Dust of My Bones - Catherine Humikowski

For her birthday, Nora wants a bus ride. Not a party or a puppy or pony, but a seat on the top deck of one of those big stupid tourist busses she always sees lapping Willis Tower.

“Let’s at least ride it to the museum,” I say.

“Yes the museum,” she says, “the one with the dinosaurs and the bugs.” 
 
For each of her four birthdays before this, I planned ridiculous parties. Wedding level parties. Open bar, live music, steakhouse kind of parties with photographers, balloon artists, themed gift bags, and Pinterest-worthy decorations. I was healing from trauma, busying myself too much to remember what else happened on the day Nora was born. Buried elbow-deep in ice cream cone party hats, I couldn’t picture all that blood. I couldn’t recall the resident who pumped my stilled heart with chest compressions: tall, boyish face, southern lilt. I couldn’t grieve the loss of the next pregnancy—the sister Nora would never have—or remember the words my own sister whispered gently after I woke up in the intensive care unit: You know they had to take your uterus, right? It took me four years (and thousands of dollars) to recognize those parties for what they were, annual barricades against whatever demons still lurked in my psyche.

But this year is different.

Nora is five now, and it’s time for a regular birthday.
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Today is about her, not me. So we ride the big stupid tourist bus to the museum, the one with the dinosaurs and the bugs.
 
Nora insists she can’t see over the top rail unless she balances on her knees. The July sun casts a corona of sparkly sweat through the last of her baby curls, framing little apple cheeks blushed pink by heat. I wrap my arms tight around her, inhaling her sunscreen like summer’s perfume. She feels secure in my squeeze, not suffocated by my worry. I hope.

“We’re here, Mama! Come on!” She wriggles from my grip with her whole body, stabbing her outstretched finger at the columns ahead. I stuff away her crackers and water bottle and clutch her hand to file down the blockish stairs, shuffling through thick heat toward the museum entrance. The stone building swallows us into its cool belly and the sweat on our skin congeals like protective armor.

Across the skylit atrium near the galleries hangs a banner for the mummy exhibit. Nora can barely read yet but she recognizes the form immediately and breaks into a run. “Let’s go see the mummies!” she shouts. 

My focus lasers on her—all boundless energetic living glory—so if my amygdala generates an impulse to flee from dead bodies on this anniversary of my own near-death experience, I squash it for now.

We cross the white marbled hall vast as a cathedral to enter a dark enclosed space, proportionately like a tomb. Nora’s kinetics dissipate at the threshold, instinctively honoring the call for quietude. She gets it. She has always gotten it.
 
She wakes screaming at the same hour each night—the deepest part of night, somewhere between two and three o’clock, just before night can be called morning again—exactly the hour when my heart drained sufficiently of its blood to stop beating on the night she was born. She was barely an hour old then, the fleshy cord that connected us for forty-one weeks still pulsatile at its base. The timing of her screams is a mere coincidence
 
that occurs nightly for five straight years.
 
She takes my hand to draw me into the exhibit. A tomographic scanner displayed at the outset anchors me. This technology I recognize from my work, modern science to explore internal anatomy. There is no death here, only stuff—bones and artifacts. This is natural history, not the edge of existence. Phew. 

I explain how archeologists use the scanner to see the mummies’ remains, how they need not unwrap the bundles to discover their insides. Nora considers it, then nods. “Like X-ray vision,” she says.

“Yes, exactly,” I say.  

We enter the first part of the exhibit, where life-sized color-enhanced images expose the mummies each in turn, lopsided bundles that would not read as human remains without the scans beside them. The coarse linen cocoons have turned brown and shrunken from age, their wraps now loose and ropes slack. 

I read the placards for Nora and we learn these are Peruvian mummies, their bodies bundled in the fetal position together with choice necessities for the afterworld. Long ago buried upright in groups, they are displayed now individually, laid down in grand glass cases, artfully lit at angles from above.  

We wander among the cases and I read descriptions of their contents out loud while Nora searches the images to find the items each mummy is buried with—a hatchet, a water jug, a fishing tool—like an ancient game of Where’s Waldo. A rhythm emerges in our game: bundle, image, placard, image, next. Life juxtaposed on afterlife, nothing hidden, nothing to hide. Peace. 

For a moment, until.

