Читать книгу Milk Blood Heat - Dantiel W. Moniz - Страница 8

Feast

There is only moonlight, a spill of it across Heath’s shoulders, illuminating how he lies on his side, turned from me, and also the pair of miniscule hands floating above the curtain rod, the fingers small as the tines of a doll’s silver fork. When I call my husband’s name, my voice splinters from my throat and Heath wakes immediately, turns on the bedside lamp, leans in so close I can smell the sleep on his breath. He checks my pupils, then lays the cool back of his hand against my forehead.

“Do you have any pain?” he asks, and I want to swallow my mouth—to fold in my lips and chew until they burst—to keep myself from laughing. I place my hands on my stomach and nod. Heath reaches underneath my sleep shirt to test the tenderness of my skin.

“What hurts?” His fingers keep pressing, like I’m clay.

“Everything,” I say.

He looks at me then, and in the look I can see him envisioning how I will be at some point in the future, ten years from now or twenty. I am a vague imprint of the girl he’d thought I was when we married, my mouth a black cave, ugly and squared.

“Rayna, you’re fine,” Heath says. “Everything’s okay. It was a nightmare.” He turns the light back out, and I don’t correct him, don’t mention the tiny hands that are still climbing up and down the drapes. We are both pretending. It’s the only way we sleep.

This thing with the body parts makes sense to me, this fixation with scale; I blame all those baby tracker apps for that, measuring the growth of my child as compared to produce—kumquats and Brussels sprouts, pomegranate seeds, green lentils—except instead of roots, it was growing a brain and tongue, eyebrows, a thumb to suck. Briefly, I’d been in love with it.

Heath and I had been married for three years, and he had this whole other child, this ex-wife, a past life that had nothing to do with me. I had my friends’ questions (When y’all having kids of your own?) and my mother’s proclamations (That baby’s gonna have good hair!). I had two hands held out, waiting to receive my due. I’d wanted a honeymoon baby, a curly-haired kid with golden skin and Heath’s hazel eyes. While I waited, I would practice with his child. Out together at dinner, I’d wind a strand of Nila’s hair behind her ear, tell her not to eat so fast, introduce her as our daughter.

Nine months ago, when I missed my period, when I confirmed with the pee stick and the doctor, when I told Heath over a bottle of expensive champagne and a card that read Daddy, I was glowing from the inside out. This baby validated me in the same way as my master’s degree, my good credit; Heath’s getting down on one knee. I bought the baby books, browsed the best cribs, shunned the million things expectant mothers should shun. Rule-by-rule, I was everything I was supposed to be—twice as good for half as much.

The baby was the size of a Washington cherry, with miniature sex organs even a skilled technician couldn’t see, when I lost it. There’d been no symptoms, it was too small for fluttering, and when I went to the appointment, the milestone when embryo became fetus, the doctor told me she was sorry, her face solemn and practiced. There was no heartbeat. It was, and then it wasn’t.

“This is common in early pregnancy,” she’d told me. “It happens all the time. Once the fetus is out, and you begin ovulating, you can try again.” The fetus, she’d said, and the word I’d been so excited about minutes earlier soured.

I opted out of the D&C and the pill, waiting for things to proceed “naturally.” There was still hope inside of me. Doctors were wrong all the time. I prodded my slim belly, shook it, willing my baby to move. “Wake up, baby,” I commanded, but the next day, the bleeding started and didn’t stop. The doctor said, It’s beginning, and there was nothing to do. Heath kissed my forehead, tried to fold me into his arms, but I couldn’t let him hold me. I locked myself in the bathroom with the baby books, flipping through them carefully, and nowhere was it written how to reverse time or spark a heartbeat. How to make a womb worthy. I tore the pages out in handfuls and flushed them down the toilet, watched as they swirled back up in soggy clumps and came to rest at my feet. Later, in the shower, my baby would come out that way.

