Stone Baby

A CT scan leads to a surprising discovery in this short fiction from Australia.

Clara’s first (and last) acting role was that of Medusa, the Greek monster. She was ten when Mrs. McCarthy picked her for the part. It was only later, some decades later, that Clara wondered about her teacher’s decision. Had she detected a hardness in Clara’s gaze or (worse!) a quiet wickedness about her being? But then, maybe Clara was overthinking it. Perhaps Mrs. McCarthy had simply deemed Clara to be the pupil least likely to stuff up the operation of the elaborate Medusa headdress—a papier-mâché crown with a porcupine-like array of unconvincing glowstick snakes. 

There was nothing particularly challenging about the role of Medusa. The Gorgon featured for only five minutes of the excruciating, two-hour-long production—a pipe-cleaner-and-tea-towel-festooned flight through centuries of classical antiquity. Every rehearsal, Mrs. McCarthy instructed Clara to slink along the central aisle of the assembly hall, hissing at imagined audience members as she went, before finally scaling the stairs and arriving on stage to be greeted—if one can call a cardboard and tinfoil sword to the throat a greeting—by a golden-haired Perseus. Perseus was played by Tom Smyth, who would have been lovely if not for the buttonlike warts all over his fingers.

Clara had no issue with any of these stage directions. It was the death scene she struggled with. At rehearsal, the poor girl found she simply could not do what she was being asked to do, which was to produce a primal scream that, in Mrs. McCarthy’s words, would flood the ears of every man, woman, and child in the assembly hall, even Billy, the road-crossing supervisor, who had recently been fitted with hearing aids. In retrospect, Mrs. McCarthy may have had some troubles of her own.

When the week of opening night arrived and Clara was yet to unleash a single scream, her teacher threatened to give the role to Lexi Bowles—a girl from grade six who supposedly had a Hitchcockian set of lungs on her. Then, and only then, did Clara find her voice. Oh, how she shrieked! Mrs. McCarthy’s painted eyebrows momentarily disappeared behind her thick black fringe. 

Oh, how she shrieked! Mrs. McCarthy’s painted eyebrows momentarily disappeared behind her thick black fringe.

It had been two decades since Clara had visited Dr. Alderman’s rooms. In that time, they had been refurbished. Now, instead of cards and photos pinned to an oversized corkboard, there were large screens with photo montages of all the babies Dr. Alderman had delivered over the years. Clara did not read or look at her phone while she waited, preferring to surreptitiously observe the other women in the waiting area and try to pick out the pregnant ones—some from their obvious bumps and others from the (uneasy but definite) smugness in their faces. How cruel, Clara thought, to lump everybody together in one space. She stood up and went to the water cooler, prompted not by thirst but by a hope that the pump of blood through her muscles would refresh her thoughts.

Clara’s mouth was still full of cold water when she heard Dr. Alderman call her name. She swallowed hard—so hard she felt a pain and worried she had pulled a muscle—but she smiled through her discomfort, conscious of how many precious seconds the doctor had already wasted watching her throw away her paper cup and fumble with her handbag. She followed him into the consulting room, her eyes fixed on his back. Dr. Alderman had grown wide in the decades between Clara’s appointments. She imagined him like a tree, acquiring a new layer of truncal adiposity with the passage of each year. 

The room was the same but somehow appeared larger. Clara had expected it to feel smaller, the way a family home can seem smaller to a returning child. But then, why would it? Unlike Dr. Alderman, Clara was not growing. If anything, since the perimenopause, she felt as if she were fading, shrinking, imploding like a distant star. Indeed, it struck Clara that the doctor’s office—with its tall windows and expansive views of the city—would be perfect for stargazing. She wondered if the gynecologist and his family (extensive now, with a couple of pink-faced grandchildren added to the photo frames on his desk) gathered here to watch the fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

He did not look at her but at the computer, and this was a relief. Clara studied the way the screen’s white light played with the fissures of his face. He was an old man now. Retirement could not be far away.

“It was good of your family doctor to organize the CT scan,” he said. 

“Oh yes, she’s helpful that way.” This was how Clara was with doctors: vapid and sycophantic.

This was how Clara was with doctors: vapid and sycophantic.

Dr. Alderman didn’t speak for several minutes. Clara could tell he was reading the report of the CT scan, and that he was reading it for the first time. When he eventually swiveled around on his fancy leather chair to face her, he wore a look Clara recognized: the look of a man weary at the prospect of breaking bad news when his stomach was grumbling for lunch.

