After Life (And A Bit Before)

You arrive in silence. You look up, startled and blue, a red ring around your neck. You turn toward the sound of my cry and open your mouth to protest perhaps, but an oxygen mask smothers your sounds. Scissors snap and just like that we are two and you are in the hands of the man who pulled you from me. He passes you to a woman who waits in a long white coat. She peers at you gently; you shut your eyes.

The room shifts quickly then. A cart is pushed aside, a tray tips over. The woman holding you hurries out the door. Your arm falls to your side. Your fingers, old-bruise blue, sway and still. Your father, sobbing and sweating, follows you down the hall.

After you leave, a crowd remains. My doctor, two nurses and three others—I don’t care who they are—all in surgical masks and green smocks, peer inside me. The room becomes cold and I shake. The nurses rest latex fingers on my legs to still them. I ask if you will be all right.

The doctor stops, his needle suspended by blood-soaked fingers, looks up and finds my eyes, “We’re doing everything we can.”

It is then that I feel it, the fear, rising up, choking even the pain between my legs. It is then that I understand it, the seriousness of what is happening, the fact that you are fighting to breathe, the fact that you may be dying or already dead.

For a moment I think that I will vomit, that I will spew out all the terror that knits inside, but instead the room goes black.

***

My mother believes she died once. She slept in the hospital on tight sheets bleached too white. My father made us waffles for dinner while her body hummed, alive with worry. Her hysterectomy left a space and something protested. A vein collapsed and blood seeped, unchecked, a swollen river without a shore.

There was a chill, she says, felt only by the warmth that tiptoed behind. She rose from her bed. She looked down at her body. She realized she was prettier than she had known. And she could breathe, full deep breaths that made her buoyant.

There was a light—there always is—and she followed it. A tunnel formed, she knows it sounds trite, but she still says today, over thirty years ago, it made her float. She followed that light, in that tunnel, and stopped in a place brighter, but sweeter than the sun.

She prepared to rest, she says, to unfold like a blanket thrown over sand from the sea. She felt large and full and there was no pain and no worry and no thought of the nutritional value of waffles at dinnertime. She started to stretch, a woman free of clothes too tight, heels too high, and then she thought, “But what about Gina and Laurie?”

A bolt, a slash of pain: she winces even now describing it to me. “And then I was just so heavy, so trapped, my pockets full of bricks.” She looks at me hard, weighing my worth, considering her choice. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven us.

The doctors say her heartbeat stopped for four minutes. My sister, Gina, says Mom’s always been a bit insane.

***

The frog is perfect. He is still and pale green, a shade two leaves from the core of a head of lettuce. He sits in the driveway by our garage.

“Ooooh, he’s so cuuuute,” says my second son, Zack, just three. He bends to pet it, one dirty finger reaching out to its back. It does not move and I look closer.

“Wait, honey, don’t touch it,” I say.

He pulls his hand back fast. “It bite?”

I shake my head. “No, it’s dead.”

“Dead?” he asks and I kneel down, too, place his hand over his heart.

“Do you feel that?” a quiet pump beneath a dinosaur T-shirt. He nods, not sure.

“It’s your heart,” I tell him, his breath close to mine. “And the frog had one, too, but now it doesn’t work and when that happens, it means he’s dead.”

“Dead,” he says.

“Yes.”

“He jump?” He says and I sigh just a little.

“No, the part of him that jumped and played and ate flies is gone now.”

“Oh.” A silence. He weighs the worth of this frog and says, “His Mommy sad?”

I do not know the heart of a frog, but I do know that the path to a frog begins with two hundred eggs, fewer tadpoles, and then, a long lonely process in a damp place. The frog, finally formed, then hops away. I doubt he remembers to call home.

“Yes,” I say. “His Mommy’s sad.”

We both take a moment, pay our respects.

Then, “I keep him?”

I picture Zack’s closet, his box with feathers, rocks, a square piece of a snake, evidence of a lawn-mower murder. It is the perfect resting space for a skeleton of a frog, but not a corpse that beckons to bugs. “No, honey, he belongs to the sun and the sky and the dirt and the wind. They’re still a part of him. They’ll take care of him.”

Zack stands then, looks at me. “He be cold.”

I stand, too, put my hand on his shoulder and feel the bones beneath his shirt. How easily he could break, almost as weak as a frog left in the Florida heat. “He can’t anymore. He can’t be cold or hungry or sad or have owies anymore. Nothing can hurt him now.”

He nods. We watch him for a while and consider this absence of discomfort. Too much perhaps for a boy with two skinned knees, a bruise on his elbow. Then, “No sads? No more?”

