And Then There Were Two

For a long time it was just Me. For a really long time. Like all my life long. Then there was Him. Then it was Us, but not just Us because there was three or four other people that I didn't know were part of Us, too. By the time I was aware I was already well into my 16th year and halfway into my first pregnancy and suddenly the little person growing inside me was so much bigger than Him that He didn't matter much anymore. I would run my hands over my school uniform while standing sideways in the mirror and try to suck my belly in, and shield my baby with my schoolbag when I'd cross paths with the teachers and the Year Heads who looked at me funny when I got up 5 times during class to go pee, or when I greeted them so that they would keep their eyes on my face and their judgment off my belly. I hid my happy smile under a grave face when she finally called me into her office. Hands clasped on the desk, she looked at me silently for a long time and I looked calmly back. Defiantly defending him before I knew he was a him.

I am hearing rumors that you're pregnant, young lady. Is this true?

I didn't break eye contact, nor did she.

No, miss.

(He kicked a little fluttery butterfly kick and I bit the inside of my cheek, hard, because he made me happy. He was mine.)

Her eyes narrowed as she considered this lie, then dropped slowly down to my un-tucked uniform shirt, my scabby, exposed, and somewhat knobby knees and my untied shoelaces. I shuffled in place, needing to pee.

I saw when she made her choice and felt a rush of love for her at that moment. I didn't know her well and I was pretty scared of her because rumor had it that she had a big wooden paddle in her office with a hole in it but I loved her then and wish I would have hugged her that day.
She pinned me with her unblinking gaze again.

You know that you cannot graduate if you are pregnant, don't you, young lady?

Yes, miss.

So I will ask you once again. Are you pregnant, Miss Ebanks?

No, miss.

I walked slowly out, head hanging appropriately low as a duly chastised young ladies' head should hang and I shuffled slowly to the austere bathroom block, looking very solemn, sighing deeply so that she if she was watching she would see my shoulders rise and fall with the shame that the British school system dictated I should be feeling. As soon as we got to the bathroom I started laughing and my laugh bounced and echoed off the walls of the dingy concrete cubicle and I held my blooming baby under my sweaty hands and laughed and I sat down and laughed and peed and peed and peed. Graduation came and he walked up to the stage with me, my half pound secret, and we walked slowly home alone together, waving past the car loads of friends going out to party the parties of those newly released and on the cusp of adulthood; we turned down invitations to join and enjoyed the night air, passing businesses closed for the night, the bright lights of limousines ferrying heady not-so-young-anymore kids to bars and beaches and beyond. The flushed faces, the yells and the goodbye-we'll-keep-in-touches faded into the balmy night and I walked on, and I never admitted once that I was alone, or that I might have gone with them had they pressed me, or that no one being home to greet us hurt. I had begun the never ending cycle of sacrifice and was too naive to know it. We unlocked the door to the silent dark and then we sat and pulled out the Hefty bag of second-hand baby clothes that were old and stretched and that had someone elses babies puke stains on the fronts that I got out with a little bleach and carbolic soap and a good scrubbing on my hand and I smiled and smelled them and was happy. I, while still a child, would be a child's mother.

On the night I finally met him, I screamed and cried for my own mother. I walked and crouched and laid down and stood up and shrieked and screamed and was screamed at. The happy and helpful nurse made an attempt to comfort me.

Girl, hesh that noise! I say hesh! I bet you never made all that noise when you was makin' it, so I don't know why you screaming now!

I wailed and pushed and cried and pushed and then suddenly, searingly, in a burning rush he flowed out of me. Then there were two of us. My First Boy came into my life as silent and still as the delivery room that I pushed him out into, stunningly small, magnificently beautiful, wonderfully made, but for the blue of his skin against a shock of thick black hair. Words I didn't understand, clanging instruments, a flurry of activity, a solid slap and a squeak that turned into a squall and then he was there, and he was mine, and I was his and we were two. Where there had been just Me had now become we. And first off, he smelled. My First Boy, he smelled like gingerbread and cotton candy at a country fair, like vanilla cake with cream cheese frosting and like the beach on a warm Caribbean night. He smelled like fresh bread buttered and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, like peaches in summertime and like hot cocoa with marshmallows and I wanted to eat him alive. I tasted his fingers and later when we were alone, his toes. I ran my tongue over the impossibly tiny nail and wanted to bite down and consume him. I unwrapped him and got him naked and turned him over in my hands and ran my fingertips over his little fuzzy back and rubbed my cheek on his downy skin. I looked at his tiny butt and his little privates and marveled that such a dumb and ugly girl could make such a perfect and beautiful tiny human boy. I picked him up and looked into his bitty squeezed up face and let him suck on my nose and cradled him into a cocoon between my upraised knees and my chest and held him there and smelled him and laughed at him being so little and so mine and so perfect until he peed on me and the nurse came in and yelled at me for letting that baby nearly catch his death of cold. I tagged along feeling stupid and small as she took him and bathed him and put a doll-sized Pamper on him and stood there feeling lost until she gave him back to me wrapped up tight but I just unwrapped him again to make sure she hadn't washed his smell away and tucked him against my breast, and we slept.

