[Read Part 1 here : https://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/colic-part-1/]
[Read Part 2 here : https://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/colic-part-2/]
By this time, I was hungry, hot, and exhausted. Every second in the house left me more depleted. After foraging in the pantry and finding some crackers to stomach, I trudged like a vagabond around the house, warily climbing my way back into my room. I wanted my bag to be all packed up as soon as my mother arrived later. I made my way up the stairs as stealthily as I could. My body cringed with each creaking step, and I gave the nursery a wide berth as I passed it. I threw my clothes wildly into my bag, but just as I was about to zip it up, a sound came from the nursery that shook me to the very depths of my being. It was a preternatural scream, as if the heavens were being torn in half, and someone was being thrust into the gaping chasm between. It sent my soul out of my body, and I watched myself run, against my will, to the nursery door, my skin glowing hellishly in the room’s ever-reddening light.
I threw open the door to find Great Aunt Mara writhing on the floor, her entire body trembling. Falling beside her, I tried to prop her up a bit. Sweat came upon her skin like morning dew, providing whatever water it could to her dry, thirsting skin. Her belly bulged with some oblong shape, and I could just see the baby doll’s limbs poking out from the shawl.
And she wailed—wailed so much that the walls shook, as if every woman since Eve who had known the wretched beauty of bringing new life into the world were uniting their shrieks in disjunct harmony. I tried to ask her what was wrong, but every time I spoke, it only increased in her agony. So, I just kept holding her as she screamed and cursed and coughed and shook, praying desperately that each scream would be the last.
Then her face blanched as she was struck by a transcendent pain. She looked as if she had just seen a bright white light, her eyes swimming in her skull, and her arched back collapsed into the floor. Panting fiercely, she gave one last, shuddering cry and pulled out through the shawl the baby doll, looking at me as if she had just realized I was there.
“Why,” she asked, staring blindly at the ceiling, holding my hand weakly as all her strength trickled from her fragile body, “why isn’t she crying? Why isn’t she breathing?”
I picked the doll up carefully, looking at its lips that were always locked in that half-open look of surprise.
“No.”
“Why not?” she cried, her fresh tears mixing with her sweat, sliding together down her face in a steady stream.
“Because it is a doll,” I said flatly, placing it in her arms so she could see for herself. She could barely bring herself to look at it at first, afraid to accept the truth, but as she stared at the doll more intensely, she let out a long, uneven breath. She smacked her lips together, her face contorting as the briny sweat and tears seeped into her mouth.
“Crazy,” she began, kneading her sore legs with her hands, “that’s all you can see me as. I see how you look at me.” I had never imagined that behind those penetrating eyes was a person that might be perceiving my own glances. But the mirky water in her eyes became less clouded, and for a moment they gave me a clear, lucid window into her harrowed heart.
“But I am not crazy. I couldn’t be further from it, actually. I know what is real and what isn’t.” The sleeves of her shawl stretched far beyond her hands, and as she melted like a puddle into the floor, she looked smaller than ever.
“I was only playing a game,” she said, her eyes widening innocently with each word, “same as you. The only difference is that you are allowed to,” she sneered, rubbing her thumb across the bruise-colored mark on the baby’s head where it had been dropped.
“But you,” she hissed, reaching out her bony hand to cup my chin, “you are real.” My heart sank deep into my stomach as she crawled to the far corner of the room, setting the baby down in the white crib. She rummaged through a pile of toys until she found a dress to hold out before me. It was pink, ruffled, and identical to the one worn by the doll. But it was made to fit me.
“I wondered whether God would ever repay me for the years of suffering,” she mused, stroking the skirt of the dress, “or whether He just wanted me to be miserable. But now I know that he has finally given me my little girl.” She motioned to the white toddler’s chair, and the breath flew from my lungs as I saw the shaky scrawl written in stark, permanent ink on the back of the chair: VITA.
Her face glowed fiendishly as she basked in her self-created reality, conjuring it before my eyes as she whispered, “baby, baby, my baby.”
She stepped toward me slowly, still holding that dress as if to smother me within it. And with each of her steps toward me, I backed farther away from her.
“Please, please, my baby,” she stuttered, “just put on the dress. I made it just for you, see? Just put on the dress and sit in the chair, nice and still. Just stay, and I won’t have to be lonely.”
Desperation infected her voice, and her chest heaved rapidly. Startled, I took too quick a step behind me into the hallway, and I fell backward, hitting my head onto the hard floor. My vision blurred, and my head beat in tandem with my panicked heart, but I refused to cry. I would not be her baby.
But it was then that, with unfounded dexterity, she pounced upon me like a feral cat. She pinned down my arm, her bony fingers pressing sharply into my skin. A sick, frenzied smile spread across her face as she tried to put the dress on me with her other hand.
“Children never know what is good for them, do they?” she claimed as I tried desperately to wrest my arm from her. She hovered over me menacingly, her breath hot and stale. But then she faltered, her ribcage seized by her heaving cough, and I managed to raise my foot to her sternum, kicking her just hard enough to break free. I scrambled to my feet, ready to sprint to my room, but as I glanced quickly behind me, I saw that she was pummeled by the blow, lying eerily still in the hallway.
