Short Story: Seven

Seven

By Abby Minot

He was called the McKnight’s Son instead of Warren, but he was a grown-up who lived with his parents. Everybody forgot his first name, even though there was nothing complicated about it. I’d see him on roads far from his house, walking, in any weather. From a distance he looked like an old person. His shoulders were hunched over and his face was weather-beaten. The corners of his mouth turned down and he didn’t look directly at anybody. He kept to the narrow dirt edges of the roadside, with his head bent and his gaze trained on the little bits of road trash, or the stray animal parts of road kill, a claw or a tooth.

Mrs. McKnight told me about Warren. “He loves those rabbits. He’s built the most ingenious rabbit high rise in the yard, seven levels, and seven rabbits on each one. It’s so clever, needs no fuel to heat it, and he grows all the food they eat, too. He’s not able to hold a regular job. His nerves are delicate and the rabbits calm him. It’s a fast growing market, you know. Better than chinchillas. More sustainable, more marketable. He’s always spent a lot of time in the meadow on the far side of the swamp. You know, the one that has huge banks of fragrant orange and fuchsia striped lilies. That must be where he got friendly with the rabbits, and convinced them to live in the high rise. It seemed harmless to his father and me. Actually, it was a blessing, that Warren took an interest in something. We worried that he would never find his niche in life. He was such a quiet, introverted boy.”

I’m not sure why she called it a high rise, as it was neither rectilinear nor urban in appearance. To me it looked like a huge sculpture of a lumpy porcupine. It was rounded mounds of dirt, with straw embedded in such a way that the straw stuck straight up, all spiky looking.

“He’s his own sort, is my Warren”, she continued. “When he was a teenager, he learned how to make his eyelids thin, so when he closed his eyes, he saw the world through a pale pink blurry haze. That was when we decided to home school him. The system just does not know what to do with a boy like him. He learns more through scent and sound than he does by sight or speech. For a while, we thought he would have a future in perfume design, but he lacks the interpersonal skills needed to work for a large company. That, and the fact that he withers if he spends too much time indoors. He has trouble sitting still. Last winter, when the blizzard hit, he grew so agitated that he developed twitches in his feet and hands. The only thing that helped was constant walking up and down the stairs. As soon as the snow melted enough for us to open the front door, he was outside again, in his snowshoes, walking the roads in the blinding white. He’d come home with a big smile, but complaining of intense headache. Winter is difficult for him. 

“He’s always been attracted to the darkness of the night, and he knows all the constellations. When the moon is full, he spends the entire night outside with the rabbits.” Mrs. McKnight brought a tray with aromatic mint tea and carrot cookies, and set it down on the coffee table in the living room. Warren was sitting on the couch next to her. He helped himself to a cookie while his mother poured tea for the three of us. I sat opposite the mother and her son, so that I could observe their facial expressions.

I asked Warren, “What is it about the night that pleases you?” His face was placid. “The rabbits are more open-minded when the moon is full. They let me pat them and hum to them, and their fur is so soft. Did you know that rabbits purr?” He made a high-pitched sound that pained my ears, and smiled, then dropped his head. “I’m all they have, you see. They trust me, so I must provide for them. I’m important to them.” A look of tenderness passed over his rough features. It made him look young, in spite of his prematurely wrinkled skin and gaunt cheekbones. “Excuse me, I need to do something now. It can’t wait.” He slid off the edge of the couch and landed cross legged on the bare floor. His mother and I continued to sip our tea. With his face turned towards his lap, I had a view of the top of his head and his busy hands.

He pulled a small bundle of golden straw sticks from a ragged-edged dirty canvas bag that was plopped like a mud puddle on the floor beside him. They were tied with a tri-colored braid of grass in three shades of green: one a fresh, deep green, one a pale, dead green, and the third a dried tan color. It had a slip knot with a single loop. He tugged on the loop, and the bundle stuck together for a full second, before the short pieces of straw tumbled to the ground. He started counting them into piles that he arranged in a semi-circle in front of him, mindfully placing them at right angles to the direction of the wooden floorboards. He stayed there, kneeling on that wooden floor, until I began to worry about his knees digging into the hard surface. I didn’t say a word, but Warren must have heard my thought, because he looked up at me for an instant, made charming but fleeting eye contact and he smiled, as if to reassure me that he was content and comfortable. I noticed that there were seven piles of straws, which reminded me of the sevens in the so-called high-rise. I went outside to take a closer look at it.

