Her: A Memoir (34 page)

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A year after my stay at Payne Whitney, I’d been admitted to the graduate program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with the poems I’d written while in the crazy hospital. I was granted a full teaching fellowship, just like Cara. After Cara died, I found myself mingling our words, just as the pages of our two manuscripts had been mixed together by the wind.

It is very difficult to explain the thing that happened to me through writing. It did what time and therapy and lovers never could. I knew that to write I must have a clear mind. And because writing was the only way to be with Cara, to move again in tandem, writing won hands down over my grief. To write I knew I would need sleep and nourishment and sobriety. At one point in those early writing days, I’d almost practiced my way into a better life.

Soon enough, though, writing became increasingly difficult, and then almost impossibly hard. I’d fuss with a single page for days, unable to say what was needed without sounding exactly like Cara. Was I a fraud? I wondered. Was I hiding in her words, mimicking her, because I couldn’t write for myself? That’s when Valium became my best friend, when it softened my frustration until it had gone soft as a pillow, diffuse as a dandelion puff.

I became so reliant on pills that if I went without one for a certain number of days, withdrawal set me off into worse panic. I had tremors, and I saw things that were not there. The hallucinations disappeared only if I took more drugs. I’d fill my prescription at the middle of the month, then look down, worried, into an empty bottle two weeks later. D had always helped by giving me his pills to get me through. But finally, I couldn’t stand to ask him; I couldn’t bear the shame.

I tried to quit.

I sat naked at Cara’s desk in the middle of the night, the quivering blip of a passing ambulance sounding on the street below. I traced my fingers over the small carving of her initials in the center of the desk; scratched there crudely by something blunt, like a paper clip. I wondered if she’d been in my place before, trying to kick the drugs. Could the carving have been a smoke signal or SOS she’d made for herself? My half-finished manuscript sat to the left of the carving, Cara’s to the right; our words flanked her graffiti.

Withdrawal pounded an iron mallet against my bones. And it froze me: I shivered, shrouded beneath the down comforter I’d pulled from the bed and onto my shaking body. It was high summer, hot and sticky and relentlessly still. Yet I knew no warmth. And I couldn’t sleep. I’d read that it would take five days to clear the drug, and five long days I waited, wrapped in the comforter, wide awake at Cara’s desk, until the need for those pills left me, like a ghost.

I slept.

I began to write again.

One night I had a beautiful dream: Cara and I sat together in a tree house, looking up at the midnight sky. “What if I’m a star hurtling through the atmosphere?” I asked her.

She considered my words carefully, and then she smiled bright as the moon. “You’ll get stardust in your bra,” she said, and took both my hands into hers and kissed them.

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On Friday, I met Tony at his cottage in the Catskills. The meal he cooked was delicious, as promised: short ribs braised slowly in a luscious red wine and homemade beef stock with an accompanying creamy, peppery potato fennel gratin. I made a coconut cream four-layer cake with a salty butter cream frosting. Before we ate a single bite, we gazed at the clear night sky full of stars, hundreds of shining specks of light. Cara had crossed into the afterlife alone; this was her fate. There are places even a twin can’t follow. I stood transformed on a cold night in September, four years after she’d died, my heart pumping warm blood, face flushed with something unexpected: hope. How had I managed to live without her? Tony and I stood together on his rickety porch hand in nervous hand, sipping wine, feeling about as small in the universe as a human should under the magnitude of the heavens.

I was a woman entirely humbled. I’d been spared by the wrathful grip of grief, and not because I hadn’t been willing to be stolen into her clutches. I was thrilled and terrified. I was alive.

This seemed such a curious and rare thing, the gift of life I’d been given. I was going to hold on to it as tightly as I could. I had something before me that Cara would never have: years. I would try to cherish each one. They were so hard-earned and they were solely mine, just as Cara’s death was hers.

Drunk on pinot noir and thankfulness, I looked at Tony, who was trying his best to find Orion.

“How about we try again tomorrow night?” he asked and smiled timidly.

“That sounds perfect,” I said and squeezed his hand.

