Hardly a soul slept the night my mother was in labor. Nocturnal birds gathered on the lawns like pious parishioners to eat noisily, their doomed prey screaming wildly into the dark. Earlier in the day, the crows and sparrows had tormented the neighborhood with angry calls, flying into windows and after small children. Viviane, however, was unaware of the strange disturbance her upcoming delivery had brought to the neighborhood birds.
Gabe drove her to the hospital in the clunky Chevy truck he’d bought for the odds-and-ends jobs he took around town. Emilienne was still at the bakery, and there was no time.
“No time!” Viviane screamed from the passenger side of the truck, her clenched fists as tight as the ball of her belly. She squeezed her eyes shut in pain, and a slick layer of sweat gathered above her upper lip.
Gabe reached across the old truck and grabbed her hand — slightly disgusted with himself for finding pleasure in being able to touch her at such a time.
“Hold on, there, Vivi,” he said. “We’ll be there soon.”
Gabe was forced to remain in the waiting room as Viviane was whisked away by a pair of apron-clad nurses, who quickly set her up in a sterile white room before their squeaky shoes took them back down the hall.
Alone, my mother cried and screamed. Screamed for the nurses, for Jack, even for her mother — though Emilienne was hardly the type to hold her daughter’s hand or wipe her forehead with a damp cloth. And when the pain felt too great, when it felt like the contractions would split her in half, the squeaky shoes finally returned, bringing with them a cold syringe of relief.
Just before slipping into a deep twilight sleep, Viviane swore she saw giant feathers falling from the ceiling, an image she attributed to the anesthetic.
When I was born, the on-call doctor examined the forceps in his hands in bewilderment before going in search of family in the waiting room.
According to the nurses in attendance, moments after I made my entrance, I opened my eyes and pointed a pinkie finger toward the light. This was an admirable feat considering I first had to unfold a pair of speckled wings sprouting from the edges of my shoulder blades.
My twin came as a surprise to them all — most especially the doctor, who had to be rushed back for his birth. It was later debated whether or not my wings had anything to do with how Henry turned out. But that wouldn’t explain the many others like him — others who were born just as strange as Henry but without a feathery twin.
It took two hours for the press to catch wind of my strange birth. Soon there they were, crowding the hospital hallways, the nursing staff shooting them malicious looks. The head nurse was able to keep the cameras and journalists from the actual hospital room, but outside our window the devout gathered into the night, holding candles and singing hymns of praise and fear. The crowd was so dense, it took Gabe four hours to pick up Emilienne from the bakery and bring her back to the hospital. It took another four hours to take her back when Emilienne declared that, after an uncomfortable forty-five minutes, she had been away from the bakery too long.
It was the nurse’s aide who attended to us during most of our stay, who emptied my mother’s bedpan and enticed her with tiny cups of green Jell-O and bottles of chocolate milk. The nurse’s aide was a feverish reader of the Bible and brought in pages of notebook paper on which she had jotted down all the feminine forms of Michael, Raphael, and Uriel she could find.
“She really does need a name,” she said.
As a newborn, I was lovely in every sense of the word, or so I’ve been told.
I had dark eyes and a full head of black hair like my mother’s on the day she was born — right down to the ringlet at the back of my head. Other than the fact that I had wings, I was perfect. And even the wings weren’t that bad. Only a few days old and I was already able to wrap them around myself like a swaddling blanket.
“I like Michaela,” the nurse’s aide said, standing in the doorway. “Or maybe you could call her Raphaela.”
It usually took Gabe a while to get from the elevator to the hospital room. He had to will his fingers to stop shaking and his chest to stop heaving first. When he did arrive, it was with a ceremonious bumping of his head on the door frame and a bouquet of flowers, wilted from his tight and sweaty grip.
“I was thinking you could call her Ava,” he said, rubbing his head and handing the flowers to the nurse’s aide. She gave him a quizzical look before adding the bouquet to the array of brown flowers from his other visits.
“What angel was ever named that?” she asked.
“It means bird,” Viviane said softly. She tried not to look disappointed, but she and Gabe and Emilienne all knew that a very large part of her was still hoping Jack would walk through the door. She didn’t care if he brought her flowers. Or even an apology. She just needed him to be there. She needed him because that was the only thing that made sense.
Then, for a moment, my mother caught a glimpse of Gabe’s good heart and forgot that her own was in mourning. For a moment, she saw in him a common soul and smiled at the thought of spending the next fifty years sleeping in the crook of his long arm or walking together in stride — arms matching arms, step matching step. But then she remembered Jack and all those months she’d spent waiting for a love that never returned, and she wrapped her heart in its burial shroud once again.
“Well, fine,” the young aide said, rolling her eyes. “Name her whatever you want, but what about the other one?”
To Viviane, one of the worst parts about all the attention — the reporters, the newspaper articles, the crowds of worshipful followers — was that it focused on one twin, as if I were a single entity. What were twins but a pair? They came together for a reason, after all. But maybe worse was that underneath her motherly indignation lay the underlying fear that Viviane wasn’t so sure about the other one either. He was small and quiet, too quiet for an infant. He went limp when anyone tried to hold him. It seemed to Viviane that she’d given birth to not one oddity but two.
“Henry,” Viviane decided. “I want to call him Henry.”
Gabe smiled. “Ava and Henry.”