Shine Shine Shine (34 page)

She felt the bottom part of her belly tighten and a pain shot across her like a bolt of lightning wrapped around her gut. She clutched herself with both arms and crumpled up around her baby. She could feel the tightness of the muscles there; it felt like a rock. The pain twisted through her, stretched around into her back, and she found herself rocking back and forth and moaning. The nanny had taken Bubber to the pool in Maxon’s car. She could call the hospital, but how stupid.

She decided that after she opened the third envelope she would lie down, drink some water, turn on CNN, and take her mind off the baby. When the nanny got home, they would go to the hospital. She could wait until then. The contraction waned, the fist around her middle relaxed, and she took a deep breath. It was as if it had never happened, the relief was so complete. She wondered if it had really been that painful. Maybe she had been imagining things.

She slipped her finger under the seal of the small white envelope and ripped it open. There were two sheets of notepaper, penned in her mother’s spidery, formal hand. The first was addressed to Maxon, and the second was addressed to Sunny. She read the Sunny one first.

Dear Sunny,

It was so hot in Burma. I wonder if you remember. Yet you were always so cool in your little robes, you never seemed to sweat. I think it’s the hair on most people that makes them appear sweaty. Yet another benefit of your condition. The Chin people loved you, and they all wanted to bring you presents. I tried to throw all of their presents away when we left, but Nu saved most of that stuff and brought it with her when she emigrated. There are beautiful things, handmade things in the attic of the farmhouse that you may want to unpack and discover someday with Bubber and the baby.

I wanted to bury myself there in Burma, or evaporate myself. But when you came along, I didn’t want that anymore. I did what I did because I wanted to save you, to keep you from living in your father’s world. I thought that being in Burma would suffocate you, that being of a different race in addition to being bald there, and a zealot’s child, would make you so strange that you would have no chance of ever finding out who you really were. I worry now that maybe that is who you really were, that bald white baby under the mountain in Burma. What would have been your life, if we had stayed? I don’t know. Maybe I should have let you find out.

I don’t apologize for doing it. I want you to be happy, most of all. It is all I’ve ever wanted. From the time you were born, I was a mother first, and everything I did was for you. No one else mattered. I know you think that’s what you’re doing too, and I do apologize for railing at you over that damned wig. I’m just thankful for all the years you didn’t wear it.

Please don’t pursue Chandrasekhar and his witch doctor potion. He was a thief; he stole what he could of your father’s research. At one point, I tried to meet with him and stop him, but our lawyers told me there was really no point. It was such a small thing that he managed to pirate, and it didn’t work anyway. I promise you, it would not have worked. If your father had been able to develop it, maybe. But he died. I’m sorry for all of that.

Love, Mother

Sunny dropped the sheet to the floor and read the second sheet.

Dear Maxon,

I am going to die from whatever is wrong with me right now. There is something you need to tell Sunny after I am gone. I was the one who turned in Sunny’s father to the Communists in Burma. I am the reason that he was killed. Please do not tell her until after I am dead. Choose a good moment, when she is feeling well and has had something to eat. Tell her clearly and calmly, with no movement in your face. Afterward say you’re sorry, and hug her with both arms. Then give her my letter.

Love, Mother

“You’re a murderer,” said Sunny out loud. “You’re a murderer.”

She remembered the perfect face of her mother, the young pale face in pictures from Burma, so ruthlessly serene. She remembered her mother’s body on the farm, sharp like a blade, hand clutching a broom, or a hairbrush, or a handful of envelopes. The way she had looked when Maxon got his acceptance letter from MIT. She remembered the hungry look in her mother’s eyes when she looked at Sunny across the top of her glasses, the way she said, “Sunny, you can do anything you want in this world. Be happy. Be free.”

And then her water broke.

