Fate Weaver

The best I can figure, what happens when you die is you’re stuck alone in a bunch of places you knew in your life, and they’re stuck exactly how they looked when you were alive, and you have to make your own fun for the rest of eternity.

You can visit with some of the people you knew or saw in life, if they’re still alive, but they have to be dreaming and come into a room or field or car where you’re hanging out, and then suddenly you’re in their dream. When that happens, they know you’re dead, and you can have a conversation with them.

It is thrilling at first, to see a lover from your youth in their old attic bedroom, nude and drenched in morning light. But he’s aged into looking like someone’s father, and to him, you look exactly as you did when you last parted ways. You’re hungry for news and want to hear about what household gadgets they’re connecting to the internet these days or who’s running for president or even the newest flavor of potato chip. But all he ever wants to talk about is the past, and how things ended between you, and were you ever happy in life. It’s usually about closure, his closure. And the sex isn’t very good, either.

You learn some places to avoid: your elementary school, for instance, is always the site of someone else’s stress dream; your doctor’s office gets pretty weird pretty fast.

Behaviors you held secret and delicious in life become your dearest meditations. You experiment with gulping, guttural sounds for hours. You fondle one short, coarse hair on your chin all afternoon.

Sometimes, you might think you’re totally alone, sitting on your kitchen counter, heels knocking against the cabinets. You are in a fugue, remembering how it felt to climb up as a child and reach for the shelf with the sprinkles or the cupcake liners or the intoxicating vanilla extract, heart racing, and spill it all over the floor, the decadence, the knowledge of spoiling a prize for everyone. And then, to your utter shock, you’re not alone. There’s a rustling at the door to the backyard.  The knob turns. Your daughter walks through. She is grown, and she is pregnant. And you fill with a fury that life did not prepare you for.

 * 

Jim called his boat Fate Weaver because Dream Weaver was taken. I visit but I never see him there. He never dreams about the water. I asked him about it once while he dreamt of the record store up the street from our first apartment, how it looked before Ruby was born.

I told him, “I think everyone dreams about water at least sometimes. They say water represents the subconscious.”

“Hmm,” Jim said. “They teach you that up here?” He held up a copy of a Dr. John record, the haunted house-sounding one, Gris-Gris. “You like this any better now that you’re a ghost?”

I see Madge on the water sometimes, usually out for a motor through the swamp, and we talk. My favorite days we just cruise in silence. Here and there a snake plops down from a low-hanging branch, and Madge will lay it across her bronze shoulders and pout for a camera that’s not there, my little sister, devastating and glamorous and youthful, even as she outlives me.

 * 

Ruby is pregnant. She confirms it one night when she dreams of the aquarium by the beach. “I can’t believe you remember this place,” I say when she sits next to me on the bench in the Indonesia room. “The last time we took you here was when you were, what? Four?”

Ruby looks at me with a dizzy smile, then squints. “You’re serious?” she says. “All of high school, I cut third period once a month to take mushrooms here with Bunny Davis.”

She points to a flock of surrealist Pinocchios circling the tank. “I used to feel so connected to these guys, I told Bunny it was like my blood was talking to theirs.” 

“The ones with the noses?” I ask. Their faces look startled and prim.

Ruby frowns, shakes her head. “Those are their horns,” she says, “it’s why they’re called unicorn fish.” 

I look again. I get the feeling of looking at that old optical illusion, the is-it-a-bunny-or-a-duck drawing, the one where I could only ever see a duck. Every time I think I catch a glimpse of the unicorn, my vision snaps it back to a humanoid face. “I can only see the unicorn if I don’t look at the whole fish at once,” I say. “Does that make sense?” 

Ruby sighs. “No.”

I ask her about the pregnancy. She used one of the embryos my parents stored a generation ago, leftovers from when they had Madge and me. I’m angry and unsurprised. 

Ruby was curious about the embryos as a child. My mother encouraged her to call them her aunts and uncles, a gross habit Jim and I never got Ruby to shake. She’d ask me their names, and when I didn’t have an answer, she gave them some herself. She wanted to visit them. When we drove by the storage facility on the way to her gymnastics classes, she’d wave.

In the second grade, Ruby drew what appeared to be a jar of tadpoles and snails and labeled it “My Family.” When she was in high school she overheard Jim and me joking about a life unencumbered by embryo storage fees. “You take out the security cameras, and I’ll torch the generators,” Jim said. Ruby burst into the kitchen in furious tears, saying, “If you won’t give them a life, I will!” We were more careful around her after that.

