Page 88 of Counting the Days

Rhea could see her looking up from tending a succulent garden and waving through the fence slats with a gloved hand.

“Hi!” Rhea waved back.

She was greatly comforted by this new feeling of knowing her neighbors. Just because she was single did not mean she had to feel isolated. Maybe she wouldn’t need to move into aretirement home after all. Maybe, in her later years, her neighbors would look out for her and Heimlich all of her lodged chocolate-covered almonds. She had assumed community came preassembled, but it turned out to be something she had to build herself. Unfortunately, she could not remember the woman’s name. She thought of Danny, who was brave enough to get “Greta” out of Wild Eyes. Rhea cleared her throat.

“Hey, can you tell me your name one more time?” Rhea called over the fence.

“Andrea!”

“Andrea! Got it. Locking it in.”

Andrea laughed, and Rhea felt silly. Did she really think someone would be offended if she asked them to repeat their name?

Rhea went back inside and did the dishes. She was feeling hopeful about Christmas, but also guilty, like she was betraying her mother. She felt obligated to spend that day and the days leading up to it mourning the relationship. Every Christmas since she was twenty, she’d continued her ritual of writing her mother a letter and burning it in her kitchen sink. She wondered if her mother would be waiting for the letter and disappointed when it did not arrive.

Rhea was still nursing such a powerful desire to speak to her mother, she decided heaven did not have calendars or holidays, and writing the letter a month early would not offend Sarah Darby. Rhea got a notebook and a pen and sat down at her table to write:

Dear Mom,

Why did you want to have a child? Or did you even want to? I know I wasn’t planned, but you had other options. Why didn’t you take them?

I’ve been thinking a lot about my reasons for wanting a child…. I would have someone to love. They would be there for me when I get older. I would feel a small sense of immortality. I would get to celebrate holidays with them and share baby pictures on the text chain.

Are my reasons for wanting a child entirely selfish? Or is there a deeper reason? Are there feelings a parent has for a child that are pure and sacred? Feelings that cannot be experienced elsewhere?

A few months before you died, you told me a story. When I was little, you stayed up all night with me. I had a very high fever, but you were scared to take me to the hospital because we were so broke, so you just held me all night. You told me it was the first time you ever felt like you could touch God. You said your love for me was deeper than anything you had ever experienced, and you found yourself praying for the first time in your life and asking God to spare me. You said, “My heart became a shooting star. It blasted up to heaven and begged God to bring your fever down…and it worked.”

I will remember those words forever.

If I never have a child, will I never feel that kind of love?

And is that a selfish question?

But maybe I have felt that transcendent love you described. Because I was the other person in that story. I was the little girl being held all night with such a high fever, held by someone who sometimes made me feel like the most important person in the whole world. Maybe it goes both ways, and one does not need to have children to know that feeling. Maybe I have felt that same love for you, my funny, complicated, beautiful mother.

And because of you, I got to be born. I got to be alive. There are times when being alive feels so unbearably hard, times when I wish I had not been born. But there are other moments, breathtakingly marvelous moments full of laughter and magic. I never would have gotten to experience any of them if you had not given birth to me. So, how could the desire to bring someone into this occasionally wonderful world be entirely selfish?

I used to be so certain about everything. I used to know exactly what I wanted, but now I am lost. Please tell me what to do, Mom. Send me a hummingbird.

47Days

Rhea pushed a shopping cartthrough her local hardware store. She collected nails, a hammer, a ladder, a stud finder, a drill, and something called a level. The woman behind the counter talked her through what she would need to rebuild shelves and shared a YouTube clip that could guide her through the process.

She got home and began pulling everything out of the closet. She made a pile to bring to the coalition and a pile to be reorganized and put back on the shelves. She took in her vision board and felt proud: She’d fixed up her backyard and started volunteering; she’d made her future brighter all by herself. She made a mental note to start working on becoming the next Jenni Kayne; maybe she could open another Topanga General Store in Ojai or Santa Barbara…she put her vision board aside before she got too distracted.

She found an outdated denim jacket, an old hair dryer, and a barely used blanket. She put them in the donation pile and felt positively charitable. She came upon an old memory box and wondered if there was anything inside worth donating. She found an apron from when she was a waitress in a West Hollywood diner and an old black and white wig from when she wentas Cruella de Vil for Halloween in her twenties. She smiled at the wig; turns out, she had not always hated Halloween.

Almost at the bottom of the memory box, she pulled out a rolled-up piece of white poster board. She unrolled it, and her hand slowly moved over her mouth as she took it in. It was a vision board…one she must have made in high school. She had a vague memory of making it, but the images glued on it were astonishing.

A magazine cutout of a cliffside cottage that was eerily identical to the cottage she currently owned.

A cutout of a chic boutique that resembled Topanga General Store. Rhea remembered that her high school dream was to open a boutique, before she went to fashion school and they filled her head with the idea of a big, fancy career.

A cutout of women laughing together, clearly meant to be her with Tiny, Zoe, and Ada, the women she still laughed with regularly.

There were images of women hiking; she had always loved hiking. Images of women surfing; she had always loved the ocean.

There were no children on her vision board.