Eve (26 page)

“Don’t move,” hissed Adam.

The bear was panting now, blowing a hot, foul wind out his nose.

I did not at first feel the searing pain. I simply went from standing to lying flat on my back, staring up at the blurry undersides of wounded leaves, a broken stick in my hand. The bear sauntered off, chuffing his way through the forest.

“Eve,” Adam breathed. He knelt by my side, his eyes wide and uncertain, his mustache and beard scratching my face. “You shouldn’t have jabbed him.”

My weariness was more than physical. For the first time, Adam had seen it all wrong and seen fit to give me advice to the contrary.

“He was going to strike me,” I whispered. My hands were shaking uncontrollably.

“Because you poked him,” he said.

“That was after,” I said. I sat up. My head throbbed, and my jaw ached. I winced and touched my cheekbone. My hand came away bloody. I reached around to rub my lower back, which seized in pain. I vomited.

“Here,” said Adam. He helped me to my feet and led me to the fire, adjusting the lion skin around my shoulders and body. He took my hands between his and rubbed them together briskly. He put his arm around me and pulled me close. He was concerned for me, true, but behind his tenderness was his obvious frustration that our stories weren’t congruous, that I didn’t see things
his
way.

There was nothing to be done about it. The bear had clawed my face. I saw one thing—
felt,
really. Adam saw another. I could not persuade him to believe something else.

Looking back on this, I am amazed that words connect us with any modicum of honesty or correctness. I cannot praise Aya without her thinking that I am humoring her. When I praise Cain, he acts like a lamb that wants to hoard all his mother’s milk. When I praise Abel, he becomes abashed and more distant. And Naava, alas, how do I explain my woman-child? If I offer her words of encouragement, I am the dumbest ass alive. Everything about her screams,
How can you know what I’m going through?

These things—these words—are so limited. They fly from your mouth and land in odd poses you do not intend. Perhaps the world is beautiful because it sings without words.

While I warmed my chilled body and held my hands over the dwindling fire, Adam went to search for leaves with which to clean my face. I moved my aching jaw from side to side, thinking,
I am alive.
I studied my hands, my fingers, my body. All there.
What was this death that Elohim promised? Why had it not occurred yet? Would He do this thing Himself? Or were we to do it to ourselves?

It was only then I noted, all around, the telltale claw marks upon the trees, the wild tufts of hair caught up on the bark. We should have known.

My abdomen tightened like a fist, and I let out a sob. The cramps came again and again, like waves upon a shore. I curled into myself and sat very still.

Adam returned with a fistful of snow and motioned for me to hold it to
my injury. “There are no ants,” he said. Once, in the Garden, Adam had cut his shin on a ledge of granite, and Elohim had picked up several ants and applied them, one by one, to Adam’s leg, severing their bodies from their heads after they had closed the lips of the injury with their pincers.

Adam held a hard frozen blackberry before my mouth.

I shook my head
no.

Adam put his hand on mine. “You must eat.”

Another wave of nausea hit, and I vomited again. The pain in my middle had not lessened.

“Come,” he said, holding out his hand.

I stood, bent over like rain-slashed grass, and stumbled after my husband into the forest. The snow in my hand had melted, and my fingers and my cheek burned with a wretched heat. The cold air seared my lungs, for in my agony I had taken in too many gulpfuls of breath.

And then we were made to understand.

I felt a loosening below, a heaving spasm and a warm wetness between my legs. I reached down with my fingers to feel and came away with a clot of blood and tissue between my fingers. My monthly flow had waxed and waned like the moon, which was Elohim’s way, but this whiteness, this tiny curl of life—for that’s what it was, a miniature tadpole, with two arms and two legs and a large head with black eyes, all enclosed in a small transparent sac—was sucking its thumb. I had not known I was with child. “Adam,” I murmured.

Adam slowed and held out his hand. “Up ahead,” he said.

“Look,” I said.

He peered over my cupped hand and absorbed the gleaming slip of our child, immersed in sea. I had seen animals born of the mother—the stretching, the tearing, and the licking—but those babies were much larger and usually able to move on their own. This, this replica of us, was too small and lifeless and cold.

A violent grief flooded me, devoured me whole. I fell upon Adam’s chest, keening. He held me fast and gripped me tight. I felt his chest pound, his breath grow heavy. He stepped back to hold the weight of me. He clung to me but said nothing.

Elohim has spoken,
I thought.
Here we have our death.

You might ask why we would grieve for something we didn’t know we had, and I would tell you that in that moment I saw myself as a mother, Adam as a father, and I wanted that baby, wanted that child, more than anything else in the world. The child was ours, and Elohim had taken it away. Grief comes swiftly, in the briefest of moments. You do not have time to plan for it. In my uncertain dreams, I see my too-little child in the palm of my hand turn to look at me, its sad pitiful eyes wondering
why,
and I have no answer.

Beautiful child, where did you go?