In the dark blue grotto of the Indonesia room, I watch the fishes’ shadows play across Ruby’s stomach. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to think of that embryo as a child,” I tell her. “I think it will always be an embryo to me.”

“It’s already not an embryo,” she says, hand cupping her barely-swelling belly. “They start calling it a fetus at eight weeks.”

It was still legal to destroy frozen embryos until I was in my early twenties. Madge and I followed the news with dread and panic, like watching a tsunami roll in. Mom used to laugh at us when we asked her to get rid of them. She’d say, “sibling rivalry.” But you don’t inherit a sibling or eat up your kid’s college money to fund a sibling’s perpetual suspended animation. You can talk to a sibling. A sibling lives, and, eventually, dies.

 * 

I’m troubled to report that fetuses do dream.

 * 

One nice thing about an afterlife is you get to try on some of the lives you didn’t choose before. You can spend years in the sleepy bartending job your husband made you quit. You can live forever in your high-ceilinged, quiet house, filled with the books and art you still love, and never once think of your child; you can live in the house before the child ever existed.

You can afford the home without the husband, you can move about in the lithe body of your past, you can live as a nun in a world without vows or gods.

There are people who think heaven should be a place where everyone you ever knew is huddled and waiting to envelop you in love somewhere with lots of gold and light. But don’t you remember how it felt to be beautiful some August nights and satisfied with your own company, drinking gin out of a sweaty glass, all the lights in the house on and you in the backyard smelling the earth. What envelope of love can come close?

*

In our childhood bedroom, Madge and I have a tea party in comfort, lounging and sipping with our beds pushed together. She says Ruby’s asked her for my old journals, but Madge doesn’t know where they are. She says Ruby has questions about motherhood, my experience of motherhood.

I never wanted to be a mother, I tell Madge. It happened and it was fine and I don’t regret it, but I didn’t want it. I say: to me, motherhood is mourning an invisible friend. My not-life. I say: I hope this doesn’t offend you.

Madge says no, she is not offended. And she tells me the truth, what she did with her inheritance.

 *

Madge and Steve weren’t radicals, but Madge was fearless. Steve was a civil engineer and moved to town when the big bridge project came to cut the swamp in half. Madge worked at the pharmacy and when people forgot to pick up their prescriptions she’d sell a little speed to the guys pouring the concrete piers. They met at the jobsite; Steve asked her to wear a hard hat and she asked him to lunch. He’d already eaten but said yes anyway.

After they got married, my folks harangued them to have a baby. Madge always said “Steve can’t” with a sad smile, so our parents conferred and decided to give her half of their frozen embryos. They said, “You’d inherit them anyway; maybe you can put them to use now.” Madge thought it was just as bizarre as I did: a multigenerational duty to frozen genetic material, giving birth to your own sibling. But once the embryos were in her name, she had to either use them or pay for their storage. She and Steve didn’t have that kind of money.

For Madge to take custody of the embryos, she had to have an exam. Dr. Redding was near-retirement and childless. Madge wept when the doctor said, “I can’t think of a reason you shouldn’t be able to get pregnant right away.” It was too much. The doctor pulled off her gloves and said, “Wait here. I have something that might interest you.”

Steve had gotten an illegal vasectomy years before. Madge had never told me. I’d driven Madge to New Mexico for an abortion when we were teenagers. We said we were taking a sisters-only trip. She’d never told Dr. Redding any of it; she wasn’t sure if the doctor would write it down or make a report.

When Dr. Redding got back, she handed Madge an antique issue of Fertility and Sterility. The spine was held together with ratty duct tape. Coffee stains blotched the creased pages. “There’s an article in here I want you to read. I’ve highlighted the pertinent details. Come back next week. Bring the journal with you; it’s my only copy.”

That night Madge smoked a spliff at the kitchen table and leafed through the brittle pages. And then, on page 1628 (why do I remember the page? Madge says when she gets to this part; it was your lucky number, I say), she saw a faded pink slash across a phrase that made her whole body relax. In a discussion of preferences for the final disposition of couples’ leftover embryos: “another alternative option—that the embryos be returned to their body at a time when pregnancy was unlikely.”

Madge saw Dr. Redding the next week, and, over the next two years, her fertility doctor implanted our tiny siblings into her womb just in time to slough out with her period.

