Page 88 of Night Songs

I thought of my own mother, never given the opportunity to hold her baby. She wasn’t there to protect me once I was out.

I reached into the bassinet, and I took the baby into my arms, resting her head on my chest. Her mouth opened like a baby bird, searching for my tit, and I pulled it out and helped her latch on to the nipple. She sucked, and this wave of feeling rose and washed over me.

Iwas here. I could protect her.

I imagined my body hardening and expanding, growing beyond the confines of the room, reaching up into the air until it towered above the hospital and the city beyond. I would hold her in my giant hand, shielding her from the evils of the world.

A grand, heroic music entered my vision, surrounding my towering body and ringing out over the mountains in the distance like God’s choir. I realized it was the sound I’d been searching for since I got clean.

I would become so large and imposing, so unstoppable, that the devil couldn’t slide me down his gullet, no matter the curse. I would be five thousand feet tall, one mile high, my wig puncturing the sky.

I would defy time and space, and Rhea would be safe.

30rhea

2009

At first my body just roiled, like the ocean was churning in my gut. I didn’t know if it was anxiety, or the swirling, sucking motion of life being made.

Then, I became a fertile, supernatural creature. My pubic hair grew into a long luxurious beard, and my nails grew into strong white talons. At night, I prowled around the neighborhood with my newly powerful nose, smelling desert jasmine, fresh mulch, meat charring on the grill.

When I saw the shadow on the ultrasound, batting at something unseen, it was difficult to grasp it was happening inside me. When I thought about it too hard, I would sometimes seize up, imagining how claustrophobic it must be inside the tight, dark space of my body, and I would have to push the image away.

The doctor moved the wand around, and there was a flash of silver I couldn’t identify. She pointed and said,Look, right there. The little penis.

It was a boy.

When he started to kick, he felt like a dolphin flicking his fins against my insides. He demanded food at all hours of the day, and I was happy to oblige him, cramming in stacks of banana pancakes and well-cooked cheeseburgers and heaps of vegetables whenever I could. I was proud ofhow strong he seemed, my big, vital baby. Perhaps my creature would make a good boy—the raw energy of it creating a powerful specimen in my abdomen.

But that wouldn’t be all he was—he was also half Micah, and so he would be sweet and contemplative. Micah made a playlist of soft indie music for him—dubbed amniotic rock—and we listened to it in the car, imagining him floating in his little ocean with his arms waving in wonder, surrounded by the gossamer sounds of Fleet Foxes and Band of Horses.

I also played Belle’s music for him, running through her entire catalogue, from the Clayton albums toThe Cursed WomantoMile High Womanand her other pop albums. If he would never meet her, at least he would know her voice, and how she’d seen the world through her many transformations.

When I called Hess with updates, she was so happy that it was almost like getting to tell my own mother and feeling the warmth of bringing a new member of the family into the world. The pride of having fulfilled some sort of ancient duty, as archaic as it sounded.

I didn’t want to just pick a name out of a book. I wanted to somehow discover it in nature—a name with a greater meaning that would root him to the world. We thought of naming him after Micah’s brother Kenny, or perhaps Tate, after my father, but I worried it would be a bad omen to name a child after men who had died so young.

Everywhere Micah and I went, there were now the three of us, the little world I’d dreamed of just coming into being. We talked about how we would do things differently than how we were raised—we would not shame him for his emotions. We would encourage his talents. We would, above all, make him feel loved in a way that we were never loved.

We knew this was a futile exercise—there was only so much you could control, of course, we knew that—but what was the harm in fantasizing? Sometimes it felt like the baby was creating me, rather than me creating him—I was calmer, happier, less prone to anxiety and dread. As unnatural as it was for me, I was able to lean into the joy without reservation.

When I was twenty weeks, I dreamt I was back on that rocky cliff in California with Shelli, except this time there was a crowd of people there both alive and dead—Hess, Martha, Micah and his brother, Dinah—and we were all passing the Mad Dog bottle and having a wonderful time.

When I walked to the tip of the ledge to jump, they cheered me on.

This time the quarry water was warm, and I sank instantly into that sliver of night beneath the surface. I floated serenely until my foot kicked against whatever that slick, solid thing had been. I tried to swim to the surface, but this time it caught my ankle, and it started to pull me down.

I looked beneath me and saw the man in white from my mushroom vision, his skin glowing in the murk, his long, thin fingers wrapped around my ankle like jellyfish tendrils. I could see the outlines of his face rippling in his own light, fine-boned and feminine at one angle, then almost brutish in another. For a moment, we stared at each other, unmoving.

Then from up above, breaking through the surface, I heard a scream. It was happening again, I needed to save her, but the man in white began to pull me down once more, tugging me down deeper into the darkness below.

I woke with a start in bed, still feeling the water on my skin. I ripped the covers off, and blood soaked through my underwear, pluming around me in a large, lurid blot.

Micah rushed me to the hospital in silence as I panted in the passenger seat. I was grateful for the unrelenting pain; I clung to it. I wanted more, and more.

At the hospital, the doctor said I’d lost too much blood, and they needed to get me into surgery right away. Through the haze of the pain, it seemed we’d skipped a few steps and I asked, “Is he gone?”

The doctor and Micah exchanged charged looks, as if this had already been discussed. Micah tried to answer, but then his face twisted up and he couldn’t get the words out. He turned away, and the doctor took my hand instead. “I’m so sorry. The fetus didn’t make it.”