“There we go,” Hartford says. “Tea?”
Ibrahim shakes his head.
“Toast?”
Ibrahim is now pacing between the window and the table instead of between his studio and the bedroom, and he’s still shaking his head.
“Right. I’ll get the whisky,” Hartford says, and pours two glasses.
TIME PASSES; the song loops; Ibrahim downs his whisky and listens to the shouts and grunts and muffled words coming from upstairs; then, worse, silence. Everything inside him is poised to go towards the room—he’s on his toes, he’s leaning forward, his hands are clenched so tightly he’s forgotten about them—like a wave as it crashes in the middle of the sea, smashing forever towards land. Should he pray? He’s not sure he remembers how to pray, or really even to whom. To his higher power, to his family, to the God of All Things?
Please let everything be all right.
Then one huge, majestic scream, doubled. The scream turns to a hiccupping burble.
Life.
XXV
BLACK. BLACK AND RED, the pain its own palpitation. Then—a white, lightning-searing flash. Life. She is a cog in the system of creation and has fulfilled her duty, has churned forth a new seed. She is a mother machine.
When the pain has abated, absence. Her breath is a black abyss. When the life that was inside her is gone, there is no more. She’s been emptied.
When the baby is gone from her womb and is replaced with a hole, the rest of the world returns to her through this opening. First: the wood-beamed white ceiling, the feeling of fabric around her ankles. Second: an unrecognizable scream. The fear evoked by this scream instantly transfers to Silvia, who screams in response.
“Shh, there, there.”
Third: Cynthia’s face, dark, close, deeply lined. Seeing this face brings a different kind of distress, and Silvia’s insides turn cold. She closes her eyes and sees the teeth, bees’ wings like floss between them.
Part of Silvia’s very being is now outside herself—she feels this physically. She opens her mouth, but no words come out. The words have left her along with her child. She tries to lift her head so as to see more than what’s in front of her nose, but her neck no longer seems able to support her skull.
“There, now,” Cynthia says, her hands on Silvia’s shoulders. “You just stay still, rest.” Silvia stares up, helpless, unable to stop what is happening. “It’s all over.”
“Please,” Silvia utters before her voice runs out again.
“Hello, baby,” Cynthia says, and Silvia hears the smile in her voice. The feeling of this smile gives her a pain nearly as intense as the one she just pushed through, but this time the pain is in her heart. The pain is her heart.
“Let’s go and get you cleaned up,” Cynthia says.
The baby is no longer screaming but gurgling, as if bubbles are catching in its throat. Silvia can do nothing but lie there as Cynthia leaves the room, holding the child—her child, Silvia’s child, Silvia’s heart.
As soon as she’s alone, not by choice but almost as if in a primal form of defense, Silvia falls asleep.
XXVI
IBRAHIM IS LITERALLY on the edge of his seat in the kitchen, and when Cynthia walks in, he jumps up. “How is she? How’s she doing?”
“It’s a girl,” Cynthia says, smiling, holding out the baby to show him.
A girl. It’s a girl! He dances forward to see: a perfect baby girl. Ibrahim has always wanted a girl. He loves girls. And this one’s his. “Oh, she’s perfect,” he says, and she is. With her soft tufts of golden hair and her little pink feet, each one of her tiny toes smaller than one of Ibrahim’s Chiclet teeth. With her rubbery, paper-thin fingernails, her legs like croissants, all pleated with buttery chubbiness. With her little ears like pressed clay—a fingerprint here, there, and with her hands opening and closing like tiny anemones, hungry for something, reaching for it. “Can I?” he asks as he takes the baby—carefully, so carefully—from Cynthia, and he feels love surge like an electric current, practically short-circuiting his heart. He loves this little human; he has been put here on this earth just to love her.
“How’s Silvia?” he asks, remembering himself. “Is she doing okay?”
“Not too well, actually.” Cynthia’s tone is controlled, opaque.
“What? Really?” Ibrahim lowers his little girl, still holding her tight.
“You have to support her head,” Cynthia says, adjusting his elbow. “There.”
