Hazel Whiting had finished her freshman year at Mountain Hills High, where there were a lot of ponytails and clanging metal lockers with pictures of hotties taped inside. She had some friends there, but not too many, and usually preferred being by herself to discussing other people’s haircuts or dreamed-of love lives. The truth of those love lives—a glance in the dingy hallway from a crushable boy, a dark, tangled session on an out-of-town parent’s couch—was like a tiny, yellowed tooth, hidden under a pillow, which the high schoolers believed, prayed, would soon be replaced by gorgeous, naked, adoring treasure.
Hazel, of course, wanted love someday, too, and she did admit to feeling a whir in her chest when she thought about a bed shared with a boy—or a man, by then. Still, when she looked at Bobbie Cauligan’s gelled-back hair and calculated leather jackets, or the white perpetually new sneakers and tennis-club polos strutted by Archer Tate, or the too-big flannel shirts of the shy boys like Russell Fieldberg-Morris and Duncan Story billowing as they tried to dart from the safety of one classroom to another, Hazel did not see the possibility of love. Will these people look more like humans when they are grown? she thought. Now they looked to Hazel like children, like beasts, like helpless, hairless baby rats. Do I look like that to them, too? she wondered. Whatever else it was, high school was a soggy thing, being a teen-ager was a soggy thing, and Hazel had decided early on that she would survive each of these endeavors by not becoming invested.
Hazel chose not to follow the troupes of other girls toward endless slumber parties and pictures of models torn from magazines and stuck to mirrors to remind them every morning, while they were popping a pimple or switching the part in their hair, of the enormous distance between beauty and their own unfinished faces. Instead, Hazel wanted to observe the day revealing itself unspectacularly around her. She wanted to feel that her life was a small thread in the huge tangle of the world and that nothing she did mattered all that much one way or the other.
When school let out for summer, while her mother held meetings about the potholes and the winter food drive, Hazel walked all over town, street by street. She upped one block and downed the next while ladies watered their roses and the few men who were home during the day—retired or sick or broke—sat at the window reading the paper. When Hazel returned home for a sandwich in the middle of the day she found her mother in their newly renovated blue-and-yellow kitchen, bent over the construction of a low-this, high-that salad, trying feverishly to grate an almond. “Why are you doing that?” Hazel asked. Her mother had never needed to work, yet she filled her days with an endless string of tasks, executed with the conviction of a first responder at the scene of an accident.
“The body has an easier time breaking down foods that aren’t whole,” her mother answered, scraping the single nut.
“What’s the point of breaking something if it isn’t whole?” Hazel asked. Her mother looked up at her and narrowed her eyes in a comic-book glare.
“You are such a teen-ager,” she said. “I thought I was done with this stage after your sisters went through it, and that was ages ago. Now I’m right back where I started. Couldn’t you just skip ahead?”
“Gladly.”
Hazel lived alone with her mother, though she had three sisters, all much older, all in their own houses with their own dishwashers, lists of emergency phone numbers, and husbands who had good jobs, good values, and well-shaped eyebrows. This family had been symmetrical, a family of plans and decisions made years in advance in which Hazel was a very late, very surprising accident followed almost immediately by her father’s diagnosis. While Mother grew fatter, Father grew thinner, and everyone had felt certain that they were watching a direct transfer of life from one body to another.
Hazel and her father were never in the world together—by the time she entered, he had already closed the door behind him. Her mother was still wearing mourning black in the delivery room, surrounded by a ring of grieving daughters. The final shock came when the baby was not a boy but a girl, looking nothing like the man she was meant to replace.
As she kicked a rock down the oak-lined streets, Hazel considered her mother’s wish. Perhaps, if she opened her arms to whatever came to her and stopped turning it all away, she might arrive at adulthood earlier. Adulthood was a place Hazel pictured as a small apartment kitchen far from anyone to whom she was related, furnished with upturned milk crates and exactly one full place setting.
