Nightwatching

by Tracy Sierra

If there was some great beyond, didn’t nature prove it would be more astonishing than people were capable of conceiving?

They’d look at each other, horrified. Each imagining how their son’s clean love, his constant need for their arms around him, would vanish. Because of course it would. It had to. That particular type of sensitivity, affection that straightforward, couldn’t survive. The natural order was to hide the depth of your love, for fear that others might see it as weakness.

To survive it, she clung close to the memory of her mother’s effusive joy over everyday things. The hummingbird at the feeder, the precise twist of a wire, snowfall, a perfectly cooked egg, to all these simple things her mother would say with genuine wonder, “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it just beautiful?”

she no longer saw a higher power as an unquestioned given, certain her mother’s death proved any god inadequate. After all, if God had set it right, then God must also have set it wrong. Maybe he had stepped out of the picture altogether. Maybe had never been in it at all. She didn’t pretend to know.

“It’s a pretty extreme thing, to assume he was after a little girl.” “Is it? Ask the women you know what it was like being a little girl.”

After the incident with the wine and the stairs, she didn’t dare drink to help her sleep. Alone in the house with the children, she’d never take a pill. When white noise failed to do anything but annoy her, she tried earplugs, which made it easier to drift off yet still let the sound of the baby monitor through.

She wasn’t better than they had been, wasn’t more deserving of survival. So she stayed quiet, knowing how deeply people hated to admit or recognize the oversized space chance takes up in life. And, worse, in death.