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Mother and Child
by Rebecca Levin

A female octopus is a selfless mother.  She lays her eggs and so marks the last months of her life.  Protective, she hovers around her brood, gently fanning water over the pearlescent beads.  As they swell thickly like transparent chains of grapes, she grows grayer and thinner, transmitting life and love in soft, sweeping motions.

​

She won’t eat anymore.  She has a more important duty.  The most important duty.  Thousands of them, each as precious to her as a single child.

  

An octopus gives birth only once, and she cares for those babies with every pulse of her three hearts.  I gave birth twice, but with one heart there wasn’t enough love to go around.  

​

*  *  *

​

The first time, I was twenty-five.  I hadn’t planned to have children; teaching second-grade was fulfilling enough.  My mom never pressured me, either.  In a way, I was her beloved grandchild, born after her enchantment with aquatic life, her joy in jellyfish and horseshoe crabs.  Then Randall Norton sauntered along with his blonde hair and quick smile.  He stared into my eyes with such intensity that I let him in, never considering that he might be trying to see his own reflection.  “Randy” ran off soon after with some blonde waitress. 

​

“I’m sorry Randall left, honey.”  My mom’s voice crackled over the phone.  “But you’re strong and you’ll make the best of this.  If I could, I would wave my magic wand and take away the pain.  Unfortunately, I lost that old thing in the attic years ago.”

​

“You mean Dad?” I asked, trying to contort my trembling lips into a smile.

​

“You know, I was wondering why I hadn’t seen him lately!  He must have given up trucking.  If he’s going to be home now, I guess I can’t tease him about being married to a single mother anymore.”  That coaxed a genuine smile onto my face.  My dad’s trucking job had taken him away from the house so often when I was growing up that my mother had practically raised me herself.  It must have been hard, but I never heard her complain about it.  In fact, she loved to bring it up, laughing merrily each time.  Whenever she did, my dad would scan the room until he caught sight of me, then declare exaggeratedly, “I have a daughter?  If I had known, I would have charged you more for rent!”

 

Thinking about my parents’ love brought me spiraling back to Randy.  

​

“Was it obvious that we wouldn’t work out together, Mom?”

​

“Sheila, the choices Randall made make me think that he never saw a “we” in the first place.  I admit, I don’t like the way he acted towards you – anyone who treats my daughter like a toy to be picked up whenever he wants isn’t worth the air he breathes – but it wasn’t a decision I could make for you.  My job is, has been, and will always be, to support you in whatever you do.  Unless you decide to become—”

 

“An axe-murderer.  I know, I know.”  With a sigh, I began to relax.

​

Weeks later, I was stunned to find out that Randy had left a part of himself with me.  My mom, however, was overjoyed, and she insisted on making the two-hour drive down to visit immediately.  The next morning, she regaled me with familiar stories about her own pregnancy.

 

“I was scared out of my mind, you know – young mother, husband rarely home.”  She reached for the pepper and sprinkled some on her eggs.  “But I told myself ‘Barbara, if male seahorses can handle hundreds of babies all alone, then so can you!’  Pass the pepper, please.”

 

“It’s right where you left it, Mom.  You just used it.”

​

“Did I?” She frowned, examined her eggs.  “So I did.  Anyway…what was I saying?”

 

“Seahorse dads,” I supplied obligingly.  My mom was notorious for losing her train of thought.  Not so much the pepper shaker, but this wasn’t her kitchen.

 

“Right, yes.  Well, one night, I called Frank while he was on the road, because—” 

 

“Frank?” I interrupted.  “Don’t you mean Joel?”  Frank was my mom’s dad, and every other time Mom had told this story, she called my father.

 

“Joel?”

 

“Your husband.  Mom, are you O.K.?” 

 

“Of course I’m fine, stop frowning at me.  And pass the pepper, please.” 

​

Wordlessly, I reached across the table and tapped the shaker, which stood exactly where she had left it.  Mumbling an excuse, I rushed out of the kitchen to call my dad.  He showed up the next day to take Mom back home.  She called him Frank again when he opened the door.

 

I couldn’t afford to take time off.  All I could do was sit next to the phone each night for weeks, waiting for my dad to call about another incident, another visit to the doctor.  

​

Dementia, it was decided.  

