Rainbow

Rainbow

She is our baby, our flesh and blood, and I want you to love her as I do.

I cried tears of elation and agony as she tore out of me. She is my angel of fire, but was spared my flaming red tresses. Instead she was blessed with your hair, fine silvery blonde wisps that will one day grow to curtain her eyes, cascade over her shoulders, down her back. Those chunks of frosted grey ice stared up at me the first time she was placed in my arms, her eyelashes long and thick, and inexplicably dark. I kissed those lashes countless times the first time I held her, cradling my daughter to my chest as the Healers came in and out of the room, trying to stop the blood leaving my body as I lay, weakened from the hours of anguish I endured to bring her on this earth.

Oh, but it was worth it. The torture and misery she caused me as she ripped from my body was nothing, nothing compared to the torment of all those months of waiting, of feeling her move inside me while my arms ached for her.

"Miss! We need you to let go of -" I hear vague voices that seem to be screaming at me through all the chaos in the white room. I feel someone try to take her from me and I must have cried out. They took my angel, and all I could see was white.

Through my anger, my sadness, I knew that what should have ceased had not. The blood is leaving you. That is what they have told me.

I smile even as I sigh. She was beautiful, my baby was. She had your hair, your eyes, but was tiny like me, and had my little nose and long, slender feet. How I hated my absurdly thin feet, but on my little girl, they were beautiful. Her angular chin, high cheekbones and the thin fingers, you gave those to her. I still hear people around me. I can feel my head whirling again as the potions they spill inside me begin their Magic.

I scream for her.

"You must calm down!" cry the voices again and I bite my tongue so hard it bleeds. More blood. I can tell it is scaring them and their shouts of seizures gives me a vicious pleasure. I feel them push a piece of cotton between my tongue and my teeth as the blood pools in my mouth.

I can hear her crying, my newborn, my everything. I choke out a strangled scream again. She needs me. Why are they keeping me from her?

Why are they keeping her from me?

Before she was born, along the river was our favourite place to play. We played hide and seek among the bulrushes all summer, where I counted out loud while she shifted until I could not feel her anymore. Oh, my baby girl, you are far too good at hiding. Only when I listened hard could I hear her, her evenly beating heart giving her away. I would find her hand deep within me and press mine to it, and wish for the hundred millionth time that I could feel her weight in my arms. Waiting for her was the hardest part. It always is.

My angel holds a part of you. I think of you now as the ladies in bright green hurry in and out of the echoing white room where I lay, their faraway voices crying out of all the blood. I think of your hair and your eyes, your muscled stature and your large, smooth hands. I laugh.

I knew you would never see it, watch your seed, ours, come into the world. I whisper to myself that you love her, and I know that she will someday love you, one she shall never know.

Maybe she will come home from school, with that wispy white blonde hair fluttering around those eyes that pain my memory, her little mind wrapped around the one person who was never there to love her. My heart will shatter when I know that my love is not enough anymore. And I will tell her of you. I will curse your name in my mind, the way I promised never to, and in my heart I will ache for you while telling my baby why you are missing. No, angel, he is not coming home.

Watching her, my baby, tucked into her trundle bed under faded princess sheets, I will challenge you, mock you. Look, look at what I've done without you. She is mine, and she does not need you. Neither do I.

I will recall the years before, when my body wanted you every second of every day. It is still astonishing that my heart did not seem to want the same. For as much as I tried to pull you into my heart, desire is the one and only thing that bound you to me. And desire is something that I do not need anymore. Because I have her.

The Healers are quieting now. I do not hear her cry anymore. Angel, perhaps you will sleep now. I will.

I feel someone at my arm. "She's fading," they say quietly. I laugh, my amusement flawed and unreal. I am still here. The blood leaks through the cotton on my tongue and my heart is beating slowly. Inhale. Exhale. The pain in my head would make me wince if I was not already so numb.

"She's fading."

Beep, beep, beep. The heart monitor sings. I listen to the rhythm of my own pulse. The dull monotonous melody becomes my favourite song, the predictability, the comfort of the sound that represents my life. I listen to it for what seems like an eternity, and for a time, it is as though the world has ceased around me.

"She's fading." I am fading. My laughter becomes softer, until finally, I need silence. The song needs to stop. I whisper to her.

