Part I
The kid is born with two shadows. You better believe I head straight down to the Department of Balance office to appeal their decision. It isn’t right, giving an extra shadow to a baby. It’s not like she killed you on purpose, Beau. She’s a newborn baby, for fuck’s sake. She’s basically a more sophisticated potato. And that’s exactly what I tell the receptionist resting his boots on top of his desk. He is long and slender, with a droopy face.
“Where’s the father?” he says.
“I’m her other mother,” I say, trying to steady my pulse. I always hate this moment of vulnerability, of simultaneously waiting for and anticipating a reaction.
“Oh, I see.” He clears his throat then lowers his boots and leans his elbows on the desk. “Sorry, those deaths are automatic shadow assignments, ma’am.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, knowing fully well what he means.
His lips part into an approximation of a smile, as if daring me to challenge him further.
“Is it because I have one? Because that’s not her fault—” I say, my face gathering heat.
“No, ma’am. It’s standard procedure,” he says.
“That’s not true, and you fucking know—” I say, stopping myself before I accuse the Department of living up to its reputation. Everybody knows they’re homophobic, racist, transphobic, ableist, xenophobic, sexist, all the goddamn phobics and ists, but they’d sooner strip away my extra shadow than admit it.
And yet, punishing a newborn still seems excessive. But maybe I’m giving the Department too much credit.
“I’m afraid I don’t make the rules, but I do make people hell-bent on breaking them wish they hadn’t,” says the receptionist.
I haven’t been a widow—what a miserable, lonely word—for more than an hour. I don’t want to lose our baby, too. But what I want matters very little to my temper, which I can feel building behind my eyes before it finally overflows, wet hot tears streaming down my face. It has always been this way, my anger and sadness twin forces inside of me.
I look down at the squish-faced kid, expecting to find a sleeping baby, peacefully unaware, but no, she is wide awake, her big, swollen eyes full of questions, her blue-gray alien hand pressed to her cheek.
“Come on,” I say, in between sniffles. “Please don’t do this to her.”
He knits his eyebrows together in a painful display of empathy. It would have been kinder if he punched me in the face.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” I say.
“We don’t exactly kid around here,” he says. “At least not until happy hour.” He laughs when he says this, and I imagine him and the boys at a high-top table, spilling pints all over each other and sharing the day’s stories, the kid and I no more significant than a cockroach squashed under his foot.
“Fuck you,” I say.
I watch him clench and unclench his jaw, perhaps deciding his next move. Although I can’t see him, I can feel the security guard inch closer to me, his movements quiet and fluid like a good hunter. I readjust my grip on the kid. My breath grows stale in my chest.
“Get her out of here,” says the receptionist. “This Shadester’s not worth my time.”
The security guard grips me by the bicep and escorts me out the door, releasing me back into the world with a small, pointed shove.
Upon confronting the car seat, I realize that it had been your job to learn how to use it. It takes me twenty minutes to get all the kid’s parts where they need to go. Except for her second shadow. It has a smug freedom about it that sets my teeth on edge. I swear I catch it high-fiving mine.
You aren’t waiting for us when we get home. You aren’t lying in bed reading. You aren’t cooing in Mischief’s fluffy face. You aren’t sifting through the mail, perusing the circulars for sales. You aren’t, against your better judgment, making an afternoon coffee. Suddenly, all this unoccupied space. I want to get blackout drunk for months on end. Yes, that’s what I want. I want to sit in my own filth and like it.
“And what did we learn today?” I ask the wailing kid, patting her baby body with a damp sponge. On the other side of the sink are the dirty dishes. Mischief leans down to lick the solidified butter off a plate, and I shoo her away.
“That’s exactly right,” I say. “We learned that I am the second most well-behaved person in this room.”
I wait for a reaction, but the kid seems unmoved. I want to be someone who moves people, even tiny, helpless people. Now, where is that switch, the one that turns off such a humiliating desire?
A dozen or so drinks would no doubt do the trick, but I can’t get properly wasted—I have a baby to keep alive. But how? A therapist might diagnose my panic disorder with a panic disorder of its own. When we first decided to start trying, I said things like, I can’t even wash a wine glass without breaking it—what if I break our baby? You pulled me close and reassured me that babies’ bones were made of rubber. I imagined an impossibly small baby with a skeleton comprised of pink erasers. I imagined rocking our baby to sleep, my fears smudged and unreadable. Get me there, get me there, I thought.
