A s I STOOD BY THE INCUBATOR, FEELING AS FLAT NOW AS AN EMPTY COAT, I WATCHED HER CRY AND CRY, CLENCHING HER BODY LIKE A FIST. THIS WAS A CHILD OF MINE. MY HEART, HEALED ONCE FOR DEATH, BROKE OPEN AGAIN. from the basin with a cloth, turning away from the mirror and taking my undergarments off under my gown. And while I was hiding my body from myself, I was figuring ways to avoid taking food into it, by spreading small portions on my plate, picking slowly at the food until the chance came to cover it with my napkin and carry the plate to the trash, where I swiftly wiped it clean. I would throw my sandwich out the window of the truck as I drove, stay late at school and pretend to have eaten there when I got home, hide my mother’s cookies and tarts in a pocket until I could get to the bathroom and drop them in the toilet. “Julie’s looking peaked,” said my mother in June. “You’re studying too much.” But that wasn’t true. I had gotten poor grades in the spring quarter and was going to do as badly in the summer. But I took heart from the fact that she hadn’t said I was looking thick in the middle. I looked at the reflection of my clothed body every chance I got, satisfied that no change was apparent, and from this thinking it wasn’t hard to begin to believe that nothing was happening after all. I got used to my breasts being tender and my stomach soft. It seemed as if what had threatened had been stopped. If only the bleeding would return. I pushed down on my abdomen at night, just above the pelvic bone, trying to press the blood out. Nothing. But I couldn’t be pregnant, I thought through the month of July, and through August too, though I pressed harder and willed my body to dispel whatever it was that had turned me solid within and tender without. There is no way I could be pregnant, I would say in the morning, standing in ,profile and full dress before the hall mirror. But I was picking certain things to wear, dresses with loose belts, blouses that did not tuck in, pants that had always been too big and that I could still button now. Still I reasoned, if I were pregnant, I would be wearing shifts and smocks. I would be blown up like a balloon. It would be plain to see, and people would know; my mother, who had me, certainly would know. I left the house, my breakfast wrapped in a paper towel to throw by the side of the road. I wasn’t taking classes now but drove to Fayville nearly every day anyway, to use the library, I said, and that is in fact what I did. I had nowhere else to go. There it was easier to sit at a table in my regular clothes, a book open before me, and say, it simply is not possible that I could be pregnant. Something is wrong, but it isn’t that. In September classes started again, and with some effort I maneuvered myself through registration and began sitting in lectures, taking notes as always, though I hardly registered what the professor said. By now I was feeling movement in my bowels, as if a large bubble was rolling about or someone was drawing a finger back and forth inside. Then I would write furiously on my page, almost verbatim, whatever the lecturer was saying, though I entirely missed the sense of it. One day I imagined that Sheldon was sitting behind me, and I wondered what I should say to him, and if he would notice that I looked different, though of course he would see that I looked ill. I sat the whole lecture looking rigidly forward, dreading to turn my head and see him there, though of course he was not. “Julie, you look like death warmed over," my mother said in late September, after the equinox, and I knew the game was up. “We’d better get you to a doctor.” Panic immediately brightened my mind. I can’t go to a doctor, I said to myself in so many words. He will see that I am six months pregnant at least. No longer could I deny the truth. The days that followed called for bitter planning. I told my mother I was in an exam period and would go with her to the doctor when that was over. With this small respite, I prayed for deliverance as I drove the route back and forth, but the God that knew my father did not know me. What was I going to do? At night I lay awake, my hands rubbing the skin on my stomach and thighs, searching my own body for the answer. The weekends passed in slow motion, my mind divided between the density in my body in which the finger drew slowly back and forth, and Sheldon’s face. I called to him silently for help, to come and take care of me now because I could go no further alone. Sheldon, I thought, Sheldon, I am six months pregnant at least. But he never came, and I never believed he would come. On a Monday in early October it came to me what to do. I was sitting in the library when I decided to end my life in our neighbor’s camping trailer by turning on the propane and going inside. Fred Boardman kept his trailer in an old barn halfway between our two places and only used it in November to go up in the hills and hunt. The trailer had two tanks on the front containing propane for a gas stove and lamp. On Friday, I would drive away as if I were going to school, put the truck behind the abandoned shack up a deadend road called the Hooftrack, go into the trailer and open the jets. The tanks would be empty before anyone even thought of looking for me, and it would probably be the next day before they found the truck or thought of looking in the barn. As this plan unfolded in my mind, I looked through the library window at the sky, which was clear and blue except for a scattering of white clouds. Breathing in the stillness of the sky, I felt my fear turn to peace. The leaves of the young trees in the courtyard were red and gold, the bright colors of their dying, and for the first time I found this kind of beauty in myself as well. The sounds of the students outside did not reach me. It was as if there were only silence now. It was as if I were already somewhere else, looking back through this window at the world. For three nights I slept deeply, reaching down in the darkness to touch the edge of my death. Soon I would be there. Soon. I felt a lightness that was like the lifting away of time, as if life were nothing more than the tedious effort to keep from floating away. I belonged to the sky. My sadness was little white clouds. But on Thursday I awakened heavy again, a dull cramp lodged