Birthright

It was ninety-six or ninety-seven degrees everyday that summer my brother and I argued about the mobiles. How many mobiles? Soon-to-be-siblings.

As she walked down the grocery aisles in town, steering the cart at arms' length to protect a soccer ball protuberance, we loitered around the frozen food—Ellio's square pizza, Green Giant peas, Neapolitan ice cream, leering at the big box—and heard projections:

"She's having a litter," said a man we knew.

"Ain't she," said a man we didn't.

Our cat, Sophia, curled in a closet behind laundry and shoes, once produced eight milk-white kittens with rosewater eyes and fur as soft as breath.

Bickering led to building. First, math: forty boxes of Cracker Jacks (plastic pieces, two in a box, ten per mobile), a few tins of dental floss, plus wire hangers. Then, mapping: two cribs in the bathtub and one on top of the wide box TV, another on top of the fridge. We could give others away, we thought, emptying the house, one by one, like the palm-sized colorless kittens.

I wanted to crawl beside my mother at night, her loose hair strung over the pillow, water glass sweating nearby, to whisper that we didn't need more siblings; we just needed her. Instead, my brother and I huddled in the basement, praying for stillborns, then praying for forgiveness for our prayer.

One night I burst out choking in a quiet sort of way and I told Dad straight: we didn't need more siblings; we only needed her.

"Nothing to do with it," Dad said, letting the paper crackle to the floor. Fold, crease, punch, crackle.

He headed heavily up the stairs, brushing my bare arm with worn Lee blues. Then the words "too late" fell out, and I caught the words "too late" again in the drone, "too late to tell her."

The words held, hung in the humidity while I sat shifting, staring at dirt between wooden planks, moving my fingers along the rough gaps, irritating a swollen splinter. Even now, those words return, a faded funk of meaning, a message dragged behind propeller planes cranking through the fog.

That summer it was ninety-six or ninety-seven degrees everyday and my mother, in her late age, had twins nobody wanted.

Cara Murray writes web content about dance, yoga and the environment.  Her recent academic work appeared in the journal Coastal Management and her poetry is forthcoming in Platte Valley Review.  Her essays have aired on WRNI, Rhode Island's National Public Radio affiliate.