◼
I knew you were impractical, but I didn’t realize you were this impractical, you once said, removing an entire lemon from our garbage disposal. I’d heard good things about the cleaning potential of citrus. That was back before the Department slapped another shadow on me. We argued so often we thought we’d made a mistake marrying for love when there were things like fear and loneliness to bind you.
For the record, you had no business coming into my life just to turn around and leave. On our first date, you took my hand across the table and smiled with every atom inside of you. Your boldness was almost revolutionary. I thought, what are the odds that this is happening everywhere, all the time?
On the second date, you said, I could hang out in a dumpster with you. The very idea excited me.
Once I’ve safely strapped the kid to my chest, I do what is expected in these situations: I pick up the phone and change people’s lives forever.
“What are you talking about?” says your mom. “What are you saying?”
I was always the one who was irrationally afraid of dying. Never you. You were too stubborn to be afraid of anything. We used to joke I was afraid of my own shadow. We’d talk about early death over dinner or TV like it was a cold front moving in.
Make sure my dad doesn’t put me in that ugly snakeskin dress for my funeral, I said, fighting off the breathless terror of panic. I think I’ll probably end up throwing a clot. Yeah, I see that for myself.
If you were in a good mood, which meant only two parents had called the school that day, you’d smile a slight smile, shake your head, and stroke my hair. You’d say something like, If you die, I’ll kill you, or, That’s not going to happen on my watch. If you were in a blustery mood, which meant another asshole kid had provoked a fight or spread a rumor about a certain slut who wouldn’t sleep with him, you’d roll your eyes, maybe get up and pour some wine.
It’s just a joke, I’d say, scrambling to recover. A quiet sip at the counter, a glance out the window then back at me. Did you defrost the chicken?
You knew I wasn’t joking, but you also didn’t know just how far I’d let myself go. Every evening, despite my low blood pressure, I slipped into the bathroom and swallowed a baby aspirin to prevent a stroke or heart attack. Science didn’t matter. I imagined the pill surging through my blood and dissolving anything that threatened to tear us apart.
What I mean is, it never once occurred to me that you, too, were mortal.
◼
I watch a lot of reality TV in the days following your death, the kid alternating between guzzling down her bottle of hospital formula and sleeping in her rocking sleeper thing (I’ll admit, I don’t know its proper name). I wonder if this is what it feels like to work in the Department’s surveillance unit, although our lives are not filtered and dispensed by editors with a dramatic agenda—the contextual horror of it all!
I lick the salt off pretzels then feed the naked pretzels to Mischief while the people on TV bitch and moan and drink and hurt each other’s feelings. They lie, they cheat, they lose their jobs. It feels nice to feel sorry for people who are far better off than me.
It seems Mischief, for the first time, has discovered our new litter of one. She tiptoes up to the kid’s swinging contraption and wets the kid’s hand with her nose. She shakes her head a few times, wipes her face clean.
I focus on my own recent discoveries: broken egg yolks now make me cry, the kid’s crying makes me cry, the mail makes me cry—who gave businesses permission to print your name? It feels like time has slowed so dramatically that it has begun to move in reverse. My face, although pink and puffy, looks younger than it has in years, as if relieved that all that worrying had been justified all along.
Truth is, I’m terrified the Department will confiscate our baby if they suspect even the slightest hint of neglect, but that doesn’t stop me from dissociating for hours on the floor while the kid learns about her new home, the bassinet. Any floor will do—the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room, even the bathroom. I’m not interested in small answers to small questions, like will formula ruin her standardized test scores? (You were right, the parenting forums do have an agenda, Beau.) And will those ruined test scores condemn her to a lifetime of harassing her friends with pyramid scheme pitches? Those answers will hash themselves out in due time. What I’m interested in are the unanswerable questions—how can I manage to keep on living in a world without you, a world that hates both me and my family?
Before you, whenever I heard the word family, I pictured generations of strangers crowded in a living room, jockeying for position.
“Move over, I can’t see the tree.”
“Which presents are mine?”
“When can I go home?”
“This brandy has eggnog in it.”
“The holidays depress me.”
In middle school, my only queer friend taught me to use the word familywhen identifying a queer stranger in public. As I got older and gayer, I heard a lot of talk about chosen family, but I didn’t understand why something so beautiful had to be compared to family. Why couldn’t it just be its own good thing?
