Gary Moshimer
The nurse returns to Mary’s room with the bundle and hands it to me carefully, like a priceless treasure. The tuft of black hair shows above the pink swaddling blanket. After she leaves, soundlessly, I don’t know what to do.
I say, “Mary?”
“No,” she says, buried head and all under her blankets. She made the nurse bring more and more. And there’s the quilt from home. It’s a fortress.
I carry Rachel around the room. We circle the bed. We rock a bit. Mary thinks I’m taking this lightly, but she can’t see how my body quakes. For a while I walk on my knees, bearing the tiny offering. I pull myself up at the window sill, considering the going-home outfit Mary’s mother bought. I stare at my camera.
As if reading my mind, Mary shouts from under, “Don’t even think about it! That’s something from the olden days!”
“Olden days?”
But I know what she means. That creepy book we looked at months ago. Old-time photos of people dressed up. Old and young. Infants, too. Eyes open and closed. They had this in common: they were dead.
I lean into the window. “Look, Rachel. Down there in the parking lot. Daddy’s car.”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” I rush over, for a second almost forgetting and holding Rachel like a football. I yank the covers, but she’s sealed tight.
Our voices are loud, and there are other babies we might wake up, so the nurse comes back. I hand over the bundle.
***
In the hallway I see the chaplain again. “She’s looking for you,” I say.
From the end of the hall I hear the basketball game. It’s the room where the neonatologist stays. The door is open and he’s sitting on the bed not watching the game. He’s looking at the floor, and I stop and stand right in the doorway until he looks up. He seems relieved to see someone. He shakes my hand and motions me to the recliner. He opens the tiny fridge and roots around. “Apple juice?” He has mocha skin, an Indian accent.
I sip from the tiny juice box and we watch the game. “Lakers,” he says, after the ball has changed hands a few times.
He picks up the remote and turns the TV off. He leans forward from the edge of his bed to see my face. “Do you mind my asking, what the baby’s name was to be?”
“Rachel.”
“Ah.”
“My wife acts like the baby never existed.”
“It’s very difficult. It’s understandable. My wife lost two, back in our country.”
I nod my head.
“Come see something.” He helps me out of the chair. My legs wobble, and I have to lean on him.
There’s an adjoining room with a desk, bookcase, large aquarium. He rolls up the desk chair and sits me in it, facing the fish. He stands behind me and places his hands on my shoulders. “I find this very helpful,” he says. “Just listen to the bubbles.”
His long fingers work my neck with the rhythm of the grass waving in the tank. I close my eyes and picture his wife weaving pods from grass, bundling the babies in, placing them in a slow moving brown river and saying farewell, anointing their foreheads.
When I open my eyes a fish is staring at me, mouthing something. Smaller ones zoom back and forth, silver and orange, phosphorescent. Something bobs near the bottom. Instead of a diver it’s a fetus, its mask attached not to an oxygen line, but to an umbilical cord which snakes into the pebbles. The doctor must feel me tense up. “Sorry about that,” he says. “It’s not real.”
I notice a fish gone belly up near the surface, and point it out to him. “Watch,” he says. He scoops it out with his hand, places it into mine. The gills are not moving. “Now close your hand,” he says. “And your eyes.”
A minute passes before it comes alive. The fluttering in my palm makes me giggle like a child.
I turn my wide and hopeful eyes to him, but he shakes his head.
–
Gary Moshimer has stories at PANK, Word Riot, Smokelong Quarterly, Decomp, and many other places. He works in a hospital.
