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Sparkle (2)
On a warm June day in Paris, in a little park adjacent to the Musée de L’Orangerie, I started to cry.
There was a little girl nearby, with dark curly hair and white shoes, and a pale pink hat with a wide brim. Her parents sat on a bench watching her as she toddled away into the grass, looking back at them every few moments to make sure they were still there. She was a stark reminder of the little girl I never had a chance to raise, whose chaotic flutters inside my 13-year-old belly were the beginning and end of our communication.
So I placed my head in my hands, and wept, and apologized for ruining our honeymoon, and Jason put his arms around me until I couldn’t cry any longer.
When my baby was growing, I had pictured her with curly red hair and Alex’s eyes. I envisioned us reading fairy tales together, and under the covers of my twin bed I whispered some of my favorites, hoping she was listening. I didn’t know she was a girl, not really, but I imagined she was—hoped her allegiance rested with me, rather than her father. I loved him despite the calm, cool way he always smiled after raping me, the way he refused to turn his ring around before striking me. All the same, I couldn't bear the thought of giving birth to his mirror image. So it was decided: the baby was a girl. Even at thirteen, I knew I had no hope of keeping her. I was only a child myself. But I didn’t expect to lose her the way I did.
When Alex realized I was pregnant, that was the end. No more. Our daughter was a liability, something to be disposed of. Years later, I scribbled:
Inside the box, your tiny body
is wrapped in a knitted purple scarf.
I was afraid
you might get cold. You see,
babies lose their heat
so quickly.
I named her Adrienne, and I will never know the color of her eyes, or her hair, or the sound of her cry. Instead, I remember the sweat on her father’s brow as he beat me, and the way that, afterward, the bloodied instruments cast aside, he told me he loved me, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear. I remember my mother finding and throwing away a bloodstained handkerchief a few months later, and staring at me when I broke into sobs. It was the only memento I had.
My world is different now, and the same.
There are familiar stirrings in my belly, a boy this time, and before bed his dad reads stories to my growing abdomen. We watch as little limbs make ridges in the taut skin. In the afternoons, our daughter rests in my lap to watch Kipper, clutching a stuffed animal, or three. I am happy, or should be.
But in the night I still whisper fairy tales, and I’m never quite sure who I’m trying to reach.
Cate Linden blogs about marriage, motherhood, and simple living at Liberal Simplicity.
