Out There: a novel (23 page)

The best moments of life, she thirsted for those.

The best moments of life, she thirsted for those.

The best moments of life, she thirsted for those.

He chanted the line over and over as he rubbed the woman’s stomach and patted the young girl on the head. He chanted because he did not know what else to do, because life had caught him unprepared. His need to make it to Mexico City, his memory of all those killed nearby in combat, all those lost limbs and all that blood, coagulated with the longtime sorrow of all he’d never had, and still, the baby made its way toward the light and air and the touch of its own mother’s skin.

He tried to pray, but he could not. It had been so long since he had spoken directly to God. He tried to remember scenes from TV shows and movies dealing with childbirth, but nothing he could recall was helpful. The woman screamed and thrashed her knees from side to side, and there seemed nothing to do but hold her. He closed his eyes.

The child screamed something he interpreted as “Baby’s coming!” and he nodded, believing it must be true. He repeated the words—
Baby’s coming!—
to the woman, and she nodded between screams and took a series of deep breaths, as if preparing for something really big. The child squeezed his wrists, and the woman closed her eyes and groaned in a new deep tone, a sound Jefferson would have guessed meant death rather than life. He did his best to separate himself from the dark pain of her voice and her eyes, and he focused instead on that little wet head emerging. It popped out a bit more—he could see a forehead and the beginnings of ears—and then popped back inside. Then there was a pause as the woman caught her breath. It seemed the bursts of pain were separated by about twenty seconds. The next screams brought the baby’s head completely out, half its purple neck too, and the child placed her small hands under the baby’s head and screamed in delight to her agonized mother. The next scream and push brought the first shoulder and Jefferson reached in and held the baby, waiting for what seemed like the certain end. With a final whoosh the second shoulder and all the rest of him—because he was a boy!—poured forth from the woman and into Jefferson’s arms.

Almost as soon as the heavenly light had begun to soften, the young girl stood at Jefferson’s side with the big kitchen knife, gesturing to indicate that she would hold the baby and the cord if he would cut it, and so he did. Blood and wetness glistened upon every surface, on his fingers and hands and wrists and forearms and in his hair. There was a swath of blood across the thigh of his blue jeans—he noticed this later—but in the moment he was aware of a warm quiet and of a licorice scent and of the young girl’s humming. He swaddled the baby in a towel, and handed him to his mother, whose face had been transformed, after the savage screaming of moments earlier, into that of a dewy damsel. She could not have been more than twenty-three.

The infant suckled, and the young girl arranged dandelions on her mother’s bedsheets, and the woman smiled and then dozed, smiled and then dozed. All seemed well and good. Motes of light sifted through the leaves of the surrounding trees, abiding spirits to christen the moment. For indeed there was a tangible holiness in that clearing beneath the pines, and he recognized it, a feeling he had sometimes had among the newly dead. Whether it was the presence of God or of some other heavenly being, he could not say; he did not know how or what to call it, but the presence was unmistakable, and it was good.

By some mystery of nature or perhaps fate, mother and child and babe were healthy and whole. The infant’s skin glowed a vibrant red, and when he was not cooing like a baby rabbit at his mother’s breast, his lungs spewed the loud fury of hot, lively life.

Jefferson sat with his back against a tall sturdy pine, his mind brimming. He fought with his brain, and tried to stop all the thinking. He could not explain the reason for his deep, steady breath, but he guessed it was good for him, this steadiness. He had not known it would be like this, helping to deliver a baby. Was that what he’d done? Had he helped deliver a baby? The process had had a natural momentum and seemed not to have required his help, but nonetheless, he had followed the call of the young girl into the woods, he had knelt between the legs of the shrieking woman, and with his own two hands Jefferson had welcomed the baby into the world. A host of heavenly beasts flew in abundant loops in the sky overhead, and the quiet was full of the music of the ages, while from the tops of the trees the ravens kept watch and waited and chanted silent blessings and prayers of thanksgiving. An easy breeze accompanied the night as it came upon them, full of the twinklings of distant galaxies and the mother moon.

The three passed the night easily, and in the morning Jefferson prepared to leave.

“Will you be okay?” he said to the woman, hoping his tone would convey some of his meaning. He touched her shoulder—he was close enough to see the perspiration above her lip—and then took several steps back to survey the scene. The young girl—yesterday’s sentinel—slept in the crook of her mother’s arm, and the babe suckled, and the woman smiled a weightless smile.

“I’m leaving, okay?” he said. “Adiós?”

She nodded.

To turn and walk out of the hollow tore at Jefferson’s heart, but he did it anyway, never looking back as he walked down the hill, the pup at this side, past the large piñon he’d been about to climb when the child had first found him. He pulled the motorbike up from the hard ground and walked it back down to the two-lane highway. Remedios leaped into her basket, and he pulled out onto the road, heading southeast for the outskirts of San Miguel, and beyond, toward Querétaro.

The
bike raced along under Jefferson, carrying him onward as his mind replayed the birthing in the hollow. Those forty minutes had been intense, but something else was haunting him now. He felt he’d experienced that same intensity before; it was as if he’d seen those deafening rays of light and heard those blinding screams in another lifetime. Jefferson had never thought about it before, and even now, as he did so for the first time, he told himself it was impossible.

Throughout his twenty-three years, similar flashes of memory had occasionally lit up Jefferson’s mind with wonder, but he had never been able to identify their source. When he was very young, they might have been set off by bright sunlight shining directly into his eyes, or by too much sugar, as his grandmother maintained. Later, after he’d been introduced to the concept, Jefferson thought it might be the Holy Spirit spreading comfort and insight. But now that he’d helped a woman give birth, Jefferson wondered if this flash of memory might have originated in his very own birth. Could anyone possibly remember his own birth?

