I am the younger sister of a dead baby. He was born and died in 1965–full term, but something terribly wrong happened to his brain. I never knew what, but that’s how I always think of it: Something Terribly Wrong.

One photograph exists of my mother pregnant with that child. My parents are vacationing somewhere in Europe, maybe Venice. Her hair is cut short like Audrey Hepburn’s and she wears pitch-black sunglasses. Her face is round and pretty; her belly is round and pretty.

“When were you there?” I remember asking when I was very young, and used to pore over my parents’ heavy photo albums as if they were pictorial Torah scrolls, the wisdom of all that came before me.

“Six months or so after we married,” my mother replied in a diffident voice. “Maybe longer, I don’t know. We took a belated honeymoon.”

Something felt off kilter to me even back then. But it was a haze, just a wispy thought. Much later, once I knew a lot more, I realized: of course. They married in 1964 and I was born in 1967. That pregnancy wasn’t me.

* * *

My father told me when I was seven. He and I were in the upstairs hallway of our house in Ann Arbor; Michigan, his back was to their closed bedroom door and even though it was the middle of the day, my mother was inside the darkened room, silent and alone. I must have asked to see her, or asked why she was alone in the dark.

I certainly didn’t expect his reply.

“We had a baby who died a year and a half before you were born,” he whispered. “It was a boy. If he had lived, we would have named him Philip, after my grandfather.” I don’t know why he told me at that moment—what I do remember is a gray quality to his face and voice, and my own sudden feeling that I was much older than only seven.

I knew without my father telling me that I was not to mention this ghost brother to my mother. She was a rather ghostlike figure herself in those days—I think of her curled in a corner of their bed wearing a soft, peach-colored cotton nightgown, with her too-weak glasses tilted at an angle in an attempt to sharpen her vision. I remember not wanting to touch my mother on her nightgown days.

Many things were unspoken in my family, and as the oldest (living) child, it was my job not to speak about them. The Dead Baby was A-number-one on that list. My father and I didn’t mention him again.

I thought a lot about Philip. I began to pretend he had lived to be my big brother who taught me about the lives of boys and let me wear his plaid flannel shirts. Philip and Anne. We were best friends for years in my imagination, taking care of our younger sister, Jessica (child number three, live baby number two).

When I was a teenager, after we moved to a suburb outside of New Haven, Connecticut, I would occasionally try the story out on a friend or a boy I wanted to impress, particularly when I felt silly and juvenile because of the lack of drama in my family life: married parents, two kids, suburbs, dog—boring.

“I had an older brother who died,” I would say, and watch the reaction on the face of the person across from me. If the expression was some variant of delicious shock, I would continue. “He was two years old when he died of a terrible brain disease.” Or, “He and I were inseparable as babies.”

I deliberately lied to see how it felt to be part of this story, to claim a piece of the dead baby. Then I would feel guilty, sinful. But by this time, I half-thought I had made the whole thing up anyway. Had my father really told me such a story? If so, why had we never talked about it again? I returned to the photo of my mother in Venice, where she stood demurely against a railing with gray water flowing behind her. She looked happy. I must have misunderstood the year they went to Europe, I told myself. I was the first baby; this was a picture of her pregnant with me. But I didn’t ask any questions. Questions were fragile in my family, like children. You had to be very cautious about each one, because it might have Something Terribly Wrong with it.

So I answered my own questions. I decided I had imagined everything because I wanted a story to tell.

During the first two years of college, I thought about the story of Philip occasionally. Sometimes in my fantasies he was still my older brother, helping me navigate the social and academic confusions of college. But sometimes, now, he was a newborn, and I had to take care of him. I would hold him, wrapped in blankets, and touch his tender head gently with my fingertips. I had to protect this child.

Each time I imagined him, I chided myself for making it up. When I told the rare friend or boyfriend the story, I did so with the guilty thrill that I was telling a lie—all the more reason to keep it from my parents. I was using them, using our family, to tell the story I wanted to tell, even if it wasn’t the truth.

My sister, three years younger than me, left for college when I was a senior. By then, my thoughts had moved to my adult life, my future, my next steps. I graduated and found a job in Washington, D.C; my then-boyfriend, still unemployed, followed me into my new life. This made me proud. When my mother graduated from college, she got married and followed my father into his new life.