◼
At your funeral, in your hometown three thousand miles away, everyone wears soccer jerseys and shotguns beers and passes the kid around like a hot potato.
“Stay strong,” people from your past say, gripping me by the shoulder while trying to avoid eye contact with my shadow.
But I don’t want to be strong, I want to be a time-traveler.
After your mom chokes her way through your eulogy, I pass out in the funeral home bathroom. She picks me up off the floor and holds a beer to my mouth.
“You know she would have insisted you finish your beer,” she says.
Before the kid was born, your mom was all, “Here’s your twentieth box of diapers,” and “You better make sure she calls me Nonna,” and “I can’t wait to hear her birth story.” She even mailed us a cheesy poem called “I’m the Mom of a Mom to Be.” Today, she keeps her distance from our baby, from me. Every time I try to hand her the kid, your mom has to run off to greet so-and-so or change the song that accompanies the slideshow of your life.
The birth story thing is an old habit of hers—every time she meets someone new, she asks them to share their birth story. I trust that she genuinely wants to know about everyone’s transition from womb to world, but I also suspect she’s dying to regale everyone with yours. You can see the ask me, ask me in her eyes.
You were four weeks early. Your mom didn’t make it to the hospital in time. She pulled over at a lookout spot on the side of the mountain, climbed into the passenger seat, and gave birth while a family took self-timed photos nearby, bunny-earing each other. She claims you arrived in three minutes flat, as if it were an Olympic qualifying race.
“Notice anything different?” I ask back at her cabin, your old house. I waltz with the kid around the kitchen so her shadows dance across your mother’s face while she sips her 7 and 7.
“You know I don’t judge,” she says, glancing at the Department camera in her kitchen.
“Okay,” I say, afraid of what will happen if the kid and I stop waltzing, afraid of what still moments will bring.
Your mom stares into her drink, running her finger around the circle of the glass. Her skin hangs loose around her jowls, like a bloodhound.
I want her to look up and smile at us. I want to know that, despite your death, we are still hers.
But she doesn’t look up. She stands from her stool, still examining the glass as if it contains your last words, then takes her drink to bed.
“There’s extra blankets in the hallway closet if you need them,” she shouts over her shoulder.
We sleep in your childhood bedroom. It looks like a teenaged you still lives here with her baseball mitt, cleats, shin guards, several soccer balls, and posters of athletes. Your dresser is crowded with framed photos of you and your mom, arms thrown carelessly around one another, as if you’d always have each other.
We haven’t had that much time together, we said. I want to be sixteen with you, we said. Do we really want to bring a child into this mess of a world? President Colestein was becoming more and more of a tyrant, his new shadow implementation shattering everyone’s hopes for recovery and rehabilitation. Maybe we wanted another person to join us while we watched the world burn.
◼
We is the longest word I know.
◼
I used to love talking on the phone. When we first met, I called you every time I was in between places—the car, the train, the bus, all became opportunities to hear your voice, to reaffirm that you were, in fact, real. Now, every time the phone rings, I sink further into the floor. At first, I try to ignore it, but the unknown caller persists.
“Hello?” I finally say, leaning on the kitchen counter for support.
Long, deep breaths on the other end of the line.
“Who is this?” I ask. No response.
I rack my brain for who might be on the other end. Everyone I called is now avoiding me. That, or they found religion and are consulting with a higher power.
“Fine,” I say. “Be that way.”
The same long, deep breaths, broken up by static. I am only slightly concerned; mostly, I am irritated, surprised by how much I want to hear another person’s voice.
“If you’re going to interrupt my nightly cry, at least make it interesting,” I say.
They hang up.
I’m due back at work exactly a week after your funeral. I tell my manager, Jackson, I don’t feel ready to return and he tells me I am never going to feel ready, but I have to do it anyway. He believes in me, I am strong, I can take control of my life.
“There’s a mindcast for this,” he says over the phone. “I’ll get you a copy—on the house, of course.”
Another phone call.
The same breathing. This time, I am a bit more spooked.
I triple-check the locks on the doors and windows. I feed the kid formula. I lie and tell her I made it myself: does she like it? I kiss her alien hands and alien feet. I tell her you’ll be back soon, you are just at the store picking up a few things.