Esco had told him a few stories, enough to prove that he’d been born into the world just like every other baby. Much of her banter about his mom he’d tried to ignore, however. Once he reached fourth or fifth grade, when he emerged out of the haze of early childhood and had to face the fact that he did not have a mother’s hand in which to place field-trip permission forms, Jefferson decided that the less he knew about her, the better. And his birth? He’d never actually thought about his birth.

Now he tried to remember enough of Esco’s stories to begin to piece them all together. His mother had been sixteen years old, a sophomore at Santa Fe High. Her name was Faith. She’d stayed in school until her stomach gave her away, and then she’d dropped out, saying she was done with books anyway and that she refused to be part of what she called the Preggers Club, the ten or so other Santa Fe High student moms who that particular year had waddled around the high school, and eventually brought their new babies to the on-site day care. His grandmother hadn’t known much about the boyfriend, Jefferson’s dad.  Only that he was Lakota, like Esco’s husband, and that Faith had been crazy about him.  Once, when Jefferson had begun to think about his mother’s choices, about the fact that she had chosen a life without him, he’d felt himself getting angry. Although he knew it wasn’t Esco’s fault, that Esco had not been the one to leave, he yelled at her anyway. “How could you have let her do that to me?” he yelled. “She left me! I was a tiny baby!”

“She was so young, Jefferson. Not a bad person.” Then Esco gave him her I’m-serious
look. “She couldn’t face what she had done, but I tell myself she’s out there somewhere, living a good life.  And your father too.  He must have been a good kid.” Her voice trailed off then, and she looked away for several minutes, way out the window toward the Jemez. When she faced Jefferson again, she was composed. “Each of us comes into this world with challenges,” she said, as if she were a trained therapist. “You should thank god she was smart enough to leave you behind with me as early as she did. Do you have any idea how lucky you are?”

That was the first and last time Jefferson had raised the topic of his mother’s personal merits. His perspective and that of his grandmother were too far apart, separated by too many circumstances. But he continued to think of his mother—Faith—just as anyone might. He wondered where she lived, whether she was in fact still alive at all, and which of her traits had
whooshed
with him through the birth canal and stuck to his very being. Was he a good reader because she had been a good reader? Was the 200 meters his best race because she had been a sprinter? Did she reject meat too? He thought about Esco long ago insisting that his mom had been a good person, and he wondered what specific examples she would give if asked.

Low hills pulsed alive around him as he rode on. On that day his mind spun with the fact—an irrefutable fact—that his own mother had been pregnant with him for nine whole months, carrying him around in her young little belly until it was time to push him out between her legs and into the big, bright world. He’d traveled through the
whoosh
just as that tiny baby boy in the hollow had, the nearness of life delighting his own vivid face, his wide-open eyes, his strong, firm fists. And just like the woman in the hollow, Jefferson’s own mother had experienced the flash as he had nestled into her arms and suckled at her breast that very first time. He just knew it. It had been late in the night on November 18, 1986, and there must have been peace and love and thanksgiving, if only for a little while.

She’d
given him a lot of money, and she’d hugged him, and he guessed all that meant she was probably thinking about him, sending him good vibes. He wished he could tell her about the twins and the bergamot woman—surviving that close call with those bandits. Boy, she’d have loved those stories, but he didn’t have a phone, so he’d have to wait until he got back home. Jefferson didn’t think he was going to tell Dr. Monika, or anyone else for that matter, about the baby being born in the hollow, though. Helping that little boy come into the world, fill his lungs up that first time—that was his own little miracle.

In
Querétaro, as Jefferson read the words
La Biblioteca Pública Gómez Mori
n
on the large contemporary building on Avenida Constituyentes, a wry smile spread across his face. Here he was, standing exactly where he needed to be.

The building pulsed in front of him on that sixth afternoon like an answer. He’d had no plan to end up there, no map, and in truth he could not remember the last time he’d stepped inside a public library, though it must have been sometime in sixth grade. He did not count the library at Santa Fe High, which he had been permitted to visit only once, his junior year, to complete a research report on Toni Morrison, but where students were not allowed to loiter during lunchtime or after school. As a child he had walked to the La Farge branch of the Santa Fe Public Library most Saturday mornings with Esco, but that had ended after elementary school, he thought. His grandmother still checked out a pile of books every week. Jefferson couldn’t say why he had stopped going.

Jefferson leashed Remedios to the motorbike, crossed the street, climbed the several steps, and pulled on the heavy brass door handle.

Inside, he stood on the ground floor, looking up and around at the librarians ahead, at all the stacks of all the books. Stacks disappearing around corners. Stairwells suggesting more, both upstairs and down.

What was the question the library was answering?

Five steps nearer to the circulation desk, he gave what he thought was a clever nod to one of the librarians, who seemed to be watching him suspiciously. Looking her way, Jefferson gave his sweatpants a tug, resisted the celebratory good-luck handstand he really wanted to do, and tried to read the map of the place. Everything was in Spanish.

The librarian was beautiful, a librarian created by a heavenly casting director, he thought. She wore it all so well: her half-glasses askew at the tip of her nose, her dry smirk, her muted short-sleeved cardigan. She was a perfect part of the whole that was making him feel something really good in that moment.

Jefferson smiled a true smile at her—a smile meant to be read as
Don’t worry, I love libraries
—and went on through the foyer and to the left, into a large reading room.

Old dust and old paper and old wooden armchairs creaking under the weight of generations of readers, all of it inside four contemporary concrete walls. He couldn’t believe how lucky he was to have found this place.

Later—he didn’t know how much time had passed—Jefferson found himself on the second floor, roaming between two long floor-to-ceiling stacks. The air was both crisp and calm as he let down his traveling guard and began running his fingertips across the spines. So many words. So many ideas. Such good work. Such hope.