I saw the first baby part in a bouquet of marigolds Heath brought home that night, the small slit of sex resting among the petals—a girl. I was afraid to blink, in case it disappeared. She was with me, talking to me, which meant maybe I could talk back. I was glad to see her, even in this way; if a tiny ear appeared, I’d whisper into it how much she’d been wanted. But over time, these signs began to feel less like benedictions, more like blame. I didn’t tell Heath; this was for me, and I didn’t need a psychiatrist to understand what these visions were—a reminder of how the baby would have developed if she were still safe inside of me.

The moon has been replaced by the buttery glow of midafter­noon sun when I’m woken by my phone ringing. I know without looking it’ll be my mother or Heath. By now, no one else bothers to call.

“Hello.”

“You’re still in bed,” Heath says. Not a question.

“Yes.”

The college has been kind, allowing me to stretch the interpretation of “sick leave” these last few months, as long as the job gets done. I’ve covered my bases diligently: all accounts manned, no client left untended. Mostly I work from home, running formulaic programs that allow financial aid to go through so students can buy their textbooks and birth control, stock their shelves with Top Ramen. But Heath knows my primary post is my bed, my real work the practice of forgetting through sleep.

“You have to pick Nila up from school today.”

I bring my free hand to my face and examine the fingers, the pinkish white of my nails, the frayed cuticles holding them in place. I bring them to my mouth and bite away the excess skin.

“Are you there?” Heath asks, and I hear an edge of worry in his voice, expertly mixed with a dash of irritation—our most common cocktail these days.

“Yes,” I say, still gnawing. My stomach rumbles.

“Rayna . . . you promised you would spend the day with her.” He pauses, and the space between us hisses with static, his wishes and mine distorted through the phone lines. “Please,” Heath says, and I sigh. Now that I’m pitiful, I’m a sucker for beggars.

“I’m getting up,” I tell him. I work up a spit in my mouth, swallow the torn-off skin.

I park on the street, outside the circle of mothers and fathers corralled along the drive marked for child pick-up. The children are hazy with movement, erratic bits of color sprinting from the school, waving papers, some carrying retro plastic lunch boxes, the kind I used to beg my mother for. Everything always comes back. The children screech like seabirds and collide with their parents with the same energy as waves meeting the shore. I shield my eyes and search for Nila in the crowd.

I see her among all the others at the edge of the curb, her tongue poked out in concentration, looking for me. At the sight of her, a pang starts up in my stomach, a kind of knocking, some feeling asking to be acknowledged. My hand is on the keys and the gas tank marked full. It would be easy to drive away before I’m spotted. I could vanish—follow the wet summery air down an unfamiliar highway and try to escape the little legs dancing on my kitchen counter, or the lungs the size of kidney beans wheezing from the nightstand. I imagine cracked earth; giant saguaro; the hot air drying the farther west I ride and the sun sinking red. Out there, I would track vipers through the bleached sand and lie beneath the moon’s cool regard, my belly full and swaying with meat. The coyotes would sing my lullaby.

I pull the key from the ignition and get out of the car, cross the street, and hold my hand high. I wave. It’s been almost five weeks since I’ve seen her, and I’d forgotten her six-year-old’s exuberance, the brightness of her hair, that she loves me. She throws her arms around my waist, and her stomach, soft and plump, pushes against me. I hold her away from my body at the shoulders, look into her face, and feel nothing but appetite.

“Let’s get some food,” I say, trying on a smile, a stretched thing.

At the car, I buckle Nila into the backseat and she tells me about Jupiter’s moons and clouds of space dust where stars are born. She tells me about gravity, how it keeps us pinned to Earth and makes apples fall from trees. “We did drawings today,” she says, and promises to show me later. I know what I’m supposed to say, but can’t. I am a dead satellite, picking up information but relaying nothing back. She’s a smart kid, she senses this. She tells me she missed me, and because I’m trying, because I love her, I lie.

“I missed you, too,” I say, and guide the car onto the road.

Heath and the ex-wife have agreed Nila must eat vegetables with every meal, a helping of fresh fruit and whole grains with little allowance for processed junk. I order bacon cheeseburgers and large fries at Wendy’s and we eat them in the parking lot, sharing a chocolate Frosty between us, dipping our fries into it, getting brain freeze as the cold saturates our teeth. I let her gulp down my orange soda between sloppy, open-mouthed bites, flick away the bit of hamburger and bread left on the straw like a flea.

