If I Had Two Lives

by Abbigail N. Rosewood

  “How long until you’re due?” she asked once we were inside.

  “Next week. Where are they?”

  “Jon told me that they’d found a surrogate. Everything—everything was just getting so much better for them.” She looked down at her hands folded on her thighs. “April 17, they were between route—and—a truck swerved into them. The truck driver was not drinking, or using his cellphone, or on drugs, the police had confirmed. He said he didn’t know what caused him to momentarily lose his concentration. They died on impact. It was an accident, that was all they told me.” She spoke without pause. She’d had to say the same exact words to many others before me. She looked at me now, seemingly apologetic that she hadn’t thought to call me until now.

  She didn’t cry or even appear as though she wanted to. Her eyes looked past me vacantly as though she were waiting for someone to suddenly appear through the windows.

  “I’m sorry, dear. Did you know Jon well? His wife?”

  “I knew them,” I said.

  She looked at my belly and leapt up suddenly, saying, “My grandchild. My grandchild!” Then as if abashed from losing her composure, she sat down again with her elbows on her knees and cupped her face with her hands.

  “I’m keeping the baby. You can’t take it from me,” I said. My neck felt hot. I realized how angry I was getting.

  “Oh no, dear. That’s not what I meant. I’m just happy that at least—but are you sure? This isn’t what you signed up for, but we don’t have to talk about it now.”

  I put my hands on my stomach. It was all I had.

  “We’re having their funeral in Connecticut next week. Both of our families are there. I’m here to pack up the rest of their things.” She looked over her shoulder. “Will you be able to come?”

  “I can’t travel when I’m due so soon,” I said.

  “Right, I understand.” She stood up, smoothed her skirt, and went into the bedroom. She came out with a box of Chilmark chocolates. “This was all that was left from the back of the car.” I looked at the dented box. She let out a small, bitter laugh. “I can’t eat chocolate. I feel like they would have wanted you to have it.”

  As I was leaving, she gave me a card with her phone number. “Please call me when the baby’s born. Call me for anything,” she said.

  When I went out, the empty iced tea bottle was still at the base of the potted plant. The entire lawn was motionless as if even the soaked spring leaves had turned to stone. I could not take another step forward, my own feet cemented to the ground. I tried to twist my upper torso to look back because I felt Jon’s mother eyes on me but failed. A moment later, bony fingers pressed my lower spine, turned me around, and guided me back inside.

  Cynthia, Jon’s mother, shifted in and out of the bedroom as I dozed. Through the slits of my eyes, I watched her move soundlessly, listened to the sound of her pouring hot water into a washbowl. The steam rose as she repeatedly dipped the hand towel into the bowl. She wrung it with the strength of a young man, muscles swelling on her arms as she twisted and twisted the towel dry. She cleaned my feet with it, holding each toe in her long, thin fingers. She seemed like a spirit and I a body she was preparing for burial.

  I recalled the last expression on Jon’s face when he dropped me off at the airport. See you tomorrow, he had said like asking a question as if some parts of him knew. I felt as though it was me who had died in a plane crash and they had made it safely back from the vineyard. Our planes of existence were only different—they were in the same world where I was, except I wasn’t there anymore. I wondered if it was I who had died instead.

  “Cynthia,” I said.

  “What is it dear?”

  “What are you doing?” She had positioned herself behind me on the bed so that my head rested on her chest. She applied a balm on my temple, behind my ears, my jaw and massaged my face in circular motions.

  “Don’t you feel better?”

  I nodded. I fell asleep. When I woke, my lashes and cheeks were wet. My lips tasted salty. Cynthia was still behind me, supporting my neck and head with her stomach.

  “You were crying in your sleep,” she said. “Did you have a nightmare?”

  I shook my head, “It was a good dream. I climbed up a mountain—there were large bunnies there, the size of elephants. From far away, I could see them nibbling on grass. When I got closer, I saw they were just statues.”

  “They’re with God now,” she said.

  My neighbor was right after all. Lilah and Jon were now in a permanent state of forgetfulness. I and the child I was carrying no longer existed to them. The acme of all love was abandonment, the only point at which we would fulfill the promise of immortality, to persist in our love for those who are absent, into oblivion.

  Evening came, then night, and morning again. Cynthia emptied the basin, refilled it, wiped away my sweat and stilled my shivers. On the third day, I could walk into the living room. The orderliness of when I first came was gone. Various cans of instant food were left open on the sink, fruit flies circling above them. Prescription bottles were everywhere in the house, on windowsills, on the floor, between seat cushions, either empty or on their side with only one or two pills left. Cynthia was still in the same skirt she wore the first day we met, now with brown stains on its front. Her hair had loosened almost completely from the hairpin; visible gray strands curtained her profile. She was looking out the window while eating the Chilmark chocolates she’d given me.

  “They’re with God,” she said.

  I took a trash bag from under the sink and swept the cans into it.

  “Leave it,” she said.

  I continued to move around, picking up pieces of balled up paper, plastic spoons and forks off the floor.

