* * *
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“Are you in there?” they would ask very quietly, when the baby’s eyes began to travel and her heart rate climbed. When she turned lavender, blue, that quartzy gray, they all jumped up from the couch and sent their chants to her like cheerleaders: you can do it, everybody loves you, come on come on stay with us.
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“Keep me alive,” her friend who was a disability activist had told her, and gestured toward a room of crystalline intervention: machines, tubing, oxygen. “Keep me alive till the end,” she said, for she did not believe in the vegetable state. “You would come visit me, and you would read to me, and I would be in there.” This belief that the I persisted, a line of light under a locked door—slim as a chance, an odd, a window, filed away fat and a little much.
* * *
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The Enlightenment went on, pouring itself perpetually into the cup of coffee she drank as she watched the baby in those boiled-clear mornings. One day they had the idea to hold a toy piano up to her bare feet, and at the first note she struck she uttered a sound of wild outrage—that they had been letting her kick against air and nothingness when she could have been kicking against music this whole time.
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“Write everything down,” she told her sister—the portal had taught her that, that just one word could raise it all up again before your eyes—and came across a slip of paper afterward that said, “scanning always back and forth, like someone with an endless supply of sight.”
* * *
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But she could not breathe, she gained no weight, she began to refuse the steady drip of medicines that they put into her bottle. She told them the truth, with her patient look, and so they took her to the hospital, even as they understood that the hospital meant the end. “What’s wrong, honey?” one nurse asked, bending over the baby, as she opened into one of her rare high heart-tugging cries.
“Everything’s wrong with her,” another nurse said, almost without thinking. “With us!” she wanted to shout. Everything wrong with us!
* * *
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Her hair had not been cut in months, and she knew the funeral might be any day, so she took an afternoon off and went to the salon. “I saw a meme the other day,” her hairstylist said, concentrating hard on the back of her head. “It was about how cowlicks are formed, and it showed a cow coming into a kid’s room at night and actually licking his hair, and that’s how it happens.”
A tear slipped from her eye in the mirror. She recalled the text thread she had going with her brother, where he just sent her minor variations of the “guess I’ll die” meme, which to be honest she had never fully understood. “Oh God, did I snip you?” her stylist asked, bending down under a curtain of benevolent hair.
“No, no,” she said, laying her hand on the stylist’s arm, feeling that new and unstoppable stream of care pour out of her palm. “I was just thinking that you and I . . . have seen very different memes in our lives.”
* * *
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The next day was the baby’s six-month birthday. At the last minute, the people surrounding her decided to be a party—a pink cheesecake appeared from nowhere, and a wrapped gift, and a cheerful bunch of balloons. The cake sweated silently at the end of the bed while the baby’s oxygen plunged, once and then again and again. But perhaps she felt the lift of helium, sensed the sugar, perhaps the ribbon on the gift slithered and untied with every jerk of her hand, for suddenly she rallied, her breath rising with the balloons to the top of the air, and then she was awake, she was at the party. Visitors from miles around crowded steaming with their coats through the doorway, and everyone broke into song for her—it felt like breaking—and she smiled as she had not smiled in days. There was enough cake for everyone, and when they looked through the final smile, they saw a white glint flashing in her lower gums: first tooth, to help them eat it.
* * *
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“Everyone is here,” she told the baby, and then had a sudden brain wave. “The dog is here,” she told her, putting the limp hand up to her own short shaggy brown curls, and the baby patted back, I know.
* * *
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Her brother leaning over the hospital bed and singing “Sunrise, Sunset” in her ear, his voice joking at first and then seamlessly serious—because she liked it, of course she liked it, she could not tell the difference between beauty and a joke.