by Nicky Singer
You just looked asleep, a baby snuggled in some blankets, napping. You fooled me with your beautiful face and your perfect little lips. You’d wake at any moment, I thought, wake and open your eyes and look at me.
That’s why I couldn’t leave you alone in the cot, even when I had to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t bear the thought of you waking alone, waking when I wasn’t there.
When they came to take you away, I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream, not out loud, anyway. I just thought, as the little white shawl of you disappeared through the door: I should have unwrapped you. Why didn’t I unwrap you? I never saw you naked, never held you skin to skin. Never saw your feet.
And now I’m back home, sitting at my ordinary desk, writing with my ordinary pen. Writing to you. But perhaps you already know that. Because now I’m not so sure you’ve gone after all. I can still feel you, so close. I can feel the breath you never took on my cheek. So do you know what I think, darling boy? I think one day you’ll wake after all. And when that day comes, I’m going to be right beside you still.
Until then, my darling boy, keep safe.
Love you forever.
I pause. I can barely say the last word.
“What?” says Zoe.
“Mommy,” I read.
63
I’m wrong about not being surprised anymore. My head is zinging with surprise. I see (as if she were in the room) Aunt Edie holding her dead child in her arms. Because that’s what it means, doesn’t it? That Aunt Edie had a son, Rob, a baby who was born dead.
“That’s so sad,” Zoe says, all ghostly quiet.
“Yes,” I say, zinging. “And no.”
“No?”
“Well, yes—of course yes.” The very idea of Aunt Edie holding her dead child is enough to tear my heart out. “Sad then—but not now.” I pause. “Don’t you see?”
“What? See what?”
I hold up the shimmering green flask. “This. What this could actually be?”
“A soul, you said a soul . . . oh, my gosh,” Zoe says.
“I can still feel you so close. That’s what she said. All those years ago.”
“No.”
“Yes,” I say. “It has to be.”
“But what’s that . . . that thing got to do with Clem?”
“Everything. Remember when I was out in the park, when I put the flask between the snow babies? You remember? And it sort of slipped, or Clem took it, under his arm. And it looked like the flask belonged somehow, and I thought that Clem was saying something, or the flask was saying something . . .”
“What? Saying what?”
“Zoe—if you were a soul, a lost soul, the soul of a little boy who died, what would you want?”
“A body.” Zoe’s whispering. “I’d want a body.”
“Yes. Of course. Which is why it must have kept coming back to the bottle, to a thing that looks a little like a rib cage, to the only place of safety it could probably find. But inside this hard, hard glass, you’d never give up looking, would you?” I think of all the times the breath sat on the windowsill, looking out. “You’d be wanting, yearning . . . searching for your real other half, your perfect match . . .”
“. . . your twin,” says Zoe.
“Yes.” We hold each other’s gaze a moment. “And Clem,” I go on. “Think about Clem.” My mind is rushing again. “Why do you think nothing’s making any difference? The doctors, the medicine? It all went so well. That’s what Gran said. So the doctors can’t understand why Clem isn’t doing better than he is.”
“Because he has something missing, too.”
“Yes. It has to be. Richie always had more of everything. He was—he is—the bigger twin. He didn’t have the damaged heart. He had a greater share of the liver. . . .”
“And now they’re separated,” Zoe says. “You think Richie has the greater share of their joint soul?”
“Yes. Or all of it, maybe. What if Richie has all that life force pounding in him and little Clem has nothing?”
“Which is why he’s fading. . . .”
“Yes. Exactly. Because it’s not just a body that makes us alive, is it? Whatever Pug says about Mrs. Nerg. We’re not just blood and bones.” I hold up the shining flask. “We’re something more.”
I come to a breathless pause.
“You have to get to the hospital,” says Zoe. “You have to go right now.”
I run into the hallway, where Gran is making preparations for bed.
“We have to go to the hospital,” I shout at her. “We have to go now.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Gran. “It’s nearly eleven o’clock.”