  “Leave it,” she said more loudly and forcefully. “If you feel better dear, you can leave.”

  I was grateful to her and so I let her be, her only chance to grieve for her son before the funeral, where she would be forced to organize, greet the guests, and politely accept their condolences. When I came near, I noticed she was gripping a pack of cigarettes in her fist. I asked for one. She explained she wasn’t normally a smoker. We both looked at the bump on my stomach. It seemed that between us an understanding was reached silently. She lit one for herself. We sat and smoked together, looking out the window for a hint, a sign.

  13

  That night, I couldn’t sleep and rummaged through my old things. I found one of the tapes Mother had given me on my first day at the camp. It was at the back of my closet, wrapped in a white cloth that had turned yellow. She had put it in my backpack when we said goodbye before I left the camp for the last time. I had wanted to listen to it many times, but the families I lived with either didn’t have a cassette player or I never found the time and privacy to play the tape. Over the years, I came up with more rules and circumstances to delay listening to it. I gave myself temporal landmarks and told myself I would find out why she had included only this one tape on my sixteenth, eighteenth, twentieth birthday. More years went by and the idea of what the tape held grew in my mind. It was a small thing, like the butterfly that changed the history of the world. In my hand now, it weighed almost nothing.

  I remembered that my neighbor had brought a portable cassette player back from Vietnam. I went upstairs to borrow it. He was asleep on the living room couch so I grabbed it from his book and shoe shelf. Then I went back to my own bed, got under the covers, inserted the tape, and pressed play. My mother’s voice—it was different, gentler, slower than I remembered. It was the voice she only used when speaking about my father.

  I’m taping over the one I made for you before you were able to move to the camp to live with me. When you’re listening to this, we’re already separated. I heard her sniffle, a small tremor in her voice. I balled my hand into a fist and bit my knuckles. Since I won’t be there to wake you up when you have nightmares, I
’ll tell you a few stories you can listen to before bed. You’ll have good dreams then. Think of it as your own a Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

  She cleared her throat and began. She told the story of the fisherman lost at sea and returned a hundred years later to a changed world; a rabbit who changed his name and went on an adventure; a mummy who was buried deep inside an ancient Egyptian tomb; when he woke up, and unable to get out, spent the next thousand years grieving for the woman he had loved and lost when he left her to go conquer other cities. Once in a while, she interrupted the stories to let me know which one had been my father’s favorite, which one her own. I listened to the tape, cradled in the warmth of her voice, both known and unfamiliar. Through the night, I listened.

  At about three in the morning, I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. I was having my first contraction. I called my neighbor and he came down to meet me carrying a stack of towels.

  “Do you want to be taken to a hospital?” he said. He could see the bewildered expression on my face, since I’d never considered another option. “Some women prefer to deliver at home. Do you have a midwife?”

  I shook my head. “Let’s go. I feel like it’s coming.”

  At the hospital, we were quickly ushered in. My neighbor nodded when a nurse asked if he was the father. I was grateful for this gesture. Neither of us felt like explaining.

  When the baby came, my neighbor sat next to the obstetrician and was allowed to catch my daughter’s head. My daughter seemed to have sensed my pain and exhaustion from the previous days; she arrived without too much effort on my part. The nurse cleaned and handed her to me. I searched her face for something of Lilah’s, an illogical but hopeful thought. I found only her soft brown hair and her eyes, a tint of grayish blue, much like Jon’s.

  I looked at the ceiling of the hospital room and felt the strength of my own determination. Sitting there under the fluorescent light, I could finally admit to myself that for weeks I’d wrestled with guilt, thinking about what Cynthia had said, that I hadn’t signed up for this. In Connecticut, Jon and Lilah had been laid underneath upturned earth for several days. Jon was right after all. There was little difference between being in a cradle or a casket.

  I touched my daughter’s fingertips to my own, the impossibility of her skin, her nails, her palm. The utter impossibility of her—and there she was. I’m so sorry, Lilah, my tears fell on my daughter’s closed eyelids. It looked as though we were both crying. For the first time, I realized that a mother could never move on from the death of her child. Lilah had been whom I thought of as the woman I loved and yet I’d understood nothing. She was—beyond everything—a mother without a child.

  My neighbor held the baby during the cab ride back to our apartments. Cradled in his arms, she was silent and docile. I leaned my head against the car window, remembering the snowstorm in Montauk that had led me here.

  “Have you thought of a name?” my neighbor said.

  “Quoc-Anh, Jon picked it.”

  “What about an English name?”

  “No. She only needs one name.” I could tell by my neighbor’s expression that he was concerned. I understood it too because so often a name could determine the way a person is perceived. Names that are difficult to pronounce are passed over in favor of common names. Those with sonically beautiful names tend to be more successful in life. I also used two names, neither of which I was particularly attached to. A name could make you whole or fracture you.

  “It sounds too foreign. Makes it harder for her to fit in,” my neighbor said.

