Flannel

My brother’s house is full of us, all gathered for some post-funeral dinner and decompression. Pan after pan of enchiladas and rice have disappeared, the cousins have run off, and five of my brothers have shed their pallbearer suits and converged in the garage to take part in their decades-old ritual of brotherly bonding: The Hack. (Also known as Hacky Sack.) Kicking a tiny, crocheted bean bag around a close circle of bros might be the best kind of therapy.

With my daughters off giggling somewhere and my son lost in the world of Wii, I make my way down to the playroom, a temporary storage spot for boxes and boxes of my father’s belongings—files, yearbooks, VHS tapes, life stories, even pre-marriage love letters between my adorably unknowing parents.

I’ve just spent the greater part of Thanksgiving weekend digging through these boxes with my siblings. We set aside items to display, quoted snatches of journals in quavery voices, laughed at forgotten photos, and gasped at the evidence of a goodness so encompassing you barely take note of it until it’s gone.

But now there’s something new among the boxes. A stack of neatly folded shirts just brought over from Dad’s house. I paw through the pile and they all fade away as my eyes find the one at the bottom. Flannel. Red, blue, and green plaid, lined inside for warmth. A shirt that is him above all others. This is the shirt that should be coming through the front door right now, to calls of “Grandpa’s here!” I’m sure I have rested my cheek on the front of this shirt more than once.

Faster than thought, my hands grasp the soft fabric. Yearning rises up and struggles against my desire to be fair, my awareness of the number of siblings versus the number of our father’s personal items. But I’m walking nonetheless, up the stairs, through the kitchen. I struggle to swallow as I pass spouses and children and piles of food and open the door to the garage.

The Hacky Sack plops to the ground. Five heads turn to see me standing on the step with a men’s extra-large shirt clutched in my hand.

“How do we . . . ?” I falter. “I mean, who gets what?”

And these sad, tender brothers—these tall, bearded men—look from me to the shirt to each other and confer. In moments it’s decided. It wouldn’t fit them anyway, they assure me. They want me to have it.

“Really? You’re sure?”

I slide the shirt over my shoulders. My fingers barely peek out the ends of the sleeves. And my tears are a deluge and here comes my baby brother, the tallest son, a father himself in three more months. He murmurs, “Aww, Aim,” and pulls me into his arms.

I’m used to the hole my mother left, the absence of her, the pain that is dull but can spark at the scent of her perfume packed away in a box of my dad’s. The wound still hurts but has long felt familiar. I’ve fashioned my very self around that sorrow. Without it I wouldn’t be me.

But this.

This plaid-flannel ache sits heavy on my shoulders and enfolds me in loss. This hole is new and surprising, filled with echoes of a voice still as close as a phone message, and whispered words that sliced through delirium like a beam as I leaned over his bed only days ago.

I pull the billowing shirt in tighter around me.

I could drown in it.

I Have No Words

 Raymond J. Felix

December 30, 1949–December 1, 2014

Out of My Hands

 “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake
is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
―Pema Chödrön

The phone rang as I followed my toddler son around, sweeping up graham cracker crumbs. “Hi, Amy?” came Miss Tara’s voice. “I think you’d better come get Ellie. She feels a little hot and she’s just not acting like herself.” On the way to the preschool, I wondered how my daughter would be when I got there. Would she be sobbing on the floor? Waiting at the door with a tear-streaked face? I was still new to this school mom thing. New to being separated from my girl. Heck, I was still relatively new to the girl herself, so all I could do was guess.

I rounded the corner and saw her sitting at the little table with the other kids. Her head rested against her hand, but she was meticulously writing letters on dotted lines, her face focused and impassive. Until she saw me. Her features melted, then, into misery and relief, recognition and longing. As I pulled her feverish head to my chest and felt her hot tears escape, I thought of that look in my daughter’s eyes. I could fall right into that look.

 I was in first grade when I threw up in the school bathroom. I didn’t make it to the toilet, but at least the carpet in the hall was spared. The seconds ticked by as I waited on the hard chair in the school office feeling dizzy, embarrassed, and utterly wretched. Until I looked up and there she was. The one person on earth who could fix this. The one whose arms were my home. She was there, and she was enough.