This man had seen so much suffering: war, loss, dashed hopes. I decided that I would never, if it were in my power, add to the troubles in his pack.

We were married three months later.

Part III

Chapter 32

Cara had gone the
way of our grandmothers, and I had won the name Josephine fair and square.

Tony and I knew we wanted a family together; it was only a surprise that it happened so quickly. Four days after we married, on the eve of the New Year, the test was positive. Our Josephine was coming. I was often worried during my pregnancy that I’d birth Josephine into a life of my tribulations and losses. There was also the worry of resemblance. I didn’t wonder whether or not she would have my eyes or my smile, or the small Sicilian ears with points at their tips like my mother, sister, and I. I worried that she would look like Cara.

I grew round and robust in pregnancy, looking more like Cara than I ever had, even when we were girls. The sight of myself, my new body, was a jolt. It was hard to trust a body that looked like Cara’s. I showed both the promise of life and the fact of death; I tried not to conflate the two.

Toward the end of my pregnancy I stayed up nights imagining Josephine. She had blue eyes like her daddy’s and hair like peach fuzz. I didn’t go beyond those features in my imagining. There was still a sensation during my pregnancy that Josephine was other, that she was mystery. Although she was clearly living and rumbling inside of me, she was a question mark; she eluded the fantasy of detailed description.

Tony and I played a guessing game. We’d move our hands over my belly and feel for our daughter’s arms and legs and head. She bounced around when we tried to tickle her.

“She’s got tiny wrists just like Mommy,” Tony would say, and loop his fingers around my wrist. Since the week before we’d married, his name had been inked there. It was a crazy lover’s impulse we had, tattooing each other’s names just over our pulses, as if it would be possible to forget the other without the cursive black letters that ran across our wrists. Tony had gotten my name tattooed first, a game of loving chicken he played with me, a dare I took.

Only eight months later, our daughter floated peacefully in my womb. At night, she’d kick out her foot or wiggle her elbow as Tony read her poems before bed. He was careful with each word, tender and steady, as if a single word or sound had the power to convey to his Josephine how much he had wanted to learn to love her. Poetry was his nurture, his promise. Sometimes she’d hiccup and I’d feel our girl rapping, a quiet, insistent rhythmic knocking. As she grew and moved, my belly rippled with her like a windy lake.

The pregnancy had been easy. I still enjoyed hikes and read and wrote every day. There was very little of the morning sickness or fatigue I’d heard about. I did have heartburn, but the old wives’ tale that heartburn meant a baby with lots of red hair had won me. With each flame of the burn, I imagined braiding, washing, or brushing the orange hair from her eyes as she looked at her first great crayon drawing.

By the middle of September I was a week overdue. The signs of her birth were near. Practice contractions had been coming for weeks. My belly had dropped. I wept at my prenatal appointment, begging the midwife to induce the birth. But she shook her head and laughed; she’d seen this bargaining every day of her professional life. “It’ll be time soon,” she assured me and closed my chart. “You’ve both been working very hard at bringing her here.”

The afternoon before Josephine was born I stood in front of my television screen and attempted the routine of the prenatal yoga video that Tony had ordered for me months before. I’d put on fifty pounds, and I rolled around on the yoga mat grunting and sweating after only five minutes. At Namaste and prayer pose, I’d already given up. I sat and watched the round-bellied women stretch, rubbing my sore legs.

I tried again to join them.

The instructor on the tape asked us all to squat and hold and then to roar like lions. “Stick your tongue out and call to your babies, get them ready to join your pride.” I looked around for my husband and didn’t see him and roared as quietly as possible, the sound no louder than the growl of a tummy. I thought of my own mother as I did this. She was a wallflower. Even if music fills her, her legs won’t allow her to dance. Did mothers teach shyness? I wanted Josephine to be able to cut a rug and twirl and give herself over to joy. “Roar again,” the yoga instructor commanded her troupe, and I did. I roared and stuck my tongue out and panted. I growled for Josephine, lifting the lights on all the parties she’d ever attend.