We lived and we loved and He grew and we loved even more. My whole world had become very small and was shaped like him, baby boy-shaped, soft at the edges in watercolor shades and always smelling like Johnson's Baby Lotion and Gerber bananas. I'd take the lotion after his bath and warm it in my hands and rub him all over, his fat legs and pudgy belly, the warm folds of his no-neck and turn him over and let him swim around like a tiny naked fish as I massaged his arched back and soft little brown bum. I was in love, obsessed, that shut-out-the-world-and-hope-it-goes-away kind of love, lost in his wide eyes and an ever present need to kiss his toothless mouth, whispering foolishness into his little shell cup ears and not once did I admit that I wished someone else loved him, too, or that our world was a really little tiny kind of lonely one. Going out without him was a torture I endured once or twice, separation was a kind of agony that made my heart beat faster and my breasts fill and leak and hurt in anticipation of holding him again, as everyone around me danced and drank and listened to reggae, I yearned to be home with him in the dark, listening to him breathe, feeling the rise and fall of his back under my hand, fluttering my fingertips over his flawless cheek, kissing him awake so that he would need me again.

The calling of the outside world hurt my ears. I would cover his as we walked in the beating Caribbean sun, step after step in the endless pursuit of Pampers and pacifiers, pads and playthings. His existence absorbed money the way he absorbed my milk, my love, my time, always needing more than it seemed physically possible to give. Days became weeks became months became a year and then two; would we have enough today for big-boy pants? I would lust after $10.00 packs of Ninja Turtle briefs the way some women do over Jimmy Choo shoes - I wanted them so badly I would have stolen them - but after he carried them around the store and chewed on them awhile I'd put them back and settle for a pair from the thrift store and tell myself that it wasn't so bad and that he didn't care anyway and what was one old poo stain, anyway? I mean, you've seen one poo stain you've seen them all, right? His little legs began to actually work and he would tag along at my leg holding onto my shorts and never touch but look longingly at crappy dollar store toys and then look at me and say "not 'aday, honey, not 'aday" and I realized that telling him "Not today, honey" one more time was going to cause me to lose my mind if something didn't change, or something didn't break or something didn't give in my life. That if he had to play with one more goddamn cracker jack toy my heart was going to break and fall right out of my chest in pieces on the ground and then where would he be?

My Second Boy was a surprise that I received on the night before the father was to be married. Not to me. So then we were three. My First Boy didn't look at me for a whole day when I returned home carrying a small, red, squirming bundle that began to scream promptly as I left the hospital and didn't stop until he was almost a year old. He would nurse and he would bite, I would cry and he would scream. I would hold him close and he would push away. I would sit to play and he would turn away and play alone. I would sit in the dark next to his crib and watch him lying there, screaming and angry and I hated him. I prayed for him to sleep, prayed for him to quiet, prayed for the days to end and the nights to begin so that another day could begin and end. I prayed to the bare, lifeless walls and to the cold floors and to the solitary light bulb hanging over my bed. I prayed in the tub and as I ate, as I sat on the toilet and as I slept, I prayed for things I didn't even know and had never even seen, I prayed for my mother to come and take it all away and for death. I prayed for death. I prayed for the strength not to quiet him forever. When my sister drove away with My Second Boy in her car, far away to raise him in the hills of Kentucky, I pulled the First Boy close again and I was relieved. I breathed out relief the way a whale spouts its pent up spumes at the ocean's surface just before it drowns, and I could breathe again. Yet...yet in all of it, I missed My Second Boy and I stopped praying to die and after a time, began dreaming of seeing him again, of the new little boy he must surely be now that didn't scream anymore that might love me now and that had a halo of golden curls, with pudgy hands that used to try to pick up sunspots off the floor and give them to me, I dreamed of him again. He was standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the lamp in the living room and wearing bright yellow footie pajamas on the night I returned to take him home again. Three thousand miles and 18 months between us had turned his eyes a beautiful hazel green and his hair a honey blond, and pouty Cupid bow lips that he popped a thumb from with an audible plop when I bent down to pick him up. He laid his head between my neck and shoulder and his curls caught the tears that dripped into them, and we drove slowly down the winding forested hills, toward home.

