Choose a moment or very brief scene in the story (less than half a page) when the author makes this character’s actions especially striking, puzzling, revealing, or meaningful. Drawing on your skills of close reading and analysis, examine the scene’s details for evidence of significant implications of the character’s behavior.
what in the story could have a second meaning behind it? symbolism?
The hospital room was narrow, with one window that faced another building, a thin strip of light giving the illusion of perpetual twilight. The first night, Eve slept on the bed and Manu stayed in the corner on a vinyl armchair that reclined into a cot. The walls behind Manu s chair were papered with signs: “10 Benefits of Breastfeeding”; “Stages of Labor”; “How to Welcome a Newborn.” This last was illustrated with a pale, smiling infant, swaddled in a pink blanket, soft head disappearing into a coarse hospital-issued woolen hat. Eve kept her head turned toward the window, her gaze avoiding both Manu and the posters.
“Do you want ice?” Manu asked for the second time that night. Eve would not answer.
“Are you hurting?” Still silence.
He watched her from the corner, a pair of plastic monitors strapped to her swollen, tiger-striped belly with a flat elastic band to capture the twin heartbeats. She was tethered to a station that graphed their pulses, printing a strip like a polygraph machine. Beneath the girls’ heartbeats was a line intended to map the pressure of Eve’s contractions; it had been flat since they’d arrived, the muscles of her uterus quiet and still as Manus muscles grew more and more tense, cramps beginning in the soles of his feet, the uneasy feeling of suppressed movement coiling in his calves. Unsure of what to do, Manu finally pushed himself out of the chair and walked to the side of the bed, where he stood facing the window, Eve’s stomach curving into his peripheral vision with each of her shallow breaths.
Manu waited by Eve’s bed, but he did not dare hold her hand.
Manu was used to waiting, had waited at home while Eve spent weeks at a time collecting fossils in the Badlands–brushing dirt from the bones of a three-toed horse, a land turtle, an antelope–wearing and rewearing two canvas shirts until they were stained dark and uneven from the sweat under her arms. Manu woke up each morning to their tiny, spare house, but it was Eve who had filled it with remnants of her digs: a single, pitted vertebra from the swan neck of a plesiosaurus; the dark, smooth tooth of a megalodon, flat as an arrowhead; the petrified cone of a Jurassic conifer tree, its surface glossy and hilly, its marrow pale and layered like sheaves of paper.
When Eve told him she was pregnant, her stomach already beginning to swell beneath the cage of her ribs, it seemed impossible to Manu that, after occupying so little space in her life, something he had done could have changed her at all.
But she had changed. In the hospital bed, she seemed heavy, the weight of the twins pressing her toward the ground. Her eyes were closed, and she rested one hand against her stomach. Her lips were pressed together, and Manu thought that she might be smiling, though he couldn’t be sure.
From her trips, Eve brought home the dead, and when she left, Manu would hold the fossils that remained in the apartment and imagine each one alive.
From the Arctic Circle, Eve returned with the corpse of a twisted-wing wasp. The wasps, Manu read, warm themselves inside the bodies of other insects, beneath the furred ruffs of honeybees and the thick armor of ants. The virgin female consumes her host and wends her way into its brain. She instills in it a desire for altitude, to climb stalks of grass, fallen leaves, thin twigs, and once they reach the top, she will release a seductive perfume to attract a mate. Her thorax protrudes from her host’s walking corpse, and the wasps mate while her foreparts are still furled inside. She has no birth canal, and her offspring will feed on her flesh, bore a hole in her head to free themselves. Her adult sons will grow wings and legs to leave the host, but not jaws: their unformed mouths will exist just to taste the air for the scent of a female, for they will die within hours, once they mate and before they must eat again. Her daughters, destined to remain, to live and die within the host, waiting for a mate, will be legless, wingless, eyeless, but ravenous.
“It’s not alive,” Eve told him when he showed her the picture of an adolescent wasp emerging from its mother. She fingered the wasp’s tiny carcass, brushing each wispy leg with the edge of her nail. “Why wont you love it like this, the way it actually is?”
Bent over her workbench, Eve found a story in each flightless, gossamer wing, each feathered antenna. A thing didn’t have to move to have meaning to Eve, Manu knew, and he loved her for the tender way she held each corpse and honored each lifeless organ. But Manu couldn’t help himself. In his mind, the wasp’s desiccated body held a fluttering heart and a tremendous hunger.