Adam urged me to sit again, on a felled limb rolled from the forest into a clearing full of soft, rounded snow mounds. Busily, he cleared an area of snow and built another fire, an arduous task to repeat in the same day. As I stared at the lost life in the palm of my hand and tried to ease the aching in my belly, he dug with his fingers through the snowy crust and into the frozen earth. He did not stop until he had scooped out a small rounded hole for the baby. His fingers were bloody and numb. Every few moments he would tap his fingers hard against each other, flicking them back to life.

As I watched the bulk of him digging, I thought,
He is sad too. We are both sad, for this life we have lost.

Adam stood and looked at me with such concern and trepidation that I burst into tears all over again. He came to me and gazed again at our first child, in the lake of my palm. He spoke to the child. “Little one,” he said. “Your mother and father are very sad. We did not know you were coming to us. We did not know you would come too early. We are giving you back to the earth, for Elohim has said to dust we all shall return.”

The tears flowed then, for both of us. Adam helped me up and led me to the hole in the ground under the sighing trees. We knelt and laid the child in the cold, cruel womb of the earth. Adam took the dirt he had removed and replaced it gently, to cover our baby’s sleeping silence with kindness.

It was then that I thought of the seeds—the Tree of Life seeds I had collected.
Had Elohim not said they would give eternal life—or was He referring to the tree’s fruit? Could they restore life, where life had been stolen away?
Hurriedly, I tugged at the strings of the pouch and poured the black seeds out into my palm. I extracted one and handed it to Adam.

“What’s this?” asked Adam.

“To mark the place our baby died,” I said, reluctant to admit that it was from the Tree of Life. In truth, my hope was that it would bring life back to my baby.

Adam studied my face for a long while. Then he sighed and tapped the seed into the ground.

I knew that Adam’s fingers were already tired and numb, but he took up some of the loose soil from the baby’s grave with his fingernails and mixed it with his spit. He stood. “Come,” he said, holding out his arms to me. He held my head and wiped the wet earth on the gouges in my cheek. I said nothing. There was nothing to say. The mixture would dry and tighten, closing up the wounds.

As night fell, we leaned into each other’s sadness.

I sat there, empty-handed, my heart gaping, Adam’s too, and we waited for the moon to shine, the stars to light, our hearts bursting and breaking.
This is too much.

Adam mumbled our song then, the one taught to us by Elohim. His breath drifted; his voice was a bird that flew out of his chest. I looked at him, the bristled false cheer of his face, and I wished him to look at me, to see the mother of his child, broken before him.

Is it possible to remember the details of your own birth? I saw my
own clearly, in the hot shade of a dusty afternoon, the sun cutting through the door in long wide chunks. The flies were merciless.

There was Mother, squatting, legs wide apart, leaning on a staff. There was my sister Naava, wide-eyed and terrified at the water and blood gushing upon the floor.

Mother yelled, heaved, dug her fingernails into the staff. My shoulders were pushed out upon the cold earth. Naava began to cry, and I joined her. Mother picked me up by my ankles. I dangled, scarlet and purple, and she dipped me in a bowl of river water, washed me clean. She cooed, “There you are, oh my.”

She traced the arc of my leg, the abrupt angle of my foot.

Wait. Go back, please. There was Mother, squatting, legs wide apart, leaning on a staff. Naava was there too, and her eyes were like ostrich eggs. Now stop. Hold everything still. I want to ask,
When did my foot go awry? When did it go its own errant way? Was it something I did or Mother did? Did Elohim know of my deformity—I hate that word!—or of Mother’s disappointment?

“What’s wrong, Mother?” said Naava, reading the blossoming frown on Mother’s face.

“She has two arms and two legs,” said Mother.

“Like me,” said Naava.

“Yes,” said Mother. She leaned over, gasping at the pain, to show Naava her brand-new sister. She yanked my leg down, straight from the hip, like dough that needed to be worked. “My two beautiful daughters.” She thought for a moment. “Go tell your father and brothers.”

Naava ran out, excited to be the bearer of news.

Mother laid me upon the floor, releasing my leg. My leg, which curled up like a snail shell. I looked up at her beautiful face as she squatted, weary and disappointed, to wait for the slimy afterbirth. It came with a
balup
sound, and she leaned over to bite through the cord. She wiped her purple-stained mouth with the back of her hand. She would bury the placenta later, in her garden. She did this because she was superstitious; she thought that if something ate it, I would die. Maybe she thought for just a moment of setting it out for the wild animals to eat; that way she would not have to look at this monster she had created.

She picked me up and went outside. With a groan, she held me up to the burning yellow sun and turned slowly.
Was she introducing me to the world? Was she seeking Elohim’s blessing?

I opened my arms to it, to how warm and beautiful it was. Pieces of hot fire entered me. I grew wings. It was my first flight.

There are three ways to live: past, present, and future. There’s Mother, who lives in a lost paradise. It’s lostness
makes
it paradise. There’s Naava. She lives in the present, waiting, hoping that her life will change—
snap snap,
my fingers go.

I live in the future. Someday Elohim will heal my foot. After all, I am His most admiring and faithful advocate, besides Abel.

I wear patience like a garment. Belief is my middle name.