When I brought the baby to Aki, he looked at her with a coldness that chilled me. We stood at the center of the village, the baby not an hour old, so new to the world that she struggled to open her eyes. I offered him the baby, but he would not touch her. He would not look at her. Ciba’s death had made the child invisible to him.
“What will you name her?” I asked.
“Ciba must name her,” he said, without meeting my eye. “It is our tradition that the mother chooses the name.”
“But Ciba can’t name her,” I said. “Ciba is gone. You have to do it.”
Aki looked so forlorn, so lost with grief, that I said nothing more. I understood that his silence was not indifference, but his way of expressing the pain he felt over losing Ciba. His rejection of his daughter was an act of mourning, one that took the opposite form of my own grief: I wanted to spend every minute with the baby. Ciba had given her life for this child, and I would care for her as if she were my own.
I named her Isabelle. If the tribe called her something different, I never knew it. Aki could not bear to have her near, and so Isabelle slept in Uma’s hut, in a wooden box lined with fur. In her first days of life, I spent every minute with her, anxious that she would fall sick. I wrapped her tight in a blanket, so that she felt warm and secure, and held her close to me when she cried. I watched for signs of illness. She was strong at birth, and remained healthy for the first days, but soon began to grow weak. She needed nutrition, and there was no milk. Uma soaked a towel with warm goat’s milk and put it to Isabelle’s lips, but she wouldn’t take it. She began to grow thin.
“There is no other way,” Uma said, gesturing to my breast. “You are her mother now. You must feed her or she will die.”
Uma lifted my tunic and positioned Isabelle at my breast, guiding the tiny mouth to my nipple. “You love this child,” she said. “You will keep her alive.” Of course, it wasn’t possible to feed Isabelle. When I said as much, Uma replied, “It is possible. I have seen it before. Hold her. Sing to her. Keep her at your breast. Milk will come.”
At Uma’s urging, I slept on a cot near Isabelle, waking every few hours to bring her to my breast. It was Isabelle’s instinct to nurse, and so she latched on and began to suck at my flesh, desperate for milk that did not arrive. She cried with frustration and hunger. It struck me as a futile endeavor. The very idea seemed absurd. Surely, there were hormones and chemicals swirling through a mother’s body that I simply did not have. Uma made teas from mountain herbs, and I drank them religiously, but they did nothing. Isabelle would cry, and—more out of desperation than belief—I would try again, praying that Uma was right, and that my body would comply with Isabelle’s needs. Some nights, I would hold her for hours at a time, rocking her, as she cried herself to sleep; I would whisper her name when she woke, calming her in my arms, bringing her to my breast. Days passed like this, and Isabelle grew weaker and weaker, her voice becoming no more than a whimper.
I saw her small body diminish, the tiny ribs becoming visible through her pale skin, her arms and legs like twigs, her tongue dry and white. The horror of watching Isabelle wither cast an ominous shadow over my thoughts. I slept very little, and when I did, I was haunted by dreams of Ciba. Always, in every dream, I lifted Isabelle from Ciba’s arms, carrying her away from her mother as if just for a moment, no more than a quick walk around the village. There was no blood. No scalpel. Just a simple exchange—I took Isabelle; Ciba kissed us both and then ran into the blackberry bushes alone. I interpreted this dream as Ciba’s blessing to love and protect Isabelle.
One night, I was asleep on the cot, when I heard Isabelle crying. I woke, pulled myself out of bed, and went to her. I was used to waking up every few hours. The thin towels we used for diapers soaked through easily, leaving Isabelle wet and uncomfortable, needing to be changed many times a night. But when I went to the box, Isabelle was not there. I walked through the hut, looking for her, but there was only Anna, asleep at the far side of the room. A slap of fear stopped me cold. I imagined an animal sneaking into the hut, perhaps a wolf, sliding past my cot, taking my child in her teeth, and dragging her away. I understood with a terrible clarity the anguish Greta must have felt upon discovering Joseph missing. I felt a deep, instinctual longing for Isabelle, a physical need to have her against me, to feel the compact warmth of her, to see her hard, glimmering eyes, to hear her pink lips sucking at my body. This longing—this unbreakable connection between me and my child—was stronger than anything I had known before—stronger than hunger, stronger than pain. Even stronger than the loss of my own child. I was not Isabelle’s biological mother, but nature had made me her mother anyway.
Isabelle cried again, and I followed the sound outside, just beyond the hut, where she lay cradled in Uma’s arms.
“She woke up,” Uma said. “You are tired, Kryschia. You didn’t hear her.”
I was so relieved that Isabelle was safe, so exhausted and emotionally unsettled from the weeks of watching her die, that tears came to my eyes. “Give her to me,” I said, taking Isabelle in my arms.
But something had caught Uma’s eye. She stared at me, her brow furrowed, as if she were not quite sure she could believe what she saw. I looked down and found my tunic wet. My breasts had swollen with milk and leaked. I gasped, overwhelmed by joy and confusion as Uma lifted my tunic and placed Isabelle at my breast. The milk came slowly, but Isabelle was soon full.
For many years after I left the village, I believed that the milk that saved Isabelle was a miracle. How else to explain such an impossible gift? But recently, after doing research online, I found that lactation without pregnancy is not impossible, and that in certain parts of the world where maternal mortality is high, it is still common for an adoptive mother to breastfeed. Certain natural protocols—all of which Uma had known—could produce milk and save a motherless baby.
With regular feeding, Isabelle grew stronger and stronger. But even as Isabelle thrived, Anna drifted further away from the world of the living. I sat by Anna’s bedside, Isabelle at my breast, and tried to coax the girl back to health. I told her stories of dragons and princes and castles tucked into the mountains. I sang songs and asked her questions about her parents. But she rarely gave a sign that she heard me. She never smiled and she never spoke. If I brought her food—roasted vegetables and milk from the goats—she refused it. She took a bite or two of meat, if I brought it from the grotto, but it didn’t help. She grew thin and pale as she wasted away. If I said her name, she turned away. Her only expression was a solemn, shocked stare, numb and terrified. She grew listless and dull-eyed. I wasn’t sure if it was the broken arm or her terror of Uma, but her suffering had slowly begun to undo her.
Uma made medicines from herbs, distillations of mountain flowers and grasses that she gave Anna to drink. They had no effect. By the end of the first month of Isabelle’s life, Anna eyes were glassy and unfocused, her skin pale and clammy. When I brought the other children to see her, a flicker of interest played over her face, but when Uma stepped near the bed with water, terror flitted through her eyes and she faded away again. Uma tried her best to heal Anna, but her best wasn’t good enough. I knew Anna would not live long unless I got her real medical attention.