​

I put on a brave face for my students and spent night after night in conference calls with my dad and assisted living facilities.  Half the time, I was too nauseous to pay attention to the numbers and buzzwords being bandied back and forth.  One day, I passed a billboard featuring a smiling mother and daughter above an orthodontist’s phone number.  My throat constricted, and I had to pull over to the side of the road because I was sobbing so hard that I couldn’t see. Two weeks after Mom had been moved, I finally gathered the fortitude to call.  

 

“Hello?”  

​

“Hi, Mom, it’s me.  Sheila,” I added after a pause.  I couldn’t escape the lingering fear that she had forgotten me.

 

“Well, it’s about time you called,” she said playfully.  Normally.  “What kind of daughter doesn’t attend her own mother’s house-warming party?”

​

“I’m sorry, I just can’t afford the time off, Mom.”

​

“Do they make you live in the school now, then?  I thought you might visit after work.”

​

“Mom…I haven’t had the time to make the drive,” I hedged.  I had been too scared to make the time.  “I have a lot of prep work to do for testing season.”  I barely stopped myself from adding “you know that” and hastened to something more like the truth.  “Besides, I’ve been tired and sluggish recently.  I wouldn’t have been any fun at a party.”

​

“I understand,” she said brightly, and I started to choke up.  “Get plenty of rest, and don’t forget to eat well.  You’re chewing for two, after all.”

​

“What?  Who else would I be…”  Nausea rolled through me, and I reached a shaking hand towards my stomach.  I had spent almost two months radiating worry out to her.  Now I could feel a strange weight under my fingers.    

     

*  *  *

​

The octopus huddles away in a cave with her eggs, a world within the vast ocean.  I imagine colors and textures run riot on her, three hearts’ worth of rapture bursting forth to bloom just under her skin.  What does she think about these progeny she’ll never meet?  Undulating in the cold ocean dark, she plans for sleepless nights and wonders how she can possibly hug all her children with only eight tentacles.  Will they have her eyes?

​

Indistinct months pass, time dragging her along.  She has imagined tens, hundreds, thousands of futures for her children and regarded with quiet delight all the futures she knows she cannot even begin to imagine for them. 

 

*  *  *

​

Yet, as my belly grew, my heart shrank.  My mom’s mental condition kept declining.  I spent each week worrying about her and each weekend shoving my fear aside to make the two-hour drive to visit.  The woman who had birthed and raised me was vaguely pleased when her new friend “Shelly” arrived.  There was nothing I could do for her, no magic cure, but I drained myself anyway.  When my protruding belly and sensitivity to motion precluded the drives to see her, my mom and “Shelly” became phone-pals.  

 

Then she died.

​

I fell into a waking coma.  After a few days, my strong, stoic father called me, voice shaking with grief, to talk about his wife.  I forced myself to talk about her, to help him – to help us – find a new normal.  The one we arrived at was less lustrous, more prone to brooding silence than before.  Habit carried me to and from school each day.  I worked around my stomach, forcing down food, trying to keep the nausea at bay.  I could smile almost naturally again.  

​

One day, I went to the hospital instead of the school.  But I was convinced that the baby I received after hours of pain wasn’t mine.  A tuft of nearly transparent hair lay plastered to his skull, and I tried to remember if I had ever known anything important about Randy.  I named the boy Nathaniel and politely held him, but knew that I didn’t love him, that I couldn’t love this child.  Like a parasite, he had sucked up the resources I needed for my mom before ripping his way out of me.  What right did he have to cling to my body heat, to try and nurse?  

 

A tiny hand waved in the air, miraculously small fingers flexing.

​

Remorse chased repulsion away.  Nathaniel was not a parasite; he was a baby.  Existing was the only thing he knew.  He would grow up to be a sweet ball of energy, like my second-graders.  I could juggle raising him with caring for myself emotionally.  I had to.  So I lay there, haunted by the feeling that a stranger’s child was squirming in my arms, waiting for someone to rush in, apologize for the mistake, and take him away.  

 

No one did, so Nathaniel still lived in my apartment six years later.  I had initially tried to engage him by showing him pictures on my mom’s camera, reminiscing about the trips we had taken on her birthday to the huge aquarium in the city.  We roamed in delight for hours each year.  Once, my dad had been home on her birthday.  She had told him that he could take her out to a nice dinner if he wanted, but he wasn’t allowed on our special excursion.  Stooping behind Nathaniel at the kitchen table, I would loosely embrace his booster-chair and murmur in his ear.  Lost in a wistful daze of better days, I rambled on and on, gently moving his little fingers away from the camera screen whenever they got too close to my memories.  After a few attempts to touch the brightly colored fish, he clung to my hands instead.  

