Page 75 of Night Songs

I looked over at Hess, shocked, and she smiled again and caressed the door. “It used to be your mother’s. Your father actually gave it to her for Christmas one year. He taught her how to drive.”

I studied the interior with new interest, as if there might be clues hiding in the black leather. I imagined my parents riding in it together, golden with ’70s glamour, my mother’s bare feet propped on the dash.

Hess and I really talked then, about my marriage to Micah and how I’d stopped worrying about him leaving me.

Hess told me about a new album she’d been writing, inspired by her experience with menopause, though of course, she couldn’t say it outright. She had to use metaphors so that only the women who understood would get it.

We heard a guitar kick up inside the house, and the voices of Phoebe and Tima calling for us. At the sound, I saw Hess’s face suddenly wilt, and tears finally make their appearance. “I don’t want to sing without Martha,” she rasped, and I took her hand in mine and let her ride the wave.

When she calmed, we walked inside to Tima’s son playing guitar while Tima sang and Phoebe danced around the living room with Micah and her granddaughter.

I left Hess there to join in, and I went to the kitchen to help clean up, preferring to be out of the fray. Tima’s daughter, her husband, and their two children were already there, and I watched as they washed and dried dishes together among the retro wood panels.

The children were young—maybe eight and nine—and as they helped their parents wipe the plates, the family seemed to move in concert. They made strange inside jokes with one another as if they were speaking their own language, and when they laughed, the sounds of their joy blended in harmony.

It was such a specific world they’d created—a small glowing bubble of a world that fit them completely. There was something familiar about it that I couldn’t place.

I wondered what it would have been like if my mom were still alive, and I had grown up in her world. It was hard to imagine her as a mother—she had spent so much of her life chasing her dream and making music that I couldn’t see her tied down, sequestered to a warm bubble. And perhaps it wasn’t something she had wanted, and she had made the best of it.

But when I looked over at Micah dancing with Phoebe’s tiny granddaughter in the living room, IknewI wanted to share the world we’d created, built on love and respect and joy and truth, with children of our own.

And in the next moment, a voice inside me whispered,What do you know about being a mother?

But as we traveled back to Arizona, the desire only grew stronger.

For days after we returned, I hid from myself and focused on work.

Then at some point, as I stared into the blue light of my computer screen, I realized I had been my own mother all these years. And I wouldn’t be raising a child by myself. I had Micah.

But I was nervous about what he would say. We’d never talked about children—it was one of the only things we’d failed to discuss that year we fell in love. We were so young back then that the possibility had seemed remote. And the specter of his brother loomed there, telling me to be quiet.I wondered if Micah had decided never to put himself in the position of his parents and risk the kind of loss that had destroyed him and his family.

Then one night while we ate dinner, I was suddenly seized by the need to tell him. I couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“I want to have a baby.”

Micah stopped shoveling lentil soup into his mouth and set his spoon down. I couldn’t see his face at first, but when he finally lifted it toward me, his eyes were shining like the glass sculptures that took up every surface of our home.

“I want one, too.”

“Really? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t want toforceit on you. I’m not the one who has to carry it. I thought I’d sound like a dick if I said, ‘Rhea, let’s put a baby in there!’?”

I laughed. The relief was intoxicating.

I got up and sat in his lap. I put my forehead to his, and I felt that restoring energy, our cells regenerating.

Then he fucked me with hearty purpose, right there on the cold clay of the kitchen floor.

26rhea

2003

It was a game at first. To see how many times we could have sex in one twenty-four-hour period. We fucked in the bathroom at the hot shop, and in the backseat of Micah’s green Volvo, and in the prickly bushes of a weekend hike.

I listened to my mother’sMile High Womanalbum on loop, remembering Clayton’s words:She said it was the sound of you coming into the world.The music was grand and bursting with life, the album cover featuring a giant Belle in a flowing white dress reclining in a green valley like a sexy Paul Bunyan. I imagined growing my baby, and hearing my own choir as the tiny life entered the world. My own little act of creation.

When after a few months I still wasn’t pregnant, we did a bit of research. We started tracking my cycle and making it count.