I lean down, look around, as if I’m about to do something horrible, but really it’s to see if there are birds watching. How crazy is that. Birds watching. The nest looks not so much like a gathering of sticks, but like it’s been spun with them. Like there has been some kind of sorcery, some swirling of the forest to make this nest for this single perfect egg.
But now, closer, I can see there were other eggs. They are smashed and cracked, there along with the leaves and the bird’s feathers. Something horrible has happened here. Still, though, the perfect blue egg. All alone.
And that’s when I feel it: this sort of pop and then this fluid down my legs. I realize it’s on: I scramble up and over the creek, back up to my house, calling for my mother. She comes running out of the house, wiping her palms on her jeans, car keys in her hand.
And then: it is five hours and two big pushes. It is the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, even with the medicine I had to beg for. It is the most important moment of my life. It is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. It is the feeling of what it’s like to break my own heart. It is the way she slides out. It is the slippery animal seal of her, it is her there, the most beautiful perfect being. It is me thinking, you are going home but not with me. It is me thinking, I have loved you first, I am the first person to ever love you. It is me thinking, please. It is Daisy, Rose, Maple, Ivy, Marigold, all the things that grow and grow and grow, you are perfect. It is the way I can’t smell you enough or look into your blue eyes for too long, touch your perfect fingers and toes. It is how I don’t want this kind of love to ever leave me, but I don’t see how I can survive it. It is meeting you today.
It is the parents and it is me seeing them and knowing that she is theirs now and that is how it has been written, but it is also knowing that I worked so hard and did this, did this, and housed her and all of it and it was for them and not for me. It was for her, I know, but it is me not being able to feel that right now. It is me being split and sewn back up again, but inside, it is empty. It is the nurses saying I shouldn’t hold her for the night but it is me doing it anyway. And it is me not looking at the new family, her family, the family she belongs to, I know that, but it is me not being able to see that right now because she is mine and she is me and I need her. It is me breaking in two again and again and again.
I can tell they’re terrified. I can see they don’t want to push me, that they know she is mine until she becomes theirs. They hold her like she’s made of glass. They give her back to me too quickly, hot potato, and smile, and one of them, the one who looks so much like Dahlia’s mother, is weeping. She leaves, weeping. I can hear her in the hallway and I imagine her back against the wall, body-shaking movie kind of weeping, the kind I’ve been doing for months now. It’s going to be one of us now. But which one? Maybe it doesn’t have to be me with my back up against the wall. Not today.
They are gone. My mother packs my suitcase, folding all my underwear and T-shirts, carefully, as if they are baby clothes. So carefully. She waits and waits but she is gone, too.
Come, I text Dahlia. I think, we will deal with this later, how uneven our friendship has been. I will be good, later, but now, please, help me.
And here she is. Dahlia in the doorway, her head a mass of curls, her strong arms outstretched, each hand touching a side of the doorframe. But she doesn’t come inside.
“Help me.”
Behind her is a line of people all making their way in: Baylor. And then I see my mother again and Baylor’s mother and Rosaria. They are all in a line and they come in. I hide my face. I want them all gone. I want it to be only her and me now. That is it. Everyone else is somebody else that is in the way of us. But they move in around my bed. They circle and close in. I feel like it’s a vigil for me. Like, where is the minister with my last rites? What is happening? Then I think:
Maybe I’m already dead.
They hold hands, the string of people who know me. Their heads are all bowed. Maybe I have already died.
“Please give our Bridget the strength to know what this little baby needs,” says my mother.
I want to be angry but I also want that strength. I want the strength to break my own heart.
She is in my arms, my flower, my garden. My mother is reaching for her.
No! I am screaming No no no no no no. It’s all the times I have ever wanted to say it. Everyone looks terrified. No no no no no. To all of you.
She is crying too now.
My mom comes next to my bed, kneels down. Please don’t tell me she will be praying. I cannot have the praying here. “We’re here for you,” she says. “To help you.”
