“Where are you going?”
The personal question took me aback. “To the Blue Ridge Mountains with my husband for our anniversary.”
“That’s cool,” he said. “I like the mountains. It’s weird to live in a place that doesn’t have them. When you look outside it’s like your eyes don’t know where to rest. There’s no anchor. It’s just emptiness. It sucks.”
He was right. Maybe that explained why I felt the way I did. Lately the sense nagged at me that a nascent dark thing was coming, and that, as my midwife had once said, there was no way out of this thing but through it. But perhaps it was simpler than all that. A matter of finding an easy place to rest one’s eyes, and with them, one’s thoughts.
I smiled at him, and, in an abashed, close-lipped way, he smiled back.
2
In his earliest memory, Zach is nestled snug in bed with his mother, back to breast, skin to skin. His father is there as well, his back broad and winter-pale, his spine curled in sleep. It must have been February, because Zach is secretly sucking a pink strawberry candy of the type sent by Grandma Moo, his Chinese grandmother, every Chinese New Year. Most likely, this being New Hampshire, there would have been snow on the ground as tall as himself. And yet there he is, warm beneath the featherbed and his parents’ indigo batik quilt, nursing his hoarded candy. Sucking slowly, so she won’t notice. This is what he remembers—the drowsy heat, the angled sunlight, the solid sweetness in the middle of his tongue; and the way his heart palpitated when his mother suddenly asked, “Zach, is that candy I smell?”
That was all. Some of the details, in retrospect, stood to reason: for example, his mother had slept shirtless for years, having slipped into the habit during the several years in which she nursed him. And Grandma Moo—so called because she was his mother’s mother, her
Yet stripped of reason, the memory is purely sensual. There is nothing before it, but much after; the quiet room, the cave-like warmth forming the Big Bang from which his consciousness unfurled. It occurred to him that he would have no recollection of that pleasure, had he not been caught in the act of disobedience.
But Zach knew that this consciousness, as he understood it, was nothing more than an island in the great stirring sea of his mind, that formless dark which informed everything. In it were his dreams, some remembered, most not; there lingered all the moments of pain and fear and pleasure his childmind had failed to process. But also there lived the ancient shapes his teachers called, altogether, the collective subconscious: the witch, the white knight, the princess in the tower, the devil. A body of archetypes, a language of symbols passed down through time, birth by birth, like the code for the shape of an eye, the blueprint of the human heart. A racial memory.
The room was different now—painted sky-blue rather than mint-green, and relocated to Maryland—but the bed was the same, a Colonial four-poster built by his dad, and the quilt was the same, although faded by wash after wash. And the child curled at his mother’s belly was not him but his sister, the not-yet-born. She carried a Christmas due date, and as the months wore on Zach found himself anticipating the birth with surprising eagerness. His friends, for the most part, expressed a sort of repulsion on his behalf, centering around the evidence that his parents were still having sex. Without exception Zach found these remarks amusing. Were their parents just really good at keeping it quiet and sneaking around? Wasn’t that the point of being an adult, that you could screw with impunity?
On this day, after his mother finished volunteering him to work with Scott’s bitchy mother on the holiday bazaar, she received a visit from the midwife, which redeemed the day somewhat. Zach liked the midwife. Her name was Rhianne, she was somewhere between his age and his mother’s, and every time she arrived at the Pattersons’ she appeared dressed for gardening. Faded blue jeans, rubber-toed boots from L.L. Bean, a flannel shirt with the sleeves folded up. Zach sat in a chair near the far wall of his parents’ bedroom while she examined his mother with a stethoscope, listening for the baby’s heartbeat. His mother’s belly, golden-pale above the indigo bedspread, looked like the moon.
“Do you want to listen, Zach?” Rhianne asked him.
He shook his head. “I heard it last time.”
“I can feel an elbow,” she said. His mother laughed, and Rhianne waved Zach over. “Feel it.”
He moved to the edge of the bed beside his mother’s legs and allowed Rhianne to position his hands on the giant expanse of belly. “Elbow,” she said, and then with her right hand over Zach’s, “spine, and her little tuckus.”
“That’s cool,” he said. His mother beamed at him.
“Have you started buying things yet?” asked Rhianne of his mother. “Sling, diapers, bassinet?”
“Here and there,” she replied. “We won’t be needing a bassinet. She’ll just sleep with us, like Zach did. Although hopefully not until she’s seven.” She shot him a look of loving reprimand.
“Wasn’t my idea,” said Zach.
“Every time we tried to put you in your own bed, you snuck back into ours.”
“So, you should have beaten my ass.”
The women both laughed. “Listen to the child,” said his mother.
“He’s hardly a child,” said Rhianne. “You’ve got one almost-newborn and one almost-man.”
“He’s still a child yet,” insisted his mother. “Take a look at his bedroom and you’ll see what I mean.”
After Rhianne packed up her instruments, Zach walked her to the door. He knew what was coming, because Rhianne pulled him aside after every visit. She considered it part of her job.
“Your mother is very invested in believing you’re still a little boy,” said Rhianne, “but we both know that’s not true.”
Zach shrugged. “She knows me pretty well. She’s just thinking like a mom.”