The sun was at a low angle behind the rabbits’ dwelling. The spiky straw bits glowed like matchsticks about to catch fire, while the sun continued to set, sending tangerine and magenta streaks across the horizon. I didn’t hear the door open, but quite soon, Mrs. McKnight was at my side. “Oh dear, no, this is never a good idea. This time of day, near all those fuzzy creatures, can be too much for anyone to bear. Come with me”. She gently took my elbow and led me back inside. Perhaps it was the changing light that made the McKnight’s living room appear entirely different, as if the ceiling had been raised to let the sky enter the room. Warren was gone, and there was a small hand woven rug covering the bare floor where he’d been earlier. There were seven groups of straws lined up on the wall facing the back yard, tilted vertically against the baseboard. I counted one batch, and, as I suspected, there were seven straws in it. It was time to go, so I said my goodbyes and went on my way. The sky had become dark blue, and the Pleiades were visible overhead.

Several months passed before I returned to the McKnight’s. It was July 7, a few days after the fireworks display that went awry and burned the strip mall at the east end of town to the ground. Mr. McKnight answered the door with disheveled hair and a harried expression. With urgency he led me up the narrow staircase and down a long hall to Warren’s bedroom. Warren was sitting propped up in bed, with hoary gauze bandages covering most of his head, including his eyes and mouth, but exposing his ears and nose. His hands, too, were swathed. In his lap was a pure white rabbit with translucent rosy ears that glowed in a spot of sunlight that pooled upon the bed. “He won’t speak. From time to time he rubs the rabbit’s fur on his neck.” Warren’s tanned neck was covered with unshaven blondish stubble. He seemed to be awake. He had a curious semi-smile pulling his mouth up on one side.

“He seems cheerful, or at least half cheerful. Have you tried bringing six more rabbits into the room?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized that his parents were concerned about keeping the house clean. Seven rabbits would make a mess. “Sometimes life is messy”, I added, to dampen their fears. 

“All right, let them in”, said Mrs. McKnight. Her husband went to the window and threw it open to allow the rabbits who were waiting outside to enter. They filed in, politely, not like wild rabbits at all. They reminded me of children dressed as angels, filing onto a stage for the Christmas pageant. They positioned themselves evenly along the walls that faced the end and sides of the bed, two per wall. Warren’s nose quivered, as if it was a tuning fork, and he emitted the same sort of high pitched note as before. But this time, the rabbits joined in. Instinctively, I raised my hands to my ears, to protect them from that unpleasant squeal, but I was surprised. When all those high-pitched notes converged, they transformed into an ethereal melody that transmitted warmth and calm. Melody split into harmony, and the music vibrated my bones in a delicate, pleasurable way. Mrs. and Mr. McKnight and I looked at each other to gauge whether we were all feeling it. We could tell by the expression on each others’ faces that we were witnessing something ethereal. In the instant that our non-verbal communication registered, the music faded. The rabbits scampered out of the room, dragging lengths of gauze that curled and drifted like plumes of disappearing smoke.

I suspected that Warren’s injuries might be connected with the fire, so I asked them, “Did you see the fireworks?” Mrs. McKnight looked at Mr. McKnight with her lips pressed tightly together. “Warren hates fireworks. They frighten the rabbits. He spent all night trying to calm them down.” Warren was looking at the floor, his head cocked to one side.

“Warren, what happened that night?”

He lifted his gaze and settled it on my chin. “The bright flashes and loud booms scare all animals, wild ones and tame ones, not just the rabbits. A rabbit who has been frightened can lose all her fur. Last year, several of them got bald patches from the fireworks. At least it was summer, when they can keep warm easily. If the fireworks came in January, some would certainly die of cold.” He shook his head slowly, as if holiday pyrotechnics were an evil he would never understand. “We can’t stop them. The best I can do is comfort them when it happens.” A cloud of sadness passed over his craggy features. I glanced down and noticed there was ruddy new skin on his hands.

His mother made a sharp sideways movement with her head. Warren continued in spite of his mother’s silent signal to stop. “They scratched me that night, when I tried to hug them. There was a lot of blood, so Mother had to bandage me.” Mrs. McKnight’s face flushed with guilt and fear.