“Tell them, Dahlia,” I say to my friend. “I need time. Tell them!”
My mother wipes the hair out of my face, the way she did when I was a toddler. I remember it just when she does it, but it’s like I’ve always held the memory with me.
“It’s going to be okay.” My mother stands and nods toward Baylor and Rosaria and Dahlia and Bay’s mom.
No one looks at me as they walk out the door.
My mother holds my hand but I nudge her away. I look over at the empty doorway. I look down at this little baby, a loaf of bread in my arms.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Mom. I’m okay. I just need some time.” I am willing myself calm. But all it is is this crazed panic inside.
“I’ll wait outside in the hallway,” she says.
Dahlia kisses my forehead. “Right outside that door.”
I watch them leave. When the door closes, I look at the dark corners. It’s okay, I say to my baby. To my daughter. That’s when I whisper to her what I’m going to do.
If Only
Montana
Ziiip. Her face is covered in black hair, shaggy, no haircut in, what, years, it seems. I still trim her bangs. Crooked.
“Hey,” she says.
I lean back into my book. I shrug.
She climbs out of the tent and comes over to the little table we’ve got set up here. I have no freaking idea where we are. Somewhere cold and blue and lonely.
She shoves her hands into the pocket of her hoody, tucks her hair into the hood. She looks like a superhero or a criminal. Rubs her hands together like there’s a fire she’s warming over but there’s no fire here.
“What’s for breakfast, Ivy?”
I don’t look up, slide over some cereal bars we picked up at a Target—where, in the last town? Bozeman. Butte? I don’t know and I don’t really care either.
“Lovely,” says my mother. She looks over at the green Coleman stove on the table. Cold. We got cereal bars but we did not get Sterno. Don’t ask.
I glance over at her. Watch her open the wrapper with her teeth and then look up. She smiles at the sky or the tips of the trees. They’re turning now. Either way, whatever she’s looking at, it will be cold as all get-out soon.
“I’m thinking we’ll go back to the ranch. What do you think? You can go to school again.”
I ignore her. We spent last winter there and I went to school and it sucked. The school sucked and being new and a sophomore sucked and it was both too big and too small for me. I was all caged up and also it was like I was all free, too. You know? I mean it could have been that if I had friends. But the ranch is a good place. Huge. Our own room. People cooking for us. Jonathan. He is the one thing about going back but he won’t care anymore. He might be gone by now anyway. Nothing is permanent on the ranch.
My book: Black Beauty. It’s my TV, internet. It’s all I get out here, really. I love horses.
Mom looks at me. “Hello?” She flips her hair out of her face, her shock of blue.
I look at her. “Hello.” Like a dare.
“Remind me how we got here again?” She kicks at some fallen leaves. She uncovers a bunch of feathers. A huge pile. She kneels down.
Does she mean, like, the hitchhiking? With the professor, the mother of twelve, the truck driver? No one was safe. Did you know that? No one. Or does she mean it, like, no
t in a physical way, like how did we get here, on this earth, in this forest, doing time in this tent night after night? I used to love it. The sleeping bags zipping together, a gift from Gloria, who runs the ranch we’d been working at each summer. Now just the sound of it—ziip—makes me want to flee.
I get up. “I’m going for a walk,” I say.
“Be careful,” she says.
I just start walking. The trail out from the site leads to a small rise, and I can make out the mountains. What are they? Gallatins or Crazy? I don’t know. I think they’re the Crazy Mountains. Or I like to think it anyway. I wonder what’s over them. Like, what there is for me. Somewhere else. The sky as blue as a robin’s egg, like blue through and through, nothing else in front or behind it. There are other things. I know there are. Hands in my pockets, I can feel the seams, the stitching, coming loose. I look back and there are other sites with little wisps of smoke coming off the morning fires. Coffee, bacon probably. Not us. Nothing warm for breakfast since the ranch. I remember Marianne, the cook, the oatmeal and scones she’d set out for the workers before she served the guests. Warm and warm and sweet with syrup and berries.
