Stephanie Halldorson

LISTEN

READ

Five Michaels. Like an echo.

A husband. One son. The three other sons known only after they had ceased to be. All gone from her. Like an echo. The first Michael came to her abbreviated, a Mike. Everything about him compressed and under pressure, fast and forward. Pushing the world in front of him with confidence and optimism: a bow wave he pushed with his arms and hands. Even his hair: worn long, he was always pushing it off his face; in the summer, the brown turned almost golden and in the fall it settled into dark chestnut, following the seasons in its thick strands that slowly curled at the nape of his neck. Why were his lips so red, his words so full, his stories so endless? He was the man she’d eloped with when she was sixteen—he was almost double her age, he alone knew what they both needed.

He was the Mike she had married and the Mike who had stayed through miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage, while she, secretly, desperately, wanted to give him a son of his own name. She held onto the full lettering of his name, the Biblical Michael—the warrior, the great captain—as she saw this secret child. The name itself would be her gift to him. In her mind she said the name—Michael, Michael—into the heart of her belly, willing a boy into existence. And she got her boy. Again and again she got her boy, but she could never convince him to breathe. Instead, he died and he died and he died in her belly year after year. And then the secret, the name itself, became something else. She imagined a world of young boys trapped on the other side of where they should be, each named the same as the last. Like a drunk gambling on the same tragic horse, determined beyond hope or sense, she pulled another Michael from a world of them into her belly and begged the child to reach out to her. But he never did. And she mourned, not for the child but for the leaving behind of the name of her love renewed in the world.

Her husband was unaware of the battle Rose fought for him. To Mike, the unborn were not connected to him or to Rose. They were in his thoughts only briefly as “a baby,” not even with a capital letter, just the common noun of flesh unformed that they left at the hospital for disposal. He was sure that though they never spoke of it, they felt the same. He and Rose returned home, time after time, not devasted by loss, not tragically enfolding one another in their arms, but stoic in the face of unrealized expectations and the physical pain of unrewarded work. They knew how to live with that. And they knew there was always another season after the last.

But with each miscarriage, Rose became stronger, more insistent. She willed herself into health and pushed herself into that next season, not with hope but with the righteousness of someone who knew it must be. She’d pluck the next fairy Michael from her imagined world and place him gently into her belly—Michael, Michael. Each night silently whispering her mantra—Michael, Michael—and then one day for no particular reason, five years after first naming and renaming her son, and with one final fading echo—Michael—the namesake she wished for was finally born.

***

A black-haired child with sharp blue eyes awoke in the sunlight. The tiny hands grasped at the empty space falling in on him. Mike tried to focus his eyes on the swirling fists but felt himself loosing balance with the effort. Rose slowly swished her legs beneath the sheets.

“I just thought,” she said.

He was standing over her, drunk, reconsidering the name, a week after the birth. Rose had suffered through the pregnancy and was still sore and unhappy in the hospital where everything smelled of ether and ammonia.

Mike made short, impatient harrumphs as he gave the child a finger to grasp. He had been drinking at a bar with strangers. Days earlier he had been drunk in celebration of his first-born, his eponymous boy, and now, days later, he was drunk because of the weight he felt from having a sick wife and a living child. Over the years, the miscarriages had been a flux of emotions for him: of disappointment, of frustration, of incomprehension as he watched Rose suffer, but then they also started to come with relief. He was ambivalent, had never been fond of children, he only wanted Rose, but he understood that it was expected and something that she wanted, so he stepped back and let it happen. He never told her of that small rush of freedom he felt after each lost chance; he let it be muted by the growing volume of Rose’s want and covetousness as babies seemed to appear all around their small town, like balloons drifting into reality with simplicity and ease.

Five years and three false starts later, Mike’s feelings about children had become entangled with a fear of failure. He did not want a child, but he wanted Rose to be happy. He did not want the responsibility but wanted the “it” of having created something from nothing.

At the unofficial meeting of local farmers every week at the hotel downtown no one ever spoke of Mike’s troubles, of course. But just as low crop yields were to be expected every once in a while, at some point bad luck turned into deficiency, and Mike could feel the tide turning. For the first time, he had encouraged Rose to try again and finally the child grew. It was an awful experience for both of them. Rose was ill from the start and on bed rest for months, but now they had finally come to the finish line. So with his wife and son in the hospital, Mike walked into a hotel lounge in the city, down the street from the hospital, and bought a round of drinks for the few strangers hunched over their beers mid-afternoon. They congratulated him and for a moment it felt as if things were finally coming into line and his luck was changing.

But Rose didn’t leave the hospital. Every day he’d drive home from the city and he’d eat things out of tins while standing on the porch. In the mornings, he’d drive back. He and Rose would chat while the child slept in some other part of the building. She laughed at his stories and held his hand, and he could feel her pain lessen as each day passed. A nurse would arrive with the child, and he’d leave to have lunch and a few beers down the street, then he’d come back, a little drunk, to be with Rose and then drive back to the farm. Every day the child grew stronger, and every day he felt its weight grow like an anchor around his neck. He wanted to tell Rose in those few moments they had in the afternoons what he was feeling, what it felt like to have nothing more in the world that would be just his, or theirs, alone. He already missed her and thought of their future only in terms of what would or could no longer be. “Parasite,” he said one evening as he ate baked beans out of a tin on the front porch. The child was already forcing him to keep secrets, realizing that he would never be able to share those thoughts with Rose. Alone on the porch, night after night, his grief moved through stages of anger and sadness until ten tins of beans and ten long nights saw him emerge reconciled to his fate. He would be a father and that would be an obstacle placed in their marriage, and he would bear that burden as if no one on earth had ever felt it before. The baby named, so formally titled in his shadow, was an engraved marker tied around his neck and he would carry it like a hero, proving himself worthy under the weight of it.