Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn (16 page)

That story rode with me and I wondered if it was possible for me to close my eyes after this adventure and feel as if the missing answers to all my questions would be lined up on the bathroom sink the first morning after I returned home. Aunt Marcia tried to show me how life could be, how my life could have been, and I was trying hard to remember events, people, things she'd said were part of my lost set of life directions.

My deep thoughts vanish as we breeze past a row of houses, maybe seven or eight, hardly enough to be called a congested block, and Linda pulls the Jeep in front of a tiny store that looks as if it has been standing since the beginning of time. Small sticks for the sides, no windows; from what I could see from the highway, there are dirt floors, colorful hammocks woven in reds, greens, oranges, pinks and blues hanging outside of each door and then the one glorious item we had been looking for, waiting for, hoping for since we hit the dusty road two days ago—a small rusted sign in the shape of a beer bottle.

“Is this what I think it is?” I ask, leaning forward.

Linda smiles, pushes back her hair as if she were in a movie and says, “Get your ass out of the Jeep and drink.”

The cold beer can not dislodge the thoughts of Aunt Marcia's lost lessons and I wonder if my auntie drank beer here, did she in front of this old building, did she know the shopkeeper, what did she want me to see as I stood in this hot Mexican sun?

Jane interrupts my quiet drinking with a question.

“You okay?” she asks as we lean against the back of the Jeep.

“Thinking about my aunt, life, this trip.”

“I can't stop thinking, either. I've been terrified of being alone all these months,” she says, quietly at first and then with her voice rising. “All these months I've felt that unless I was with someone that life was worthless. Being alone shouldn't feel like that.”

My hand moves to her arm without thinking. I want her to know that I am listening, that I understand, that it's okay to tell me what is on the very top layer of her heart.

She goes on a bit louder as if the first sips of beer have kick-started something that needed just a bit of oil.

“I'm pissed off. Angry that I lingered so long in a place that now seems a bit disgusting to me.”

“It's part of the process I think,” as I try to convince myself as well. “Maybe what Aunt Marcia was trying to tell me is that there are no ‘right' set of rules and directions and guidelines. Maybe it didn't matter if I came to Mexico now or twenty years ago. Maybe it's just right if your process of discovering that being alone is just a fine way to be took you over a few backroads.”

Maybe.

Maybe is what we decide to hold on to in our left hands as we drink our beer with our right hands and lean into each other and then into the rest of the day and the possibility that we may know exactly what we are talking about.

When Katie was born, the very second, I felt as if something moved through my entire body. This sensation overwhelmed me. It was beyond the physical pain of having something the size of an enormous watermelon pass through a hole the size of a grapefruit. It was beyond the very real knowledge that a baby was moving from inside of me and out into a world that I was certain neither of them were ready for. It was a sensation that some powerful force was cleansing me with some kind of invisible potion so that my daughter could leave me and begin her own life.

I felt a set of hands push down, gently, so gently, from inside of my head. If I could have focused, if anyone would have asked me during those moments and I had explained it like this, they may have never let me leave the hospital. But they did not ask, and with my eyes closed I reached up to take the hands and help them move through the inside of my body.

There was someone very far away ordering me to push and incredible pressure that made it difficult for me to breathe centered just below my waist and this sweet sound of the hands moving like wind and my fingers gliding on top of them, touching silk and then rumbling past my throat and lingering around the edges of my heart, and me thinking just then that no matter where these hands swept, the scent and feel and taste of this baby would never leave me.

When this force reached the very top of the curve of my stomach, just where I imagined the tips of the baby's feet might be resting, it stopped, and I did also. When I opened my eyes there was a mass of heads hovering below me and looking into that place of finesses, into me, into my vagina, where the round ball of my baby's head was jamming up the process, and I calmly said, “She's coming,” because at that moment I knew that the baby was a girl and who she was and that the hands were really there inside of me.

She came then, screaming before anyone but me could hear her, and I felt the hands glide and pull and push the baby girl into place, and then my hands boldly stopped everything because I knew I would never, ever have another baby and I wanted to feel this last moment, the moment when pain shutters everything so tightly that there is room for nothing but the simple hope that you might live beyond that very moment. The moment when you can imagine the welcoming arms of death and when you can feel your bones stretching and the songs of birds flying to peck out your eyes and the roll of drums as objects draped in black come to seize what is left of your flesh.

I held on to that moment for one and then two and then ten seconds and then I screamed from a place I had never been to before or since. I screamed and I felt the edges of something filled with fire and then I grabbed the top of the hands and I pushed them out of me behind the baby girl, and even then this force lingered in the room. Lingered because the baby had grown so quiet. Quiet, we quickly discovered, because she had been removed from my dark and safe uterus and thrown into the cold and rather bright world of the hospital delivery room. When I closed and then opened my eyes, whomever or whatever had entered the room was gone.

Katie, some would say, came to me possessed. She was a kindred spirit filled with all intentions good and wonderful, because Katie was an independent gem from the moment she was born.

She is always in my heart, but when she plows into my mind and sits there hour after hour, there is something she needs from me. I know this just as I know my need to drink water or to lie down when I can no longer stand. That is why I ask Linda to help me hunt for a phone right after we inhale our second beer.

