Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

Later: I got up the courage to ask my real parents and my siblings over. We stood in the threshold, dumb. Words were useless to us.

“How are you?” we asked one another.

“Well, thank you.”

“The weather,” we started, but had nothing more to say about it. It was the saddest room in the world. These were not my parents or my siblings now, and any other friendship felt pitifully inadequate. We pulled our chairs close together, our knees touching. We closed our eyes, and we sat like that while the rain gained speed and lost it, the wind gusted and hushed. It was not enough, not nearly. When they left, we promised, in the friendly way guests and hosts always do, to visit again soon, but all of us knew in our hearts we were too weak to withstand another moment like that, pretending to be a family when we no longer were. It was better to love one another from a safe distance than to cantilever ourselves out over the chasm, always barely failing to touch fingertips.

Each day I had visited the stranger in the barn. She had two chairs set up back-to-back, and several thick volumes to record our prayers. The chair she sat in was big and soft, while the one for the visitor was a straight, ladder-backed chair, because we had decided a person praying should not be too comfortable. He should not want to settle in and take a nap, but should sit straight and remain serious. A prayer, in our minds, was like the turn of a wrench or the pounding of a nail — it fastened, sturdily, our lives together. I remembered looking at the constellations around me. We had covered all the easy parts — from the floor to the height of our shoulders. The background colors were everything from light blue to black, and sometimes had shocks of red or deep brown. The stars were always white, though some had the soft pink-flowered pattern of another world’s wedding china. The Constellation of Hope, Lost and Gained, was the only one on the ceiling. It was the fixed point in our universe, our guide. Looking up at it, I prayed for everyone I loved. I prayed for food and sleep and patience, all around. When I stood up to go, the stranger always said the same thing: You are you. Each time, it felt a little bit more true.

Late at night: I woke up and was pummeled with the feeling that everything was fine. With the feeling that I was a person in my own bed, in my own home. I was so shocked by this that I lay there until daybreak, only trying to memorize the sensation.

Igor opened his eyes. “How old are we now?” he asked.

“Older,” I said.

“Have I deserted you?” he asked.

“You have always been right here,” I told him. “You have been steady.”

“I suddenly got scared that you were alone and I was far away.” He reached out to me, rubbed his hand over my body. He turned me dark and infinite. He pressed the stars of his own constellation onto me: here and here and here and here. I let the rest of me go away into darkness and only those spots, those pins of light, remain and shine holes into him. Drill him through with my brilliance. We connected the stars with lines, drew a map of our heavens.

Inside me, the dust of a new planet began to gather.

For the next forty weeks, everything made me cry, whether it was beautiful or sad, grand or meaningless. A pile of beets, a swarm of ants covering a dead bird, the falling sun turning our whole village gold — I stood there in awe, facing all of it with a pair of salt-wet eyes.

The light the day of the baby’s birth was white, and the villagers shaded their eyes against it. They shifted on their feet, passed hunks of cheese, made a few laps around the usual topics of conversation: When would the rain stop? How much caraway makes the perfect sauerkraut? How long before the sky was complete in the barn? How much lazier were men than women? Meanwhile, my husband was giving the world’s birds the feast of their lives. They might have picked him up in their beaks, carried him to a high, avian throne. I would have told my baby the story again and again that his father was a bird king who had been taken to the top of the highest tree and, flightless, would remain there to live the lonely life of the worshipped.

But as the seeds ran out, the birds began to depart. Igor was filled with fear that there would be nothing left of him, that he would find himself a picked-clean skeleton. Back to the tree went the ravens and woodpeckers, back to the square went the pigeons. Igor examined his arms and legs and found them uneaten. But he could still feel the points of the birds’ feet and hear their feathers against one another, against the wind.

And just then, from inside: the cry of a brand-new life. Into my arms the healer placed a creature small and slippery. It was complete, I marveled. And I was complete — neither of us had to be undone for the other to exist. “A boy,” Kayla said. “Isn’t that amazing? A boy!” She threw the door open, spread the news.

Igor smelled like birds when he kneeled at my bedside, his eyes pooling. His hair was wild from clawings and his black wool coat was streaked with the tears of droppings.

“What became of you?” Kayla asked, using the same cloth she had mopped my forehead with to clean Igor’s sleeves.

“You look like how I feel,” I said. Igor brought his face to his son and took a long whiff. This made me laugh. “How does he smell?” I asked.

“Warm,” Igor said. “Extremely warm.”

The boy cried wildly, throwing himself completely into the sadness of being alive. “Cry all you want,” I whispered to him. “You have been born into this new, strange place.” But he did not keep it up. He learned in a few days that the milk was warm and sweet and the touch of his mother’s hand on his head was as soft as anything, and each pair of hands was safe.

When I put my son to my breast, and when I felt that there would be warm liquid for him to drink, I closed my eyes and I did not need to open them for a long time. Whatever else was there — the chair holding my back, a table, the rugs and windows, a jar full of spoons, onion skin like a piece of stained glass in the sunlight, and outside, birds and the shadows of birds, oak trees and their pinky-brown lost leaves, the approaching night — it did not need to exist in order for me to go on feeding the one I had made.

Igor sat in another chair, thumbing the hem of the tablecloth.

“I will show you everything,” I said to the baby. “Don’t worry.”

Igor jolted his head up and stared at his son — his son! This person in my arms who would absolutely not exist without he himself. Igor examined his own fingers and his own arms and found them bald and inadequate. “Do you know how to be a mother?” he asked.

“I hope so,” I said. “I have never known how to be what I was, but the next thing always came anyway.”

“But this baby has nothing without us. He’s completely helpless without us. He would die in a matter of hours without us. You hope you know how to be a mother?”

“I have been someone’s child, twice,” I said. “I just have to do the other side of the job this time.”

Igor put his head in his hands. “I have no, no, no idea what I am doing. The last baby I knew died under the weight of his own father,” he said into the sweaty trunks of his wrists. “He is ours. I am the father.” I gathered the baby and sat on the floor at my husband’s feet. “Oh, dear,” Igor kept saying.

“Let’s say the world is beautiful and safe,” I began. “Let’s say that the new world we are all making together is a fair one, and that everything turns out all right. Let’s believe that you are a good father and I am a good mother, and this baby is a healthy boy who will live long enough to tell the story again and again that he was the first baby in a brand-new world where there was always enough food, always enough warmth and always enough love.”