What Should Have Been
Chapter 3 of THE WILD IMPOSSIBILITY, a multicultural tale of motherhood, metaphysics (maybe), and what it means to love
Cari amici,
On to chapter 3! If you liked chapters 1 and 2, I hope you’ll keep reading. If you missed them, you can find them here and here.
Thanks again to Regal House Publishing for allowing me to excerpt The Wild Impossibility.
THE WILD IMPOSSIBILITY
Chapter 3
February 28, 2011
Kira flicked off the alarm and listened to the pulse of the shower. Dan was up early. The space between them stretched beyond the half-lit room, beyond her body, immobilized in the bed, and his, streaming with soapy water. The thought of him in the shower would have aroused her once, but after Aimi’s death, desire had drowned in the wake of despair. As Kira surfaced from sleep, the memory of what had happened in the hospital parking lot hijacked her brain. Panic followed, and she lay there blinking back tears, muscles contracted, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with her.
The best explanation, the one she wanted to believe, was that nothing was wrong with her, that she’d dozed off and dreamed, the same kind of dreams she’d had every night since her mother’s death. Of course weird things would happen after weeks of minimal sleep. And Rosa’s death had reignited Kira’s grief for Aimi. It had been there all along, buried and unresolved, a constant background thrum with the half-life of uranium, and the dreams forced it to the foreground. Every night they tormented Kira with reminders of what should have been—Aimi crying, Aimi at her breast, Aimi asleep, drooling milk.
Dan said that the dreams were a grief response, and Kira wanted to believe that. It would have made sense if the dreams were normal. What Dan didn’t know, and what left Kira disintegrating in fear every morning, was that she wasn’t herself in them. She wasn’t in the dreams at all, had no presence she could connect to her own psyche. And didn’t dreams arise from your psyche, acting out whatever drives your anxieties and regrets, your hopes, your memories? Not these. She’d been ambushed, disappeared by this teenage stranger whose identity now clung to her cerebral cortex, as tenacious as a tumor. And even odder, these dreams refused to fade or disappear with time. They stayed with her, every one of them, tangible, vivid, indelible, as if she were supposed to make sense of them.
Kira couldn’t make sense of them. She couldn’t make sense of losing both her child and her mother, or of the fact that when she saw Dan sitting at the dinner table or lying next to her in bed she wondered why he was there and whether she wanted him gone. It was a dispassionate exercise. Kira would ask herself if she still loved him, this gentle, clear-headed man, and the reasoning side of her mind said yes. She’d been with him for five years now, when she’d left every other guy she’d dated before the one-year mark, bailing when she saw, or imagined, signs of an imminent exit. Better to leave than be left; Kira had learned that lesson at the age of four.
Now, she couldn’t remember what love without devastation felt like.
Maybe what happened in the parking lot had something to do with the fight she’d had with Dan that morning. Not that it was anything new. She’d been furious at him ever since Aimi died, because he seemed incapable of losing control, and yesterday she was furious at herself for being furious. Which was probably why she’d overreacted.
Dan had made eggs and toast, and coffee strong enough to shred stomach lining. He sat across from her, pretending, as usual, that neither of them was thinking of the darkened room upstairs, the empty crib.
“I’ve got a late meeting, but I should be home by eight,” he said. “Pizza sound good?”
“Sure.” Kira knew what was coming, let him struggle.
“Rough night,” he said carefully.
“Sorry I kept you awake.”
“It’s not that. You know it’s not that.”
“You’re the one who says there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I know, but you could get something to help you sleep. Some Ambien, or that stuff you took after Aimi—”
“This is different.”
She could tell him that she was afraid to take medication, tell him there was something so wrong with these dreams that she was afraid drugs would make them worse.
“Maybe you should talk to someone. Or how about a grief support group? I’ve thought about going.”
Kira forked into a yolk as if she might actually eat. She knew that she should reply in a way that matched his love, his good intentions, but saying the words he needed to hear would feel like tendons snapping. She dropped the fork, grabbed her mug and winged it toward the sink, where it crash-landed in a satisfying eruption of china and glass. Leaving Dan stunned, she grabbed her jacket and keys and backpack, telling herself to stop, go back, apologize. At the front door she hesitated, willing him to understand that she wanted to apologize, that she needed him to come after her, to hug her and forgive her for being a cruel person she didn’t recognize.
He didn’t come. And Kira had stepped outside, shivering in the gray grasp of early morning, shaking at the thought of what she was doing to her marriage. And terrified that she couldn’t seem to stop it. In the wake of two deaths, love seemed like an abstraction she could no longer grasp.
They’d taken different paths since Aimi died, she and Dan. He tried to normalize things, believing that if they pretended to have recovered for long enough, eventually they would. Kira couldn’t do that. Every month she silently marked the single date of Aimi’s birth and death, each time wondering if a child who is born dead really has a birthdate, and each time anticipating the stab of agony that followed. Every thought, every memory of that day brought more pain, regenerated the wound that went deeper than Aimi, twenty-one years deep to when Kira was thirteen, pregnant and desperate not to be.
