Closing time

Open all the doors and 

let you out into the world

[semisonic]

It's two in the morning. You're one week old today. 

I'm getting to know you, bit by bit. You have a fierceness that surprises me, an intensity to your dreams, your brow slightly furrowed. Then you smile in your sleep so sweetly that it breaks me. What does a seven-day-old dream of? 

I remember the brightness of the lights as they hung the drape for my c-section. Thirteen hours of mind-bending, bellowing labor and I could not dislodge you. Your father started weeping when they wheeled me away but I was beyond caring, outside myself from the pain. It was time for you to be out, one way or another, and as I roared through another contraction I knew that I had matched my will against yours and you had somehow prevailed. A knife would have to separate us.

I felt them tug you one way, then the other, my body heaving like the broken-backed deer I once saw on the highway. She's stuck, said the surgeon. God, she's really wedged in there, said another voice. 

Then a third voice, a beat or two later. We need to get her out now.

I tried to picture you brain-damaged. I tried to picture you dead. But despite the months we'd shared my body I'd never seen you and even now, I just couldn't begin to imagine what you looked like. All I knew was the first quicksilver flicker of you in my belly, the tiny shudder of your hiccups, the squirming of your feet when Ivan sang You must be daddy's little pumpkin, I can tell by the way you roll. 

I haven't prayed in years but I started to whisper Please keep her safe. Please keep her safe. Let her come into this world whole.

Is she okay? I asked the hand of the anesthesiologist. His fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the gurney. Almost there, I think.

And then, my body stilled. I heard nothing. Moments passed, and still nothing. After months and months of you, all at once I was alone inside myself again.

Miriam. We always knew what your name would be. Drop of the sea, bitter, beloved, longed-for. I smelled blood, sharp and hot, the interior of my own body. I sensed you were near. I thought of animals that eat their young and suddenly I understood. I would rather have you inside me again than blue and cold on a table in this bright room, where everyone can see you but me. 

Then. A noise. A barely perceptible intake, the very shadow of a gasp. The air shifted.

Suddenly a cry rings out. Unreal, unreal. You sound almost like you're asking a question. Then another. Another. They built in intensity as I tracked them across the room, blind behind my curtain. Go to her, I told your father, and he did. 

A few weeks ago Ivan came home and mentioned a random fact he'd learned about the song Closing Time by Semisonic. It was from some podcast about songs from the nineties. It's about his child's birth, he said while we loaded the dishwasher. No way, I replied, but all the sudden the lyrics finally made sense. Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

I added it to our birth playlist, which was on my phone tucked into a bag in a room a million miles away from here, along with my birth plan and my sanity and all the other things I no longer cared about. But that was okay. The lyrics have seeped into me from hearing it a thousand times over the years. It's one of those songs everyone can recite from memory whether they want to or not. I let my eyes slide shut.

Closing time, one last call for alcohol so finish your whiskey or beer

Closing time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here

A noise. I can see Ivan out of the corner of my eye. He's bent over, lifting something up against his chest.

Closing time, time for you to go out to the places you will be from

Closing time, this room won't be open til your brothers or your sisters come

He turns and begins to walk towards me. Tears are running backwards, up my forehead and trickling into my hair. A year ago we lit a candle for our first small one, who never made it here. How miraculous that you did. 

I know who I want to take me home

And then, all the sudden, here you are. 

I know who I want to take me home

Whoever you are, we will love you. Whoever you are, you are ours.

I know who I want to take me home

In this moment, it becomes clear- it was all worth it. It all brought us to you, specifically you, inevitably you. It was always meant to be you.

Take me home

And then, finally, we do.

Epilogue

 we never unpacked.

so far east it’s west to another man. no bells here.

still we move. almost back where we left now.

[gboyega odubanjo]

Held in the arms of my desert

I assuredly rest in peace

[tombstone, terlingua ghost town, tx]

Last night I wrenched open all the windows in our house to let the night air in. My husband trailed behind me, closing ones he thought I wouldn’t notice, murmuring asides about the cold, the northwest summer still too new.

But there was a child kicking inside me and I couldn’t sleep and all I could think of was when I was the child, when I was gobsmacked by the scent of early summer in the desert, how you opened the windows in our stucco red-roofed house and let the night breeze blow through. How fresh it smelled in the morning, how sometimes a storm had passed through while we slept. 