I think it’s the Crazy Mountains for sure. I look down at my feet—high-top Vans. I might not make it over today, but I will. I am going to go. I just have to figure out where. Where I’m headed. Where I want to be.
Ivy
2017
I like to hold the rock when I’m on the phone. It has these strange relaxing properties. When my hand is too hot, it’s cool. And when I’m cool, it warms me. I throw the rock in the air, catch it. Again.
“Alex texted,” Claire says. “He wants to hang out.”
I miss it now and it hits my desk with a delicate ping, falls to the sweet soft carpet. “Are you going to?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, why not, I guess.”
“Do you even like him?”
There’s silence.
“Do you?”
“I just love who he is, in the world. Like this big person.”
“Do you want to make out with him or be him?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“I think you want to be him?” I say, and she focuses in.
This rock. I feel a desperation about finding her. It’s different now. In my bones, I feel it. Under my skin. It makes me itchy and sore.
“I mean, he’s kind of a dick,” I say.
“But did you read those poems?”
I nod.
“Hey, so, me now. Are you up for that road trip?” I ask. “The find-my-birth-mom journey?”
“Absolutely,” Claire says. I can tell she’s thinking if she wants to be Alex.
“Okay, I’m calling Patrick now,” I say. “More soon.”
“More soon,” Claire says. “More and more and more.”
I think of leaving here, even for this trip. This, here, is not misery at all. I love my family, all our chickens, my grandmother who comes here and sighs into a chair and says to my mom, darling, when on earth are you coming home? Mom’s been here for, what, twenty years? It’s more home than the original home now. That’s how I feel about it.
My mother always says, oh, Nelly, like her mother’s name is a sigh.
But still, it’s like, I want to know. Like I need to know what happened between then and now. Because . . . life.
I call up Patrick.
Swoop, hey, hi, what’s up, done with practice, cool, yeah, I want to find my mother.
“You need to talk to your moms,” Patrick says. “They love you, I.”
The thought of leaving them makes me want to cry. Why would I leave them? And it’s like a movie: Riding my new tricycle with streamers on the handles. My first puppy. My first cat. The first guinea pig. The visits to my grandmother in the city. Lying in bed with Mom when I’m sick. Her reading to me, all safe in her arms. My first day of kindergarten. The three of us looking out from the Eiffel Tower. Paris. Collecting shells in Maine. The day Pearl got mauled by a fox. Picking out Court and Spark, taking them home. Gay pride in New York City. The Pantheon in Rome when it started to snow. It’s more like a photo album flipping through the years. My memory won’t move like a video does. I have had this beautiful life, even I can see that. But there has been this thing and it has been missing. I am allowed to go looking for it. “I want to find her now.”
“Let’s go,” says Patrick. “Let’s do it.”
“Claire wants to come, too.”
Another pause. “Well then,” Patrick says. “Road trip.”
Patrick.
I put down my rock.
“Okay,” I say. “It’s just Ithaca. I mean, that’s where she was.”
“Let’s start there,” Patrick says. “A good place to start.”
“Okay,” I say again, and we are back to before. Good night, GG, Dt (done talking). Hang up. More texts come in but I am already texting Claire.
We are going, I type. Let’s go, my thumbs say. Let’s find my first mom.
Bridget
October 20, 2000
Nothing feels different inside, but I’m in the hospital now. It’s over and I take her home. I don’t look at the parents. I don’t talk to my mother. I don’t think about Baylor. I just take her. Maybe I convince myself it’s so everyone can say good-bye. My family. My blood. Home.
I can’t go into it. What it’s like. You know her. You know her. You know her. And then it’s like, isn’t my body supposed to finish up here? After? After she’s been cut from me.