When I packed up the car with everything I was taking from my parents’ house, preparing to drive the six hours to Washington, I kissed them good-bye. I turned to look back at them as I pulled out of the driveway. They stood on the concrete front stoop, and as I drove away, I saw my mother reach over to hold my father, saw her bury her face in his shoulder. She was crying. I started to cry, too. Why were we crying? I wondered. This was all how it was supposed to be, wasn’t it? Everything was ticking along in the well-ordered way of generations following generations. Sure, it was a moment of transition, all that. But a good one, right?

I wonder now how much my sister’s absence, along with my own departure, left enough rooms in their house empty and quiet for those wispy, off-kilter memories of Philip to creep back in. No more live children with their demands and pouts and needs to fill the gaping hole.

Later that year when I was home for a visit, my parents sat down on either side of me on the family room sofa. I was reading a magazine, once again completely unprepared for what would follow.

My father cleared his throat—a gesture that usually stood in for conversation but this time was introducing it.

“We have something important to tell you and your sister,” he said, his inflection not unlike “Four score and seven years ago….”

“Mom and I are facing something that happened at the beginning of our marriage, and it’s time you knew about it.”

I closed the magazine with ice-cold hands.

“We are mourning the loss of the baby we had before we had you,” he continued. “We never told you or Jessica about this baby because we were instructed to forget about him ourselves.

“A week before Mom’s due date, she went in for a routine check up. That night, our doctor called us at home and said, ‘There’s a problem. Come in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.’ We didn’t even ask him what the problem was, we were so naïve. No, we did what we were told in those days. That’s how it was.

Neither of my parents looked at me. My father stared straight ahead while he spoke, as if an imaginary audience sat in rapt attention before him. My mother stayed silent on my other side.

“The next day, the doctor told us that there was Something Terribly Wrong with the baby’s brain, that his head would be enlarged and misshapen. He said the baby wouldn’t live for more than a few days and told us that all we could do was go back home and wait for labor.”

I picked up a throw pillow; it was one my mother had made in a needlepoint class back in the Ann Arbor days. It had pink and red zigzag designs and her initials stitched in the center. I hugged the pillow and thought about the irony of waiting for labor.

My father cleared his throat again.

“When Mom had the baby, neither of us ever saw it. We were told it was a boy and that he was born alive and then he died soon after. And that was it. The doctor said to us, ‘You’re young and healthy. Have more children. Forget this one was ever born.’

“We weren’t allowed to mourn this child, not by the doctors and especially not by my family. They told us to be positive and think about the future. So instead, we were afraid. And furious. When we were waiting for you to develop and be born, we were terrified. And when you were born healthy, we couldn’t believe it. When your sister was born healthy, we really couldn’t believe it. Two perfect children.”

Mom was 22 at the time and he was 26, I thought, running my fingers over the smooth velvet back of the pillow. The authority figure told them to forget him, so they figured any other way must be wrong. No funeral, no official naming, no seeing the child my mother carried for nine months.

I was crying by now, both from the sadness of what they were telling me, and from relief. It was real! I hadn’t made it up after all. The air was cleared.

“You know,” I said to them, “when Dad told me about this years ago, it had a big effect on me.”

He looked at me blankly.

“I never told you,” he said. He spoke faster and louder than before. “We never told you.” My mother looked across me at him for a moment, then looked away.

“But I knew,” I said. The air began to feel heavy around me again, and I held the pillow tighter. “You told me when I was seven. How could I know if you never told me?”

“I never told you,” he repeated. “We’re telling you now for the first time. We are in a year of mourning.”

I shut up. I didn’t argue. I was 22 years old; the authority figure told me I was wrong, so I figured I must be wrong. The baby was real but my knowledge of him was imaginary. How else could it be?

“There’s more,” said my mother.

I turned to look at her in surprise. Her hands were knotted together in her lap, and she stared down at her knuckles.

“When you were around seven and Jessica was around four, I got pregnant again,” she said, her voice wobbly. “And I couldn’t do it. I felt lucky to have two healthy, perfect children. Like I cheated to get you two, like somebody wasn’t looking and I sneaked some live ones by. I lived through each pregnancy waiting for the baby to die—it was tempting fate to go through with it again. And I felt like I wouldn’t survive the death of another one. So I had an abortion. We never told our families.”

In houses full of secrets, children must tune in to the nuances of their parents’ moods. My father told me about the first baby right around the time my mother had her abortion. If my parents were going through the decision and reality of aborting a baby, I must have felt something at the time and I probably asked my father about it. I caught a piece of their secret when I was seven and had hugged it close to me ever since.

