All summer he has been taking care of me in his big, easy, pretend-not-to way. He’s going to the grocery store, it’s no trouble to pick up a few extra things, what do I need? He has to run errands, he can drive me to my appointments. I love riding in his van — an Econoline like the one your father drives, but silver, not blue. I love sitting up high, looking down on people in cars. I love FM radio, the thick lull of sleepy voices, like they’re speaking through water. The way my voice sounds to you, maybe.
Sometimes on Sundays J.D. and I drive out to the country to a lake with a sandy beach. We don’t know anyone there. We go wading together, like a little family. I let J.D. touch my belly and you do your stunts. He says you feel fluttery, like a trapped bird. Not just any bird, I say. One with strong wings. A crow or a raven.
Sometimes I wish I loved J.D. I wish I could ever love the right person.
Dear creature who gives me heartburn and presses on my bladder and won’t let me sleep on my side,
Why do I write you letters you will never read? Because I want a record of this time with you. Because soon I will have nothing else to show for it. Once upon a time, I was pregnant. A baby grew in me. I read to him. Once upon a time, I was a mother.
Dear baby,
You love the Talking Heads song about staying up late. I dance and you dance inside me. What a change of pace, you must be thinking, from the slow, sad songs I usually make myself miserable with. Judee Sill, Joni Mitchell, Carole King. You like them too, by the way, especially Carole King.
I wonder how much music you absorb. Years from now, when you hear “So Far Away,” will it spark some memory of this time? It’s a memorable song, mostly because of the bass line, which has in it every bit of unrootedness and longing there ever was.
Dear baby,
The doctor who will deliver you is tall and confident, with strong hands that never sweat. Her hands make me feel safe. I noticed them when we first met, when she took out her magic paper disk and spun it to tell me when you would arrive — September 23. She has practical fingernails, trimmed short and polished with clear lacquer. She wears a simple silver wedding band on her left hand and a mother’s ring on her right, with five different-colored stones. I want to ask about her children. Where are they? I want to ask. Do you miss them?
I’m thinking of my own mother, sitting at home, lonesome for her children (I haven’t visited all summer; I can’t, not in the shape I’m in), uselessly dreaming of grandchildren. I sometimes think the hardest part of giving you up will be knowing that I am taking you away from her.
Dear baby,
There are days when the thought of bringing you into the world so that you can be someone else’s child is almost too much. I’m like some soul-flattened character in a Kafka story or one of those absurdist plays I used to love.
People talk about the kind of commitment it takes to be a mother. No one talks about how hard it is to hold onto the decision not to be a mother when there’s a baby growing in you.
My doctor has been careful not to weigh in on my decision. She only tests and measures and prescribes vitamins and tries to keep us healthy.
J.D. tells me I’m doing a beautiful thing and that I should not lose sight of that. I wish I could believe him. Then I could write you letters filled with platitudes about how everything will work out for the best, instead of letters I can never let you read.
II. Born
The Infant Survivor
September 14, 1989. Parkertown on a Friday evening. Rows of wooden houses, windows squinting like drunks in the late sun. Women in dresses propped in open doorways. Men inside laughing, glass jars clanking. Every now and then a whiff of reefer. Children and dogs running circles in dirt yards. Tonight the children will stay up late while the grownups get high, because it’s the weekend, no school tomorrow.
This is the rundown, furniture-mill part of Carswell, home to bootleggers and drug dealers. It has its own history: the part of town that burned in the Fourth of July fire of 1910. The mill had let out early for the holiday, and in the excitement somebody forgot the oily rags in the finish room. That night, after the barbecue and watermelon and sack races, after the gospel band and the fireworks, everybody went to bed so full and tired and happy and slept so hard that no one heard the explosion, or if they did, they thought it was just more fireworks. Flames shot out the roof of the finish room, fanned across the mill, and rolled through Parkertown — all the little wood shacks, the yards full of trash, the sleeping families. Twenty-five houses burned to the ground and everyone in them died except one child, a boy, Bobo Hairston, who was flung out a window and into a neighbor’s yard, where he landed in a patch of soft dirt the neighbor had shoveled up for a garden that never got planted.
A miracle, the firemen called him. The miraculous infant survivor.
Bobo was sent away to the colored orphanage, grew up, married a girl from the home, and brought her back to Carswell to start a family. He got a job at the Fifty-Fifty on Cotton Grove Road where he bagged and delivered groceries until the store closed in 1972.
Bobo’s wife is dead now, and he is nearly blind, but whenever anyone asks, “How you doing, Bobo,” he still says what he’s always said. “Lucky to be here.” People ask just to hear him say it, like putting quarters in a jukebox.
The spot where Bobo landed is now covered with a house — small, weather-beaten, rough as a scab. There are houses where all the old houses burned. They look like the old ones used to. Like kindling.
Music wafts out of open doorways. Sultry voices — Luther Vandross, Anita Baker. In one doorway a crusty-faced boy huddles against his mother and stares wide-eyed at the street, where a white woman is passing by — a thin, tight-lipped, very white woman. She keeps to the middle of the street, but the street is narrow and the yard so shallow the boy could count the woman’s eyelashes if he could count. She walks like somebody in a parade, stiff, stamping her feet. She’s carrying a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken in both hands. Her hair is twisted in a bun, black hair with a thick spiral of silver. She is such a surprise the dogs forget to bark; the dogs don’t even go after the smell of chicken. The little boy yanks on his mother’s skirt. “What you want,” his mother says, smacking his hand. He points at the white woman’s hair. “Swirly,” he says.
That night Claree gets a long-distance call from Sam, who’s in Arizona, visiting his wife’s family. Margaret’s parents live in the desert outside Tucson. Claree has never been to Tucson. She’s never seen a desert. She has never been outside North Carolina. She thinks of deserts not as places but as blanks between places.
Sam is talking about some cactus-tree park Margaret’s parents took them to. He’s talking fast, like he’s afraid of running out of breath. “They’re fifty feet tall, some of them. They look almost human. Like giants.”
“They aren’t real trees,” Claree says.
“What?”
“Cactuses. They aren’t real trees.” She lights a cigarette and wishes he weren’t having such a good time. She has been losing him since the day he was born. “Cacti, I mean.”