I hastened to reassure her. “Those laws are only for dogs”, referring to the ordinance that says a dog that bites a human must be destroyed. Now I understood why she was so furtive about what happened that night. As much as the rabbits were Warren’s children, they were her grandchildren, or as close to grandchildren as she would ever have. If the authorities were to remove the rabbits, it would destroy her family. I patted her hand and tried to console her. “Vicious dogs are common, vicious rabbits are not.” Her expression stayed dark. She was reluctant to believe that I knew all the laws. In comparison to her son, the mother seemed worldly, but I started to think she might be a bit fey, too.

Mr. McKnight spoke up. “Even the professionals redefine sanity every few years. People are quick to label others insane, when they are ignorant.” He must have been talking about the first man who saw the geysers in Yellowstone. The fellow returned to Chicago, telling of the bubbling pits of sulfurous mud and shooting towers of steam. He was put in an insane asylum. He stayed there for nearly twenty years, until others came back with matching stories. Perhaps Warren’s ability to communicate with rabbits was the beginning of a new human aptitude, or the resurrection of an ancient one. Again I sensed the boundaries of conventional experience melting and stretching into unknown territory.

“Warren, why seven? Why did you make the rabbits’ house in multiples of seven?”

“Seven is the smallest happy number.”

That Warren was familiar with obscure mathematical concepts like happy numbers was plausible, because his father, who worked as a statistician, had participated in his home schooling. Whether he understood the concepts or just liked the notions they evoked was a matter that intrigued me. I asked his father, “Is Warren mathematically gifted?”

Mr. McKnight’ face took on a restrained glow of fatherly pride. “Creatively gifted, not really, but Warren is quite proficient with numbers. I was able to teach him basic skills. Happy numbers were a way to keep him interested. I introduced him to them, as a practice in formulating and computing equations.”

It seemed important to see the three of them with the dwelling. “Let’s take a look at the high-rise again, shall we?”

I shepherded them through the long dark hallway, down the stairs, through the living room and kitchen, then out the back door. The day was hot and still, devoid of birdsong. A little terra cotta bowl with Warren’s road treasures sat on the earth near the rabbit’s dwelling. “Is there a reason you keep these here?” I asked.

“Rabbits are home bodies. They need a little outside influence from time to time.”

Perhaps this explained why Warren spent so much time walking the back roads. I wondered, did he gather his treasures because the rabbits needed them, or did he foster the rabbits because he wanted to put his treasures to good use? Certainly there was a satisfying symbiosis here, between Warren and his rabbits, and also between Warren and his parents. The father spoke up. “We are three, and with you we are four. Three and four make seven. Seven is a happy number, don’t you think?”

I must admit, I was filled with a feeling of happiness, and gratitude to this odd family for showing me how well they cared for each other. Warren leaned down and pulled a polished tooth from the bowl. “Keep this in your pocket, to remember us by.” He looked at me, smiling, and for the first time in our years of acquaintance he made eye contact with me. He opened his eyes and let me see into his clear heart.   

Short Short Story: The Fun Coach

Oh you’ll never guess who I ran into at the cleaners, I about died when I saw her. I was standing behind her in line and if it wasn’t for the voice I never would have guessed it was Suzy. She’s as big as a house. Her butt was so wide it’s a marvel she can get in and out of a car. Remember how cute and tiny she used to be, how she was always the top of the pyramid in our cheering routines? She must have put on a good hundred pounds, maybe two. I kid you not. It made me feel ok with the mere thirty I’ve gained. The craziest thing was, she was totally flamboyant. I mean, if I weighed three hundred pounds, I’d stay under a rock. I sure as heck wouldn’t dye my hair purple and pierce my ears six times each. Yes, purple. Well the earrings alone. You know, when somebody has six holes per ear, they usually wear something kind of basic, like little wire graduated hoops, but no, each earring was different, dangly, like a little riot of sparkly colors slam dancing there on the sides of her neck. And her outfit: rainbow and glitter meets king size deep pocket sheet, with streaming Mylar fringe on the hem. Turns out she’s divorced, big surprise; looking like that she’d have to be divorced. My Jimmy was never one for trendy fashion, you know that’s why I stick to Talbot’s and Land’s End, and frankly, I’d be scared to meet the man who would put up with a wife in a crazy get-up like Suzy had on. Not to mention her size.