in my abdomen, and when I got up it moved slowly like thick fluid into my groin. I said nothing to my mother and left for school. In sociology, taking notes on a lecture on kinship, I suddenly felt that my bowels were about to empty, and when I stood up to leave there was liquid running down the insides of my thighs. I hurried to a restroom, afraid to look at the floor, and in a toilet stall I found my underclothes soaked with pink water. I took off my clothing and blotted myself with toilet paper, using nearly the whole roll. Then I swaddled myself with my slip and put my blouse and skirt back on. My body was still damp with sweat. I walked carefully out of the restroom and headed toward the truck. I would go to the trailer now. But as I was crossing the lawn, my body gushed again, and I looked down to see real blood running down my ankle into my shoe. I tried walking faster, but a sharp pain cut through my lower body and brought me to my knees. I saw the blood soaking my skirt while people came running toward me. Then their hands were on me, laying me flat on the grass, and the sky went dark. I became conscious again as medics were lifting me into an ambulance. A man no older than myself sat beside me, stroking my arm and sometimes wiping my face with a cool cloth while the ambulance speeded me captive to a destination that wasn’t mine. I was quiet while they carried me through the emergency entrance and into an elevator, but when they had rolled me on a high bed under a strong light, I heard my voice screaming and screaming from another part of the room. Bodies in white cloth surrounded me, and a rubber cone came down over my mouth. When I awakened again, I was somewhere else, and a woman’s voice close to my ear said, “Your daughter is alive.” My daughter was alive. And so was I. When I saw her she was no larger than a hand and had such tiny parts I would not have thought she was real had she not been crying. And that is when I saw that her mouth was mine, that already she was this replica of myself. What had I done? A sprig of bones, a tendril of lung . . . how much blood could there be in a body so small? As I stood by the incubator, feeling as flat now as an empty coat, Iwatched her cry and cry, clenching her body like a fist. This was a child of mine. My heart, healed once for death, broke open again. I could not hold her. My hands were unworthy, I suppose, and I only saw through the plexiglass of the bright terrarium where she cried and squeezed her eyes shut against the light. But in a dream, I drew my finger along one cheek and rested it on her mouth, which pursed against it to suck in the semblance of a kiss. That was all. Her dark eyes opened to the light, and the furious crying ceased, never to begip again. I am not a librarian. I earn our living in a welfare office, typing the records of the poor, and that is a good job for me because I understand the errors of misfortune and how they occur. The office is in a city far from Fayville, hundreds of miles, and where we are now we may not be in another year, or the year after that. We are working our way elsewhere, for I have taken my father’s maps to heart after all, moving as his hand did across the pale countries and blue waters of his dreams. My way is slow, but once begun there is no end to it, this moving away, not only in miles but over the sheer distance of time, I and an ever- silent child etched in my brain like a shell, a frail fossil of myself. I began my journey when my parents died within months of each other, my mother first of a fierce strain of the flu, then my father, insensible already from a stroke which had left him staring from his chair as if appalled that death had stopped just short of its mark. He died with his hand in mine, grasping with surprising strength as if endeavoring mightily to pull free from himself at last. I looked at him, knowing he had gone from behind his open eyes, and wondered where his life was now, whether it was still there or had been immediately drawn away. I know I am travelling because every day, whether I am moving or not, everything becomes more strange. What I am saying is that nothing is new, I have always seen it or the likes of it before, but the meaning changes, and what I knew yesterday doesn’t matter today. Every day, I tell my story to find out what it means, and it is never the same. What I am saying is that every day I weave my net over this space known to us as our life, and what does that have to do with the day before or the day after? The wind always blows it away. If you listen to the wind, really listen, you will find that it blows constantly, it never stops, and it is the sound of life, a great breathing that you cannot change, nor can you change what it takes away or brings back to you. As well be angry with the wind as with life for blowing past you or through you or taking your web away. As well be angry with life as with yourself, that you are here, breathing with the wind and following a strange path. I am alone now in our white room across from the slow-burning tree, for the hour has grown late while I’ve been tracing my footsteps through another time. But it is not only the wind and my wandering thoughts that keep me awake. It is also the silence in the darkness where Lynn Margaret sleeps. That silence seems stranger than anything else, and it is the only thing now that I fear. To hold our bond while she sleeps, I take her bracelet from the table and slip it on my own wrist, raising its cool fires by slanting it toward the light. What I have been saying is that there is nothing to know, only that the meanings are different each day you open your eyes, and that is all I know. I and Lynn Margaret, she knows it too, and indeed it was she who taught me. I stand by her room, trying to hear her breath through the night wind, but I cannot, and it is as if no one were there. It is always like this. When she sleeps, I think she will slip out the other side of her darkness and leave me behind, and each time she awakens, I am glad she has not. I would not want to be truly alone. 4 Sharon Lynn Pugh is a writer living in Bloomington, Indiana. Her last story in CSQ was “Long Season Without Rain.” Anne Storrs is an artist living in Portland. 24 Clinton St. Quarterly
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