Then later, when she wasn’t there, I consoled myself with thoughts of the future. Babies would make it better. I would have children of my own, I decided, and as I poured into them what I still yearned for, the void would be filled. Of course, I would stay. And by staying, I would always be enough.

When Ellie made her red-faced way into the world, the doctor placed her on my chest and said, “Congratulations, Mom.” Mom. The word that tends to lodge itself in my throat had now become my name. This messy and breathtaking christening of mine was a dawning—of a new chapter, yes, but also of the understanding that life is never settled. That endings are never sure. That to open your arms is to invite in pain.

In my vague and golden vision of my future, I raise a daughter to age twelve, watch her wake up her first morning as a teenager, and then simply stay as she thrives. In reality, Ellie is hurtling her way toward that mythical moment and I am bombarded by fears of what she could face as she gallops on past. I know now that my mere presence won’t always be enough. There are some—so many!—things a mother can’t fix. I can’t even guarantee the sticking around part, no matter how hard I dig in my heels. All I can do is be here while I’m here.

Almost ten years ago I brought my baby home and held her close, marveling at her vulnerability. A frantic internet search for the elusive secret to preventing SIDS led me to an essay by a mother who had lost her infant son. She recalled how he used to sleep with his tiny hand resting on his stomach. My exhausted, hormone-addled mind latched onto this detail and twisted it into my own personal superstition. Perhaps I could protect my girl from sudden death if I never slept with my hand on my stomach. I knew I was being illogical, and I scoffed at myself every night as I drifted off. And yet. My hands never touched my stomach through hundreds of nights and two more heart-stopping babies. It was just another made-up way of feeding the illusion that I had a say in anything.

Choosing Mr. Right

Restaurant menus make me anxious. So do college course catalogs and choose-your-own-adventure books. Oh, and stores. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone shopping for much-needed clothes, approached the cashier with an armload of items, and talked myself out of all of them before it was my turn to pay.

This inability to make decisions, coupled with my other fatal flaw of closed-off emotional brokenness, did not bode well for my hope to one day meet someone, somehow get close to him, and maybe even marry him.

I bemoaned my predicament to various friends and roommates throughout the years. If my calculations are correct, from my first freshman apartment to my final bachelorette pad, I experienced forty-eight different roommates. At least forty-five of them were more excitable than I was. I stood by and watched as many of them met boys, ramped up their giddiness, and decided—with little to no effort, it seemed—to officially attach themselves to these boys for the rest of their very existences. I marveled.

“Don’t worry, Amy,” they’d say. “Someday you’ll meet the one, and you’ll feel all giddy, and you’ll just know. It’s just something you know.”

I had my doubts.

My history with guys was about as sparse as my history with just knowing anything. In high school I rolled my eyes at the hormonal currents whirling around me. In college I continued to roll my eyes, but with less conviction as time ticked on. All this eye rolling did not bring the men flocking, and I graduated with zero practical experience in how to be part of a couple.

This pattern had to change and I knew it. So I took a deep breath, clawed my way out of my fortress of solitude, and (horror!) tried to reveal my interest and availability. It was terrifying, but it yielded results.

I dated actual guys. One of them was much too perfect. He pursued and I grew sore from repeatedly pinching myself. And then, when I could no longer demurely hold off the moment, I was so worried about kissing him wrong that I probably really kissed him wrong. But the ice was broken. The thaw had begun.

The next guy was much too imperfect. This somehow made for better kissing—and easier breathing in general—and I finally came to see what all the couplehood fuss was about. I could only hope my newfound knowledge would someday be put to the right use.

Enter guy number three. The just-right one.

When I walked into Baskin Robbins for our blind date, I immediately liked what I saw. Approachable smile, studious glasses, head full of dark hair. When he stood up he got another point—he was delightfully tall. Then we started talking and the points kept coming. He had a degree. And an actual job. And a sense of humor. And the background of a hard-working Idaho farm boy. I even liked his junker car (unmaterialistic!). We talked until they kicked us out. Then we made plans to talk some more.

