down and trying to get warm. She was terribly and permanently moved. She never forgot it.
The brothers turned to him. They were finished discussing the matter, and they directed him sternly to get back into the well. He shook his head firmly, back and forth, ducked to run, but quickly one of them had him by the wrist. He let out a yelp, a sound like a wounded dog that turned Sunny’s blood to fire. Then “No!” he yelled. “No, no,” and “Please!”
She panted, her breath coming in gulps. She would call to him, “Maxon, run!,” and he would come straight to her, jump up on the back of her pony, and they would canter away to safety. She could save him, protect him, warm him, those wet bones pressing against her back as they fled, his cold arm clamped around her waist, hips banging against her, making the back of her shirt cold and wet. But she said nothing, did nothing, let the scene pass behind her, let the trees cover it, the noises of it slipping away into the birdsong and cicadas. Her pony was too small even for just her. With Maxon on board, too, it would be ridiculous, he probably wouldn’t even trot. Hers was no white stallion, she no crusader. The most she could do for him was to never speak of it, never let him know she had heard those cries, she had seen him brought so low, watched that wretched shivering in the woods, and felt for that cold body such a strange desire. Later, in the fall, she would hold him in her arms in the planetarium, and kiss him under the stars.
SUNNY WENT INTO HER house and shut the door. She locked it, doorknob and bolt. They would have to burn it open with a torch, pry it open with a pitchfork. They would have to crack her open like a nut. Inside the house, she dropped to her knees with another contraction and began to crawl toward the living room. She made it to the rug, so immaculately dyed and tied, a million knots per square inch. It had cost eighteen thousand dollars. As many knots as there are stars in the sky, said the salesman, a lively Moroccan. Bad analogy, Maxon had said. You’re looking for density, not quantity. Try rods and cones on the retina. That gives you both.
When Bubber was a baby she had laid a plastic mat over this rug, to protect it from stains. She kept pushing the mat down at the edges, then replaced it, and then she took the mat up and they abandoned this room altogether. It became the shrine, the holy crypt of urban respectability, a resting place for the crystal pieces she acquired, the Indian carvings, the silver. Cabinets ringed the walls, glass cases sparkling. A museum of only five years of history.
She rocked on her hands and knees. She could feel the baby, and the baby was coming down. There was a turn, a big somersault in her stomach, and at that moment, she knew that the baby was about to come out. The baby was about to be born. In the darkness on the inside, everything was in the right place. There was no communication from outside to in, or inside to out. But there was a process in place inside the womb that no external timetable could hinder or accelerate. She dragged off her underpants, pulling them back, down, and kicking them to the side. The contractions were now coming one right after the next, rolling like particles, not like waves, bombarding her, turning her inside out.
She put her forehead on the rug and strained, and the straining finally gave her some relief. In the straining, she finally felt better. There was no one coming to help her. There was no backup plan. If she would be torn apart, then she would tear herself apart. There was a change in Sunny’s mind. A new sense of this-is-happening. She erased all contemplation, all reflection, until there was only Sunny herself, a raw and bleeding thing in a lemon yellow silk chiffon babydoll dress hiked up wet around her waist, dripping sweat, ass in the air, trying to explode.
In the pain and the inversion, with all her blood a hot bubble in her head, she finally knew. She was unfit, and she was bald. But she was the only mother that was here. In the dark, where all the muscles were, where the baby had turned herself around and kicked for home, there was no bald and no unfit. There was only a body with a baby in it, doing its best.
The contractions overtook her. She tried to climb the drapes. She wrapped her wrists in the soft fabric and lay back against them, rocking her body against the curtain rod, writhing and groaning. The curtains held, but her mind wavered. She slipped out of time, out of this painful anchor. Maybe it was an accumulation of everything that had happened, or maybe it was an experience common to every woman who labors alone. She did feel the pull of her hands on the drapes and the burning, heavy urgency between her legs. It made her push, push, right down from her throat to her thighs. But beside it, under it, and around it, she saw a purplish fog rise up over her eyes, and she began to see things that weren’t there: her baby, and the life she would have.
She saw a beautiful long-legged six-year-old with a face like a valentine, and bright ropes of orange hair flashing in the sun. Hair just like Bubber’s. She was carrying a bamboo stick, and expertly piloting a small sailboat around the pond at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The wind was brisk, spraying water from the fountain in a wide arc and whispering in the beech trees. The boats moved fast, some almost lying down sideways, about to capsize. But the red-haired girl put her stick right against the divot on the deck of her bright blue boat and gave it a big push away from the wall, her eyes intent on its progress.
She saw a fierce, happy nine-year-old cantering on a chestnut pony across a meadow full of comfrey and mint. She had her hands buried in the pony’s mane and her bare heels dug into its sides, making it go faster. Her sunny hair was short now, cut off at her chin, bouncing in wavy layers. The girl was laughing, her knees pinned to the pony like a clamp, teeth bared. Sunny knew her breath was coming short. Sunny knew she had to push this baby out. Maybe it was the wind in her face, cantering across the meadow. Maybe it was everything in her body pushing on down. She whisked along the deer path, parallel to the tree line. Those were Maxon’s woods. Stay in the meadow, girl.
She saw the girl again, older, on a rocket to the moon. She was asleep in a bunk, her hands thrown back over her head and wrists knocking into the wall, her chin up, as if she were resisting some invisible restraint, some band across her belly, some wire in her head. She wore a white leotard with long sleeves, and Sunny could see it was just a little bit too short in the arms, a little bit too wide in the waist. She was covered by a thin, plastic sheet.
The girl grew up, she was twenty now, and she was leaving the family on the moon. They were all there: Sunny, Maxon, and Bubber, to say good-bye. Sunny wore a gray cardigan, pulled tight around her. She smiled and waved at the girl, while her tears fell down. Maxon and Bubber stood still as statues, right next to each other, exactly the same height. They wore space suits and rigid expressions. But the girl went over and kissed them both, hugged them, clamped her hand under Bubber’s armpit playfully to make him laugh. Sunny saw Bubber put his arm around his sister and pull her tight around the shoulders. Don’t go, she wanted to say to the girl. Bubber needs you. I need you.
She saw the girl on Earth, taking a human shape, living a human life, falling in love, making friends. She would visit the moon, but she would never really go back. She would be okay. They would all really miss her. Sunny would visit sometimes, but she could never ignore the distraction of the moon. She could always see it. It made her feel critical of her daughter. It made her feel rushed and anxious. She always went back, but the girl never did. Her place was on Earth. Sunny had known that this would happen.
MAXON WAS NOT MOVED by the sight of the moon’s dusty surface. There was no desolation magnificent enough to distract him from unloading the robots and getting on with his work. He was moved, however, by the sight of the lava pipe, a huge chasm in the moon’s surface, on the back side of a newer crater. The pipe went down for miles, an old vent for a hypothesized prehistoric volcano, now just a tube riddled with caves and protected from meteors and the sun. They had landed so well, so perfectly close to the place they were supposed to land, that he had found the lava pipe almost immediately. He felt, in that moment, a surge of triumph.
