In the green twilight he adjusts her pillow, rubs her back, rubs her feet, then brings her the book written by her Papa, which she does not read but holds idly, the pages wilting in the heat.
That is what we’re all doing: wilting in the heat. Wilting and waiting. We seem to occupy a timeless space, he and she and I. Expectation hangs heavy above the River Esk. It hangs in all the five corners of the three pentagonal rooms of the Birdcage, fifteen corners in all.
Here are neglected Turkish carpets eaten with mold. Butterflies crumbling on their pins. Unlabeled pupae that will never hatch. My mother averts her eyes from those.
Only the river moves. It moves faster than ever—roaring and rushing, boiling over with the rotting offal of the entire city. It stinks to high heaven—stinks so badly even I can smell it, I who only provisionally can be said to have a nose.
The river is what reminds us that time is truly passing.
• • •
Leo—are you going out? Where are you going, Leo?
Pregnancy has heightened all my mother’s senses. She can hear my father upstairs in the bedroom, tying his shoes. She can practically hear him breathing, from any room in the house. She can sense, if it so happens, the acceleration of his heartbeat.
He does not answer her, but then appears suddenly in the turning of the stairs, unbuttoned, black hair raised up at the crown of his head in a careless, unintentional crest. Poverty has ungroomed him.
Just out to the shed.
Can’t you stay and read to me? Please, Leo?
If you like.
He is mild, does not resist, sits with her on the sofa, her feet (the toes like little pink shells) resting in his lap. He will read aloud to her from her Papa’s book even though she does not really want to hear it, because he knows (and I know, too) that she is afraid.
My mother doesn’t like to be left alone with me. Not since the day, a week ago Monday, when the midwife came and pressed on me, hard, with her bony, long-fingered hand.
Any day now. She’s a’most ready. A big, strong barne. Healthy.
She has prognosticated me. She a sinewy, grizzle-headed crone from among the cottages at the bottom of the cliff—not the same one who sold my mother the hellebore and juniper leaf, but one of that kind. Bony, adept hands. It is she who will yank me out when the time comes, when my mother gets tired of pushing. This is who will attend my birth instead of the surgeon. And there will be no chloroform. Leo and Clotilde cannot afford that.
Leo will avoid most of the screaming by retreating into his shed.
But this is not yet. Not yet. For now he holds my mother’s feet on his lap, the ankles swollen but the toes still small and pink as ever, the soles delicately lined, heels calloused and dirty because she has, of course, given up on shoes as well as on clothes and because there is nobody to wash the floors anymore. A thin, grim layer of grease coats everything now.
Maybe it won’t come at all. Maybe it will stay in there forever.
This is my mother dreaming. It is her waking dream of timelessness, here in the crooked house above the river, in the summer heat, with the windows lit green by the vines of climbing roses. And it nearly seems possible—nearly. That I will never be born. That she will hold me inside forever, will stop time, through sheer strength of will, because she is afraid to let me out.
She is afraid, of course, that I, whom she wanted so badly to kill, will rip her to pieces in the process of being born.
My father says, gently, It will come.
He still loves her, you see. In spite of all.