No One Is Talking About This (39)
“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.
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Her face was luminous, as if someone had put flesh on the bone of the moon, and her beautiful blue eyes were larger than ever, as if coming to the end of what there was to see. This was called fluid shift, one of those accidental diamonds of hospital language that sometimes shone out from the dust. She thought of lava lamps and swallowing seas and flocks flying south, time-lapse footage of sunsets, ants clambering over molasses, the sweet spread of information, what had happened long ago, on earth and in our mouths, to the vowels. She thought of her sister in the creekbed with her body flung over her brother, protecting him from what wanted to swarm, the gold outside that wanted to swarm them till all their in was gone. Till they were only the movement, and the marching on.
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Inside the portal, a prisoner was requesting a picture of “MOTION! I’ve been in solitary for 23 years & 3 days today. It’s like living in a still-life painting; that’s not living, it’s existing; being ‘in place.’ So little ‘moves’ here. I’d like to see things moving. Perhaps traffic at night, lights shining & the trails from lights whizzing past. Or water flowing from a stream, waterfall etc. that shows motion. Or snow while it is falling? Anything in MOTION!” Outside the window, the request whirled down, each flake the first flake, first flake of the snow of everything.
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The day after the birthday party the hospital room was dark. It smelled of human milk and store-bought cookies and top-of-the-head sweetness. Everyone else had gone out to breakfast, and her sister had fallen into a near-unconscious sleep on the couch in the corner. She curled up in the hospital bed next to the baby. She held the little hand and waited for its wilted pink squeeze, like the handshake of a lily. She stroked the heaving back—how hard it was, to haul the body through even a single day—and traced the new brown down on the baby’s forehead. She leaned over the child and said something; she said, “It is going to be just like your mother.” The moment was so pristine and so meaningful that something must be done to alleviate it, so she picked up her phone and began scrolling through Jason Momoa pics, all the while thinking, bitch, if this even happens while you were looking at Jason Momoa pics?!?
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A nurse turned the baby on her back and shone a strong light into her eyes, so that afterward they would always wonder if the light itself had done it, opened an elevator door and let her on. The oxygen levels on the monitor began to fall, and everyone crowded into the room. Music, her sister called, and she flapped her hands, frantic, what do you play? What do you play as someone is dying? A name flashed into her mind—perhaps because she saw the cracked cassette case on the floor of her mother’s van, perhaps because those Pure Moods commercials were stamped on her memory along with the imagery of ocean waves, perhaps because she had recently read a thinkpiece about her unexpected critical resurgence—the name that flashed into her mind was Enya.
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Six months and one day old. Everything contained in that extra day, that overflow. It was not frightening, nothing was frightening. The nurses lifted her up so her parents could hold her again. Her head tilted back and her mouth opened as if to drink; her lips turned the gentle color of fingertips in winter. All of them gathered around her and poured out spontaneous speeches as they gripped her hands, feet, ankles. What they repeated, oddly enough and over and over, was that she had done a good job.