Baby, it is time to go to sleep now.

I could feel the song slowing down. I think of you again. You are looking at me, just watching me, though I cannot let my mind see you anymore. Are you smiling? You never smiled. But that ferocious passion that you always reserved for me comes through from your invisible gaze.

I am no longer laughing. The tears that run down my face burn and sting, and I cough as the salt stains my skin.

I continue to taste blood.

When will it stop? Will it ever stop?

"She's fading."

Still, I continue to fade.

Where are you?

I thought you would come, come find me, come rescue me from the beautiful disaster I have made of everything I have been given. I remember standing in front of the sink, seeing the tip of the little white stick turn pink.

Positive.

I would never be alone again.

I could not tell you, I swore I never would. Instead I lay by the river, keeping company of my own. I would revel in the silence, I knew, until she learned to speak to me. Then the language would return. Only then.

"There's nothing more we can do."

I will visit the river again. I have never been there alone.

I was never supposed to be alone again.

"Maybe she can hold on a little longer..."

Beep. Beep.

And then nothing.

Goodnight, baby. Mama will see you in the morning.

"She's bleeding, there's too much blood. Nothing can help her now. We've done all we can."

I smile once more. Every time my muscle shifts, I feel pain tear through my entire being, and the relief each stab gives me instantly dissolves, until I realize that sound has ceased, and air no longer matters.

"She's gone. It's all over."

It's all over.

There is no pain, there is nothing.

The voices stop for a long time.

The white behind my closed eyelids turns to black, and suddenly, it is hard to see, hard to remember, and I cannot see her, either.

The angel is not crying for me.

Does she not need me anymore?

"What'll happen to the little one?"

"She'll go to her grandparents. There doesn't seem to be a father."

You are gone.

"It's such a shame. She was so young. And a new mother. The family will not take it well."

They do not need me anymore.

But I need her.

"'Tis worse when their eyes are open after the life has left them. Means they've yet to find peace."

It never ends.

"What was to be the little one's name, I wonder?"

Oh, my angel, what will I do without you?

"I've no idea. But for awhile there at the beginning before she started screaming... I'd've sworn she was crying out the word 'rainbow'."

What will you do without me?

The voices leave. I sigh to myself, and lie quietly in my blanket of darkness.

I love you, my baby, my angel, my everything. You are what I love. Time to sleep. Time for both of us to sleep. I cannot leave you, never, I cannot.

I miss the song, the one that guaranteed me life, a life with you, a life I was not prepared to surrender.

No, Mama. I'm not finished my happily ever after yet. I'm not ready.

Oh, angel, I will help you.

I am gone from my body now.

And the princess lives happily ever -

I cannot remember my own happy ending.

The air becomes stifling, and it occurs to me that I am already gone.

The simple black that had consumed me turns to darkness, and finally I am alone, a place I promised myself I would never revisit.

When you dream, my angel, may you spread your wings and fly up into the sky to dance among the stars. May you go anywhere and everywhere, as long as you always return to me.

It is written on the stars, everything is. Her happily ever after is there as well. She will find it, I know she will. Mine is lost, but I have found joy, if only for one moment.

How strange that the moment after my life ended, I discovered the meaning of living.

I am silent.

You are a whisper on my past, while she remains the centre of my lonely, lonely universe.

You told me once you lived only for me, yet my own life remained meaningless until the moment the tip of the white stick turned pink, the day after you left me. I do not blame you for your absence, which you promised would be for forever. I knew you deserved the love I never surrendered to you, though you expected more of me than I could give. You resented me, for making you feel the thing that I never felt in return. But I never pretended.

When I discovered what I carried, the love I could not feel for you no longer was of any consequence. You did not matter anymore. Neither did I.

Just her. Only her.

And I have one last thing to say to you, in hopes that perhaps one day you'll come across the little angel who has your wispy blonde hair and eyes the color of a sea storm; and you will feel a jolt in your heart that will tell you she is a part of you.

She is the rainbow after our hurricane, the sun remaining, the thing that fate gave us. Long after my face leaves your mind, your hands forget the feel of mine, and my voice fades from your memory, you will feel her heart beating so close to yours.

She is our baby, our flesh and blood.

I would die for her. I have.