 

As Nathaniel grew up, he often disappeared inside the apartment for long stretches, only to reappear as quietly as a ghost.  I was often discomfited when he was in the same room, on edge when he wasn’t.  We filled the apartment – me, Nathaniel, and my uncertainty.  I started taking weekend walks with him, if I didn’t have mountains of grading.  There was plenty of room underneath the sky, but Nathaniel always put a little extra distance between us. 

​

One spring weekend, we walked to the park.  I wanted Nathaniel to go swimming, visible within the concrete boundaries of the pool behind the playground.  But when we arrived, a chemical company van was parked across the entry lane.  A figure crouched at the pool’s edge.

 

“Excuse me!” I called.  “Is the pool closed?”  The figure startled and turned around.  Adjusting the cap nestled in his brown curls, the man walked towards us.  

​

“Yes, sorry about that,” he replied as he approached the gate.  “We’ve been called in to redo the chlorination system before summer starts.”  Catching sight of Nathaniel beside me, the man grinned.  “Hey champ.  You taking your mom for a walk?”  Nathaniel twisted his hands behind his back and stepped closer to me.  

 

“He’s a shy kid,” I said hurriedly.  I reached out to tousle Nathaniel’s hair and was embarrassed at how tangled it was.  His hair was lighter than Randy’s, a pretty silvery-blonde.  Nathaniel seemed to like growing it out, but he didn’t brush it enough.  I was going to have to comb it for him again when we got home.

​

“Listen, don’t worry about it.  Story goes, I wasn’t properly socialized until I was a few years older than he is.  My mother swears I had a speech delay, but one day, I started speaking in paragraphs.  To her dismay, I haven’t stopped.”  The man smiled, adjusting his cap again.  His eyes were kind and I smiled back.  Idly, I wondered what it sounded like when he laughed. 

 

“What does your dad think about having a chatterbox?  Mine used to try and impose a word limit on me.  I started using longer words instead.”  I chuckled.  “I don’t suppose I’ll have to do that for Nathaniel.”  The man (“David” according to the tag on his uniform) didn’t laugh.  He pulled his cap a little lower over his eyes before answering.

 

“I…Hard to say, honestly.  My dad…well, let’s just say he wasn’t around much.”

 

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”  I broke off as Nathaniel shifted under my hands.

 

“My dad’s gone too.  He left,” Nathaniel said quietly.  I looked down in surprise.  Nathaniel normally said “please” and “thank you” to strangers if prompted, but not much more.  Now he was staring solemnly at David.  David looked taken aback, but, adjusting his cap, he knelt to Nathaniel’s height on the other side of the gate.

 

“I guess that means you’re the man of the family, too, huh?  You taking good care of your mom?”  Nathaniel didn’t answer, just kept staring.  He seemed stricken.

 

“He does his best,” I said.  David shot me a quizzical look.  Nathaniel stirred under my hands again, but his face was placid when I glanced at him.  “He’s well-behaved,” I explained lamely.  No matter how kind his eyes, David was still a stranger.  I didn’t even know how to explain my family dynamics, though part of me wanted to try.  We chatted for a few more minutes, and then David went back to work and we went home.  I sat Nathaniel on the floor and carefully finger-combed the knots out of his soft hair while he leaned against my legs.  

 

“There, finished,” I announced.  He slowly got to his feet.  “Make sure to run a comb through it every now and again, or this will keep happening.”  Nathaniel nodded.

 

“You’re still smiling,” he said.  Curiosity curved the statement into a half-question.  He reached out to touch my face, but I got there first.  To my surprise, he was right.  

 

I began to take Nathaniel to the pool more frequently.  When David’s work there was done, we stopped pretending our meetings were accidental.  We swapped childhood stories: his dad’s presence in the form of an alimony check, my mom’s “married single mother” joke.  Once, while I was gushing about sea turtles, I noticed him smiling at me.  There was something so gentle in his expression that I faltered and became aware of my heartbeat.

 

“You light up when you get passionate, you know?” he said.  “Like there’s magnesium sparking behind your eyes.”

 

“D-don’t be ridiculous.”  I hurriedly looked around for Nathaniel, even though I knew he was sitting in the shallow end, swaying with the current like an anemone.