“A phone?” Elizabeth asks as if I said I needed to quickly rent
Gone With the Wind
or order a taco to go. I can tell she wants to argue, so I don't even bother to say anything. Sometimes she gets like this.

“Whatever it is will have to wait, Meg. Are you crazy? Who do you want to call?”

We are hanging on to the Jeep, and all I know is that I need to hear my daughter's voice and to know what she needs.

“Katie,” I say. “She needs to ask me a question.”

Before I can say another word, Linda hands me a cell phone. This is the first time I have seen it. She must keep it zipped up inside the white vest she never takes off.

“I have a daughter,” she tells me, holding her hand against mine while she puts the phone inside of it. “I was in high school when she was born. She's twenty-two now. In graduate school. She's the only one who has this number. Call your daughter.”

Has life always been like this? I want to ask someone this question, but it will only make me look more foolish than I already feel. I want to know how much I have been missing, how many things I could have had if only I had bothered to ask. What was the whole world doing while I folded socks, studied for anthropology exams and stared blankly out of the kitchen window? Where the hell have I been?

Katie is not at home, but I call her own blessed and lovely cell phone, and when she answers, when I hear the sweet sound of her voice saying, “Hello,” and then lifting two hundred degrees when she hears me say, “It's your mother,” I start to cry.

“Mom, are you okay?”

“I'm fine, baby. What do you need?”

“You.”

“What?”

“You forgot to leave any phone numbers and I was worried about you, Mom. I knew if I thought about you long enough that you would call me.”

“Jesus,” I think. In a flash, a blink, my daughter has become my mother. Then I realize that I am no longer someone she knows very well. I have never left her like this. I have never traveled off in search of the source of my silver rings in the land where dogs dance and mysteries of the past are hidden under brightly colored blankets. I have always been around the corner or over at Grandma's house or in the library or out waiting in the car.

“I'm in a small city that is not on a map. It's on the east coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. Between Campeche and Celestun. We're looking for those dancing dogs I told you about.”

“Mom, are you smoking dope? You know what that will do to you.”

She is half joking and half serious, which gets me half concerned. If I find out she has volunteered to cook a meal or walk the dog, I'm flying home as soon as I can get back to the airport.

“Not yet, it's too early. We're sticking with the Mexican beer until we find something better. I love you, Katie.”

Jane whispers to me as I disconnect and hand the phone back to Linda. Jane tells me about the baby she lost. The baby lived for three months, she tells me while Elizabeth and Linda huddle near the front tires. Three months and then this sudden rush between her legs and wailing that seemed to come from a place so far away, which turned out to be her own voice.

“That was it,” she says, even more softly. “No more babies, and he wouldn't adopt, and I kept padding through all those days and nights, wondering about motherhood.”

She tells me that during the first days alone, in that nice house where some lights are never turned off, she dreamed her lost baby back to life for a while. Crawling, walking, talking, graduating from high school, coming in to sit and talk with her after a date or a game.

“Some things you never get over,” Jane explains. “I accept that, but I wonder—now, more than ever—if I couldn't have filled up the empty space with someone else.”

Wow, Jane. Wow.

Linda brushes off my thank you with a wave of her hand and we manage to pull Elizabeth out of the shade, where she is conversing in her interesting version of the Spanish language with two men who both look terribly confused. Elizabeth could probably get elected mayor of this village in two weeks if we left her here alone. Me? I like to keep one hand on the Jeep at all times.

Three hours later I find myself sitting at the edge of the ocean, fairly oblivious to anything that exists beyond what I can see when I turn my head from side to side, and what I see is enough. I am immersed in a world of blue—sky, water and roofs. The brightness has me cornered in a way that makes me think of nothing but what I see and I know this is a good thing for just a little while because what I need to think about is big stuff, really big stuff. I like to believe that I know what I am doing here on this beach, but if I move even an inch I can hear myself shift in the wind. My life is a question right now—one huge question.

Linda has deposited us at a cottage just north of the city, and from what I can see in the first five minutes, I know this is what the entrance to Heaven must look like. Everything is simple and clean, and Elizabeth, who claims to never have been here before, seems speechless with happiness for a good five minutes, which is a very long time for her. Jane is quiet, looking everywhere, exploring her temporary landscape like someone who has just had her sight restored.

Linda barely stopped the Jeep before she whirled back in the direction from which we'd come, shouting that she was off to find the dogs and that Angelica would take care of us. Angelica finds us with our bags in our hands, staring out at the endless sea as if we are waiting for a lost lover to walk right out of the water. When she speaks we are all startled.

“¡Ay, mujeres bonitas! ¡Bienvenido a Fiesta Harbor!”

I say “Hello” because fake Spanish is worse than anything I can think of during that moment and I can barely order a beer in the native tongue. But Elizabeth launches into a conversation that Angelica must be able to understand, because she answers back.

She asks her about the resort where we are staying first in Spanish and then as an aside to me in English. Elizabeth tells me the piece of land and small rental business have been in Angelica's family for a very long time.