Forty minutes early, we’re at LaGuardia, as if there were a secret route through distance and time. Some people seem annoyed by time to kill. The paramedics take me off, cuff my arm. My blood pressure alarms them. “Look at this,” says one to the other. “Will you look?” There are two of everyone today, it seems. They want to take me to Jamaica hospital; I insist on going to a pay phone (my dime). The paramedics make me sign a waiver stating that I’m knowingly ignoring their advice.
By the time I get to my doctor, 20 minutes later, the baby is active. We listen to the heartbeat. “You’re fine,” my doctor says. “Go home and eat starch.” I call my husband, who goes out to buy crackers.
When I call my dad, I say my flight arrived the better part of an hour early. “Really,” he says. “That never happens to me.”
6. Labor room. Everyone is leaving. The nurse slips out; my doctor, who is pregnant (what a sight we must be!) takes a swollen ankle break, and my husband — we’ve done this before — is buying something for a headache. My father’s parents, who are dead, come into the room together. Everything is fine with them. The baby is fine, fine, fine. I am very happy. A woman is screaming. Something is slapped on my face and I open my eyes and I’m under an oxygen mask. “Delivery!” the woman says. My husband’s face appears. I’m lifted, heaved and wheeled. “Is there oxygen in there?” my doctor keeps asking. My grandparents — people are yelling at me. “Push! Push-push!” There’s a whole crowd in here. Someone checks the plastic mask I’m pushing off my face. I feel the baby leaving me. They take away the baby. Then they bring the baby back, and then he looks at me and takes my breast, and then they take him away again.
I am on the phone, leaving messages for everyone. No one is home. Later a doctor enters my room and tells me not to worry; he’s checked the baby over and the baby is fine. “Why wouldn’t he be?” I ask. The doctor wants to know if I remember him — the whole team, with the crash cart. I shake my head no.
7. Tetanus shot — preventative; why wait for a rusty nail? (“ Do you know what lockjaw looks like?” my mother used to say.) I pay my co-pay and collapse. Women in the waiting room are swooning over me. It was quicker than I think, they say, of shorter duration, this blackout or spell. I thought that I was home, in a room that is gone, and also somehow in motion. The receptionist is speaking with a certain irritation. “Your patient—” she says to the intercom system. She makes me eat a cracker, two crackers from somewhere, left over from lunch. “I don’t like this,” my doctor says, reading a meter. She won’t let me look. When she lets me stand, I can’t make it to the door.
The doctor calls at night. She wants to talk to me; she is talking to me about things that end in “noma.” I fire her.
I get worked up. Knock on wood. No noma, the endocrinologist says. He has a name for my condition, which I make him repeat. It escapes me again.
The babies have birthdays. My grandfather appears in a dream where he’s carrying the body of a man I can’t identify. My father sits down swiftly, surprisingly gracefully, witnesses say, while dancing, and never gets back up. When I call the house, I get his voice on the machine but the body is elsewhere, in storage, is ash.
There are no more spells. I am learning things, like when to keep my head down and the uses of salt.
NO PLACE ON EARTH
“Which would you rather be?” she says. “A rock or an insect?”
“Rock,” he says. He is pressing his face to the glass again.
“Why?” she says.
“Rock crushes insect.”
“What if the insect’s huge?” she says.
The boy turns. The bus stops. “Huge,” he says. He pushes his face against her chest. “Until it meets the rock.”
“Not our stop,” she says.
Winter is on them, ice on the trees. Roads have been salted.
The boy’s pale skin is damp from the window. His skin is like hers.
“I know that,” he says, and sits back down.
His breath on the glass is the matter through which she views the world. It is late afternoon; the heat too high, the sky about to darken.
Her ankles are swollen, belly, her breasts.
“Smarty,” she says. She loosens his scarf. She crawls her fingers up his neck. So soft, the boy! “ Then where did you think you were going, you?”
“A sister or brother?”
“Silly,” she’d said. “ You will be a brother.”
A snapshot she keeps on the mantel at home. Look at her: the size the boy is now. Afraid of her shadow. Clearly it is afternoon, the light in a slant.
She was posed on a boulder for added height.
The stone is not visible.
“Reason you’re tall,” her brother had said, “is that I am holding you up.”
“ Here is a brand new fact,” she says. “Salt erodes rock.”
The boy asks a question she cannot answer.
“ Water,” she says.
What was she thinking? Wrong for a child — the scarf he wears. A purchase on impulse, too hand-made, an afterthought, or no thought at all. Rummage. Who knew where things came from? The tassels are wet.
“ Jupiter or Mars?” he says. “Where would you rather—”
“Rather be”—an end, not an answer.
A window or fist? A wish or a feather? Candy or rain.
“Rain,” he says. “Don’t want to be eaten.”
“Look at it, look out the window,” she says. Ice falls in drops. She smells the boy’s neck from the back, the nape; his smell a narcotic, impermanent, impossible — she knows it, she does. You do not have to tell her. Bottle it up.
“Rain,” he says.
“Then I will drink you.”
Someone is listening in on them. She hears the woman listen, behind her, intent.
He is sipping a drink from a box she brought. Provisions on her person, always, she thinks. Things stuck to her — a pouch, a container, fluid. Retention.
She says, “I see the future.”
His hair appears slick, poking out from a cap. He is sleepy, she thinks. Must be sleepy, she thinks. You are getting sleepy.
A wish if there was one.
Nausea, or craving, is creeping over her.
“Ask me?” he asks her. “Ask me again.”
Outside the window, seen through a smear: a school she once went to, a world subsumed — there’s nothing as it used to be. “Winter was colder then,” she says.
“When?” he says.
She turns to look behind her.
The boy makes legs on her arms with his fingers.
“ Listen, ” she says. “I would walk home alone, unless my brother was along.” The day that she stripped off her mittens, she says, her brother was someplace, no place, gone. “I wanted to touch the snow with my fingers. Snowballs and angels.” She touches his hand. “Please, don’t do that.”
“Which would you rather be?” he says. “A snowball or angel?”
“I mean it,” she says. “I was crying from cold when he found me there.”
“Who?” he says.
“Frostbite.”
She sees the boy regarding her. Blue, his eyes. She will not tell the boy what she did not tell her brother, her father. What is her job if not to protect? Protect the protectors! “Hands,” she says. “An officer returned me home. My mother ran water.”