All at once I face an image whose placard I need not read to recognize its contents. I look from the image to the bundle to my own reflection laid over it in the glass. I fall silent, the meditative rhythm fractured. 

“Keep reading, Mama.” But I am paralyzed.

The scan shows the skeleton of a woman, knees drawn to chest, skull curled forward over the singular treasure she carries with her into the afterworld—the remains of her newborn child.

I race back a thousand years to this woman, to her infant, to the family who tied these ropes around them. Fifty billion mothers have labored since and fifty billion children have been born and grown and died but we are connected across generations by a common sacrifice. What distinguishes her from me? Only time and chance, yet she lies wrapped in linen with her dead baby while we fog the glass around them with each living breath.

The dark walls now feel too close, the ceiling suddenly too low. The other visitors and the glass cases and all the placards leave no room for air. 

I am Alice: too big, trapped, in peril.

Go away Leave us alone I will not come with you now! I hear these words like they rose from my own throat unbidden and I think this is what people mean when they say go crazy. If I’m shout-mumbling at death but only in my head, does that still count?

I grab Nora's hand to pull her toward the exit but she moves slowly, transfixed by the image. “Aren’t they pretty Mama?” How natural she sees it that the mother cradles her child, wrapped together in the position we each were born from, how right to honor them this way.  

Nora leans into the image and my tongue turns to sand. My heart radiates its ruthless throb from the base of my neck to my eardrums, insisting it still beats. “Let’s go baby it’s time to go,” I say as I pull Nora away from the glass. I drag her at a maniac’s pace through the rest of the exhibit to flee, across the Egyptian section to escape. 

Distinct from the Peruvian mummies, I note how the Egyptians’ bodies are laid straight and supine, encased alone in hard enamel instead of soft linen, with their internal organs smashed between their legs and their brains discarded through their noses. Immediately the Peruvian mummies seem comforting by comparison—bundled in the very position I wish to curl into right now, here on the floor in the middle of this goddamn museum—and I want to turn back.

“This way let’s go this way,” I urge, snaking through the exhibit to find the quickest way out. I can’t navigate the maze of dead bodies fast enough to sate my adrenaline so the panic bores its way into the pit of my guts, unable to work itself out through tensed muscle fibers twitching to sprint. I circle like a trapped animal, icy sweat precipitating under my arms as I search for an exit and try not to puke. 
 
When I first brought Nora home from the hospital—me swollen and stitched, her tiny and perfect—I devised an emergency escape route from our seventh story apartment to the fire house six blocks away. If an intruder came, I would carry Nora in a bundle to the roof and we would rattle down in the freight elevator to the back alley and I would run to CFD Company No. 5 on Desplaines between Jackson and Van Buren with her tucked inside my shirt. If the fire house was closed (why would a fire house ever be closed?) I would race north to seek refuge inside Old Saint Pat’s church.

I counted her breaths when she slept back then. Not every night, but some nights.
 
I wish I had an escape route now.
 
I look to Nora to confirm I haven't lost her in my panic but also for the clarity she doesn’t even know she provides. She seems confused, unsure why we have been scrambling about like this, but she is not afraid or upset. She leads me back to the Peruvian mummies to examine something she spotted as we fled past, a bundle enclosing a child around her size buried with a round gourd that looks like a playground ball and some whittled figurines depicted brightly like toys. Oh Jesus here we go I think, this is where I actually lose my mind.

I tighten my grip on Nora’s hand to yank her from the death vacuum when she tugs lightly back and looks straight into my face. With her little head cocked, gray eyes calm and curious, she purses her lips to prepare her statement. “How lovely to have these with you when you die,” she says. “It was nice of the parents to include something to play with.” She drops my hand and sits—cross-legged on the floor like an oblate under the gallery light, her blonde hair blazing like a halo—to inspect the image and the diminutive bundle beside it.  

Her clairvoyance suffuses me and I know for sure that if I have never feared like this it is because I have never loved like this. I died for her once and I would do it again, a thousand times more, and in a thousand years from now the dust of my bones will love her still. 

She catches my gaze upon her in the glass and smiles, proud that she captivates me more than the bundles beyond her reflection. I smile back, and framed by the display case before us, we become a portrait of the living among the dead. 

My pulse slows. We breathe on.