“Our secret,” I tell her with a cartoon wink.

“Can we go to the toy store after?”

I recognize the hard bargain, the first experiment with parental blackmail, and don’t resist. From the early childhood development books I’d devoured, I know this type of thing is natural. A sign of normal growth. At the toy store, I give her a quarter, watch her insert it into the crank of a dilapidated gumball machine and grin as the ball spirals down the chute into her waiting hand. I watch her mouth become a red ruin as she chews, her small, perfect teeth smeared with candy blood.

We do Nila’s homework at the dining room table; she’s still babbling, her mind a constant river, surging forward, changing course. Unlike her father, she requires only modest participation. She tells me that the only place as strange as space is the sea. Heath will be home in an hour, no more than two, and then I can escape this, crawl into my bed and lie naked beneath the sheets. I scribble gray spirals in the margins of her papers with one of her fat school pencils and imagine myself disappearing.

“Look,” Nila says, fetching a construction paper cube from her backpack, pride glowing in the focused point of her face. The cube is only slightly smushed. “I made this.” Its six sides are different colored papers taped together and each one bears a face drawn in Magic Marker and Crayola.

“Here’s Mommy and Daddy and me,” she says, rotating it so I can see. Heath’s side is the blue of robin’s egg and his eyebrows hover like two hyphens above his squiggle hair. He seems surprised to find himself rendered in his daughter’s careful hand. There’s Maui, her French bulldog, with a happy lolling tongue. I’m there too, depicted on yellow, my mouth a seedless watermelon slice. I could be laughing or screaming.

Nila holds the last side out like a gift, and there on pink, another body part. She’s drawn a generic baby’s head: there’s a halo and bird’s wings where a neck should be, and its eyes are closed, as if in peace. I can feel her expectancy, her need for my approval, for me to say Thank you or Nice work. She’s waiting for me to be the mother.

I run to the hallway bathroom and vomit into the toilet. I do it again, and again, until there is only bile, the same cautionary shade as my stick-figure face. I can hear Nila outside the door, the fear in her voice as she calls to me and brushes against the knob. “Don’t come in!” I say. I flush the toilet and climb into the tub.

I know I should go to her, should comfort her and tell her I’m fine, but I can’t see her right now. I’m tired of smiling when Heath sides with the doctors, says we can try again soon, as if life is interchangeable, one indistinguishable from another. Right now I can’t pretend that I’m okay or that Nila is mine. There is no make-believe that makes me less horrible, that changes the fact that all day I have wondered why Nila is here—her living, breathing, tangible form—while my baby is not.

Heath’s home. His deep voice reaches me through the bathroom door, a soothing rumble. In the pauses between, I know Nila is filling him in on our day, directing him to my presence behind the door. He pokes his head in and when he sees me curled in the tub, his face clouds. I feel bad for him, but not bad enough to explain. “How long has she been out here by herself?” he asks, and I shrug.

“Is the house burned down?”

A muscle tenses in his cheek. “We’ll talk when I get back,” he says, and closes the door behind him. I can hear him pacing, gathering Nila’s things before packing her into his car to take her home.

When he returns, half an hour later, moving with the heaviness of a much larger man, I’m waiting at the front door, ready for the fight. “Did you tell her I was fine before you dropped her off?”

He closes his eyes, moves past me into the living room. “When will you be able to let this go? When can we get back to normal?”

“Let this go?” I spark like a star in the night, feeling suddenly full to the brim. “I’m glad this is so easy for you.”

“Jesus, Rayna! I don’t know what to do. It’s been eight months.” He grips the bridge of his nose. “I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying what everyone’s told you already. It’s common! It happens all the time. It wasn’t even . . .” He stops. Looks like he wishes he hadn’t come back. “We didn’t even know what it was.”

But I knew—soft petals shimmering gold, my baby girl. And I wanted my common pain.