 

“I’m serious, Sheila.”  David reached for my hand.  His grip was cool and firm.  Randy had always held me by the shoulder or waist.  I curled my fingers around David’s.

 

That weekend, David came over to the apartment to chat with Nathaniel.  Sequestered in my bedroom, I perched on the edge of the bed and stared at the paper containing a partial lesson plan.  Part of me wanted to join David and Nathaniel in the living room, but part of me didn’t want to hear what Nathaniel might’ve said.  When David opened the door, I sprang up.

 

“How did it go?”  

 

David sat on the bed and took my hands.  

​

“Pretty smooth sailing.  I told Nathaniel I wasn’t trying to replace his dad, which he ignored, and he asked if you like me.  I said, ‘I certainly hope so!’, but he didn’t react to that either.  Serious kid.  Intense, too, like the world was at stake.  I guess it is, when you’re that age.”  I squeezed David’s hands a little harder than I meant to.  David returned the pressure gently.  “I told him you do like me, and that I would do everything in my power to make you the happiest woman alive.  He got this odd look on his face at that, like some mental wires had crossed.”  David paused.  “I think I got the same way when my mom would mention getting a boyfriend, but I wasn’t anywhere near as mature as Nathaniel back then.  I never considered that she could have me and still feel alone.  Anyway, I told Nathaniel that you dating me didn’t mean you weren’t still his mom, like how carbon-13 is still carbon, just with an extra neutron hanging around.  I’m not convinced he understood the analogy, but he nodded solemnly.”  A small smile crinkled around David’s eyes.  “We’ve been given the silent seal of approval.”  Laughing with relief, I moved into David’s arms.  

 

It didn’t take him long to see the disconnectedness between Nathaniel and me.  I think it hit David close to home, because he kept dreaming up weekend activities for the three of us.  When it became clear that Nathaniel and I were skilled at dancing around each other, David tried to organize “guy time” instead.  Nathaniel refused point-blank to get his hair cut short, even though it still got so tangled sometimes that I had to finger-comb it.  He did, however, allow David to take him to the library and to the grocery store on occasion.  Recently, David had begun pushing me to “connect more” with Nathaniel.

 

Almost a year after we had begun dating, David took me outside on his way to work.

 

“I know what Nathaniel’s going through, Sheila,” he told me earnestly.  “I lived it.  Without my dad around, my mom was my world.”  David fiddled with his hat.  “But the two of you, you’re like pieces of a broken bone that didn’t set properly.  Maybe you can use the field trip to the aquarium today as an opportunity to heal.”  His blood-blind devotion touched my heart, but I blew out a frustrated breath.

 

“David, I know you mean well, but I already raised Nathaniel.  I may not have raised him perfectly, but your constant attempts to force us together have gotten overbearing.”  I gave David a perfunctory hug good-bye, which he returned with a quiet apology, before walking back inside. 

 

“Come on, Nathaniel,” I said briskly.  “I don’t want to be late for the field trip.”  Nathaniel stared at me from the kitchen chair where I had shown him my mother’s pictures.  There was a strangely serious cast in his dark eyes.  As the car rolled through the dawning of a spring day, I kept glancing at him in the rearview mirror.  David had bought a booster-seat for Nathaniel, but I always piled my school materials on the passenger seat.  It was better this way: Nathaniel had the luxury of the whole backseat to himself.  Our silence was thick and heavy.  I was already flicking the radio button when movement from the backseat caught my eye.  Nathaniel closed his mouth as the news came on.  When we arrived at the school, I deposited Nathaniel with his teacher and prepared for my own class to trickle in the room.  

 

During the bus ride, I tried brainstorming ways of reaching out to Nathaniel, but I hadn’t thought of any when I crossed the aquarium threshold.  The damp air inside smelled vaguely of fish and old memories.  I hadn’t been to an aquarium since my mom had died, and the need to find that lost magic overwhelmed me.  The momentum of the knee-high waves painted on the walls carried me through the tiled rooms.  I searched behind the buzzing tank of multicolored seahorses, past the lidless rectangle housing a nurse shark.  These were familiar species, but they weren’t the animals whose pictures I had shown to Nathaniel.  Despite all the transparency and open space, there wasn’t any trace of my mother.    

 

Weak-kneed, I leaned against a wall and stared past the PTA moms milling about.  Endless waves rolled silently around and around and around the room until I became dizzy with their futility.  The moms began to throw probing glances at me.  This was not the time to mourn.  Pulling on a bright smile, I joined the students clustered around a nearby tank.

