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It is her own name that wakes her. Uttered just once, as firmly as the hand that squeezes her hip, as the soft yet oddly insistent exhalation that warms the side of her neck. Her body does not jolt, though her eyes open seamlessly, the panic that never quite leaves her sharpening against her belly once again.
Delphine faces the shuttered window, alarmed not to have the weight of another’s body pressed against her chest. Feeling weak, somehow ashamed, she realizes she must have rolled over in her sleep. The thin, distorted slivers of light that filter over her pale face burn her eyes. Her right arm reaches back instinctively as her body tenses, reorienting herself.
She doesn’t bother calling out her name. Not in the night. She only asks, “What is wrong,” gaze seeking Cosima’s as she turns over, appraising her body. In the half-light, her pallor is indistinct, the hollows around her eyes obscured. She doesn’t know what she was expecting – the obvious crimson frothing from her chapped lips, blotting grim rorschachs into the crisp, white sheets, perhaps. Swallowing thickly, her hand goes to Cosima’s cheek, cradling. All is dry. No blood. No sweat. Just that feverish warmth that makes them both shiver involuntarily as they press together in the too-small hospital bed.
“I have to tell you something.”
“Are you all right?” She can’t resist the anxiety that burns in her gut. Her eyes skitter helplessly along the soft planes of Cosima’s face, trying to weed out the roots of her distress before they ever have the chance to pass through her parted lips.
Unconsciously, her thumb brushes over the cannula in her nose, pulled askew in restless slumber. Cosima stills her with a gentle hand on her wrist.
“It’s fine. Look at me.” Her deep brown gaze, appearing wider, younger without the contours of her eye makeup, stills Delphine’s, bores into her. Complying, she takes a deep breath. Cosima smiles then – a crooked, near imperceptible expression that is somehow stunningly reassuring. “I want to tell you a story.”
With anybody else, in a less dire circumstance, even, this appeal would seem absurd. To Delphine, though, it feels familiar, safe.
“Okay.” She nods quietly, unable to deny the sudden intensity in Cosima’s eyes. In spite of that urgency, however, the smaller woman’s voice comes out delicately, her cadence ruminant.
“Okay. I was four, so… my family—we were living in Tracy then, about an hour from San Fran. Nice little suburb. Nice little house, too. I mean, it was small. Cramped. But I remember there being, like, wall-to-wall picture windows. And vaulted ceilings. I loved it.” She pauses for a moment. Delphine can almost see the image conjured just behind her eyes as they dip out of focus. “I still love that house. My parents kept a really lovely garden in the backyard. The fences were like six feet tall, so everything felt really, uhm…” Her hands begin to move, searching for the right word. “Secluded. Which was perfect for me, because I was wildly imaginative. Even for a little kid.”
Delphine smiles then, attempting to picture tiny, spirited Cosima. She’d seen a picture once, in the Minnesota apartment, of the girl and her parents. She was beautiful, luminescent – all dark, wild curls and a massive grin too mischievous to be strictly innocent. Delphine hadn’t wondered much on the evolution of that impish girl. She could still see her in Cosima now, in her cheeky smile and flighty hands.
“That’s not hard to imagine, is it?” She chuckles, eyes gleaming as they are caught by the errant moonlight. “All flowers, green grass. A sandbox my mom had built for me – she’s always been handier than my dad. Our neighbors had this gargantuan oak tree in their yard. The branches would hang over the fence in the summer, and I’d sit under it, in the shade during a real scorcher.”
Cosima stops suddenly, her brow furrowing. The corner of her mouth quirks up, however, and Delphine can see a bit of color in her cheeks. She places her fingertips against her forehead, and looks up at the woman waiting so intently for her to continue.
“This is all exposition. I’m not, like, a born-storyteller or anything.”
“A bit of detail is good,” Delphine assures her, playing absently with a dread. “However, if you start speaking in metaphor I may nod off.”
Cosima chuckles again, the sound cut off by a wet rattle. She rubs at her own sternum, shaking her head before Delphine can give voice to her concerns. When she has seemingly rubbed the tremor from her chest, she looks up at the blonde, eyes sparkling.
“What, you don’t want to hear me wax poetic?”
“I would love to hear that, actually,” she replies teasingly.
“Another day, then,” Cosima promises, eyes narrowed. “Back to Tracy, though. The oak tree.” Delphine nods. “I went out one day, in the spring, to play. I was sitting under the tree, and I found a robin’s egg in the grass. Big discovery. I was already something of a little scientist, so I was thrilled. But also, since I was still kind of a baby myself, I was very anxious about this. Because I knew where the egg came from – the tree, obviously – but I also realized that it had to have fallen out of the tree. And it was way too high up for me to climb and put it back in its nest.
“So, all I could think about then was that this unborn bird had been separated from its family – about it being born alone. And I just had this idea, which seemed so brilliant, that I could take this egg and hatch it, and that I could be its mother.” Delphine smiled. How typical an idea for a child. Cosima’s gaze turned inward once again, more pensive than before, more serious.