Boy was she chatty. I could barely get a word in edgewise. Apparently she nearly died in a helicopter crash, and it changed her life. Long story short, she chose food over men, said that the pleasure of eating was better than the pleasure of sex. I guess a few of us have had that thought from time to time, HA! But who would ever act on that? She’s got some weird career now; she calls herself a Fun Coach. You won’t believe this: she teaches rich workaholics how to relax and enjoy life, and she makes a pretty penny doing it, not to mention the bennies. It is her business to know all the best restaurants, the most romantic luxury hotels, the most decadent leisure activities. Things you and I might do once, twice in a lifetime, she’s doing several times a week. Sounds likes she’s best friends with the wine steward at the French Laundry. Can you stand it? Plus she never worries about her size, or what people might think of her clothes. I got the feeling she doesn’t worry about anything. Odd as it sounds, she looked good. I mean, she had this liveliness about her that made me smile, just standing there, kind of like her happiness was oozing out of her and spilling into me. You know I’ve been so worried about my daughter Torie’s engagement to that dead-beat rock’n’roller, and stressed out over the guest bathroom remodel, with those flakey contractors, that it was like a mini vacation, standing there, watching the light glinting off her earrings, reminding me of how sometimes plain old dull black pavement sparkles when the angle of the sun hits it just right.

I had to run. I was late to pick up the twins from their clarinet lesson, and the dog from the groomer, and I had a conference call at five, so I was on a schedule, as always. It got me to thinking, though. Not that I don’t like my life, of course I love my kids. Jimmy’s kind of a pain in the butt, he can’t help being a complainer, but I love him, I do. I don’t think anybody can be married for twenty years, and not lose the pizzazz in the process. Pizzazz is for teenagers, anyway. My accounting business is predictable, yeah, it borders on boring, but I make good money, good enough, anyway. That’s what everybody really wants in a job, isn’t it? Something you can count on. I wonder if there’s any security in being a Fun Coach. Not that I’m considering a career change, not at my age, that would be stupid. I wonder how much she charges? Maybe I should hire her for an hour or two, wouldn’t that be a kick? I got her card, just in case.

Short Story: The Godmother

         

The Godmother

By Abby Minot

It was only after Victoria withered to a skin-sheathed hairless skeleton that Margo was forced to admit to herself just how much she depended on her ally and sole confidante. A pit of loneliness opened inside her, excavated by the realization of the singularity of their friendship and the anguish its loss would unshackle. It was logical in the early days of Silicon Valley that the tiny number of women executives would stick together in the hostile soup of roiling testosterone, but Margo, who embraced the masculine model of competition, had, due to a serendipitous situation decades earlier, forged an enduring bond with only one female colleague: Victoria.

Margo had been a chief executive officer at a Fortune 500 company for over ten years. Stalwart in her autonomy, from the very beginning she rejected networking invitations from other women executives; she scorned anything that smelled of mushy femininity, and preferred to stay well away from the sentimentality that she believed molded and restricted the feeble gender to which she grudgingly belonged. Even when her company teetered on the brink of failure, despite being simultaneously awash with hormones from an early and dispassionately terminated pregnancy, she had never, ever cried. Her metallic impenetrability that showed up as brittle bitchiness in her twenties had weathered into majestic armor in her ripening fifties; she was still a svelte size two, with artfully low-lighted hair that gave the impression that she wasn’t trying to deny the gray but rather enhance and celebrate it with several other complimentary colors. Restrained employment of Botox and Juvederm convinced observers that she was simply genetically lucky; they knew she’d been around as long as the transistor that started the tech revolution, of which she was now a legend. Her appearance never prompted anybody to actually do the math equation whose sum would put Margo on AARP’s mailing list.

Hers was the kind of success that spawned an entire dream realm for younger women whose fantasies were fueled by her achievement. These modern young females stood on the shoulders of the women’s liberation warriors of the sixties and seventies, and unlike their heroines, they knew their power lay not only in their work, but also in their life creating power of motherhood. They planned their marriages and careers with that objective, choosing husbands who would share child-rearing tasks. The new gender-free corporate policies of family leave enabled them to work and parent and express emotions as if they were entitled to them.