She’d never told Dan about that pregnancy, saw no reason to. And after conceiving Aimi, Kira had wanted her baby in a way that was visceral, stronger than any compulsion she’d known. She’d dreamed of their future, her daughter’s life tied to hers, imagined the ways Aimi would imitate the past, the ways she would defy it. A world had awaited Aimi, the black-and-white outline of a life that she, this small, wondrous being, would fill in with colors only she could envision. But Kira’s body had failed her, and Aimi had died.
Yet Kira couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t her body but she who had failed Aimi. And Aimi had died.
No wonder there was a crying baby in some of the dreams. That girl, whoever she was, rocking a baby at her breast—an innocuous scene in theory; there was nothing frightening about a mother and child. What terrified Kira was the persistent presence of this unknown young woman, her apparent isolation and unhappiness, and the subtext of the dreams, a sense of urgency that screamed, “Pay attention!”
And, most of all, the way she, Kira, disappeared.
After Aimi died, Kira and Dan had agreed on one thing without having to say it: their baby was not to be discussed. The practice brought relief, and almost as much guilt. Kira had stopped saying her baby’s name—what kind of mother does that?
While Dan was in the shower, Kira dressed quickly, hoping to avoid him. She left a note saying she was having breakfast with Camille. Camille was her oldest friend, the kind of person who always said yes when it mattered, who heard the imperceptible catch in Kira’s voice or recognized the desperation buried in a text message.
<<>>
When Kira walked into Peet’s, Camille was waiting, a black coffee and a cappuccino on the table in front of her. Kira shook off the cold-needle rain and hugged her. “You’re a sweetheart.”
Camille slid the coffee across the table. “Because I didn’t buy you a blueberry scone and spared you all those calories? Which you could use, by the way. Anyway, how are you? Besides the usual level of not-good.”
Kira shook her head. “I’m... I don’t know... just exhausted, I guess.” She glanced around the coffee shop, populated by graying women in threes and fours, a tattooed skater hunched over an iPhone, a barefaced young woman with a baby bump who was trying to get her three-year-old to stop blowing milk bubbles. Suddenly the woman smiled and pressed her son’s hand to the upslope of her belly.
Kira remembered that feeling, the weird invasion of privacy, the duality of body within body.
“What’s going on?” Camille said.
Now that Kira was here, in the reality of rain and coffee, she found it nearly impossible to explain. In the daytime dream, or whatever it was, the girl was the constant, the protagonist; like the nighttime dreams, it was too sketchy to understand. The dreams left Kira with a sense of foreboding, as if there were something about them she should know. Yet she felt the girl’s emotions, carried them implicitly with her as if they’d taken root in her own DNA. She was that girl with the baby—and that terrified girl, without her baby, in the daytime dream—but Kira had no context for any of it. No names, no childhood memories, no labels. Trying to make sense of them was like trying to put together a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle when half of the pieces were missing.
The table next to them was empty now, the young mother maneuvering her strollered child toward the door. “You know the dreams I’ve been having, with the girl and the baby?” Kira said. “I had one yesterday, kind of. I mean, I guess it was a dream but it was after work and I couldn’t move and it was so fucking scary.”
“Yeah, I’ve had dreams like that, when someone’s coming after me with a knife or a gun and I can’t scream, much less run. I hate that.”
“I wasn’t asleep, though. I was in my car—Jesus, I don’t know, I must have dozed off, right?” Kira told Camille everything that had happened the day before, about the fight with Dan and the twins dying and the terrifying not-dream. Then she was sobbing, Camille’s alarmed eyes on her, everyone’s eyes on her, and what she was saying sounded worse than when it was trapped in her head.
“Come on, let’s go sit in my car.” Camille steered Kira to a Subaru wagon strewn with sippy cups, stray socks, and pulverized Cheerios. Kira crumbled into the passenger seat, shaking.
Camille turned on the heat. “With all the crap in this car, you’d think I’d have some Kleenex. Wait, here’s a napkin. Okay, listen. First of all, you’re going to be fine. Yes, you are. You’re strong; look at everything you’ve been through. I know you had a horrible day and it was really scary, but give yourself a break. Your mom died and you’re exhausted and you spent the day dealing with dying babies. That’s a lot.”
“Babies die all the time.”
“But they’re not always your patients. And you’re vulnerable right now; it’s only been a few weeks. Give yourself some time.”
“Dan wants me to see someone.”
“You told him?” Camille squeezed Kira’s hand. “That’s good.”
“No, he said that yesterday morning. I didn’t tell him about the daytime thing. I’m not going to.”
“Why not? I know you don’t want to hear it, and I’m not trying to piss you off, but he is trying, you know. Let him help you get through this.”
“I’ve got you for that.”
Camille gave her an exasperated look. “You’ve got him too. Don’t you think he wants that?”
“I’ve got to go.” Kira dug her keys out of her bag. “I’ll call you later.”
Standing on the sidewalk, Kira lifted her face to the wind whipping the gingko trees along the curb, then walked, jacket unzipped and hood down despite the scattered rain. The skies shapeshifted, gunmetal clouds gathering force.
