The spring that Marie lost her baby, Soho was full of scaffolding. Whenever one stretch of scaffolding would come down, a new configuration would rise up a few feet away. It seemed to Marie, as she strolled beneath the constantly transforming metal frames, that these were ancient bones disguised by peeling paint—the skeleton of some defunct beast that could be dismantled and restructured but never completely destroyed.
That spring was a hazy maze of missed appointments, memory lapses, and sluggishness. Despite the fact that she was remarkably light on her feet for someone so heavy with child, there was no quickness about her. The baby growing inside her made her distracted. Her apartment was perpetually scattered with open books, the kitchen counter littered with ingredients for dishes that were never made, tools from incomplete home improvement projects were left strewn on the floor, and the corners of every room were cluttered with clothes she planned to donate.
Her husband bore the messiness of her downward spiral with a bemused grin. The grin masked his exasperation. He began to lie to her constantly. He lied about how annoyed he was to find a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich on the edge of the bathroom sink. He lied about the inconvenience of always having crushed papers underfoot. But mostly he lied about time.
He cushioned arrival times without revealing that he was infuriated by Marie’s hopeless lateness. At first he exaggerated event times by only ten or twenty minutes, but by the end of Marie’s pregnancy he was inflating their arrival times by a few hours. The appointments they kept in those final weeks of pregnancy were due to Steven’s cunning. Marie never noticed his dishonesties; she was too gripped by the bizarre happenings inside her body—the squashed bladder and compromised lungs, the odd pains in her abdomen and hips, the heat rash and heartburn, the otherworldly sensation of a sentient being moving around inside her.
During her third trimester, Marie spent an inordinate amount of time resenting the scaffolding. After living in Soho for four years, she had turned dodging teenagers and tourists into an art form. But the scaffolding disarmed her. It hemmed her in, turning wide, open sidewalks into narrow corridors. She couldn’t dart about, couldn’t zigzag around leisurely shoppers. Steven had heard so many complaints on the topic that he refused to listen to another word. She was left to hate the scaffolding silently, blaming it for everything from her lateness to the anxious tightening in her chest that flared whenever she had to navigate around strollers and slowpokes.
Mostly she resented the scaffolding for stealing her sunshine. The winter had been hell: the coats, struggling with layers, the flashes of sweat that engulfed her when she was finally all bundled up. When she started seeing the sun, and feeling warmth when she pressed her hand to the windowpane, all she wanted was to go outside and let it soak into her skin. She would smile anticipating the flush of the sun’s rays on her cheeks as she leisurely strolled to her appointments. But the sunny meanderings she longed for would rarely materialize. She would waste time reorganizing her file cabinet, cleaning the edges of the kitchen hardware with a Q-tip, or shredding junk mail with a pair of scissors. By the time she left her apartment, strolling was never an option. She had to make a mad dash for a cab as soon as she made her way down her front steps. She would stand in the shadow of the scaffolding, hand raised to hail a cab, an angry scowl tugging at her face.
Sunshine was not something that Marie grew up chasing. Warmth came early in the bayou where Marie grew up, and hung around—thickly—for most of the year. But here, in New York, spring brought a giddy eagerness that Marie knew her brothers would have teased her for feeling. Their teasing, once the torturous backdrop of her childhood, had become the language of their newfound closeness as adults.
Marie would be the first to admit that their closeness was metaphorical. It had been so long since her last trip home, she might as well have been estranged from her family. The irony of her absences was not lost on her. During her first months in New York, she had held on to her memories of home, feverishly, desperately, as if she would wash away on a sea of the city’s dirty grays and browns if she didn’t hold on to birthplace as her anchor.
