"Maps" - short fiction

Maps

There is a recurring dream; it goes like this:

The house becomes a boat. Water laps up on my bedroom windows; fish swim by, pausing to look in at me, their brown mouths opening in surprised little ohs. Startled by my entrance into their world. I sit in the middle of my bedroom, which is completely empty except for all of the maps that are lying on the hardwood floor. Maps of the world, of cities, of mountain ranges, oceans, tributaries, streams. Topographical renderings of everything on earth. The house begins to rock and it sails up and down ocean swells, dipping into the dark green valleys between waves, and steadily climbing back up again. I can hear the furniture downstairs scraping against the floor as it rolls from one end of the house to the other. And the thump against the wall when the house sinks into the valleys between swells. Rolling, rolling, rolling, thump. Rolling, rolling, rolling, thump. I sit in the middle of the floor, surrounded everywhere by maps, listening for something. Listening for you.

And then I wake up catching my breath, feeling sea-sick and heavy-headed, looking frantically around the room. No maps. Just regular bedroom items: bed, nightstands, armoire, vanity table, his bathrobe on the closet door, the laundry basket over-filled. Outside the window is early-morning air, not the secret, verdant, underwater dwellings of fish. He is sleeping beside me, totally uninterrupted by my startled awakening. Heartbeat slows to normal.

It’s been ten weeks.

The moment I put my feet on the floor and stand up, a wave of nausea creeps up my spine, floods my head, and plummets to my stomach. Sea-sick. I swallow hard, but my stomach revolts, turns sideways, climbs the green swells of my nausea and I am running to the bathroom. Holding my own hair back while he sleeps uninterrupted in the next room. On the bathroom floor, once it’s done, I stare at the closed door. The alarm clock starts going off, and I can hear him roll over in bed. Its bleeps break off and silence regains the house. In a moment, I hear him get out of bed.

The bathroom door opens and I look up at him from the floor.

“Are you okay?” He asks, stepping over me, turning on the shower.

“Fine.”

He steps into the shower and pulls the curtain closed. While using the counter to help myself up, I find myself startled to see my own face in the mirror. Crow’s feet. Dark purple circles. My hair clings to my forehead and temples still glossy with the perspiration it takes to reverse the digestion process first thing in the morning. I leave the bathroom and go downstairs.

She’s been awfully difficult. I have to hold my breath when I walk by the olive cart in the supermarket. I can’t stand chicken, milk tastes sour, my brain feels fuzzy around the edges where it used to feel sharp. And she’s been making me sick at least twice a day. She is a fetus, officially – graduated from zygote, blastocyst and embryo. Next week, she’ll start using her lungs to take practice breaths, not for oxygen but to begin teaching them how to work. She has hands and feet. A heart and a brain.

I still have your things in a box in my nightstand, close to me while I sleep and dream of being afloat in a vast, green ocean. In the moments before sleep, I think I can feel you, but it’s not you, is it? It’s someone else. A stranger. I think about her taking practice breaths and I learn to breathe at the same time: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. This is what I tell myself when I look at the weight accumulating around my midsection, when I feel the sickness coming on, when I think about your tiny, insignificant box in my nightstand. Is that all there is left of you? Of the first, fervent, all-encompassing love that I felt when I knew you were there? The first star in the night sky seems so significant when it’s the only one.

I can’t forget the dull ache, low and deep. Not sudden, sharp pains, but an omnipresent rock forming inside of me. I would lie in bed clutching my abdomen, trying to cradle your unformed body in my arms, trying to tell you it would be all right. This went on for almost a week, and when I told the doctor, she just looked at me and nodded and sighed a little. Said, “we’ll see.” And then it finally happened on a Saturday night while he was out renting a movie.
Blood on my sheets. I could hear my own voice crying like it didn’t even belong to me. Come back to me. Don’t go. Don’t leave me now. It’ll be all right, just come back.

My body recovered so quickly. I was angry at how quickly it bounced back, how quickly I became pregnant again: how dare it support her so delicately and gently and not you – why not you? Before I knew it, you were nothing but remembrance in the form of a box in my nightstand and he was ecstatic about her. He was overjoyed that you’d been replaced by her.
I sit down at the kitchen table, wanting a coffee, knowing that I shouldn’t. I think about what it would be like if the house just floated away in the night, and we woke up somewhere else. I think about sitting in the middle of my bedroom floor, listening so carefully, straining to hear the slightest sound. Straining to hear you crying as though you were just down the hall behind a closed door. As though I could hear you crying out to me and I’d be able to save you, if only the sounds of the ocean outside my window would die down a little. I think about all of the maps and all of the possible destinations and all of the delineations of how to get there.

I put my hand on her, on my stomach where she practices breathing, and wonder where I’m going. Wonder where you went.