Gus

They told me it wasn't possible. Three rounds, and the science stopped. I put the wanting down the way you put down something heavy you have carried up a flight of stairs. I was not going to have a child. I had made my peace with it, which is to say, I had stopped looking at it.

So when the nausea came, years later, I thought it was my body beginning its next subtraction. I went to the doctor to ask for something to move the hormones. She told me the hormones were doing exactly what they were meant to do.

I told the man. I told him I expected nothing, that I only thought he should know. He raised his voice and told me to end it. He didn’t stay long enough to hear the no. 

So, it was the two of us.

I could keep almost nothing down. Salt crackers with more salt sprinkled over them. Perrier in the green glass, not the one I always drank, my body suddenly certain about the opposite thing. I was swollen like a peach in August. I was always hot. I was more uncomfortable and more alone than I had ever been. Somewhere in it I was also, quietly, the happiest.

A woman who sat on my bed and took my hand in hers told me to name him. Talk to him, she said. You will feel better.

When I learned he was a boy I was wearing an olive green jumpsuit, the one that always returned me to myself. It was the last day it fit. After that I grew quickly, and the outfit went into a drawer, and never came out again, and I did not mind, because he was the reason.

I called him Gabriel first. The angel. Here with me after all the ones that did not stay. But it was a heavy name to hang on someone so small, and it did not sit right, and one afternoon, running to the bathroom for the third time in an hour, I thought of the round little mouse in the Cinderella cartoon, the one who bounces and grins and cannot hold still. Gus, don't bounce on mama right now, I said. And it stuck. The way true things stick, before you have decided anything.

I worried it was too slight a name. So I wrote out Augustus in calligraphy, cut around the letters, and put it on the refrigerator, to see if he belonged to the larger thing. I saw it every time I reached for another green bottle. Augustus. 

I never once called him that. It was the wrong name. To him I was always mama, and to me he was always Gus. And slowly I understood that Gus was not a senator or an orator. He was a musician. I knew it the way you know things you cannot prove: because I had begun to sing more than I ever had, standing in the kitchen on one leg like a flamingo or in the living room rocking side to side. He went still when I sang. Not a stillness of absence. A stillness of listening.

So I took the calligraphy down from the refrigerator, and I folded it, and pressed it between the pages of a book and put the book on the shelf. I did not need to see his name written anymore. It was Gus. True things sound true.

I would ask him things, and we made an arrangement: one kick for yes, nothing for no. He never double-kicked. It was always the single answer or the silence. The first question I asked him was whether his name was Gus. He had never kicked before. He kicked then. I took it as confirmation of the answer I already knew.

I bought a pajama to bring him home in. I told him about it, and asked which one he wanted. Blue? Nothing. Sage green? Nothing. There was a yellow one I was sure he would not want, so I passed over it and asked about the others, and to every one he said nothing, until the only one left in the store that I had not named was the yellow. I asked about the yellow. He kicked. Yellow is not subtle, I told him. You are not going to like it. I bought it anyway, because he had chosen it. 

My cortisol was dangerously high. Bedrest was not restful. People sent me their remedies. Scriptures. Poems. Prayers. Chants in languages I did not speak. I was open to all of it. I meditated, or tried. I breathed the way the breathwork class and the videos taught. I listened to every soothing thing. None of it did what I needed it to do. If anything, the trying made it worse. I began to grieve my own failure at the trying, and the grief was its own weather, and it did not lift. The cortisol kept rising. The cascade. My body behaving as though we were both under attack. Aging for a body on its own. Lethal for one still attached to mine.

I was so close. He was nearly here.

And then, he was not.

I was in the bed with the blue gown and the sheets that scratched, my knees up on either side of my belly. Such a big baby, someone said, that's going to hurt to push out, your husband must play football. My feet flat on the mattress. 

He was born.

And then, quietly, I began to leave. The blood was going and it was taking me with it, out past the edges of myself, and the voices in the room grew distant, and somewhere ahead of me Gus was moving in a direction away from me. I did the only thing a mother’s body knows to do when her child runs. I followed. Not away from anything. Toward him. Let me go, I said, it's alright, I can be with him. What mother would not follow her child running ahead of her.

They held me back. 

My grandmother, who had been gone for decades, was in the room. Roses and cardamom, the way she always was, cut flowers and something baking. I heard her as clearly as I have heard anything.

I'll take good care of him for you, she said. I'll take him with me.