Elinor had decided she would name the baby Iris. After Iris Murdoch, she told me, when I called two weeks later to check up on her. But also after you, in a roundabout way.
Her news filled me with the kind of hope I’d known, for just a few moments, one afternoon, a few days after I’d told Karl I was pregnant. At the end of a school day, on our way out of the building, Lina and I heard a piano rumbling under girls’ voices as we passed by the music room. They were singing a song I thought I knew by heart but could not name. “One Fine Day”? “Please Mr. Postman”? “My Boyfriend’s Back”? Songs my mother and her sisters danced to in the kitchen when they were teenagers, songs my mother and her sisters sang to me in that same kitchen when I was very small. Folk songs. Hymns. I loved those songs then and I love them now.
I took Lina’s hand and pulled her over. We stood looking in the window of the door to the music room, and I saw a student I loved—Claire—standing in the middle of four other girls who were singing, stopping, laughing, and starting up again. I heard the music teacher, off camera, at the piano, laughing, too.
I know you can do it! he said. I believe in you! Let’s make those harmonies happen!
The girls shook out their hands, bounced on their toes, bobbled from side to side. The music teacher began to play again, and counted off. One two three four—and they stood tall, readying themselves for liftoff—five six seven eight—and then launched themselves into the background vocals. Claire planted her feet second-position wide, knitted her hands together and cracked some knuckles. Then she brought them toward her chest in prayer, lifted her head and sang, eyes to the fluorescent lights, in a pure, clear soprano that showed a few cracks in its crystal, the first line of “Mama Said” as the other girls’ voices, with more joy than precision, more desire than aptitude, rose up and down around her like synchronized lit-from-within water fountains. Standing there looking through that window I felt, for the very first time, the weight of the life inside me in a way that did not feel like grief. Innocence and joy were possible, therefore this child might be possible, and my sadness did not have to be the only thing I passed on to her. I could teach her these old songs that always sounded new, and I could tell her of the alchemy that happens when girls stand next to each other working hard, so hard, like these students, like Rose and I did, to stun and beguile and so become much more than girls and turn into gold. Go find those girls, I could say, and you will never get lost.
Hello, little bird, I whispered to her, as Lina sang along, as the voices behind the glass effervesced. Come meet your sisters.