27

Sunny stepped out the door. The afternoon buzzed too brightly around her, all the salt in the water in the air crackling her skin, all the leaves refracting the sunlight into her eyes, the entire neighborhood twisting like an abdominal muscle in distress. She held the side of the porch railing, dragging her feet all the way around to the steps, and then she lurched down them one by one. She needed to keep moving during the contraction in order to avoid falling deep into the panic that was under it. There was a flow from her uterus; it gushed a little as her left foot hit the sidewalk, sending a trickle down the inside of her thigh. She gasped. The belly tightened around the baby, and her spine felt broken in half; in the back of her at her waist there was definitely a knife sticking in. She choked but could not cough, it had gripped her too tightly, and she tried to bend forward to relieve her back, clinging so tightly to the porch railing. From somewhere outside herself, she thought there should be a voice in her ear, telling her to breathe. Otherwise she would pass out. Then it subsided.

She left the house where she had lived.
It’s a monster house,
she thought.
We’re in it, we’re monsters, and we’re making more monsters.
It might as well have a bell tower and iron grates across the windows. It might as well have a stone dungeon full of skeletons and a gibbering aunt locked away in an attic. There would be a sitcom about them. In order for the plot to work, they had to live exposed as monsters. The Manns had been keeping undercover, under wraps. The grandma, a murderer. The father, a robot. The mother, a freak. The son, a danger. The daughter, who even knew? Now a newspaper story would be published. Or something like that.

She needed help.
I need help,
she thought. She couldn’t go, red-faced and straining, to her girlfriends. She needed a stronger arm, a more upright salvation. She couldn’t go down to the main road and lie down in traffic. No one would agree to kill her. She couldn’t go back and crawl under the bed, cry “I want my mother!” She couldn’t sob “Maxon, help me!” The only person she could think of that was stalwart enough to help her, that was unmoving enough to be of assistance, was Les Weathers. It was to his trim and elegant town house that she now drew her sagging body.

*   *   *

O
N
B
UBBER’S BIRTHING DAY,
everything was different. She woke up in the middle of the night with a contraction, firm and insistent. There was time to shower before the next one came, time to put on a wig before the next one after that. She tugged Maxon on the shoulder. “It’s time,” she said, just like the women said in movies and on television. “Maxon, it’s time.” He woke up, instantly alert.

“Okay. Let’s get Mother,” said Maxon.

“What? Do we have to?” Sunny said. “Can’t we just go?”

Maxon rubbed his face, pulled on his pants. “She came down here to see the baby being born. Don’t you think she wants to go to the hospital when you’re in labor? That’s where it’s most likely to happen.”

“It’s the middle of the night. She’s asleep.”

“We need her,” Maxon said. Sunny paused. She felt the strange thing happening in her uterus, and felt the foot of the baby roll across her belly just below her ribs. She would like to have her mother there, because she was such a strong supporter. However, her mother would not approve of the wig. She had been disapproving of the wig since the beginning of her visit, when she met Sunny at the airport and said, “Who are you?”

“Oh, fine,” said Sunny. “You get her. I’ll get ready.”

Sunny put on eyebrows, eyelashes, makeup, matching pajamas, a silk robe, and then sat looking at herself in the vanity mirror in her bathroom. She had experienced moments in her life when she realized that she was actually alive and living in the world, instead of watching a movie starring herself, or narrating a book with herself as the main character. This was not one of those moments. She felt like she was drifting one centimeter above her physical self, a spirit at odds with its mechanical counterpart. She stood up carefully. Everything looked just right.

“Is she coming?” she said to Maxon, who had come back into their room, and was putting on a shirt, buttoning it all the way to the top.

“Yes, she’s coming. She’s up.”

“Now you say, ‘I’ll get the car,’ and then you drop your keys, or, no, let me think. You can’t find your keys,” said Sunny, standing by the door, directing the
I Love Lucy
episode that Maxon clearly hadn’t seen.

“My keys are right here,” said Maxon. “Are you all right? Do you want me to carry you?”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Sunny. Her contractions were weak. “Offer to carry me, but I refuse. I say, this is perfectly normal. Perfectly normal. I say, women have been doing this since the beginning of time. And then you walk into a wall.”

In Maxon’s Audi, a car seat was already installed in the backseat, behind the driver. Her mother got in and sat behind Sunny, both hands on her shoulders. As Maxon sped toward the hospital down that empty street, Sunny cried quietly every time her body hurt, but she was excited, so excited to see the baby, and make sure it had been made properly. She felt she was on her way to receive an award. She was on her way to witness the results of all her hard work. Every time Sunny cried, her mother squeezed her shoulders. When they arrived at the hospital, Sunny threw up in a bucket.