The weeks and the talking went on. We hiked orange autumn trails, discovered Italian restaurants, and watched TV in his meager but cozy apartment. He treated me to an elegant evening of the Nutcracker and The Roof, prepared a gourmet meal on Valentine’s Day, and drove me through a blizzard to his hometown, where he was charmingly kind to his mother. He filled up many of my days and most of my thoughts.

But still, I mused, how on earth can anyone know?

One day in late spring we looked at rings for fun and because we could. A growing sense of panic made me want to throw up my Coldstone afterward. What were we playing at? Who was I to mess around with something so serious? We stepped back. I fretted. I waited for the giddiness. I prayed. I wondered, Is this stupor of thought a Stupor of Thought? Or just my everyday stupor?

And then I did what desperate times called for. I asked my grandma if my mom had been sure when she dated my dad. Had she just known?

 

“Heavens no, Amy! She drove your poor dad crazy. She never could decide things, that girl. And you know, you’re just like her.”

In retrospect, Grandma wasn’t the most objective sounding board I could have chosen. She’d been pleading with me for years to marry whatever walked by in a tie. But she knew my mom like no one else had, and her words somehow helped me know myself. Maybe giddiness wasn’t a universal litmus test for knowing you’d found the one. Maybe I simply loved a good man who loved me back, and I’d rather be with him than without him.

We were married on a clear October morning. My veil caught the sunlight; my happiness was real. Of course kneeling at the altar hadn’t changed my personality, and I had a moment there—waiting alone in my wedding dress at the edge of the parking lot while he brought around his (our!) car—a “What on earth did I just do?” moment. But the feeling was awe, not regret. Something inside had unclenched. Already the future felt right.

It kept feeling right on our honeymoon on the Oregon coast, as I watched him harvest mussels on the rocky beach and then prepare a meal of lemony pasta in our tiny bed-and-breakfast cottage. And as we sat in our rental car outside a row of shops, listening to the rain and Norah Jones.

It all felt right in our newlywed apartment, when we were snowed in for three days straight over my birthday and I couldn’t think of a nicer way to celebrate.

And then again the day I had my first post-wedding migraine, and instead of dragging myself off the bed, groping my way to the medicine cabinet, and gulping down pills while the pain pulsed across my skull, I squinted up to see him at my bedside with pills, water, a cold washcloth, and an ice pack. The sight brought tears to my eyes.

Then years later, on an evening after a regular day from hell, I had angrily dumped an entire pan of failed rice down the disposal as crying babies slobbered on my feet and traffic kept him away. My brilliant move cost us an hour of his fruitless plunging and seventy unbudgeted dollars for a plumber’s house call. After he paid the bill and showed the man out, I tried to slink away to wallow in my shame, but he was there, grabbing my hand. 

“Come here,” he laughed, and he pulled me in close while I cried out my hot frustration and relief. And there it was—I just knew. It was nothing but right. I chose the right adventure.

Together

I’m seven years old, I’m in bed, and my parents are upstairs laughing at Newhart. I long to be in on the joke, so I slide out of bed and sneak up the stairs as quietly as I can, like a cat in my padded slippers, like a robber, like Santa himself, who never gets caught. At the top I lie on my stomach and peek around the corner as another round of canned laughter bursts from the TV. Dad murmurs something and Mom laughs her response as she crochets an afghan. Or maybe she’s folding laundry. I stay there for a while, my face in my hands, watching the backs of their heads and trying to figure out what’s so funny. But the jokes aren’t jokes to me, and my eyelids are scratchy, so I pad back to my bed and drift off to the sheltering sound of my parents’ contentment.

I’m three. It’s time to brush my teeth for bed, but the bathroom is so far away. Dad’s long legs walk over and stop right in front of me. His soft tenor voice floats down from above.

“Hop on, I’ll give you a ride.”