Sometimes, after the divorce, Clara would drive to Greg’s house. He never noticed her: an upsetting detail to Clara in the beginning but which she now found freeing, as if she were a spirit observing her widowed husband pursuing his second life. 

There was a shady spot beneath a paperbark tree across the street from his townhouse, where Clara would park her car. His children were grown now, almost adults, but they still lived at home. Occasionally, Clara would spot them. The daughter took after her mother with dark hair and a long, flat-chested torso, but the son was all Greg—short and squat and muscular.

Clara remembered the way Greg’s face had burst into a grin when Dr. Alderman had read out the results of his semen analysis. It reminded her of a child being told he had passed a test at school with flying colors. She couldn’t help but wonder if Greg had imagined this suburban life back then—his second chance with a younger, more fertile woman. It had never come up in their arguments. Greg was not that cruel. Instead, like most couples, they had fought about wet towels and empty toilet rolls and whose turn it was to stack the dishwasher, but Clara was convinced their marriage had ended the day they’d given up on IVF—each ensuing battle haunted by the ghosts of the children they would never have.

As it turned out, Clara didn’t have cancer. The mass her GP had felt in her lower abdomen was not an enormous tumor, as they had feared, but something exceedingly rare and (mercifully!) completely benign. A medical curiosity, Dr. Alderman had called it. So curious, in fact, he planned—with Clara’s permission (which was given promptly and effusively)—to write a case study about it. 

Not cancer but a lithopedion, derived from the Greek lithos, meaning stone, and paidion, meaning child. Dr. Alderman had explained the phenomenon in that hurried, matter-of-fact, jargon-heavy way he had, as an ectopic, abdominal pregnancy that had died and become calcified. It was only once Clara got home and searched the internet that she understood exactly what had occurred.

Clara tried to work out the date of conception. After she and Greg had finished with the fertility treatments, they’d only had sex a handful of times. This act, too, had become blighted by failed dreams. But Clara liked to imagine it had happened the very last time they’d fucked, soon after the divorce papers had been signed, when they’d got tipsy together on a bottle of Penfolds Grange Shiraz—a wedding gift they’d saved for a special occasion. 

Back when she and Greg were dating, Clara had declared, somewhat defiantly, that she didn’t want children. When she was growing up, she’d preferred chasing boys and climbing trees to playing with dolls. After university, as her friends had started marrying and getting pregnant, Clara had worried she lacked a necessary and natural maternal instinct. She feared she would make a testy parent, a little like her own mother, constantly on the lookout for escape. But Greg had wanted children, and for a long time Clara had wanted Greg—as much as Clara was capable of wanting anything. Because (as she was now coming to realize) she only ever really wanted something the moment it was about to be taken away.

She felt a new tenderness toward him, knowing they shared this secret twenty-year-long pregnancy.

When Greg’s car pulled up in front of the house, Clara’s heart fluttered. She felt a new tenderness toward him, knowing they shared this secret twenty-year-long pregnancy. She wondered how he would react, if he knew. Greg, we had a child together. His brain doing the calculations—a grown man, a uni student, a new mate to share a beer with at the pub—but the child died. Grief and relief entwined. Only it was not really a child at all. It was an impossible conversation. And yet Clara wanted to try. 

She could smell dinner cooking as she crossed the quiet street and approached the house. A curry, Indian, possibly a korma. Her stomach murmured. She had skipped lunch. She imagined the children setting the table, Greg pouring cold water into glasses. They would be startled by the doorbell, and they would ask, with irritated voices, who it could possibly be. Greg would say that only con men and scared neighbors rang doorbells anymore, and he would joke about how even the Mormons had moved on. 

Clara skirted the edge of the small property, not daring to lift the latch on the gate or step inside the fence, and so she was hidden by the shrubbery when a woman emerged from the townhouse to drag a wheelie bin along the driveway. She gasped when she saw Clara.

“Can I help you?” 

Greg’s wife looked different up close, older but somehow more beautiful with eyes that, in the final low beams of the sun, glinted copper.

Clara had spent countless nights resenting this person who now stood, like a gift, before her. Her replacement. A woman blessed with a uterus that was not hostile (Dr. Alderman’s preferred adjective for describing Clara’s). Clara had expected to detect an arrogance—at the very least, an annoying contentment—in the face of her nemesis, but instead she discovered only sorrow. This surprised her. It was like looking in a mirror.

