Page 72 - WTP VOl. X #6

Spiraling (continued from page 34)
belly. And now after—meaningless days of waiting for signs, of dodging Pete’s friends and their parents, of working overtime and making extra trips to the gym, all in an effort to distract herself from thoughts of her son whirling around in limbo. There is nothing in between these two crucial sections of time: before and after.
“Is he tall? Thin?” Maggie’s head and neck jerk, as if waking from a dream. She leans forward, up on her elbows.
“You see him?”
“Something...someone is coming, yes.”
“Is it him? It’s Pete?” Now that they’ve called him in, she isn’t sure if this is a mistake. What would her Catholic family call this? An abomination? Is her self- ishness dictating Pete’s fate? She used to be so cer- tain about her life, her choices. I want a career where I am helping people. I want to create a home where my child will always know comfort, a family that doesn’t rip one another to shreds. And now, the only sentence she is certain of: I want my son back.
“Just try to relax. Breathe,” Charese says. Maggie lies back down, attempts to still the voices, to practice ujjayi breath, which she’s learned in yoga. In through the nose, out through the mouth. A son is meant to be with his mother, she tells herself. One way or another.
“I can’t quite make him out. Remember what I said, about a question. Or a message. Have you come up with anything?” Charese asks.
The smell of sage permeates the room. Maggie wants to know where he is. If he still has opinions and con- sciousness. If he is going to be okay. But it’s as if she’s having one of those dreams where she is trying to tell someone something urgent, but is unable to articu- late it; she opens her mouth to shout, but no words will come. Say something, she tells herself. Something that matters.
Maggie knows the grief of not being able to have a child, and the grief of losing one. Before she became pregnant, when the doctor told her, “It’s going to be difficult, but not impossible,” she envisioned and idealized all she might never experience—first steps and first words, the way children gaze up at their parents as if they are the only people on the planet, the secret keepers of all universal mysteries. When she beat the odds, and her belly expanded, her fears about what she would miss out on fell away, dis- solved into the atmosphere like forgotten regrets
scattered throughout decades.
When Pete was a toddler, and she took him to the nursery at her gym, the children used to line up outside the aerobics studio, so she was able to see him through the wall of glass. She’d read his lips as he waved, said to his tiny friends: “That’s my mom.” No one else in the world had ever been that pleased to see her, and no one would be again. And now, she is forced to endure a deeper heartache than the pos- sibility that she might never meet or know her child. That a glimpse of him in the room of a psychic is the closest she’ll ever get to seeing him again.
“I had him. But he vanished,” Charese says. “Vanished?”
A tingling, a cross between static electricity and pins and needles, rises from Maggie’s feet up into her hips. Her legs begin to fall asleep while her mind races. She has a sensation of wanting to hit herself in the mid-section, to cause her body physical pain; she isn’t sure where it’s coming from, but it accelerates with each moment. She considers what it would be like to punch herself, to wail on her face and chest. Deep into the pit of her stomach. She wonders if this is the way the young cutters she encounters at the hospital feel—filled with the desire for their agony to be tangible, to wound themselves just enough to make an imprint. She wants to split and sear into her own flesh.
“Pete will come back. When it’s the right time. We have to be patient. We have to be open.” She isn’t sure why Charese is acting as if they are going through the same thing—as if she has stepped inside Maggie’s grief and is experiencing it firsthand, through her own senses. How could she possibly know?
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