It’s true: if given the chance, I would trade her for you.
◼
The parenting blogs aren’t particularly helpful—they are written for NoShads by NoShads. They tell me to live in the now. Okay. They tell me to make healthy choices. Organic vegetables, fruits, whole grains, as if I can get my hands on any of that. I’m lucky if I can find a fresh carton of eggs on our designated grocery day. The blogs tell me to focus on me and my family. Every family’s journey is different, avoid comparing notes. They don’t say anything about the absence of family.
I want to be domestic with you, you said the first time I invited you over. I had one fork, and I was so nervous I didn’t dare eat. Instead, I organized my bookshelf and watched you make yourself at home. Don’t lose my fork, I threatened.
◼
Whenever I feel out of control, I recite all the creatures I can think of that have exoskeletons. “Grasshoppers, cockroaches, crabs, lobsters, snails, clams, chitons, spiders, ants, scorpions, shrimp, dragonfly nymphs, cicadas, butterflies, moths,” I say to the kid while putting her diaper on backward. I have one eye on the Department cameras, our third, fourth, and fifth family members. “It appears we’re outnumbered,” I whisper into the kid’s ear.
Later, the kid poops so loudly she wakes herself up from a nap. She is inconsolable. But I want to wait—I sense more is on the way.
“I have filed your grievances with the customer service department. They will get back to you in two to three business minutes,” I tell her.
But those two to three minutes are a mistake. The poop—it goes up to her neck.
◼
We are at the liquor store, comparing wine labels. One of us is exercising our new lungs quite loudly. The cashier gives me a look, but I ignore him. The kid likes the label with the golden retriever on it; I like the one with the abstract face that seems to change every time I look at it. The wine labels remind me of you, how people were intimidated by you and your matter-of-factness until they took a step back and studied you from a new angle, understanding that you were both hard and soft, loveable and disagreeable. Some people took one or two hangouts, some never learned. I’ve known them for five years, you used to say. At this point, it’s no longer my problem.
The kid abruptly stops screaming. Her eyes focus, or rather, try to focus but end up crossing on something behind me. I turn around and it’s you. You’re buying a six-pack of our favorite cream ale. Your blond hair is pulled up in a bun and you’re wearing your gray workout leggings, the ones that inspired a spank every time you put them on. We follow you through the aisles to the checkout. We forget about our car, our bodies in space, and follow you down the street and through a crowd outside the school. We follow you past the basketball court, past the library, past the alley where you and I had once walked, hand-in-hand, pretending our then-partners didn’t exist. Daring someone to spot us, to blow our lives up so we wouldn’t have to. We follow you all the way to the train station where we watch you wait in line, tapping your hand against the side of your thigh, rising onto your toes to see what is taking so long. Eventually, you reach the window and buy a ticket. Then you get on the train, and you leave us, Beau. I look from the kid to the train back to the kid. We don’t understand why you did that. It doesn’t make any sense.
Pop Quiz:
Q: What do you know about distance?
A: I know that I feel it everywhere.
◼
Are you going to be okay? they asked me at the hospital. I exchanged a yes for the kid.
◼
You couldn’t wait to be a mother. You had big plans. And by extension, so did I. But they were never truly mine to claim, were they? I’d always considered myself too selfish to have children, too jealous to share you. I loved children, was good with them, as long as they belonged to someone else. At work, before I’d been fired for my extra shadow, I held group therapy sessions for the troubled kids at school. We’d write songs and poems and the kids occasionally forgot they were supposed to hate group therapy. I disliked the word troubled, but that was the word the school assigned to any student with a lick of personality.
At social gatherings, you always gravitated toward the babies, laughing, and smooching, and tossing them into the air. Every time you and I reunited, even if we were just coming home from work, I secretly hoped you’d show a similar enthusiasm when you set eyes on me. What was I missing? I couldn’t see what was so exciting about them. I did my best to blend in with the other adults, cracked a beer, nodded along.
The kid’s screaming has burrowed its way into my brain and found a nice den in which to live. If you were here, you would laugh and say, Sounds about right. According to my mom, I screamed for three years straight.
I text your mother: “Seems lung capacity is genetic.”
She replies a few hours later: “Ha. Good for telling people to fuck off.”
Mischief joins in the screaming. She throws her bowl at me. She spider-monkeys the screen door. ...
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