 *

When I’m feeling nostalgic, I like to go to the fishmonger’s. I pretended my whole life to be just as put off as everyone else by the smell, but I love the way the briny decay hits the back of your throat when you breathe in. It’s a marvel that we bring up these slippery, shimmering creatures from the depths, that they’re so unfit for the air they smell like death almost immediately, that we keep them alive in buckets until the last possible moment, that we pull out their spines, we anoint their flesh with butter. We should thrill at how quickly it all happens, how quickly it must happen if we want to cheat the inevitable rot nipping at our heels.

The most salient image I have of Ruby as a child is here, waiting in line after a day on the boat. She was a gangly seven-year-old whose torso was a little too long and whose limbs were a little too thin to fit well in her shiny gold swimsuit, her favorite. Her hair fell halfway down her back in a dark tangle. The place must have just been redone- I remember the room was bright white with fluorescent lights and pristine tanks of pick-your-own sea creatures. Ruby was just tall enough to stand in front of a glass case and come face-to-face with the lobsters inside. She’d learned about lobsters from Jim, how they don’t actually age into death, how if they’re lucky they grow larger for a hundred years until molting their giant shell takes so much effort that their bodies just give out. No senescence. It was amazing, really, to watch a near-immortal being swim-crawl to my daughter’s face and rear up to reveal its belly, to see it wave a rubber-banded claw back and forth at her, to watch as she slowly raised her arm above her head and waved, too, like her arm was pushing through the water, like she was hailing a friend back on the shore.

 * 

When Jim appears, I’m in the hammock out back. The hammock is wide, white, made of canvas. The sides come up so high they curl inward, a cocoon. I watch him emerge from the woods between the ropes at my feet. 

“You know you don’t have to sneak in from the back,” I call, our old joke still the first thing out of my mouth. “My husband’s never around!”

“No sense risking it!” he shouts back. “I hear he’s the jealous type. And mean!” He reaches me and looks up toward the house, shakes his head, lets out a low whistle. “But you gotta hand it to the guy- he does a hell of a job with this lawn.”

I roll my eyes. Jim bends to kiss my face. He pulls up a chair.

“Anyone ever tell you you’re a better flirt since you died?” he asks, pulling a cigarette from a pack in his breast pocket.

“I get a lot more practice now,” I say. I bat my eyelashes and pluck the cigarette from his hand. He lights it for me.

“What’s this news about our daughter knocking herself up with my albatross?” I ask. 

“First of all, please never say ‘knocked up’ about Ruby again,” Jim says. He shrugs. “We always knew she’d do this, we always said unless we found a loophole and got rid of them this was gonna happen.” He closes his eyes, leans his head back, blows smoke into the pink clouds overhead.

“I just don’t understand how we raised someone who buys into this shit. Is it a generational thing? Are other people’s kids doing this?” I ask.

Jim looks at me and flips his palms face up, shakes his head, looks away. We finish our smokes.

“It’s weird,” I say. “You know when you’re pregnant, the baby’s DNA circulates in your body? It stays in your brain for years after.” 

“Mmmhmm,” Jim says.

“Isn’t it weird that all the extra DNA in her veins is going to be DNA she already has? Or close to it?”

Jim is quiet for a minute. “Can we just drop it?”  he asks. He hates when I talk about life, real life. He acts like his dreams about me are supposed to be straight out of the movies, idyllic trysts montaged with technicolor scenes of us laughing til we cry.

“I don’t know why you come here,” I say, “if you want me to flatten myself out.” I feel my throat tightening. “I’m still me.”

He stands, moves over to my cocoon. “I know,” he says, climbing in, settling his body against mine. “I guess it’s not too weird, in the scheme of things. Think of all the inbred kings. What was happening in their moms’ veins?”

 *

I don’t dream anymore, but if I did, I would dream of the baby being born as the very old woman I never became, of the swamp turned dusty red clay, of the final days of the last living person who ever saw me.

*

“Jim’s not willing to talk Ruby out of this,” I tell Madge on the Fate Weaver. We’re anchored in the inlet, looking out onto the oyster shoals. 

Madge pulls a flat stone from a paper grocery bag at her feet. “I don’t know how much it would change,” she says.  “Ever since Jim started seeing that woman, Ruby hasn’t had much time for his opinions.”

My stomach drops. I feel my eyes widen, but I nod, pretending it’s not news that Jim is with someone. I had nightmares in life about Jim cheating on me, about me finding out this way, casually, about realizing that everyone knew except me.