My Boys grew the way boys will grow, bumbling and clumsily, banging heads and scraping knees, destroying and building, searching and scouting, screaming and shouting, tin foil hats and tin foil men, guns made from sandwiches and macaroni alphabets scotch-taped to the fridge. Velcro Keds, mismatched socks, gap-toothed grins and hair cuts at home, Power Rangers and Nemo in Slumberland, Little Foot and Simba and Ninja Turtles, all around me was the evidence of little-boys being; caterpillars from egg crates with beads for eyes and lop-sided pipe-cleaner antennae, raggedly cut paper hearts for Valentines Day and Joseph and Mary and the Baby Jesus made from empty eggs at Christmas, drawings of me with just legs and a head and long yellow hair beside a house with a chimney with smoke coming out of it. At night time we'd get out the books and read about how I'd love them forever and as long as I'm living my babies they'd be, we'd read about the Runaway Bunny and sometimes My Second Boy would cry and swear he would never be like the Runaway Bunny and that if he ran away I could come with him, if I wanted to. I told him I would want to, very much. And could Brother come, too? I'd ask. Yes, an adamant nodding of the curls and a watery sigh of relief that I would come with him, and yes, Brother could come, too. I would hold him longer because he needed me most, My Second Boy; My First Boy sleeping soundly already in the bunk above, protected by Pinko the Dinosaur, I would hold My Second Boy and every night our conversation would go something like this:

A small whisper, liquid green eyes locked on me in the dark:

Mommy, who do you love most? (this from another favorite book).

I love you both the most, bunny.

Why?

Because you're my boys and no one else can ever be my boys.

Why?

Because mommies always love their boys better than anyone else.

Oh. Well can any girls be your boys? (I had had another child by this time, a girl)

Nope. Just you and brother can be my boys. No one else.

And he would settle deeper into me, and I would feel his hot little breath begin to slow in the evenness of sleep on my neck, and I would stroke his curls still damp from his bath until I felt him relax and the grip on my shirt fall away, and I would tiptoe out, leaving his protector Pound Pup next to him and I would look back at the shapes of them under the covers, and I would be afraid. I was afraid of something but I didn't know what, afraid of their fragility and the tenuousness of our lives, and I feared that fear, and I feared loving anything that much. I feared being their everything because what the fuck was I? I feared their perceptions of me. I feared them growing up and seeing what I really was, a dumb country/island kid who never planned them and who never knew what I was doing or who I was or where I was going or how we would even begin to get there.

Time and circumstance dragged us behind it, unwillingly, never mindful of the hairpin turns, the dead ends, the potholes on life's road. We got lost along the way. Tends to happen when you don't have a map and wouldn't have known how to use one anyway. Down one road I found and lost A Third Boy, down another I lost myself; yet another missed sign and then I lost them both, and finally, at a precipice with no guard rail, I lost all hope. The climb up from the crash down would be long and steep, and time after time I would grasp onto something that looked strong enough to hold onto only to have it break and send me sliding back down again into a pit there seemed no way out of. I'd crawl up again on bloodied hands and knees, and a few times I even made it to the top, very nearly to the edge, up and out, almost there but when I pulled up over the top two young men that I barely recognized met me at the ledge, and looked down at me with unreadable faces and hair on their upper lips, harder eyes and hands in pockets. My First Boy shook his head and turned away, and my heart broke into two halves and he took one with him, a jagged-edged piece that would forever fit with his. My Second Boy extended his hand and pulled me into his embrace, accepting, never questioning, never doubting. He and I walked along together for a good long while until suddenly he said he had to go on ahead on a road of his own, one where I was not allowed to follow. I didn't understand how he could leave me so I cried and I screamed and I bargained and I beat the ground and I cursed him and I wailed like an animal and then I did what I had to do and I told him goodbye. He told me not to worry, that he was going somewhere that had been prepared for him a very long time ago and that I'll be there, too, one day. I watched as he walked away, trailing what was left of my heart behind him.

And then there were two.