The night before the operation, Clara spent hours examining photos of stone babies on the internet. Like any collection of beings, they were an eclectic bunch. Some resembled thousand-year-old fossils—lumps of rock with a few hints of human: the arc of a rib, the blade of a shoulder, the eggshell-smooth dome of a skull. Others resembled props from early alien movies—yellow otherworldly creatures with giant holes for eyes. Clara wondered which category her stone child fell into: a fossil or an alien? Dr. Alderman had walked her through the CT scan, moving up and down and zooming in and out, pointing and naming bones. Here a femur, there a pelvis. He spoke rapidly and with authority, but to Clara the white shapes were as formless and intangible as clouds drifting across a gray sky.

Clara had not spoken to Greg. She’d chickened out upon seeing his wife’s copper-colored eyes. Instead, she’d mumbled something about having once lived in the townhouse a long time ago, before running like a madwoman to her car. Once inside the safety of its cabin, Clara examined the fragment of her face in the rearview mirror. She’d applied makeup for the occasion, and now lines of mascara fell like black tears from the corners of her eyes. What had she been thinking, dolling herself up like that? Perhaps she hadn’t been thinking. Perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps that had always been the problem. The problem with her. A paucity of thought. 

The hospital was an absurd place. In their powder-blue scrubs and booties, the doctors resembled Smurfs—Clara couldn’t take them seriously. The nurses jerked curtains closed and pretended they were as good as walls—that they silenced the wails of the teenager in recovery and the loud complaints from the woman in the adjacent cubicle. I bled for months afterward. Months! I worried my entire womb had fallen out of me. Was that how Clara would feel by the end of the day? As if her entire uterus had fallen out of her? Dr. Alderman had said the lithopedion might be contributing to Clara’s constipation and urinary frequency. He said she was going to feel great after the operation, like a completely different person! But what if she didn’t feel great? What if the lithopedion was like a building block in a tower of building blocks and its removal would cause everything above it to crumble? 

Clara sat in the padded chair beside the bed, awaiting further instruction. She had changed into a white robe and was holding a paper bag containing her clothes to her chest, the way a small child might clutch a soft toy. As she waited, she wondered what would happen to the stone baby once it had been removed from her body. It was an important question, maybe the most important question, and yet she hadn’t thought to ask it. It would probably be sent to a laboratory for testing, like any other tumor. Perhaps, one day, it would be placed in a jar of formaldehyde and exhibited in an anatomy museum for the viewing pleasure of medical students. 

As Clara waited, a memory seized her. It was the memory of a pebble beach somewhere in Europe. She would have been young, perhaps only five years old. The sun had been merciless, the water had been warm. Her mother had been asleep on a deck chair and Clara, painfully bored, had resorted to making friends with the stones. She remembered examining them closely and being surprised to find they were all different from each other. Some had rounded foreheads while others were pleasingly flat; a few had chips in them, glittering like desert skies at night. Clara had smuggled her favorite—a pale disc that fit perfectly into the hollow of her palm—past the interrogating eyes of the uniformed men at Melbourne airport, her heart bounding like a rabid animal beneath her ribs.

Just then, a nurse pushed a trolley into the cubicle. She checked the name on Clara’s wristband and wrapped a plastic cuff around Clara’s arm. Rather than look at each other, the two women fixed their gaze on the rectangular screen in front of them. They watched the fall of the numbers: 167, 153, 140, 128, followed by a flashing black heart. 

“You don’t happen to know what they do with it, do you?” Clara muttered. “Once it’s all over?”

“It?” the nurse mumbled, without looking up from her clipboard.

“The baby.”

That got the nurse’s attention. “The baby?” She flipped through the papers attached to her clipboard as if the baby could be found there.

“The stone . . . the lithopedion . . . the mass . . . that they’re removing from me.”

At this, the nurse stopped flicking through her papers and looked directly at Clara. It was the first time she had done so in the half-dozen times she had entered the cubicle. Clara couldn’t return her gaze, couldn’t endure the pity in her eyes.

“That’s a question best put to your surgeon,” she said. “He should be ’round in a few minutes.”

The nurse’s voice was matter-of-fact, but the hand she placed on Clara’s shoulder as she departed was warm—almost unbearably maternal. 

Alone again, Clara moved from the chair to the bed. She lay on her back and stared up at the white striplights on the ceiling. She felt the pull of gravity on her flesh, felt it dragging her tissues into soft pools around her bones. What if she needed the lithopedion, like a deep-sea diver needs a weight around his belt? What if, without it, she would float uncontrollably to the surface? What if she, like the diver, would be seized by a pain more severe than childbirth, a pain without end, a pain without remedy, an unplaceable pain that caused her body to bend in two?

The next time the curtains parted, Clara screamed. Oh, how she shrieked! If Mrs. McCarthy had been alive and around to witness it, she would have been pleased.

Melbourne