The night grew so cold that when it began to rain the drops froze the moment they hit the sidewalk. There were hundreds of accidents: cars and buses skidded on the icy avenues, lights in hotel rooms flickered as generators came to a halt, pipes froze and then burst, and every frail tree in the city was hidden beneath a shower of ice. Up in her room, Lila was surrounded by black fire. She might have slipped into the darkness forever if her cousin Ann hadn’t arrived a little after midnight. The bedroom door opened slowly, and the scraping of wood against wood sounded like the flapping of some huge bird’s wings. Lila gasped when the sudden light from the hallway filled her room. For one calm moment Lila wondered if she had imagined the pain, and she watched as her cousin took off her gray wool coat and her leather boots. Before the bedroom door was closed Lila had enough time to look out and see her mother peer into the bedroom. At least, Lila thought it was her mother—she wore her mother’s clothes, and was her mother’s shape and size. But if it really had been her mother, wouldn’t she have run into the room and thrown her arms around her daughter and tried to save her? Lila blinked and strained to see, but the figure in the hallway just grew shadowier, and when Lila’s cousin walked toward the door she blocked the light, and then there weren’t even any shadows. There was nothing at all.
When the door closed the sound echoed. Lila could actually feel the sound somewhere beneath her skin. Immediately the room was airless; the heat in the radiator poured out until it was impossible to breathe. That was when Lila knew she couldn’t have this baby.
“I’m sorry,” she told her cousin. “They made you come here for nothing. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going through with this.”
Ann had been a nurse for eleven years—long enough to know she had better not tell Lila that every woman in hard labor had made the exact same pronouncement.
“I can’t do this!” Lila screamed.
Every neighbor on the floor above could hear her now for all she cared. Her contractions had been coming two minutes apart for some time, but now something changed. She could no longer tell the difference between one contraction and the next; the pain began to run together in a single line of fire. As each contraction rose to its highest peak, hot liquid poured out between Lila’s legs. She couldn’t sit, or lie down—she couldn’t stand. Ann helped her onto the bed and examined her. By the time she was through, Lila was so wet that the sheets beneath her were soaked.
“Give me something,” she begged. “Give me a shot. Put me out. Do anything.”
The pain owned her now; it owned the earth and the air and at its center was an inferno. She was in the darkest time before birth, transition, and even though she didn’t know its name, Lila knew, all of a sudden, that she could not go back. There was nothing to go back to, there was only this pain—and it was stronger than she was. It was swallowing her alive.
She wanted Hannie, that was all there was to it. In the past few weeks she had considered going to see her a hundred times, but a hundred times her pride got in the way, and now it was too late. She tried to imagine the stiff black skirts, and the clucking sound Hannie made in the back of her throat, and couldn’t. There was nothing but this room, and inside the room there was only pain. And even if Hannie had been right beside her, Lila would still have been alone. That was the unbearable part of this pain—no one could accompany you, no one could share it, and the absolute loneliness of it was nearly enough to drive you mad.
Ann went to the bathroom to dampen some washcloths, and when she came back she found Lila standing by the window, looking out. The sidewalk was three stories down, and from this distance the ice that had formed on the cement seemed as cool and delicious as a deep, blue bay in Maine. Ann ran and turned her away from the window. It did no good to think of an escape, or even to wish for one. This was the center of it, and all you had to do was stand your ground—you could not even think about giving up.
When she saw the damp washcloths, Lila grabbed one out of her cousin’s hand and sucked out the water. She was dying of thirst. She would have given anything for a piece of ice, a lemonade, a cool place where she could drift into a deep and dreamless sleep.
“Please,” Lila said to her cousin.
“Just remember,” Ann said, “I’m not going to leave you. I’m going to stay right here with you till the end.”
“You can’t leave me!” Lila cried, terrified and misunderstanding.
“I won’t,” Ann told her. “I’m right here.”
