* * *
■ ■ ■
What did we have a right to expect from this life? What were the terms of the contract? What had the politician promised us? The realtor, walking us through being’s beautiful house? Could we sue? We would sue! Could we blow it all open? We would blow it all open! Could we . . . could we post about it?
* * *
■ ■ ■
Her father holding the baby, sweating, panicked—had he ever held a baby before?—and then handing the bundle back to her after a mere five minutes. “She looks so happy in your arms,” he said. “Not like mine.” She knew the words that wanted to come next—you were made for this, sweetheart, why didn’t you ever—but as a gift he did not give them to her, not this time. “Here, I’ll show you what she likes,” she told her father, and set her phone next to the baby’s ear and played Music for Airports, the music streaking like a bird from one end of the terminal to the other.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“She only knows what it is to be herself,” they kept repeating to each other. The rest was about them and what they thought a brain and body ought to be able to do. When the neurologist, in that first-ever meeting, had said gently that maybe the baby would one day be able to count to three, she almost turned the table over on her, because who needed to count to three? Look what counting to three had gotten us. I’m warning you.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“We can take her to the Cincinnati Zoo,” she said, flashing on in the dark like a lightbulb. “We can put her in the double stroller, with her oxygen tank on one side, and wheel her through the crowds, and when we get to the elephant enclosure we can wrap a finger around her finger and squeeze, to show her how the little ones hold on to their mothers.”
“Yes,” said her sister, looking like her very young self again for a moment, and bowed her head for such a long time that it seemed she was going to cry. “We can also mourn Harambe.” For whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for these moments.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The great gift of the baby knowing their voices, contentless entirely except for love—how she turned so wildly to where the pouring and continuous element was, strained her limbs toward the human sunshine, would fight her way through anything to get there.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Different, yes, different. But we were going to be different, the future had asked it of us, we had already begun to change. And there was almost no human being so unlike other human beings that it did not know what a kiss was.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The baby kicked her legs past other legs, punched her fists past other fists, windmilled her arms, climbed the air like a staircase. Plucked idly at the pale hair on the back of her head. It was the baby whose movements were designed for a new and unimagined landscape, the baby who was showing us how to blast off and leave—how we would fly, touch down, pick flowers in other places.
But please, not yet, we liked it here.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“I want a year,” her sister said fiercely. “I want one year,” when for so long the rest of us had been thinking only how to skip ahead till the dictator was gone, how to lie down and sleep in a glass rectangle among roses till a bearable reality returned.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Her brother-in-law and sister spent late pink hours decorating the baby’s nursery, though they knew she might never get a chance to sleep there. The theme they had chosen was swans, serene and graceful, though the only swan she had ever personally met had stared her down outside the Kafka Museum in Prague and then attacked. It had chased her all the way down to the water, its half-a-heart neck stretched out in a scream, but of course, she had understood later, its nest must have been somewhere near.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“If she stops breathing, it’s just because she’s forgotten that it’s something she’s supposed to do,” the pregnant nurse told them, on their very last day in the NICU. “When that happens, just slap her cheeks very softly. Just give her a little pinch on the fingernail.” Don’t sit under the apple tree, he was the boogie woogie bugle boy of company B.
* * *
■ ■ ■
It spoke of something deep in human beings, how hard she had to pinch herself when she started thinking of it all as a metaphor.
* * *
■ ■ ■
They loved best to dress her precious head in pink, polka-dot, leopard-print turbans, until she looked like a psychic, until she looked like a little Golden Girl who had lived a hundred years, who stared out from underneath with the skepticism that came from having seen everything.