I clap my hands and plop myself down on his sled of a foot, curling my legs around his ankle and hugging his calf as he starts to drag me down the hall. My brother runs over and hitches a ride on the other foot, and the three of us make our lumbering, giggling way toward the bathroom and Mom, who smiles in the doorway, awaiting our arrival.

I’m ten. I’ve been hosting a pre-dawn coloring party in my bedroom for the last hour, but to wait any longer would be agony. I push my parents’ door open and walk to their bed, stomach almost sick with excitement. Dad’s voice floats through the darkness, feigning confusion.

“You’re all up? You’d think it was Christmas morning or something.”

We jump and we tease as the grownups stagger and shuffle. Finally we all make our traditional trek down the stairs to the sheet that has been pinned up as a barrier between our prying eyes and the living room of Christmas wonders. As usual, Dad goes in first.

“Oooh, wow, I don’t believe my eyes!” he calls, and we moan and shake where we stand while he plugs  in the tree lights and maybe starts a fire in the wood-burning stove. Only when he deems the room magical enough does Mom pull aside the sheet and usher us into the happiest day of the year.

I’m eight. Michael and I are in our beds in the basement room that we share during this year in the duplex. Dad comes in to talk to us about Something Important. He clears his throat. He fumbles for words. I shrink into my pillow and look at anything but him. He talks about Mom (who has been away in the hospital but it’s okay because she’s back now). He speaks with such care and strained optimism it’s painful. This is the first time I’ve ever heard the word. Cancer.

My brother asks if people die from it. Dad’s voice catches. “They do, they can, sometimes, but lots of times they don’t.”

My turn for a question. “Is it catchy?”

Mom comes in a few minutes later for goodnight hugs. She sits on my bed and I know it’s not catchy. I know. But still our hug feels different and her eyes are red. Maybe she heard my question and it made her sad. I hug her again, better.

I’m eleven and I’m pretending to be asleep. I hear a car outside and know they are back from the few days’ stay at the hospital. The front door opens and my heart pounds. My ears strain to extract words from the low hum of Grandma’s questions, the rumble of Dad’s weary answers, the quiet snatches of Mom’s soft voice. Grandma leaves, and it sounds like they’re settling down in the living room for now. I want to stay where I am, to not be awake, but I have to see. I have to know. I peek my head around the corner and look down the stairs to the back of her dark head resting on the couch. She still has her hair. Satisfied, I crawl back into bed and fall asleep in the silent house.

Twelve. A baby’s cries seep into my dreams as my dad struggles alone through a night of my new brother’s sleeplessness. He walks and he coaxes, maybe he pleads as the dark presses in and the baby won’t calm and both beds lie abandoned. Then despair rises up and he hurls the bottle away, denting the door as the baby jumps and the rest of us sleep on in this world that isn’t right.

I’m four years old. Michael and I have been put to bed, but this time there’s a treat. Dad brings in his guitar and tunes it up, plucks out a few chords written on a paper on the floor. Mom sits next to him and leans against the wall, and together they work out a few lullabies, their cautious harmonies gaining strength as they go. If they had a hammer, they’d hammer in the mo-or-ning, they’d hammer in the evening, all over this la-and. I snuggle under my blanket and try to understand about hammers and magic dragons and little streams that say “give.” And blossoms that cling to the vine. Their two voices blend together and their song washes over me, goes inside me, takes hold.

I can’t be contented with yesterday’s glories,

I can’t live on promises winter to spring.

Today is my moment, now is my story.

I’ll laugh and I’ll cry and I’ll sing.

Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine,

I’ll taste your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine.

A million tomorrows shall all pass away

Ere I forget all the joy that is mine

Today.

The Way Life Goes

My dad has cancer.

It’s not that unexplainable kind that might show up out of the blue in a thirty-year-old mother who never sunbathed in her life.

It’s not even the kind they take out of your colon when you’re sixty and life goes evenly on because they get it all before it spreads.

No, it’s the furtive kind that has its beginnings in tiny asbestos fibers that maybe you breathe into your lungs at a random construction site in your twenties, as you work to feed your sprouting family.

Or it could start even earlier, they say, when you yourself are a kid and your dad comes home from his shift at Geneva Steel with the tiny jagged fibers on his clothes and in his hair.

