No One Is Talking About This (38)
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Talk, laugh, carry, lift; the clear flow of animating water. Once she had flown to New York for a photo shoot and had posed against a brick wall at golden hour wearing a large black garbage bag, but when the photographer showed her the pictures on the monitor, she was embarrassed to see that her hands were dead in every shot. The garbage bag she was swathed in had more line, more purpose—she looked like she was disappearing from a Polaroid because her parents had failed to kiss in the past. “No one knows what to do with their hands the first time,” the photographer had reassured her, but now, the tension in every finger as she maneuvered the baby up the stairs; the cramps she felt in her wrists after supporting the head for an hour.
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Some people were etched, transparent, lovely in their grief. But whenever she caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror behind the couch, she looked like she was trying to poop after a three-week course of Vicodin. Her stomach at all times roiled, like the comments section under a story about pillow angels.
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No vehicle ever invented for the transmission of information—not the portal, not broadcast radio, not the printed word itself—was as quick, complete, or crackling as the blue koosh ball that the baby kept tucked against her chin as she slept, her small mouth open to say oh my answers. Her other hand she kept twisted in a bright red pom-pom, believing it was her mother’s hair.
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“Nobody else likes those toys,” the hospice nurses told them, interested—for they, too, were gathering the pinpricks of facts that would be added to the sum total of stars in the sky. “It’s too much input.”
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“Can she meet a dog?” she had been asking pathetically, back to the time the baby was born. “When will it be OK for her to finally meet a dog?” At last, at last, the baby got to meet a dog. It was a little white poodle, and as soon as he was set down on the couch he began to lick her all over, arms, legs, face, as if she were his long-lost owner.
“He’s not allowed to be an official service dog,” his trainer explained, “because the test is that you have to walk past a bucket of fried chicken and ignore it, and that was never gonna happen.” The baby squealed and called for more. The dog ate her fingers one by one—strange, how everything in the entire world wanted to do that to a baby.
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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.