By ELSA LYONS
Giving birth hurt much less than I had expected. There was a feeling like someone’s hands were tying my organs into intricate knots and then loosening them. Finally, a great loosening, and a wail, a tiny squirming marvel lowered into my arms. During pregnancy, I had been afraid of the pain. It seemed wrong to be afraid, so I didn’t discuss it, not even with Andrew. I had never experienced overwhelming physical pain; nothing more than a fractured ankle in ninth grade, a couple of bad toothaches. I knew this would be worse—I just wished there was a way to know precisely how much worse.
But Ellen seemed to dive out of my stomach and into the world. After the epidural, I barely felt anything. And that scared me more than the prospect of pain had scared me. It was supposed to hurt—enough to somehow justify the impossibility of a child appearing where there was only a lump under my shirt before, a distended stomach. I went home feeling like I had cheated, gotten away with something. Like there was a kind of dangerous knowledge that I’d managed to evade, but that I couldn’t evade forever.
Nearly two months into my daughter’s life, I realized she was fading. Maybe she had been fading from the moment she was born. She still cried and smiled; still sucked the milk from my breast; still lay on her belly and pressed her tiny round palms into the rug beneath her to raise her head slightly, inquiringly. But something was different. For a long time, I couldn’t decide what it was. Was her skin changing color? Or was her gaze unfocused, blank? No, neither of those things was true. I knew she had grown, her stomach and thighs ballooning. But in some undefinable way, she seemed to be shrinking.
Andrew didn’t seem to notice anything. Since the birth, something new had gurgled into the space between us, like my body was a castle encircled by a moat of milk and spit-up. I couldn’t ask him if he saw what I was seeing, because I didn’t know what I was seeing. I told myself that I could wait until Ellen’s two-month checkup. Maybe the doctor would be able to tell me what I was seeing.
The pediatrics office was a shrine to infancy. Mounted on the walls were professionally photographed portraits of babies with huge piercing eyes, posing against flat white backdrops. Only one of the pictures featured a mother, her baby balanced in the crook of her arm. It reminded me of a mosaic at my church—an image of Mary and the baby Jesus. This mother, too, was looking at her baby with reverence, with a sense of duty.
“I’m just wondering,” I confessed to Dr. Lopez after she weighed and measured my baby, turned her on her back and then her stomach, watched her lift her head. “Do you notice anything—anything different about her?” Dr. Lopez’s white coat looked almost gray against the intensely white walls of the examination room.
“Different?” she asked. “This little angel? Different how?” She poked Ellen’s soft belly, and they both smiled. Her face had relaxed, and she was no longer examining Ellen—just looking, interacting.
I wanted to show her with my hands, because I didn’t have the words for it. But all I could do was massage the air with my fingers, as if trying to wring the truth out of it. Now Dr. Lopez was watching me the way she had watched Ellen during the exam—her gaze focused, eyes narrowed slightly.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I squeezed Ellen’s shoulders, feeling her red romper fold under my palms. “Nothing seems off to you?”
“Everything looks normal,” Dr. Lopez said. “You’re a healthy Little Mama!” The last part she said to Ellen, her lips puckering around the words as if she were sucking on them. It took me a moment to register that she wasn’t still talking to me. Was I healthy? I wasn’t sure of anything.
“Okay,” I said, moving my fingers over Ellen’s romper. “Are you sure?”
“Are you getting enough sleep, Mama?” asked Dr. Lopez. This time she was talking to me. Her tone was teasing, melodic, but there was something else in it too—an undertone, a kind of doubt. A silver cross dangled from her neck, swaying as she moved. I hadn’t noticed it before. Even when I did, I was vaguely conscious of the fact that the cross generated no associations in my mind. I took it in without really seeing it.