But wherever those fibers find you, they somehow do. And they implant themselves in the lining of your lung.

And they irritate your very cells.

And those cells might start to change imperceptibly as you buy your kids an Atari and stage Pac-Man and Breakout tournaments.

And you carry toddlers on your shoulders down crowded parade routes, and hike with them up paved trails to dark, clammy caves, and all the while the rogue cells are still altering their design. 

Then maybe they start to divide, even as you work all day and spend your evenings building your family a home, pouring cement, guiding little hands to leave a print and scratch a name in the sticky new patio under the stairs.

And you help white-clad children into baptismal water,

And paint pinewood derby cars,

And watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind whenever it’s on television.

But the silent, biological corruption is still simmering inside you, and the day comes when your dark-haired love has to leave, and your chest seizes and your lungs won’t fill, not because of the cancer—not yet—but because you are buried in grief and in burden, and six lost children all turn their questioning eyes to you.

And still you forge on, and so do those errant cells, as you raise those kids, and others, too, and you log endless hours watching them play soccer, and football, and softball, and piano. And you film their moments and you worry and yell and you drop into bed night after night in sheer exhaustion.

And the children succeed, and they leave one by one, and they sometimes come back and still you are there, and you write them letters and you guide them on and you put your big rough hands on their heads and speak halting words of immeasurable love.

And the cancer has formed and the cells multiply as your kids do the same, and the grandchildren pour down like rain with hardly a breath between, and you welcome and wonder at them all.

Then one day the latent intruder steps out from its hiding place. And you’re tired, and you cough, and over and over you have fluid drained from your lungs. And you undergo tests that are largely inconclusive.

And you attend a long-planned family reunion, where you hike down and up 888 slippery steps in a dripping cave with your progeny, and the tour guide explains things they already know, because you taught them about caves decades ago. And you and your wife stage a raucous game of Minute to Win It, and the grandchildren clamber to take on your challenges. And the two of you bring out gigantic bubble wands, and together you smile as the little ones laugh and wobbly, iridescent blobs emerge, bigger than they are.

The vacation ends. There’s a biopsy. And then the news.

And your grown children cry, and they move through their days with a cold heavy ache deep inside, and they push it away and it pushes back in, and the world feels dark, and then they call. You ask them how they are, and your calm voice brings back the light, and things feel okay again, for a while.

That’s the kind of cancer my dad has.

Home Again

“C’mon, sleepy head, aren’t you coming with us? Time to go!” Gentle hands pulled me to the surface of my murky dreams and the soft voice held me there as I struggled, wanting to sink back into the depths. But a blur of an idea floated by and I blinked as it tried to define itself. Oh . . . yes. Time to go.

This journey would mark the longest and farthest I’d been away from home in all my ten long years. I had never left my state and only occasionally my county. The borrowed blue suburban sat packed in our driveway, an awe-inspiring upgrade from our tired, wood-paneled station wagon that would have wheezed at the mere thought of such a trip. We were finally off on our first real vacation, an entire week in California.

Five pajama-clad, pillow-hugging children stumbled out into a foreign, pre-dawn yard and clambered into the back of the suburban, where my parents had folded down the seats and laid out blankets, hoping we’d catch a few more solid hours.

Those hopes sat unfulfilled. Who can sleep surrounded by giggling siblings, while rumbling tires below roll you on toward lands unknown? Who can sleep while speeding away from the hints of a subtle sunrise, the desert around you changing hue in the rising light and the highway ahead never veering?

And so we bounced around, seatbeltless, in the giddy newness of it all. We worked our way through word searches and coloring books, stuck goofy Velcro facial features on fuzzy stuffed bananas, and made up lyrics to the songs on my mom’s ABBA tape, unaware that forever after these songs would have the ghostly power of dumping us right back into this bumping suburban at the first snatches of their melodies. (“Gimme gimme gimme a mannequin midnight. Take me to the doctor cuz I’m breaking my leg.”)

