The summer I’m thirty-five, I get pregnant. When we know for sure, we sit on the couch under a blanket looking out at the island. The streets are busy, the restaurants full. There is music drifting out of Jack’s.

“I don’t think I can do it,” I say. “I’m afraid it’s him.”

Tuck holds my hand under the blanket. “Him?”

“Still wanting to be born.”

Tuck nods. But I see what’s there in his expression. He wants this, wants a son or a daughter. He has so much love—more than me.

“Not this one,” I say. “Let’s wait. This one’s him, I feel it.”

“Maybe it’s always going to be him,” he says. “Every time.”

That night I walk up and down Clara Day Street alone. The lights are multicolored, reflecting in the harbor. I try to feel around inside myself, to feel him there. What is he after this time? I look deep inside and ask him, why me?

I have something of yours, he says.

“What is it?” I say.

Something you need, he tells me.

You really want to be born? I ask.

Yes! he cries. Yes! He shouts yes at the lights and the stars and the water all around us. He shouts yes at the buildings that rise into the night, the lit windows, the sparkling streets. He shouts yes at the parking meters and road signs and the music coming from the bars. Color and light and noise is what he wants. Smells and tastes and the feel of the wind. One more breath. He wants a sensory life.

“Okay,” I say to Tuck climbing into bed with him.

“Seriously?” he says.

His body is a wonder to me still. I lie in bed beside him, not knowing what will happen now. I’ve never been so conscious of a future stretching out before us, a life reaching in two directions, into the past and into the future. Either way I look, there is sadness and loss, there is loneliness, inevitably. But when I look ahead, to the future that Tuck is part of, I feel prepared for all of that, prepared to have more than I ever imagined having, and prepared to lose it, too. Tuck rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. I look out the window at the harbor with its buoys and boats. The masts clang in the wind, like clocks keeping time. I think, This is only the beginning.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments