His last name shall be his father’s name.
His second name shall be his grandfather’s name.
His first name shall be a name for his ownself, but unknown to him, all those fathers before his grandfather live in this name. That is something a mother has the power to do to her son. Anyhow I am going to be a terrible mother; my son has raised the alarm. He is desperately pushing my stomach away from him.
On Monday I wake up and spend about an hour in alternation between vomiting and breathless whimpering; with tap water I rinse away far more food than I could have eaten. I am afraid to open my mouth and taste air. Air tastes like grease; air tilts my stomach until it spills yet more. I prop up my legs on the closed toilet seat and lean my head against the sink so that the bathroom is holding me. At some point Aaron comes and ties my hair up in a high knot, rinses my face, gentle, with warm water. For some reason he checks the whites of my eyes. Then he wraps himself around me and hugs me, hugs me. He goes away when I mutter “Go away” and vomit over his shoulder.
On Tuesday I buy a pregnancy test, and two blue windows have me wincing; they tell me my son is coming.
He is coming, yes, out of my inconsistency, my irregular approach to pill popping, which bores me.
He is coming, my son, from an inaccurately remembered chat about the rhythm method in sex education lessons at my Catholic school. The Church doesn’t want the rhythm method to work, of course it doesn’t. Babies, hurray, and so on.
My son. I don’t even know where I got the idea of him from. When I was five I discussed him with Mami, and because I was years away from having a period, she laughed and humoured me, suggested names, until I seemed to forget about it. I didn’t forget about it, I just didn’t talk about it. I realised quickly that people would think I was crazy if I seemed too convinced that I was due a son. But I just knew. I fast–forwarded over the process of getting a son
(I had vague ideas about one day having to do something large and bloody, put my eye out, or split my forehead open)
and instead I just had my boy, warm, alive, walking beside me, gaining strength from me. He was full of laughter and he wanted me to be happy and so I was.
My brother Tomás was born when I was nine, and I loved him straightaway, curiously and wholly in my imagination, with the kind of affection that one doesn’t touch for fear of breakage. Because he was a quiet baby and gave my parents less night trouble than I had given them, I watched Tomás for cot death when my parents were asleep. Sometimes Tomás saw me. I wonder what he saw—a big face flitting over him, mouth open for suction, searchlight eyes picking out his breath. I wonder if it seemed I had come to kill him. Babies are not trusting. Tomás mewed at me the first few times I broke sleep to visit him, then he just watched me back, or slept.
Tomás was in no way my son. He designated himself Papi’s son—I think the real reason why Tomás learned to walk was because of his need to keep track of our papi. There are photographs of Tomás determinedly weaving along behind Papi, Papi slowing down and looking back, rapt, at this tiny beauty who places a firm hand on the back of Papi’s knee, gathering the trouser material into a peak in his fingers, not as a restriction but as a reminder. Papi would say to him jocularly, “Tomás, Tomás, T–boy,” but my brother wouldn’t respond to that kind of talk.
They thought Tomás might be autistic, but he wasn’t autistic.
He was just serious. Already he was serious.
Sometimes Papi and Chabella call Tomás “the London baby.”
But before Tomás, when Papi, Chabella and I were in our Hamburg house, I was a sleepwalker. I went to bed with everyone else, fell asleep, tottered in circles around the house and woke up to the sound of early–morning bicycle bells and wheels soft–shooting over paved stone. I woke wherever I had dropped in exhaustion—curled in a ball under the kitchen table with my long nightie dragged down longer and wound around my numb feet.
Mami took the opportunity to ask me if we had rats; she thinks that a house at night is a kingdom of rats. I wasn’t in any position to notice rats. But when I started sleeping normally, I remembered that two silent girls had been there with me when I sleepwalked. They never let me go outside, never let me take down the bolts Chabella so fastidiously fastened every night. The girls detained me with their small, fuzzy selves, embraces, smiles, their scent; we played hide–and–seek, but they were always easy to find because they smelled of Chabella. They were completely bald, heads smooth and deep brown, small–boned faces with eye sockets like vast copper settings for their frozen amber eyes. They saw me and their pupils dilated as if darkness had just fallen, as if I was their endarkenment.
Often the girls were wet, their clothes soaked through even when the weather outside was dry. I communicated
I think it’s terrific – absolutely first class! – and I worked in publishing for years. A purist would say there’s too much direct exposition (show-don’t tell what happened) and certainly a story has much more impact if so written – especially the beginning, where you need to grab your reader’s attention. However, if there’s some direct action soon, and if the plot matches up to the writing style, I’d buy it in a minute, just as it stands. I wish I knew your name – it would be nice to watch your progress and feel I’d played a minuscule part in your rise to fame and fortune! Heartiest congratulations!
PS: Keep your work secret – there are thieves about.