When the end was near, we discussed what to do with your body. What would you want?  It wasn’t a conversation any of us had ever had with you. Your business was only with life, the bullshot crack of it, the flat hot glare of the light midday, the night breeze blowing through the house. We couldn’t contemplate you buried. We couldn’t send you out to sea. The only option left was ash.

Of all the many things you loved in this world, a good road trip was at the top of the list. Something that could be turned into a column in a pinch. We decided to have one more, together, as a family. 

Besides, we needed to take you home. 

We drove through the West Texas desert, my mother and sister and I taking turns at the wheel, you in a cardboard box in the back. It felt so strange that it somehow came back around the bend and felt right again, the heat lancing in through the window to burn a slice of my right collarbone, the moon eventually rising to the left. 

As it dipped in and out of the clouds, my sister pulled up Luckenbach Moon on her phone and began to read. Then there was the moon, she said.

And last night it showed off. The greatest ever.

The first place we left part of you was Prada Marfa. When I looked over my shoulder as we walked away, your shrine had already blown into the desert.

Makin’ silhouettes into things and things came alive

The second was Chinati. How freely you shared your delight with us. The familiar angles rising eternal against the horizon.

On moonbrite nites like this, big eyed deer

Tiptoe into larger openings and they can dance better 

‘cause they can see where the rocks are at

The third was in the Davis Mountains, the heat already crackling with the rising sun as we wound up and up through the trees.

Their prancin’ gets fancier and freer because they know mans

Not there to dampen the dance

The fourth was at Big Bend, on the trail to the Window. We slept under the stars, ate tacos in Terlingua at the Starlight Theatre. 

This kind of moonshine makes you crazy if you sleep in it,

They say

But I think you’re crazy not to try it

The fifth was Balmorhea. The water as icy as it ever was. We stuck our feet in and let the minnows nip us, the dappled sunlight visible all the way to the bottom, and it was summer again, childhood again.

Those who saw the moon said they could smell it.

One said it tasted like sin

The sixth was on the banks of the Concho River. This water was warm, meandering, unhurried under the eternal eye of the stone mermaid, the Pearl of the Concho. Home.

We’ve been telling strangers who come to Luckenbach ‘bout our Moon

We brought you to your brothers. The funeral home had small urns, but nothing felt right until I found two small cigar boxes from Grandad’s store in the attic and felt whatever part of you that was still in my heart do a little two-step. 

But I know they won’t believe that

We have such a big moon

For such a small town 

And then, all the sudden, we were back at the beginning. Rattling over a cattle guard through a very old, very familiar gate, at the end of our journey and back to where everything started. A portal to the place where you found your peace. The rest of you, the most of you, we brought back to the farm. 

When we stepped out of the car, I wondered where you were, as I had so many times before. I couldn’t exactly feel you there, as I haven’t exactly felt you anywhere. But everything about the familiar wide sky, the heat, the warped timber of the mesquite reminded me of you. I half expected to see you walking up the road, wide brimmed hat, snake guards, walking stick, a crooked smile. 

Instead I hefted the cardboard box while Mom wiped her forehead, examined a dead tree near the entrance, and declared, “We can just spread him here.” You would have thought that was funny. 

We paused at a few places, the shelter you built with your brother, the trees you planted and watered so carefully, the found art you assembled, the old rusted pickup you loved tangled in the unchecked weeds. We read things aloud that you’d written in your blog over the years. The dim roar of the cicadas rose, then fell, then rose again. We made our way up the hill to a place that felt sacred, a semicircle of stones stacked and crumbling. 

We finished it there, laid you to rest, your brothers and their wives, your wife and daughters. A small ritual. We read things you’d written about this place, so humble and beloved by you for so long. We left offerings on the rocks, things destined to be taken by the wind and the sun. 

You always cherished the small, the unassuming, the overlooked- rusted mailboxes, a runty abandoned dog, a snakeskin half shed. A dryland farm in West Texas is a thing loved by so few, but of course it was easy for you to find its magic. I don’t know if your spirit is a thing separate from your body, but in case it isn’t, your body needed to be here, in the place you loved best. We read the words over you that you’d written about your love for this place you had christened Spur Creek Farm.

