The Daughters: A Novel (2 page)

Still, I can’t help but know what I know. I know when my heart rate increases by a single point, know the placement of my ribs with chiropractic precision. Feeling a child wake up inside me was as obvious and instantaneous as a slap to the face.

What I didn’t know was where my phone had gotten to, and it disturbs me, the ease with which John plucked it from the ether. If he’s aware that Kara’s blood is not his own, then the question
of what he might do next is still an open one. Why hasn’t he said anything? Why does a part of me wish he would? I’m sitting on the edge of a precipice, legs dangling into the dark.

Small things: a lost phone, the unnaturally blue eyes of a child.

Outside the storm is still raging, the sky shedding snow. Not as loud as last night, perhaps, but just as angry.

A
cross the room, out of my reach, our stereo sits on a shelf with recordings and ruffled sheaves of sheet music. A thin smattering of selections on vinyl, which is John’s pretension, not my own. I’ve never understood his fascination with how music is preserved. I’m interested in how it’s made. Living inside music that lives in me, so that we, the song and I, are a continual unfolding out of one another, a growing vastness, an emerging pattern.

John left this morning to rehearse
La Bohème
and I did not. For now, this is the way of things.

It seems odd to me to think of my voice scratched into a wax cylinder, trapped like a spirit caught in a jar. Worse still a computer chip: the tip of my tongue striking my teeth, the glottal contractions in my throat, even the air that circulates through my lungs and my blood, all somehow frozen onto a thumb drive that I can toss into my purse. A song is best sustained through performance, where it can respond to the world around it. Be shaped by its surroundings. Made new. In that way it’s like a story, never so alive as when it’s being told.

From my seat I take stock of the operatic scores I’ve lined up to read as I nurse, each with a variety of recordings tucked beside it. Just tools. Their usefulness predicated on the belief that this pause in my career will end, and end well. When I take on a new
role, I like to read the full score of the opera first, sing it through, to let my body interpret the notes on the page. Then I listen to all the recordings I can get my hands on to make sure I’m not imitating someone else’s voice.

Kara observes me, fighting off sleep, and I wonder what I could say to her to help her relax. Release her hold on the details she’s drinking in from around her so we could both get a moment or two more of rest. The doctor, after all, told me that rest was what I needed. “Your body has been through a struggle,” she said. “You need to take some time off to get your strength back.”

I could tell Kara a story. She has a lot to learn about me, about the past. Where she comes from, where she’s going. And anyway, isn’t that the function of stories? To teach our brains to dream? It would be daunting to fall asleep into the noise of complete darkness, infinite probability. Without the guide of a little narrative, a little magic, how would we know where to go when we closed our eyes?

Despite her restiveness, the baby barely makes a sound. Sometimes soft snufflings, yawns that expand her entire body so she seems to be unkinking at the joints. We named her Karina, but I haven’t called her that since John and I made the official declaration for her birth certificate. She’s Kara, plain Kara. In the muted light of day, she doesn’t mind that it’s snowing outside, that a slick mix of sleet and ice and rain is tapping on the tall windows of the living room. To her, the entire world is the chair I sit in, or perhaps just the length of my arm where she lays. To her, the sun is a bent lamp at my elbow, and the whole of existence is quiet, because I made it that way. Tappings, stockinged footsteps, hush, the baby is sleeping.

Since Kara was born I haven’t sung a note. I’ve lain in bed with her soft weight splayed across my chest, and I’ve inhaled
the milkfat scent of her hair. I’ve passed her to my husband and watched him press his nose against hers, stare cross-eyed into her pupils, smile his smallest, truest smile. I’ve seen other, more complicated shifts in his expression too, but we don’t talk about them. I wrap silence around myself like a blanket, like I’m always cold. Looking at my scores makes me shiver. Waking up with
Tosca
in my head fills my lungs with ice. Kara is so small, just a creature of cheeks and folds, eyes and rumples. I wrap silence around her, too, and tell myself it is to protect her. To keep her core temperature high, so the breath she sighs out at me will heat my neck in tiny bursts.