I rub his hair with the palm of my hand. “No sads, no more.”

He nods again, considers. “I kick him?”

I hesitate. “I guess so. But just to the grass.”

***

You are four hours old and no longer blue. Hands bring you to me, place you in my arms, arrange the tube taped to your mouth. We are both awake now and we look hard at each other.

My tears fall on your face, but neither of us blinks.

I study you. I breathe you. I have never felt so much and so little like an animal.

Then, I realize it, this simple truth: we have loved each other before. I know you like I know the freckle at the base of my wrist, the attic of my childhood home, the curve of your father’s chin. I know you. This knowing is not like the face in a crowd that you look at too long, wondering where you’ve met before. It is like the hidden cellar beside your Grandmother’s home. You grow—your youth a memory—and return one day, a guest where everything is and is not familiar. You go to the cellar, you open the door in the ground, you step down, inside the dirt, reach out your hand into the dark and there, there, your fingers awake and remember: the jars of jam, the bin of potatoes, the candle on the shelf, the matches behind the stewed tomatoes... everything just the way you left it. You remember, even in the dark. You know.

Years will pass and one day I will have two other sons and they will be as loved, but you are the only one that I have known at the break of birth.

***

My Uncle Bud is dying and he’s taking a long time to do it. My mother, his sister, says he was always that way, doing things the hard way.

We are on our way to visit him at the nursing home (“No, Laurie Ann, the long-term care facility for God’s sake, don’t say ‘nursing home’ to him”). I am driving, my license one week old. My mother makes us take the back roads, they wind and curve, and old Illinois oaks cloak every comer in surprise. But it’s safer for a new driver, my mother tells me. Everyone else is on that interstate.

I drive the way Jimmy Carter says I should to save gas and lives, as slow as I can. I wish away time. I am only coming to see my Uncle Bud because my mother let me drive.

I think of the last time we saw my uncle, his eyes half closed on a bed shut still with metal bars. He struggled when he saw us, pulled himself up to a slump on straight pillows. He waved his three fingers at us—two lost in the door of a fire truck a decade or so before—and motioned me over, “Look! Pull that sheet up, kiddo. See what they did to my goddamn leg.”

A blurred brown bandage was wrapped around the space where his leg once stood. His thigh, an orphan, looked too thin, underfed. I looked away, pulled the sheet back. “Ouch,” I said, too soft. His face shifted then, lost and gained more years than I had been alive, and he began to cry, long wails that sounded like a joke at first.

My mother motioned me out of the room, a flick of her wrist. I backed away from the bed.

Later, I stood by the door, listened to the even tone of my mother, a mix of murmured words all in tune. Every now and then I would hear my uncle, as loud as when he was drunk, and then, “Shit, sis, I’m scared to death. All the shit I pulled, you can’t know.”

But my mother does know. She made tea for my aunt the first time he hit her. My mother kept his children for a summer, watched my father teach them chess. She told my aunt sometimes even Catholics have to get divorced.

My mother knows the shit he pulled—believes in the Hell he fears—but still she says, “Do you remember that time when there was no money and Dad had to do the one thing that could make a man hate him: cross the picket line? Do you remember what Mom said when they bombed our house and all the kids were wailing, ‘We’re going to die’? She said we are promised eternity and we are, Bud, we are.”

Today, when we will visit him, he will tell my mother that their brothers, both dead for many years, have come to see him. He will tell her, “They keep bugging me to go with them; they never let the hell up.”

My mother will plead, “Why don’t you go, Bud? Why not?”

He won’t answer and we won’t ask him anything else, but years later when we tell family ghost stories, we will tell this one and forget to say that on the day Uncle Bud saw his brothers, he also thought my mother was his mother, that I was the nurse, that his leg was whole, his infection a sunburn after a Fourth of July picnic with his ten-year-old son who had been married and living in Chicago for fifteen years.

***

You do not die. You are not even wounded much. Your bruises soften and fade, your breath grows strong and even. Your throat heals, your mind whirls. You grow, you love, you learn, you lie and cry, you consume me, perfect, a part of me. Everything that shook your birth is stilled; nothing but the loud life of you remains.

Tonight we drive away from my parents’ home, along an Illinois highway where even in the black, fields lie down like pancake batter in a pan. Everyone but you sleeps while I drive. You are seven now and you want to know how four girls can die in a fire. “But two of them ride my bus,” you say, and I cry without notice or noise.

