■ ■ ■
The ideal thing to watch as you held a baby having an hour-long seizure was the Hallmark Channel, which had just begun to roll out its holiday programming. The plot of a Hallmark movie, invariably, was City Bitch Learns to Kiss a Truck . . . on Christmas. The city bitches were exactly thirty-seven years old. Their eyes were wide with christ coke. And at the end, they were so happy to be finally taught their lesson, happy to stay in the hometowns forever, with family.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Touch me!” the baby demanded at all times. “Touch me, I am in the dark!”
* * *
■ ■ ■
There was a robot in her sister’s house that listened to them 24/7, filing their conversations away carefully in case they all murdered each other at some point. Those headlong months of words would be locked in a vault for eternity, sobbing on and on, what will we do, what are we to do, underpinned everywhere with the baby’s breathing and the blips of her machines, occasionally brightened by her sister throwing out little interrogations of the quotidian like, Alexa, how tall is Kevin Hart?
Alexa, play classical music!
* * *
■ ■ ■
This time last year they had been at The Nutcracker, and in bed that night she closed her eyes and the ballet was still dancing itself. The ballerina was caught again and again by safe rough hands. The score filled the air like a pillow fight, but above it was the sound of toe boxes on the boards, that ugly human thump that refined the spectacle to a beauty past all bearing, so that the man in front of her broke down entirely and shouted out, “BRAVA!” Perhaps this is the afterlife, she thought, the eyes close but the ballet keeps dancing, the bodies that are the ballet still spin, as great snowy trees are lowered from the ceiling to the earth.
* * *
■ ■ ■
On Christmas Eve she took a sharp right turn and drove past the farmhouse where her great-grandmother had kept her son chained to a stake in the front yard. The shutters were a flat funeral black, like widow’s weeds. The window was a merciless glass rectangle. She saw her history there as she passed, saw the circle of dead and pounded grass that was the radius of his freedom, and where he sat for hours doing the only thing he could do: see what he could see.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Movement was now completely impossible—they could no longer even take the baby in the car. Her sister’s freedom had been snatched from her, neat and complete. She did not sleep or shower. Her heartbeat was the beep of the monitors. She was tied to the baby, who nevertheless had turned out to be the leafiest shade on earth, towering high above her and almost to the heavens, stirring with little birds.
* * *
■ ■ ■
To watch her sister was not like watching a saint; it was like watching the clear flowing stream the saint was filled with, water that talked, laughed, carried, lifted, and never once uttered an impatient sound. “How?” she asked her sister once, and her sister stared at her like water and said, “Perfect happiness.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
God, we sound like cult members, she thought. Of course they sounded like cult members! When astrology, and crystals, and Jesus hair on dudes came back, when the apocalypse began bringing with it unbelievable sunsets, when synths appeared on the soundtrack like new kinds of hearts that might make it, when the flame leaped higher in human faces as if a gust had just come through the door, then, then! Then it was time for cults as well.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Have you heard?” her husband cried on the phone, rattling a newspaper in the background. “Have you heard that they can now shoot a word into someone’s head using a microwave ray?”
“What word?”
“Any word.”
“How long does the word last?”
“We don’t know yet,” he told her, dropping his voice to the nightmare range. “Could be forever.”
Maybe that’s what happened, she thought. Maybe someone had shot the child’s name into her, into some deep bull’s-eye at the center of her body, maybe she would never be able to think of anything else again. Or not the name, even. Just: Love. Love. Love.
* * *
■ ■ ■
As the baby struggled to breathe, as it became clear that her airway was collapsing, as her head grew too heavy to even turn from side to side, it slowly dawned on them that she was experiencing an enlightenment, a golden age. She grasped beads and rattles; she answered with sweet gurgling near-giggles when you talked to her. When they played the game called Little Touch, her eyes traveled to all the places they kissed her, one by one. Against all wisdom, and in the face of her bleak gray pictures, she was learning, she could learn.