Small Wonders

“Is it spring, Aunt Jay?” asks a curious voice at my feet. Only the soft curls at the back of her head, swept gently around the collar of her winter coat are visible to me. She is crouched down, face close to the ground, peering at the purple-tinged daisies poking their heads above the grass. I shiver as the wind slithers its way under my jacket and touches icy fingers to my side. I feel the light of the clear day on my face and close my eyes, noting that I can in fact feel some warmth there.

           “Not long now,” I tell her. When I look at her again she is looking back at me, still crouched down at my feet, curious maybe why I had closed my eyes. “You’re right, the flowers mean spring is coming.”

           “I want one,” she says. I lower myself to get a closer look. A vague memory of plans I had once made, that I would teach my children to only take one flower, one seashell from the beach, one autumn leaf, pops into my mind.

           “Which one do you want to take home?” I ask.

She doesn’t hesitate. “This one,” she says, and she reaches out to the most scraggly of the flowers.

“Good choice,” I tell her. I watch as her tiny hand clutches around the entire bloom and she tugs it up until there is the soft pop of the stem breaking. She opens her palm again and looks at her treasure and we both stay there for a long moment, her looking at the flower, me looking at her, wonder in both our eyes.

My thigh is cramping, so I stand again and she is distracted from her prize. She reaches up without a word, her signal to be picked up.

I had been so sure on my drive into town that she would have forgotten me over the past year of quarantine. She was so little when we went into lockdown, how could she possibly remember? “Of course she’ll remember you,” my sister-in-law told me. “We show her your picture and talk about her Aunt Jamie all the time.” But are pictures and video calls enough for a toddler to know you and to feel safe?

           I needn’t have worried. Even if she had forgotten who I was, there must have been some imprint left on her heart of all the hours I had spent holding her as a baby, my lips pressed against the top of her warm head as she slept, speaking to her in a soft hum of all that I would show her in the world, all that she would grow to be. Within five minutes of meeting me anew, she was taking my hand and leading me to the window seat and asking me to read her a book, her head resting on my arm, her hand on top of mine.  

           I had pictured this moment so many times in my head leading up to my visit to my brother and sister-in-law’s home, and I had been certain that I was going to cry when it happened. I expected the tears not because I was sitting with my niece reading, not even because we would be seeing each other for the first time after nearly a year apart, but because I knew that on this trip I would experience the first human contact I had had in months, and I could only imagine the experience as being overwhelming.

Had it really been that long? No hugs, kisses, hands held or high-fived, or even accidentally brushed past someone else’s while handing over a grocery bag at the store. It had been months since I had had anyone near. I was wrong about crying though. As we sat in the reading nook, I simply breathed, and my whole self listened as I felt the beating of her heart as she leaned into me.

           “You want me to carry you, huh?” I ask her, putting my hands teasingly on my hips. “You’ve got two legs, missy.” She stretches her arms even more. I smile, “Okay.”

           As I lift her into my arms, her hands wrap around the back of my neck. I can feel her sweet pudgy fingers playing with her new flower there. I inhale deeply, taking in the scent of the fabric softener on her coat. My shoulders pull forward and stretch under her weight. She leans in and rests her head on my collarbone. My cheek is tickled by her hair. “You weren’t supposed to be here,” I think.  

           She was our family’s miracle. Her mother had struggled with fertility, painfully, for years. I had prayed nightly, also for years, for them to be able to have a child. And then she was there, a little spot on a sonogram picture texted to me with the question, “How does it feel to be an aunt?” Wonderful. Marvelous. Beyond words.

           But then she was born with a weak heart that went lub-gush instead of lub-dub, and she had to have surgery, her tiny fragile chest pried open. And it was the worst nightmare any of us had ever not slept through. But then she was better. Or mostly. We still had to be careful of infections, wash our hands and clean the house often. But how easy that was when there was this beautiful life to protect.

           I visited her as often as I could. There were new pulls on my time, things in my own city that made my life feel like it was opening up and finally beginning, but that precious little life was like a magnet, pulling me in as soon as my thoughts got close to her. I felt the need to be in both places. And so I traveled back and forth, and as the miles on my car’s odometer ticked upward, it felt like everything in life was on a positive trajectory.