“No, you don’t understand. We have to go now.”
“We’re going tomorrow, first thing. That’s time enough.”
“It isn’t. He won’t last that long.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I hold up the flask. I’m talking about holding the hope of Clem’s life in the palm of my hands.
“You should be going now,” Gran says to Zoe.
Which is when the phone rings.
It’s Si.
Si says we need to get to the hospital right now.
64
Zoe hugs me tight. “Good luck,” she whispers.
But I don’t think luck will have anything to do with it.
The journey to the hospital passes in a blur. A blur of colors. I cannot take my eyes from the flask; it swirls and changes continually. The closer we get to the hospital, the more definite the new colors become. Peach, apricot, a flutter of pink. As we enter the hospital parking lot, there isn’t a single thread of green left. Not one. I don’t know what it means, but the new colors are strong and warm, and in that my courage holds.
We arrive, ascend the fifteen floors, and buzz to get access. A nurse greets us, avoids eye contact, and leads us to a different ward in the Intensive Care Baby Unit. I see Richie at once. There are a million wires going in and out of him, and arranged around him, overhanging him, are machines that hum and beep and flash. The bandages, which cover most of his tiny chest, disappear beneath his huge diaper. His fragility shocks me: If Richie is like this, then Clem . . .
Clem.
Where is Clem?
Clem is not lying beside his brother in the cot.
He is not lying in an adjacent cot.
Clem is not there at all.
Without Clem beside him, Richie does not look whole; he looks like a ghost of himself.
“Poor little thing,” says Gran in a whisper. “Oh, you poor little thing.”
“Where’s Clem?” I ask the nurse in a voice far too loud for this hushed and beeping place. “Where’s my other brother?”
We cannot be too late. We cannot.
“This way,” says the nurse, and we follow her through the ward to a side room.
Mom is sitting in a chair and Si is sitting on the edge of the bed beside her. Mom has Clem all bundled up in white in her arms. He’s not hooked up to any machines and there’s not a single tube or wire going in or out of him. This should be good news, but from Mom’s face, I know it isn’t. Mom isn’t crying, but it looks as if she has been. It looks as if she has been crying all night.
The only part of Clem that isn’t swaddled is his head. I’m close enough now to see his skin. It’s not the right color—it’s a pale and slightly sweaty gray. Gran asks some question without moving her lips and Si shakes his head. But I already know why they’ve taken the wires out of Clem and put him in Mom’s arms.
They’ve put him there to die.
The hush in the room is suffocating, heavier than snow. The only thing holding Clem to the earth is his mother’s love. Mom is holding that gray body as I imagine Aunt Edie once held Rob. Holding him so close that you would have to kill her before she let go of him. And Si is so close to Mom he’s part of it, too; Mom is holding Clem and Si is holding Mom. They’re all wrapped up there together in defiance of the whole world.
I take
out the flask.
I don’t know what I expect to happen; I haven’t got that far. But this is what happens: nothing.
Nothing at all.
I wait and I wait and I wait and there’s still nothing. No matter how I turn or hold or offer or clutch the flask.
I feel hopeless, sick, foolish.
Please, I say, I beg. Please.
No reply.
No reply at all.
It’s as if death has taken our breath away and filled the room with stillness and silence and we’re all just waiting and waiting for the terrible thing we know must come.
For minutes and minutes, there’s nothing in this room but death, unless it’s grief. That’s one thing you can hear: grief, crying for itself like it did in “For Rob.” I can hear all the notes and twists of it, sobbing and sobbing for the little boy who was never to grow up, whose life ended almost before it began. Edie’s Rob. My Clem.
It’s as if, somewhere very close, Aunt Edie is still playing the tune, her tune, “For Rob,” and weeping.
“No,” I cry out. “No!”