“I’m sick!” she cried to her mother.

“It’s all right,” her mother said. “You’re doing fine. But this wig. Surely, you—”

“Don’t you dare take it off me, Mother,” Sunny growled, tightly curled around another contraction. She grabbed the bucket and heaved into it, bile and foam oozing out over her bared teeth. “You don’t touch me. I will put you out of the room.”

A doctor came and asked how Sunny was doing. She asked for an epidural. She asked for a towel, a mirror, and she dabbed at her face, pressing down her eyebrows, counting out the space between the contractions. She puked again, her stomach empty. The room seemed to swirl around her every time she vomited, and when it righted, she had to check that no one had removed her wig. She had to check that her mother was still there. Maxon had gone out into the hall. “Are you okay, Dad?” said the nurse. “No,” said Maxon. “I need to go.” The doctor did a pelvic exam.

“She wants an epidural,” said her mother. “Get it.”

Another doctor came in and made Sunny sit up and lean over. He stuck a pin into her spine, releasing a drug that caused her bottom half to go numb. Instantly, she stopped feeling the contractions. She stopped feeling anything. One more foaming heave, and she was done vomiting, too. Her body gave up, stopped trying to assert itself. It lay still. She closed her eyes.

“I’m cold. Get Maxon,” she said. “The vomiting is over.”

Her mother went out in the hall, and when they both came back in, Sunny had her handbag in her lap and was fixing her makeup, smoothing her hair. Knees bent up on the blanket, hair spread out on the pillow, she wondered if she was ready to become a mother. She pointed to a mirror lying on a countertop.

“Maxon, get that mirror. Stand down at the end of the bed and hold it up.”

“Dearest,” said her mother, “that’s for looking down there when the baby comes out.”

Sunny knew what it was for. That it was for watching the baby’s head emerge. But she needed to see the baby’s mother first, and make sure that the mother was okay. In the mirror, she saw a woman lying on a pillow, dressed in a hospital gown, about to give birth. The woman was flushed, the woman was wide-eyed, the woman was in all ways exactly what her baby needed her to be. Sunny looked sideways into the mirror so that her mother was in the picture, too, long glossy blond hair neatly tied in a bun, eyebrows perfectly groomed, a silk scarf at the throat. She looked at her mother inside the mirror and her mother looked back and smiled. Sunny breathed a deep sigh and lay back on the pillows. The mother put a hand out, as if to touch her on the head, but then drew it back, and patted her on the arm. Maxon put the mirror down.

Two hours later, everything was still perfect. Maxon had fallen asleep in a chair, and the nurse had turned down the lights in the room, saying that Sunny might as well rest. She might as well get ready to push, because the contractions were steady, and things would be moving along. They had punctured her water bag, and had stuck a little curved wire up into her, inserted it under the baby’s skull, where they could monitor his heart rate and humanity. They had wrapped another monitor around Sunny’s belly, so they could measure the contractions. Sunny saw the needles skip across the page, drawing on a paper which fed out from a machine beside her bed. She could feel her belly get hard when the needle skipped up a hill, and feel her belly get soft when the needle dropped back down. It was as if the needle itself were moving her muscles for her, and not the other way around.

She didn’t know if she could push, because she didn’t know what pushing would feel like. She poked absently at her calf, and felt nothing. She couldn’t move her legs. She tried to sleep.

The doctor came back in and felt around inside her, and told her she was ready to push. The lights in the room went up, Maxon was told to stand next to her head to count, and her mother stood on her other side, and held Sunny’s hand. It was all coming into place, every piece of the picture in order, and yet Sunny felt herself floating, drifting away, up out of herself. She tried to anchor, tried to moor herself in the body, in the physical fact, but it was too hard, and she kept rising up, like coming to the surface of the pool, something you can’t seem to stop yourself from doing. It was as if she had been moored to herself by her legs, and once they were numb she was free to drift, whether she wanted to or not. Don’t balloons get kind of scared, floating up through the sky above the grocery-store parking lot? After all, where are they supposed to go now?