My daughter. Say it—hold it in your mouth, look at the words: born dead.
To be told there is no pulse at the precise threshold of birth—water breaking. To be told to deliver anyway. Death.
The day birth came at last, the labor had lasted two days. I nearly gave in. I kept thinking, To what end? It seemed true that at any point I could simply surrender to the pain of an ordinary body and . . . leave. I looked at the people around me—my eyes puffy, my skin done in—and thought, I love you, I love you all, enough, good-bye. But I did not leave, and the dead girl was born.
I expected her to be blue, and cold. Lifeless. I expected her to feel dead weighted. I expected to die, quietly and with soft breathing, from holding her.
But she was not blue, and she was not cold; she was like the weight of the history of love in my arms. Her skin was flushed and her eyelashes were very, small, long. Her lips were in the hue and shape of a rosebud. Her hair . . . she had a small halo of almost-hair. And her hands were curled in the shape of something tender and potential. I was holding life and death—those supposed opposites, those markers of narrative worth; a beginning, an ending—all at once in my arms.
I did not die.
But I could see the grief coming like a towering wave of water about to swallow the world. When grief comes, you must breathe underwater. I knew I didn’t have much time. You know, hospitals will not allow you to take a dead baby home with you. You must make arrangements, with the hospital or with a coroner or a morgue. They send in “grief counselors,” and, if you let them, god help you, clergymen.
I just wanted her body. I wanted her body more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. And so I did what I had to do.
I asked the poet—my lifelong rival, beloved friend, a borderline criminal—to steal her from that fucking place for me.
You will think it sounds impossible, but it was not. It was laughably simple. The poet was close friends with an attendant, an addict, at the morgue where I agreed to send her. The morgue had its own crematorium. In lieu of her lifeless body, a little pig covered in a soft blanket was sent down the metal road to the fire.
Instead, I took her to a place where a river empties into the sea. I drove there alone, with her perfect weight next to me in the passenger’s seat. I talked to her and sang to her and recited poems to her. When I got there—not anywhere anyone would be—I placed her in a backpack that also contained kindling and sage and waited for night. The wind was unusually still, and the surf had the rise and fall of breathing. The moon’s giant eye looked on. It was the end of an Indian summer. I removed my clothes. I held her body to mine for a long time. Until it came, the great flood. Animal sounds came from my throat. Nearly all of the night we rocked that way.
When a dead calm came over me, I made a pyre of sticks and sage and the only thing I had to give to her, my hair. All of it I could sever. Great clumps of American blond. I placed her body and my hair atop the pyre and lit it on fire. I watched her burn. I did not cry while she burned. The smell of burning skin and ocean and sage. I did not look away. I collected the ashes in the morning and walked into the sea with them. So there was a moment when we were together in the same waters.
Then I entered a cataclysmic silence, a white vast, for nearly a year.
After grief—strange sister self—left me, I thought, stupidly, that I could live my life, and love the artists who are in it, and carry on by writing. I gathered them together for meals, for art events, for films and readings and gallery exhibits. I thought I could narrate over everything. This . . . what I am still doing now. I am writing a journal of the girl. But I don’t know if I can withstand it. I hear my husband and son in the kitchen, making dinner, setting plates, and I close my eyes. My heart is beating me up.
I am an American woman writer. I am in the room I write in. The room with midnight blue walls. Dark red carpet against deep brown hardwood floors. Two windows with long off-white curtains. And books . . . books everywhere—on floor-to-ceiling shelves, on the floor, on the desk, piles of literature, art, photography, philosophy. The colors of their spines and covers the colors of skin, blood, fire, water, night. A black iron lotus Buddha with a broken hand that we glued back on—me and my husband, my now-husband. A good ironic metaphor. Various feathers from birds I have come upon: eagle, heron, crow, crane, and swan. Bowls of rocks. A photo. The cat’s food bowl. Desperate talismans, the colors of blood and night and the bottom of an ocean. And the scent of someone over-saging a room because they are afraid they will make something to death.
I think things like, Be brave. Hold on to voice. It’s your only chance. Pick up the glass of scotch. Bring the amber liquid to your mouth. Drink. Large. Hold it there. Close your eyes. Move your goddamn hands before your mind makes a mess of it.
I see an image of a dead girl—an arrested image.
My breath jackknifes for a moment.
It’s the girl. I don’t know if she will kill me or save me.