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.They poke and prod, examine her stitches and her charts, ask questions which she doesn’t answer.Until they walk away, she keeps her eyes tightly closed against them.This way, if she ever gets better and meets them, say, in a shopping mall, she won’t know who they are.She’ll walk right past them with the polite, powerful unconcern only a stranger is capable of.Once she hears the night nurse talking to Umesh about her.This nurse is an older woman, not foolishly chirpy like the others.In her pre-hospital days, when she had energy for such things, Aparna would have equipped her with a complete, imagined life: She had lost her family, husband and all four children, in the Los Angeles earthquake, and moved to the Bay Area, where she now worked nights because she couldn’t stand to be home alone.Or perhaps she’d been in Vietnam and seen things the young nurses couldn’t even imagine.That’s why she watched them with that slightly sardonic expression as they cooed over their patients, bringing cranberry juice and tucking down comforters.But the present, eroded Aparna only knows that the night nurse is comfortable with death.She knows it from the way the nurse sometimes comes in after lights-out and massages Aparna’s feet, leaning there in a dark that smells thick and sticky, like hospital lotion, without speaking a single word.But now, outside the door, the nurse is speaking to Umesh.“She’s lost the will to live,” she says in her dour, gravelly way.“But why?” asks Umesh.His voice is high and bewildered, like a child’s.“How can she, when she has so much to live for?”“It happens.”“I won’t let it,” Umesh says angrily.“I won’t.There must be something I can do.”Aparna listens with faint curiosity, the way one might to a TV soap playing in the next room.Does the wise nurse have a solution which will revitalize the dispirited young mother and unite her once more with her caring husband and helpless infant?“You must—” says the nurse.But what he must do is drowned in the excited exclamations of a family who arrive just then in the room next to Aparna’s to view their newest member.SHE SHOULD HAVE known what they were planning.But the medication has turned her mind soft, like butter left out overnight, so that the things she wants to hold on to—questions and suspicions—sink into it and disappear.Still, she shouldn’t have been so utterly shocked when her friend walked in carrying Aashish.A few times before this, Umesh had tried to get her to see Aashish.But each time he suggested it, she wept so vehemently that her temperature went up and the nurse had to give her a shot.Afterward, he would stroke the ragged ends of her hair with distressed hands and say, “Please, please, Aparna.Don’t act this way.Be reasonable.” She did not want to be reasonable.He had no right to ask her to be.An enormous, thwarted emotion ballooned inside her chest whenever she thought of her lost baby—lost, yes, that was the right word.She felt it pushing into her lungs, displacing air, long after Umesh gave up and left.She watches them now, her friend who looks anxious as she sets the car seat down and picks up Aashish.Aashish in a little red two-piece outfit that Aparna didn’t buy for him.Aashish looking so grown and cheerful that Aparna can hardly believe he’s hers.But that’s it, he isn’t her baby.Something terrible happened to her own baby because she was in the hospital and couldn’t take care of him, and they’re afraid to tell her.So they’ve brought in this.this little impostor.Where’s my baby? she wants to ask.What did you do with my baby? Instead she says, in a gray, toneless voice, “Take him away.”“At least hold him once,” her friend says, and she bends over Aparna to move the tubes out of the way so she can lay the baby beside her.Her eyelashes are spiky with tears.Aparna can smell, in her friend’s hair, the woodsy fragrance of Clairol Herbal Essence.It’s the same shampoo Aparna used when she was pregnant.Suddenly she longs for the slow, steady green of it pooling in her palm, the relaxing steam of the shower, her fingers—her own fingers—on her scalp, knowing just where to rub deep and where to lighten up.But here against her side is this baby, kicking his legs, batting at her with his small, fat arms.When she offers him a finger, he grabs it and gives an unexpected, gurgly laugh.Her friend has stepped outside, leaving a bottle of baby formula on the nightstand.“Baby,” she whispers—she isn’t ready, yet, to speak the name that will claim him as hers—and he laughs again.The sound tugs at the corners of her stiff, unaccustomed mouth until she’s laughing, too.His gums are the color of the pink oleanders she planted in her backyard.Then he’s hungry, suddenly and absolutely, the way babies are.He’s starting to fuss, in a minute he’ll begin crying, she can tell from the way he’s squinching up his face.She reaches, hurriedly, for the bottle, then stops, struck by an idea so compelling she can hardly breathe.She glances guiltily at the doorway, but it’s empty, so she pulls at her hospital gown until she uncovers a breast and holds it to Aashish’s mouth.Why does Aparna do this? She’s aware that she has no milk, although exactly how that occurred is obscured by the cottony fog which hangs over the first few days of her readmission to the hospital.Perhaps this is a test, offering her breast to the baby: If he’s my true, true son, he’ll take it.Perhaps it’s the hope of a miracle.She remembers, vaguely, old Indian tales where milk spurts from a mother’s breasts when she is reunited with her long-lost children.But mostly it’s her body crying out to feel, once more, the hard, focused clamp of those gums.Aashish will have none of it.He howls, face splotched with red, his body gone rigid [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]