<<>>
When a child is born dead, you give up your future, yours and hers, the promise of a blended life. When your mother dies nine months later, when you are still little more than animated cardboard, you forfeit the opposite—your history, your identity, both drawn from the woman who held you, nursed you, comforted you with her body, voice, touch, smell. Kira felt unmoored without the only person who’d known her intimately as a child, who’d shared her memories, who would have had answers if Kira had been allowed to ask questions.
She hadn’t been. Don’t ask, her mother had said. Betrayal and abandonment are not proper subjects for dinnertime conversation; that message was clear by the time Kira was eight. There were the two of them; that was enough, her mother said. They would do fine without her father, the goddamn son of a bitch. “You were four, Kira, four years old. Who ditches his wife and kid, disappears and never sends a dime?”
Kira had tried to make herself invisible when her mother talked like that. A headache, then silence, would follow the rage, and Rosa would retreat to her bedroom, snapping the door shut behind her. To Kira, the door closing sounded like an accusation.
If Aimi had lived, there would have been no closed doors, no child left alone to do her homework and put herself to bed. Aimi could have asked any questions she wanted to and Kira would have done her best to respond, even if she didn’t have many answers. They would have been a family of four—if she counted Rosa, and it was impossible to use the word “family” without thinking of Rosa—but on the day Aimi was born and died they became three again, hopeless; two again when Rosa died. Two people joined by marriage, not blood, and it wasn’t the same thing.
Kira chastised herself for thinking that way, remembered hating that her mother swore by the old saying that blood was thicker than water. Yet she pushed Dan away, and he drifted alongside her on silent currents until he couldn’t stand her distance any longer. When he reached for her, she pushed him harder, below the surface, and still he bobbed up, treading water alongside her. She was grateful for his resilience, certain it wouldn’t last, incapable of worrying about it.
Dan tolerated her sabotage as if he understood it better than she did. When the dreams started, he’d reassured her that of course she’d dream about a baby after Aimi died; you didn’t have to be Freud to figure that out. Kira didn’t point out the flaw in his logic—that the dreams didn’t start after Aimi’s death but nine months later, after Rosa’s. Dan promised that all this would fade with time and they would move on. But he didn’t feel the rending Kira did, the physical betrayal. The helplessness when her labor started at thirty weeks, she’d never forget that. And when her hope died, an ashen despair buried itself in her muscles and bones.
Kira had been at work when the back pain started, so severe that she couldn’t stand. By the time Dan arrived to take her home, the contractions were coming fast.
“You’re dead white,” Dan said. “We’re going to the hospital.”
Kira reached for his hand. He was disappearing, getting smaller by the second. How odd, she thought. Is that what fear does? Do we all get smaller until we disappear? Her body enlarged to make room for the pain, dense as clay.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” the charge nurse said.
“It’s ten minutes to Oakland General,” Dan said. “I’m not waiting.”
They were at the ER in five. Dan jerked the car to a stop and helped Kira out. “Fuck,” he said, staring behind her into the car. Kira looked at the tan leather seat, black with blood, and that was the last thing she remembered until after the surgery.
A partial abruption, blood pooled behind the placenta. There was no explanation, no reason it should have happened; Kira had no risk factors. If she’d seen the bleeding sooner, Aimi might have lived. The C-section should have saved her, but the blood loss was too great. No explanation. Should have saved her. Meaningless, infuriating words.
Afterward, Kira and Dan held Aimi for hours, Rosa crying next to the bed, looking ten years older. They unwrapped the pink blanket, stroked Aimi’s small body, kissed her sweet face, smoothed the hair like black down. Touched the tiny fingers that Dan, at some point in that void, wrapped around Kira’s index finger and photographed. Tears like lava. Dan’s ravaged face. Rosa’s whispered prayers. The pain of breathing. The loss, the memory of loss, hollowed into Kira’s body. She had wanted this baby. She wasn’t thirteen anymore, worried about shaming her mother, willing her fetus to die.
No, the baby in the dreams wasn’t Aimi; she was someone else’s. Dan was wrong, despite all his reasoning and good intentions. He would insist that in dream language a baby was a baby, a manifestation of longing. No. Whoever this baby was, she was someone. That baby and her mother meant something.
<<>>
At home, chilled from the rain, Kira took a bath. Thoughts assaulted her—the dreams, the weird daytime thing, Aimi, her mother, the long-ago miscarriage. “Stop, just stop,” she whispered. “Please.” She sank below the water, stayed there until the knifing pressure in her chest silenced the clamor in her head.
Some time later, a tap at the door. “Kira? You okay?”
Dan was there, worried about her, about them, waiting for her to give him a sign that she was, or could be again, the person he loved enough to marry. She wasn’t that person anymore. She wasn’t sure she could be.
© Cheryl A. Ossola 2019/2023
Reprinted with permission.
For more information, or to order the book, visit Regal House Publishing or my website. If you do read it and like it and you want to be my hero, a positive rating/review on Goodreads and/or Amazon and/or Barnes & Noble would do wonders, as would recommending it to the readers in your life, asking your library to stock it, and so on. You’d definitely make my day!