“Flying Carpet” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

The surgeon holds out a gloved hand, palm up, and says, “scalpel.” He makes a smooth, long, incision across my wife’s belly, below the umbilicus, and above the pubic hair. Skin spreads. The thin layer of fat glistens yellow. Small red dots appear along the edges of the skin. One spot blossoms larger, and blood trickles into the incision. The surgical assistant touches the spot with the electrocautery pen, and there’s a tiny blue buzz, and a small puff of smoke. The incense of burned blood.

The latex gloves have smears of red, but not enough to make them slippery. The exact and silent movements of the surgeon and assistant become more urgent. They dissect and tug. Grip and cut. Down through the muscles of the abdominal wall, grasping, stretching, and digging quickly, down to the hard purple muscle of the uterus. Then there’s a pause, followed by a low transverse cut, and a gush of clear fluid that sloshes out across table. The room is quiet, save the slurping sound of the surgeon’s hand plunging into the belly, up to the wrist.

The surgeon gropes around, blindly finds the head, and then pulls upwards, wrestling the baby out through the wound.

~

Sally is in a bed in the recovery room. I’m standing next to her. They’ve taken the baby somewhere. Dr. Gage[1] pulls the curtain open, and the guides in the aluminum track make a clicking, clattering sound. He’s taken off his OR hat, and his forehead has a red arc across it. His green scrubs have dark sweat stains under his arms.

“I checked on the baby,” he says “Congratulations. She’s beautiful. She seems healthy, had great APGAR scores.” He pauses. “She has two small heart murmurs – probably a small VSD and a patent ductus.”

Sally and I are both medical people, so we understand – two small holes in the heart.

I take a deep breath. Maybe it won’t be too bad. The VSD may close on its own. Same with a patent ductus.

Sally turns her head a few degrees to the side, keeping her eyes on Dr. Gage.

“We’ll get an ultrasound of the heart,” he says. “Make sure.” His voice is gentle and clear.

“And?” Sally says.

“She has Down syndrome.”

Sally shrieks. Fists at her side, neck veins bulging, she takes a big gasp of air, and screams again.

Sally’s wailing fills the room. Her face is ugly and red. Cracked lips open wide.

My heart beats fast. I lean down, and place my forehead next to hers, hairline to hairline.

She continues wailing.

I keep my head touching her head. Her screaming is full throttle.

Her gasps for air become more frequent.

I close my eyes.

~

A nurse brings the baby into the recovery room, to feed.

“Do you want to hold her?” the nurse says.

I shake my head.

Sally reaches out. “Hello, Sarah.” Sally’s voice is musical, and hoarse from the screaming.

Sally grabs the bottom edge of her gown, pulls it up, and tucks it under her chin. Her breasts are swollen and heavy, with faint blue veins visible through the pale skin. “Let’s see how we do,” she says.

The nurse watches as Sally grasps her breast.

“Farther back from the nipple,” the nurse says. “Sarah needs to get a big mouthful.”

Sally holds Sarah close, and brushes the baby’s cheek against her nipple.

Sarah opens her mouth wide, like she’s yawning, and Sally pulls her into her body.

Sally smiles.

“Like a pro,” the nurse says.

I let out a pent-up breath.

Sally looks down at Sarah. In oil paintings of the Madonna and Child, the light is soft, and the shadows softer, and breastfeeding looks peaceful and quiet; it suffuses a radiant calm. But surrounded by the pastel stripes of this too-bright cubicle, this meeting of saliva and skin, milk and tongue, is a slurping, grunting, air-whistling-through-the-nostrils affair. And it’s a cold bright light that shines down on this baby.

~

It will be twenty-two years before I cry for my daughter like Sally did. It happens while I’m at a writers’ conference working on this book. I’m in a workshop taught by Nick Flynn, a writer I have long admired. He assigns an exercise in which we cut our manuscript into chunks of text – actual paper and scissors – and rearrange them. The empty spaces are supposed to open up our minds. At first, it seems precious – gimmicky. But Nick’s writing is so brave and clear, I decide to give it a try: see if it works.

We’re at The Atlantic Center for the Arts, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. About two miles inland, the Center is a small cluster of buildings, all redwood siding and angled rooflines jutting into the sky. The buildings seem to float in a sea of plant life – the spiky fans of palmetto palms, wild magnolias, scrub oaks and Spanish moss. The illusion is enhanced by the weathered wooden walkways between buildings. Without the waist-high railings one might expect, they look like piers, jutting into the lush green foliage.

