Kim Church - Byrd

Maybe there are people who sit around drinking coffee and checking the local papers to make sure nobody’s having their baby. Addie doubts it. Anyway, she’s sure Roland is not one of them.

Dear—

What to call you? Almost-child? One who has taken root in me and won’t let go? One who might have been mine? Could still be, if I were brave enough?

But I’m not. I can’t be the mother you deserve. I know this in the way other women know they’re meant to be mothers. I know from everything I have ever been or dreamed or wanted .

You will not read this letter, which is the only reason I’m brave enough to write it. You will not know what you went through to get here. Already you are braver than I will ever be .

I promise to take better care of us from now on. No more red M&Ms, even if the government says they’re safe. No more coffee or pink wine. No more coke, even if I knew where to get it (I suppose I could ask one of the late-night talkers in the bookstore where I work, but I don’t want that kind of intimacy with any of those people; I don’t want that kind of intimacy with anyone else ever again). No more cigarettes .

You are resilient. (I would call you lucky but that would go too far.) My doctor says you are healthy, all your parts intact and in the right place .

You are a secret I share only with my doctor. And with my boss, who wants to know why I’m getting so big and private and morose, why I can’t be around people .

Dear creature who has taken up residence in me,

If I were going to keep you I would be thinking of names. I would be shopping for hats and blankets and sleepers and onesies and tiny pull-on pants in the softest eggshell blue. I’d pick out a bassinet, a stroller, a changing table, a swing. I would be learning to install a car seat and administer CPR .

This is what I do instead:

During the day, when the store is closed to customers, when it’s just you and me, I read to you. Lately I’ve been reading from the new catalog I’m working on , Books About Books. No matter how much you’ve been kicking — you are a ferocious kicker — my voice settles you. “Entry number thirty. Aldis, Henry G . The Printed Book. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, nineteen forty-one, second edition, yellow cloth, one hundred forty-two pages. Slightly soiled and sunned, short tear at spine head, binding good, text very good. Douglas C. McMurtrie’s copy with his signature. Twenty-five dollars.”

My boss, I’ll call him J.D., taught me about books. He taught me vocabulary, like “foxing” for the brown spots old books get, the same as old-age spots on people. He showed me worm trails — when a worm eats through a book it leaves a little path from one page to the next. He says you can sometimes find the body of the worm, but I never have .

J.D. goes around in lumberjack shirts and has an odd, ripe smell, like turmeric. He’s always humming old songs, the Doors, Moody Blues. A refrigerator of a man, he hums without knowing he’s humming .

All summer he has been taking care of me in his big, easy, pretend-not-to way. He’s going to the grocery store, it’s no trouble to pick up a few extra things, what do I need? He has to run errands, he can drive me to my appointments. I love riding in his van — an Econoline like the one your father drives, but silver, not blue. I love sitting up high, looking down on people in cars. I love FM radio, the thick lull of sleepy voices, like they’re speaking through water. The way my voice sounds to you, maybe .

Sometimes on Sundays J.D. and I drive out to the country to a lake with a sandy beach. We don’t know anyone there. We go wading together, like a little family. I let J.D. touch my belly and you do your stunts. He says you feel fluttery, like a trapped bird. Not just any bird, I say. One with strong wings. A crow or a raven .

Sometimes I wish I loved J.D. I wish I could ever love the right person .

Dear creature who gives me heartburn and presses on my bladder and won’t let me sleep on my side ,

Why do I write you letters you will never read? Because I want a record of this time with you. Because soon I will have nothing else to show for it . Once upon a time, I was pregnant. A baby grew in me. I read to him. Once upon a time, I was a mother.

Dear baby ,

You love the Talking Heads song about staying up late. I dance and you dance inside me. What a change of pace, you must be thinking, from the slow, sad songs I usually make myself miserable with. Judee Sill, Joni Mitchell, Carole King. You like them too, by the way, especially Carole King .

I wonder how much music you absorb. Years from now, when you hear “So Far Away,” will it spark some memory of this time? It’s a memorable song, mostly because of the bass line, which has in it every bit of unrootedness and longing there ever was .

Dear baby ,

The doctor who will deliver you is tall and confident, with strong hands that never sweat. Her hands make me feel safe. I noticed them when we first met, when she took out her magic paper disk and spun it to tell me when you would arrive — September 23. She has practical fingernails, trimmed short and polished with clear lacquer. She wears a simple silver wedding band on her left hand and a mother’s ring on her right, with five different-colored stones. I want to ask about her children. Where are they? I want to ask. Do you miss them?

I’m thinking of my own mother, sitting at home, lonesome for her children (I haven’t visited all summer; I can’t, not in the shape I’m in), uselessly dreaming of grandchildren. I sometimes think the hardest part of giving you up will be knowing that I am taking you away from her .

Dear baby ,

There are days when the thought of bringing you into the world so that you can be someone else’s child is almost too much. I’m like some soul-flattened character in a Kafka story or one of those absurdist plays I used to love .

People talk about the kind of commitment it takes to be a mother. No one talks about how hard it is to hold onto the decision not to be a mother when there’s a baby growing in you .

My doctor has been careful not to weigh in on my decision. She only tests and measures and prescribes vitamins and tries to keep us healthy .

J.D. tells me I’m doing a beautiful thing and that I should not lose sight of that. I wish I could believe him. Then I could write you letters filled with platitudes about how everything will work out for the best, instead of letters I can never let you read .

September 14, 1989. Parkertown on a Friday evening. Rows of wooden houses, windows squinting like drunks in the late sun. Women in dresses propped in open doorways. Men inside laughing, glass jars clanking. Every now and then a whiff of reefer. Children and dogs running circles in dirt yards. Tonight the children will stay up late while the grownups get high, because it’s the weekend, no school tomorrow.

This is the rundown, furniture-mill part of Carswell, home to bootleggers and drug dealers. It has its own history: the part of town that burned in the Fourth of July fire of 1910. The mill had let out early for the holiday, and in the excitement somebody forgot the oily rags in the finish room. That night, after the barbecue and watermelon and sack races, after the gospel band and the fireworks, everybody went to bed so full and tired and happy and slept so hard that no one heard the explosion, or if they did, they thought it was just more fireworks. Flames shot out the roof of the finish room, fanned across the mill, and rolled through Parkertown — all the little wood shacks, the yards full of trash, the sleeping families. Twenty-five houses burned to the ground and everyone in them died except one child, a boy, Bobo Hairston, who was flung out a window and into a neighbor’s yard, where he landed in a patch of soft dirt the neighbor had shoveled up for a garden that never got planted.