Satisfied, feeling that he did know his mom just a bit better, he closed the journal and returned it to the shelf. He wheeled out of the room just in time to hear the key unlocking the door. His heart pounded and he felt lightheaded. He glanced back toward her room to check for evidence that he’d been there. He saw none. The door opened and his mom stepped inside. She had a brown paper bag and two plastic cups filled with green sludge.
“I got us scones, too,” she said, smiling. But then her smile fell off. Her mouth was a straight line and her forehead crinkled.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing, why?”
“You look guilty. Did you do something?”
“Uh, no. I just have to poop, I think.”
“Oh, ok, let me get you on the toilet,” she said, and put down the cups and the bag. She crossed the room, lifted him out of his chair, and carried him to the bathroom. She grunted when she put him down.
“You’re getting too big for me to carry,” she said. Marko knew she was trying to make him feel better. Even with the growth hormones he’d been taking, he hadn’t gained much weight. While the hormones had caused him finally to start puberty, and while his legs and arms seemed somewhat longer, he was still only 65 pounds.
On the toilet, he helped her pull his pants down and remove his diaper and he was embarrassed to see an erection there, between his legs. Where had that come from? He felt his face heat up and he started stuttering.
“It’s okay, it’s fine,” she said. “It happens, no big deal.”
But it was too late. Marko was crying and covering his penis. The feeling it produced in him was unbearable and insatiable.
“Honey, why are you sad?”
But Marko wasn’t sad. Whatever he was, he didn’t understand, and it was overwhelming enough to make him have to cry. His mother said nothing more. She looked at the wall over his head and bounced him on the toilet seat, waiting for poop to come out.
4. December 13, 2014: Cambridge, MA
Kalina sat in the office of the shrink. She couldn’t believe she had actually shown up this time. The shrink, clad in gray tights and a form-fitting skirt, came out through the plain white door and welcomed her in. The room was furnished from Ikea. Kali knew this because she loved IKEA. It was her favorite thing about America, even though it was from Sweden.
The shrink was not ugly and not pretty. Perfect for a shrink, Kali thought. She sat on a simple green loveseat couch unadorned with pillows, across from the shrink. The shrink asked Kali about when she came to America, so Kali told her about how she didn’t have money back home in Bulgaria, and how she got a job at the American Embassy taking care of military children. She learned about rice crisps and milk in a carton. One family adopted her as a nanny. When the mother’s sister had newborn twins, they sent her to the U.S. to help take care of them. January, 1999.
She landed in New York City. The age she had on her ID was 23. She felt nine.
The dumpy hotel she stayed in had a view of a brick wall. She marveled at the city surrounding that brick wall, vibrating with life and stinking of piss.
She lived in Swampscott and took care of the twin babies.
She stayed for eighteen months until she went to school. She received a scholarship for being foreign and smart and got a degree in psychoanalysis.
She got a job and made two hundred dollars per week.
In school, she met her ex-husband. They had similar values. Children, society, family, money. They were married when she was 26. He was 24. She got her papers.
She had an abortion after the first pregnancy and that destroyed the marriage. The second pregnancy was an attempt to save it. She didn’t show up for her 20-week ultrasound because she thought she was on top of the world. She gave birth on December 12th.
She remembered the midwife looking between her legs with a look on her face like she had just watched a car wreck. The midwife wouldn’t look at Kali. It was early in the morning. The baby was taken away from her. It felt like hours they were gone. She was left alone in the room. She delivered the placenta and lay there. Finally, she got up, even though she wasn’t supposed to. She had to find her baby and hold him. She made it to the hall and saw five people in white coats coming toward her. As soon as they approached, her legs collapsed. She fell against the wall and slid down to the floor. She stayed on the floor while they told her everything that was wrong. It wasn’t just one thing. It was five or six things.
Major spinal, brain, and heart surgery. Because of all the surgery and recovery, the baby had to be on morphine for six straight weeks and developed an addiction. He was then on methadone for morphine withdrawal symptoms. The shrink listened patiently. Kali stopped talking. The shrink blinked her eyes. Her brown hair, cropped short to chin length, moved slightly. Otherwise, the shrink was very still.
5. December 13, 2014: Cambridge, MA
Journal entry dated September 27, 2005
My favorite place in the city is a cemetery. I visit every Sunday but my favorite season to visit is autumn. The tops of the trees are burnt orange and flame red, the leaves are curling and coloring and letting go to blanket the graves to crunch underfoot. Nowhere else in nature is dying so beautiful.
There is a still, green pool in the valley formed by the connecting of several hills. A sloping path surrounds it and winds through grassy plateaus, perfect for sitting and not being seen. When I sit at the banks of the pool at dusk, I watch the dragonflies being born. There are two important observations:
First, the buzzing of this new, exotic life stands in stark contrast to the stillness offered by the surrounding dead people. In the cemetery an essential fact emerges in sharp relief: life is perpetuated by death.
Second, the new dragonflies emerge from within the pond on the stems of foliage. Another important fact: life supports life. Also, things rise to the surface and the world decides to let them in or not.
They climb up and out of the water as nymphs, their larval stage of development. They have hatched from eggs lain in the water. In the right temperature of water, larvae will hatch from eggs in less than a month. The larva or nymph will grow quickly, feeding on small bacteria in the water. Some nymphs are passive growers, sitting and waiting for prey bacteria to come within reach. Others hunt.
Tetralogy of Fallot causes low oxygen levels in the blood. This leads to blue baby syndrome. The classic form includes four defects of the heart and its major blood vessels: Ventricular septal defect (hole between the right and left ventricles); narrowing of the pulmonary outflow tract (the valve and artery that connect the heart with the lungs); shifted verriding aorta (the artery that carries oxygen-rich blood to the body) over the right ventricle instead of coming out only from the left ventricle; thickened wall of the right ventricle (right ventricular hypertrophy).
Nymphs swim by forcing the leftover hydrogen from the chamber housing the gills, which acts like a jet to propel the nymph forward.
Spina bifida, or SB, is a neural tube defect caused by the failure of the fetus’s spine to close properly during the first month of pregnancy. Infants born with SB sometimes have an open lesion on their spine where significant damage to the nerves and spinal cord has occurred. Although the spinal opening can be surgically repaired