Victoria’s cancer was fast moving. Margo carved out time from her crammed schedule to visit her nearly every day, and sometimes ran into her husband, Dave, and their daughter, Lauren, who was eight months pregnant. For all the evidence Victoria had provided about the insanity of combining motherhood with an executive title, it was piercingly obvious that the sight of her daughter’s swollen abdomen infused her ravaged face with joy. Margo’s abortion, so successfully repressed thirty-some years ago, was bubbling up through her metallic shell, forming an increasingly thin dome in the metal, not unlike the rounding protrusion of a growing fetus within its mother’s belly, and it was dangerously close to rupture.

Observing mother and daughter in the hospital room she was forced to consider the exact opposite: that motherhood had, in the end, been the deeper and more significant achievement in Victoria’s life. Granted, the circumstances surrounding each woman’s pregnancy had been different; Victoria was married to a man who cheerfully took on the role of house husband before the term was coined, while Margo’s pregnancy had been the result of an ill-advised post-merger dinner celebration with a considerably older, happily married chief financial officer. Rather than talk about the past with the one person who might understand, Margo chattered on about her current company’s power struggles and strategies, until Victoria slipped off to sleep. When she left, she felt frustrated and unnerved, and went back to the office to bury her confusing, distressing feelings in the familiar oblivion of work.

Cradled in a custom burgundy Herman Miller Aeron chair behind a sleek polished cherry desk, Margo was surrounded by cold smooth marble topped file cabinets and a credenza that reflected daylight from the huge corner windows. A museum scale Rothko oil covered the only solid wall visible from the desk. The surfaces held not a single framed photograph of any people at all, not even of her sibling’s progeny at the various stages of life. Conscious and uncluttered was how she saw her space, but her brother Charlie would’ve said it was a reflection of her barrenness. A few Christmases back his wife Margie sent a cherry wood framed photograph of his family, including the dog, all wearing holiday red sweaters. In it the two boys looked uncharacteristically serene and tidy, nothing like the sticky fingered, boisterous whirlwinds that dominated Charlie’s house when she visited. It was so noisy there she could barely make a phone call. The picture had been tucked away to make room for a massive flow chart several months before, but since she didn’t miss the vague feelings of discomfort it brought up, she had no impulse to reinstate it.

 Margo’s office was more obviously occupied by a human than was her home, where the refrigerator rarely held more than soda water and a doggie bag or two, the couches were not inhabited enough to create a crease or smudge in the upholstery, and the dust was pitilessly wiped away by her housekeeper twice weekly, well before it became visible. Years earlier she’d had a florist deliver fresh blooms weekly, but stopped when she realized she couldn’t remember a thing about them: not their scent, nor their form, nor their color. She was often out of town on business, or so late coming home that she’d barely have time to wash her face and brush her teeth before she collapsed into her down-comforted bed, her only acquiescence to comfort and sensuality.

Even her bed was becoming a torture chamber of sorts. Until recently, she did not remember her dreams, or if she did, it was only for a brief moment between sleeping and waking, and by the time she was in the shower they dissolved as fleetingly as the shampoo lather that ran down the drain. For the past six months, coinciding with Victoria’s illness, although the connection between the two events would never have occurred to Margo, that moment between sleeping and wakefulness had stretched into a purgatorial prison, an elongated interlude where the dream felt more real than did her daily life and she was held there, unable to move forward into the day or backward into the blissful unconsciousness of sleep. The dream returned, and every time it did, she was more rattled by it, and parts of it began to stick in her tortured psyche.

It started at the seaside, where she felt the warm sand beneath her and the gentle heat of the sun above her. The sound of the surf grew louder and louder, until it roared in her ears, and she was catapulted inside it, tumbling and falling and unable to find air. As she struggled to save herself her attention was arrested by a high-pitched, mewling whine that eclipsed the intensity of her fear with a purpose; it was a helpless child, caught in the maelstrom with her, and saving its life became more compelling than saving her own. She struggled to reach it, gauging her progress by the increasing volume of the heart rending cry, her vision obscured by turbulent watery froth, until after an excruciatingly long time her hand touched slippery skin. She awoke, clutching her iPhone, her face wet with tears and her hands slick with sweat, her hand cradling the rubberized sheath so aptly titled “skin” in the advertisements, while a repeating question hammered in her head, “Was it a boy or a girl?”

