I give her a quarter, watch her insert it into the crank of a dilapidated gumball machine and grin as the ball spirals down the chute into her waiting hand. I watch her mouth become a red ruin as she chews, her small, perfect teeth smeared with candy blood.
We do Nila’s homework at the dining room table; she’s still babbling, her mind a constant river, surging forward, changing course. Unlike her father, she requires only modest participation. She tells me that the only place as strange as space is the sea. Heath will be home in an hour, no more than two, and then I can escape this, crawl into my bed and lie naked beneath the sheets. I scribble gray spirals in the margins of her papers with one of her fat school pencils and imagine myself disappearing.
“Look,” Nila says, fetching a construction paper cube from her backpack, pride glowing in the focused point of her face. The cube is only slightly smushed. “I made this.” Its six sides are different colored papers taped together and each one bears a face drawn in Magic Marker and Crayola.
“Here’s Mommy and Daddy and me,” she says, rotating it so I can see. Heath’s side is the blue of robin’s egg and his eyebrows hover like two hyphens above his squiggle hair. He seems surprised to find himself rendered in his daughter’s careful hand. There’s Maui, her French bulldog, with a happy lolling tongue. I’m there too, depicted on yellow, my mouth a seedless watermelon slice. I could be laughing or screaming.
Nila holds the last side out like a gift, and there on pink, another body part. She’s drawn a generic baby’s head: there’s a halo and bird’s wings where a neck should be, and its eyes are closed, as if in peace. I can feel her expectancy, her need for my approval, for me to say Thank you or Nice work. She’s waiting for me to be the mother.
I run to the hallway bathroom and vomit into the toilet. I do it again, and again, until there is only bile, the same cautionary shade as my stick-figure face. I can hear Nila outside the door, the fear in her voice as she calls to me and brushes against the knob. “Don’t come in!” I say. I flush the toilet and climb into the tub.
I know I should go to her, should comfort her and tell her I’m fine, but I can’t see her right now. I’m tired of smiling when Heath sides with the doctors, says we can try again soon, as if life is interchangeable, one indistinguishable from another. Right now I can’t pretend that I’m okay or that Nila is mine. There is no make-believe that makes me less horrible, that changes the fact that all day I have wondered why Nila is here—her living, breathing, tangible form—while my baby is not.
Heath’s home. His deep voice reaches me through the bathroom door, a soothing rumble. In the pauses between, I know Nila is filling him in on our day, directing him to my presence behind the door. He pokes his head in and when he sees me curled in the tub, his face clouds. I feel bad for him, but not bad enough to explain. “How long has she been out here by herself?” he asks, and I shrug.
“Is the house burned down?”
A muscle tenses in his cheek. “We’ll talk when I get back,” he says, and closes the door behind him. I can hear him pacing, gathering Nila’s things before packing her into his car to take her home.
When he returns, half an hour later, moving with the heaviness of a much larger man, I’m waiting at the front door, ready for the fight. “Did you tell her I was fine before you dropped her off?”
He closes his eyes, moves past me into the living room. “When will you be able to let this go? When can we get back to normal?”
“Let this go?” I spark like a star in the night, feeling suddenly full to the brim. “I’m glad this is so easy for you.”
“Jesus, Rayna! I don’t know what to do. It’s been eight months.” He grips the bridge of his nose. “I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying what everyone’s told you already. It’s common! It happens all the time. It wasn’t even . . .” He stops. Looks like he wishes he hadn’t come back. “We didn’t even know what it was.”
But I knew—soft petals shimmering gold, my baby girl. And I wanted my common pain.
“Maybe you never wanted me to have it. Too afraid to tarnish that pure family blood,” I jeer, and Heath’s face twists. I can feel the thin line I’m towing, about to cross over, but this anger is delicious, satisfying as a last meal, and I can’t stop eating of myself. “Maybe you’re actually happy. After all, you already have your perfect daughter.”
“That’s enough!” Heath roars. He steps forward and grabs me at the wrists, and if he were a different sort of man, I can see how this might go. But Heath just looks at me like he can’t tell who I am, like he wouldn’t want to know me. His breath comes hard until the anger softens, and when he lets out a little whimper, a window opens, and through it, for the first time, I can sense his sadness, his jagged need. Stunned, I watch him swallow it. “How dare you,” he whispers, and I’m ashamed.
I lean my forehead against Heath’s and he doesn’t move away. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.” I wish I could pin this loss on Nila, on anything, but there’s no explanation, no one to blame. I know it’s not her fault or Heath’s, maybe not even my own. I kiss Heath until he kisses me back, until we’re undressing and he’s pressed close against my skin. We’ve needed this; missed it. There are so many ways to be filled. “Please please please,” I beg over and over, like it’s the only word I know.
I say it the way I did when the baby fell out, warmed by body heat and shower steam, the color of raw life. Red globules, liver-streaked, clots the size of champagne grapes. And then a slippery, silvery sac, small as a coin. My baby in pieces, fig-dark and glistening. Before I hunched empty under the showerhead, letting the water grow cold; before I slid the sac into a Ziploc; before Heath drove me to the hospital, I picked up my baby and cradled it, tried to see if I could make out a face or a miniature knee in the alien landscape of my insides. I rocked my baby in my hands, told it everything was going to be fine. I knew already what a mother should do.
Nila said, The only place as strange as space is the sea, so the next morning, I drive to the city aquarium and buy a ticket. The halls shimmer, filled with a dense, amphibious silence. Here it’s safe to wander, to be driftless. I pretend to goggle at the flitting of fluorescent fish, to be consumed with nothing more than the wavering of sea kelp stretching up toward artificial light. At the tide pools I trail my finger along an urchin’s purple spines and watch it shudder, blindly grasping until I still my finger in the middle of it, let it hold me.
Suddenly, the aquarium is teeming with children, a first-grade field trip. The kids rush in, trailed by frazzled teachers, their eyes wide and hands reaching, grasping as the urchin. At once I want to hold them, press their small chests against mine and feel that vital thump. The children awe at the boneless creatures resting at the bottom of the shallow tank, and their joy is simple, tactile, too much. Feeling unworthy of them, I fade away to seek out darker, more solitary spaces.
In a dim room where the water seems heaviest, I rest my head against the glass. For a moment, I can almost remember what it is to be unborn—this darkness, this weight, a comfort. Then, something stirs in the water, stealing my attention. In a corner of the tank, hidden by living rock, rests an octopus—iridescent orange with blue rings spiraling up the trunk of its body. Slowly, golden eye unblinking, it feeds a tentacle into the black of its mouth. Its other arms wave, two or three of them shortened, partially eaten already. I can feel its stolid regard, and like the body parts, I know this is meant for me. A synchronicity; something about ashes and rebirth, Ouroboros eating his own tail.
“Hey!” a man next to me says, a middle-aged father in glasses towing a child in each hand. He had snuck up while I’d been transfixed; maybe my
