations for raising a child. I shouldn’t feel like one dead pecan tree in my backyard is a five-alarm fire. But I cannot shake the tenuous feeling that this world or fate is one of many, like a flimsy transparency film laid over darker worlds. In this delicate world, the tree is a threat and a reminder. The tree is the void that never fills, that never finds its way to my lap to smile back at me.

 

This morning, nine months after the move, I stared at the current pile of branches felled by last night’s storm. They are too large for the city to take. They are your problem, the property manager told us. We must hire someone to cut and haul the branches away, but we will still be stuck with what remains of the tree.

 

“I’ll just let the branches rot there,” I told my husband over coffee.

 

I imagine the rotting. I would like to imagine something pretty and hopeful. The way the branches will protect the wild grass and flowers. They’ll grow tall and thick. Ferns will glom onto the peeling bark. Perhaps a sapling or two will sprout. The possums, raccoons, and feral cats will seek refuge there, nesting in the overgrowth. From the barren detritus, they will make a home. But the metaphor feels forced, and no amount of wordsmithery will erase the dead tree staring back at me.

There is no culmination. No courtroom standoff where I will triumphantly fling the phrase “hazard tree” and some local ordinance at the judge. No near miss with the tree that forces me to overcome my postpartum anxiety, to accept the terror of loving a child who almost never came to be and whose impossible existence feels like a ghost I have mourned for years only to now find him giggling at the shadows my hands make on the wall when the afternoon sun spills golden into his bedroom. We will leave quietly before the next hurricane season and the dead tree will become someone else’s problem.

We will find a new home. Our safety checklist has grown longer. For old houses, we will ask about a history of lead testing. I’ll consider which room—the most interior with the fewest windows—will be safest to ride out a storm. This time, I’ll inspect each tall tree on the property–

 

As I wrote that last line, I felt the house shake and heard a crash and a prolonged rumbling. I rushed to the window, but the tree still stood tall. I ran out the front door to discover a plume of white dust or smoke rising from the property across the street, one door down. A silver sedan’s hood was crumpled into the unyielding corner of a blue cottage. By the time I reached the street, the driver’s seat was already empty and a cluster of men hovered near the vehicle, all looking unscathed but befuddled. A woman paced nearby dialing 911. I asked a neighbor what happened. “Probably a drunk driver,” he said. “That’s why I won’t live on the corner of a busy street. Too many accidents.”

 

I add that to my list.