Madge looks at me, “Oh my god,” she says, “of course you didn’t know.” 

“It makes sense,” I say, just like I always thought I would. “I’ve been dead a long time, right?” I realize I’m not sure. I don’t have days anymore, just a sky that shifts when I think it into being. 

“I don’t know,” Madge says, eyes on the water. “I’m sleeping. Time doesn’t really work like that for me anyway.”

“How does it work?” I ask.

Madge reaches for the hem of her skirt and folds it over on itself, a linen accordion. “Like this,” she says. “It’s all layered on top of itself, all at once if you want it to be.”

I nod. I don’t understand.

“You get it,” she says. She gestures toward the flat water. “You’re always here, and always not.”

I try to smile. “Tell me about her. The woman,” I say.

Madge pops a piece of bubblegum into her mouth. “Ugh. Sherry!” She chews while she talks. “They met at an air show, the Blue Angels? Jim’s into all this airplane stuff now that he’s retired. She was running the funnel cake stand. She loves going out on the boat.”

A pink bubble blooms from Madge’s lips. She sucks it back in with a loud snap. I reach into the bag for a stone and pass it from palm to palm. It’s cool on my skin.

“Anyway, she made Jim move the Fate Weaver from the inlet marina to some boat garage further inland. Because the marina bait shop still has that picture of us all from when you were pregnant, remember? When Steve caught that marlin?”

I remember, of course. Danny, who ran the store, loved when we’d come in; he never charged us for the cheap beers from the barely-cold fridge and was always giving me floating keychains with the shop’s address on them. “So Jim doesn’t have to go diving if he drops his keys,” he’d say every time. Jim never once lost his keys, but it was beside the point.

Danny’s daughter, Lila, was my best friend in high school. She had a job selling popcorn and soft serve at the snack bar by the docks. When she got off work, she’d make us each a cone with chocolate syrup layered between pumps of vanilla ice cream. We’d share the salty popcorn dregs and a tallboy and wait til most of the boats were nestled into their slips for the night and go skinny dipping. We’d swim under the moon until our silvery bodies were too tired to tread water. We’d float on our backs, making up new constellations. She died, Lila, in childbirth, in our twenties. She wasn’t like a sister to me, she was something else altogether; a deep friend, someone I didn’t have to know by birth but could choose to be in communion with. I dreamt of her when I was pregnant with Ruby and terrified of my future. “I don’t think this is what kills you,” she told me then.

Madge keeps talking about Sherry. “I did hear she’s sure that Ruby’s baby will look like you. She thinks the baby will grow up to be in love with Jim because it has the same genes as you.”

“Christ,” I say. It’s insulting, the love of your life going on to love an idiot.

“Yeah,” says Madge. “I half want to tell her you’re haunting the boat, that you’ll drown her if she ever goes out alone on it, but Steve told me not to, that she’d make Jim sell it.”

I smile at that. Madge laughs. The boat rocks. I pitch my stone far out into the water. 

“I do think there’s still time for Ruby to get rid of it, if you could try, maybe offer to take her to Canada,” I say.

Madge places her hand on my wrist, gentle. “No,” she says quietly. “Ruby’s made up her mind.” She folds me into a hug and I let my chin rest on her shoulder. She strokes my hair the way she did when we were younger, a trick Steve’s aunt taught her, fingers moving like she’s catching my thoughts as they spring from my head and brushing them away. It’s good for the aura, Steve’s aunt said.

“It doesn’t make how we felt less real,” Madge whispers. We sit close together and listen to water lapping against the boat for I don’t know how long.

*

I never dreamt about my mother after she died. The last time I saw her was at one of Ruby’s swim meets. My mom came to all of Ruby’s meets, and before Ruby could drive herself my mom would sit through her practices, alone in the bleachers, pickling in chlorined humidity until it was time to drive Ruby home. My mother never learned to swim, never once waded in past her knees. Madge thought it was deep fear that held her back, I thought it was herculean restraint and resistance to pleasure. Jim thought she was just pathologically incurious.

I remember sitting next to my mother during Ruby’s events, my mother using her phone to take zoomed-in, blown-out photos of Ruby’s blue-capped head when it emerged from the water. This from the woman who did not come to my own high school graduation because “there’s no parking in that part of town.”

The day she died was the same as always. Eyes fixed on the pool, she told me about her neighbor’s granddaughter, how she was desperate to get married and have a baby. “It’s a blessing you didn’t need to use the other children,” she told me. “Ruby can have them someday. She won’t need a man.” She patted my knee and smiled to herself.

