What I mean is, was Ada’s death my fault? Was it Kara’s? She’s so light in my arms, her skin so sweet-smelling, that I think it can’t be so. But what about Greta and her boys? All those baby girls born blue, who never breathed air, never felt the sun on their skin. Never had skin, some of them, to speak of. What about the children dead during one of the rehearsals for Kristallnacht, lying in the street on beds of window shards? What about a girl on a table being given a shot of poison slowly, into her spinal column? And another shot of poison, and another? All those girls. Did we reach our hands between their ribs, between the sinew of years and bones, and take their heartbeats for our own?
If they had to die so we can live, then yes, right? Somehow we did.
Today is the day of Kara’s baptism, when she becomes John’s child officially enough that nothing is likely to change things. A festive atmosphere is called for, despite the fact that Ada is missing, and my husband is being so cold to me that sometimes I forget I haven’t told him about Finn at all. Despite the fact that I haven’t sung in weeks, but today am meant to open my mouth and sing Kara welcome as part of the choir. At least it’s funny, so many problems at once.
Under a sky the white of dirty cotton, I step into a cab with my husband’s hand gripping my shoulder. Kara is curled against John’s chest, wrapped up in as many layers as an onion. Beneath the ergonomic blue baby carrier, and the fleece blankets, and the pink hooded coat adorned with kitten ears, is a dress as frothy as egg whites whipped up for a meringue. She has been alive for ten weeks, her soul in ostensible jeopardy for all that time.
“Christ, what time is it?” John stretches his elbow upward to try and get an angle on his wristwatch without removing his hand from the baby’s backside. “We’re going to be late, you know.”
I slide into the taxi, which is cold beneath me, the gray vinyl squeaking. I’m not in a hurry, and I’ve gotten used to John’s tone. Proprietary. Wounded.
“Well, damn,” I say. “Then they’ll just have to christen someone else. Who do you think they’d choose? Out of everyone?”
John looks at me blankly. Another joke. That we can do anything, choose anything, without consequences. He situates himself beside me, peeking at Kara under her hood.
“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” he asks.
I hesitate, then lean against him. He lets me, and I’m grateful. It’s been so long since we touched easily.
At the christening, a baby is given her name. She’s made a part of the world, and she is announced to it. Past and future. Ada never met Kara, not really. But she planned this event, and so we’ll go.
“You really have to ask?” I say.
John looks helpless.
“We don’t even go to church,” he says. “It’s not such a crazy question.”
It isn’t, for him. The language of institutional faith is foreign to my husband — seductive, maybe, but incomprehensible. He was raised with Sunday morning cartoons and trips to the swimming pool on summer weekends. John’s parents told him he could be whatever he wanted to be, as they zipped him into a rain jacket and walked him to the museum. Cathedrals were pointed out to him in terms of architecture and design, the glint of stained glass and the turn of a spandrel.
The first and only Communion he ever took was with me, one afternoon in Sacré-Coeur not long after we met. It had been five years since my own last confession, when I’d admitted to the sin of vanity and decided that I could presume that sin for myself going forward. Instead of going through the fuss of attending Mass and asking forgiveness, I began saying preemptive Hail Marys each week from my bedroom at home. But ignoring the rules is not the same as forgetting them.
We met in Paris, both of us twenty-three and singing our first roles at the Palais Garnier. The city’s new modern house, L’Opéra Bastille, had opened several years before, but the director of our show wanted what he called “an antique feel” for the sound.
“An imperfect feel, he means,” John said. He wore a blue vee-neck sweater with a hole at one elbow over a crisply ironed button-down shirt. He kicked stones as we walked down the street, and spoke in importunately loud English. I liked him because his shirt had soft pink stripes, and because he was blunt and a little bit proud of it. “A crappy feel. A boxy feel.”
“You have no sense of history.” I bumped him with my shoulder and he bumped me back. We tottered along through Montmartre this way, bobbing together like buoys in a tide. Both our voice coaches had somehow double-booked the afternoon, and our sudden freedom elevated us up off the street, almost out of our shoes. “Spaces carry memories! Singing in the Palais is like singing with Maria Callas!”
I flushed. The air was cool, but spring cool. Sorbet. Chilled grass.
“You know what?” I said. “I’ll show you.”
His hand felt soft and dry, the palm littered with an embarrassment of lines and wrinkles.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
I tugged him forward, keeping my eyes on the street signs, because I suddenly knew that if I looked back at him, my happiness would overwhelm my sense of purpose and we would fall into kissing against a wall and never leave. The possibility filled my head with soft bees, grumbling against one another and tickling me with their wings. Though he couldn’t see it, I smiled.
“Wait and learn.”
At the top of the hill that houses Sacré-Coeur, we both leaned, breathless, over our knees. It takes a special kind of fitness to run up so many stairs without getting winded. While trying to straighten up I stumbled into a stone barrier, and when John laughed at me, I pushed him to watch him wobble back and forth, and to feel the warmth of his chest underneath his sweater. We both giggled in between deep ragged inhalations until we heard the gong of bells and fell solemn.
“Okay,” I said. “Do you believe in God?”
John searched my eyes, as if to measure which answer was more likely to impress me.
“No.”
“Right,” I said. “No. Not now. So follow me.”
The Basilica bubbled white behind us, a lure of light. I tilted my chin towards the entrance and we walked inside.
We were in time for the end of afternoon Mass. I dropped to one knee in the doorway, crossing myself, and then stepped in line for Communion. John followed me with a look of game incomprehension. He raised an eyebrow. I mouthed, Do what I do.
So we shuffled slowly to the front, looking up at the golden mosaic in the apse and the Latin lettering hammered into the walls. When my head turned, John’s head turned. When I put a hand in my coat pocket, he did the same. There were two priests up at the altar, splitting the line to more efficiently deliver the sacrament. Bless me, Father, I thought, for I am about to sin. I turned to the left and signaled to John that he should go right, hoping he’d better be able to see me and mimic the two-fingered motion of crossing myself, my bowed head before the priest and the silver dish of Eucharist wafers.
Around us rumbled the lowing chants of the monks, and through them rose the ivory spires of soprano voices. I’ve never been able to resist the drunkenness inspired by the church smell of candlewax and incense. The vegetable taste of old paper, the masked sweat of old women, the polished wooden pews — as a child in tow to my babenka, these mingled aromas made me feel both minute and infinite. As an adult, the combination of them hitting my senses still humbles me with the feeling of being in God’s presence. Bashful and in awe.