When you were younger you used to play dead.
Sometimes when I knocked on your door in the morning, I’d see you there, with the light streaming in through the window, and you’d be pretending not to breathe. Your eyes would be closed and you’d be so still. A terrible fear would come over me that this time, maybe it wasn’t just playing, this time maybe it was real. I’d want to rush in and shake you until your eyes opened.
“It’s just a phase,” your dad used to tell me, “children do all sorts of things that don’t make sense to adults.” He never understood how scary it was. Even when he saw how the panic left me shaking and he’d rub the spot between my thumb and index finger, a thing he’d done to help with the pain when I was in labour.
You were unexpected from the very first moment and everything that’s happened along the way has had an aura of unpredictability. The fall, you coming into the world ten weeks early, blue skin, struggling to breathe.
“Can’t we just put her back inside?” I don’t remember saying it but your dad says I asked the doctors that. There wasn’t enough of you. You were half-formed and I thought if I could just swaddle you up in another layer of skin—and another and another—you’d get better. You did eventually but after there was always a shine about you. I’d look at you and I’d see blue. I’d see the web of your veins and they were blue. I’d see how pale you were, how your skin was almost transparent.
As we rush you into surgery, a part of me believes this isn’t real. You’ll blink your eyes, you’ll wake up when I touch you. But an austere doctor with silver spectacles is talking to me. His voice is crisp and emotionless. Lane Ballard. He was there when Kira died—but this time when he speaks I feel like a misbehaving child.
He tells me the procedure was a success. You have a heartbeat, there’s brain activity. But no one knows how long you will last. You’ve lost a lot of blood and your immune system is badly compromised. He tells me you might not get better, he wants to send you to a research facility near York. When I ask about Dr. Varghese, he frowns and informs me she’s been suspended.
Talking to him I feel so many things. Shame, anger, frustration. I shouldn’t have let you go out. I should have come after you sooner. I never should have left. Beneath it is a dull rage. My body glows as if it’s made from burning metal.
“Don’t you touch her!” I snap.
There are procedures in place for this, he tries to tell me. He says I’ve seen what can happen if they aren’t followed. That this is for the best. He has two orderlies with him with the look of men prepared for violence.
Suddenly Irene is beside me. “Do you think she gives a damn about your procedures?” she says. “We know what you’ve been doing here and if you come near Sophie I’ll kill you.”
I stare in wonder at her. She was always the calm one, infinitely reasonable. Now her face is scarlet and her hands are shaking. We both know what we saw out there, those shapes in the sky. How many there were. You told me Kira is with them. You told me she is alive.
I’d have given anything to have her back. I’d do anything for you now.
Police in fluorescent vests load a crowd of evacuees into a bus headed inland. Bryan is still here, his mother too, treating the injured, the children and teenagers who lie motionless on cots. There are so many with JI2—more than I would have imagined. Bryan helps direct the flow of evacuees, breaking up fights when the crowding gets too bad. But he comes back to me when they can spare him, splattered in mud up to his thighs. He brings me tea from a thermos. “It’s cold now,” he says, “sorry.”
I can see the way he is staring at you. Breathing like he doesn’t really want the oxygen. I know how he feels. Dr. Ballard told me I shouldn’t touch you but I do anyway. I hold you, I scrub my hands and then I reach out for you again. No one tries to stop me.
Eventually the place is almost empty.
There are only a few of us left, huddled under blankets, looking like the last people alive in the universe. I tell Bryan it’s time to go. At first he resists and I understand that. You look so fragile. It seems impossible that we could go anywhere but I know we have to. We can’t stay.
It’s Bryan who finds the four-by-four ambulance, me pushing your stretcher behind. It makes me almost laugh, the sheer craziness of what we’re doing, but there’s no time to think about it. All I know is that you’re my responsibility and I won’t leave you.
There are five of us in the end: Irene and me, Bryan, his mother and you. Bryan takes the front seat while the rest of us load into the back. There isn’t much room. In the chaos no one pays attention to us until he’s driving. Then I can hear shouts, people yelling at us to slow down. But we keep going, silent and afraid.
We have to stop twice to figure out if the road is passable and once we have to backtrack because the main road has been completely washed out. But when we head north on the M40 toward Warwick things are easier. No one says much. There is no plan, just the hope that maybe we’ll find safety there. For a little while. You’re breathing still and I watch your chest rising and falling, willing you to live, remembering your birth.
You in the incubator at thirty weeks, a machine showing you how to breathe. “Live,” I whispered as I looked at you behind the glass, “please, live.” But it doesn’t always work like that, does it? Only in fairy tales does it work like that.
All at once I feel like I’m going to be sick and I ask Bryan to pull over. The rain is finally beginning to lighten. He opens the back of the ambulance and I climb out.
After everything, it’s turned into a clear night. None of the streetlights are working and I can see the stars—there are so many of them! Ditches and divots cradle rainwater, reflecting moonlight. It gives the landscape this otherworldly glow.
I remember a story you used to read Kira. From Egypt, maybe? It was about the world, how it was submerged. And when the land rose the first thing to appear was a heron. And the heron created the universe. It made the gods and the goddesses, it made the men and the women, everything. It made them all anew. Kira loved that story. So did you.
I know you’re almost gone. In my blood and bones. The ambulance is stopped. I don’t want it to happen here so I tell Bryan to carry you outside where the air is cool and fresh and there are stars overhead. We’re all around you, waiting. For what I don’t know. When does waiting become something else?
“I don’t think she’s breathing, Char,” Irene whispers.
She’s right. It’s coming now and I want to be ready for it, but how can I be? I search your face for a sign, some last signal that you know what’s happening even if I don’t. But there’s nothing. The terror, the hopes are mine to sort through. To take up or discard.
For a moment you’re perfectly still but then your body begins to shake. Is this it then? Everything seems as if it’s moving fast and slow at the same time. Too fast, too slow.
I hold you in my arms as it happens. It’s as if you’re shedding layers now, coming undone. And I have this feeling of being lifted up and out of myself. There isn’t any clear way to explain it, only the sense that overhead is something important, something hypnotic. I imagine I can see dark shapes in the sky above me. The ones like Kira. But they aren’t here for me, are they? They’re here for you. All of this is for you.
The rain is falling, washing everything away. You’re changing, becoming something new. I don’t want to be afraid of it—but I am. I can’t help it. Because you’re young. What you did was so stupid and brave in the way I suppose all young people are stupid and brave, thinking they were the first people to ever really live. I could’ve helped you if you’d let me.
We stand there, all of us—hopeful, curious, desperate. And all at once I want to take them into my arms. I want to take the whole world in my arms, all the scared people, the mothers and daughters, the fathers and sons, and whisper to them what I used to say to both you and Kira when you were small enough you still believed me, hoping it will be true.
Shhh, baby girl, the storm is passing. It’s going to be all right.