Ibrahim looks down at the face of this child, whose head he doesn’t know how to hold correctly, whose mind he will never be able to read. He feels her heart beat through her body, through his body. “What happened? Is it serious? Should we take her to the hospital?”
“Silvia? Oh, no, I think she just needs some rest.”
“Has she seen the baby? Should I go up to her?”
“Of course she’s seen the baby.” Cynthia half laughs. “She gave birth to her, didn’t she?” They look at each other for a moment. “Silvia’s sleeping, and given her circumstances, I think she needs the rest.” Cynthia looks at him meaningfully.
He nods. The word “circumstances” lends a solemnity he cannot argue with. He looks down at his baby. His baby. His little girl. Her mouth has been drawn with a pencil, tiny puckering lines and a wavering, grumpy top lip. The sun’s framed in the window behind her head, haloing her golden tufts; the sunlight through her earlobes glows them red. He is filled up.
His love of Silvia has become embodied in this beautiful little baby that they created together. He loves Silvia, he loves the baby, and he loves the world for having made life this way.
He holds his baby up to the sky, then quickly brings her back to his chest, suddenly afraid of how far away from him she is, afraid that he won’t be able to protect her if she’s way out there.
XXVII
WHEN SILVIA WAKES her breasts are aching, swollen as footballs. She has no idea what she looks like; she hasn’t seen a mirror in forever. And since she’s a mother, maybe she’s completely changed. Aged. Grown up. She can hear birds screeching outside; their cries sound like a baby’s. Maybe it’s her baby crying. Then she hears the sound of an unfamiliar car. At least she thinks it’s the sound of a car—she hasn’t heard one in a while. She wants to see whose it is—there are so rarely visitors here—but she can’t get up, or turn around. Fear, laced through with a fine, small hope, that it might be her parents. In a way, it would be a relief if they came. The perfect excuse. All she wants is to leave as soon as possible; she knows her parents would want this too.
She gives up, tries to empty her mind of thoughts and fears and hopes. Her stomach is slightly deflated, like raw dough. There is nothing inside her anymore. So much nothing. Believing in nothing, she decides, is completely different from not believing in anything. It would be so much easier if she could believe in nothing.
XXVIII
THE HOUSE FEELS, for the first time in a long time, perfectly calm. It’s late afternoon and all the windows are open, “so the house can breathe,” as Cynthia said. The baby is now nearly twenty-four hours old. Ibrahim thinks that his whole sense of time will now be permanently shifted, measured only by the lifespan of his child. Hours, weeks, and years will be counted according to how long she’s lived rather than anything else.
Silvia is sleeping, Cynthia is trying to put the baby down, and Ibrahim and Hartford are sitting at the dining room table finding excuses not to talk so that they can focus on their thoughts. Hartford alternates between polishing the silverware and balancing the chequebook; Ibrahim repeatedly reads, and then recoils from, the baby book Silvia tried to get through; he’s still blissed out on love and doesn’t want to disrupt it with this harsh, gloopy reality. Then there’s a knock at the front door.
“Who is that?” Ibrahim asks.
“I don’t know,” Hartford says.
“You should get it—you live here.”
“Right.” Hartford stands up, but when he’s halfway to the door he look
s back at Ibrahim, remembering that he lives there too.
Hartford pulls open the heavy door smoothly but slowly, ready for anything.
“No reception up here?” Meg is standing on the front step, holding her phone up at shoulder height as if trying to capture signals that might be floating beyond her waist.
“Hello, Meg.”
“Hartford, how are you,” she says, walking into the kitchen, not wanting a response. She puts her black bag on the chair next to Ibrahim and smoothes down her hair, puffier than usual in this fresh spring heat. “Ibrahim, how’s Silvia?” The real question. “I thought I’d pop in to see how things were going”—she waves her useless cell phone—“since you’re otherwise unreachable.”
Ibrahim feels a great sense of relief. “Silvia’s sleeping,” he says quickly. “She had the baby.”
