Katherine L. Hester 

Bunting

The first time, she was in the middle of a dream—but dreams were so obvious, one couldn’t resort to the shorthand of dreams to explain things. He was sleeping beside her, he wasn’t dreaming at all. What was there for him to do but wake up, and then, later, to sit beside her on the chilly floor of the bathroom and hold her hand in his?

“It’s just… tissue.” She shook off the dream-memory of her outstretched hand grazed by little fingers. She had the power to snatch her hand back; she would never bother to tell him. “It’s nothing.” They went to get groceries and after they put them away, they went to a movie. 

That was the first one. 

※

The nurse said it was fine to treat oneself to a bagel, but what she really wanted was ice cream. Her body insisted on itself. She bought nondescript clothes in black stretchy knits to obscure the ways it kept changing. No one who worked with her wanted to acknowledge the obvious, which was that her job was the sort that women seldom came back to. Which way would she jump? Every day she sat in the break room, twenty-two stories up, and read a magazine while she picked at the salad she’d brought from home. Her view was of a green triangle of park, the chess-players who sat along its periphery no bigger than ants. A vendor hawked souvenir t-shirts announcing allegiance to sports teams. A stream of people ducked under an awning into Starbucks, then reemerged with their hands full. 

The nurse said this would happen, and then that would happen, an orderly progress. The city spread beneath her had been wrung out by summer. The sun glinted from the surrounding towers, bright prisms of light refracting from the white sidewalks. The baby drummed against her ribcage. An orderly progress.

※

One morning he called her at work, saying something about a plane and a building, saying she should find a television set. She’d picked up the phone automatically as she was walking into a meeting with her supervisor. A plane? A building? “Can’t talk,” she hissed, hanging up. The longer she talked to him, the greater the risk that her supervisor, who never had time for meetings, would lose attention and pick up his own phone. And then—poof!—no meeting. 

“Something’s happened,” she realized out loud, sitting across from her supervisor in his office. 

Yes—but elsewhere. The building where she worked wasn’t very tall but the tallest building in the city stood right beside it. The supervisor who seldom had time for meetings sent everyone home. The building where her husband worked wasn’t very tall either, but what took place inside it was important enough to the running of the city that his superiors sent him home. 

Her body continued to insist on itself. The baby elbowed her as she turned sideways and sidled through the office workers clogging the sidewalk, when she pushed past the t-shirts that drooped on their hangers in the vendor’s stand. It gave her a pinch as she blindly put out her hands to press through the turnstile into the station. 

Even the vendors had begun to shutter their kiosks. The man with the frayed cardboard sign who sat in the atrium above the trains, who knew how everything connected, was shouting about airports. Her husband ended up on one train; she ended up on another. On hers, a man with dreadlocks talked on and on, on a cell phone. Everyone else in the car listened, their faces blank. Maybe he could explain things? 

What did they know about sorrow? It all happened elsewhere. She walked into the house and dumped her purse on the floor and pointed the remote at the television set. 

A crumpled bag on the platform meant his train was held up on the track. When he finally opened the door, she was still in front of the television set, still wearing her work pumps, still clicking from channel to channel, still looking for the single sentence that might explain things. 

He slipped the remote from her hand and set it on the coffee table with a click. “Why don’t we take a walk?” he suggested. 

※

There were still pockets of land that the city had forgotten to inhabit, where trees still met overhead and creeks still scoured upended flagstones of granite. Little pockets of land, where English ivy ran riot, where something lived in the hole halfway up the clay bank. Little pockets of land, evidence the city had forfeited its right to actually be a city. The real city was somewhere else, a place where people were waiting for trains that never came, for loved ones who, they began to realize as the day unfolded, would never arrive home. All the planes had been ordered out of the sky. The air over their heads trembled with absence. As they walked down the sidewalk away from their house, they saw the flickering blocks of television sets in front windows, one after another. 

“We should go back.” She stopped, stricken.

He put a hand to her elbow and steered her forward.

It was that time of year when the temperature pushed the mercury in the thermometer up—but really, it had lost enthusiasm for the whole enterprise. The sunlight was such a tired eggwash. It had stopped holding up its end of the bargain. “I’m sorry,” she said. All day she’d reminded herself that his first thought had been of her. Her first thought had been that she couldn’t let whatever seemed to be occurring allow her supervisor to weasel out of looking over the expense reports in her hands. Was pettiness really going to be her response to tragedy? And if it were, what kind of mother would she turn out to be? They walked one block, two, in silence. Past the low-slung glitter of the elementary school and the still-life of its empty baseball field, white-lime stripe against green lawn beside it. 

On the far side lay a stretch of vacant land where custom had worn a path through matted blackberry bramble and kudzu and privet. He hesitated at its mouth, then started down ahead of her, heel-to-toe, like someone who knew what he was doing. 

Trees grew in the low spots, spindly, inelegant trees neither of them knew the names of. The trees on the vacant land were not the sort of trees people ever loved; they were more just the kind that sprang up on land nobody wanted. It flooded when it rained, it was located over a brownfield, it was too difficult to build on. For whatever reason, nobody loved the vacant land, although they had all walked their dogs and jogged through it so long they considered it theirs. He reached for a whip-like branch and held it up so she could duck underneath it. The leaves overhead flared up, suffused with green light. “Look.” 