Almost ten years have passed since The Conversation. My parents and I have never spoken about it again, and my sister and I have never discussed it at all. Something Terribly Wrong seems to have calcified inside of me; I dance around it like an iconic object of worship. Is this image so far off? Now alongside Baby Philip in my imagination lives a tiny, nameless fetus that was offered up to him as what? Sacrifice? Apology? As if below our family village lived Philip the Dragon, peaceful as long as he was fed a virgin or two by the citizens?

Was I the make-up child for his death? My sister and I lived. Should we be grateful to him and to the other sacrificed baby for every breath?

* * *

Jessica and I have grown up to have near-identical replications of my mother’s body. You could line the three of us up and place a two-by-four on our heads, and it would be level enough to balance a table setting. Put another two-by-four against the fronts of our cube-shaped feet and you could use it as a guide to paint stripes down the highway. We all have strong shoulders, slim torsos and disproportionately wide hips that don’t seem to end before the thighs start. We all hate buying pants. My mother and Jess have big, powerful hands; I have small, skinny hands. My mother and I are nearsighted; Jess has perfect vision. When Jess and I laugh hard, we hiccup uncontrollably; when my mother laughs, she needs to pee. The three of us derive endless pleasure from this sort of compare-and-contrast wisdom. My father contributed plenty of genetic material—he has the good eyesight and the slender hands—but in one particular, fundamental way, we are of her, not of him: we possess female bodies. I wonder if my father feels left out.

If Baby Philip had lived, would he and my dad look at each other and say yes, your body is from mine? Perhaps somebody in our family other than my father would have thin, muscular legs. And what if the fourth child had been a boy, too?

Sometimes I lie awake at night next to my husband, Wayne, and watch his profile against his pillow as he sleeps. It’s never fully dark in our bedroom; even behind blinds and heavy curtains, the diffuse light that seems to be permanently trapped between the buildings on our Brooklyn block seeps around us. I try to focus on my breathing to help me sleep: Deep breath in, hold the air, long breath out. When I think about the air that enters my lungs to be carried to every capillary in my body, I think, I am designed to oxygenate a fetus, too. But I stop myself from feeling like it’s magic, or a divine gift, because along with inheriting my mother’s hips and thighs and square feet I have inherited her fear that my baby will die.

I argue with myself: It didn’t happen to me. This is all in my imagination. I never knew my parents’ dead children. Why do they keep me up nights worrying?

Wayne and I talk endlessly about having our first child. We sit across from each other at small tables in restaurants, touch each other’s wrists or knees and say how glad we are that we’ll be parents together. When we see our nephew, Wayne’s brother’s son, we almost devour him out of our hunger to love and protect a baby. Yet I am terrified to stop taking birth control pills. Every night when I swallow that tiny blue tablet, I’m protecting myself not only from pregnancy but also from the possibility that my baby could die. No dead babies will be conceived tonight, I think as I visualize the blue pill heading straight for my uterus. I hear the pill whispering, “Let’s make believe we’re already pregnant so nothing can happen to us, so we can be safe.” The eggs and uterine lining and Fallopian tubes giggle and hold hands, creating a barrier against any intrusive sperm that might try to make a dead baby. It’s the old children’s game in reverse: Red rover, red rover, no sperm can come over!

But the time is coming. All four of my mother’s children had been born, or else died, by the time she was my age. She was done and I haven’t started yet. Am I better or worse off for having waited?

On the other hand, how badly did my mother do, really? Four babies: two lived, two died. Life and death in equal proportions. Somehow, that doesn’t seem so wrong.

* * *

If it’s all in my imagination, then that’s where I’ll go. It’s late at night. I imagine my parents young again in Ann Arbor, lying in their bed in the dark, the real dark, sleeping next to each other under two parallel piles of blankets. Silently, my mother floats out of bed in her peach-colored nightgown to a secret door that appears beside her. She travels up a mystery staircase to a room full of toys and books and soft light and plush carpets where her two other babies wait for her. They are playing together, the big one and the small one, and laughing their beautiful baby laughs. They are so happy to see her; she laughs, too, with delight at their pleasure. She hugs them and drops kisses on their delicate, perfectly formed heads. Then the babies sit on her lap in a big rocking chair, nestled in the fabric of her warm nightgown and they sigh contentedly as she tells them stories about their sisters, Anne and Jessica, who grew up and lived.