The Story of HA

I want to tell you the story.  The one I wrote on blue paper, from the office, which I lost somehow.  I get angry, even tonight, about the fact that I lost it.  I can't understand how I could throw away even accidentally the story of Gabriel, born of the two people I love the most in this life, at least in these years, in these times, through all the men and boys and in the place I call home, like no other.  This is a different language, I suppose, the one with which I was meant to speak it.  So, here it comes.

Heather and Ariel are my family.  There is no other way to say it.  She is a voluptuous, red headed fire woman whose anniversary of living in Red Hook is exactly one year before mine.  A German Ohio farm girl who converted to Judaism for the love of a beautiful Sephardic Jewish man, from Brooklyn, via Israel, Chicago, and Brooklyn again, his mother born in Casablanca says it all really.  They laugh at fart jokes, enact the very same in my presence, are the archetypes for mother and father, opposites who cannot live without the other's presence, always and forever....I had always thought them a beautiful pair, sexual in the most open ways possible...H once gave A a blow job on my couch when I was in the adjoining apartment, many years ago, just a few months after I moved in, and afterwards, when they sat there, her getting up and giggling the timbre of a flock of baby birds who just found out they can fly, I knew that she loved him more than anything she gave her name to in this world, and it was gorgeous, and alive and kicking and breathing and all that I wanted for myself, and nothing less. 

I was the right hand woman throughout the pregnancy, and all the women in red hook like me wanted a boy - we were the sort of women who didn't like other girls, and all referred to ourselves as "guy girls" which could be a blessing and a curse.  I was already named as the hot neighbour lady who would offer the boy his first boner.....a title which I held to and respected, in case you wondered.  Nothing wrong with that.  It was magical, and everyone - EVERYONE - knew it was two incredible lovely people who CHOSE to do this, even though it was a technical accident in Costa Rica - that weekend I stayed at DWK's place yet again, and he moaned at me when I walked up his steep stairs, the day after the night he had himself in me, and me reciting the alphabet backwards, pleasuring me with every part I got right, and lack of pleasure punishing me for all that I got wrong (I didn't get much wrong), and then he walked up the stairs behind me, in my tight red summer dress and no underwear, not showering since I'd been with him last, on purpose of course, I loved smelling him and feeling that he was still inside me, his tongue in my mouth, his mind at my feet, all of it was alive and there with me, when A and I dropped off their old and non neutered dog at the Wallace K household, and his dog, the white pit bull who I love and miss so much, tried to mount the Rottweiler and there was spit, and fluids, and we laughed our asses off and drank beer while the dogs settled in together for the length of this Costa Rica trip.  So, he moaned behind me, my summer red ass leading the way, the red spanking marks of his hands still on me beneath the fabric, and his sounds fully letting me know that he wanted me again in his bed with no headboard, the sun shining too bright as he pulled me into his knowing of me further than ever.

I had went out, on that night in question, in the inappropriate black dress, sandals and necklace.  I went into the  bar once I knew she was in labor, and got them hamburgers and delivered cupcakes that I had made just a few days before...the horrid teal icing, which was for my friend who loved the colour more than most things she ever knew.  The birth went on, at home, through the night, they had been though all the classes and he had been ready nearly too.  She bought him his favourite bourbon since he deserved it, and I sleep with awful, misunderstood and murky dreams that night.  Red Hook is quiet - there was no big night down at the Irish bar, and the streets were silent, our windows open, and I heard no sound of babies crying......come 6:19am, I awoke, as their same Rottweiler who would be put to sleep a couple weeks later, banged at the door between my apartment and my neighbour's, and I awoke to silence, and knew it was wrong (baby's birth time was 6:19am).  I sat on the opposite side's couch and called her best friend, and then....sirens....awful sounds they are.  I went down to go to work, and saw the ambulances cross the wrong way on the street, and I knew what was happening, but I was so incredibly in denial.  I texted on the bus, called, nothing.  Then, at the job I returned to, for reasons I now know of, being myself like I've been gifted to be again, and all, A called me at 10:30 and explained rather calmly but clearly in shock, that the night was long, the labour intense, and it was a "crazy day"....and when asked about the baby, he just said, without hesitation or sighs of any kind (this was after I learned he stood there, beautiful, sensitive and strong A, in the emergency room, watching them admirably try to do CPR on his son, and failing, but he stayed, and watched and waited) that "he just didn't make it".......I later went with their best friend, now the woman who shares my top floor, and saw them emerge from each other's wounded arms from their bedroom, that he built onto her huge and voluptuous studio loft, in addition to the baby room, in tears and shock and an outpouring that I could never and hope never to understand.

Later that night, we watched stupid films and ate McDonald's, and he and she held hands across my lap and we cried and laughed and talked about porn and he told us that when he went to the roof to smoke, that the name of the boy came to him.....the Hebrew word Neshema, which means soul and also breath, and since their son (he made sure to tell her that she was a mother, and IS a mother and no one could take that from her, even though it all felt like a horrible dream to her) couldn't take his breath, it was the perfect name for him, as the stars shot across the black sky.  He came over to her, vulnerable and open and herself, all pistons firing, and kissed her hard on the mouth and said "well, I'm bound to you, and that's it. Forever" the sort of promise most people couldn't keep for a tenth of a lifetime, they had it in their own personal pain which was mine, and the world's and then...............................................................after 6 months of recovery and shame and guilt and inappropriate laughter, and trying and living, she got the Lola bean in her, on her birthday, when he proposed to her, and she, drunk, walked out of the bathroom with her pants around her ankles and crying for some over dramatic reason she was prone to, and he laughed and said "you really want me to do this right now, like this" and she didn't say no, so he got down on bended knee, and though the ceremony still hasn't taken place, they've been married since before they were born.  And the double fortune baby, the sister of Gabriel Neshemah, was born perfectly, soundly and safely in that following fall late night, and the name of Lola became a legend - a girl who is ready to stand up, fight and leave us all to better adventures at 4 months old, with her grey blue eyes, laughing smile and perfection which none of us could figure out just yet.....makes the loss of Gabriel a gain, and our lives a sanctified remembrance of circumstance.  Our lives are just our own, and god is just our watchmen, don't you know.  I love you, and there are few I know who have lived their lives as themselves as fully, honestly, without excuse and with all the passion this world has to offer, and with as many grins, laughs, folds and visceral embarrassments as you two.  You are Adam and Eve, in reversed cowgirl, roles unclear, lips kissing til the end of time, through the darkest hours and the lightest of tears, now and forever marked with the loss that makes you gain everything - each second you can, and will and do.  Look up to the sky - the shape it is forming, is in honour of you.

M. Lucia