And the discoveries kept on coming. Every little thing was new back then. The (free!) individual containers of jelly at the breakfast restaurant. The palm trees that sprung up anywhere, as if they actually belonged on the side of a road instead of on postcard islands only, silhouetted against garish sunsets. The miracle of a ride like Pirates of the Caribbean, where the crickets and the breeze and the ink-blue ceiling above make you think you’re outside when you know you’re really in. The way the sound of the ocean can put you in a kind of trance, can make you say things as you sit on the sand next to your mom, things you’d never think or dare to say in the kitchen as she sweeps the floor.

One week later we pulled back into our driveway and spilled onto the grass, happy to be spread out and stationary. The neighbors drifted over and we lounged in the yard, putting off the unpacking as a familiar breeze came down from the canyon to welcome us home.

My mom sat on the porch with our neighbor, showing her how to put rag ringlets in her daughter’s hair. She asked me to run down to the laundry room and grab the fabric scissors, so I skipped into the silent house and took the stairs by two. I stopped short when I reached the sewing machine. There on the table lay the scraps of purple fabric I had been trying to fashion into a purse the night before we left—a lifetime ago. They had sat there, untouched in the stillness, while we got splashed by a whale at Marineland.

I looked around at the coat hooks, the carpet. My little brother’s sock at the foot of the stairs. The walls stared back like strangers, and I walked up to my room feeling vaguely traitorous. There was my bed, rumpled and cold, not warm like it had been when I detached myself from it and yawned my way out into the night, expectant and unknowing.

But I knew things now. So many things. I knew that one hundred miles might sound like a lot, but it’s nothing. I knew that a five-kid-family can incite amazement and disdain out beyond the mountains of my little valley. I knew that the ocean is real, and it smells like yearning, and your dad can teach you how to jump its waves as they roll in, and when you sit beside it and have a grown-up talk with your mother you feel like the tiniest, most important person alive.

I stood there knowing these things, in a house that knew nothing, breathing air that had gone stagnant in this lifeless space while the rest of the world had deepened. The pale blue curtains were placid, the trailing wallpaper flowers indifferent. When the quiet and the knowing got to be too much, I turned and ran.

Daughter

We move from the theater to the minivan in a happy little group, kicking loose rocks and giggling about the antics of Lego guys. I slide open the door and everyone scrambles in. Everyone but you, that is. As I look down on the top of your golden head, I can almost hear your tiny teeth clench. You flash me the look that sets my own teeth on edge and then stare at the ground, heels digging into the gravel.

 

Danger.

“C’mon, let’s go get pizza! Yum!” I chirp.

“No,” you declare. “I don’t want to.”

“Everyone’s waiting. Get in the car. . . . Okay, I’m going to count to three and then I’m going to pick you up. One. Two . . .” You climb in with a growl and slump into your car seat. I move to fasten the chest clip.

“NOOO I WANT TO DO IT!” you shriek. I stand back to let you try, but you don’t. You fix me with your steely baby blues and move not one single muscle.

“That’s it,” I huff. I click your buckle and dive into the passenger seat before the maelstrom can begin. But begin it does.

“Noooooooooooo!” you shrill as your dad pulls the minivan out of the parking lot and I slowly close my eyes. My eardrums protest as you pause to refill your lungs. Your next blast puts the first to shame.

  

Your siblings, who have inconveniently low tolerance levels for sudden, distressing noise, react as I predict. Your brother immediately slams his palms against his ears and yells at you to stop. Your sister yells at him to stop making it worse. Soon we have three kids in tears, one of them under so much duress that he gives himself a nosebleed. And still you scream and flail, kicking the back of my seat, growing hoarser yet louder by the second. Your dad mutters something, eyes on the road, hands at ten and two, intent to reach the end of this happy family outing.

I make no effort to quell the rage. My voice would not be heard if I tried. I slouch in my seat, my powerlessness engulfing me, the walls of the minivan closing in as we move too slowly and sit too long at stoplights. I know this is just a tantrum. Because you’re three. But it feels like a warning siren, a harbinger of some dire future. If I can’t handle you now, what will become of us?

