“Go outside?” I whisper.
I draw the curtain back, the sky in the trees a weak boy-blue, light enough to sec by. I see she has a pile of the cotton pads I keep in my bra to sop the milk. The pads are shredded. She has found a bra the dog tore up and a plastic diaper cover too.
She has my gown on. On her pillow is the mangled snapshot I have learned to expect to see: the newly loved, the newly dead, a name in her hand across the back, the boy’s name: Joe Young. She will pull it from her pocket and speak to it when George ferries her back to the airport: I’m coming home, Joe Young.
Her duffel’s open. Two spores. Socks: one pair. The raggedy peel of an orange. She has brought her makeup case, my kaboodle, she calls it, locking, big enough for shoes. Cowboy music and a hymnal — so she can practice: make the cut, the bus.
They go by bus, the Miracles, mouths pressed against the windowglass, plying the river towns. They wear their leather bracelets, tooled: W.W.J.D.?
The mark of the exalted. The innocent, the maimed.
Sister wears hers in her sleep, I see — should she wake in the street, the rain coming down. Should you find her. She has wandered off, her house in flames. Her ribboned hair freshly curled.
W.W.J.D.?
Let it be a question.
What would Jesus do?
A little something, baby. All I’m asking.
I try to think of something to take from her, to give to her, the towels I took from the hospital, mementos, what have you, the drift of things, the sock stuffed with rice for the suture, I think, to lay across it, warmed, a balm to me, a smell like buttered toast. Let Sister strew rice through the house, I think, make a trail, tattered foil and tampons, the shells of the eggs I have boiled for her, dribblings, her mark. The body’s gluey excess.
Here. You got me here.
I will find her with the sock with the toe eaten out and pretend she has failed to be grateful where gratitude is due.
I slip her Jesus bracelet off.
Make a deal with myself, with Sister, the gods. I will teach her how to hold him, how to bathe him, what to do. How to tend the stump of umbilical, the pasty, toughened button. It is turning on its tether by the time Sister flies in.
You draw the nub back, the button. Take an easy sweep at the healing root with a cotton swab.
Don’t be afraid of it, I will tell her. I tell her what Nurse Jane told me. Nothing to snip, to tuck or stitch. Nothing to be alarmed about.
Come light, first thing, when I am tidy yet, rested some, stronger then, scrubbed. The night behind us, breakfast on the stove. Sister will come down swinging her basket, pleased, and take her place at the table.
Somebody new to talk to. Somebody new to listen. Sister, listen.
We left the house first thing in the morning, I will tell her, salt on the roads, the blank of the day, a foot in the cage of my ribs. We crossed the river — once, twice, crossed again, for the feel of it, the sweep through the fog; for the time it took, the scrap of a chance to be ready.
I didn’t know what to feel. What would it be to love him, to tend to him, never to be alone again, my own again, never to be without him? Still to wake and find him gone. A curtain tapping at my window.
This was our house when you were a boy. Here is the bed you slept in. When you waked, you shouted, It’s morningtime! and we lay in our bed and listened for you — coming to us, bright boy, running to us, for the sound of your feet in the hall.
She will sing to him, coo at him, bounce him on her knee, the baby palsied — her whole body going, his. “Whee hee hee. Whee hee hee.”
Oh don’t worry, Binny. Don’t you worry, Binny. I am right here.
Sister turns in her sleep, moaning. At her throat: our mother’s pearls.
“I saw her sleeping.”
I say it aloud, whisper it — to hear how it might sound to her, how it sounds to me. “I saw our mother sleeping at the bend in a yellow road.”
They wheeled me off from him. They wheeled him to me — swaddled, scrubbed, still as death in his Lucite bucket.
Nurse Jane wheeled him to me. At her throat, a string of pearls. First light, white world, the blind at the window sprung.
Little bird.
The day clapped shut. The river turned and gurgled.
I thought I had lost him. I thought if I never saw him.
They drew the curtain across my chest.
No moon. The light popped, the room stuttered out.
Maa maa. Want to jump on rocks?
I called out for a nurse.
Nothing doing.
I slip her pearls off, her glassy ring.
“Little bird,” said the nurse, “little keeper.”
“Nurse Jane.”
She lifted him out to show me, pleased: no X where there should be a Y, no extra smudge of either. No stump of gray, vestigial tail, no show of sticky bone.
No moon. Not a sun I could see.
You think it’s easy?
I kicked at their hands, their faces.
I wanted to go out swinging, wild, and knock off their heads with my saber, bawling Sister’s name. In the name of dumb heroics, of the bold Tecumseh’s boys.
I will let her hold him. Tend to him. A deal, a balm, the pretense, our lie. I make a game of it — of pretending she will not hurt him.
I make my offering: the band at his wrist, the name my name, a loopy, girlish cursive. Orderliness, a story. Something to think of us by.
“Nurse Jane tidied my bed, humming,” I say. “She seemed to bleed from her ears.”
I bend to kiss her. I kiss the bright patch above Sister’s eye, a scar from when we were girls.
You will take good care of your sister? Mother asked.
Her children loose in the world.
No harm. All’s well. Nurse Jane. Come light.
I would have destroyed him — when he was in me, pod, stalk and sponge, not to have him be like her, not to be as I am with her.
Her mouth is open. I think to spit in it.
I think of us in the quiet, the blessed antiseptic cool. The nurse standing by to wait for her. You have to wait for her.
She draws her foot back. Such a pretty girl, our Sister. So easy, for a moment, to love.
I bend to kiss her, I kiss her gently.
I think of how she called to me; she pressed my hand to her belly.
“See?” she said.
I said nothing. Nothing came to me.
Nothing comes to me now.
The baby kicked and swung in her. He was having a good hard romp in her before they got him out.
I stood and felt him. The nurses whistling, padding about in pneumatic shoes, music on the PA. Sister hummed a bar, how like her.
And then he quieted. I think to hear her. I swear I think he quieted to hear the bit of a song she knew.
I leave the basket. Get out before she wakes, I think, go down to dip the eggs.
And yet she wakes. I press the pillow against her face — to calm her. It has calmed her for years: to have something soft to scream into.
She thrashes and shrieks and I hold her, wait for her to twitch off to sleep as she does — on the instant, the disconnect, the body jerking free.
Then I go down to dip the eggs.
I dip them briefly, pallid blues and yellows, enough to be seen in the snow. It is early yet, the plows have not come. The wind has not come from the sea yet and the snow is crusted over.
I pull my boots on, step out.
The yard is shining. Everything is shining, throwing off light from the snow. The trees are bristling. The crocus are showing through. The first of the jonquils bloom and droop and the thrush in the trees come back to us out of the hot, flat land.