“Maybe you never wanted me to have it. Too afraid to tarnish that pure family blood,” I jeer, and Heath’s face twists. I can feel the thin line I’m towing, about to cross over, but this anger is delicious, satisfying as a last meal, and I can’t stop eating of myself. “Maybe you’re actually happy. After all, you already have your perfect daughter.”

“That’s enough!” Heath roars. He steps forward and grabs me at the wrists, and if he were a different sort of man, I can see how this might go. But Heath just looks at me like he can’t tell who I am, like he wouldn’t want to know me. His breath comes hard until the anger softens, and when he lets out a little whimper, a window opens, and through it, for the first time, I can sense his sadness, his jagged need. Stunned, I watch him swallow it. “How dare you,” he whispers, and I’m ashamed.

I lean my forehead against Heath’s and he doesn’t move away. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.” I wish I could pin this loss on Nila, on anything, but there’s no explanation, no one to blame. I know it’s not her fault or Heath’s, maybe not even my own. I kiss Heath until he kisses me back, until we’re undressing and he’s pressed close against my skin. We’ve needed this; missed it. There are so many ways to be filled. “Please please please,” I beg over and over, like it’s the only word I know.

I say it the way I did when the baby fell out, warmed by body heat and shower steam, the color of raw life. Red globules, liver-streaked, clots the size of champagne grapes. And then a slippery, silvery sac, small as a coin. My baby in pieces, fig-dark and glistening. Before I hunched empty under the showerhead, letting the water grow cold; before I slid the sac into a Ziploc; before Heath drove me to the hospital, I picked up my baby and cradled it, tried to see if I could make out a face or a miniature knee in the alien landscape of my insides. I rocked my baby in my hands, told it everything was going to be fine. I knew already what a mother should do.

Nila said, The only place as strange as space is the sea, so the next morning, I drive to the city aquarium and buy a ticket. The halls shimmer, filled with a dense, amphibious silence. Here it’s safe to wander, to be driftless. I pretend to goggle at the flitting of fluorescent fish, to be consumed with nothing more than the wavering of sea kelp stretching up toward artificial light. At the tide pools I trail my finger along an urchin’s purple spines and watch it shudder, blindly grasping until I still my finger in the middle of it, let it hold me.

Suddenly, the aquarium is teeming with children, a first-grade field trip. The kids rush in, trailed by frazzled teachers, their eyes wide and hands reaching, grasping as the urchin. At once I want to hold them, press their small chests against mine and feel that vital thump. The children awe at the boneless creatures resting at the bottom of the shallow tank, and their joy is simple, tactile, too much. Feeling unworthy of them, I fade away to seek out darker, more solitary spaces.

In a dim room where the water seems heaviest, I rest my head against the glass. For a moment, I can almost remember what it is to be unborn—this darkness, this weight, a comfort. Then, something stirs in the water, stealing my attention. In a corner of the tank, hidden by living rock, rests an octopus—iridescent orange with blue rings spiraling up the trunk of its body. Slowly, golden eye unblinking, it feeds a tentacle into the black of its mouth. Its other arms wave, two or three of them shortened, partially eaten already. I can feel its stolid regard, and like the body parts, I know this is meant for me. A synchronicity; something about ashes and rebirth, Ouroboros eating his own tail.

“Hey!” a man next to me says, a middle-aged father in glasses towing a child in each hand. He had snuck up while I’d been transfixed; maybe my engrossment brought him. He gathers the attention of a nearby worker. “Something’s wrong with this squid!” Nosey, ignorant man; he can’t even tell the difference.

I press closer to the tank and my reflection superimposes over the animal, my eyes a dark glinting on its body. The man is panicking, perceiving madness or danger—some invisible, toxic signal radiating across the current. But I know this act is natural, a truth beneath it, muscled and gleaming; I had heard the creature speak. Sometimes you must consume the damaged body, digest it cell by cell, to taste the new beginning.

I lean in, lips almost to glass, before the onlookers come to gawk, before the workers can interrupt this godly process, and look into its eye.

“Good,” I tell the octopus. “Like that. One bite at a time.”