Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

“You’re right!” Kayla hollered. “How could we have been so stupid?” She laughed and rocked her baby girl. “We have a lot to learn about being parents,” she whispered into my soft hair.

Hersh had to think carefully. His darling had not snapped back into sanity now that she was a mother. She had snapped into something, but it wasn’t that. He met my eye and I knew he wanted to tell me he was hoping to save us both. If I followed along, perhaps I would be spared. He built his first fatherly strategy, saying, “I have a feeling this baby is going to grow very fast.” Here we were again, trying to save ourselves by telling a story. “Pretty soon I bet she will be as big as a one-year-old, not long after that as big as a two-year-old. She’s a very unusual child.” He looked at his wife with her oversize load. “Don’t you think she’ll grow quickly, my dear? Don’t you think she’s a prodigy? A prodigy at growing?”

“Could we be so blessed?” Kayla was not looking at her husband. She stared into my eyes as if the rest of the world had dried up around her. If Hersh had become a dead balloon of skin on the floor right then, she hardly would have noticed. But his voice seemed to filter into her like light. In this way, he offered his wife a deal — I could be a baby, a crying, drooling, helpless baby, but not for long. Every few weeks I would gain a year. Hersh wanted to catch me up with myself quickly so that the eleven-year-old they had adopted could soon be the girl they lived with and loved. He hoped sanity, reason, would be there to meet them then. He did not see how seriously his wife would take the proposition — the weeks that would continue to represent years, past when I should have slowed way down, aging as everyone else did, the change invisible from one day to the next.

“A prodigy!” Kayla glowed. “We are so lucky to be her parents. Where can we show her off?” Hersh begged me silently to comply. Just for a while, his eyes said. Before you know it, the upside-down world will right itself.

For my debut, Kayla dressed me in a green velvet frock with a frilly collar and new pointy leather shoes that laced up the ankle. She clipped a string of delicate pearls around her own neck and another around mine. For the first time in her life, she put a ribbon in her daughter’s hair. Hersh wrapped a soft gray blanket around me and held the whole cocoon in his arms.

“Here we go,” Hersh said shakily, twisting the cold brass doorknob. The seam between the walls of their house and the rest of creation was a puddle my new parents had to leap over. The rain had softened to a mist that tickled my face. “This is our baby,” Hersh said to each person they passed. “Please forgive me.”

“She was born perfect,” Kayla said.

“Oh?” the villagers asked. They studied me. I could not defend or save myself.

“We are trying to believe,” Hersh said. “We are trying, in general.” The heartsoreness the villagers felt when they looked at Hersh was a bruise whose origin they could not remember. He looked unprepared not only for the demands his love would make, but for his own endless desire to fill them. A happy wife is a happy life, the grandparents used to say. This kind of devotion tested that theory. The villagers examined me, this new version of me, and they thought I looked all right. The world was new, and there would be many surprises, wouldn’t there? Isn’t the fun of telling a story that you don’t know what will happen?

“She’s very, very beautiful,” they said. “She’s big.”

That was it. If I tossed a rope out, no one was going to drag me back to shore. I bobbed out there in the depths and the villagers settled on picnic blankets, waiting to see what would happen next.

My new parents and I walked circles around our village, past windows trimmed with white, past flowerbeds turned and ready for new bulbs, past the few remaining stakes of an old fence, rotting and covered in vines. They walked until the round cobblestones had worn Hersh and Kayla’s feet into crescents, until they were soaked and their eyes stung with dirty mist, until Kayla’s hair began to fall out from its precise twist. There was little light left to see by and Hersh was tired from holding the sixty-pound infant. But they kept walking. And the longer they walked, the more they both felt the sting of being parents. Of loving something so much that their organs were crushed under the pressure. Their eyes were slimy with love, their throats were dry with it, and their bodies were purposeless except to protect the new life.

Crushed but safe in my uncle’s arms, I did not cry or beg to go home, either my real home or my new one. I did not insist upon my own age or otherwise chew my way out of the cocoon Kayla and Hersh had me in. I said a very small prayer, a prayer for the right thing to happen, and then I closed my eyes, and in the arms of the man who would be my father forever after, I went soft, but I did not sleep.

Kayla said they would have to show me everything or I wouldn’t know what it was.

“Should we take her to the river?” Hersh asked.

Kayla thought for a moment. “The river!” She laughed. “She doesn’t even know what a river is!” Hersh laughed with her. “Can you imagine what that must be like, not to know?” they said. They looked into my eyes, foggy and wet. Hersh shifted me in his arms.

“Do we tell her or do we keep it secret?” Kayla suddenly asked.

“Once she knows she will never not know again,” Hersh said.

“Let’s keep it secret. Let’s not tell her everything yet.” They danced in the street, celebrating every unspoken fact of the torn and blooming world. Every iris and daisy and gravestone was theirs to give to their daughter when they saw fit. And before that, my eyes were as useless to me as river rocks.

“I want to nurse her — I bet she is hungry,” Kayla said.

Hersh stopped short. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? What kind of father are you? Are you the kind of father who starves his children?” Kayla sat down at the edge of the road and undid the long string of buttons on her top. “Close your eyes,” she said to Hersh. My eyes were already closed and I kept them that way. I did not open them even for one short glance. Kayla took me to her substantial breast. She put the point of the nipple into my mouth. I tried not to cry, but was unsuccessful. If Kayla had looked down she would have seen that the only liquids being transferred between us were tears.

In the darkness, folded tightly into bed, the whole mysterious world was wrapped around me. Its wooden houses with their pointed roofs, the old bare trees out front, the wheelbarrow, the woodpile, the haystack. Shop windows and signs in those windows advertising jars of clover honey and bags of flour, and footprints in the mud leading to the doorway, and then leading back out through the mud again. The mud, which was a mixture of dirt and water, water that fell from the sky — what a miracle that was, to be there when it was falling, out of nowhere, no one in charge of it — down and down onto anything it could hit, onto any warm or cold or sharp or soft or lost or found thing, roaming or sitting dead still, mouth agape, swallowing whatever it was given.

And then, ping . Just like that. The sound of something hitting my window. I opened it, and the stranger’s cloaked face was there. I had wanted it to be my mother. I wanted that worse and harder than anything. “Once upon a time,” she began without saying hello, “there was a beautiful baby, but the problem was that two different women claimed to be her mother. They fought bitterly, but neither one would give in, so eventually someone called the king, who proposed a solution: he would cut the baby in half and give one part to each woman. One woman agreed, the other said that she would rather give up her half to ensure the child remain whole. That was how the king knew she was the real mother.”