I wake to you quietly singing to our daughter, an invocation from mother to child. You fold her to your breast and urge her to drink. Like the moon reflecting sunlight, she is given form by your love. Her translucent skin reveals organs struggling to become real, to move from the phantasmic to the biological. Lungs gently pulling. Bowels gently pushing. Her heart is not so much a beat as the quiet hum of the universe.
Your love for her transcends hydrogen stars and tidal rhythms; it pushes aside the laws of entropy, reaching around incubators and doctors’ pronouncements. When you brought her home, you asked me to believe—but it’s only by moonlight that I think I can see her. I wonder if I can coax her into the daylight, bring her into my solid world where gravity holds us together and mitosis divides us. My love requires empirical data.
On Friday night, we attend a séance. You want to ask our daughter if she’s getting enough milk, if the love tethering her to us is sufficiently strong. I drop you at the door of an old brownstone on 15th and Cheshire, then park the car across the street near the trees that line the park. It’s November cold, but I stand outside in the chilled air. I’m afraid to go in, afraid of what our daughter might say once given words, afraid she’ll wonder what I’m even doing there, a doubter wondering Golgotha
You peek through the drapes of the bay window, and I know I can’t put this off any longer. Crushing my cigarette underfoot, I climb the steps and go inside the house. You ask what took me so long, but I don’t tell you of my secret fear that our daughter won’t recognize me as her parent. After all, I don’t have a tether that will reach from this world to the next, nor the milk to make her real. I only have the silent hope that one day I will reach into the shadows and find her reaching back.
A young boy ushers us into the parlor and offers us cans of Coke; he points to a mixing bowl filled with Cheetos. You decline, but I take some of the Cheetos. I’m trying to get the orange shit off my fingers when Madame Rita enters and proclaims herself a conduit to all things otherworldly. She seats us at a table and then summons the spirits; she calls for a connection to the other side. A tambourine and trumpet hover in the shadows to shake and squawk. Soon there are raps on the table—one for yes and two for no. Madam Rita pulls out every magic trick for this evening’s journey to the spirit world.
But not everything here is fakery. In the seat beside me, you sit sobbing and caressing our daughter, and for the first time I see her, really see her. She rests in your arms, looking up as your tears roll onto her lips. She stops fussing at the taste of you.
And there it is, the only true connection made this evening, the bond between mother and child. With the taste of love still on her tongue, our daughter utters her first word. Mama. It’s barely audible over the trumpet’s call. Mama, she says, and the word rises to quiver within the air above us.
You must hear it too because you start to levitate from your chair.
Madam Rita stops jabbering and pulling on her strings. The tambourine and trumpet crash to the floor. For a long moment, Rita and I watch in silent awe as you lift toward the ceiling. Right then I know: our daughter will never join us in the light. All along, I’ve been mistaken. She’s not becoming more solid; I’ve just been slowly vanishing.
I stand and gently pull you back to the floor. When we leave, you float several inches above the ground, holding our daughter tightly in your arms. We cross the street, and I open the car door for you. You don’t get in though. Instead, you drift over the curb, glide across the grass, and disappear into a thicket of elms.
The streetlight above the car surges brighter, electricity popping. It feels safe to stand within that cone of light, and I’m tempted to stay there until morning. But at the edge of that light, the shadows in the park grow deeper. I see it now—the space in between, that space where you find her every night. Elm trees growing side by side hold a vacancy between them like a darkened doorway.
You call for me to join you, and I step from the light and into the shadow. It’s there I find you above a park bench, slowly rising from the earth. Her head lay on your shoulder while you hum a lullaby. You beckon for me to follow.
Love only requires my leap of faith.
Our daughter looks down at me and her eyes are filled with stars. Dada, she says, and the word flutters down to sit of my tongue. I lift from the ground to levitate beside you.
In this world you’ve created for us, the dreamlike world of twilight, we remain motionless, breath held in anticipation, fingers grasping but never closing, but also never surrendering to release. We can live here together, the three of us, in this space made real by our faith in each other.
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Ⓒ Sam W. Pisciotta
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