I ran until I couldn’t anymore, then I walked and walked for what seemed like hours but it could have been nothing, no more than fifteen minutes. Once or twice, I fell but I kept going because I was too terrified to stop; for as long as I kept moving, I would be getting farther away from the house in the woods and I wouldn’t have to look at his face—the stillness of it, his absolute quiet. “I’m going to get you home,” I whispered. I pictured finding a hospital and leaving him there. He would be safe and he would go to someone who wanted a baby. There’s always someone who wants a baby boy, I thought. But another part of me imagined arriving home with him in my arms. There, the image froze. Try as I might, I couldn’t bring to mind the faces of my parents at the door, letting me in. Instead I saw myself, as easily as I saw my feet, scratched and muddied by the undergrowth, standing and waiting in front of a closed door that would never be opened to me. I was still trying to picture my parents’ faces when I came upon a clearing and a wide field beyond it. There were a few huts, their roofs fallen in, walls sloping to the ground. Still I called out. No answer. Then I looked down into my arms. At his closed eyes, his eyebrows, so soft they were hardly there. His cupid’s-bow lips were pale, almost blue. Cold. My legs wouldn’t work anymore so I sat, leaned back against a tree and closed my eyes.
When I woke up, I was in hospital. The child was next to me. The first thing I said to the nurse was a lie: “The child isn’t mine. I found him.” The words came so easily, they must have been right. “He belongs to someone else,” I added. I remember her face, kind, distant, unreadable. She took him away and I fell asleep again, this time for days.
That is one story.
Or, I sat for a long time in the clearing waiting for him to open his eyes, touching his face, holding my ear above his nose to try to hear him breathe. I sat there as the sun crept from east to west, as a light rain fell in the late afternoon. The crickets were starting up when I accepted that he wouldn’t, that his quiet was permanent, there would be no waking him. And there I was, surrounded by different trees, choosing which one to bury him under. I chose a young angsana and broke into the ground with my fingers. The damp soil came away in my hands quite easily. I made a deep hollow in the earth, smoothed the cloth around him again to cover his face, and put him in. It took everything I had to push the soil over him, patting it firm when that was done. I sat for a long time touching my hand to his resting place. I told myself he was safe, that there was nothing he would have to fear anymore. When I woke, I was somewhere else.
Or, I called out in the clearing and an old woman, so small and bent that the grass had hidden her completely, stepped out from within the field. She had been foraging, had a little basket filled with leaves and tapioca in the crook of her arm. She asked if I was okay and if I needed help. Her hut was just ten minutes’ walk away, she said. It was a tiny village—no more than eight families—and as we approached, people came out to look or stared from their doorways. She said not to mind them, and led me in. It was just her and her husband, no one else, and she made me a meal from the things she’d found. Yam and rice, the porridge tinged orange from the sweet root. While I ate, she fed the child for me, spooning the gruel into his mouth. There were a few goats in the village, she said, and if she asked she might be able to get some milk. There was a softness in her voice, and I thought about asking where the rest of her family was but I didn’t, afraid of the answer. Before it got dark, her husband went out and returned with a rattan mat. They made a bed for me in the sitting room, gathered as many blankets as they could find to make it comfortable, and told me I could stay for as long as I needed to. I thanked them and waited for them to fall asleep. Before I left, I made sure the baby was warm and nestled in the middle of the blankets. The last words I said to him were: “I told you I would find you a home.” I stumbled for half an hour in the twilight until I became too exhausted to continue and ended up back in the clearing, under a tree. I slept until I was found again.
“But,” he said, “but which one is true?”
I said all of them were. All of them. Every one of the things I told him, with my thousands and thousands of words and sounds, every one of them was true.
“But...” he repeated. The furrows between his eyebrows getting deeper, pinched in.
So I asked him, “Which one do you think is true?”
He took his time, and when he looked up, he was sure.