The next day, at the hospital, that identical phrase popped up, suggesting that the real world was issuing from the dream world, and not the other way around, which made Margo jolt to hear the nurse ask Lauren, “Boy or girl?” From her seat in a no-frills stackable chair placed at the foot of Victoria’s bed, her view of her friend was half hidden by Lauren, whose sizeable form occupied the vinyl upholstered wooden visitor’s chair, her legs splayed out to help support the weight of her middle. Lauren laughed with her mother about how she could only wear slip-on shoes because she couldn’t reach her feet to tie laces. Imagining life with a bowling ball belly repulsed Margo to the point where she couldn’t join in the joke. She smoothed her manicured hands over her flat abdomen and forced a smile.

Her first contact with Lauren as an infant was on a weekend, when she’d gone to Victoria’s house, to get her signature on a contract. Victoria was consumed with the tiny organism who was wailing, red-faced, and miserable with colic; her husband was uncharacteristically absent and there was no nanny available. Margo was shocked and irritated by the extent to which the child monopolized Victoria’s attention. At one point Victoria handed the screaming bundle to Margo, who was astounded by the sheer volume such a small being could emit, unnerved by its squirming rage, and undone by the panic its plaintive tone evoked in her; all these combined to cement within Margo the decision to forego motherhood.

During Lauren’s youth, there were numerous occasions when Victoria had been compromised by her child. Margo pitied Victoria when she was forced to perform motherly tasks. Repeatedly she’d counted herself lucky, assessed herself wise, for choosing the abortion; and for one-upping her friend by also avoiding the slippery slope that led to reproduction: intimate relationships with men. But that day, in the hospital room, Victoria’s radiant smile gave an onlooker no clue at all of the previous regret and resentment raising her daughter had caused and that observation undermined Margo’s certainty about her own irreversible decision.

Margo’s Patek Philippe watch ticked away seven minutes. The memory of baby Lauren brought her dream back to the front of her consciousness and she felt nervous, not sufficiently self-aware to sense that underneath she felt jealous, frightened, and excluded. The nurse hovered, to protect Victoria’s strength; the window for attention from her friend diminished with each moment the daughter lingered. The young woman’s lustrous chestnut hair shone in the usually unflattering fluorescent light, and her face was nearly iridescent with third-trimester glow. Lauren was thirty-two; as automatically as her timepiece ticked away, Margo’s inner calculator determined that her unborn baby would have been twenty-nine. To chase the discomfort from that calculation, she dug into her handbag for her iPhone to see what emails had come in, a reflexive action she used to restore her machine-like demeanor when emotions loomed.

One name on the list of unread email provoked a wave of antipathy and irritation, it seemed, but it was a decoy on the deep and murky pond of suppressed anger about how she had consistently abandoned her personal life in favor of the noisier, flashier, and financially rewarding demands of work during her entire adulthood. A few quick taps showed there was a voice message from the same scapegoat e-mailer, ratcheting up Margo’s anxiety to the point where she left the room without excusing herself. Normally she would have let the pest fester. Margo was seasoned enough to know that a subordinate was more likely to figure out a solution when left alone, and communicating with somebody who was flustered was generally a waste of time. She punched the return call button, got voice mail, and hung up without leaving a message.

Lauren emerged from Victoria’s room as Margo was taking a breath. Their cool, polite smiles bounced off each other in passing, and Margo went to take possession of the still warm chair at Victoria’s bedside. Her friend’s eyes were closed, and she blamed Lauren for using up all her energy. There was nothing left for Margo, who had finally worked up the courage to tell Victoria her dream, not because Victoria would understand, or do anything about it, but because Victoria was the only person to whom she had ever revealed distress and vulnerability.

          For a moment Margo just sat there blankly, the wheels of her mind immobile and locked against the obvious fact that was evidenced by Victoria’s shriveled face: life was limited, death was stealing closer day by day, and the colleagues who had been her team, her troops in the stress-filled trenches of corporate warfare, were too busy with the next product launch, or funding crisis, or assimilation of acquisition to schedule a non-business excursion to confront an associate’s mortality, much less their own. Victoria’s pale blue veined hand brushed Margo’s knee and dragged her thoughts back into the room, and the two women’s gazes met: Victoria’s irises of pale aqua encircled with a thin navy line, the only thing about her that remained familiar, with Margo’s, of deep brown, solid and illegible. A poisonous little knot of tense fear was all she sensed, not able to identify it as a worry that she would be in her friend’s place one day, but without a daughter, or husband, and possibly not even her brother, to sit by her.

          “I hope I can live long enough to see the baby.” Victoria’s voice was soft and raspy, scarcely resembling her former healthy podium voice of resonant power.

