The Transient Rains of April Thirteenth

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If nothing else, I have this: I once saved a girl’s life. Five years back, before our son was
born, I was walking a street that had grown as familiar as your pulse. January. Twenty below. Chestnut trees, stripped of their torches, hardened in the fragile air. Crabapples
blackened satchels of shriveled fruit. One hundred and one crows whetted their feathers on the bloodless sky. She wore frayed pajamas: purple stripes. Her hair bristled like
the heart of winter. Her bare feet sloped down driveway frost to the street. When she raised her arms to me, I lifted the bundled cornstalks of her bones and took her to
the nearest house. You carry a stranger’s child the way you would deliver a pillar
of carved glass. The way you carry the angel fresco dislodged from the cathedral arch of
your remaining days. I knocked on a screen door. An older girl answered, examined us through the ragbag curtain of her bangs. Her brown T-shirt bore a jaguar face with
emerald eyes. “That’s ours,” she said, pushing the door open. Then wump-wump-wump-
wump. The mother’s frantic stampede down the stairs, her face an earthquake, and her arms
gathering the loose laundry of her daughter’s soul to her breast. I walked away, having learned something I would realize the day I stood outside for the first time with our
newborn son to taste the glorious rain-gusts of spring: the faces of horror and ecstasy
are the same face. Later someone told me a black sickness had stung the girl’s mother
the previous October—stage four cancer was the offhand report—and now her face
is the only thing I see, now that the earth has grown as unfamiliar as your pulse, and I swing
our baby boy in the deadly basket of my arms under April’s unruly caravan of clouds, each boisterous plume a mad crusade, the chill of fresh drops rallying blood in our skin.
I see the way she charged the threshold of her home, snatched her golden hatchling from my outstretched arms, and slammed the door as if I were not a hero but a terrible disease.