Blue

"She looked at me and I looked at her and neither of us blinked. She did not blink because newborns do not blink. I did not blink because I was afraid that if I closed my eyes she would not be there when I opened them."

I had not cut the cord.

The realisation arrived the way things arrived in the aftermath — slowly, through the fog of exhaustion, surfacing from beneath the weight of everything else that had happened. The cord was still attached. It ran from the baby's navel to the afterbirth on the soiled sheet, a thick, twisted rope of tissue that was no longer pulsing, no longer carrying whatever it had been carrying between my mother's body and my sister's body for nine months. It was slack and cooling, the colour changing from the dark red it had been during the delivery to something duller, a purplish grey, the colour of something that had finished its work and was waiting to be dismissed.

I had watched my mother cut cords. Dozens of times. The procedure was simple — she had made it look simple, the way people who had done a thing a thousand times made every complicated thing look simple. Two pieces of thread tied tight around the cord, a hand's width apart. The knife between them. A single clean cut. The separation of two bodies that had been one system, one circulation, one shared existence, into two separate lives that would never again be connected by anything as direct and as absolute as blood.

The knife was on the bed where I had put it. The small blade, my father's, the one my mother borrowed for births. I picked it up. My hands were still trembling — a fine, persistent vibration that I could feel in the bones of my fingers but that I could not stop, as though the shaking had become a permanent feature of the apparatus rather than a temporary malfunction. The handle of the knife was warm from lying on the blanket. The blade was clean. I had not used it yet.

I needed thread. I looked around the room — the back room, the space behind the curtain, the twelve square feet of mattress and floor and blood-soaked linen that constituted the entire world at this moment — and my eyes found the mending basket on the other side of the curtain, visible through the gap where the fabric hung crooked on its string. The red thread. My mother's thread, the one she had been using to mend my Sunday petticoat when her hand gripped the table and the morning broke in half.

I stood. My knees objected. They had been pressed against the floor for — I did not know how long. The skin was raw where the floorboards had imprinted their grain into my kneecaps, and the joints made a sound when I straightened them, a grinding pop that seemed too loud for the quiet room. I walked to the curtain. I walked back with the thread. The distance was four paces and it felt like forty.

The baby lay on the mattress beside my mother, both of them still, both of them breathing. My mother's breath was shallow and slow, the rhythm of a body that had spent everything it had and was now running on whatever reserves remained beneath the reserves — the deep fuel, the stuff that kept the heart beating and the lungs working when the conscious machinery had shut down. She was asleep or unconscious and I could not tell the difference and the difference, for the moment, did not matter. She was breathing. The blood had stopped. The colour of her face was still wrong — too white, too paper-thin — but it was stable wrong rather than worsening wrong, and stable was enough. Stable was everything.

I cut two lengths of thread. I tied the first around the cord, close to the baby's belly, pulling the knot tight with fingers that fought me at every stage — the thread slippery with the fluids that coated everything in this room, the knot refusing to hold on the first attempt, catching on the second. I tied the second a hand's width from the first. My mother's distance. The space she always left. I had watched her measure it with her fingers so many times that my own fingers found the interval without instruction, the knowledge living in my hands the way my father's knowledge of timber lived in his.

I placed the blade between the ties and cut.

The cord severed cleanly. The tissue was softer than I expected — it offered less resistance than I had prepared for, the blade passing through it with an ease that made the act feel too small for what it accomplished. Two bodies that had been one system were now two systems. My mother's blood and my sister's blood would never again move between them. The connection that had sustained the baby's life from conception to this moment was a piece of dead tissue on a soiled sheet, and the baby was — for the first time in her existence — alone. A separate creature. A person whose survival depended on the air she breathed and the milk she would drink and the hands that held her rather than on the interior architecture of another woman's body.

I wiped the blade on the clean corner of the linen. I set it on the floor beside the bed. I picked up my sister.

She weighed nothing. That was my first thought — not a thought, really, but a sensation that registered as thought, the disconnect between the weight I had expected and the weight my arms received. She was small and warm and wrapped in the lavender-scented sheet that was now stained with blood and fluid and the waxy residue that had coated her skin when she emerged, and beneath the wrapping she was trembling with the fine constant vibration that I had noticed before, the whole system running faster than it needed to, a new engine still learning its idle speed.

I held her against my chest. I sat on the floor because sitting on the floor was what my legs decided to do without consulting me, the muscles surrendering their remaining tension all at once, dropping me onto the boards beside the bed where my mother slept with a gracelessness that would have embarrassed me in any other circumstance and that now simply happened, the way everything in this room had simply happened — the cord and the blood and the silence and the cry and the cutting and the sitting.