  “I haven’t accomplished anything by trying to fit in,” I said. “I may have gotten a few gigs because of my English names but the surprise on people’s face when they meet me—they look as if I’d lied to them.”

  Once we were inside my apartment, I was struck by how well Jon and Lilah had prepared me to bring my daughter home. While I nursed her, my neighbor went through the plastic bags full of baby items I wouldn’t use for several more months. He held up a two-layered container, one of which would be filled with hot water to keep the baby’s food warm.

  “What the hell is this?” he said.

  “It’s for when she can eat solids.”

  “Can’t they keep it simple? All you need is a bowl and a spoon.”

  I laughed. “It’s okay if they just eat dirt too, right?”

  “Yes!” he exclaimed. “As much dirt as possible. It’s good for them.” He smiled. “Get some rest. Tomorrow I’ll work on that.” He gestured the wood planks of the unfinished crib lying haphazardly in the corner. Then spontaneously he leaned down, kissed my daughter’s nose, and went upstairs.

  That night I climbed up the same mountain and found the same field of giant bunnies. As I came close to one, I called out my daughter’s name. The bunny looked at me before hardening into rock. I’d forgotten to let down the curtain and woke up to a blue moon light surging in the window. Bathed in it, my daughter’s skin seemed lit from underneath. She was like a translucent fish whose visible skeleton made it look both frail and magical. I sat up in bed to feed her. For the first time I truly felt the loss of Lilah.

  The fiber of the dream she’d hoped for us disintegrated like quicksand around me. Alone with my daughter in the cool illumination of the moon, I wondered if this moment was meant to last forever—and wished for us both to turn to stone.

  14

  The afternoon was filled with the sound of drilling and splitting of wood. My neighbor had brought his work home so that he would have some time to finish putting together the crib Jon had started. He handed me a stack of documents and asked me to look for errors and any incorrect word choice. I glanced at the loose papers and knew that I didn’t have the legal knowledge required to copy edit it, but to make my neighbor happy, I took a pencil and started reading. I hadn’t set aside my goal of becoming a journalist completely, though I knew it would be on hold for a while. In the meantime, I thought I could learn something by working as a paralegal, so I accepted my neighbor’s offer and began to practice more sincerely with the work he brought from his office.

  As I read the files, I was moved. My neighbor represented undocumented youths mostly from Mexico, Honduras, Cuba. He continued to feel responsible for the kids whom he’d helped secure a longer stay, putting them in sports academies or finding them temporary homes. If they didn’t have a future as athletes, they still risked being deported. It was a job, my neighbor felt, that was never finished. The only success he could claim, he told me, was a boy who crossed the border to come to the United States when he was thirteen. He was now studying chemical engineering in Portland, Oregon. Other than him, most of the children’s lives were a series of obstacles and dangers that even adults couldn’t overcome. I thought, with a wistful sadness, that maybe I was to my neighbor another immigrant to be saved.

  “All done.” He stood up and tapped his pants several times to shake off the sawdust. “Jon really thought of everything. This is a good design too . . . ”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  With a gentle paternal instinct, he lifted Quoc-Anh from my arms.

  “Am I still much like him?” he said.

  “Not anymore,” I said. I thought of the person I’d chased from the subway station more than two years ago and how my neighbor was no longer that man, a placeholder of memory. “Am I still like her?”

  He shook his head. “I wish she and I could have had this, but it would have been a lot different.”

  “Could you watch her for a while? I want to lie down,” I said.

  In the bedroom I closed my eyes, but sleep didn’t come. It would be at least five or six more years before my daughter would begin to sense her difference, to articulate the difficult questions. Yet I already found myself trying to weave together a narrative to tell her when the time came. I didn’t want to hide anything from her, though now I understood why so many parents lied to their chil
dren, because they too wished desperately for that alternative version, the one in which their children came to the world simply, unhesitatingly and not through an adult game, a twist of fate.

  I went to Lilah and Jon’s place often, watching their front door from across the street without blinking as though my concentration and yearning were enough to will them back into existence. My soldier had once said that anything you wanted badly enough, you would get. As a child, I’d blamed Mother for not bringing back father. Against all physical laws, I mumbled prayers, bargained with God.

  One time I took my daughter with me, carrying her in a sling tied to my chest. Together we looked at the knee-high gate, the lawn, and the door Lilah had painted green. The window blinds were drawn, but I could see the shape of someone moving inside. It seemed a great trick, a hole in the fabric of the universe, that a structure could go on standing there after the fact. Death had diminished my world, making me wish only for decay, for my surroundings to match my inner state, and at the same time, my body could barely contain the fact of them being gone, exploding with too much color and meaning. Everything was finely woven into a cosmic arabesque. Then—with a sweep—nothing.

  My heart stopped when the curtains were pulled and I saw her standing there, her eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. A nearly exact image. She shaded her face with her hand, turned her head left and right, and closed the curtain. A few minutes later, she came out the front door. She walked out of the gate, paused, looked at me directly across the street.

  “My sister had that exact same dress,” she said. “Where did you get it?”