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A teenager on the nighttime ferry snuck his phone over her shoulder to take pictures of the baby in her special stroller, though by that time it seemed baffling, she didn’t look that different from other babies, did she? He was taking pictures because of her sweetness, her freshness—not because he was going to post them, right?
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“I just don’t want people to be scared of her,” her sister had said when they first received the diagnosis, but now that the baby was here the whole family had turned to a huge blue defiant stare that moved as a part through the waves, with the fear of the world curling tall on either side of them. They wanted—what?—to take the sun by the face and force it down: Look at her! Look! Shine on her! Shine! Shine!
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A round rainbow followed her on the plane ride home from Orlando. Every time she looked out the window it was there, traveling fleetly over clouds that had the same dense flocked pattern that had begun to appear on the baby’s skin, the soles of her feet and palms of her hands, so she seemed to have weather for finger and footprints. The round rainbow, her answers told her when she touched down, was actually called a Glory.
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Her sister painstakingly composing a letter to her senator, striking out all the phrases that looked like red meat. She wrote:
always tried to be a good citizen
ate healthy food and exercised
doctors assured us that nothing we did could have caused this
no idea when I can return to work
our insurance could drop us at any moment, due to the astronomical cost
she is the light of our lives
Asking finally, “Do you think it’s too political?”
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Was the baby American? If she was, was it because this was the dust that had raised her particles, was it because she was impossibly ambitious in a land of impossible ambition, or was it because this was the country that had so steadfastly refused to care for her?
The letter to the senator—begging for help, a night nurse, a day nurse, a do-over, full reproductive rights for all women, an overhaul of the entire healthcare system, a new timeline, anything, anything, everything, everything—the letter to the senator was never mailed. How could it be, when their whole clock was full of the child?
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“I can do something for her,” she tried to explain to her husband, when he asked why she kept flying back to Ohio on those rickety $98 flights that had recently been exposed as dangerous by Nightline. “A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has—I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?”
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And something about the rawness of life with the baby was like the rawness of travel, the way it laid you open to the clear blue nerves. You were the five senses pouring down an unknown street; you were the slap of your shoes and hot paper of your palms, streaming past statues of regional Madonnas. The indelibility of a certain thrift shop in Helsinki, the smell of foreign decades in the lining of one leather coat. The loop of “Desert Island Disk” in a certain coffee shop in Cleveland, where the owner warned her not to have a second detoxifying charcoal latte because it would “flush the pills out of her system and get her pregnant.” The bridges of other cities, where she would watch their drab green rivers buoy up their rainbow-necked ducks, where she would drink espresso until there was a free and frightening exchange between her and the day—she was open, flung open, anything could rush in.
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She returned to her sister’s house for the holidays. She wrestled the eighteen-pound turkey into the oven and then ran back to the couch to check the monitors. She basted it with bubbled cupfuls of white wine and then ran back to the couch to exchange the turkey’s weight for the baby’s. She arranged sprigs of thyme and slices of pear in champagne flutes for something called an Autumn Cocktail—she would create a holiday atmosphere or die trying! Finally, as the sun was setting, they all sat down to eat with the baby beside them, and they looked at the flowers in the center of the table, and they looked at her green grass and marigold numbers, heart rate, oxygen, and they thought of something called abundance.
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Ben Franklin turkey myth: He didn’t champion turkeys as nation’s symbol. He used turkeys in electricity experiments
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