Meg pauses for a moment, her right eye twitching slightly. “Then why didn’t you—”
“The baby came yesterday—her water broke, I asked Cynthia to call you, but she said—I can’t remember what she said, actually. But it was all happening so fast and we didn’t know what was going on and I had to wait down here, and now they’re both sleeping. It’s a girl.” He wants Meg to have all the information; he senses that she’ll be able to see answers he can’t.
“Right.” Meg is gripping the back of the chair with both hands. “Where are they?”
“Silvia’s in her room, and the baby is . . .” Ibrahim pauses, looks at Hartford, and whispers as though he’s offstage and missed his cue, “Where’s the baby?”
“Cynthia’s putting her to sleep in the nursery.”
“The nursery?” Meg says. “But—okay, never mind. Baby first.” Meg picks up her bag again.
“CYNTHIA,” MEG SAYS, striding into the pink nursery, making a beeline for the baby. “How is she?” She goes to the butter-yellow crib and looks in. Her manner, though always efficient, is rather more brusque than usual.
“Meg! We tried to call you,” Cynthia says. “She’s just gone to sleep,” she adds protectively.
Hartford and Ibrahim are standing at the door, watching.
“You did?” Meg reaches down to pick up the baby even though she can tell Cynthia doesn’t want her to. “There you are,” she says as she scoops the baby into the crook of her right arm. “From the pay phone way down at the end of the road? You’re still using that, right? Well, it must have not gone through.”
Cynthia, silenced, watches Meg with a mournful expression that looks almost like longing as the midwife rocks the child back and forth, gently bringing her to a state of wakefulness, with no tears.
“Six pounds, seven or eight ounces,” Meg concludes.
“What’s that?” Ibrahim asks.
“The baby’s weight.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been doing this for more than half my life, young man,” Meg says, jokingly scolding. “What’s her name?”
“She doesn’t have a name yet.”
“Bad luck not to name a baby,” she says, suddenly serious. She goes to her black bag and retrieves a cloth tape measure that unspools as she pulls. Wrapping it like a ribbon around the infant’s head, Meg announces, “Thirteen inches.”
“Silvia had a . . . a sort of attack,” Cynthia says, finding her voice again.
“Not an attack,” Ibrahim corrects, trying to smooth this over for himself as much as for Silvia. “She just got anxious.”
Meg looks between them and waits for a further explanation.
“In any case,” Cynthia continues impatiently, “it must have triggered an early labour, and it all got a bit chaotic in the moment. She’s still very . . . fragile.”
Meg adjusts the baby in her arms. “You came early, didn’t you? The early bird catches the worm, you know.” Meg doesn’t do baby talk: she speaks to the child as though she might reply. She sticks her finger into the baby’s mouth and feels around for a moment, wiggling her index along the palate. “All good there. Sucking reflex working well.” Meg looks up. “Fragile how?”
“Mentally unstable,” Cynthia states frankly.
Ibrahim, hurt by her impermeable candour, says, “She’s just found the whole thing kind of hard. She used to be really religious, and there’ve been some strange—”
“Where is she, then?” Meg’s patience has met its limit.
“Resting,” Cynthia says.
“In her room?”
Cynthia nods.
“And this is the nursery?” Meg looks at the bassinet, the pink walls.
“Hartford painted it,” Cynthia replies.
“Why is it on the opposite side of the house and downstairs?”
There’s a pause for a moment. Cynthia and Hartford attempt to speak at once, offering rational reasons for the room’s location, but Meg interrupts. “I’m going to go check on Silvia.” She sees that Cynthia is about to say something, so continues: “It doesn’t matter if she’s resting. I need to check some things, and it will only take a few minutes.”
Meg taps the baby on her nose, then folds her arms over her body and gently places her back in the crib. “Sleep for you,” she says. All the while, the baby hasn’t made a peep. “We’ll be back to look at latching soon.”
Hartford and Ibrahim leave the nursery first.
“After you,” Cynthia says.
“No, you first.” Meg gestures for Cynthia to walk ahead, but when she’s in the doorway, Meg reaches out to touch her arm.