Our workshop meets in a small and narrow library, with two walls of books, and two walls of windows. For this exercise Nick has arranged for us to use one of the artists’ studios. It’s a large open room with a concrete floor, natural light, and five long tables splattered with paint, giving the place a Jackson Pollock feel.

I start out calmly enough, laying out two rows of blank paper, stark and white against the reds and blues and yellows of my workspace. I glance around, and my classmates are all busy cutting and taping. I enjoy the summer-camp feel of the activity – the absorption of scissors and tape.

I cut several paragraphs free, and spread them out onto the pages. They look like chunky fortune cookie slips. So much white space and so few words. I glance at my classmates’ work. They have more pieces of text, and they are all busy moving the pieces around, rearranging them. My pages look bare. I turn to Nick, who is pinning pieces of a poem onto a wall. “Can we use pictures?”

He turns. “Sure. Whatever helps.” Turns back to his work.

I go to the computer center, and print off pictures of the things I’ve been writing about. Three portraits of John Langdon Down, the “father of Down syndrome.” He’s wearing a frock coat and a black bowtie. Two photographs of Jerome Lejeune, the scientist who first discovered the extra twenty-first chromosome that causes Down syndrome.

I print out the karyotype that Sarah’s geneticist gave me after she was born. It’s an eight-by-ten photograph of her chromosomes all lined up two-by-two, except for the twenty-first chromosome – it has three. I print a snapshot of Sarah, dressed up as a wicked princess for Halloween. Another photograph of Sarah, 22 years old, living in a group home. She’s sitting between two framed movie posters – one with Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor skipping forward in yellow slickers, umbrellas twirling – Singing in the Rain. In the other, Audrey Hepburn poses in a slinky black dress, neck encircled with diamonds and a tabby cat, black gloves all the way up to the elbows – Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I place these pictures on the near-blank pages, and step back from the table. Stare at the pages. Try to let the process work. I lean forward to jot a note to myself in blue ink on the white page. Stare some more.

The picture of Sarah’s chromosomes entirely fills the page. I lean down and write, “This picture looks so big. So real.” I look over at a snapshot of Sarah. It looks so small there, askew in the corner of an empty page. It hits me that from the day she was born, I’ve seen a diagnosis instead of a daughter. This strikes me like a bolt of lightning splitting a tree. I feel as if something in my chest has been riven – my aorta torn away from my heart, or my trachea ripped free from my lungs. I do not know my daughter.

I feel tears coming. I leave, pushing thorough the door of the studio, and out into the sun. I make it partway down the unrailed walkway. But this feeling in my chest is too big to control. I jump down into the bushes, pushing alongside a building, the branches scratching my face, vines catching my feet, crying, and sobbing, till I come to deck, a bare platform without railings. I stop and wail. I am undone. Unhinged. Bereft. I hear my howls swirling out of my body and into the air. The shrieking finally slows to sobs. I become aware again of the sand under my feet, and the thicket I’ve stumbled into. I take a gulp of air. The breeze is soft against my face. The trees sway gently.

“Are you okay?” I hear someone call from the walkway, a disembodied voice coming through the tangle of plants.

“Yes,” I call back. I take a deep breath. “I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” I say. “Thanks.” I hold my breath. I don’t want anyone to see me.

I hear a few footsteps on the wooden pier, and then a door in the building I’m standing next to open, and then close. Fuck. I’ve been wailing right outside someone’s workshop.

I blow my nose on my fingers, and sling the snot into the bushes. I wipe my fingers on the cuffs of my jeans. Wipe my face and cheeks with my shirtsleeve. I feel empty inside. Clean.

I push through the bushes back to the walkway. No one is there. Good. I climb up onto the walkway. Find a bathroom. Splash my face. Dry it.

The studio is empty: they must’ve gone back to the library. At my table, I stare at the photograph of Sarah, and gently straighten it on its page, glad that it’s not too late. My daughter will forgive me. It’s the way she is.

I walk back to the library. The group is sitting around the table. Nick looks up.

Thought we’d lost you,” he says. “Did you go to make more copies?”

“No,” I say, gesturing outside. “I was needing to cry.”

He looks at me and nods, as to say, “that sometimes happens.”

I feel calm and expectant, like that glittering moment right after a thunderstorm, when the trees and sidewalks and streets have all been scoured clean, and new. I’ve been given a second chance.