The floor was cold through the wool of my shift. The fire had burned down to embers again and the room was cooling, the air that had been thick with heat and the smell of labour thinning as the temperature dropped. I could feel the cold on my bare arms, on my neck, on the exposed skin of my ankles where my stockings had torn through during the run to Eel Row — the run that belonged to a different morning, a different girl, a different set of problems that had seemed impossible and that had been replaced by problems so much larger that the originals had ceased to exist entirely.

My hands were covered in blood. My mother's blood. It had dried in the creases of my palms, darkening from red to brown in the lines that crossed my skin, filling the whorls of my fingerprints with a residue that I could feel when I rubbed my thumb against my forefinger — a slight grit, a texture, the physical remainder of a crisis that my hands had navigated and that my mind was only now beginning to comprehend. The blood was under my nails. It was in the folds of my knuckles. It marked the cuffs of my shift where I had wiped my hands without thinking and where the fabric had absorbed the stain with the finality that blood applied to cloth — permanent, indelible, the kind of mark that no amount of washing would fully remove.

The room smelled of iron. Iron and sweat and lavender and the sweet undertone that I now understood was the smell of birth itself — not a single substance but a composite, the accumulated exhalations of a process that engaged every fluid the human body could produce and deposited them in the air and the linen and the skin of everyone present. I would carry this smell with me for the rest of the day. I would catch traces of it in my hair for a week. Years later, entering rooms where other women laboured, I would recognise it instantly — the smell of the threshold, the smell of the space between inside and outside, the smell of a body working at the absolute limit of what a body could do.

My mother slept. Her face on the pillow was slack, emptied, the muscles that had been clenching and working and contorting for hours finally released into the blankness that exhaustion provided. She looked older than she had looked this morning. Not by years but by something else — by experience, by expenditure, by the cost that the morning had extracted from the reserves that forty years of living had accumulated. She looked like a woman who had been through something that had required everything and that had taken slightly more than everything and that had left her operating on whatever existed in the space below nothing.

She also looked alive, and alive was the only thing that mattered.

The baby moved against my chest. A small motion — the arm shifting inside the swaddling, the head turning by a fraction, the minute adjustments of a body learning the dimensions of its new environment. The movement pressed her weight against my ribs and I could feel her heartbeat through the linen, quick and light, a rapid tapping that was nothing like the slow, heavy beat of my own heart and that reminded me, with each tap, that the body I was holding contained a mechanism that was entirely its own, a heart that pumped blood I had not provided, lungs that drew air I could not breathe for her, a life that had begun in dependency and was already, less than an hour old, moving toward the independence that all lives moved toward whether anyone was ready for it or not.

I looked down at her face.

The eyes were open.

They had been closed since the crying stopped — sealed shut, the lids thin and faintly veined, the lashes so pale they were barely visible against the pink-flushed skin. Now they were open, and they were looking at me, and what I saw in them was nothing — nothing in the sense that the eyes of a newborn contained no recognition, no comprehension, no awareness of the face above them or the room around them or the morning that had produced them. They were eyes that had never seen anything and were seeing everything for the first time and could not distinguish between the two because the apparatus that would eventually sort the world into meaningful categories had not yet been assembled.

They were blue.

Pale. Clear. The colour of the sky over the harbour on the rare mornings when the cloud broke and the light came through clean and unfiltered and the water reflected it back in a shade that was not quite the same as the sky but that rhymed with it. A blue that was specific rather than general, a blue that belonged to these eyes and no others, a blue that I was seeing for the first time and that I would see thousands of times over the decades that followed and that would never, in any of those thousands of viewings, lose the quality it carried in this first one — the quality of something arriving, of something that had not existed before this moment and that would exist after it and that had chosen this particular shade to announce itself with.

I knew — I had been told, by my mother, by Mrs Graham, by the accumulated wisdom of women who had attended more births than I could count — that newborn eyes changed colour. That the blue I was seeing might darken to brown or green or grey as the weeks passed and the pigment that determined such things made its final decision. That the colour a baby was born with was provisional, a first draft, subject to revision by processes that operated beneath the skin and beyond the reach of anyone's preference or prediction.

I did not know that these eyes would stay blue. I did not know that the colour I was looking at was not provisional but permanent, that the pale clear blue of this moment was the pale clear blue of every moment that would follow, that my sister would carry this particular shade through childhood and girlhood and womanhood and old age and that it would become, in the private language of our family, the colour of the morning she almost did not survive.

I knew only that she was looking at me. That her eyes — blue, unfocused, empty of everything except the raw fact of being open — were pointed at my face, and that my face was the first thing they had encountered in a world they did not yet know was a world, and that the hands holding her — shaking, bloody, fourteen years old, untrained, terrified, still bearing the imprint of the cord they had unwound from her neck — were the first hands she had known.

I held my sister. She breathed. I breathed.