Your granddaughter will be born soon. I can’t think of her without thinking of you, how strange it is that part of you and us all will continue to live on, that life perpetuates itself. I wonder if I will recognize parts of you in her. I wonder if she will shimmy like you once did, if her joy and careful attention will one day strike me as strangely familiar. 

Regardless, she will have her inheritance- the knowledge of sift light, Annie Dillard, armadillos and monarchs, rusty mailboxes and strangely worded street signs. She will grow up in a house with dusty paperbacks and strange boxes in the attic filled with oddities, and in a family that loves a good road trip. Maybe she will have hazel eyes and a crooked smile. 

I can’t believe that she will never get to know you, your singular way of being. But what she will not lack for is love, and hopefully a sense of wonder at the world and the joyous coincidence of her being here in it, for just a little while.

Maybe she will one day look out the window while driving barefoot across the west at night and think to herself unbidden, 

What a big, mean moon we have.

And in that moment, you will be here with her, and with us, again.

Prada Marfa

Chinati

Fort Davis

Big Bend

Balmorhea

Concho River

Spur Creek Farm

It would have been a lot easier to have a master plan from the beginning-

But it wouldn't have been better. Just different, OK?

Easy isn't the only thing that matters.

And if easy really mattered very much to me I sure as heck wouldn't be doing this.

This is about spiritual values.

The objective was not to move in and have a place to live; I can do that anywhere.

The objective was to do something.

[robert bruno]

I spoke her name

a hundred times.

[mary oliver]

It's a Monday, and I get the call. You're here, for today. The doctor said you likely wouldn't stay. 

I haven't named you, not in my heart, not in my head. You're feral, elemental. Little more than blood, a pulse right in the meat of me, sinless, saline, unfathomably small. Cousin to what dwelled the earth before trees or rivers existed, when the seas smoked and deep within them something began for the first time to stir. I wouldn't dare name you any more than I would call to any cave-dwelling thing that moved beyond me in the dark.

The first night you were in me, I dreamed about the end of the world. I flew along the coastline in a car, watching fire strike the ocean, the tidal wave rising up, darkening the sky. When the water receded there were strange sea beasts mounded on the sand, beheaded, bleeding.

The night before the second blood test that both confirmed your existence and cursed it, I dreamed of you. I held you in one arm, than the other, fed you from my body. You were so small. A daughter. 

Are you female? We didn't test the embryos, so we don't know. You are only yourself. You'll likely never have to be anything else.

I watched a meteor shower on your second night here. I wanted to inhabit my body too while you were in it, sense my own spin through the universe, notice the ceiling of the world as the Perseids blinked and evaporated. We are on a rock flying and you were in me, safe that day- as the nurse so artfully put it- like a sesame seed flicked into a jar of peanut butter. 

The next blood test comes and goes. You're growing, but too slowly, and you started too late. 

After the blood draw, we go to the grotto in Portland. It's carved into the side of a cliff, the Madonna surrounded by candles. We light a candle for you, watch as the flame gutters and sways. Do you want to wait and watch? he asks. I say no. We walk away slowly, my hand in his. It's your last day.

The final blood draw happens and I check the results from my lab test as soon as they come in. I want to be the first to know, before the doctor, before my husband. You're gone, just like that. It's as though you were never here. 

You were, though. Whatever happens, you'll always be the first- though the first what, I'm not sure. Sesame seed. Star falling. I imagine your flame flickering as the three of us walked away, you, me, and your father. I imagine night falling, the grotto darkening, all the candles bright but one. 

Anything worth having has its price.

[joan didion]

Dear unclaimed souls, swirling in the ether, etc etc:

I know. We're cheating. 

I'm sorry. I wish it had all been very magical too. Maybe you picked us, but the next thing you knew you were spat back out in the time before time. Maybe none of you picked us, and now we're doing the equivalent of deep sea commercial fishing: throwing out a huge net and scraping you from the swells and currents of the world between worlds, willing or no. 

Who knows. But every morning and evening, when we gather in the kitchen and silently lay out syringes and band-aids and medications that cost the equivalent of a down payment on a Tesla (or, okay, maybe a Ford Explorer), I think about you, and I wonder. Do you exist at all, anywhere? Do you long to be here too? 