After a lot of afternoon walking, Hazel wanted a break and a snack or a soda with a straw. She went to the 7-Eleven, where she always sat out back on a nice bit of grass that was close enough to the dumpsters so that no one else came but far enough away that she didn’t smell anything except when there was a big gust or a bad bag.
Johnny came out of the store on his lunch break, his uniform button-down untucked, planning to piss on the trash bins because they were cleaner than the toilets. He was clearly surprised to see a girl there, but he just said “Hello” and paused for a second before going on with his plan anyway. He stood with his back to her, a plastic bag in his left hand and his right hidden. She could hear two things: him whistling “Strangers in the Night,” and a delicate stream hitting the green metal of the dumpster. Afterward, he sat down next to Hazel and took a large package of teriyaki beef jerky and a six-pack of Miller Lite out of his bag.
He started right in about the horse races in Deerfield and the off-track betting down in Green Springs. He told her about Million Dollar Mama and Sweet Sixteen, both winners. But not Johnny—he’d lost fifty. “Just not my lucky day,” he said. As he said “lucky day” he looked right into Hazel’s eyes and winked, and it seemed that he’d been practicing this for years in his rearview. She sucked her lemon-lime fizzy and noticed his arms, skinny and brown, like hungry snakes.
Just a few feet beyond where they had talked, Hazel and Johnny lay down on their young backs. There was a muddle of bushes there that hid them from the road and the midday gassers and snackers. Johnny didn’t have a line, he’d just asked, “Wanna go lie down behind those bushes?”
“O.K.,” Hazel had said, because she did not have a better answer, and because, having decided an hour before to say Yes to growing, she could hardly now say No.
He carried her soda for her, left his two empties where they were. When she sat he said, “Nice hair.”
“Thanks.”
He leaned over and kissed her, putting his tongue right into the center of her mouth and moving it around in whirling circles. It tasted like beef jerky and beer. She decided that she was supposed to do the same—two tongues spinning now. But then she wanted a rest, pulled her head back. Johnny took the pause to mean: O.K., next step. He rolled on top. He moved his hips the same way he’d moved his mouth. She could feel him pressing into her bladder.
Hazel had had one close call before, in eighth grade, with a pimply boy named Derek, who was the brother of the girl having a slumber party. After everyone else had fallen asleep to the sound of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” they had made out in the laundry room. Bloody screams masked the washing machine’s rattle as Hazel and Derek pawed at each other on top of a pile of mateless socks.
Johnny got up the courage to grab her breasts. He sat, straddling her, and put one big hand on each B-cup and pumped as if they were udders. He did not softly caress and he did not pinch. Just squeezed and released, squeezed and released. She could tell that this was making him happy because his closed eyes were squinting and his mouth was pursed. “Mmmmmm,” he said. “Mmmmmm,” she returned. Hazel thought they were like whales in the sea, searching for something over long, dark distances.
Johnny took his shirt off and her shirt off. He had a few scratchy little hairs. Then pants and pants. He looked at her and said, “O.K.?” She didn’t know exactly what he meant, but she nodded. She found out right away that he meant underwear, and in a second both were off—his first, then hers. He rolled on top, ungraceful and floppy, bit his lower lip and pushed. Hazel started out making the noise but then realized that he didn’t notice either way, so she stopped and instead watched his big head move in the sunlight. This is it? she thought. This is the whole entire thing?__
Hazel went home that night and ate salad with her mother on the screened-in porch while mosquitoes tapped audibly to get in.
“How was your afternoon?” Hazel’s mother asked.
“Fine,” Hazel said, wondering if this was a true answer and deciding that it was. “Yours?”
“Just the usual disasters. The club has the red, white, and blue flowers ordered in time for the Fourth, and what is the city out there planting in every median? Marigolds.”
Hazel did not tell her mother that she had had sex with a convenience-store clerk, and that it had been disappointing but harmless—she felt no ache to see the boy again, no real change in her own body, no broken heart. She had done this grownup thing, yet she suspected that her mother would find her even more childish for it.