My grandmother Ada,
babenka Adelajda
, tells me that when I was first born I blinked my eyes with the regularity of a metronome. As a child I ran down the tiled aisles of the grocery store leaping in time with crescendos in the piped-in music. If the song was up-tempo I got mischievous, pinching all the grapes in a bunch to find the crisp ones and popping them in my mouth when no one was looking. Sometimes I tried to sneak one bite of every kind of fruit and vegetable in the store: a bean sprout; a lettuce leaf, with its torn green taste; an apple, bitten down to the white on one side and placed back on the pile with its shiny, unadulterated face forward.

If the music was slow, I lost the will to walk. My baba Ada held my hand and asked, “Is that the weight of the world I see on your shoulders?” I leaned into her, burying my face in her side and letting my knees buckle ever so slightly. But it wasn’t sadness, exactly, that stilled me. I wanted to lie on the floor and progress at the same pace as the chords. Toss an arm out, then rest. Roll onto my stomach, then rest. My body was starting to ascertain that the quiet moments between notes, between sounds, were as important as the sounds themselves.

The wind blows water against the window in waves, as if it were a body heaving backwards and thrusting itself into the glass, demanding entrance. We’re close enough to the beach to be a target for the lake effect, frozen raindrops assaulting our building in droves, snow accumulating at a magnitude. Ours is a nice neighborhood in the north of the city, but there is no protection anywhere from the weather. You just get used to it. The pounding is so regular it’s almost soothing, at least with a radiator near my knees, hissing steam in concert. My spine cracks as I stretch in my chair, and the child stretches her fingers, which look boneless.

I
’m on hold. Alone with a baby girl I have reason to be wary of, a baby girl whose birth I can’t remember. Her first hours are a black space in my body’s history that leaves me feeling as if I woke up in the wrong skin.

John asked me yesterday if it was really going to be okay for him to go back to work and leave me alone. He was worried, he said, about me not rehearsing.

“Doctor’s orders,” I told him. As if he didn’t know. When my contractions got intense we hailed a cab to the hospital, and I hoisted my bulky body into the car easily enough. But partway through the drive something went wrong. I felt warmth spreading over my thighs and cursed, thinking that my water had broken, and we would have to pay the cleaning fee for the cab. When I touched the wet spot, though, my hand came up red. I remember the earth tilting. Inside me something gave way, clicked, cracked, and I can’t recall anything else until the moment I found myself in a hospital bed, strange hands affixing an IV to my arm. Then I lost consciousness again.

“She was a little too eager to come into the world,” my doctor
said later. She sat beside me with her hand on my arm while John slept in a chair nearby. Apparently this is what happens when you trip unknowingly close to death—you cause physical sympathy. The baby was in an incubator, the doctor explained, for observation. “Tried to push through the wrong way.” She pressed lightly on my stomach with her free hand, checking the dressing, and I gasped out an
aah
. “You see. It’s unusual. But not unheard of.” She frowned. “You’ll have to be careful with yourself. Are you in a position to do that?”

The proper term for what happened to me is a
rupture
or
dehiscence
, an event usually reserved for flowering plants. Spontaneous opening of the fruit. Splitting to spit out seeds and flesh. Dehiscence also occurs with old wounds.

When I draw a very deep breath I can feel the place where my body is torn, a hairline scoring in the womb. By now it’s supposed to be healing, but I can’t picture it that way. I can only imagine the tear as fresh and electric. After all, it responds to me with great sensitivity, whenever I do the things I most wish to do. Like breathing in. Exhaling. Reaching for a high, clear sound.

Supposedly I will absorb this pain like a gong absorbs a blow. First it will radiate through me, in waves. Then I will settle into its absence, perhaps a little warmer with the memory of the vibration. Supposedly I’ll wake up one day soon and my lungs will open as sails do in a high wind. I won’t need to worry that singing will cause
renewed dehiscence
. Or that there is something dangerous about my daughter. Something inherent, that she cannot control.

The doctor couldn’t tell me exactly how long this process of healing would take though. Every body is different, she said. Our estimates only exist because people ask for them.

To fear my own child: a ridiculous thought. But in this case, not without its reasons, its precedent.

