* * *
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Two nurses gave her a sponge bath, crooning to her as if she were still alive. “You’re so good,” the nurses said. “You’re being so good, sweetheart. Now just turn over and we’ll get your back.” Finally they each slid a hand under her neck and lifted and there she was, her knowledge finally unheavy, staring straight up at the ceiling for the first time. Holding up her head! they all exclaimed. Sleeping like other people!
* * *
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She sang into the cup of the baby’s ear as she was being washed, for her hearing hung perceptibly above them, like a big bronze bell now rocked to a stop. Strange, but she couldn’t seem to remember anything but the most universal choruses, jukebox hits, stadium anthems—songs where the radio rested after scanning past the shouting evangelists, where the whole family lifted up together and let whatever the human voice was just fly.
* * *
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The baby did not ever lose her warmth, as long as she was in that room. Their father would carry her down to the morgue himself, breaking all the rules, insisting, let me, with a blanket so she would not be cold, and his own pearl-gray rosary wrapped around her wrist.
* * *
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An hour went missing while she wandered the halls with the family’s belongings piled on a hotel cart, and then one of the nurses who had given the baby a sponge bath was holding her next to the hospital entrance, saying the words “Your singing . . .” into her ear. She concentrated on a patch of empty air behind the nurse’s shoulder, for she knew if she turned her head even one degree she would see herself on the phone in the smoking section, holding a cup of coffee and being interviewed about the concrete goose, which was wearing black today.
* * *
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The end of the Wikipedia entry always the most suspect. But listen, this time it was true.
* * *
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The light on the drive home was like the hide of a breathing animal, silver and gold hillsides of it, fawn and rabbit and fox quivering in a blue snow. It allowed her to approach even though she was human; for once it was not afraid. Under the echoing dome she kept hearing the disembodied cry, “But she’s not gone, is she? She can’t be gone?” Then the nameless birds were caught and lifted until they were just the light on their undersides.
* * *
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At the Cloisters, she remembered, pressing her flaming cheek against the window, thinking of the rosary wound round the little wrist, one of the wooden statues was alive. The forehead leaped out of itself and into the real world; it bulged with one ripe thought, which was the resurrection of the body. It was Jesus, and perhaps he really had been raised, for the sign that was nailed up next to him said, The fingers on his right hand have been restored.
* * *
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Like hey! More legs!
* * *
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They did not, in the immediate aftermath, holding heaps of downy garments on their laps, wish for a cure. They wished for a better way to preserve a human smell. She and her mother and sister tore through the house like gray calligraphic hounds on a scent, and when they found a onesie or pair of socks or little tutu that was marked with that glowing signature they waved it in the air and said, “Here!”
* * *
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She put on a T-shirt that was stained with the baby’s eyedrops and tucked the koosh ball under her pillow. She set her 24-hour NICU badge on the nightstand and told herself that if the volcano erupted at midnight, it would find her with all the right things surrounding her, so bring on the black ash, she said, and slept.
* * *
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At the funeral home, as the family sat down for a meeting with the funeral director, her brother fucked up and somehow introduced himself as the baby’s husband. Their laughter approached hysteria, tears streaked down their faces, they gripped each other’s arms and could not stop. She closed her eyes against her brother’s shoulder and saw him carrying the baby into the woods, where his green skills waited to keep them all safe.
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“That one,” her sister told the undertaker, and pointed to a casket sunk deep with pillowy satin, an open valentine that even in the picture seemed to lower itself perpetually into a white ground. Something of her old voice returned to her here, the one that stamped her born in 1987 and that had seemed so in danger of disappearing. “That one right there. Because she classy.”
* * *
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After the meeting, she wandered through what looked like a gift shop, full of brass urns and memorial collages, pocket watches and Swarovski roses, granite slabs sandblasted with the faces of bygone Lindas. She lingered there for a considerable time, picking up paperweights and setting them down, for she only ever liked to travel when she got a souvenir. did you know you can get your ashes put into a golf ball? she texted a friend. did you know that your casket can be camouflage? did you know they can put you in a papier-maché turtle and release you into the sea?