The second the engine turns off, your sister flies out of the van and takes off on her bike, as far and as fast as she can go. Your brother runs to his bedroom and slams the door. Your dad stomps into the house in frustration. As I hastily unbuckle your cursed straps, I spend one second thinking about that Internet article entitled “Parenting Your Strong-Willed Child,” the one that told me to remain calm, to sit with you and hug it out and give you a safe place to release your emotions. The very next second I flee, leaving you to wail and gasp in a soggy heap on the floor of the van.

It’s the next afternoon. Sunday. We’re sitting on the creaky old bench on our front porch, just the two of us. The hazy sunlight warms our skin and makes jewels of the nail polish bottles lined up at our feet. Just when I’m almost too hot, the late-spring breeze comes along, rustling the leaves that hide us from view of the street. The light seems thick and lazy, like a golden blanket muffling the sounds of distant children and lawnmowers.

You plop your grubby little feet with their flip-flop-shaped tan lines on my lap. “I want pink sparkles on my toenails, Mama.” (“Pink spock-ohs on my toe-nay-ohs.”) I apply said sparkles to your specks of nails, and while the breeze lifts the purple leaves and trails your long, wispy curls across my face, we converse. We talk about birds, and Elsa, and the sounds of trains and ice cream trucks. Your nose scrunches up as you scrutinize my work. When I’m finished, you rest that creamy cheek against my arm and announce with a sigh, “Well, actually, I wanted blue on my toes.”

Not again. “No, you can’t change your mind once I’m finished.” I brace for a meltdown. Wait a beat. Then—

“Okay. I will get blue next time.”

I look at you, this little creature I know intimately, who is in my face for half the day and at my feet the other half, this flesh of my flesh, this chocolate-mouthed monster with whom I have shared my oxygen, my minutes and years, and my last bite of everything, whose tears mingled with mine in the colic days, when we would pace the floor together, me trying every shushing technique in the book.

I gaze at you, this perfect little stranger.

And now you are on your feet, smudging your still-wet pedicure, performing a new dance that is all the rage in nursery. “You put your hand in, you put your hand out, that’s what it’s all about!” You hokey-pokey around, toenails sparkling in the sun, hair lit up in a halo of tangles, eyes alive with everything. You’re not three; you’re just you. Timeless. I flash forward to other years, other new songs, other Sunday afternoons of talking and nail polish and wonder.

This is the picture I’ll keep. The next time you’re straining against the belts that hold you in, curled up in ear-splitting anger as the walls threaten to bury us all, I’ll reach into my emergency reserve and call you back, this you in the sun, arms outstretched, eyes alight, turning yourself around as though the world isn’t big enough to contain you.

Relief

Until my heart seized at the sight of the caller ID, until my voice betrayed me as I greeted the nurse, I hadn’t realized how on-edge I've been. How heavy I've felt. How I’ve been holding my breath for four days.

“Good news, Amy. All three moles were completely benign.”

I could fly right out my front door.

(Hey, hypochondria, I see you hiding there. Why don’t you go ahead and take a week or two off? I’ll be here when you get back.)

One Halloween

My pink leotard, tights, tutu, and raffle tickets were good to go. But I was not. It was my ninth Halloween and I had a sore throat.

I stayed home from school that morning, but Mom said she’d take me to the Halloween carnival with her if I was feeling better by afternoon. I spent all morning trying not to swallow, willing myself to feel better. When the time came to put my hair up in a ballerina bun, Mom looked in the mirror at my star-bright eyes and rosy cheeks, consulted her mother’s intuition, and shook her head. “I’m sorry, honey, but you just can’t go when you’re feeling this sick.”

She led me to my room and I started to cry. My surroundings swam as she helped me out of my itchy tutu and into my soft cotton nightshirt. I shivered under the covers; she tucked an extra afghan around me. Even as my hot tears pooled at my ears and dropped onto the pillowcase, I knew that nothing had ever felt better than submitting to this bed, to my mom’s cool palm on my forehead. She shook the glass thermometer and placed it in my mouth, then sat down on my bed, right on top of my feet, right where I liked her. While she waited for the mercury to rise, she hummed quietly. And then, the verdict. Definitely a fever. A real party-killer of a fever.

