Gone home
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Where have you gone, little one?
Your ashes, just a small bag of them, shut with a round, metal tag stamped with an ID number, sit on my dresser in the little pot with the bird on its lid, the one your grandmother picked out in Puerto Vallarta. When we arrived there, our family of only three, all shell shocked and me still leaking milk, she wanted so badly to take us right to the shop to see the pots but I resisted until it was almost time to go home again, and have no memory of picking it out, only a sense of my mother, pulling me by the hand through the narrow and twisting cobblestoned streets to a shop I would never find again on my own, her energy homing in on its hidden door and quiet green courtyard, all to find you a home, of sorts: an urn suitable for a tiny baby girl, for Baby Sister who was ours.
Of course, that’s not where you are. Each week I pick up the pot and dust its burnished gold and green surface, the black bird carved in stone on its handle, and know it’s not you in there, though I’ll dust every week until I, too, am gone wherever it is I’ll go.
You weren’t in that room at the hospital, either. That dark room that is always blue in my memory, in the quiet after you were delivered, after the nurse declared you beautiful, wrapped you in hospital blankets and manoeuvred a cap onto your little head before placing you in my arms. You were beautiful, though you were already gone. I never peeked under that cap. I don’t know how much hair – if any – or what colour. I didn’t see your eyes. Your tiny hands, with their long fingers and delicate wrists, though – those I saw, and memorized, how the nurse folded them just so, your perfect fingernails. We sat for hours in that blue room. I held you in the same position, afraid to move, unable to let you go, even though I knew – could not deny – you were gone.
Where did you go, little one? In our old neighbourhood, I let myself believe sometimes I could feel you: in the night sky between our tall building at the edge of the park and the mountains beyond; in the curl of saltwater along sand strewn with small, shining pebbles and ribbons of green and black seaweed; in the waving daffodils of all our neighbours’ spring gardens. The new neighbourhood is so new and manicured, there is nothing wild, nothing free, except the eagle’s nest at the top of tree across the field where the school will one day be built, but you were far too small and delicate to be found there, at the top of that tree in the calculated swoop and dive of such an animal.
A golden and green snail clings to the stone gate post where the sweetpeas are trying to grow. Hummingbirds weave in and out of the Japanese maple where the feeder hangs. There is a haze around the early summer sun. We’ve passed so many seasons without you, little dear one, and I still haven’t found out.
The snail carries its home on its back and keeps growing that home as it needs to, though I like to imagine it can, like a hermit crab, discard one home for another when the first just won’t do. A falling star, like the one I saw above the mountains on the night you left us, shoots off into the atmosphere and burns itself off.
Where have you gone, little one? Where did you find to make your home, alone, in the wilds, without me?
Where have your babies gone? Do you know? Can you imagine? Where do you find them now?