Lila threw her arms around Ann’s neck. She had never wanted to be closer to anyone. Again and again she whispered “please,” but she knew there was no one who could save her. And then something let loose inside Lila, and it was simply beyond her powers to hold it back. She felt a terrible urge to push this thing inside of her out, and when Ann told her she couldn’t push yet, she started to cry. Ann showed her how to pant—it was a trick to fool her body into believing it was breathing that she must concentrate on—but even then Lila’s tears ran into the back of her throat and nearly made her choke. Nothing was working, she couldn’t even pant; she took in more and more air until she started to hyperventilate. Ann began to breathe along with her, and eventually Lila was able to slow her panting to match her cousin’s. Lila stared into Ann’s eyes and the room fell away from her; the city no longer existed. She fell deeper into those eyes—they were the universe, filled with energy and unbelievable light. Lila heard a voice tell her to get back onto the bed. She didn’t feel herself move, and yet there she was, on those damp white sheets with her legs pulled up.
“It’s time,” Lila heard someone say to her. “Now you can push.”
For a moment everything was clear. Lila recognized the ceiling in her bedroom, and the face of her cousin who was a hospital nurse. It seemed that a serious mistake had been made. This could not possibly be happening to her.
It was day now, but the air was so cold that the dawn was blue. Lila sat up in bed; she leaned back against the pillows and pulled her legs up as far as they could go. She pushed for the first time, and when she did she was horrified to hear her own voice. Surely, a sound like that would tear a throat apart. She pushed again, and again, but after more than a hour there was still the same enormous pressure. The only difference was now Lila was so exhausted that she couldn’t even scream. All she wanted was for this horrible burning thing inside her to come out. She found herself thinking the same odd phrase over and over. It’s only your body, she told herself. It was her flesh that had betrayed her, her blood that was on fire. The solution was simple and took only an instant. As her cousin leaned over her and wiped her face with a washcloth, as dawn reflected through windows all over the city, Lila left her body behind.
Her spirit leapt up into the pure white air. The utter joy of such a leap was almost too much for her. Lila rose upward, guided by a perfect beam of light. Below her, she could see her body propped up on two pillows, she could see that her eyes were closed, and that she held her breath as she pushed down with all the strength she had left. But how could she be concerned with a body that twisted and groaned, something that was so far away? Up here, in this strange new atmosphere, everything was silent. The air was so cold it crystallized, and each time Lila opened her mouth to breathe it quenched her thirst. There was the scent of something much sweeter than roses, and Lila wasn’t the least bit surprised to find that her spirit had taken the shape of a bird. What else but a blackbird could swoop so gracefully above a room of pain?
“So now you’re free,” someone was saying to Lila. “Now you know that absolute freedom of leaving your body behind.”
“It was so easy to do,” Lila said. “How could anything be this easy?”
Far below her, Lila could hear her cousin ask who on earth she was talking to. But Lila didn’t bother to answer. Any moment she might have to return to her body, each second was too precious to waste. The blue dawn was nothing compared to the white light that Lila had discovered. And when the time came for her to return to her body, L
ila felt such a terrible sorrow that for an instant she thought she might choose not to return at all. She was floating just above herself, still undecided, when she suddenly found herself moved by the struggle beneath her. Her body’s shallow breathing and the beat of her own heart filled Lila with pity; with one tender motion she slipped back inside her own flesh.
This time when she pushed, something hard moved so that it was nearly out. Lila reached her hands between her legs and felt the soft hair on the very top of the baby’s head.
“Oh, my God,” Lila said.
“The next time you push you may feel as if you’ll explode,” Ann said. “You may feel like you’re burning.”
But Lila had already been a spear of flame; she could dance on red coals now and not feel a thing. She bore down harder, and suddenly the baby’s head was free. Lila panted again to stop the urge to push while Ann untangled the umbilical cord from around the neck, and then, with the next push, the entire body slipped out in a rush.
Blood poured from Lila, but she felt strangely renewed. She leaned her elbows on the pillows and lifted herself up so that she could watch as Ann cleaned off the baby and wrapped it in a white towel.