“Promise you’ll put my raffle tickets in and be there when they pick the winner?” I sobbed. The big raffle prize at this year’s carnival was a Cabbage Patch Kid, and I had been eagerly saving up my good-behavior tickets, confident that my name would be picked because, well, I wanted it most.

Mom assured me she would put my tickets in the jar, but she also gave me a little talk about the meaning of “odds.” I didn’t care about odds. There was a chance I could win, so in my mind I had already won. Mom left the room to put my toddler brother in his jack-o-lantern costume, and I hazily daydreamed about the new doll who would soon be mine.

I already owned two Cabbage Patches. The first was a bald baby boy who came with the name Aldin Timothy. I had eagerly mailed in his papers and received a replacement birth certificate with the dazzling new name of my choice: Timothy Todd. Timmy was something special. I spent hours inhaling his baby powder scent and changing his fake little diapers. The year we lived in the duplex he became the victim of a dramatic kidnapping when the neighbor boy Hyrum brazenly entered our apartment while we were at church and waltzed out with my baby Timmy, hauling him over to the dark side of the duplex, the side with the scary teenage brother, the stacks of empty beer cans, and the urine-scented carpet. I pined after my baby for weeks, his fate a mystery, until the day my mom spotted him outside being swung around by the grubby hand of the dastardly Hyrum. She staged a daring rescue. Oh, sweet reunion! Timmy sustained a long white scrape on the top of his bald head, but he was otherwise unharmed and I loved him all the more for his bravery.

My second Cabbage Patch was a girl with long dark pigtails, blue checked overalls, and plastic white shoes. She was called Emily Luann, a name I deemed attractive enough not to tamper with. Emily was the only black person I had ever met, and I found her exotic and loveable and perfect. She helped me hone my braiding skills and enjoyed frequent costume changes as my collection of doll clothes grew. Fortunately, Emily’s young life was free of traumatic events, and we all got on rather well.

But I had room in my heart for more. Maybe this new addition would be a redhead. In a clown costume. Maybe she’d have a dimple and tiny white teeth showing. I couldn’t wait to hug her and kiss her freckled cheeks. I wondered what her name was and pictured introducing her to Emily and Timmy. I would keep her forever and bestow her upon my own kids. She would be an excellent consolation prize for having to be sick on Halloween.

Mom peeked in to check on me. I was almost asleep and her whisper barely registered. “Honey, I have to go work the cake walk for a little while. I’m taking your tickets. You just sleep. I’ll be home soon.”

Before I lost consciousness, my mind drifted over all the delights I’d be missing: the thrill of the fishing pond, the challenge of the bean bag toss, and the pride of the costume parade. (I didn’t mind missing out on the spook alley in the school’s basement. I had never dared go down there and I never would.) Filled with these images and an acute sense of injustice, my mind sank off to sleep.

When I surfaced dizzily, the house felt oppressively empty. Almost foreign with quiet. I was just mustering up some real self-pity when I heard the front door open. Mom was back! Maybe she was carrying my new doll up the stairs! I held my breath in excitement. When she entered my room, her arms were empty. She saw the hope in my eyes and let me down gently. “They didn’t pick your name, sweetie.”

“Oh.”

I sank back on the pillow. This was the worst Halloween ever. Whoever won my doll was probably the kind of kid who would drag her around and neglect her and not even care what she was named. And to make things worse, I couldn’t even go trick-or-treating.

But my brothers came through for me heroically that night. They carried my plastic bag through the neighborhood and explained at every door that their sister was sick but would love some candy anyway. Then they tromped back home and plunked a bursting bag of loot at my feet. As I stuck my face inside and inhaled that heavenly blend of Bit-O-Honeys, Tootsie Rolls, and peanut shells, the pang of my loss diminished and my heart swelled with goodwill. After all, wasn’t this, right here, this bag heavy with sugar and happiness, what Halloween was all about? The Cabbage Patch could wait until Christmas.