The girls, Manu knew, had been the same person until the first week was over. By then, the only evidence that they would come to exist had been a sac, a dark hollow beneath layers of muscle that curved and swelled into the shape of a ripe mango on the ultrasound screen. At two months, the ultrasound showed two flapping hearts afloat in one sac, anchored to the single placenta that lined the wall of Eve’s uterus like a dense cobweb. At three months, their umbilical cords had twined into a smooth, fishtail braid, two pulses visible in the same ropy segment, and by three-and-a-half months, the two narrow cords had become indelibly knotted into a tortuous ball, tightening and rising like a woven mound of challah bread.
Eve was restless. She returned to the Badlands once, early in the pregnancy, and a picture from the trip–Manu never knew who had taken it–captured her in front of the dig site, before labyrinthine canyons carved from steep slopes of loose sand and slick red clay. Eve’s back was turned to the camera, and her stomach was hidden beneath a black wool coat. When she returned, Manu fought to keep her still, fetched her tea and cooked her eggs, but she wandered, climbing the stairs aimlessly and stopping on each landing to stare out the window.
With no dividing membrane between them, the twins, too, wandered, floating in their shared, watery sac. The ultrasounds became snapshots of their sisterhood: at thirteen weeks, their faces kissed, their round foreheads pressed close; at fifteen, their arms looped; and at twenty weeks, one curved around the other, their translucent limbs tangled like the tentacles of a jellyfish washed up on shore.
Now, at thirty weeks, just as their budding lungs started to fill with fluid, one of the pulses in the matted segment of cord began to quicken while the other slowed.
In the hospital room, Manu paced the three feet of floor between the bed and the wall. Eve opened her eyes periodically, following his path from the cot to the door and back, seven short steps and a turn. When she closed her eyes, Manu paused to look at her. She was lying on one side, pillows crumpled under the small of her back. One of her knees was bent, reaching forward, while the other leg stretched back as if in mid-run. In the corner, the dyssynchronous heartbeats marked the time, fast and slow, polygraph needles sweeping across the page in disorganized arcs.
When she came in, Eve could see the doctor was stocky and firm. “Feet up,” she instructed, lifting Eve’s feet into the stirrups. She donned sterile gloves, sliding first the left and then the right down over her square wrists and snapping the rubber cuffs, holding her elbows at her waist and her hands up at her shoulders as if the weight of gravity alone might pull the gloves off her hands and onto the floor.
From Manus chair in the corner, he could see just the silver crown of the doctor’s head, bent in the valley between Eve’s raised knees.
“Still closed,” sighed the doctor. “Not engaged.” As she stood up, Manu saw that her first two fingers were dark with blood. “The babies haven’t moved into the birth canal yet, and they don’t have much time. They need to come out.”
At twenty-five weeks, Eve had been given a medication to leech the fluid from her uterus, to drain the sea in which the twins swam in order to keep them still, keep their umbilical cords from knotting further. Still, Manu imagined the girls floating away from the doctor’s seeking hand, her fingertips barely brushing one soft head before the sisters drifted out of reach.
“They don’t want to leave,” the doctor told Eve.
Eve shook her head. “I know,” she said. “They won’t leave.”
On the polygraph machine, Manu could hear just one pulse, the other so slow it was nearly imperceptible, the needle sluggish, arcing at its own, celestial pace–the spin of Earth on its axis, the tides. Manu thought of Eve, bound to her bed, and of the twins, confined in her womb, and he wondered whether his daughter was shriveling from stagnancy, drowned by her anchor.
That summer, Eve had traveled to Africa for three weeks. In her bag, she carried home the fragile, wispy exoskeletons of roundworms and scorpions, comb jellies and a single dragonfly, the wandering glider. Its carcass was pale and brittle in Manus fingers; alive, Manu discovered, it had been swollen at the joints like a bamboo staff, fine, its wings scaled and translucent, eyes wet and red.
The wandering glider spends the summer traveling south through India ahead of the monsoon. In the summer, India is unbearably hot, halfhearted winds raising dry dust storms in the north, while along the coast, the kind of dampness that blisters book covers, peels lacquer from furniture, blooms. In the heat, the air pressure drops, and the moist winds hovering over the Indian Ocean snake inland, pool at the base of the Himalayas and rise, dark and dense, as clouds. The sky breaks open, rain needling between the wide slats of old apartment buildings and shattering windows.
The dry, gold Western Ghats darken and green, and the wandering gliders mate, the female laying her eggs with the male still curving against her thorax. The eggs hatch in the fleeting pools of rainwater that gather in potholes and ditches. In broken roadways and gutters clogged with waste, the larvae grow wings before the water dries up.