Hazel walked the northern quadrant of town and, since it was a Saturday, there were a lot of folks out in their yards trimming bushes and pulling dandelions out of the ground with flowered canvas hands. The day after that it was the same thing, but the western quadrant, where she watched the first few innings of a family softball game and petted some dogs in the dog park. She walked past a flower shop where dyed-blue carnations were the best things going. She walked through the church parking lot. Father O’Donnel’s Honda was the only car there. She peeked into the back seat: an open gym bag, one ratty gray running shoe out, one in.
“Hi,” someone said, roughly. Hazel turned around fast. It was a tall man, and big, too. He had a fat face and a comb-over; his shirt buttons were barely holding. He was close.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said again. She edged toward her right, her back pressed up against the car.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“No. Thanks.” Hazel tried to smile.
“I’d like to talk to you.”
“I have to go.”
“Actually, you have to stay.” He put his hand on her arm, but didn’t grab hard. “Look,” he said, “don’t scream. I won’t hurt you if you don’t scream.” Hazel did not scream. Later, she thought that she might have been better off if she had. But at that moment everything was underwater and she was underwater and there was a strong current pulling her deeper.
The big-faced man took her hand, almost gently. His round fingers interlaced with her skinny ones. Her heart took over her entire body. She was a drum. Did she ask the obvious questions? Why am I walking? Why am I not drinking a Shirley Temple and adjusting my bikini top over at the country-club pool like all the other girls? Why did I agree to grow up? Her body asked the questions for her—that slamming heart spoke them so loudly that she could not breathe fast enough to fuel it, but the drumbeat was empty of answers. They walked behind the church, under the steeple-shaped shadow, and into maples covered in the new green of summer leaves. The man stopped walking and smiled at her.
“I just want to have some sex with you,” he said. “I won’t hurt you if you have some sex with me.” The trees were barely breathing, and the turned earth from their footsteps smelled cold. Hazel thought about running or screaming or kicking, but she just looked up at him and said, “Please. Wait. Help.”
He pulled her down to the ground. He undid pants and pants. His breath, strong and bitter with alcohol, was like boiling water on her face. His mouth was right up next to her mouth but he didn’t kiss her, just breathed into her. She turned her head, but he followed. She could not avoid his lungy air. His weight was everywhere. Two words kept pinging in her mind, though she didn’t know what they meant. And yet, and yet, and yet.
A tiny white spine began to knit itself inside Hazel. Now it was just a matter of growing. Hazel sat on the closed toilet next to a little plastic spear with a bright-blue plus sign on one end. She put her hands in her hair, tried to hold her head up.
She thought of the men who could have created this. “How could you be a person?” she asked her growing baby. She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of that summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heating her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around, sniffing her cave. She did not know if this creature was here to help or to punish her.
“Mother,” Hazel said in early fall in the kitchen, where the difficult process of roasting a duck was under way. Hazel’s mother was holding it by the neck over a large pan, searing.
“Yes, darling,” her mother said.
“I need to tell you something.”
“My wallet is in the front hall. I, for one, would like to see you in a pair of decent shoes.”
“I am very pregnant.”
The duck dropped to the pan.
Hazel omitted Johnny and the 7-Eleven from her story. She omitted her own complicity from the story, she omitted any possibility of a father. Hazel’s mother looked up at her with every kind of lost in her eyes. She lifted up the baggy sweatshirt Hazel was wearing and looked at her belly and started to cry. “Who was he? How could he do that to you?” And then quickly, “I will take care of everything.” Hazel thought, There is so much now that I have to hold on to. She was about to be someone’s mother. Someone who would be killable and hurtable and whose body would be just a lump of tendons and muscles and a few hollow bones.
