Читать книгу Pages For Her - Sylvia Brownrigg - Страница 25

With Willa was born light.

That was all Flannery saw in the first few minutes. She did not see or feel the infant, properly, before people masked like thieves whisked her away to be weighed and measured and deemed to have the appropriate biometrics to join the human race. For Flannery, of course, there was no question about her daughter’s perfection. How else could anyone account for all this light?

It was inside and outside of Flannery, both. The illumination. The point was, the source must have been Willa, and yet it was not as though that tiny baby, just emerged, was emitting bright beams of gratitude that she had escaped her dim cave and gotten her life rolling. (What she primarily emitted were the loud cat cries of any newborn’s arrival.) It seemed rather, to Flannery’s drugged mind – they had tanked her up with painkillers and then anesthetic, when it eventually transpired that the doctors had to slice Flannery open to get Willa out safely – as though on Willa’s joining everyone else in the room, all the darkness went out of the place, out of every corner, leaving only this light.

She could not speak this. She could not say anything at all. Flannery was simply mute and smiling and bewildered. She took in the sequence of events: Charles joking with the nurses, though his eyes blinked with tears; the extreme contrast between his hefty self and the scarcely substantial creature he was cradling, like an image from some cartoon, a bear with a diminutive kitten in its paws; the swaddling of Willa and some helpful nurse’s holding the child before the mother’s eyes. Look at her! Isn’t she beautiful? The images lodged deep within Flannery’s memory, concealed under other immediate realities, and they would stay there always. Her daughter’s arrival.

She had Willa now, and Willa had her, and Flannery’s heart was ripped open into a new, great, terrifying capacity for love. (And, simultaneously, grief, because for some old, indelible reason Flannery felt the fear right alongside the joy – they were inextricable.) She had never known she would be capable of this love, and the feeling left her absolutely exposed to the world and its elements, like driving down the freeway at a hundred miles an hour with the top down and the windows open. Anything could get in.

What shape her fears had, what could happen once you became a mother – all of that would come later. For that day, that timeless hour, Flannery simply allowed herself to bathe in Willa’s light.