“I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t think they would let me keep a bird in the house, but I was, like, unreasonably stubborn, and when I had an idea like that, I could just latch onto it so easily, and I absolutely could not be swayed. So, when I decided I was going to take of this bird, it was just… it was going to happen. No question.
“I was smart about it. Snuck it into the house, wrapped it up in tissues and socks – you know, understanding the most basic principles of incubation – and hid it in my underwear drawer. I let it go for a couple hours or so. Went about my business. But I was dying to go check on it. I mean, I wasn’t that patient. So, later that afternoon, I took it out of my drawer, unwrapped it, and just held it in my palm. It was cold, which I was totally alarmed by, because I didn’t think it would ever hatch if I couldn’t get it warm. So I re-wrapped it, and sat on my bed for… a half hour, maybe, holding this ball of socks and tissues between my palms, just willing them to be warm.
“I thought I’d really done it that time. So, I unwrapped it again, just to check, and here… I must’ve pressed on it too hard. The pressure just cracked the thing. It was completely splattered on the inside of the tissues – dead baby bird and egg goo.” She shakes her head, laughing dryly, though the sound is tinged with sadness. “I was mortified. And my immediate thought was, oh my god, I’m going to be in so much trouble if my parents see, which is so selfish, but… I was four. What else could I think? I panicked. I disposed of the evidence. Flushed it down the toilet.
“For a moment then, I felt kind of relieved, because I realized I was going to get away with it.” She pauses, eyes squinting. “But then I thought about what I was actually getting away with. I’d killed something. Sure, it was this tiny baby bird. I hadn’t meant to. But none of that even mattered. I’d had pet fish that had died. My grandfather had died when I was three. I was perceptive enough to kind of grasp the concept of death, but it was this completely different matter… that I could make things die.”
A shiver rolls through Delphine, her lips pursing. Cosima is bright – always has been, clearly – and she doesn’t just mean that she is intelligent. She is light and sweet and happy. Genuinely. It is what drew her so instantly to the other woman – her subject – during their first encounter. One only has to grant her a cursory appraisal to glimpse it.
Cosima’s life is incontrovertibly complicated though, too. Tainted by genetic identicals and unethical scientific patents, and their consequent duplicities. At her core there is light, but darkness bites unavoidably at the edges, as well, causing solemnity to grip her at the most unsuspecting of moments. That she can vacillate so seamlessly between the two, and so suddenly, has always mystified Delphine, left her feeling perilously adrift in these darkened moments.
She places her hand upon Cosima’s neck, counting each thrumming pulse. She says nothing. There is nothing else to be done.
“It was strange, too, because all I’d really been trying to do was love it. To save it. Best intentions, you know.” Cosima looks her directly in the eyes, her gaze piercing. All the breath leaves her. Delphine is all too familiar with that particular sentiment. “You do know.” Her hand strokes Delphine’s arm, and she smiles through the remembered sadness. “I didn’t know that—” Her voice drops, coming out quieter. “—that loving could be so damaging. So fatal.”
Delphine hates herself for the way the heat pricks at the backs of her eyes. She can’t allow the tears to fall, not just yet. She will allow nothing to fall.
“I think I just… cried for about fifteen minutes there, in the bathroom, while I stood over the toilet. Really hard, too. But then I blew my nose and wiped my eyes, and… walked away. Like nothing had ever happened. I was only four,” she adds, curiously. “And my parents never knew.”
Cosima looks down, toying with the bed sheets, the hem of Delphine’s shirt. The silence burgeons between them, before she quashes it, moving her hand up to cup Cosima’s chin.
“Why did you want to tell me that,” Delphine asks, fearing the answer. She thinks abruptly, wryly, of her earlier comment to Cosima, about speaking in metaphors. Ironically, this one may keep her up for the rest of the night.
Cosima surprises her again, though, as she is wont to do, with her simple, guileless answer. “Because I never told anybody.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It was just this little secret, which—” Her brow furrows again, and she turns away, straining to glance through the window. “I feel like a have a lot of those.”
“Secrets?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure if that’s the right word. Like, if you’re not consciously trying to hide it, I’m not sure it can really be considered a secret.”
“So, they’re just things you never told anybody about?”
“Right. Innocuous things, really. Inconsequential. Shit happens, and you forget about it for years and years, and it just gets all fuzzy at the edges in that dreamlike way. You can’t remember if you were sleeping or awake.” She scrunches her nose, squinting at something upon the wall, shakes her head. “But I can tell you about them now. They stuck, somehow. Which means that they had to have been important. Changed the way that I thought or felt. Altered the course, and all that…” Her voice trails off with a dismissive wave of her hand.
“You can experience so much in thirty years,” Delphine adds. “That’s an awful lot of stuff for one mind to house. Even if it is particularly large,” she pokes Cosima playfully in the forehead, eliciting a gentle smile, an even gentler roll of the eyes. “The things that float along the surface – they are the most significant. Or one would assume.”
