In the night and early mornings I started to see strange things. Waking dreams, streaks of light. The shadows in the corners of our room moved and re-sculpted themselves. I drew the knife through the darkness as if something could be caught on the blade. Whatever was happening to Lila was happening to me too. It was catching, a low-grade fever. We couldn’t tell if it was normal, something to be expected. What other sickness or state could make our taste buds change, push our hearts against our lungs, set our moods to swinging wildly? I found I no longer wanted to know the details of what was happening inside me, even if it were possible. It was too overwhelming to think about bursting out of myself, new-blooded and transformed. When I looked down at my body, I half expected to see feathers, scales.
I didn’t know if pregnancy was a kind of wound, what the body considered it: a state of grace, a state of danger, or both. When I touched a finger to my armpit it came away slick with sweat. The heat came off me like I was a star in a dark sky.
Come back to bed, Marisol said. You need to watch these behaviours. Her voice was gentle but she held me in her arms with a vice-like grip so I could not return to whatever I thought was there. I’m worried about you, she said.
I’m not worried about me, I replied, feeling hard and clean and ready.
You’re slipping away from us.
No, I said. I’m here more than ever before. I’m just pregnant.
I wasn’t afraid to say the words any more, mostly. Pregnant, I said to myself like a dare. Mother. Mother. Mother.
Pay attention to yourself, Marisol said. That’s all I’m saying.
I waited until she turned over and went back to sleep. I lay awake. The knife wasn’t in my hand but lay on the floor, where I could reach it easily if I needed to. Fingertips brushing the handle, the blade.
All night I imagined my baby. Round, peach-downy. How even their worst cries would be a chiming of a note that I held inside myself too. And the knife on the floor, to protect them. My hands of comfort capable of tearing enemies apart. There had been a viciousness in the way I had cried over babies before, in the city, the way I had wanted to run away with them in my arms. And now this urge, to keep them safe at any cost: there was nothing gentle about that instinct. Now that I was there, almost there, grasping for it, the idea of softness felt laughable.