Everything sparkles at the edges, says Benn.
I don’t know how to say it, but afterwards you, you know… you can’t imagine that you ever thought about anything else.
Honey, would you maybe do something? She’s… don’t do that, okay? Please. Seriously. It… Don’t do that.
What? you ask.
Branda is speaking in vocal gradations that imply none of what is actually going on is actually going on.
Then a glass breaks.
The squeal that you thought nothing could be louder than escalates into something approaching puling whale noises.
It’s true, Benn says. Think of what you might never have experienced if you stayed in that other dimension. Come here, sweetie. That’s what it’s like. It’s like stepping through a looking glass into this more vivid world. Come here, sweetie. Everything becomes significant. Everything becomes… Come here, sweetie.
We wouldn’t change a thing, Branda says, her voice so clear and calm it seems like she is murmuring inside your head.
You know what it’s like? It’s like, um… it’s like everything turns fluid. Everything takes on a special kind of… Your whole world, um… your whole world kind of…
One line goes dead, then the other.
The phone conversation is happening.
The phone conversation is done.
Andi and you study each other, she standing by the counter, you sitting at the kitchen table, trying to read each other’s wide-eyed expressions.
Within seventy-two hours, your eastcoast friends begin calling to congratulate you.
To congratulate you and to offer advice.
Word gets around that fast.
If you decide to use a midwife, they advise, you should make sure to ask her what her basic philosophy of childbirth is and what standard emergency equipment she carries.
Nor can one ever really say too much in favor of fruits, apparently.
Fruits, journals, and personal poetry.
Then again, maybe not.
While no one would deny that dads play an extremely important role during your baby’s development, the chief bond for the first two years will remain between mother and child.
Nor is it ever too late to become a vegan.
A vegan or a Unitarian.
Video rigs in childbed need not be as intrusive as they sound, you can and should establish a college fund for your child before he or she is out of the hospital, and it will not take as many weeks as you might think before you can reengage in sexual intercourse.
Circumcision.
Colic babies, sleepy babies, hungry babies, grumpy babies.
Circumcision is a serious question, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying.
Every year 1.2 million American boys lose their foreskin.
Circumcision and the manifold easy and enjoyable exercises available to get you and your uterus back into shape.
Sickly babies, angry babies, excited babies, sensitive babies.
No one would deny that.
Woozy with data, you and Andi promise each person you will weigh what he or she says with care.
You thank them for thinking of you.
You thank them for thinking of you and you tell them how much their thoughts and love mean to you.
Then you invite them to Idaho.
You invite each and every last one to Idaho, confident in the knowledge that they will never show up, and, at the end of the week, you pour yourselves Aberlours and sit by the fire pit out back and stare into the combustion like you might an engaging television program and take turns wondering aloud how this ever could have escalated so quickly.
What you have done.
What you have not done.
What you must do.
What you must do after that.
And after that.
And after that.
And after that.
And, in October, the first very large check from Grannam arrives.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
SURPRISINGLY ENOUGH, everything in this photograph is in focus.
The masked nurse, the tiles on the wall, the slats on the venetian blinds, the monitor, the creases in the medical sheets, the precise inverted reflections in the mirrored lamp, even the delivering doctor’s almost-cropped-out nose and mouth, the latter slightly parted or parting — with wonder? pride? — in the half-second delay before voicing the first words the baby in the foreground will hear in its extrauterine world.
Everything is in focus, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying, except the baby’s face and body.
Everything except your wife, that is.
Everything except what matters most in this picture you unearthed in a scrapbook at the bottom of a box of memorabilia left behind by Andi’s mother.
The woman who on her deathbed told her daughter that if she, the dying woman, had had her own children rather than adopting, things presumably would not have been such a disappointment for her.
She actually said that.
To her daughter.
To the person in this photograph.
Somehow the photographer’s attention drifted, his or her eye becoming more interested in the environment than in the thing itself: in the patterns created by the squares and lines of the tiles and blinds, perhaps, or, perhaps, the nurse’s thoughtful gaze.
It is difficult to tell for sure.
It was a long time ago.
You rotate it, cock it this way and that.
It is the real unreality of the shot that strikes you.
On the one hand, the photographic subject is always here, current, locked in a chemical field.
On the other, the photographic subject’s very immediacy serves to remind you just how absent he or she or it will always remain.
Photographs are never about the present tense, in other words.
This being a common misperception.
Their sole place is the past.
This has happened, they say.
This was done, this gained, this lost.
You scan the delivery room and understand that chances are it no longer exists.
Or it does exist, only in some radically altered version of itself.
Is the doctor still a doctor, or has he perhaps retired, moved out of state, divorced, remarried after his own wife died (by cancer, perhaps), raised a new family, forgotten that he was ever part of this photograph?
And the photographer?
Who gained entrance to the delivery room to snap this picture?
Andi’s father, maybe.
But, then again, maybe not: there is reason to assume the wrong details have fallen into focus for that to be the case.
Whoever took it, in any event, was one of the first four or five people to set eyes upon your wife.
You will always hold it against him.
Him or her.
The smudge at the photographic heart is the person who will become Andi, except you will never be able to know her, not as she exists here.
She will never be able to know herself.
This is an image of the person who Andi can never become.
The person she can study from the outside but never really remember.
Remember or comprehend.
In one nearly inaudible snick once upon a time, your wife moved from sharp-edged kinesis into a blurry stasis.
Her image touches you here, tonight, alone in your office, the same way rays do from a star on the other side of the galaxy that burned itself out eons before the first ameba became the first two amebae.
Someone else besides you perhaps having already said this and said it better than you.
Amebas.
Amoebae.
Each, at any rate, an interesting word in its own right.