5. The Immaculate Rebirth of Nicki Duran #4
“Mila?” I place a hand on my stomach, flat but soft. Is it weird that I miss her? I know I said I was a loner, but I miss her.
Drawn to the cry, I pick a direction. The ground crunches under my boots. I’ve had nightmares where I look down and I’m dressed in the same clothes as when I was in high school, and there they are—my Payless knockoff Timbs trampling mulch.
There’s a baby in a basinet made of knotted roots. For a moment, I close my eyes. God, what are you? What is she? What is the thing tucked beneath that soft forget-me-not blue blankie?
When I was born, my grandmother came into the hospital to inspect my hands. To make sure that I was fair like my father, instead of like my mother. I wish my uncle had never told me that, because it’s the first thing I think of when I let myself look at Mila for the first time.
Leti’s kids are each a carbon copy of her, and it seems I have done the same. She is me. Ten fingers and ten toes. I hold her in my arms. She makes those sweet baby noises, and I tell her, “I thought you were going to have tentacles or a hunchback.”
I don’t know why I’m crying. I didn’t even want or ask for this child, this changeling wearing my baby face.
I take a deep breath, and she is gone. The rainforest becomes an airport. It’s like looking at the world through foggy glass. I squint at the little girl disembarking from a plane.
It’s Mila. She’s around ten. She wears the same clothes I did when I came to this country.
It’s the same plane, too. The same bell-bottom pants and clogs with white socks embroidered with little yellow flowers.
She holds someone’s hand—a shadow. The shadow leads her onto the tarmac and away from me.
“Stop!” I run after them and it’s like running through a cloud. I keep my eye trained on the shadow, swallowing the light around it.
I manage to grab Mila’s wrist and yank her to me. We stumble and fall backward. I wish clouds were solid, big memory foam pillows taking on whimsical shapes. Instead we go through them until we hit something firm. Beneath us is a pile of black North Face jackets. I get up first, then help Mila.
We’re in my old house post-renovation. In the mirror, I’m younger. Seventeen, maybe.
So is Mila.
When she opens the liquor cabinet, I realize she doesn’t just take after me. She is exactly like me. She knows where Mom’s husband keeps his nice alcohol, and she pours us two large glasses.
“I can’t believe you thought I was an alien.” She looks skyward and hands me a drink.
“Not me. The conspiracy bros. But, God, what are you? For real, real.”
“I’m yours, the way Athena was Zeus’s. Would you want me then? Would you be less afraid?”
“I’m not afraid. I’ve been absurdly calm about this.”
“I ate your fuck buddy.”
I frown. “Vin was simple.”
“People are anything but simple.”
I blink and Mila is older now. About the age I was when I thought my life was going to be something, anything more than it is, but somewhere along the line, I ran myself into a black hole.
Every day is a different version from the one that came before.
There is a man without a face grazing my thigh as I serve his drink.
There is a pilot who thinks that just because I fuck Vin, I’ll fuck him, too.
I became a stewardess because I thought I’d be on a route to France or the Caribbean.
When I got onto my first flight, the KLM stewardesses were tall and beautiful and smiling, and it might be stupid to base a life choice on a childish assumption, but it got me up into the air and away from everything permanent, even if my route ended up being LaGuardia to Rochester three times a day.
I live my life on the go, rootless, because my mother ran away from her past and I am filled with a black hole and I will birth a black hole that consumes everything.
I am another story; another warning of a girl who didn’t make perfect choices, who was always unsatisfied, who never wanted to settle down.
“It’s always the end of the world with you,” Mila says. “But I like when you read to me.”
She holds my hand. Lines feather at her—my—face.
I have the sinking sensation of moving through time.
I am five. Cool Pacific water washes over my feet.
I scream. The area around me is covered in dead, washed-up jellyfish.
The sun is so bright, I can only see flashes of color against the bleached sky. Salt and sand abrase my milk teeth.
“Can you feel it?” my little scream asks.
I can. We can feel the other Immaculate Ones getting ready to give birth to their miracles.
“I want to go home,” I say, but I know I want to do more than that. I want to cut a hole in the womb of the universe and crawl back inside, where I am star stuff, an extension of the creature I carried inside me. An exit. After all these years, I found my way out.
“Then let’s go.” Mila picks me up and I curl into her side, watching the world from over her shoulder as we walk into the waves, weightless, embraced by the ocean at last.