           And then, the pandemic hit. 

           The rumors that swirled around the first days after lockdowns were announced made my heart constrict. My fears, I know now, weren’t completely reasonable, but we all felt some terror looking into that wide unknown. And whereas many of my friends were already familiars with the battle against anxiety and depression and had a hold on how to manage them, those states of mind had never been a part of my nature until now.

Suddenly it became normal for my emotions to knot and rise in my chest like a meal coming back up before a big speech. I tried breathing through these moments, but the agitation would only return. The one sense of relief that I had was I that knew what would make me feel better – a good hug. And, I had someone who could provide.   

           The boy. The man, really, but it felt more endearing to call him the boy. The reason my life was being pulled between two different towns. The thought at the time of being separated from him even for two weeks of lockdowns seemed too much, and I felt the territory he took up in my heart grow as I realized that. My thoughts weren’t on missing my family at the time. We usually went weeks between seeing each other anyway. But not seeing him would be difficult.

We had a date night. We didn’t know at the time it would be the last, that the governor would shortly be asking us to stay home as much as we possibly could, and that things would be different for us after that.

There was a stillness that night, in the atmosphere of his studio apartment, and in my heart. I spent the whole evening glued to his side. As we cooked dinner together, I moved my cutting board close to where he was prepping the brownies for dessert. When we sat on the floor to play cards at the coffee table, I insisted that I was within reach to rest my legs over his, prompting a lot of playful laughter and contorting to keep cards out of each other’s views. And when we moved on to a movie, I could feel myself almost burrowing into his side, needing that touch to keep my anxiety at bay. And it did, like a miracle drug, his simple presence signaling to my every cell that I was safe.

I may never be able to say what happened after that night. First the sense of fear and social duty kept us apart while we thought the lockdown would be just a few weeks. Then the fear that he had the virus, then one of my clients tested positive, then one of his coworkers. In my mind I struggled back and forth between terror of the useable pathogen and mounting despair at his unknowable mind as he seemed to reach out less and less and slowly stop mentioning the desire to see me in person again.

My cravings for those comforting hugs grew into a need, fueled now not only by my anxiety at what was happening in the world, but what was happening to me. His withholding of his physical presence in my life made my fear demand it all the more. I tried deep breathing, I tried warm baths, I even ordered a weighted blanket to be delivered to my door in the hopes that the heavy glass beads that filled its little gray pockets would somehow put enough weight on my chest to push the anxiety blocking my airways out and let me breathe again.

           He told me over the phone that he didn’t feel like himself. None of us did. What did that matter? He told me not to worry, that it had nothing to do with me. But it did. Each and every day was spent fearing other people, stepping around them on the sidewalk, avoiding the store, washing and washing and washing my hands after touching any surface that anyone else might even have breathed on, all while simultaneously wanting nothing more than to be as close as possible to one person in particular, and not being able to put words to why he felt the most distant of all.

           During those days, I lived over and over that feeling of his lips brushing my forehead as he thought I was asleep that last night, us curled together on his couch, the TV screen still softly glowing in the darkened room though the movie had ended hours ago, and my stomach would ache and ache at the memory.

           After a few months, I was tired. Tired of fighting my need to be close. Tired of asking what was going on with him. Tired of wondering why he didn’t just end things. Should I?

           And then the day came for it to be over. I knew it when I woke up. I called him up and asked for one of our strange, uncomfortable outdoor dates. The ones where we would sit bundled up looking across a gap of six feet between us and try to talk about the little to nothing that filled our lives apart. The dates where we would hug but it didn’t feel quite right, didn’t bring the comfort that it was supposed to. The dates where I would feel the immensity of that six feet, wanting him to invite me to make it smaller, unable to focus on anything else, to the detriment of my ability to make a joke or say anything sincere without choking on tears.

           It didn’t take long after we met up that day for him to finally admit the truth. He did not care anymore. He did not want this anymore. I held my composure. Having seen this coming for weeks made it easier to do so. I said goodbye curtly and it was done. Or his part in it was done.

           For me, my year of being alone was just beginning. My life was a cycle of ups and downs, angry and bitter sobbing, laughter and comforting words over the phone with a friend, days where I could not get out of bed, nights where I couldn’t allow myself to sleep, moments where a sunset caught my attention when I didn’t think it could. I needed my family more than I ever had, but with my niece’s heart condition, I knew that I couldn’t even ask. So, I was stuck in my own head, the touch of the real world beyond my reach.