At lunch, Nick walks up with his plate and silverware. “Can I join you?”

“Please.”

“Mary Gaitskill’s workshop heard you.”

I wince. “Sorry.”

Nick waves it away. “She thought it was an animal caught in a trap.”

“Not far off,” I say.

“You’re in the middle of it.” He takes my shoulder and gently shakes it. He smiles. I feel as if he is welcoming me into a new place.

“Yup,” I say. It’s Sarah’s shorthand way of summing up a complicated truth. I am eager to get home. Get to know my daughter.

Paul Austin’s first book, a memoir, came out in 2009 “Something For the Pain: One Doctor’s Account of Life and Death in the ER” (W.W. Norton) and received a starred review by Library Journal. The Boston Globe called it “a stunning account of the chaos of the emergency room.” He has attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference as a contributor, a waiter, a scholar, and a fellow. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Discover Magazine, The Florida Review, The Gettysburg Review, Creative Nonfiction, Ascent Magazine, The Southeast Review, and turnrow. “Cry Like My Wife” is an excerpt from Paul’s upcoming book, Beautiful Eyes, which will be published in late 2013 or early 2014, by W.W. Norton.

“Spirit Sisters” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

The first question on late spring mornings is this: Can we go barefooted? We look out of the living room window. The porch and front yard are still shady, but spots of sun stipple the grass. An old woman across the street sweeps her sidewalk, but it’s early; there are no kids outside yet. Our mother calls us into the kitchen and tells us to sit and eat. The room fills with the rhythmic whoosh of percolating coffee. Down the hall, we hear our father shut the bathroom door and turn on the shower. While we chew and slurp from our cereal bowls, I try to get glimpses of the backyard as Mom moves between the table and the storm door. The yard is yellow with light. The grapevine curls around its arbor and the bush in the far corner is in full leaf. Can we go barefooted?

We are sent to our room to find clothes, as few as possible, which we pull on in a hurry. We are told to brush our teeth. When we return to the kitchen, the bowls have been cleared from the Formica dinette set to make room for Mom and Dad and their cups of coffee.  In the window framing their heads, the persimmon tree moves in what I hope is a warm morning breeze. Mom looks up and briefly inspects me. With a dishcloth she wipes the last of the toothpaste from the corners of my mouth, and, using a formula that seems to include thermometer readings, newspaper weather forecasts, and perhaps an actual field test, she determines that we can go barefooted today.

I push the metal door handle and burst out of the kitchen. Molly and I run tiptoe down the steps, dropping our rag dolls on the rough concrete, push off the sidewalk and land in the grass. We stand for a moment caught between horror and delight as the late spring soil embraces our feet, sending chills up our shins. Here we pause, feeling the last remnant of the winter’s cold and snow, then we run to the jungle gym and climb the ladder, our toes curling around the warm metal bars as we reach for the trapeze or the white plastic hand rings. We swing through the air, dew drying from our soles and the crevices between our toes.

We tire of the swings and brave the wet grass again. Our feet are light, more like wings than paddles and so we dash around the perimeter of our universe: along the alley in back of our property, along the side of our yard adjacent to the Dennys’ weather-stripped, haunted house, behind our garage, up past the back door again, around the persimmon tree where the roots punish our heels, and then the length of the old grape arbor that is too shaky for us to climb. We relearn our world, where we are likely to stumble or twist ankles, as well as where the dog’s bathroom is.  We find patches of clover and ugly crabgrass, and the occasional thistle. Here and there are bald spots where, later in the summer, we’ll find ants coming and going as purposefully as the fathers in our neighborhood.

We stand on the step for a moment, the soles of our feet making perfect wet prints on the concrete. Molly’s are almost the same size as mine, even though I am older, almost done with first kindergarten while she can’t even write her name yet. We sit down, pulling our dolls into our laps, and I scratch at my ankles, where my skin is crawly with dew and the itchy memory of grass blades. Sunlight the color of lemonade finds its way around the small persimmon leaves, leaving spots on the concrete and grass around us. A couple of birds tussle in a branch overhanging the pastor’s side of the fence. In his kitchen we can hear plates and silverware being placed on a table, and the occasional rush of water from the faucet. Across the alley, some neighbor kids run outside and stand blinking in the sunshine. The back door slams behind them. Down the alley, a dog barks and another answers. The day has begun.

