Mabel, Briefly

Amy V. Egbert

Marianne Stokes, 1883

Word Count 1191

Bumping through the countryside in a van on the way to dinner, I glance at my phone and see a text from my son, Will.

Can you talk?

The words feel urgent.

My heart jumps.

Of course. Give me a few minutes.

I step away from my friends at the family-owned winery we are visiting on a writer’s retreat on the Costa Brava in Spain. I walk down a dirt road bordered by rows of ripe tomatoes, the musky scent of tomatoes all around me. Grape vines are in the distance. A stone farmhouse is in the distance. My dress is yellow, ruched at the waist. It swirls around my calves as I walk.

Mommy! He sounds like a small boy.

What is it? I ask, already crying, my flip-flops sliding in cow shit, already knowing it is bad.

It’s Mabel, he says. She’s sick, she’s having seizures. We’re at the hospital.

Okay, I say, okay. Okay, okay, trying to take it in, trying to make sense.

They’re doing tests. I have to go back.

Oh, Will, I love you! Call me when you know what’s going on. I can come home.

I drop the phone. In shock, my mind leaps to language. I see words forming on a page: I fell through a portal today. I’m in free fall, legs and arms flailing. I pace circles in the dirt, crossing and recrossing my steps as if they can make magic or rewind time.

I remember when Will was born, his little face pumpkin colored with jaundice. We spent an extra week in a hospital in Springfield, Vermont, so he could be treated with bili-light. I stared out the window at sleet and rain. The light was bleak. I was heavy with the absence of joy. The nurses asked, “Don’t you want to see your baby boy?” I felt I had nothing to give him. “It’s just the baby blues,” they said. I lay in bed, facing the blank black face of the TV.

I think about the names I called him when he was a boy: Will Bear, Hedgehog, a new one every few weeks. I think about how he wore his red rubber boots when we took nature walks down the dirt roads in the fall. There were clouds of Monarch butterflies. Puffs of seed pods blew in the wind.

I return to my group, following them into the bowels of the winery, the smell of must and earth, spider web filaments brushing my face. I smile because I don’t want to spoil the mood. I make note that the owner is talking, I am polite—later, I will remember that the casks of wine are made of oak; I will remember how the green glass bottles of wine are stacked, row upon row. Fragile towers of glass. I cover my head with my arms. I hold out my phone and howl.

What is? Julia, a doctor from Maine, grabs me. She holds my eyes with her steady blue ones.

It’s my granddaughter, I say. She’s having seizures. Do you know what it could be?

I watch her face.

I don’t, she says. They will do tests and they will find out.

She holds me and holds me until I stop shaking.

I’m terrified. I keep repeating. I’m just so terrified.

The women sit me down at a wooden refectory table in an open barn that feels like a manger.

Do you want us to take you back? they ask. I shake my head no. Please. I say in my mind. Please. They pass me plates of ruby and orange tomatoes, bowls of olives and peppers, cheeses, and smoked meats sliced parchment thin. I’m so far away.

Some of the women snap photos of the fruit—pomegranates, white grapefruit, and pink-fleshed watermelon. There is a talk about how the grapes are grown to produce the organic, sulfite-free wine that I am not drinking. I am polite. This is my training. A big black and gray shepherd dog keeps thrusting his nose into my lap. I do not brush him away.

I nod and respond to snippets of conversation. Someone holds my hand. I am not pressed for details. Women know pain. It keeps me from screaming. I take a glass of water and dump it on my blue flip-flops to wash away the cow shit.

 A prayer unfurls in my mind: Bring healing and love and tests with only the best results; bring grace, bring mercy. Bring faith that if I pray unceasingly, God will hear me. May my lips find the words, guttural and ancient, sounds that mean breath, Yahweh, words that reach the ear of God. Let them be the right words.

The words feel clumsy, but they are mine, not the uncertain prayers of my childhood; when kneeling by my bed, I reeled off the litany of names, the list I had been taught, the familial names, the grandmothers, parents, sisters, and pets, and those material things I believed would quell that ache: the English racing bike, the toys, the outfits, the boyfriends. God bless everybody in the whole wide world, including the Russians, I had prayed as a child. Later, innumerable times, I had prayed, God, if you get me out of this, one, I promise…

The last words on my lips as I fall asleep are please, this is for Mabel, please.

The words are not the right words. In the morning, I learn from my daughter that Mabel has a rare neurological disorder. Incurable. She has lissencephaly 1, liss like a hiss or a kiss. Her brain is mostly smooth, devoid of the folds and grooves that other brains have.

Don’t google it, my daughter says as we weep on the phone.

I feel nothing as I walk to lunch with my friends.

I feel nothing. I feel nothing. I keep repeating it. How odd, I feel nothing.

When my friends nod without speaking, I know this is grace, a brief cushion of time.

Then, I am sitting in a chair at a little outdoor cafe. I don’t remember how I got here. There are tears on my face. I’ve ordered a goat cheese salad and a Coke Zero. I’m fielding tearful calls of love and support from home.

Why not ME? Raucous and angry and sinful for years. I may have to rethink prayer. I may have to rethink God.

When Will calls, he cries, Mommy, Mommy, it’s just so sad. My beautiful little Mabel! She’s just a tiny baby,

Sweetheart, I’m coming. I’ll fly home tomorrow. I’ll be there as soon as I can.

Mommy, I can’t—how can I?

You can, I say. You must.

Helpless, a continent away, I draw on everything I know to be true. I try to find the right words for my son.

Mabel chose us.

Mommy, will I have to bury my daughter?

Not today, I say. Not today.

I cry with him, pacing on a cobbled street in Palomas, Spain. There is purple graffiti on the wall behind me.

We are here! We are here! We are here! I say. Mabel will know nothing but love.

Amy is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, is a journalist published in Vermont Magazine, Manchester Journal, Grande Dame Literary Journal, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, is a graduate of the Brattleboro Retreat, studied with the poet Kate Grey, and has taken many classes at the Westport Writers’ Workshop. A retired Trauma-Sensitive yoga teacher, she lives and hikes in Vermont, and loves the “catch ‘em before they croak” bands like the Rolling Stones. She is currently at work on a memoir.