“Yeah,” Cosima nods, squinting once again. Admittedly, Delphine finds the sight endearing, which is perhaps why she doesn’t offer to grab the glasses sitting on the end table beside her. Either that, or she would rather not be seen with much clarity right now. “Yeah, but I was just thinking – I’ve been thinking – all those moments, they belong to me. Just me. If I never tell anybody… if I don’t get the chance to, they’ll just—what? Evaporate? Disappear. It’ll be like they never happened at all.”
It makes sense to Delphine suddenly, why exactly Cosima woke her in the middle of the night. The story was not meant to rebuke her, to assuage her guilt. Rather, it was meant to assuage Cosima’s own fears. She’s been aware of her mortality for months, of her own limitations; however, she never allowed herself much time to dwell on it. Delphine suspected she hadn’t. It seems to be dawning on her, now, the meaning of it all – in the middle of the night, when a lifetime’s worth of meaningless memories are stacked against a fast-dwindling pile of moments that mean too much by the virtue of their scarcity.
“It’s kind of scary,” she admits, practically wincing at her own insensitivity the moment it leaves her mouth. Cosima only nods.
“I’ve got an entire history inside of me. And when I go, it’ll go, too.” She pauses wistfully, rubbing one of her eyes, then throws her hand up. “Poof. It’ll be instant. That’s so… difficult to fathom.” She stares out the window a moment more, seeing nothing but the blurred outline of it without her glasses, before she gives up and falls back onto her pillow. Her hand finds Delphine’s on the bed, playing with the tips of her fingers. She looks up at her, offers a smile that is crooked with latent desperation. “I just wanted you to have a piece.”
Delphine feels outside of herself for a moment, hovering over Cosima, struggling for words – objective – a bystander. For all of her intelligence, she knows she ought to say something profound, poignant; but the gravity of the moment settles in her chest, making her feel numb and sluggish. All she can think to do is to roll over, so that they are side-by-side. When she laces her fingers firmly with Cosima’s, she pulls their joined hands onto her own stomach.
She should be poetic now – means to be – but when she opens her mouth, what comes out is: “I wet my bed until I was thirteen.”
“What?”
“Secrets, ma chérie.” Her head lolls on her shoulder, and she smiles sheepishly at the other woman. Cosima giggles. “It’s not funny! I had to work very hard to keep that one from my parents. I had no choice. They wanted to send me to therapy for it when I was eight. I couldn’t let them know how long it actually went on for.” She feels the heat rising in her cheeks, the need to explain herself. Yet she also wants to laugh, and not in the self-deprecating or embarrassed manner she has become accustomed to. “It wasn’t every night, either. It was stress-related.”
“Oh. Like, school stuff?”
Delphine nods. “They put a great deal of pressure on me to excel.”
Cosima squeezes her hand, thumb stroking her skin consolingly. “I hear you there. Personally, I used to just sneak from the liquor cabinet when tensions were high.”
“How young?”
“Eleven, when I started.”
“Eleven,” Delphine asks, chuckling.
“It wasn’t like I was getting shit-faced. Just taking the edge off. And when you’re, like, four-foot-six and eighty pounds soaking wet, it doesn’t take much more than a shot of Old Grand-Dad to mellow you out.” She glances at Delphine, grinning cheekily. “It’s a wonder I never developed a drinking problem. Guess I just got used to it too early.”
Delphine shakes her head. “You were trouble, weren’t you?”
“I was sneaky. I started a fair amount of trouble, but I was never the one to finish it.”
She turns away from Cosima, shaking her head with a smile, her chuckles fading. Tugging their hands from her belly to her lips, she kisses the backs of Cosima’s knuckles gently. Once, twice, a third time.
“I want to know everything. All of it,” she says quietly, her words fringed with both the need and the inherent hopelessness.
It’s unfair of her to ask for it. Some things are as difficult to remember as they are to forget. It takes a trigger – a scent, a sound, a familiar place. It takes a mood, a mile. It takes a lifetime, really, and even if she had one – if they had one – odds are, she’d go to her own grave with words left unsaid.
Everything arises with a sense of urgency lately. She has to remind herself to allow things to come organically, in their own time, even if neither of them knows how much of it is left. Even if it is very little. That is how meanings are truly made.
Cosima knows this, as she buries her nose against Delphine’s shoulder and rasps on the inhale, kissing through the fabric of her shirt. “So do I,” she says.
There are histories inside of them both, unsaid. They tuck them in, beside them, between them, the single sheet that they share pulled taut. In the dark, feeling the warmth and weight of a body against their own, they imagine so much: the history unmade, together. The glittering empire they could build, in a bed, or in a small house with picture windows and vaulted ceilings. It all seems so meaningful in the moonlight. Between the blinds, palm-to-palm, it all seems to dissipate.