By October, hordes of dragonflies have crossed the Indian Ocean in waves to settle in the Maldives, islands freckling the southern stretch of the sea, in time for the rain. In December, they move west to East Africa, Uganda, and Seychelles, then south to Tanzania and Mozambique, then north again for the second rainy season, and back to India once more for the first monsoon. Close to the ground, the monsoon winds blow toward India, but on high, they blow away, and it is here, above the monsoon, where the wandering gliders travel. Each full migration consumes four generations, and the dragonflies live their entire lives adrift, dying in droves during the journey.
Eve’s dragonfly hadn’t made it home, had instead fallen somewhere over the Serengeti. Manu wondered how she had died; was she caught in a spider web, spinning desperately to free herself? Or did she fly into a boat propeller, her brittle thorax snapping beneath the steel?
It took just three hours before Eve was moved to the operating room, where she lay under lights so bright that they warmed Manus hair and stung his eyes. He sat by Eves head, a thin paper sheet separating him from his daughters.
In the end, one was born wailing, the other curled and dark and still.
It was the silent body that Eve reached for. She cradled the length of her daughters spine in the palm of her hand and traced the arc from the bulging forehead to the unformed nose. When the nurse offered Eve the other, she closed her eyes and shook her head. Beneath Eve’s fingertips, Manu could see the skin begin to pale. It shamed Manu to realize that he could not imagine this daughter alive.
Instead, Manu reached for her twin, whose chest billowed and bloomed with her gasping breaths. He cupped her head in one hand and rested her leggy, purple body against his forearm. The worm of her umbilical cord, untethered from Eve, was cropped close to the papery skin of her belly. With each cry, her ribs vibrated against Manu’s wrist.
Manu would remember that feeling when, at five, she lost her footing on the stairs and fell to the bottom with dark blood matting her hair, crying against him when he rushed to lift her into his lap, and again at seventeen, when he heard her gasping sobs through the closed door of her bedroom, shed over a man whose name he would never know. At twenty, she would leave for good, moving across an ocean and returning only when she fell ill, and he would wonder then whether he alone had ever been enough for her. Feverish and half asleep, she asked then, not for her mother, as Manu had feared, but instead for her sister, drawing her knees to her chest and curling in the bed toward an imagined twin forehead.
The baby fanned her toes, the nails pearly, translucent. On her right heel was an uneven patch of spilling capillaries, a spreading stain the deep black-red of new wine. It traced the rope of her Achilles tendon and unfurled across her ankle like a pair of thick wings.
The baby spent her first day in the ICU, and Manu stayed with her, watching her through the thick plastic of her terrarium-like incubator. She lay on her back, arms and legs bound tightly by her blanket. Her eyes were closed, but when they opened, it seemed to Manu that they were looking past him–for her sister, or for her mother; for her fellow wanderers or for her watery home.
Her lungs were still boggy with fluid, and earlier that day, the nurse had rushed in and rubbed the soles of her feet until she squeezed her eyes shut and opened her mouth in a soundless cry of protest.
“She forgot to breathe,” the nurse told Manu. “She just needed to wake up a little bit. She’ll be just fine.”
He felt nausea rising from his abdomen in a wave. His legs were trembling, his vision dimming. The sounds of machines, of infants and parents cooing and crying, were distant and slowed, reaching his ears as if through a long, narrow tunnel. He reached for the chair behind him and sat down hard, feeling as though he, too, had stopped breathing.
For the rest of the day, Manu kept his hand inside the incubator, one finger stroking the sole of his daughters winged foot, willing her to not drift, to stay awake. He left only when the nurse shooed him away, tucking the blanket tightly around the baby’s feet and telling Manu that he should really check on his wife.
When he returned to the room, Eve was gone.
“But the baby is looking for her,” he insisted, sitting down on the unmade bed, legs still weak He could feel the curve of Eve’s weight, indented in the mattress beneath him.
“Don’t worry,” the nurse told him, smiling as she reached for the door handle. “She took a walk. She just wanted to stretch her legs. She said she’d be back in half an hour.” Again, Manu waited.
The next day, Manu found their car in the hospital parking lot, bulky twin car seats still strapped into the back. He leaned against the hood, cradling his daughter. She felt so light in his arms that only his fingers against the down of her head, his forearm bracing her back, kept her from floating away.
In the house, Eve had left behind only the fossils: a solitary bee entombed in amber; an Eocene flower pressed into clay; and the memory of a clamshell, the shell itself long crumbled, the pattern of ridges preserved in a brick of soft sandstone that cleaved to its form like candlewax.