Molly’s rag doll has blond yarn for hair while my doll’s hair is dark brown. Otherwise, they could be twins. Both have felt eyes and velvet dresses over white bloomers we almost never make them wear. They are big girl dolls with rosy cheeks. Mine is older, like me, and likes to fly because she is a superhero, and so does Molly’s. Simply running with them does not work, we’ve discovered, for they hang limp in our hands no matter how fast we can sprint, and we are fast. Instead, I hold mine by her hand and spin just like a tornado. She flies at the end of my outstretched arm, her pink legs kicking in the wind. Molly’s doll flies, too; I catch glimpses of her blonde yarn-hair as I turn. I yell encouragement to my doll, and Molly does, too. The house and tree and yard flash by my eyes over and over again until I give in to the urge to close my eyes and tilt my head to the side, which makes me feel like I’m being tickled from the inside out with a little sick thrown in.

I turn a few more times until my knees give and I tumble into the wet grass. Molly, our dolls, and I lie there, behind the garage, catching our breath and staring into the sky, which is a lot like staring into a lake. Instead of darting fish and rolling puffs of algae there is an occasional jet, as slim and silver as a minnow, and the clouds, big enough to make their own shadows on the yard. From where we lie we could simply push off and dive right in.

~

My sister gave her notice the day before she died. A dark stocking cap hugged her scalp and a white hospital blanket puddled around her body. Well-worn socks kept her feet warm in the seasonless hospital room. My short-sleeved yellow dress and the evaporating warmth of the sun on my arms were the only indicators of the spring day that had opened like the dandelions in our lawns that morning. I sat in a chair right next to her bed, but reaching her was like talking to someone through a closed door. She wiped at her eyes with a tissue and tugged the blankets up under her armpits with a hand so thin her wedding set slid up and down the length of bone between her palm and the first knuckle of her ring finger. This is no life, she said. If I can’t get better, I’d rather die.

No you don’t, I said. But I knew she was losing ground. Watching her walk through the house during the past month had been like watching an unsteady toddler. She struggled to negotiate the single step between her utility room and kitchen, sometimes clinging to the wall with both hands for support, after she started the laundry. Her long legs were emaciated and skin draped across her collarbones into the hollow of her neck. Worst of all, she had nearly dropped the baby a few weeks earlier as she carried him to his crib, and since that time she had been terrified of holding him while standing. Instead she had to content herself with watching from the depths of her recliner as the rest of us swayed with Jesse in our arms. Her eyes followed us until the morphine overpowered her, and her restless hands fell still in a pile of crochet thread.

She never left her home alone now, this thirty-year-old woman who, five years before, had hopped planes on a whim and pointed her rackety hatchback in any direction that looked interesting.  This girl who was as likely to be in Chicago as Muncie on any given weekend, letting none of us know about her journeys until well after her return. Her travels within Muncie were just as adventurous, at least as far as I was concerned: Drum circles, dim living rooms full of smoke and philosophy, alternative rocker venues with gypsy friends—people with long hair and antique jeans—who moved through a haze of patchouli. People who traveled lightly and often.

Later I learned how she wept when Dad drove her to the hospital earlier that day. Even now, I cannot bear to think about this home-leaving—the last look around the place, the last shallow breath full of the smell of her new family, a last touch of the doorknob marking an entrance to the familiar and safe. The instinct to die privately is one even animals understand. None of us chooses to begin or end a journey from a strange place.

When I returned to the hospital early the next morning, I found my parents in the oncology waiting room wearing the same clothes I had left them in the night before, and I discovered what it means when an official-sounding voice on the phone tells you a loved one has taken a turn for the worse. I sat down on one of the upholstered foam sofa cushions and tried to feel my way around the tinnitus that reverberates in my head when I am confused or distressed.  I watched my parents, helpless with grief and sleep deprivation, and saw the shape of my family shift.

I drifted down the hall to find a phone. It didn’t seem possible that the sun could shine in the windows of the rooms that I passed. It didn’t seem possible that other patients in that ward could still be talking, watching daytime television, or breathing while my sister was cut off. Her door was closed and a white notice was taped to it to keep hospital personnel from bumbling in on mourners such as my brother-in-law, whose heartbroken sobs brought me up short. I ducked my head and kept moving toward a bank of phones at the end of the hall. There was weeping elsewhere, too, and later I learned a counselor was brought in to work with the nurses, who were also horrified by my sister’s death.  I was gratified by this, glad that even the professionals recognized this death as one worth noting in a ward where death is far too commonplace.