       As the pandemic carried on, as the world around us seemed to spiral into something altogether incompatible with what I knew it to be, I fell apart. Taking care of my own basic needs was hard. I got reprimanded at work for being behind on my caseload, but even with a warning I couldn’t help but slump at my desk when no one was watching. I withdrew from friends who I feared would tire of my depression. And the months went by.

           Then, finally, there was a vaccine. And after two doses and two weeks of quarantine and a two-hour drive, I am here, seeing my family again. And, I don’t feel hope, but I do feel calm for the first time in a long time. There is something about this tiny life that I have cradled in my arms that shouts that there is more to be lived.

           My niece shifts in my arms, sighs. We are almost home. “You weren’t supposed to be here,” I think again. “And neither was I.”

           I was never supposed to be this broken. I was never supposed to be this weak. I was strong and brave and adventurous. I was secure in myself and careful in my relationships. I had never imagined this tired, closed-off person could be me.

           We hit the doorstep of my brother’s home and my niece immediately wants down to run inside and find her favorite stuffed friend, an octopus named Jelly, somehow a sayable when my name, Jamie, is not. The afternoon is spent playing with her stuffed animals and building and destroying towers of blocks. I wonder at her when she wonders at me as I show her a new way of stacking the blocks sideways or wearing a towel as a hat.

           When evening comes, she gets to change into her pajamas, but she does not have to follow the usual bedtime routine. Instead, she gets to stay up and read with me until her sweet little eyelashes flutter shut and she is breathing deeply, held in my arms. My sister-in-law comes to sit with me on the couch. My brother is off in another room, reading.

       “How’re you doing?” she asks. Her body is turned to me, her knee pulled up on the couch, and I realize this is how I used to sit with friends all the time, leaning in, intent on checking in on each other.

           I look down at my niece, the blue veins in her forehead peering through her translucent skin. I look for words, but I’m not sure I know how I am anymore.

           “I’m so sorry that you had to be alone this year. Especially with what you had to go through. You’ve been on my mind every single day. I hope you know that. We’ve missed you.”

           And that does it. The tears well up in my eyes, stronger than they have since right after he left me. I’m scared that I’m going to wake my niece as my chest begins to heave while I try to hold back the sobs.

           “Oh,” my sister-in-law sighs, and she immediately scoots closer and puts an arm out, surrounds me, takes me in. And I immediately feel safe in her wingspan with the weight of my dreaming niece in my arms. Between the sleeping girl and my rapidly beating heart, the embrace is warm, and with my tears, it rapidly becomes humid and sticky-feeling, but there is nowhere I would rather be. I cry and I cry and my sister-in-law doesn’t say a word, and my niece does not stir.

           “I always told her about all the things she could be,” I’m eventually able to say in a thick voice. “I knew she could have a wonderful life, because I believed I could too. I don’t think I feel that way more.”

           My sister-in-law leans back, grabs a tissue from the table behind her and hands it to me.

           “You don’t feel that way about her future anymore?” she says, doubt under her voice.

           “Of course I do for her. Just not for me.”

           She lowers her gaze to her daughter, reaches out and brushes the hair from her forehead. After a moment, she reaches for the collar of the little girl’s onesie, pulls it down a bit to reveal her long surgery scar. “She’s been broken, but she’s strong now,” she says. “I was broken, but this little miracle came from me. You might be broken right now, but you’ll be back, stronger than before.”

           Tears well in my eyes again, but I don’t sob this time. “It doesn’t feel like it,” I tell her.

           She smiles. “It won’t be long.”

           Eventually my face dries and my cheeks feel less puffy, and the heavy moment has passed. It is time to put the little one in her crib. As her mom shifts her into her own arms to carry her away, my niece’s palm falls open in front of me. In her hand is a tiny, sweaty, shriveled daisy.

           “Wait,” I say, and I gently scrape the flower from her hand.

As my niece goes to rest in preparation for another day of exploring small wonders, I take her daisy and find a spot to press it in my journal. I take a pen, and underneath it I write, “Not long now.”