No, I hadn’t thought about that. I’d only ever thought of Paul as fully formed, as a four-year-old arrival from another planet. I never thought of him as an infant, as one of those hours-old, red-and-wet mounds of flesh—as coming out of Patra.
“Let me tell you something, Linda.” And I wanted her to tell me something, I did. “After I got pregnant with Paul I was sick for so long. I had this belief I was doomed somehow, that everything that could go wrong would. I had such a bad feeling about it. Leo kept saying, you’re afraid, that’s all it is. You’re afraid. And I was. I was so worried I’d made a huge mistake.”
“You’d just finished college?”
“My friends were joining the peace corps, starting grad school.”
“It makes sense, how you felt.”
“It wasn’t just that I was afraid. It felt really real, how sick I was during pregnancy. There were all these complications. Leo kept urging me to worry less, kept reading me all his books, but it was one thing after another. Low fetal weight, premature contractions, everything you could think of. Then during labor, I actually felt my heart stop. I actually heard it go thump, thump, thump”—she patted my leg as she said this—”then nothing else. And that’s when I had this tiny thought, that I’d been wrong to be so scared of this, that God wouldn’t do that. God wouldn’t just stop my heart, would he?”
My throat closed up at the idea. “He wouldn’t.”
“Later Leo said that thought about God was Paul. That thought was him being born.”
Through the window, the black trees stood stiff and unyielding. Patra was quiet, her hand on my leg. She was quiet for such a long time I thought she’d drifted off, but then I felt her shift position, move closer to me so our heads almost touched on the couch cushions.
She was whispering. “I’d been resisting Leo’s way of thinking for such a long time. I kept telling him, I just don’t have your kind of mind that believes one thing without question. But then Paul was there and everything was fine. Paul was perfect, truly. And I was so happy after that, not fighting Leo anymore. Going his way seemed easy. There’s nothing to say about happiness, you know? Nobody believes you when you talk about it.” She was crying now, she was asking me: “I’m so happy, right? Don’t we seem happy to you?”
“You do,” I assured her. “You are.”
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew I was half under the blanket and half under Patra’s legs. I could barely move beneath her soft, warm weight. I could see Patra’s head sticking out from the other side of the blanket, and I felt a deep body gladness suddenly, the same as when I used to curl up with Tameka in a sleeping bag in our shared bed. That old feeling came back to me hard, the way the sleeping bag had been like a second body we’d put on each night, the best body of all, so much more substantial than our separate ones. I nestled closer to Patra, let my hip sink into a crack in the cushions. Closed my eyes. Perhaps something did tug at the edge of my consciousness then, because I remember thinking there was nothing to be worried about—that worrying now was like worrying the canoe would tip because you’d imagined it would happen. That was impossible I told myself. It didn’t work like that.
When I awoke next, I was sweating. Leo’s CD was no longer playing, and a breeze was moving through my hair. I pushed a corner of the blanket back and let my damp neck grow chill in the cool air. What time was it? Patra, across the couch, was sleeping soundly. Somehow I stood without waking her, and it was only when I took a few steps that I realized the breeze I felt came from outside. I smelled a bit of woods blow in, the bright scent of pine needles. The sliding door to the deck was wide open, and a litter of pale leaves lay across the rug.
I stepped, shivering, across the threshold. True night had come at last. The sky: starless, dark, empty.
Someone was at the telescope, crouched.
“Paul?”
He looked up at me, and his face was bright and clear as anything. He looked stronger and healthier than I’d seen him in days, the whites of his eyes and the whites of his teeth flashing even in the dark. His hair had been worked by a finger into a sharp spoke that stood on the very top of his head. He was smiling.
“Oh, brother, another beaver,” he giggled.
“Paul—” I felt relief then. I felt relief enough to scold him. “Come on inside.”
“Let’s play survival together,” he suggested.
“Not now.”