“Is it all right?” she whispered.
“It’s perfect,” Ann told her. “And it’s a girl.”
Lila’s father had come home from a night spent out on the stairway, where it was so cold it could freeze your soul. He and his wife sat on the couch in the living room, rocking back and forth as if in mourning. Behind the closed bedroom door, Ann placed the baby in a dresser drawer on a bed of flannel nightgowns. It wasn’t until after she had delivered the placenta that she told Lila that her parents had already had her contact a doctor who arranged private adoptions.
“But I have to have your approval,” Ann told Lila.
Lila leaned her head back on the pillows and closed her eyes while Ann lifted her legs and put down a clean sheet.
“You have to tell me,” Ann said. “What do you want to do about this child?”
What amazed Lila was how fast it was over, how far outside herself she had gone and how quickly she had returned. Already, the pain she’d felt seemed to belong to someone else. How strange that now she didn’t want it to fade—she wanted to grab on to the pain and claim it for her own.
“I’ll be honest with you,” Ann said. “I don’t really see how you can keep this baby. If you do, your parents won’t let you stay here. Is it fair to keep her, when you can’t even take care of yourself?”
Even though the steam heat in the radiator made a gurgling noise, and buses trapped in the ice strained their engines, Lila swore she could hear her baby breathing as it slept in the dresser drawer. It was at that moment that her heart broke in two: she knew she could not keep this child.
“I want to see her,” Lila said.
“Take my advice,” Ann told her. “If you plan to give her up, don’t see her. Let me just take her away.”
“I know what I want,” Lila said. “Let me see her.”
As soon as her daughter was brought to her and she held her in her arms, Lila knew her cousin was right. But instead of turning her away, Lila held the baby even tighter. Her skin was as soft as apricots, her eyes were the color of an October sky. Lila could have held her forever. She begged for time to stop, for clocks to break, for every star to remain fixed. But none of that happened. Up on the fourth floor the neighbors ran the water in the bathroom, in the hallway outside the apartment there was the scent of coffee.
When Lila gave her daughter up to her cousin’s outstretched arms, the room grew darker, as if she had given away a star. The dresser drawer where her baby had slept was still open, and it would be days before Lila would be able to close it again. But now, as her child was taken out into the coldest winter morning ever recorded in the city, wrapped in nothing but a white towel, Lila did manage to get one last look, and for the first time she knew the loss she would feel from that day onward, every morning and every night, for the rest of her life.
They sent Lila away because she just gave up. By the end of February her milk had gone dry, and the bloody sheets had been cut into pieces and thrown into the incinerator, but Lila still refused to leave the apartment. She couldn’t even sit too close to her open bedroom window, because the breeze from outside stung her lungs. She had grown so used to the still air in the apartment that she had come to dread fresh air and light. You couldn’t tell the hour of the day in Lila’s bedroom when the curtains were drawn. It no longer mattered if it was day or night. If anyone had asked what future she saw for herself at the bottom of her own teacup she would have said endless days without purpose or plans. But then, on a day when the sky was as gray as cement, Lila found herself alone in the apartment. She went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. And when she opened the medicine cabinet above the sink, it seemed as if she’d had a plan and a purpose all along.
As she slit her wrists with her father’s razor she felt nothing at all. Although when she imagined them finding the body she had to smile: her mother could scrub the floor for weeks with every cleanser on the market, and the blood would still never come off the black-and-white ceramic tiles. But Lila didn’t cut deep enough, and before she could correct her mistake, she fainted and hit her head on the tub. When her mother came home from the market where she’d bought codfish and potatoes and lettuce, Lila was still alive. Most of the blood had spilled neatly into the sink. But although the bathroom floor wasn’t ruined, when the ambulance drivers carried Lila out a trail of blood stained the oak floor in the hallway, and it never washed out.