There is a running list in my brain of all the names that have caught my eye in the past few years, their meanings. All the versions of you that might yet be. They pop into my head unbidden while I open the fridge, while my husband draws up one shot and I draw up another. 

Sheridan, wanderer

The needle stabs into the rubber stopper, injects a tenth of a milliliter of air.

Hugo, heart-brave

Tip the tiny glass bottle upside down, draw the liquid up. 

Merryn, light-hearted

Tap, tap, tap the side. A perfectly spherical drop grows, slowly then instantly, quivers, slides down the needle's edge. 

Bede, prayer

Stall for a few seconds, then thread the needle under the skin. Slowly depress the plunger with a thumb "like you're holding a pencil," the narrator in the video earnestly says. I want to ask her how on earth she holds a pencil. Count slowly to five.

Merritt, boundary-gate

Meridian, midday

Miriam, drop of the sea, bitter, beloved, longed-for 

Pull the needle out, paste the band-aid over the drop of blood. Recap the needle, toss in the sharps container. The second and third shots go faster. Medication back in the fridge. Can a child come this way too? From refrigerated dosage pens, syringes, a calendar in the kitchen carefully highlighted, years of savings, sheer longing?

One of my patients at my last job had gotten unexpectedly pregnant for the fifth time. I remember her laugh as she cradled her belly. I guess some of us were just meant to be mothers, she said. 

This isn't simple, the way I wanted. I always thought the things that came the most easily were the ones that were meant to be. But maybe there's a magic to being wanted so much that you bend my body before you even exist. 

In the bathroom at the fertility clinic, there's a poster of little cartoon babies diving in and out of a test tube. It reminds me, bizarrely, of swimming in the cenotes in Mexico months ago. Test tube babies, the poster caption reads. 

I guess it's supposed to be charming, but I always think of the children Mayans sometimes threw into those subterranean lakes as sacrifices and it just makes me uneasy. There has always been so much ambivalence, so much joy, so much fear and control and love and loss in bringing in new people from the other side. 

It makes sense to bide your time at that threshold, to duck the nets. There are reasons to cross over and reasons to stay put. Life is not simple and there are no guarantees- not that you will be born, not that you will live long or painlessly, not that we will live to see you grown, not that you will be able to bear children of your own if you so desire, not that you will have the life you may have wished for in a million different ways. 

It's a lot of work, just to eventually get back to wherever you are now- where sky and water meet, the outer reaches. And for all the medications, the surgeries, the highlighted calendar, the money, the appointments and phone calls and ultrasounds, at the end of it all I'm not kidding myself. I know I can't choose for you.

But just so you know, when I'm standing in the fertility center bathroom staring at that poster, I think of something else too. I remember the sublimity of swimming in that cursed, sacred, subterranean lake.

The sunlight above, the way it lanced into the darkness below. The hundreds of feet between me, floating at the surface, and the floor of the world. The very bottom, where no light penetrates, silent, cocooned in black water for millennia, where gold and jade settle against the bones of ancient children and their unknowable stories.

The world is wide. I can't promise you that it won't hurt you, that it will always want you. 

But it also isn't some formless ether, some motionless time outside of time. It is the opposite of in between. It is matter and it is myriad. Crags and sinkholes, mountains and mines, rivers wending through split canyons, ice settling in sheets, storms that lift trees from the earth, things to bend and mold and break yourself against. It is hot and wild and sweet and utterly irreversible, bound by bone and blood and gravity.

Here, from your first breath, you'll be found by Time. It will begin you and end you, order your days only forward, give you things you can't live without then take them back, make every single thing matter in a way that breaks your heart and then remakes it, like iron burst and battered and drawn again and again from a brimming forge.

And here we are too. Your family. We are bound to the world and we can't come to you. You can only come to us, to the world where everything counts and nothing lasts and it all really happened, somehow, just this one impossibly precious time.

Maybe that's nothing to you, as you do dives and flutter kicks in the sky above worlds, the mirror image of your maybe-mother fathoms below you earthside. Or maybe you're curious. Maybe just a little? 

Drift up to the light. Let us catch you. The only promise I can make is that you will be loved by us, whatever you are and whoever you'll be- unhoused soul, almost-child, prayer, wanderer, drop of the sea, bitter, beloved. Test tube baby. 

Come swim with us.

Love, 

Mom