 

“Now, what do we have here?”  I asked.  I ignored the informational sign classifying the violently bright, flat fish as discus.

 

“Some disk-fish!” a boy piped up.

 

“That’s right!” I said.  “These little guys look like an ancient game-piece called a discus because they’re so flat and round.  Can you imagine seeing CDs swimming in a river?”  The crowd of second-graders shifted as they jockeyed to get next to the glass.  Nathaniel was jostled to the edge.  I paused, smile hitching slightly as David’s advice rushed back to me.  “Nathaniel, why don’t you go look at another exhibit?”  If  I reached out, I didn’t want to embarrass him by doing anything in front of his classmates.  He turned his dark eyes down, and silently drifted to the nearby octopus tank.  Some of his classmates glanced at each other.      

 

“Miss, why couldn’t Nathaniel stay here?  Did he do something wrong?”  One of the girls in his class glanced back and forth between us.  I cursed internally.

 

“No, dear, he’s not in trouble.”  I hesitated, finding a fitting lie.  “He knows this already; he doesn’t need to listen to me repeat it.”  I clapped my hands together and injected my voice with excitement.  “Now, did you know that mommy and daddy discus feed their children by secreting fluid from their skin?”  The students murmured furiously, poking one another and examining their fingers as though expecting them to be sticky or wet.  

 

“Miss, what’s ‘seecreet’ mean?”  It was Nathaniel’s classmate again, ponytail bouncing as she shoved her friend’s hand away from her face.

 

“Good question.  ‘Secrete’ means that the parent fish create the fluid inside their bodies and it comes out through their skin.  It’s like if your mom and dad fed you their sweat.”

 

A horrified babbling rose from the students and I laughed.  They wouldn’t forget that information anytime soon.  

 

The students poured into connecting rooms, shepherded by adults.  In the relative quiet, the girl’s question about Nathaniel echoed in my mind, stifling my amusement.  David often told me to treat Nathaniel like one of my students, to start small until I could handle something more.  He was now the same age as the children I had been teaching for years.  I had never managed to pull it off.  My heart beat a little faster every time I thought about what that might say about me.  

 

Nathaniel hadn’t moved from the octopus tank.  I wandered over with feigned indifference and stood adjacent to him.  The octopus floated to the glass to meet me, scarlet with interest.  The three of us were alone.  Silver-blond hair unlike anything in my family tree spilled over the gaping neck of Nathaniel’s overlarge coat from the clearance rack.  The coat hid a thin frame wearing a white shirt, outgrown since the last shopping trip.  The fingerprint-smeared glass smudged him into even greater insubstantiality.  He caught me looking, caught my guilty gaze in his deep, dark eyes.

 

“Mommy,” he whispered, and I shuddered.  It was involuntary, full of self-reproach, but Nathaniel dropped his eyes before he could see the regret bloom on my face.  After an unbearably long moment, he spoke again in a hoarse whisper.  “The sign says mommy octopuses spend months taking care of their babies before the babies are born.  Did you do that with me, even though I was on the inside, where you couldn’t see?  Did you ever forget to love me?”  His words tumbled out, like drops from a melting icicle, glittering with the raw, startlingly brutal honesty only children can wield.

 

I blinked rapidly, staring at the octopus climbing on the rocks without seeing it.  How could I answer Nathaniel and satisfy David?  How do you explain to a seven-year-old the choice between being a mother and caring for your own mother, when you hadn’t made a conscious choice?  How do you make him understand the years you’ve spent staring into the chasm between the two of you, no hope and too much fear preventing you from jumping?  Nathaniel shuffled closer, a small hand peeking out from the depths of his coat to hover near my sleeve.  I kept my gaze on the mottled reddish mass of octopus and held my breath.  

 

“A mommy octopus can always see her babies,” Nathaniel said, trying again.  His voice quavered with tears, then became insistent.  “And she has lots.  I bet it’s O.K. if she forgets to love some.”  I knelt, my face close to the glass.  

 

“I didn’t forget you,” I lied, facing my blurry reflection as I spoke to him.  “I couldn’t, not with you growing inside me.”  Would Nathaniel feel better if he thought I hadn’t forgotten?  What would David want me to say?  The octopus turned curiously towards me.  I looked into her goat-pupiled, iridescent eye and tried to imagine loving a thousand offspring.  

