Seascape

I am at the beach, collecting seaweed to winter-proof my friend Falene’s garden. She was born and raised here in Southeast Alaska and she understands seaweed; I think of it either as a nuisance (something that sticks to me when I’m swimming), or as a wrapper for sushi. It hasn’t occurred to me, not yet, that it might be useful.

It is September, and the bigger children on our island are in school. Our daughters are still little—her youngest, my only—so they are with us; they play. The girls scurry up the slippery rocks, disappear behind the Sitka spruces, build lean-tos out of driftwood. We can hear their bubbling voices, their little shouts, the way they call each other’s names over the lap-lapping of the ocean.

My baby would be a year old now. I can picture her on this pebbled beach, small feet in brown rain boots to match her sister’s. I imagine her toddling after the big girls, slipping on the rocks, knocking over their lean-tos, acting like a general nuisance. She would stop my heart when I lost sight of her for a moment; and then she would reappear, peeping around a thicket of huckleberry bushes, her tiny, laughing face smeared with berry juice, the last of the harvest. At the beach, her absence feels like a presence.

It is a few months later, an afternoon in early January, and I am eight months pregnant with my son. I have tea with Falene in a little coffee house near Ward Cove. There was a pulp mill in the cove that dumped toxic runoff into the ocean for years before it was shut down. Now the whole area is a superfund site, but from above it just looks like water. Tourists spill out of cruise ships in the summer and see only the mountains and the bald eagles; they are not told the secrets of the water below them. How can anyone know what runs beneath the surface? I sit with a warm mug in my hands, and I am pregnant, and that looks like a happy ending in itself. But it is not, not really. I am afraid, because my daughter is dead and there’s no reason for me to trust that my son will live.

As we sit with our tea, Falene invites me to join her at the beach with another friend later in the evening (the same beach, of the slippery rocks and sitka spruces and seaweed): a bonfire, children playing, warm jackets and hats and scarves. I pick up my daughter at home and continue on to the beach. We drive past the village of Saxman. If I turn my head to the left, I can see two dozen totem poles that have been moved here from unoccupied villages all over Southeast Alaska, the largest collection of standing totem poles in the world. Since moving to Tlingit Aani, the ancestral homeland of the Tlingit people, I have learned that Raven, both creator and trickster, brings the sun. I have learned that Bear married a mortal woman, and that Thunderbird battled Whale. I have learned that when salmon bones are thrown back into the sea they re-form themselves and become the Salmon People. I have not learned how to explain the plate tectonics of my everyday life. I have not learned of an animal who protects human babies. I have not learned of a way to throw something into the ocean and watch my daughter walk her way out of it, dripping dry, like Virginia Woolf in reverse.

We make it to the beach and my five-year-old runs to join her friends. The daughter who is not here would be eighteen months old now. I can picture her—no, I can feel her, because I would be holding her. Puffy snow pants, wind-chapped cheeks, a dropped mitten quickly retrieved. She might want a snack. She might marvel at the glow of the fire. I might attempt to sit as she clings to my neck, adjust her little body so that she fits snugly in my lap, my arms wrapped around her, both of us slowly warming our feet.

My son is still inside me but he is preparing to arrive. He has dropped deep into my pelvis in the last week, and his head is pressing down. I do not know this yet, but he is hours away. After I’ve watched this bonfire spark and crackle by the churning waves of the wintry ocean, after I’ve bathed my five-year-old in the brightly lit bathroom in our warm house, my waters will break and soak through the mattress—so much fire, so much water—and he will be on his way.

Why is it that my son comes a month early? A midwife will tell me dismissively that women of advanced maternal age tend to have their babies prematurely. Forty is forty, she will say. A nurse will tell me that women who’ve given birth prematurely are likely to do so again—my second pregnancy, after all, ended at 21 weeks.

Both of these reasons make it out to be my fault somehow, but I don’t believe it’s my fault. I have a baby at forty, after losing a baby, because of a still small voice that says Your story is not yet written. I have a baby not because the act is free from danger, or fear, or sadness, but in spite of all that. I have a baby because I want to caress the warm body of a sleeping infant, feel the lub-dub of a swiftly beating heart against my open palm. I want my milk to let down as I look on waking eyes and a tiny puckered mouth. I want more—the toddling, the hand in mine, the warm wet breath on my neck. Mostly, I do not want to believe that my story of early motherhood will end with a death.

Perhaps, in a parallel universe, that hypothetical death is my own. I think my son knows that I have thought about killing myself, and that my living child is the sole reason I am still here; I wonder if he is here to save me. On the beach, my son’s head presses down, down, down and ravens and eagles fly overhead, and the fire burns, and I am between things again, between the water and the fire, between lives. But the massive crack in the earth that seems to run below me, the one I have been straddling for years—this crack is beginning, imperceptibly, to narrow.

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