The next morning, early, I lay on my side in the hospital bed and closed my eyes as each contraction bore down. A fetal monitor to my right blinked her heartbeat and charted her movements like a seismograph. Tony stood to my left and held my hand and head. Josephine’s beats flashed in white numbers that spiked with each contraction. My own beats pounded hard in my chest, and my breathing was shallow. A nurse fitted me with an oxygen mask.

At first the contractions pulled me in, a relentless undertow. Again and again the cresting of each wave took me down, crushing me. I abandoned all worry over decency and tore off my paper hospital gown. A nurse quickly presented me with a softer gown of worn cotton printed with pretty blue polka dots. I didn’t want that, either.

“I can’t breathe. I can’t do this,” I screamed out.

Mary, our doula, put her hands on my back. “You were made to do this very thing,” she said.

Mary had magic hands. She was able to halt the cramping in my back just by laying her hands on me. She escorted me to the shower and stood beside me as hot water washed over my swollen belly. She steadied me as I tried to stand. The contractions were falling one on top of the other.

“I want my sister,” I said like a child asks for her mommy. Mary took my face in her hands and held it as the water beat down on me.

“Of course you do,” she said. “She should have been here.”

I lay back down on my side in the birthing bed, moaning, waiting for another contraction. I’d taken castor oil, and it had brought on freight train labor, and Josephine protected herself by slipping down into birth position quickly, her little spine on top of my own. We gnashed like unaligned gears.

I screamed for a nurse, begging for the epidural I’d requested not to be offered. I looked at Tony and he smiled. He thought it a man’s job not to show his cards. He was hard to read and had been since our drive to the hospital. He tried his best to calm me by treating this event like it was any other thing we did. But his eyes gave him up. There was a world of panic and love in them. He’d been waiting his whole life patiently to meet me, and now his daughter was coming, too. He’d been in war, and he’d lost nearly everything afterward. He was unshakable, and he was in awe.

We had this in common, our wars. His had been in Iraq’s endless desert, and though twenty years had passed since then, he still jumped at gunfire and explosions in movies, spilling popcorn or soda and a bit of pride. We were two people who’d found each other at the bottom. I’d recognized his weariness even before our first dinner.

“You’re strong and you’re healthy. You can do this,” he urged me, and ran a cool cloth over my forehead.

He had said this throughout the pregnancy, assuring me that I was growing a healthy baby and doing a good mother’s job right from the start. He’d not been with me through the hardest years, I’d think. How did he know I wasn’t going to go back there?

I still felt the shock of a survivor who walks from a crash mostly unharmed. I was still astounded by every night of good sleep, and since I’d met Tony that had been every one.

I took in the cool air from the ventilator and closed my eyes. In our couples birthing class Mary had told us that during labor we’d find an image to focus on as the pain grew in intensity. The music of the birth mix Tony and I had made for Josephine’s arrival played against the beeping of the ventilator and its hissing air. Van Morrison sang “Into the Mystic.” Tony hummed along.

My picture came into focus:

First, a parking lot—yards of smooth, coal-black asphalt. But this pavement is cracked in one spot, and the thin stalk of a plant with a single leaf at its top has slipped up through the blacktop. This thin stalk is spare and thriving. It has been ravaged by insects or weather, but it is plucky. Its leaf has stubbornly held on. As each contraction came, wind rushed into my picture, pummeling my rebellious little sprout. And with each contraction, the leaf held on, fluttering tenaciously.

My vine and I hung on together through three hours of active labor.

We made it to transition, the period of labor where contractions are strongest and come without a break between them.

I gritted my teeth. “I can do this. I can do this,” I said to myself. The time gone by since I’d lost Cara had trained me. I had endured years of utmost agony. The pain of labor was nothing beside those years. If I could survive those, couldn’t I birth my Josephine? I grunted and cried out and bit down on my husband’s kind hand as the pain took me.

I closed my eyes and slipped back into my parking lot. There it was. I looked for my weed. But it was nowhere to be seen. There, instead, a woman stood, with her back to me. I recognized her.

Cara turned to greet me. She held her hands on her hips and smiled with half of her mouth. She was radiant.