“I’m fine.” I smiled. “Thank you.” I tried to be convinced by my own words. If Dr. Lopez said everything was okay, then everything must be okay. Outside, I strapped Ellen into her car seat, pulled the straps too tight, loosened them. She yawned, and the extra skin around her neck rippled out. Her hands fluttered like the wings of a little bird, then settled over the small mound of her stomach. How could she be so perfect? I asked myself. Anything so perfect must be false. I shut my eyes. “Peekaboo,” I whispered, to make myself open them.
I drove home slowly, winding through a maze of suburban streets. Nothing looked familiar. There were endless fences, hedges trimmed to sharp angles, houses crouching in rows. Twice I was surprised by dead ends. There seemed to be no way out of my life, or maybe no way back in. Finally, as if coming out of a trance, I saw my house looming in front of me. It was shaped like two rectangular blocks stacked on top of each other, the one on top jutting forward slightly. I wanted to drive past it, to keep on driving until I reached the edge of the world—because there had to be an edge, somewhere. A sheer cliff, stars swimming above and below. I thought about the shape of stars, their four or five points narrowing to white lines, like fine fibers holding them in place. Roots too thin to trace.
It was hard to believe that the stars were moving—they seemed so very still, so fixed. It was hard to have faith in a spherical Earth when the horizon seemed so flat. I was beginning to find it hard to have faith in anything. Every fact, every basic assumption now seemed to reveal a disturbing flatness. Was that my baby’s problem? Was she flattening? I stopped the car without pulling into the driveway and opened the backseat door. Ellen stared up at me as I cupped my palms around her forehead, feeling my way around the sphere of her head. She wasn’t flattening. But something was definitely different. The outlines of her body seemed faint, unconvincing. I looked past Ellen at the sun, already descending. No, not past her. I looked through her. The sun’s rays did not crown her head; they swam through her body.
Then I understood. Ellen was translucent. It wasn’t just her skin; all of her was less solid, almost ghostly. One day she might be totally transparent. And then what? How could Dr. Lopez have missed this? And Andrew? Well, it was still very slight. Maybe only a mother could notice something so subtle. But it was growing more pronounced—I knew that now—and soon everybody would have to notice, everybody would feel this cold dread gripping the tops of their heads, squeezing their brains, compressing their thoughts. It was a relief to think so, a relief to know what was wrong, even if I was far from understanding why. “Why” was remote, abstract. Only the blunt assertions of my senses were real to me now. I vowed to accept only the truths that insisted on themselves.
That evening, after dinner, I decided to show Andrew what was happening. Ellen was lying on her stomach on the red patterned living room rug, her chin lifted proudly. I picked up my phone and turned the flashlight on, then pointed it at the back of her head. The light filtered through her, like a horrible magic trick. The effect was already more noticeable than it had been this afternoon—it was happening quickly now.
“Come here,” I said to Andrew. “What do you see?” He came and squinted at the back of her head. “No,” I said, reaching out to smooth the furrows on his forehead with my fingers, the way I always used to do when he came home stressed. Somehow I felt closer to him now that he was about to know what I knew. “Don’t look too closely. Just—just look. What do you see?” I demanded again.
He looked at me. “I don’t know. You got me. What am I supposed to see?”
“Never mind. Everything’s fine.”
“Don’t do that,” he said. “You keep doing that; you say something and then you won’t tell me what you mean.” As he said this, I saw a certain kind of relief come into his face. This was the cause of his frustration. He had trapped it, like a firefly in a jar, and I was the jar. “What is it? Can you just—”
“It’s nothing,” I said, suddenly afraid of him. I knew he would try to bend my own doubts around me, to enclose me in my own thinking. I wouldn’t let him.
He turned away, and a crease darted down the back of his sweater like a sign, an attempt at communication. I remembered that he loved me.
He had already taken two steps down the hall toward our bedroom when I whispered: “It didn’t hurt.”
He turned around. “What? I couldn’t hear you,” he said, trying to sound tired.
“I—I’ll give Ellen a bath,” I said.