You are worried that they are in Heaven without their parents. You go through it again. “I just don’t understand how it can happen. How did the mom and dad get out of the house and the kids didn’t?” It makes no sense to you, a child the center of his own universe.

I try to explain the seductiveness of smoke, how it taunts and teases you, stumbles you into a stray sleep. “And then when that man drove by and saw the fire, he ran to the first room in the house and that’s where the parents were sleeping.”

You sigh, annoyed. “I know. But I don’t understand why they didn’t tell him where the kids were.”

“When they were outside—when the wind woke them and the smoke cleared from their brains—then they did tell him. They remembered and they tried to run into the house, even though it was really burning then and the firefighters were there. It was just too late.”

You are quiet, considering, and I think about the newspaper article, the mother screaming, “My babies are in there, my babies! Please, God, get my girls!”

Our lives push us past the spot where that house once stood. Publix, the pediatrician, play group, the gas station with the French Vanilla coffee... the house stands between us and them. Almost every day we drive by. We watch it in silence, study the shell and later the flattened plot, and I tell myself, “Enough, you cannot cry again. Enough.”

Weeks pass, but even now the road blurs and I blink too hard. You don’t even pretend not to notice, but still I lie to myself and say all my tears are for the girls mugged of life and for the mother who stumbles into that dark space—the death of her children—and crawls out with only the curse of her own life. I tell myself that not one of these tears is for me, for the fear that grows beside you, the fear that you or one of your brothers will be lost, hurt, altered, stolen, amputated from me.

The fear that I will live and one of you will die.

Tonight, you are not satisfied. “You would come get me,” you say, seven-year-old sure. “Dad would, too.”

I want to say, “Yes, of course, we would, how could we not?” but I cannot do that to the mother who lives. “Oh, honey. You can’t know how much they wished they could have.”

You think a minute, look out the window, weigh your words under the cover of the night. You are about to say something awful and maybe true and you know it. “I think they just didn’t want to be dead, too.”

“Oh, baby,” I say and I do not sigh, not even a little. “No, I don’t think so. I think they would rather be dead than have to live without their children.”

But you have said the awful words and now the gate is open. “No, they wouldn’t,” you tell the window. “And now their kids are in Heaven by themselves.”

I want to tell you my truth that Heaven is wherever there is love, but you are in your own space now, that place where you have decided what is and what is not. “Grandma says that God called them home, that He was lonely for them, for more little angels.”

I do not turn around or glance into my mirror. I look ahead into the dark and think about my God. She is bigger, but perhaps less powerful than my mother’s God. Her God is a noun; mine a heartbeat of a verb. My God wept when the air conditioner cord separated, spit and sparked. Her God could have stopped it.

I no longer pretend not to cry. “I don’t know, honey.” I do not know about lonely angels, Uncle Ghosts, the separation of saints and sinners, but I do believe those girls followed my mother’s light, their souls stepping over the boundaries of their bodies. I believe this—tonight I do—and still I think that I would trade my life for theirs, easy math, one woman not-quite young for four lives not-quite lived. And perhaps I would shrink, the gun cold in my mouth, the flames at my feet, even the loss of light in your motherless eyes, but tonight it seems simple. I have sighed with a coral reef at the bottom of the sea, peered over the tips of two skis at the top of a mountain, inhaled five hundred years of hushed holiness in the stone walls of a church. I have awakened, full and warm, to find a man I love has watched me sleep. I have matched words the way I wanted to; formed webs of friendship that weave around the corners of my life, connecting me whole; and felt joy, sticky and syrup sweet, fill three boys who jump and sing when I walk in the room. It is not enough—not nearly yet—but my scale dips full next to four girls, the oldest just nine. How could I tell this to you? How do you turn and nod at death and still lock hands with life? How do I explain—or excuse—a belief with no real basis or proof? How do I describe a homing device that may just be a masquerade for hope?

“I don’t want to be in Heaven without you,” you say and I can hear the tears in your own voice. “I don’t want to go by myself. You’ll go with me, right? You will. Right?”

Beside you two babies sleep. My life is not my own to lose. And even if it was, could I do that to my spirit? Even if the loss of you left me not half whole, would I? Or would I wait, let the world spin and end, half-sure that I would meet you yet again?

You ask me to pinky swear, the most solemn of seven-year-old oaths. I pull over and turn in my seat. I look you right in the eyes. “Yes,” I tell you. “I will die of a broken heart and go with you.” It is our first big lie. You hold out your littlest finger. I clasp it with my own. We form a sacred circle, knuckles and nails. You nod, satisfied, and I pull back onto the road and drive into the darkness.