 

Her self-assured gaze ignited a twisting anger in my gut.  Her love, no matter how intense, must get diluted, spread across so many offspring that each one only gets a precious, glowing grain.  Meanwhile, I was struggling to nurture a single speck.  Before I could stop it, the rage bubbled up and exploded from my lips in deceptively quiet words.  

 

“An octopus separates her eggs from herself, so I’m sure she forgets to love her children.  Why do you think she doesn’t care for them after they’re born?”  Tears of frustration burned behind my eyes as I strode away, haunted by the octopus’ intelligence.  How could a creature with a gaze like that act so foolishly?  How could this octopus gamble hundreds of chances, when I had lost everything with one try?  Behind me, Nathaniel pressed his hands and ragged bangs against the glass.  An empathetic double pressed against him in mirror form.  Drops of saltwater fell, and slid down the glass around the water, like unable to mix with like.

 

Nearly a decade flowed by.  Our routine had indeed broken that day, but I had little hope that we had set properly.  Nathaniel became even more diffident.  Reproach and pain seemed to echo in his silences, and he retreated deep inside himself, pushing David and me together.  Eventually, we married and bought a house.  I framed and hung the photographs my mom had taken until sea creatures populated the walls. 

 

When I realized that life was quickening again inside infrastructure worn with age, I panicked.  My father was no longer alive, so I wasn’t worried that my pregnancy would give him dementia.  But Randy had left before becoming a father.  And Nathaniel…I couldn’t stomach a repetition.  I perseverated for days before sitting David down in the living room.  Twisting my wedding band, I wondered what words would keep him from leaving.  

 

“Sheila?  Are you O.K.?  Is Nathaniel alright?”  His voice was sharp with concern. 

 

“Yes, sorry.  It’s just…well…David, I’m pregnant.”

T

he room was silent.  “David?”  

 

“Sheila, that’s fantastic!”  It was his turn to pause.  “How’re you doing?”  David’s brow was furrowed in sweet concern.  I chuckled at my irrationality.  David had married me almost ten years ago – he wasn’t going to abandon me now.  Or Nathaniel.   

 

I had lost my chance with Nathaniel, but now I could try again.  I would channel everything my mom had given me, everything I had failed to give him, into this new life.  New purpose grew inside me, and I remembered that octopus’ eye.  I understood her gaze.  The love for her thousands of babies welled up and distilled into certainty that this child was mine.  

 

“Good.  I feel good about this one.”

 

As my belly grew again, my heart kept warming and expanding.  I was lost on waves of joy, swept away by a riptide of maternal devotion.  My child would reciprocate my love: I knew it in my marrow, knew the message of love was strengthened as it wafted through my blood to mix with the blood of my child. 

 

*  *  *

 

For the octopus, the day dawns at last when her eggs are swollen and ready to burst.  Sunlight doesn’t penetrate down to her rocky nest.  In the darkness, she waits, as I waited.  Her wasted tentacles dutifully push water over the eggs, since this time they’ll hatch, after this round of oxygen, or this one, one more, just one more.  

 

Buffeted by the mother’s frantic movements, the eggs disgorge their charges.  I imagine whitish flakes peel off and swirl, an underwater blizzard.  Her keen eye pierces the debris, but lights on no babies.  The eggs were never fertilized.  In a convulsive gesture, she sends her children out into the ocean.  As their pieces scatter and settle, having learned everything they could of life, she reaches out, regretful, anxious for just one scrap, one memory to clutch to her chest, but she is too weak.  Too slow.  Too tired.  Too desperate.  Too afraid.     

 

*  *  *

 

I lie in a hospital bed, drowning in sterile sheets and her deep shame.  Somewhere in this hospital is a box as full as the octopus’ cavern and as empty as her eggs.  The contents are undeniably mine: the body-heat we shared for seven months is dissipating through the building.  Yet I can’t bring myself to confront the somber-faced nurse and demand that she retrieve the delicate proof of my failure.  I have given birth twice now, but I am still not a mother.

 

*  *  *

 

A female octopus dies after her offspring leaves the nest.  She does not weep, does not grieve, does not begrudge her children the lack of time together.  She simply completes her duty.  

 

Did the octopus ever, deep down, in her most central heart, have any inkling that she wouldn’t be allowed to have a relationship with her children?  Surrounded by soft carnage, does she regret laying the eggs?  Resent all the time she spent doting on them? 

