Seeing Deeper

by Mary Soon Lee

I stood in the sterile hospital theater, watching sweat runnel down the side of Geetha’s face and trickle into her damp black hair. Geetha panted, resting between cramps, her head turning to look for me.

“I’m here, Geetha.” I stepped forward, my hand reaching to cup her cheek. Her skin was wet beneath my fingers, and for once almost as pale as my own. Just an hour ago, I’d returned home from work to find Geetha doubled over by the rose bushes, surrounded by white petals and the heavy fragrance of incense. She had been in pain all day, but put more faith in her grandfather’s superstitions than American doctors. If the old man had been in the hospital with us, I’d have hit him.

Geetha’s eyes squeezed closed, her back arching impossibly. I tried to tell her it was going to be all right, but my throat choked and I could only hold onto her.

A green-gowned doctor reached between Geetha’s knees. A second later, he raised one plastic glove, smeared with crimson, and gave something to a nurse. As the nurse walked past me, I glimpsed the tiny blood-wet lump in her grasp. Two perfect minute arms, fingers curled, a smudge of nose, and a wrongness where the legs should have been.

One of the other nurses lifted my hand from Geetha’s cheek. I stared at the young nurse, and saw that she was saying something to me. Abruptly, I registered the background noises: the clink of metal instruments, the anesthetist reciting a numerical litany, the nurse’s brusque kindness as she eased me out of the way.

But there was something missing.

I leaned against the wall, squinting at Geetha stretched beneath the angled glare of the lights. Her face was still now, her body relaxed as strangers inserted tubing into her veins. I stood there, empty as a hollow egg-shell, listening, listening for the missing sound, not sure what it was.

The young nurse took my arm again, and steered me out of the operating theater. “Your wife’s going to be just fine, but she’ll be asleep for a few hours. Why don’t you get yourself a coffee?”

Numbly, I nodded.

The nurse stepped back inside, the door swinging behind her. For an instant, I saw a steel-bright dish perched on a table, a shallow bowl with a tiny white-wrapped bundle inside it.

I waited, listening, my forehead pressed against the cold door. But our child was silent.

Even though I was sitting beside her bed, it took me a while to realize Geetha was awake. She lay motionless, staring up at the grey ceiling. I bent over, and kissed her lightly.

She ignored me, her dark brown eyes gazing upward.

“Geetha?”

Still no response. Uselessly, I stroked her arm. The doctor had warned me that she might be in shock. “I’m so sorry,” I mumbled, over and over, “I love you.”

Geetha blinked. “Where is Madeleine?”

“She, she’s dead — it was too soon.”

“Where did they put her?”

I shivered, unnerved by the brittle dryness of her tone, the way her eyes were still fixed on the ceiling.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. I suppose in the hospital morgue …”

“You have to bury her. Quickly.”

“But your family, my mother, they’ll want to come. And I haven’t even told them yet.” It was stupid; we sounded as though we were arranging a dinner-party. And what I wanted to say, what I wanted to do, was to fold my head into the crook of Geetha’s neck, and hug her all night. I laid my hand on her cheek. “Geetha …”

She shook me away. “There isn’t time. From the bottom of my dresser, get the sandalwood chest. Place soil inside, an inch deep, and cover it with silk. Place Madeleine on the silk, and bury her beneath our rose bushes.”

“I can’t just take her. We need to call an undertaker, choose a cemetery. I know you’re upset — we’re upset — but this is ridiculous.”

“Grandfather said …”

“I don’t care what he said. Maybe he doesn’t know any better, he’s probably going senile. But you’re from New York, not some village by the Ganges. It’s about time you grew up.”

Geetha stared at me, her eyes liquid.

The tight knot in my chest subsided. I brushed her bare shoulder, my fingers shaking. “I’m sorry. When I came home, when I saw you crouched in the flower-bed, for a moment I thought you were going to die.”

“Part of me died.” Geetha’s fingers crept toward me, entwined themselves in mine. “Please, Robert. Do this for me, as best you are able.”

I knelt down beside the bed, and rested my head on her shoulder. “I’ll do what I can.”

Even in our small rural town, it seems there is an assault course of ordinances and regulations concerning burials. Although I made a fool of myself first to the hospital staff, then to the undertaker and a lawyer, I couldn’t convince them to let me bury our daughter in our garden. If I had been prepared to delay for a week or two, to allow the lawyer time to wade through the bureaucracy, then perhaps — but Geetha was growing more agitated by the minute.

So I compromised. The undertaker agreed to use the little sandalwood chest as a coffin, and barely raised an eyebrow when I asked him to put some earth inside it first.

