None of us should be allowed, I say.
I think about her, she says. The baby, she says. The other baby. All the time, I think about her. I think maybe I got to think that that’s what being a mother is.
It’s part, I start to say.
I started to think that maybe all I could do was care about her, about both of them, from far away, that up close, I was a danger to them, that I would kill her also. That I would hurt her too somehow.
I know all the ways I’m supposed to stop her, but I don’t.
I didn’t really want her, she says. I didn’t know what I wanted, she says. I thought for years she died because I didn’t want her like I should have wanted her.
She looks over at me; her face grown-up, tired. Sasha, I think, I am so sorry.
You were so young, I say.
A fluke, she says. A freak thing, she says. Cells and chromosomes misfiring. The sort of thing that could happen again.
I stay quiet and I lean toward her. This baby is perfect, healthy. The first miscarriage was a freak thing. Her body was deemed, after, perfect. It doesn’t make the fear feel any less.
I wouldn’t survive it, she says.
I’m not sure I would either.
I can’t, she says. Again.
We pass a basketball pavilion, a major street and a large crosswalk. A bus pulls up close to her and I grab her arm again and she starts and I let go and we walk so our shoulders almost touch.
The third week of our first baby’s life, my mother came to see her. Nursing wasn’t working. I was tired all the time. My breasts squirted milk too hard, too much, and the baby sputtered and choked as she was eating. She clamped down to stop the flow from coming and it hurt and I tensed up and she tensed up and both of us cried all day and night. I’m waterboarding her, I said to my husband. He would fall asleep, as if we should not, every second, be up and making sure that she was safe and happy. How dare you, I would think, and I’d feel far away and by myself. I broke out in hives and began to run a fever. I scratched the hives and they bled and I wore long sleeves in summer for the short periods of the day I was outside. I walked back and forth and up and down the halls of our apartment and I refused to give her anything but my breasts because the books I read and the internet said otherwise, I would have failed her, otherwise, I might not be good enough to have her after all. I kept gushing milk and she kept crying. I felt certain some higher authority would come take her. Instead, my mother: with enough clothes to clothe all of Brooklyn’s babies, with blankets and garish plastic toys that lit up and made noise.
She’s not okay, she whispered to my husband.
Is she seeing someone? she asked. She, who had never believed in seeing someone up till now.
I had been seeing someone, but I’d stopped when she was born.
Maybe she shouldn’t be alone with her, she said, while I stood outside the kitchen and listened. I had not taken leave from school because then I would have lost my health insurance. I strapped her to me and nursed her in an office between classes as I continued to try to read and write and think.
My mother said, She has a history.
She’s fine, my husband said. She’s tired.
She needs to just give her a bottle, she said.
I cannot, he said, tell her what to do.
I walked out of the apartment, shaking. I left the baby. My breasts ached all of the time and leaked through my shirt. I had my keys and phone and I called Sasha and she answered though we hadn’t spoken, then, in years. I think maybe I figured that she wouldn’t answer but she answered.
It’s so much, I said to her without preamble. She knew we had a baby. She’d been on the mass email announcement. I hadn’t known how to tell her about it besides that.
I don’t, I said. Sash.
I knew as soon as she picked up I had no right to ask.
Breathe, she said.
My mom’s here, I said.
Oof.
We laughed.
What if she takes her? I said.
She’s yours, she said. She can’t take her.
Both of us were quiet a long time then. I thought about the baby still not with her, the baby that she birthed but never had.
How did you … I started.
You’re fine, she said. She would not, had never talked about it to me. You are going to be fine, she said.
I said her name and she said mine and I stood on the street with cars passing and people looking at me. I had no bra on and milk fell down into my waistband and my belly button and the skin below my abdomen still smarted from where they’d cut me open, just like they’d cut her open, days before.
Go home, she said.
I did.
You ever heard of the dive reflex? she says.
I shake my head. We’re close now to our apartment and we pass the bar where I sat with Ifeoma, our laundromat.
It’s biological, she says. She makes a face and I smile at her. There was a point when she’d bring up biology, when we were in high school and she loved biology and I loved books, and I’d yell at her to stop because I thought science made no sense.
It’s a physiological response to immersion, she says. Do you know what the homeostatic reflexes are?
I shake my head.
It’s the body’s basic impulse to maintain homeostasis in response to stimuli, she says.
I only half know what she’s saying, but I love the look and sound of her now, confident all of a sudden. I try not to bring my face too close to hers.
The body understands it’s underwater,