I was the last of our family to sit with Molly that day. I pushed through the door and entered, frightened as a child. Sunlight streamed through the bank of windows highlighting the scene of a struggle. Chairs crowded against the scuffed wall and the wastebasket gaped in its corner. The bed was askew.

I took the chair next to my sister and rested my forearms against the bedrail. I looked at her for a long time and I said her name. There was the face I had always associated with her name, and the hands, slim and well cared for. There was her nose, thin as a knife-blade, and the thyroid scar in the hollow of her throat. How many times had I watched her sleeping during our childhood years? How many times had I sighed loudly or elbowed her to wakefulness just to ward off loneliness in the middle of the night?

In three days I would reach my 31^st birthday, and after that would come the Fourth of July, and then Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The whole merry-go-round would spin in its place as it always had, largely insensible to her absence.  Yet, in those few moments at my sister’s deathbed I became aware of a silent universe surrounding the spinning calendar of seasons, birthdays, obligations, and family gatherings. Sitting as I was in the center of the rush and noise, I couldn’t make out much but the blackness of this expanse. Still, I knew it was there, just as I had felt the vast Atlantic at my feet the first time our parents had taken us to see the ocean. We had arrived late at night but insisted on going to the beach. Rooted in the sand, the wind teasing my hair, I could see nothing but blackness, nothing to separate the sky from the sea, the sea from the land. Now, as then, I crouched at the edge, peering into that swirling darkness beyond and wondered about the brave and marvelous beings that moved there.

The muffled scrapings and shufflings of the hospital staff seeped beneath wide door. Dust motes drifted through the light streaming onto Molly’s bed. The business of the day was picking up. Everyone, including my parents, who, God help them, had arrangements to make, was waiting on me. I looked around the room one last time for some sign of my sister, but I could see her body was as empty as a pair of overalls she’d unfastened and dropped to the floor before stepping away.

~

Night trains sometimes drag me up from that deepest, unknowable stratum of dream into the realm of the half remembered. On those occasions, I am as much girl as woman, still sister to a sister. We drive along the flat, sun-parched roads—Molly and I—after a late band practice, roads that have become narrower and darker throughout the summer as the corn walls rise alongside. Now and then the corn drops back to reveal a tired farm spread out before us on both sides of the road: Harvestore, white barn and weathered farmhouse, cows knee-high in muck, two dogs dashing senselessly at our spinning tires. I bear down on these places like a plane, and swoop past them, honking at the windows’ watery reflection of our dust-streaming car. Windows down, we sing along to Top 40 songs written just for us—beautiful teenage girls, fresh and full of everything the rest of the world craves. But we are flying down the road so quickly nothing but the sun can keep up with us. Even the songs themselves are gone before they have time to play themselves out. As soon as we are bored with the lyrics, Molly turns the dial to find something else. Our tiny forearm hairs glisten against our skin. Gravel thunks along the undercarriage but I slow down only for stop signs and the occasional oncoming vehicle.

The grill parts the late summer air in front of us, and the evening sun nestles into the woods in the distance. Molly twists the radio dial, settling on the a cappella voices of the Eagles. “There are stars in the Southern sky,” we sing. “Southward as you go…” The old song, older than we know, streams past us and I think about a road with seven bridges, one in the country just like this, where moonlight pools in the fields and time seems to hang like dew gathering on a leaf. A place a child would run to, a place we might run to, if need be. So we sing, our voices serious and full of meaning we don’t really understand: “There are stars in the Southern sky—“  Molly pushes a strand of hair off of her sweat-spangled forehead and jumps up to the harmony line: “And if ever you decide you should go/ there is a taste of time sweet as honey/ Down the Seven Bridges Road.”

In this way, we make an angular spiral toward home, following the derelict country roads in an ever-narrowing square until we find ourselves bumping down our own sticky blacktopped road. The light is on in the kitchen and our mother’s silhouette moves from stove to table. Sun gilds the tops of the catalpas, but night is already growing beneath them. We taxi up to the garage and step out onto the warm driveway with our shoes in our hands.

Elizabeth Dalton’s work has appeared in a number of literary journals, including PMS: Poem/Memoir/Story, Earth’s Daughters, New Millennium Writings, River City, Sliver of Stone, and Clockhouse Review.

Read our interview with Elizabeth here.