Hazel’s mother began her crusade. The police came and took a description, drew a man who looked nothing like anyone Hazel had ever seen. The drawing was pinned to each lamppost in town until it rained and the posters shredded and bled, leaving torn bits of paper all over the sidewalk. A women’s self-defense class was started up at the gym. The mayor proposed a citywide emergency phone system in Hazel’s name. But Hazel herself was not meant to benefit from any of these activities. Too late now for self-defense, too late to find a bright-yellow phone with a direct line to the police. School began again and she went, stared at and eyed and gossiped about, and then she walked home, where her sisters came over in shifts, bringing her movies and trays of Poor Hazel Cookies.
For the town, in a way, it was exciting to have an Illegitimate Bastard Baby from a Rape, because people had plenty to talk about and plenty of sympathy to dispense. They whispered in the grocery-store aisles: “Did you hear about that poor Whiting girl behind the church? And to think the Lord was right next door. I’m going to drop off a casserole later.”
If you could have lopped off all the pointed roofs of all the yellow-white houses and watched from above, you would have seen the top of a blond head in each kitchen, pulling hot pans out of the oven, steam rising off meat loaves and lasagnas, counters covered in empty tuna cans, the severed heads of zucchini lying in heaps. A line of station wagons streamed past Hazel’s house, full of reheatables meant to make their way from Ford and Dodge right into the stomachs of the grieving. Hazel’s mother stopped answering the door after a while. The freezer was full, the refrigerator and the mini garage refrigerator were full. Casserole dishes started to pile up on the front steps. Baked ziti baked again in the sun. Beth Berther, who could not cook even one thing, left a grocery-store cake—chocolate with chocolate frosting and the word “Condolences!” scrawled in orange cursive on top.
People also started to deliver diaper bags and bouncy swings and little hats made to look like various vegetables. Hazel wrote thank-you notes without mentioning that her strange fur baby would be unable to wear the woollen gifts. She saved them in a box under her bed, the bed where she stayed most of the time when she was not in school. Where she was when her mother came in every morning with lemon tea and a biscuit. Where her mother sat, her big reddish-blond hair full of light, singing “Go Tell It on the Mountain” until the breakfast tray was empty.
By month six, the glowing fur baby had turned itself into a large bird of prey. It spread and curled its wings. Hazel felt them strong and tickling. It built a nest of borrowed organs, her small intestine twisted in a pink knot, the bird’s sharp claws resting in the center. Then it started to lay eggs the size of a fist. Hazel planned sweaters with wing holes and three-pronged booties. She hummed the blues.
Soon she felt the eggs starting to hatch, milky eyes and wet feathers emerging. The mother fed them Hazel’s digested meals through her beak. The babies twittered and grew. There were too many of them, though, and as they got larger they couldn’t move anymore. They were packed in, their famously good eyes useless now, pressed up against the walls of the cave.
Meanwhile, school was exactly as boring as it had always been. Hazel was smiled at more because she was frowned at more. “My mother says God is glad you are keeping the innocent baby,” a senior said to Hazel at her locker. “And I don’t agree that being raped makes you a slut.” The girl handed her a piece of notebook paper with a list of names on it. In the girl column: Grace, Honor, Constance, Mary, Faith. And in the boy column: Peter, Adam, David, Axel Rose.
Hazel thought about a giant bird of prey with the name Constance.
The birds could no longer open their womb-smashed beaks to eat and they began to starve. Hazel could feel them getting weaker. They made no noise; they didn’t twitch or flutter. One morning she woke up and knew they were dead. Knew their bodies had given up and were now just a mess of needle bones and feathers. Hazel cried in the shower. For weeks she could feel the empty weight of them in her. Through the end of fall and into winter, the avian bodies stayed. Snow was on the ground outside and storms were inside Hazel as the bodies started to flake like ash, a pile frozen inside the windless space.