Looking at Meg, Cynthia’s face is backlit by the sun, setting on the other side of the house, its copper rays stretching in from the garden-facing windows. Her dark, cropped hair is given a halo effect, and her right cheek is radiating while her left, the side facing Meg, seems to have been made invisible, an all-absorbing black shadow. Meg blinks, but the strange effect remains—it makes Cynthia look as though she has two faces, neatly divided by the central prow of her nose.
“Is everything all right, Cynthia?”
“Of course,” she answers, her tone rising. “Everything is fine.”
“I know this must be hard for you, not knowing where Leila is.”
“Not at all,” Cynthia says. “This is . . . this isn’t like that,” she adds, stumbling over on the hinge syllable, “is.”
“I’ll go up to Silvia, then,” Meg says. “Ibrahim will take me, and you and Hartford can stay with the baby.”
XXIX
THE BEES ARE GETTING RESTLESS. Over in the hives in the back lot, they scramble on top of one another in blind, hungry desperation. They are agitated; they have lost their queen, and the new one has yet to be appointed.
The beardy fuzz of fur on their faces; the hazy mirror effect of their vibrating wings; the buzz like the morning call of a muezzin; the complicated moving machinery of individuals working as one, thousands of six-leg sets tiptoeing at once towards a single desire, a common goal. It’s a muddle of bees, a blizzard of bees. They dazzle, whiz; they drizzle out through the entrance to the hive and fly up, one after another, as if they’re connected by invisible strings, until they form a cloud: cocoa-bean brown, pixellated grey. The horizon is dark.
This is passion, this is devotion, this is death. Nothing at all like love.
The suck, the cringe, the eerie drone.
XXX
SILVIA OPENS HER EYES and watches as a cloud passes across her vision. As soon as it sweeps out of her sightline another gelatinous cell floats across the world, casting shadows on her bare white walls, flattening her depth perception. She tries to hold on to them, identify their shapes before they disappear—a misguided clairvoyant searching for truths in tea leaves. She’s had floaters since she was a child, but they seem newly portentous now.
She closes her eyes. The shapes disappear. She hears the low, distant sound of a machine starting up, and this fills her with dull, familiar panic.
Her room surges with a vivid gold light, so she knows it must be around sunset. The room fills with the sun’s goodbye every evening; it’s somethi
ng she’s come to love about it here. It must be dinnertime, she thinks, but she’s not hungry for dinner, can’t even remember the last time she ate something that could be called dinner.
There are footsteps on the stairs, approaching. Two sets, four feet. She remembers the car. She had forgotten to wonder who was here and now they’re here, actually coming to her room. She tries to listen for the sound of a baby, her baby, but hears nothing. The usual panic turns into a swell of fresh terror. Where has Cynthia taken her child? She doesn’t even know what her baby looks like. Then she realises, with a sudden sinking feeling, that she doesn’t even know whether it’s a boy or a girl.
There’s a knock at the door but it’s already opening before she’s replied and Meg is there, followed immediately by Ibrahim. Seeing Meg, Silvia realises that she doesn’t know how many days it’s been since she had the baby. Has it been a week? Could it have been that long? When her water burst all she wanted was this woman, the solidity of her certainty, but now Silvia is resigned, at twenty-three, to her whole life having already passed her and to having no more personal wants at all.
“How are you doing, dear?” Meg walks to Silvia, who is lying straight as a mummy on the double mattress, and puts her bag on top of the sheet.
“Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“My baby.”
Ibrahim comes to her side and takes her hand, so small inside his. “Cynthia’s looking after her—she’s doing fine. Meg’s here to check on you.”
Silvia looks up at Ibrahim, so far above her. He looks so different from this angle that she hardly even recognizes him. The more we’ve seen people, she’s come to realise, the less we’re able to see them as a whole. “A girl?” She feels flooded.
“Didn’t Cynthia tell you?” Ibrahim shrugs away the moment of confusion. “Yes, it’s a girl.” A smile comes to his face when he thinks of his girl, their girl. “And she’s perfect.”
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