Lifesaving for Beginners by Anne Edelstein

Author:Anne Edelstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2017-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

On the day of her second birthday, Eva wakes up at 5:30 a.m. I bring her into bed with me, to try to get her to go back to sleep. It was right around this time two years ago when I was having early labor pains and she was about to be born. She hugs me and sings snippets of different rhyming songs. And eventually she falls back asleep. I get out of bed to do the sun salutations that I try to do most mornings, something I started doing a few months after Eva was born. Then I get back into bed and doze off beside Eva before the day begins.

When she wakes up the second time, she’s ready to celebrate. She loves her presents—blow-up toys for the water, and a new bathing suit. We take Eli to camp, and come home to make her cake. In the afternoon the two of us sit by the water and play with stones on the beach, just holding them, turning them over in our hands and feeling their warmth. We throw our stones into the water and watch the splashes they make. At night we all sing “Happy Birthday, and Eva blows out the candles.

When Roy returns to spend the last week with us, immediately I sleep more peacefully. The broken dreams that I’ve been having about my mother and Danny stop right away. The one about Danny is a variation on a recurring theme—he’s still alive and he’s only been wandering around for years, never really dead. He tells me about his journeys and beckons me to come with him, but then drifts away again and I wake up feeling tortured by the reality.

A couple of nights ago, I had a beautiful dream about my mother. I was lost on the way to school in the first grade. I was walking on a street in a town very unlike my own, cold, with brick buildings reminiscent of small, austere towns in upstate New York. The name of the town was “Hydro.” I roamed past an old, brick power plant. I turned a corner and walked up the stairs to my house and rang the bell. A woman who was my mother answered the door wearing a diaphanous dress in a pale shade of greenish blue. Apparently she and I lived there alone. In my dream, I kept waking up and knowing that the woman wasn’t really my mother, but then I’d keep on going back to sleep again so I could be with her.

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