had not realized so many sick babies lived in the world. This made her sad, but relieved she wasn’t the only mother who couldn’t heal her child.
Hours after admission, my fever broke and my lungs opened. Momma stood vigil in the PICU waiting room with other mothers of sickly children. Head leaning against the wall, body pressed into the overstuffed chair, she observed the room. One mother with deep grooves under her eyes sat with coffee in her hands. Another sat with an unlit cigarette in her mouth. There was a bouquet of mothers in that room that night. Some wore expensive rings that sent cascades of light across the room’s ceiling. Some, like Momma, wore no rings at all because they’d been pawned months before in order to buy food. Some looked as young as Momma, too young to have a husband and a sick baby in the PICU. Some were so old they looked as if they could have been Momma’s grandmother. Most were paired and some were lucky enough to have husbands, mothers, brothers, and sisters watching them like they watched the clock on the wall.
Momma, alone, watched the clock too, knowing she soon would have to leave in order to get my brother. She spied dawn cresting through the crack in the curtain. With no more cab money, she’d have to walk the six miles to her sister’s. There was hope someone driving along would see her and offer a ride. For her children, she’d violate her own rule, which was to never take a ride from a man while she was walking. On that morning, she was counting on those men who often pulled off the asphalt, windows rolled down, all smiles, beckoning.
She became nauseous. Since food was scarce, she’d never had the luxury of morning sickness, so she chalked it up to nerves. What would the nurses think when they learned she had to leave? What would I think when I woke and she wasn’t there? Those questions made her stomach feel as if it needed to be emptied. But staying was not an option. Champ had to be collected, and the money she’d paid on the cab had to be recouped. She needed rest because the next day and any day that began with me in the hospital would mean a four-mile trek. As she rose from the chair, she felt her bones protest in cracks and creaks. She was only eighteen, but years of worry and pain had buried themselves in her joints. Pregnant and petite, not by choice, but circumstance, she wore curves that made everyone, men and women, follow when she walked.
Momma ambled toward the nurses’ station, smoothed her wrinkled jacket, adjusted the waist of her pants so the buckle would not press against her belly. She wished for a mirror so she could see what they would see. Unsure of what to say, she practiced words that would show she was not a neglectful mother and she wanted to stay. None she conjured were sufficient. She readied for looks of disappointment, disbelief, chastising eyes indicting her for making one bad decision after another, the decision to have the first baby, the decision to marry, the decision to have the third and fourth after losing the second, and now the decision to leave the hospital. Those chagrined eyes would not know her story, yet they would sing the same song of disappointment her father sang, her brothers and sisters sang, the strangled melody which pulsed from behind her drunken husband’s jaundiced eyes.
Midstep, she stopped. No need to interrupt the nurses in the middle of their work, and no need to wake me to say goodbye when all we both needed was rest. She could steal out, take care of tasks the day required and steal back in without anyone knowing. Then, those disapproving eyes wouldn’t follow her home and silence would replace clanging reminders of inadequacies. Who’s to say when they went to find her she wasn’t in the bathroom, getting coffee, or out smoking? She didn’t drink coffee and she’d never smoked, but who was to say? Instead of walking into the judge’s chambers, she could escape before being summoned. No harm since I was safe. She could still suffer damages.
So, she pulled her jacket closed, obscuring herself, as if she were a thing being smuggled. She dipped into the elevator and exhaled once the doors closed. She continued looking down in an effort to remain hidden. Once she made it out of the hospital, away from the sliding doors, the sun shone so brightly, she believed it to be patting her on the back. But celebration was short-lived, as it often was in her complicated life. There was still much to be done. So, her walk began, which was good because movement led to solutions, meaning she was at least headed in the right direction.
My hospital room seemed to have been bleached around me. My body, sprawled across the middle of the railed bed, was the only splotch of color in the room. Sedated and cloaked by a plastic curtain, I resembled a sleeping doll in cellophane. The first few days, I barely moved. Fed through IVs, my thin frame grew portly. Creases trapped between rolls of infant chub appeared faster than they had on the evaporated milk Momma fed me. Watching was all Momma could do. She couldn’t feed me, couldn’t hold me with all the tubes and needles hanging from my body. There were times when the nurses weren’t looking that she’d climb behind the tent with me, lower her head to my chest, and feel my breath against her cheek. Some days, she conducted her own examinations, starting with my fingers, plucking imaginary dirt from my nails, nipping at the frayed edges with her teeth. Then she tended my feet, where she rubbed each pinprick seated in a blue blemish, and marveled at the patchwork of congealed blood on my heels. Then my head, where she used fingers to part hair, massaging each line as she twined clumps of strands into plaits along the landscape of my scalp. Throughout her tending, I remained motionless on her round stomach, oblivious to the care I was given.
All was quiet with Momma and me in that hospital room. Not even a history existed behind the plastic wall. There, she was not my father’s wife, his punching bag, nor his cash register. She was not eighteen and soon to be the mother of four minus one. She was a nurse, a nurturer, things so easy to be when all is quiet.
That is why I think my sister died. Too much noise. She might have made it if she’d have lived behind a tent like I did. I sometimes dream of her, the one who is dead, and I see her inside Momma, rushed to the hospital, doctors barking orders, white all around swallowing her existence. Momma must have cried the same tears, averted the same discerning eyes, but with a profoundly different outcome. I am here. She is not. That baby, my big sister, a casualty before birth. Momma reminds me I would not have been conceived if she had lived. I owe her my life, this girl I do not know.
I was seven when I first learned of my sister’s death and I felt immense guilt, as if my living had stolen life from her. I feared my spirit had celebrated from the Heavens, knowing her death meant life for me. Once I learned of her passing, I set out to right the wrong I was certain I’d caused. My job was to give her life even though she’d never had breath. I gave her an identity; she was my twin. And a name; she was LaTanya. I worked to see her running with me through grass, heading to the bus stop on chilly mornings, but she was never there. I tried to imagine us, together, playing house and combing the hair of the one doll we shared, but only my hands tangled through the doll’s hair.
No matter how I tried, no amount of rewinding could undo LaTanya’s brief existence; one in which Momma’s insides churned with hunger while she sat quietly, pressing the side of her belly. My brother, Champ, barely one-year-old, sat next to Momma on the floor. Hungry too, he rocked side to side, gumming his lips as if they were something to be savored.
There was no food for Momma, which meant there was no milk for him. When water mixed with the last of the sugar didn’t satisfy, Momma let him gnaw on her nipples even though they were dry. She sat in a chair, one of the only furnishings left in their sparse apartment, waiting for my father to come home. He had not been at work, nor had he been running errands. Rather he’d been riding life from one woman, one party, one drink to the next. Momma’s home, his family, was the pit stop he slammed into only after his wheels had worn off and his body was dented past the point of function.
Despite his less than pristine condition, he was the man she’d married, which meant he was Champ’s daddy since he’d graciously given his name. Now, he was not so gracious. He had not lived in the titles of daddy