J
ohn woke up when he heard me and the doctor whispering, and he said, “Oh, Lu.” I thought he was just happy to see me, happy I had opened my eyes. But then I blinked and saw him afresh—there was something fragile in my husband that hadn’t been there before. John tells stories, is sarcastic. He makes the world what he wants it to be. It troubled me to see him that way, unable to hide his pain.

He ran a hand over his face, heavily. As if to pull it off and replace it. His smile was strained.
Why not?
I thought. He had every reason to be uncomfortable—the discs of his spine crushed by the awkward chair he’d slept in, the plain dumb fact of where we were, and why.

Still, I couldn’t help but worry that maybe the doctor had been waiting to share something with me. Some terrible news.

“She?” My lips trembled as I spoke. I was tired, I realized. Still so tired. “Did you see her?”

John looked at the doctor, his head cocked to the side, in a way I didn’t like. He came over and crouched beside my bed, lay his chin down on my arm so he had to speak through his teeth, with the weight of his skull bearing down on his jaw. I held my breath.

“Every piece just where it should be. She’s a trouper.”

“Oh.” I closed my eyes in relief. I wanted her there in my arms, but I wasn’t sure I could hold her. My head was so light on my shoulders. So heavy on the pillow. Kara was barely real to me yet, but I knew that first I wanted her safe.

“Sleep would be a good idea.” John took my hand, kissed it. “And sweet dreams.”

I was already halfway gone, the swell of my exhaustion rising
up and drawing me towards a black slumber. But a thought flashed into view then, just briefly.

“Is Ada here?” I asked.

If John hesitated, I couldn’t tell.

“She was,” he said. It was a sensible reply. And with sleep there to take me, I had no time to mull over its vagueness, or the guilty sound that hung, hangdog, under it.

O
h, Lu
. I should have known there was something more; should have heard it in the long woe of the
Oh
, the
who
inside my name,
Lu
. But I fell asleep and didn’t wake up again until the next morning, when I found a face hovering inches from my own under the hospital lights.

“Just checking, sweetie.” The nurse, I realized, was holding my wrist, measuring my racing pulse. I’m not certain if it was her touch that jarred me out of sleep, or something in my deep unconscious. After all, there was nothing between them—the tension of incomprehension and the tension of awareness.

When she was sure my heart could withstand the rate at which it was pumping my blood and had satisfied herself that I was not about to swallow my tongue, the nurse brought me a cup of water and instructed me to sip, to cool me down and to help the saline drip in rinsing the anesthesia from my system.

“People fight the drugs,” she told me. “That’s what gets your pulse up so high; you’re reacting against it like a virus. Except”—she paused in thought—“sort of psychologically.”

It didn’t feel psychological. My limbs grew lighter and heavier of their own accord, and my stomach churned what little water I’d been able to swallow. John was gone, though he’d left his jacket balled up on a bedside chair.

“My husband,” I said. “Is he with the baby?”

“Oh.” The nurse wrote something down on a clipboard. “No. Well, I’m not sure. But I think I saw him somewhere with a phone book. The funeral home, you know.” She pinched her mouth up. “You poor thing.”

The room was so pale, the light so white-green, that for a nauseous second I wondered,
Am I dead?
I lifted one hand to my cheek and ran my fingertips over the surface of it. Tiny prickles, the heat of skin responding to skin.

So I was alive. But then why did John need to plan a funeral?

“Where
is
the baby?” I asked, my voice small.

“Still in the pediatric ICU.” The nurse picked the cup of water up off the tray beside my bed and stuck the straw between my lips. “Drink. Yes. One more sip. All right.” She set the cup back down and sighed. “Honey, do you remember anything that happened?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” she said, “from what I hear it was kind of a mess. Your husband thought the baby was coming early, and the doctors thought she was coming late”—I cringed, since I was the one who’d lied about my due date to John—“and he called your grandmother, and that’s when things got all helter-skelter.”

Ada had blown in faster than seemed possible—“Like she was waiting right outside the door,” the nurse told me—and she and John got into a shouting match. The nurse didn’t say what about, and I didn’t ask. I breathed up towards the ceiling of my room, where a water stain bloomed out from the corner. Rusty orange with hints of green.