Thaw

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark.

I lit the three candles on the mantle. Over the past two nights, they’d withered to stumps. I grabbed a flashlight and headed to the cabin’s only closet to search, in vain, for more. I found instead only cascading cobwebs and a dead mouse in a long-forgotten trap. Gingerly, I picked up a corner of the trap with two fingers, carrying it at arm’s length to the trash can outside that, supposedly, would be picked up in the morning.

That felt unlikely. The snow drifts already reached my chest, and a plow still hadn’t made it up the winding road. My car sat in the driveway, fully buried and refusing to start. I cursed my Alabama-bred inattention to antifreeze and sighed heavily as the looming gray clouds signaled the storm had not yet fully passed. The lights had first flickered less than 24 hours after I’d first pulled up to the little A-frame, following a blinding snowfall that even my foolproof weather app had failed to anticipate. Ten minutes later, they flickered again–then went dark for good.

My dream vacation, then, had become a grim nightmare. I’d anticipated this trip for months. The fall semester had been perhaps my most demoralizing since I entered academia. The students seemed unusually disengaged, clearly scrolling social media during lectures and rarely posing any questions borne of true curiosity. More than one student eval had commented on my “distracting” twang; none offered substantive praise or critiques. Outside of teaching and prepping I felt too exhausted to actually produce any new work of my own. And for the last month, “morning” sickness had left me pale and clammy from dawn until I crawled into bed, rarely making it past 9pm. 

Meanwhile, the acerbity of the city was leaving me breathless. The refusal to make eye contact on public transportation. The casual evictions that seemed to be happening left and right, coupled with the apathy toward the tent cities that had tripled in size since the recession began. Scarcely a day went by when I didn’t long for the small Southern town where I’d spent my first 18 years. For all its flaws, Harvest was peaceful and its inhabitants cordial.

So when I saw a colleague post his mountain getaway at a very reasonable rate on one of the university forums, my Christmas break booking felt foretold. I would retreat, quite literally, from the pressures of urban life, if only briefly. I would set a terse away message on my email and tell everyone, even Brian, not to call while I was away. I would surround myself with silence, immerse myself in the elements, allow the words that had long been eluding me to simply flow forth from my mind to my fingers to the page. I would emerge rejuvenated, ready for a new year, ready to finally live up to my potential.

I still heard the words in my mother’s voice, after all these years.

After I lit the candles and stoked my ever dwindling fire I wrapped myself in blankets and sat with my back to the hearth, a notebook in hand. Surely, with no distractions, not even the subliminal buzz of electricity, my writing would come back to me. I held my favorite pencil between my fingers and waited, listening for the sentences to form in my head, and for those sentences to coalesce into paragraphs. 

Instead, I heard only the soft whistle of the wind and a light scritching in the walls, likely another rodent mourning his fallen comrade. 

***

I woke in the middle of the night in a sweat. I’d had the same nightmare again. I was driving on the 405 at dusk, smack in the middle of rush hour. As I saw red tail lights ahead of me I put my foot on the brake, but the car barely decelerated. I quickly switched lanes to avoid an accident but soon found myself approaching another car’s bumper, and again, I could hardly slow down whatsoever. This pattern continued until a sharp pain radiating across my low belly left me doubled over, trying to keep my gaze just high enough to see out the windshield as my hips felt like they would crack. As soon as it began, the pain faded away, and I weaved around a red BMW just in time to avoid a collision. Moments later, the pain began again, and this time I couldn’t help but close my eyes. BAM. Everything went black. I woke up.

Contractions. I’d never felt them in real life, but I could tell that the sensations I experienced in the dream were true, culled by my subconscious from the collective memory. I felt the slow build to a peak. I felt their urgency. I felt my body taken over by forces beyond my control.

I hadn’t meant to get pregnant. It had never been part of my life plan, and my own upbringing had disabused me of any idealism around the mother-child relationship. I was driven to create, surely–or at least I had been, until hitting the debilitating fog of the past six months. But not to create another human life. I knew Brian had no desire for children, and could barely even commit to another adult. At 39, I’d come to embrace the vision of my child-free life. 

I also knew what happened to mothers in the academy. The “mommy track” was real. I could say goodbye to tenure. I could anticipate another decade of being asked to teach intro-level courses, to serve as a mentor, to lead the first-generation committee not for any additional pay but out of the goodness of my heart. 

But even the best birth control has an error rate. Since I saw the faintest of blue lines on my dollar store test I’d been in denial. I poured myself into my work and perpetually postponed calling the OB-GYN. I wasn’t prepared to make a decision either way, so I chose the path of least resistance, and did nothing. Give it to God, as my aunt would say. When I wasn’t hunched over the third floor toilet, retching in the only bathroom that afforded any privacy, it was easy to act like nothing had changed. I’d shared my secret with no one, and my body had yet to reveal me. 

But here, in the cold, the silence, the enormity of it suddenly swallowed me. I eased myself out of bed and walked to the bathroom, splashing water on my face and washing away the dried sweat. I met my own gaze in the rusted mirror above the sink. Dark circles ringed my eyes and my crow’s feet were no longer subtle. I was told there would be a glow, I said out loud to myself. My voice cracked from disuse and I suddenly found myself laughing uncontrollably into the vast emptiness of my surroundings, filling the thin air with giggles that sounded alternatively joyful and unhinged. 

A mother. I would be a mother.

***

At dawn, a new sound–a golden-crowned sparrow singing its avant garde melody. I rose from my too-soft twin bed, adjusting the matching hat and scarf that I’d barely taken off for three days. I padded into the kitchen to make coffee, lighting a match to light the burner, deeply grateful for the small grace of the cabin’s gas stove.

I peered out the window to behold a miracle. The road and the driveway both had been plowed. The sky was fully clear, the sunshine reflecting off the white landscape to create a day so bright it felt almost immoral to mope about. The solar-powered thermometer near the door showed a reading of 37 degrees. Today things would thaw, ever so slightly.

I knelt before the fireplace, tucking balled up newspaper between the logs before lighting the whole structure aflame. I pulled my oversized cardigan tight around my torso and grabbed my notebook off the counter. I settled into the loveseat, facing the fire this time. 

Dear baby, I began. This is what I’ve learned so far.

The words flowed, abundantly.