This March, my first child, a boy, will be here. My wife and I have ultrasound pictures on the fridge. In one, he looks like Voldemort, and in another, he looks like a witch. But there’s one of his face: his eyes closed, his lips plump (and curved in a slight pouty position due to the ultrasound tech having pushed him in the womb to get a better shot) – his nose nothing like Voldemort’s or a witch’s.
There’s one other feature in the picture: a dimple. It’s heartwarming, knowing he will be here soon and I’ll hear him, the sound of life: hear him cry and squeak and burp and hiccup and pigadee (Penobscot for fart) and sneeze, the moves he makes while sleeping. When he’s here, I’ll be able to touch his cheeks, his lips, his little nose and that dimple.
When I smile, I have one, just like my mother.
“You look just like her,” people have told me.
If only she were here.
•••
Mom died of a heart attack, alone in bed, two years ago. I wrote in her obituary, the accompanying picture displaying her own dimple, that she passed away peacefully in her sleep, but I don’t know if that’s true. I hope it is. My father died of a heart attack, too – 13 years ago – and I know his death was not a good one (he had fallen on to his face).
Not too long before Mom left this world, she said, lit cigarette in one hand, a stylus pen in the other, jabbing away at her Bingo game on her Kindle: “When are you giving me a grandbaby?”
It stings. It really does. Knowing we both won’t get what we want: a child with a grandmother, a grandmother with a grandchild. Of course, Charlie will have grandparents – my in laws, who are the best people in the world.
When my wife and I planned to have a child, I had – in secret – been trying to work out, mentally, this missing piece, trying to find some way to alleviate the pain that exists by my mother’s forever absence.
I don’t know how many times I shut myself away in the bathroom to cry, to mutter, “Why did you have to go?” I’ve lost count. I didn’t know how to deal with the pain, and I still don’t. Even though the grief gets easier, changes shape perhaps, its painful scrapes drag along a callus that has formed on the heart.
•••
So Charlie will never know my mother, his grandmother. Sure, when he’s older, I’ll tell him stories. Tell him about the time Grammy Carol fired a BB gun at kids on the rez who were teasing our dog; tell him about the time she found weed and a bowl in my room and marched down the road to the kid who had given it to me, ripping off his screen door when he wouldn’t answer; tell him about the time she chased my sister, Jess, who is 10 years older than me, with a yellow whiffle ball bat because she lost me, screaming, “You motherfucker, I asked you to watch him and you lose my baby!”, while my sister laughed and yelled back, “Ma! He’s around here somewhere!”
The stories my mother left! I’ll go on and on, telling him about her. And before he gets to thinking, “Wow, my grandmother was crazy,” I’ll hit him with the sweet stories: the people she took into our home who were dying. There was Bobby, a family friend, and there was Uncle Joe. She looked after people like that – she was good at it. She was caring. As a child, her unconditional love for me was so tender and potent you’d think it were the Creator themselves comforting you.
That’s why I wish she were here: she’d give the same to Charlie.
•••
My mother is gone. Charlie will soon be here. “Can March get here already?” my wife says at least 470,000 times a day. March will be here, Charlie will be here, spring will be here, then summer and fall and winter and the years that follow. They will all arrive, on time or when they mean to, and our world will keep spinning.
In the quiet, I think about what Charlie and Mom would do if she were alive: I envision him, a toddler, helping her bake or clean; kicking back and watching TV as he curls up against her, dozing, the both of them, after a day of coloring or walking or playing action figures or Legos or whatever it is Charlie will love.
And when the world and its pressures pull me from my fantasy of what could have been, I won’t be sad when I’ll look at my boy, look at him smile, look at the twinkle of my mother that still lives with us, right there on his cheek, the dimple. The best way to see one is to smile, and so why live any other way when something like a small indentation on the cheek, a small depression, can bring to life so much worth living for?
Morgan Talty is the author of Night of the Living Rez: Stories (Tin House). He is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He lives in Levant, Maine.