And at twilight, twenty-six hours after my daughter was born, she was laid to rest at the edge of an old cemetery. Two of our friends came, and an aunt of Geetha’s who lives within driving distance. I muttered some acknowledgement as they offered their condolences, my face stiff. They left almost immediately, and I lingered by the fresh grave.

The wind gusted chill, scattering scarlet and gold leaves across the grass in sudden glory. It made no sense to me: cycles and rhythms and the wheel of nature. Why should anything end before it had a chance to begin?

In the distance, I saw an elderly woman hunched over another grave, her arms full of violets. I took a pair of miniature primrose-colored socks from my pocket, something my mother had knitted in hasty anticipation. Our baby hadn’t been due until late December. I put the socks on the grave, weighted them down with a stone.

Two weeks later, I brought Geetha to the cemetery. She was wrapped up in her winter coat, her face half-hidden beneath the hood. She didn’t speak; she’d scarcely said three sentences to me since that day in the hospital. She didn’t cry. Only the press of her cold fingers against mine told me that she knew I was there.

When we got home, she sat in the downstairs bay window, and asked me to comb her hair. I ran the old metal comb through her long thick hair, easing the worst of the tangles apart with my fingers. The dwindling sunlight caught on the worked metal of the comb’s handle, glistened against Geetha’s hair.

And she started to talk.

“In India, in the village my grandfather came from …” my hand jerked, snagging her hair, but I bit back the sarcastic remark that came to mind “… there’s a sacred stand of trees, and there everyone is buried, all without gravestones, in that one place. When strangers from some big city — Bombay, I think — came to visit the grove, they described merely straggling trees. But, seeing deeper, the villagers recognized the souls of the dead climbing to the next life. My grandfather remembers how the leaves shimmered with the blue-green of peacock tails, each sapling rooted in a corpse, shooting up in a single month.”

She paused, her mouth twisting as it does when she is mocking herself. “I know you think me foolish, Robert. But I wanted to believe. I wanted Madeleine’s tree to grow near us, so I might help her on her way.” Her mouth twisted further. “I could feel her dying inside me, so I tried to make a sacred place within our garden.”

The roughness in her voice tugged at me. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe it doesn’t matter where she is; she’ll find her own way.”

Geetha swung round, her eyes bright as sunlit frost. “I need to know. I need to know she’s all right.”

Folding my arms around her, I rocked her gently, back and forth, ignoring her last words. Surely it was a good sign that she’d talked about this, surely things would be better now.

But that night I woke up, missing something. Geetha’s side of the bed was empty. I ran through the house, shouting her name, then out into the driveway. A silhouette bent down to the car door.

“Geetha!” I ran over to her. She was barefoot, her nightdress rippling in the wind, one hand tight round a garden spade. “Geetha, what are you doing?”

“I’m going to the cemetery. I need to check Madeleine’s safe, that her soul-tree grows well.”

“Tomorrow,” I said hoarsely. “We’ll go tomorrow. Together.”

“Promise?”

“I promise. Come inside.”

She let me lead her indoors, drank some hot milk laced with brandy, then nestled beneath the comforter, her eyes dropping shut almost immediately.

I paced across the bedroom, watching her sleep. She was slipping further away from me, too far for me to reach. I considered calling a psychiatrist, or even her grandfather. But what if the psychiatrist said she was unstable? What if her grandfather told her Madeleine’s soul was trapped?

Gradually, the moon crossed the sky, faint shadows washing across Geetha’s face. It was five in the morning. I had thought of just one solution, and I wasn’t proud of it. I’d plant a sapling in the grave for Geetha to discover.

Geetha shifted in her sleep, and I breathed out hard. I’d never lied to her before, yet I couldn’t think of anything better to do.

It was quiet in the graveyard, the air suffused with a deep blue glow. Dew clung to my shoes as I walked over the yielding turf, a short sapling under one arm, the spade in the other. I kept glancing around, wondering how I’d explain myself if someone saw me digging open a grave.

It took me a moment to find the grave, as yet marked only by a plain wooden cross. But there were the little yellow socks, soggy with damp. I set the sapling to one side, hefted the spade, paused.

The sun was clearing the hillside, pink-gold light aching through the far trees. The air shimmered, and there before me — where a moment ago there had been only emptiness — stood a slender tree.

I leaned forward, rubbed my hand along the silvery bark, smooth as paper. Above me, emerald leaves flickered in iridescent dance, patterning the grass with pinpoints of reflected light.

I closed my eyes for a second, kneeling down on the wet ground. Something gentle rustled in the leaves overhead, something like a child’s first laugh. When I opened my eyes, the tree was gone. I turned: the sapling I’d brought was also gone, the grass broken only by weathered tombstones and a few ordinary fall trees.

But it didn’t matter. My faith is very limited; I knew Geetha would see more deeply.

–—

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