          “Of course you will. These Stanford docs are the best in the world.”

          Victoria reached and squeezed Margo’s wrist.

          “Promise me you’ll look after the baby, and Lauren.”

          The request irritated and confused her. Margo’s intention to tell Victoria about the dream vaporized.

          “If she asks you to be the godmother, promise me you’ll agree.”

          Having no idea of what that would entail, and assuming it was a lowly feminine chore for which she was undoubtedly over qualified, Margo said yes, of course. Of course I will. Don’t worry.

          Victoria’s grasp loosened and her head sunk into the pillow, the strain of speaking having used up her last reserves. In less than a minute, her breathing became audible and regular, and her facial muscles relaxed into sleep. Margo moved the hand from her wrist, back onto the bed, and, placing her weight on the balls of her feet, she prevented the points of her heels from making any noise as she left the room.

          In the next few weeks, the panic from having agreed to do something for which she was totally inexperienced hit Margo, and, as if godmothering was a work project, she began to research parenting on the web the minute she got home, with the furtive, slightly guilty feeling a husband would have, looking at pornography while his wife watched television in the next room. Her immersion was so deep that when she was forced to get up for a glass of water or a trip to the rest room, she’d notice she hadn’t even removed her overcoat or high heels. Many were the times she would entirely forget to eat, or she’d munch down a small pile of crackers, consuming just enough to dampen the hunger pangs that distracted her focus. What room she was in, the time of day, the month, the season, none of these registered as part of her surroundings. Her world was the glow of her computer screen; the history tab on her browser tracked her path and recorded the progressing creation of a new paradigm with a new ethos. With the fervor once applied to outsmarting rival companies, she designed and executed her own crash course in everything from teething to toilet training, tasks that would never directly concern her as an auxiliary parent, but subjects that she felt were important to understand, at least perfunctorily. The body of knowledge from which she had insulated herself for more than half a century became her obsession: Lamaze classes, bottle vs. breast feeding, to circumcise or not, pacifiers and their effect on teeth alignment, household baby proofing, educational trust funds, childhood diseases and vaccinations, autism, and sudden infant death. Her obsession spilled over into her work day; the citadel which had heretofore been all work, all the time, became violated by her burgeoning parental identity. During the day she worked like an automaton, making decisions quickly, handing out terse instructions and allowing her subordinates to do their jobs without her characteristic monitoring.  Between meetings, sometimes even during conference calls, she sneaked back on the web to absorb new information, her thirst as insidious as an alcoholic’s. Her brain was ignited in a way that it had not been since she scaled the career hurdles of her younger days. She agonized over what exactly to get for the baby: a crib with all the trimmings, stock in growth companies, or several hefty gift certificates. Her head was filled with scenarios of a baby learning to say her name, a child dressed in an adorable European coordinated outfit, playing on a swing, or holding her hand while walking on unsteady legs. These imagined snapshots released her quarantined heart, and loosened the jealousy and competitiveness she’d felt towards Lauren when she was a child. Now she saw Lauren as an agent for her new role, in the way an infertile woman hires a surrogate mother, but without appreciating the enormity of the gift.

The day Margo left for a two-week business trip in Asia, Victoria was moved to a hospice. The time difference and the intense work schedule barely allowed time for sleep, and insulated her from the full impact of grief. She stayed in touch with Dave and Lauren by email, and spoke with Dave on the phone once. She left messages for Lauren, and received messages back, but Lauren couldn’t be reached at the times Margo could call. In her mind, anything less than voice contact would be inappropriate for something as significant as a godmother request. The conditions being what they were, she resigned herself to accept that it would have to wait until she got home. It calmed her somewhat, when she ordered what she intended to be the first of many gifts: a silver baby cup, fork, spoon, and teething ring from Tiffany & Co., sure that receiving such a quantity of shining sterling would impress Lauren.

The baby was born six days before Victoria died, a girl, named Phyllis Victoria. When Dave asked for her assistance in contacting Victoria’s work friends for the memorial service, he mentioned how sleep-deprived the new parents were, which helped to further dampen the twinge of anxiety Margo felt about not having spoken with Lauren.