“I didn’t mean to hurt—”
She clasped her hands over her ears at the sound of my voice. Throwing the balled-up dress into my room behind me, she followed it with her eyes as it unfurled in the air, landing limply on the floor beside me. Then she half-walked, half-crawled back into the nursery, her limbs slipping out from under her with each motion. Sliding the baby doll by the leg alongside her, she then hurled it into my room as well. I flinched as it narrowly missed by ear, whistling by it until the bare wall behind me stopped it short.
“I—I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I tried again, “but…I’m not your baby.”
And at that, she pulled at her shawl with unfounded strength, tearing her garment in a biblical show of anguish. She howled with wild abandon, her shrill caterwaul filling the air until her breath petered out and she was down on all fours, desperately lapping up all the air she could.
I tucked my head into my chest, turned my back to her, and locked the door behind me. I looked on as the family next door peeked through their windows into ours, curious as to what the source of those horrific sounds was.
Then all was quiet. The wrathful storm had finally passed, and I heard her tread meekly toward my door, jiggling the handle in vain. The scratchy sound against the wood told me she was sliding her shawl-covered back down the door, holding vigil outside right there on the floor. A certain heat welled up in my room as her body blocked the fresh air from coming in below the door, and I knew then that her loneliness was not one of sad, cold isolation. It was a loneliness that smoldered fiercely inside of her, that loathed the world for denying her joy and hated me worse for denying her my own self. And it was a heat that was desperate, desperate to make something else warm.
“O God,” she said, her voice barely reaching my ear beneath the door, “O God, what a hand I’ve been dealt.”
***
Sometimes, after watching a movie, someone can get a dreamy look in her eyes, as if the images of the film are still flickering somewhere inside of her. But then she blinks, and a certain somberness cuts through the fantasy. Her eyes adjust to the light, and she remembers that her life is not that of the characters once before her. My mother, Peggy Ann, still had this look in her eyes as she came back from Aunt Silvia’s house to get me. I watched from my window upstairs as the station wagon chugged its way over the gravel driveway. My mother approached the porch steps warily, the silver streaks in her hair shining more prominently in the midday sun than they did just a couple of days before. A knock at the door, and I heard Great Aunt Mara suddenly groan as she got up off the floor and made her way downstairs. I waited a moment, then followed her down the stairs. And I understood. We would pretend that none of this ever happened.
“Thank you so much, Aunt Mara,” my mother began, mopping her brow almost as soon as she walked in the door. She went in for a hug, but instead my great aunt turned away, walked into the kitchen, came back with the spindly remains of the orchid, and shoved the pot into my mother’s open arms.
“It refused to live with me,” she insisted, catching my eye as she said it. My mother giggled at first but looked down in mourning at the shriveled stalk with just one stubborn petal hanging onto it, each breeze from outside threatening to blow it away.
“Well,” my mother continued, pulling me to her hip, “I would love to stay and visit longer, but my husband will be coming home tonight and will want a nice dinner ready.”
She did not smile, and she did not frown. She made no movement to hug us goodbye but only nodded, casually draping the halves of her torn shawl over herself as if they were one.
“Say thank you,” my mother commanded me.
My great aunt looked at me, and I at her. Her eyes narrowed into thin slits, but through the narrow curtain opening I could see everything. I saw red hot loneliness, past and present, blur into one, the noxious mixture swimming within her eyes. I saw lovers leaving and babies dying. And just as happiness started began to surface, it was snuffed out by a thick layer of betrayal. All that fury had to go somewhere, and as her eyes suddenly relaxed, I felt a scalding heat travel up my body, tingling in my nerves and burning through me from within. She had harbored an eternal pain inside of her, and now it would live within me forever.
“Thank you,” I had to say, uncertain of this feeling I was carrying inside of me as my mother ushered me into my car. And her eyes stared at me through the window again just as they had the first day while my mother backed out the car. She was still in the window as the pale-yellow house faded into the distance, and she could still be standing there with that same spiteful look in her eyes for all I know.
The car rattled its way back north, back home. With each hour, the air around us felt cooler, but my skin was still hot to the touch. About halfway through the drive, my mother stopped adjusting herself in her seat and turned quickly to the backseat.
“Honey,” she sighed, “you forgot your doll, didn’t you? Well, maybe we get you another.”
“I don’t want another,” I insisted.
Looking out the car window, I watched as the scorched, brittle ground yielded to a soft blanket of grass. Wildflowers dimpled the earth, but just as soon as my mind could register them, the car had put an immeasurable distance between us. And as I watched them get swallowed up by that inaccessible past, I wondered how long it would be until the field would fall barren.
[Image Credit : Photo by Amit Rana on Unsplash]
Marlene Elaine Brasco is an undergraduate student at the College of William & Mary. She seeks to highlight the rich nuance found within everyday life in her work. Aside from writing, she loves reading, baking, and spending time with her family and her chocolate Labrador retriever.