Before Thanksgiving break, the girls and boys were separated and shown charts of each other’s bodies. They learned that chlamydia was not a pretty blossom to add to a floral arrangement. The girls, not the boys, were each given a sack of flour with a smiley face drawn on it which they had to carry around and feed with an empty bottle. “Hazel doesn’t have to do this assignment,” the teacher said to the class. The girls gathered in the bathroom and changed white-dusted diapers. Some bought little outfits for their flour babies—cute dresses and hats and bows. The teacher pulled them all back into the classroom, where a large penis sat erect on her desk, and said, “These are not dolls, ladies. You aren’t supposed to be having fun with this exercise.”
The pile of ashes turned into something else. Hazel couldn’t tell what it was at first, but she felt that it had little round hooves. Night by night it got clearer. The body and the long legs, and then it started to grow three heads, distinctly giraffelike. The necks lengthened, limp poles loosely twisted together like bread dough, with heads bobbing at their skinny ends.
Hazel spent the weekend in bed. She pulled her yellow-and-orange flowered quilt up to her chin.
Her mother said, “Maybe Father will finally come back,” patting her daughter’s rounded belly.
“If I’m not him, I don’t think my baby will be, either,” Hazel said. Her mother’s eyes looked desperate, so Hazel added, “Maybe he will.” Her sisters came to sit with her, circled their hands over her pregnantness. One did Hazel’s toenails in pink polish, one rubbed her hands with rose oil. One washed her hair in the sink and twisted it into two damp braids.
Hazel dreamed about the giraffe heads emerging for a visit, their three long purple tongues licking her chest. They were rough and ragged and she shone with their spit, her chest paint-white and glistening. She said, “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
In the morning, she checked for the markings on her breasts from fur pressed down. She thought that she could still smell their warm skin like hay and cheese.
Hazel went to the doctor for her usual checkup.
“You have a beautiful cervix,” he said. Hazel, staring up at the poster of a coral reef on the ceiling, said, “Thank you. I get that all the time.” The doctor laughed so long while staring into her that she wished she hadn’t said anything at all.
The doctor retrieved Hazel’s mother. He rubbed goo on Hazel’s belly and listened. Her skin had stretched so much that it was unrecognizable, not forgiving and soft but stiff and hard. A gray curled blob appeared on the screen. Hazel didn’t want to see it, and didn’t believe it when she did. What a good disguise my baby has on, she thought.
Hazel’s mother immediately started to cry and stood there, eyes wide and slippery, her hand on her chest. While her mother witnessed the miracle of life, Hazel rolled the corner of her paper gown in her fingers.
Hazel’s mother talked about bassinets and carriages and binkies and diapers. She insisted on stopping at Babies R Us to stock up. Hazel waited in the car and listened to the Soft Rock Less Talk station but turned it off when the host started making jokes about his wife’s credit-card bill. She watched people pull into the parking lot in minivans and unload kid after kid, crying, screaming, or jumping around. Mothers struggled to strap them into strollers, to get shoes on and tied. One mother, after a long fight to get her son into his sweatshirt, spit into her delicate diamond-glittering hand and smoothed it over his parted blond hair.
Hazel’s mother thundered back with her full cart, its metal vibrating loudly over the asphalt. She unloaded boxes and bags into the back seat, tossed Hazel a pair of miniature orange booties that looked like tennis shoes, complete with plush tread and real laces. Hazel stuck her first two fingers into each one, walked them across the dashboard. “If it has four legs I guess we can just get another pair,” she said quietly.
Her mother was busy shaking out the right key from her key chain. “It’s not twins—we would have seen it in the pictures,” she said.
“I never said it was twins.”
With her mother out one weekend morning, Hazel walked very slowly and heavily to the 7-Eleven. She picked out a six-pack of Miller and a bag of beef jerky. Johnny, behind the counter, said, “I heard what happened.”
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
“Do you need anything?” he asked.
“People are being helpful. Do you sell ribbon?”
“Yeah, but I think you’re not supposed to be drinking. You know, in your condition,” Johnny said, pulling out a roll of red. Hazel paid for her items and then, standing there with Johnny, she tied the beer and jerky together with the ribbon.