Two weeks later, when Lila’s wrists were still bandaged in white gauze, they sent her out to East China on the Long Island Rail Road. As Lila handed the conductor her ticket a bit of gauze peeked out from the wristband of her glove, and all the way out to East China she kept her hands clasped together in her lap. Her destination was the home of her great-aunt, Belle, a woman in her seventies who was so hard of hearing she was never quite sure if Lila’s mother had whispered baby or lazy when she called to ask for a room for her daughter. Certainly, Belle never asked what the problem had been, she just sent a taxi to meet Lila at the small wooden railroad station, and her only demand was that her great-niece never use salt when it was her turn to cook dinner.
All through March, Lila tried to feel something. But everything around her seemed bloodless and cold: the bare maple trees, the sound of bats up on the roof in the middle of the night, the empty two-lane road called the East China Highway that ran right by the house and seemed to go nowhere at all. In her cold bedroom in the attic Lila could sleep, but she had no dreams. Each night before she went to bed Lila went to the window and longed for the deep oblivion of the sky. She had no energy, nothing left to give. Just speaking a few words to her aunt was an enormous effort—afterward, Lila always had to go back to her room where she slept on the old rope bed, covered by a quilt Belle had sewn when she was not much older than Lila.
There was only one thing that attracted Lila, and that was death. The one time she agreed to do readings for her aunt’s old friends—having foolishly admitted that she used to tell fortunes—she saw nothing but symbols of death in their cups: hearts that refused to beat, black dogs, poisoned apples and pears. And although she continued to think about Hannie, she never once missed Stephen, the lover she’d thought she couldn’t live without. Stephen was a ghost; compared to death he was nothing, and it was death who called to Lila now. He was there with her every night when Lila ran her fingertips over the knives as she stored them in the silverware drawer; when she washed the dishes he was by her side, telling her that under just the right amount of pressure the glass she held could shatter into shards that would cut right through her skin. What was wonderful about these dark whispers was that they left very little room for Lila to think about her child. But at night, when the wind rose off the Long Island Sound to sweep through the potato fields and rattle down the chimneys, the cold air sounded like a baby’s wai
ling. And even when Lila put a pillow over her head and covered her ears with her hands, she could still hear the baby crying, and it cried from midnight till dawn.
Lila became convinced that she wouldn’t last through the winter. She lost twenty pounds and her dark hair fell out in clumps—she found it all over her pillow in the mornings, as if a molting bird had visited her in the night. And then quite suddenly, without any warning, it was spring. The ice disappeared, the earth was left steaming, and all over East China the air was silvery, like steam from a kettle. Puddles formed on either side of the East China Highway, and in them were small dark fish and green turtles. Laundry was hung outside on thick rope lines, and as soon as the snow melted there were white flowers and wild strawberries in every backyard.
No matter how hard Lila tried to resist she was drawn outside her room. Even when she closed her window, she could smell lilacs from the tree out in the yard that had not yet bloomed. There was the scent of seaweed in the air, and a feeling of longing in everyone, even in Lila. Early in April, more than a month after her milk had dried up, Lila awoke one morning to find that her breasts had been leaking all night—her nightgown and bedclothes were drenched, and they smelled so sweet that bees came in through the window and followed Lila all through the house until she took a broom and chased them out the front door.
Hannie had once told Lila that a long time ago, in the village where she had grown up, a separate cottage had been built for women who had lost their children at birth. Every morning people brought presents to leave outside the mother’s door: bunches of lavender, sunflowers, caged birds, hot black bread. For six nights the mother who had lost her child was not allowed to go any farther than the front door where the collection of gifts had been piled. No one was allowed to see her weeping; anyone who heard her cries in the middle of the night was to light a candle and then think of other things. On the seventh day everyone went out to collect wood, and a fire was lit outside the cottage. As the flames moved closer and closer to the rickety front steps no one could interfere, no one was allowed to run to the pond for a bucket of water. In moments the flames circled the cottage; nesting birds flew away, dragon-flies who lived in the eaves darted into the sky. And then came the hardest part—waiting until the flames leapt up to the roof.
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