But it was too late. The light had changed.  The trees had gone a diminished gray she knew ought to send them homeward. But what was there at home besides the insistent flicker of the news? If they kept to the path, it would lead them up a clay bank and spit them out on the sidewalk less than a block from their own house. They would be standing in front of it in less than fifteen minutes. 

Pat pat pat, went the little hands, fingering her rib cage, as they resumed walking. The path skirted an ancient magnolia. Shadows had thickened the space underneath its branches. “Let’s sit,” she said. “Just a minute.” She sank down, surprised to find she was panting.

※

People said instinct would take over. But then again, people also said she needed to pack a bag in advance for the hospital, that she would need low light and a CD of soft music and a photograph of something she liked, to train her eyes on, and lip balm that smelled good, as well as a bandana, to keep her hair back. And a plan, for how things should unfold. 

The second time, she had not gotten around to any of these things, she had forgotten her hairbrush in the console between the seats of their car, parked in the garage next to the hospital, and the baby had come anyway. They’d driven there in a precautionary sort of way, because her due date was not for another three months, and as soon as the nurse cranked up the hospital bed with her in it, she’d started to want her hairbrush. If she just had it! She started to cry. He said he’d run back out to the car for it.

The baby had come, and gone, by the time he got back and stood by the bed clutching the plastic bag printed with the name of the pharmacy across the street.  The second he’d walked out of the room, he’d realized—he had no idea where in the complicated parking garage, across which pedestrian bridge, around which corner, on what floor, he’d parked their car. So he’d walked across the street and just bought her a brand-new hairbrush. 

She hated that hairbrush with all her heart now but had used it that very morning. It was her hair shirt; it contained both the question and the answer neither of them could ever utter: What did we know about anything?

※

As she sat on the ground under the magnolia, her knees hugged to her chest, he paced toward her, away, his eyes on the ground. He was gathering sticks. It had been one of those days that balanced itself on the knife-edge between summer and fall, when at the last minute, the light just went, like the flicking of a switch. She shivered. 

He squatted beside her and began to arrange the sticks he’d collected. The magnolia’s broad leathery leaves were doing a good job of keeping out the last of the light. She couldn’t make out the expression on his face, just the intent tilt of his head. 

There were three sorts of fires you could build, everyone knew that.

“Teepee, log cabin, or lean-to?” she asked. Was it an accident, that the structures you could burn were also structures you could live in? They had debated which might be the better one since their earliest days together, when they pitched a two-man REI tent in hard to reach places. It seemed like a long time ago, maybe another life. He usually relied on teepee style; she liked the idea of a log cabin construction, the arrangement of kindling like Lincoln Logs that never worked outside the pages of her old Girl Scout Handbook. 

He stood and patted down his pockets, pulling out a book of matches. She watched him touch one to the tinder at the heart of his construction. Why on earth was he walking around with matches? How could so many things about the people you loved remain secrets? He rocked back on his heels and watched the sparks eddy upwards. There was a rustle, overhead. The fire had startled an owl roosting above them. Who cooks for you? it asked. Who cooks for you? 

※

It was folklore, of course, to think that what you looked on might somehow mar you. Just as it turned out to be an old wives’ tale that you needed hot water. At one point she turned her head and threw up neatly into his cupped hands like an animal as he crouched beside her, and like an animal, he disregarded that, and helped her how he could. Earlier in the night that had meant straying from the circle of firelight for more sticks.

Now the fire had transformed itself into a seething red mat of embers. He sat cross-legged beside her, stroking first her hair, and then her fingers. There had been a single bad moment, there at the end, that quick, slithering spill before which they were helpless, his fumbling hands, the way she had gone mindless and dumb. The fire had flared up just as he set the squirming bundle on her chest and she had shrieked and shrieked at the slick red glisten of it, it has no skin, no skin, none of us will ever survive this.

She would never, not for the rest of her life, be able to forgive herself for the way she had called her baby it, in a second’s-worth of instinct that would remain her most terrible secret. The baby had stiffened and shrieked back at her as if it could sense that momentary hitch of reluctance in her heart, as if the cord between them could never actually be severed, as if her daughter really had been born wearing her skin inside out and, because she was the mother, she was the one to blame for this unbearable life, for the way it would never stop making her daughter feel things. 

All that had been bad, but it had just been for a moment. He jumped up and clawed his white t-shirt over his head and now the baby was wrapped in it, and snugged to her chest, taking her rightful place. 

In the middle of everything, she’d been conscious of a shadow moving overhead and had known that the owl roosting in the tree above her had left for his night’s hunting. Now it was—not dawn, not yet, but night had loosened its hold enough that she could make out a little. He slumped beside her, his hand in hers. Every few moments, she felt the twitch of his fingers as his head bobbed, down, down, and then jerked back up again. The baby at her chest snuffled wetly. Everything was coming back into focus. The owl’s outstretched wings were a sudden gray smoke coming closer, gliding in, banking, until it came to roost on a branch above her. The ground where they lay was littered with magnolia seed pods, furry and mouselike. The baby had worked one tiny arm loose of the swaddling t-shirt. 

What would it be like, to stay here forever? She could just creep away in the dark while they slept and come back with handfuls of tomatoes snuck from neighborhood gardens. If they stayed here, they’d never have to crack the shell, of early morning.

The baby flung out one arm. Frightening herself, she whimpered. 

Looking for a rabbit skin, to wrap my baby bunting in, she bent her head and sang. So soft and fine and luxurious! A second skin, to shield them from all the possibilities the world might dream up.