Or maybe I don’t cry out, because nobody hushes me, nobody does or says a thing. We’re all in the same space and not in the same space. All locked together and apart. So I don’t know, when the tune begins to change, whether it’s me who’s singing, or someone—something—else. Knowing what’s inside and what’s outside my head—I’ve never been very good at that.
But the “For Rob” tune is changing; the minor chords, they’re shifting slightly, just as they did in Aunt Edie’s front room. It’s coming, I think, it’s coming, the creation song, only it isn’t notes; it’s more like a breath, or one of those very gentle summer breezes that carry sounds from somewhere so far away you think you must be imagining it.
The breeze blows across Clem’s forehead. There isn’t much hair sticking out from under his white cap, but what there is quivers, one or two sandy strands of hair suddenly lifting, and, despite the harsh hospital strip light above, sparking gold.
Hair of the lion.
My heart lifts, but Clem doesn’t react at all.
Clem is still a closed-up little clam.
The breeze increases in intensity, blowing not just on Clem, but up my arms, raising goosebumps. Behind Mom the curtains begin to buffet and the sounds, such as they are, come closer. Get louder. More major, less sad. Gran said you can’t smell a promise, so I don’t suppose you can hear hopes and dreams. But that’s what I think I’m hearing: hopes, dreams, and the sudden whisper of a woman.
Rob, Rob, I’m here.
She isn’t here; my aunt isn’t here. I’m not that stupid. But the hopes and dreams are. The hopes and dreams of anyone who brings new life to earth.
Which are my mother’s dreams, too, as she hangs on, refusing to let go. Not now. Not ever.
Love can do that, I guess.
The song changes again, deepens and broadens, but it’s nothing I could ever play, nothing I could ever sing. No wonder I couldn’t put my hands on it in Aunt Edie’s house. It’s way, way beyond anything I’ve ever heard before. Huge and strange and beautiful. I don’t really know how to describe it, except to say this is how I think the earth would sound if you could hear dawn breaking or the roots of a giant redwood searching the soil for water, or the petals of a mesembryanthemum unfurling to welcome the sun.
Wake. Wake, my darling boy.
The words come on the breeze, tiny as a baby’s snuffle, big as a storm wind. I cannot tell now which is stronger, the wind or the song, but the curtain behind Mom is flapping furiously. She moves her arm around Clem, perhaps to protect him, and that lets his head move, so he seems suddenly to be facing right into the wind. And all at once, he doesn’t look so gray anymore; there’s a more natural glow to his skin, there’s a peachy color, a flutter of pink.
Of course—how could I not have known? Guessed?
I have to touch him, just to make sure. I have to feel what I can see, I have to touch the life that’s coming back into his cheeks. So I reach and touch and all the noise subsides. The wind and the song both end the moment he opens his eyes.
He looks straight up at me.
And, of course, he’s just a baby and babies can’t focus, so actually he’s not looking at me at all, he’s looking through me, past me, to whatever lies beyond.
Then his little blanket lifts, as though he’s taken a huge gulp of air and his rib cage has to rise as he breathes.
And breathes.
And breathes.
We all stare at Clem’s chest, at its rise and fall. Rise and fall. And no one says a thing.
Except my stepfather.
Si, the Man of Science, says, “Oh my God.”
65
Afterward, we talk about what happened in that room.
Mom says, “It was a miracle. I told you those babies were miracles, didn’t I? Right from the beginning, I knew. God’s graciousness, his gifts to us.”
Gran says, “I heard angels. Did anyone else hear that? It was like a choir, celestial music; I can’t really describe it, voices far away and yet terribly near, and so beautiful, it just made me want to cry.”
And Si says, at first, “There was a strange sound in the room, not singing, I didn’t hear singing, more like wind in trees, on the coast, where there’s also the sea. And that curtain flapping madly as though there were some storm outside when there wasn’t.”
“A miracle,” repeats Mom.
Si looks at her. “We have to be careful,” he says. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
Mom looks at him. “Did you ever wonder why the babies chose to be born at Easter? At the time of spring and rebirth and Jesus?”