“Here,” she said, “it’s for you. I hope you understand.” She went out the door, which rang its bell to say, Goodbye, whoever you are.
With one week to go till her due date, Hazel stopped sleeping. She couldn’t keep her eyes or her mind shut. Her brain bled a list of worries, ongoing and impossible to ignore. All the things she had to remember to do as a mother. She started lists, animal by animal.
Lion: lie under a tree with its tail wrapped around my leg, learn to cook its caught rabbits, braid its mane. Koala: grow eucalyptus, watch it climb trees, lie down and look up at it through the branches. She had stacks and stacks of these lists. Some animals were blank. She didn’t know yet how to care for a sloth or a platypus. Almost as an afterthought, she made a list called Human Baby: hire a math tutor, record enough home video but not too much, bake lemon-meringue pies, move to a remote unpopulated island when he/she turns thirteen, sled.
They numbed Hazel from the waist down for the birth. It took a few minutes before it started to work, but then Hazel felt the warm emptiness creep over her. She could feel her body melting away. She held her mother’s hand. Her sisters wore sweatsuits and ponytails and looked ready for action, but there wasn’t much to do except hope, which they did while they drank thin, fake-creamer coffee out of Styrofoam cups.
Hazel’s mother fell asleep for a few minutes, her black shirt riding up to reveal the loose skin of her midriff. The sisters talked of their own offspring and partners. They discussed a spinach-salad recipe from a magazine, and a new kind of tea that began as a pearl and unfolded into a flower. Hazel could hardly hear them above the sound of her body working to release the creature. All the animals she’d prepared for began to run together. She saw the hooves of a cow and the head of a mouse and the body of a kangaroo. She felt the long teeth of a hyena and the soft fur of an alpaca. Hazel almost felt her own body turn into something else. Something capable of stalking prey and tearing flesh.
By the time the doctor made the bittersweet announcement that this healthy baby was a girl, and all the women in the room gave up hope that their husband and father’s sharp features and smarts would live again, Hazel was lost in her menagerie of beasts. She looked right at the bald skin and didn’t see it. Didn’t believe that the puffy-limbed crier, all pink with bright-blue eyes, could be the thing she had been carrying around. Hazel did not reach out when the doctor handed it to her but kept her arms flat by her sides. The baby’s body seemed impossible to her, as if she had given birth to a chair or a bicycle.
“It’s a nice little girl,” the doctor said.
“Whose is it?” Hazel replied. They all laughed warm and low, as if she were joking. Her mother took the child from the doctor and rocked her, wrapped her in a blanket with big ducks on it. In the growing darkness, Hazel thought a duck’s bill might be attached to the child. She fell asleep thinking about it quack-quacking around the house with its tail bobbing.
While Hazel was sleeping, Johnny stopped by with three gas-station cloth roses, pink with plastic dew. He had been ready, calling the hospital every day to see if Hazel Whiting had been admitted.
“I’m just a friend of Hazel’s,” he said, leaving the flowers with one of her sisters, who was reading a magazine in the bright hallway.
“You shouldn’t bother her,” the sister said. “But I’ll let her know you stopped by.”
“Tell her if she needs anything from the store . . . snacks or whatever. Candy. Smokes. Not that, but you know, I think we sell diapers.” The sister brought her eyebrows together and rattled the roses. Johnny’s footsteps were heavy on the floor all the way back down the long corridor.
Four in the morning and Hazel was awake. It was raining outside and no one was in the room. Hazel felt around under the blanket to inspect her body, which was still swollen—a tight, empty globe. What had been growing there was done and out and growing someplace else now. It didn’t need her blood or her air.
The room was a dark yellow, with a lot of moon and a little hall light coming under the door. The blinds at the windows chopped the glow into slices and divided Hazel’s covered body into slats. She looked around the room at the machines, which breathed back at her. A small red light went on and off. Hoses hung, and the shadows of hoses hung lower. A forgotten mop and a mop bucket. Hazel felt suddenly stuck in a laboratory, caught and studied. She thought she might be left there forever, that her mother had taken her baby and introduced it to the human babies. It would assimilate. It would be accepted into their tribe and given a flowered diaper cover and fed smashed peas. It would never learn to hunt or peck or make its mating call. Hazel sat up and then stood up but got dizzy and sat again. She hit the pillow with her fist.
