The Road North

The road turned north for the last time, toward the line I did not yet know was the last line, the one after which I would not be alive anymore. The desert opened ahead of us, hard and bright and honest in a way the rooms had not been, and I walked into it carrying more than anyone could see.

In those last weeks something moved in me that I could not hand to any of the lies I had been handing things to. I had blamed the sickness on the water. I had blamed the tiredness on the road. I had blamed the changes in my body on the food, on the fear, on him. There was always a reason and I always took it. But there is no reason on earth you can give a girl for the thing I felt then, low, deep, a flutter and then a turn, a movement that was not mine and was not hunger and was not fear, its own small separate insistence inside me. I felt it and everything in me went still. The part of me that had refused to know for months finally could not refuse, and I want to be honest about what I did with it, which is that I still would not say the word. I felt it move and I prayed, in secret, with no sound, and I did not let myself finish the thought the prayer was circling. I had survived the whole road by not asking. I was not going to start asking now, this close to the end, about a thing I could not have borne the answer to.

By then I was already carrying the dead. Mateo was gone. I had told a child I would keep him and I had not kept him, because keeping him was never a thing the road was going to allow, and knowing that does not lift the weight, it only tells you the weight was always going to be yours. The girl with the marigold behind her ear was gone too. The road took the people who had taught me how to stay a person, and it took them in the part I have walled away, and all I carried out of it was their absence and the things they left me, a flower’s meaning, a promise I broke, a steadiness I had borrowed and could never give back. I prayed for them, secret and silent, walking north. I did not know yet that praying for the dead would become the whole of my life. I was only doing the one thing I had ever known to do with grief, which is to say a name into the dark so the dark does not get to keep it.

My faith in those last weeks was a small silent thing, the candle behind the cupped hand guttering low but not out. I could not have told you what I believed. I believed in the dark. I believed without words, without evidence, against the man’s patient question that still lived in me, did anyone come. No one had. I believed anyway, and the believing had no shape left except the refusal to stop. I walked north carrying a child I would not name even to myself, and the dead I could not save, and a faith worn down to one silent flame, and I thought, God help me, that the worst was behind me. The worst was a grave at the end of the road, and it was close now, and I was walking toward it with something alive inside me and no idea that either of us was about to die.