Si says, “Maybe it was a mass hallucination.”
“Stop,” says Mom.“Just stop.”
And actually, he does. He stops.
It’s not until I return home that anyone thinks to ask me what I saw or felt.
“What happened?” says Zoe. “What happened, what happened, what happened?”
“I heard the universe,” I say, “whispering.”
Zoe says, “No surprise there, then.”
It’s wonderful to be able to tell her everything, every little detail. When I finish, she says, “You know that letter you wrote? The one you left on the doormat, about how your heart’s all messy?”
“Yes?”
“Well, it isn’t. And you know what?”
“What?”
“Being your friend. It’s just . . .” Zoe pauses, “. . . amazing.”
66
Of course, the flask is empty. Though not empty in the sense of lonely or miserable, it’s just empty in the sense of not being full. It remains iridescent, cool to the touch, beautiful. Not at all everyday—the flask could never be that.
I wonder what I should do with this marvelous empty flask?
I don’t know, so it sits on my windowsill like a piece of unfinished business. Also unfinished is the business of Aunt Edie’s letter—and Gran. I want to talk to Gran about Rob. I want to know everything there is to know about the little boy who gave his life’s breath to my brother.
“So why don’t you just ask her?” says Zoe.
So simple. So Zoe.
I remember the look on Gran’s face when she came into Aunt Edie’s sitting room when I was playing “For Rob.” That look, I now realize, was pain.
“I don’t think I could,” I say.
“Why?”
“I think it would hurt her.”
“Why?” says Zoe again. “I mean, it didn’t happen to her.”
“I can’t explain. I just feel, I feel I ought to . . . protect Gran.”
“Your gran’s an adult,” Zoe says. She puts a big stress on adult as though if you were an adult, you’d be beyond hurt. It’s the first time I’ve ever really thought about adults hurting.
We leave it alone, then, Zoe and I, but the letter doesn’t leave me alone. It bangs around in my head. It’s like it was with the twins: Even when I’m
not thinking about it I am thinking about it. About him. Rob. Aunt Edie’s Rob. I mean, I didn’t even know she was married.
I carry the letter around like I used to carry the flask. In my pocket. It bangs around in there.
Bang, bang, bang.
It’s there when I come down for breakfast, or go to the park, or sleep. It’s there when Gran drives me home from yet another visit to the hospital.
We’re not out of the woods yet. That’s what Si said, and it’s true, though the doctors are surprised, in fact the doctors are amazed, at the progress the twins are making. Especially Clem.
The drive back is rainswept, the windshield wipers going so hard the outside world seems a blur and the inside world, the one that includes just Gran and me, appears very small and close. There’s a box of Kleenex on the dashboard of the car, but when I want to blow my nose, I reach inside my pocket (the one that has the letter in it) and pull out an old tissue. With it comes the letter; I have it half in my hand and half not, so it spins a little and falls into my lap, the right way up. You can see the writing.
“What’s that?” says Gran.
“A letter.” Did I deliberately pull the letter into my lap? There doesn’t seem to be anything up my nose that needs blowing.
“I can see it’s a letter,” says Gran.
“From Aunt Edie,” I say. “To her son.”
Gran nearly swerves into a stop sign.
“What did you say?” asks Gran.
But I know she’s heard. “I found it.” I say. “In the bureau.”
We are passing a turnout; Gran brakes sharply and in we go. She yanks up the hand brake and turns off the car engine. Rain cascades down the windshield.
“Give it to me.”
She takes the letter. I know it by heart, so I don’t need to see the words to hear every one of them in my mind as Gran reads.
When she finishes, Gran doesn’t say a word; she just takes a tissue out of the box on the dashboard.
“I never even knew Aunt Edie was married,” I begin.
Gran does blow her nose. “She wasn’t. That was part of the problem.”
“Problem?”