 

I imagine that she dies from the inside out, a huge contraction beginning in her hearts.  

 

I will bury a single body, but two hearts.

 

Unlike her, I only had one.

 

*  *  *

 

Several days later, I awaken from dreamless sleep to the waking nightmare of another morning.  The continued existence of the world, of myself in this world without my child, is noxious.  I want to fall into a rage, but my emotions have congealed.  I stare at the emptiness in front of the ceiling for a lifetime.  

 

The box knife I used to unpack another picture frame lies on the bedside table.  I imagine tracing the veins in my arm with it, lightly scraping the skin until it itches so much that the only way to quench the sensation is to press harder.    

 

I hear the front door open.  The box knife sits heavily in my hand, enticingly sharp.  Nathaniel quietly calls to me.  He says it’s past time for the funeral.

 

A sardonic rictus-grin pulls at my face.  Past time, indeed.  

 

Nathaniel calls to me again, gently.  He says David needs me.  He says she needs me.

 

At the mention of the child I lost, guilt spasms through me.  The box knife clatters to the floor.  Moving with the jerky composure of a marionette, I toss off my pajamas and pull on a black dress and scarf.  Stumbling out of the bedroom, I miss the hall light-switch, so my mom’s pictures remain heavy with shadow.  They seem to hang askew, tossing me with odd angles to the front door.  A picture at the end of the hallway doesn’t feature aquatic life.  In it, my mother sits, beaming down at the bundle in her arms.  Her radiant bliss pours out of a youthful face in faded sepia.  An empty frame waits on the opposite wall.

 

Nathaniel stands in the doorway, shaggy silvery-blonde hair stark against a black suit.  He starts to speak, but I cover my mouth and nose with the scarf and stagger past him through the front door and the frigid air to collapse in the car’s backseat.  We shouldn’t make her wait.

 

He drives.  Snow begins to fall.  We arrive at the graveyard fifteen minutes late and decades before I will ever be ready.

 

The box containing my heart is lowered into the ground.  I try to retreat inside, but the grief pierces me like icy wind and takes up residency in all the scarred and hollow places.  

 

David stumbles away from the grave, sobbing for the daughter he never knew.  I haven’t moved, haven’t looked away from the small patch of earth signaling my failure to all passers-by.  I can’t bear to be reminded of what I lost, and yet I can’t tear myself away from what I almost had.  I try to apologize to her, but tears tear at my throat, and the result is a hoarse, keening wail.  A figure moves quietly to stand slightly apart from me.  Snowflakes swirl between us.  

 

“It hurts you, too?” Nathaniel asks quietly.  “The guilt?  Realizing it was your fault, even if you were powerless to have done anything?”  I can’t bring myself to speak, grief blocking any words.  The wind picks up.  Tangled locks of my hair toss between us like white-streaked, reaching feelers.  I raise my hand to adjust my scarf; I feel a brief warmth.  Our fingers have brushed together.  Looking down, I realize that his hand is hovering near my sleeve.  His fingers are not as small, but somehow still as delicate, as they were decades ago in the aquarium.

 

“That day, I realized it was my fault you don’t like me,” he continues.  “I thought David could make you happy instead.”  He finger-combs his hair back into place.  “But you’re sad again.  Does that mean you forgot to love her while she was on the inside, too, Mom?”

 

*  *  *

​

I imagine the contraction begins in the octopus’ systemic heart, a disembodied tentacle gripping it with all the crushing force of her anguish.  Her blood stops circulating.  The phantom tentacle reaches for her two branchial hearts, greedy to stop the oxygen flow through her gills.  Her eyes glaze with joy betrayed and world-weariness.  

 

A new current brushes by.  One egg, overlooked in the chaos of death revealed, has broken open.  A tiny life, her image in helpless miniature, bobs lightly among the settling carnage.  The mother octopus watches her baby swim out of the cavern.  Hope and new loss flood her, tinging her skin and washing away the grasping extensions of the phantom tentacle.  It still grips her systemic heart as she drags herself to the edge of the cavern, following her child into open water.  She should be dead, but the love that sustained her through foodless months keeps her animate, though she is crippled and withered. 

 

*  *  *

 

Snow lands on the ground.  A realization bursts through me like a sunbeam through storm clouds.  Our eyes meet.  I hold the connection as long as I can before my tears blur everything.  How many years has it been?

 

I leave the graveyard holding hands, awkwardly, with my child.

 

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