Forget about during. I could remember forever about what it was like to deliver her. Maybe I am. Right now. Maybe these are my memories.
I can’t get into any of it, not even to myself. But this: I take her home and I have nothing for her there because that wasn’t the plan. No crib, no cute little onesies and booties for her teeny kissable toes. Just the little bag of baby crap they give you when you leave: a hand-knit cap, a pacifier, a can of formula, ten diapers. The blue-and-pink-striped blanket she’s wrapped in. But I have me. I am her mother. My self finishing what my self started. I don’t know what I’m thinking. I’m crazy with sadness. It’s the most crazy sadness I’ve ever had in my life. I can’t imagine it being like that again ever. Baylor dumping me? Please. That was a push in the lunchroom. This is a full-fledged thirty-car interstate pileup. This is an ax to the head, to the heart, a knife slashing at my throat. This is a thing you don’t come back from the same. Maybe you don’t come back at all.
If you come back. Do you? Do you? How do you know?
I take her home and I lock my door and my boobs are all filled up and I’m in there with her for a minute or seven months or sixteen years, I can’t say. I don’t take any calls. If it’s the adoptive family, that’s not the family anymore, I am. I am delirious with my choices. From them. There are so many and there are so few. All of them, those pink lines I dream about like they’re swords from another time and someone is on a dragon charging at me with them. The lines turn into a baby. That’s what happens in my dreams and that’s what happens now.
I have a daughter I have a daughter I have a daughter.
I wake up from napping, lightly, I’m scared I will smother her, and I think first that I have a daughter and it’s like finally waking up on Christmas, it really, really is. And then I remember all of it, and how if I keep her I will lose everyone.
I pray. I am a good person. Please, I am humble, please tell me what to do.
I need to know that what I’m doing is right. What is regret?
My mother bangs on the door but she doesn’t say what a mother is supposed to say.
This is what a mother is supposed to say: I love you I love you I love you I will never ever let you go. You are not alone.
Why isn’t my mother saying this? She is banging on the door. She is saying, “So help me God, Bridget, if you don’t give that child back, you will not be staying here.”
“Give it back? Back? This is back. I am back.”
“You
will have to go,” my mother says. “This was not the plan. Those poor people!” she is saying.
And who is she talking about? I know she means the parents. I know she means them—the lesbians she was once against—and not me and I can’t care. No one can be hurting more than me.
“I need cream,” I say, quiet. Ashamed. “For her.”
“Honey,” she says because she’s not crazy. She knows. “Honey. Please. Your hormones are nuts right now. I’m telling you, come out. You cannot keep that child. It’s all wrong now.”
Which is when I think, who am I putting first? Here’s this baby—what is her name? She’s crying and crying. Secretly, I call her Sunny. I call her Lily. I call her Daisy. I call her Clementine. Aspen. Hazel. Anything that can grow. Everything between us is a secret. Her hot breath. Mine. Her fine sweet hair, the soft head, a spot I could jam my thumb straight through. I run my thumb along her forehead. Down her nose, just a little polka dot. Her belly, teeny hands, nails already growing and growing, fingers, long yummy toes. She eats and eats and if I can stay in here and never leave I will have everything I’ve ever wanted. Big love, heaven-sent love, all kinds of angels. If I don’t move, I won’t detonate my life. My life me me me. Will anyone love me again?
What about her?
What does it mean for her? What will she want who will she be what will she feel? What will she do without me? She cries a lot and I can’t make her stop. She shits everywhere. I am running out of diapers and wipes and I don’t have diaper cream, so I use the shea butter I was rubbing into my belly. Sometimes she won’t eat, too, and also the crying changes. It’s dark and deep and from her tummy I think and what if she’s sick?
My body, too.
I want to put it all on the altar. I can do this.
I open the door and my mother is sitting out there, on the floor, back against the wall, hands propped on her knees, her head hung. There are diapers and wipes and a cream for her bum. My mother looks up to me.
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