I felt a burning in my head. All of a sudden the echoing room was too loud and too crowded. I thought, get me away from this woman.  

“You know how I feel about the embryos,” I said instead. “So we don’t need to keep having this conversation. 

My mom started to feel lightheaded and short of breath. I offered her some peanut butter crackers. She put them in her purse and left early, maybe the only time she’d ever left one of Ruby’s meets before the end.

She died sometime that night, my mom. The coroner said “acute pulmonary edema.” Her heart failed, and too much fluid built up in her lungs. Drowning from within.

* 

Jim is somehow smaller than I remembered, somehow jowlier. He comes into the bar where I worked where we first met. I’m behind the counter, trying to imagine the foulest combination of liqueurs I can put together.

“I’ll take a bourbon, neat,” Jim calls from the doorway.

I grab a bottle of something Spanish. “You sure about that?” I ask. “I thought you liked sherry.”

Jim goes very still. He stands, backlit, halfway between the entry and the barstools. He’s like a wild rabbit when tension rises. In life, he would freeze as soon as he sensed my dissatisfaction zeroing in on him. If I let fly anyway, he would hide. Once, in a middle-of-the-night-what-do-you-mean-you-just-forgot-to-pay-the-electric-bill-for-a-couple-months fight, he pulled a blanket over his head and stayed under there, silent, until I stormed to the couch. I’ve had more fun with Jim than with anyone else I’ve ever met. It is hard to square that with the part of him that refuses to meet my eyes when I need him to say something.

“Do you love her?” I ask, suddenly twenty-five years old, pathetic, asking this same question in a sticky vinyl diner booth one hungover morning after a desperate and blurry night with an ex, tears streaming down my face, voice a little too loud, knowing that no answer will return us to the no-brakes, tumbling, endless fall into one another’s depths.

Jim walks toward me. I can see his face now, a little pale, raised apologetic eyebrows, a grimace, “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe?”

My breath catches in my throat. Jim goes on, “You know how it is,” he says. “Sometimes you know it’s there, you both do, and you don’t even have to say it.” He points at me, then to himself. “Other times, maybe it’ll happen, maybe not.” Jim sighs and looks around the bar. “They tore this dump down a couple months ago, you know that? They’re building a storage place.” 

I wonder how many of my favorite places only exist in dreams now, and how much longer anyone will be around to dream of them. How soon the barflies will be dreaming of roaming the endless climate-controlled halls of the self-storage complex, trying a key in every lock, listening for whispers at every rolldown door. I am on an island, I realize, and everyone I love is on a lifeboat swept slowly into the fog. I think: they must have grieved my death before I did. I think: I won’t know when to grieve theirs. My dearest loved ones, already living in buildings I’ve never walked past, cooking with sauces I’ve never tasted, slowly forgetting how to dream of me until they stop completely, with no one left to tell me where they’ve gone. 

Jim leans forward to kiss me on the cheek. “Does she love you?” I ask, my insides on fire.

Jim smiles and shrugs. “Probably,” he grins, looking away to keep from laughing.

 *

I see Ruby again just before the baby is born. She dreams of the creek that ran behind my parents’ house. I go there to run my hands over the mossy rocks, to listen to the wind, see the sun splash down through the trees.

I sit and put my feet in the water. I pat the ground beside me. Ruby shakes her head and stays standing on the other bank. “I know you hate this,” she says. I don’t know if she means “this,” the pregnancy or “this” its provenance. I wonder if there’s really a difference for me.

I don’t know what to say, so I say the truth. “I do hate it.”

Ruby nods. Her face doesn’t change.

“I just always wanted you to feel free,” I say.

Ruby looks into the forest, fixes her gaze just above my head. “I do feel free,” she says.

I look at Ruby, my perfect and strange daughter, and I see the version of her I first knew decades ago: giant dark eyes locked onto mine, comically severe little mouth, impossibly thick black mane cowlicking crazily out from her head. I think, hold still. My heart surges with love. 

“I wonder if the baby is dreaming right now, too,” Ruby says. “What do you think they dream about, when they’ve never seen the world?” 

I shake my head. “I wish I could tell you.” 

Ruby turns from me and starts walking. She doesn’t look back.

 *

Here is how the dream goes: dark, red, warm, salt, glow into the bones, sound is the tide, breathing is the tide, I am the tide, all of it so much that even this, when this is all there is, is enough.