The baby, sleeping in her bassinet in the corner, began to cry. Hazel got up, slower this time, her body creaking as she slid her socks over the linoleum like a skier. There was almost no light in the bassinet, nothing to brighten the skin of the new life lying there. It cried, the new life. Hazel put her index finger into the bassinet and poked softly until she felt the warm mound. She touched the ears, the spirals of them. She touched the back of the neck and the front of the neck. She tried to find the mouth, which was still crying. She thought she felt whiskers and a wet nose. She felt soft fur just starting on the top of the head. Suddenly she knew the answer. It was a seal, fat and legless. She put her hands over the round eyes, which she knew were black but could not see. The seal barked into her palm and its breath was warm.
This was one animal Hazel hadn’t planned for. She thought of those twirling underwater torpedos in the zoo. It was gill-less, an air breather as she was, but it also liked to be wet. She went to the window and opened it, cupped her hands and waited while the air blew cold across her skin. Drops fell but dripped through her fingers and she couldn’t collect much. She returned to the flopping baby and rubbed her wet hands onto its face and then its back, which someone had tried to cover with a nightgown, a thing that seemed ridiculous to Hazel.
She remembered the mop bucket and slid her way over to it. It was hard for her to bend down, but she was able to drag it to the bassinet using the mop as a handle. She pulled the mop up and water streamed down, splashing her feet and the floor. She ran its gray tendrils over the baby, smelling the soap and dirt in the water. The baby started to cry again. She made shushing sounds in her mouth and tried to hum “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The mop went back and forth, the baby cried, Hazel hummed. She took a deep breath and leaned down to grab the bucket. Sharp shots crossed in her belly. She winced and squeezed her eyes shut but kept bending. She caught hold of the handle and lifted. It wasn’t as heavy as she had expected, and coming up was easier than going down.
Hazel started to sing the words of the song as she raised the bucket above the bassinet and poured. The water was cold and gray in the dark room. It ran out in ropes and splashed into the bassinet, where the baby cried and threw her small weight from side to side. The blanket soaked through. The thin mattress soaked through. The front of Hazel’s hospital gown was wet from splash. The baby’s cough was so small it didn’t even make it to the walls to bounce back.
“Is that enough?” she asked.
No sound came after that except a plip plip plip on the floor. The baby was quiet and Hazel was quiet. The rain continued to be rain, the bed continued to be flat and rumpled. Nurses in other rooms carried on trying to move soundlessly while they adjusted feeding tubes and emptied bedpans. Hazel’s mother was still her mother. Hazel was still not her father, and neither was her baby. The two of them would be fatherless together. They would be young together. “Now that I am a mother,” Hazel said to the baby, “I get to set the rules. And the rules are: swimming, sunning, playing. Everything else, we ignore.” She put the bucket down, empty now, and leaned into the bassinet to pick up the baby, blanket-wrapped and dripping.
The bundle coughed one beautiful polished river rock of a cough. Hazel put her ear right down against its lips and heard air, in and out. The eyes looked up at her, surprised and afraid. Hazel breathed her air into her baby’s mouth and then waited until the baby breathed out so she could inhale that sweetness.
Hazel walked around the room, careful and slow. The baby’s body was cool against her. Her clothes stuck to her breasts. She sat on the edge of the bed. She put the baby down and removed her hospital gown, and then decided to remove the baby’s clothes, too, so that their skin could touch. She held the baby to her chest, guided a nipple into the little mouth. Hazel had become aware of the baby’s arms and legs, but still saw the seal face, the slick black eyes. She could feel the whiskers brushing against her while it sucked, toothless and silent. ♦
