Mother May I(84)

I stood up, blinking, stupid as a cow. “I don’t understand.” My voice sounded trapped inside my head. I didn’t want to understand. Robert? I didn’t want to understand.

I heard Trey’s voice, tinny and faint, screaming my name from very far away. I looked down the hill. He was out of the car, his face a featureless white disk turned up toward us.

Coral was heaving now, writhing and gurgling, her skin reddening in a frightening crimson blush. Then I was running without knowing or remembering when my feet had started moving. I banged into the stampeding unicorns on the arm of another of the heavy wooden benches, and sharp pain bit into my thigh and hip. I shoved myself away and kept on going, leaping off the platform, sprinting around the edge of the carousel. A plume of gray smoke was pillaring up into the blue, blue sky, high above the trees.

I ran around the carousel and toward it, through what used to be the gold mine, my feet sinking in mounds of still-soft earth that filled the framed boxes. I could see an orange glare growing up and ahead of me.

I reached the woods, and I realized I was screaming. It was a word, this scream. The word was “Robert!” and this made no sense. I didn’t want it to make sense. I could not stop screaming for him, stumbling up a steep slope through the trees, screaming in the wake of that, screaming into the stink of chemical-burn smoke rising in front of me, a black column marking an altar.

I pulled myself up onto a flat cleared space, and ahead of me, way on the other side of a small open field, I saw the smoking remains of a hole in the rock wall. There were bits of wood and twisted metal scattered about, and a few small fires burned inside and around it. Ash drifted down in flakes and specks.

I leaped forward, running toward it, as if there were still a reason to run toward it. As if I might find him there, pink and sweet and fat and gurgling, unharmed in all that wreckage. Thorns grabbed at me, trying to slow me, and I ripped through them. My feet tangled in a low rail fence. I went sprawling into brambles and sun-warmed earth. I could barely breathe. There could be nothing living in that smoking, blackened cave. I knew that. I couldn’t make myself not know. I felt blackness rushing through me. Coming for me somehow, though its root was in me. It was coming. I could not stop it.

I said, “Robert. Robert,” quietly, into the dirt.

That was when I heard him. A thin, unhappy wail. I knew his voice, upset and singular and uncertain and perfect. I felt a sharp pain in my breasts and then a release, as if the milk from all the weeks I hadn’t nursed him had let down at once.

I rose up on my knees, looking all around. Behind me Marshall was coming over the rise, red-faced and breathless with the car seat in his arms. He ran across the thorny field toward me. He must already have been on the way down to Trey when the blast hit. He must have heard me screaming.

I got up, ignoring the thorns that were ripping at my clothes and my skin, and I ran toward them. I got to them and grabbed them, both of them, hauling them to me, the car seat banging hard into my chest between us. Marshall grabbed me, too, holding my arms as I clutched the seat and stared down into Robert’s dear, red, angry face, his eyes now screwing up, his mouth opening in a perfect, furious circle, his volume building.

I dropped to my knees, and they came with me to the ground. I had never loved anything more on this earth than I loved the tiny life we held between us. The car seat’s base touched the dirt, and I bent over it, hands scrabbling to unlatch him, to feel him all over, making sure he was moving and whole and unburned and unhurt and exactly himself. And he was. I pulled him out and held the dense, warm weight of him against my chest. His whole body was a clenched fist now. He screamed in my ear, and I loved his living, perfect fury.

My eyes met Marshall’s, and he was looking back, whispering, over and over, “I got him, I got him.”

I drew Marshall to me, his dear face, and I pressed my mouth against his forehead, his ear, his hair.

“You got him,” I said back.

To our right a little patch of fire had caught in a dead rosebush. It glowed orange, growing, and smoke rose, and Robert yelled and squirmed in my arms.

Now I could feel where the thorns had torn my skin. My hip pulsed pain from where I’d slammed into the bench. I understood that I was still in Coral’s world. I might live here forever, from now on, in this fear-soaked place my mother had always known existed. She’d tried to tell me. She’d tried, but I refused to listen. Robert’s tiny heartbeat fluttered against my own, his breath and tears hot against my neck, so even now, even knowing she had always seen things right, I could not care.

My husband was calling my name from far away, below us.

“Up here!” I called back. “We got Robert! We’re up here!”

“We got Robert,” Marshall echoed, and his eyes were an animal’s eyes, wild and wide.

Somewhere, watching close or waiting far, Lexie Pine still walked. She was an enigma, who might be as angry and as dangerous as her mother or just something small and broken, wanting only to return to the deadly balm of her addiction. But in this moment my heart was so full I could not spare the room to fear or pity her, not in any incarnation. Nearby, so close we felt the heat of it, the rosebush burned and flakes of gray ash drifted down on us, gentle as snow.

Marshall and I clung to each other, Robert between us, calling loud so Trey could find us, “We got him, we got him!” At the same time, we were saying it most truly to each other, back and forth, back and forth, his arms tight around me with Robert, perfectly angry and alive, held safe and whole between us.