That night, I dreamt that I saw the face of God against a white background. He looked a little bit like Andrew, but older and bearded. And yet I knew He was God. He leaned forward, tilting His face toward my left breast, opening his mouth as if ready to drink my milk. I reached out to stroke His face, but when I touched it, it ruffled like a curtain. Reflexively, almost defensively, I grasped the fabric of God’s face in my fist and tugged at it, ready for something to be unmasked. The face stretched, twisted, and then fell; there was nothing behind it but the white background. Featureless, blank, and yet it seemed to be leering at me.
I woke up sometime when it was still dark, wondering whether my baby loved me. If she loved me, she wouldn’t be disappearing like this: slowly, inexorably. So she must not love me—but if she didn’t love me, was she even real? Like God, a baby is love; without love, there is no baby, no God.
How could Andrew, the doctor, everybody else, have such complete faith in Ellen? How could they be so sure that she was real, that she would persist in being? Maybe they saw that she was changing, but were afraid to tell me. Or were they fooling themselves? Did they just need something to believe in, something pure?
I stared at the beige bedroom curtains as my thoughts began to clench their muscles. We named Ellen after God, His Hebrew name being El. It was Andrew’s idea, and I thought it was clever; what better metaphor could there be for infinite potential? But now I realized that I had never really believed in God. There had always been the impulse to unmask, to embarrass Him the way I was embarrassed by the flimsiness of my faith. I resented God for requiring of me what I could not give. For offering so little and asking so much.
I could not connect the idea of God with my own pressing thoughts and feelings. I knew what I should not feel about God: I should not feel doubt, I should not feel resentment, I should not feel abandoned or ignored. But what should I feel? Pleasure? Yes, maybe, but a diluted pleasure—an almost neutral pleasure. Like trying to paint a watercolor with only water, no paint.
I heard Ellen give a sudden bleating moan from her crib next to our bed. It was not like her usual crying—there was an unearthly quality to it that I recognized only because I had once watched a lamb die by the side of the road. I had been driving through a rural area on the way home from college my sophomore year. There, the houses were sprawled, not squatting. The lamb must have escaped from one of the local farms. I remember she hadn’t yet been shorn—her wool was thick and matted.
The road curved sharply, and I was behind the car that hit her, so I knew it was going to happen a second before it happened. I guess the lamb had wandered out into the road, confused. She stood staring into the headlights of the oncoming car as if staring into somebody’s cold, unblinking eyes, trying to understand. The driver started to brake too late.
I don’t remember the collision; all I remember is feeling like I owed it to the lamb to stay with her. The driver who hit her stopped to call for help, but I knew somehow that she was beyond help. There was blood all over her body, gushing from wounds I couldn’t see, trying to form a crust and then bubbling forth again. But it was the tone of her whimpering that told me she was leaving this world; it seemed to be a part of a chorus whose voices I could not hear.
That was the sound that Ellen was making now—it was strange, solitary, inhuman somehow. Her pitch dipped low, but it seemed to be soaring. For a moment, I just listened to the music of her cries. Then I went to her crib and lifted her into my arms. Andrew rose behind me, rubbing his eyes.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“She’s dying,” I said.
“What do you mean?” He stepped closer. “Oh my god! Oh my god—she’s turning blue!”
I said nothing. Now he saw—now he knew. Andrew dialed 9-1-1, and the ambulance picked us up a few minutes later. All the way to the hospital I held her, humming, trying to pick up the melody that the inaudible voices were singing all around us. Sometime before we arrived, Ellen died. A soundless swelling stroked my chest, and then I knew she was gone.
Pain was a network of cords extending from every part of my body, holding me suspended, tethered to the corners of the sky. Here was the evidence that Ellen had lived, that Ellen was real: pain, the only reliable proof. Pain, and a small pouch inside it filled with something else—something distinct from pain, but not separate from it. A deep knowing: a knowing that had nothing to do with thinking. The tight snares of my logic unwound, releasing me into a vast liquid emptiness that was not white, not flat, but endlessly rounding, filling out its dimensions. And for the first time, I knew what god was, and I wasn’t afraid.
Elsa Lyons grew up in New York and is currently a student at Amherst College.