          Victoria’s memorial service was a week after Phyllis’ birth, the day after Margo returned. Still foggy from jet-lag, Margo thought Silicon Valley Congregational Church looked like a child’s paper airplane, twisted and pinioned by surrounding mature oaks. The stained glass front doors were a rounded geometric design reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose sparse prairie aesthetic continued in the interior, where simple pine benches angled invitingly inwards, and a tall inverted V shaped roof line contained a massive unembellished wooden cross behind the altar. She found it well suited to the technological community, free of any blood-dripping, thorn-crowned Jesus depictions that would reference too graphically the ancient and raw aspects of Christianity.

The family was on the left. In the front row was Dave, looking gaunt and years older than he had the previous year, before Victoria had been diagnosed. Next to him was Lauren, her pale face hiding behind a wall of luxuriant russet hair, hunched into her tissue filled hand, and beside her, the handsome father holding the pink swathed baby. Margo sat on the right side with the work friends, a conglomeration of faces that were more of an old home week reunion than any college or high school could’ve been. Adept at name recognition, Margo turned around from her seat in the front row and silently ticked off the names of the business colleagues she recognized in the crowd, and categorized them: the ones that worked with Victoria before the web was world wide, the ones that were the core group that all became millionaires when GoBuy.com went public eight years ago, and a sea of younger ones, women, mostly, whom she did not recognize, but whom she surmised to be Victoria’s current crew of admirers.

As the service progressed, to dampen her fear of crying in front of so many people who recognized her, she concentrated her thoughts on the future of the tiny girl on the other side of the church, as if welcoming the new life could circumvent her simple human need to grieve the loss of her closest friend, the person with whom she had shared more intimacy than any other. At the end of the service, various associates grabbed her attention, using the event as a free pass for direct contact with her to which they were not entitled, under normal circumstances. After the crowd thinned, she made her way to the front of the church, where Dave, Lauren, and her husband were accepting condolences. Margo quickly searched her memory for the husband’s name, a common, two-syllable name, Richard, or Robert, and settled with certainty on Richard.

She held her hands out to grasp Dave’s, but he put his arms around her shoulders and hugged her. She withdrew, grasped his elbows, mindful that her tears not disfigure her makeup, and said something about new birth being the best antidote for sorrow. Lauren’s husband stood next to Dave. Margo courteously turned to include him, stretched out her hand to be shaken, and said, “Richard, I’m Margo.” “Roger”, he corrected, and Margo winced. “Yes, Roger, of course.” Lauren was deep in conversation with a blond woman of her own generation who was holding the baby. Margo, finally able to lay eyes upon the object of her desire, stood expectantly near the two women, until Lauren broke focus.

“Margo, this is Becky, my roommate from college, and baby Phyllis.”

Margo peeked into the bundle and beheld the tiny face. It was the first time she had looked at a baby she cared about, and she was flooded with longing and love, sensing the potency and possibility inherent in this new life as a path towards her own rebirth; this child would miraculously provide her the means to redress the errant decisions of her unenlightened youth. Baby Phyllis was the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen.

“May I hold her?

Becky smiled widely as she held the infant towards Margo.

“I don’t know if I want to give her up, she’s my first godchild.”

Margo reeled with shock that paralyzed her body while her thoughts raced, seething with outrage and formulating an all out attack to stop this deluded interloper. Who did this grinning pipsqueak think she was, usurping her rightful title? This was insane, outrageous, a crazy misunderstanding, a horrible mistake. She repeated to herself, Victoria told me, Victoria promised, Victoria wanted me to be the godmother; I’m the godmother, not you. With a stabbing gush of realization, it registered that it was she who had made a promise to Victoria. A flaming blush rose up from her belly, along her neck, and into her face: the choice of godmother belonged to the mother, and not the grandmother. She felt colossally naive, ridiculous, betrayed and mortified. Shrunken to utter insignificance by her brazen foolishness, she saw her months of preparation reduced to delusional mania.

She lowered her head towards the baby, praising her arms for their steadiness, a steadiness her head did not share. Blessedly she was saved from the gaze of the younger women, whose attention was consumed by the continuing parade of emotive mourners. At that moment, when nobody was observing her, she observed herself, as if from the height of the cross at the highest point of the arched ceiling. She saw tiny Margo, with infinitesimal Phyllis. She had everything she wanted, and nothing, in the same fraction of a second. She had no idea how much time went by, perhaps it was a minute, perhaps less. But eventually, unknown faces were stooping over the baby in her arms, and before she knew it she had transferred the weight in her arms to the next adoring embrace that waited.