Page 8 of Songs of Summer

“Mine’s green!” Maggie exclaimed.

“Mine looks green too. I’ll google it unless you remember.”

“I only remember that blackest black was down and depressed and darkest blue was love.”

Jason pulled out his phone and searched.

“This is nice—green is calm, comfortable, and content!”

“I love that for us,” Maggie gushed.

“Me too.”

And they sat up in the willow tree in silence for a good long while. Contemplative, calm, comfortable, and content.

Track 3

I See the Moon

Beatrix

Beatrix Silver strolledalong Middle Path, a ten-foot-wide tree-lined gravel walk that ran the length of the Kenyon College campus. She had been walking that same path since she’d first arrived there as a freshman over thirty years before. Now a tenured English professor and a world-renowned expert on Henry James, she still marveled at its beauty.

Kenyon College, in the small town of Gambier, Ohio, was everything one would imagine of a two-hundred-year-old liberal arts campus. Tall trees and gothic architecture towered above idealistic young minds. Walking through the grounds never got old, whether it was a spring day like today or, at other times of year, crossing the snow or fallen leaves.

A casual end-of-semester get-together was being hosted that night for the English Department at the dean’s house on Wiggins Street. Bea usually looked forward to these potluck events, a chance to socialize with faculty and show off her mother’s famous chocolate cake recipe, but baking it last night had thrown her into a hysterical fit of tears. So much so that she worried the cake would taste salty.

She had remembered that it was her daughter’s thirtieth birthday, and she hadn’t laid eyes on her since she had brought her into the world. This wasn’t something she usually cried about—not since the child was a baby or a toddler or a little girl—but something about this very adult milestone set her off.

Three decades ago, Beatrix Silver had given birth in a hospital a few towns away from school. She hadn’t even realized she was pregnant until well into her second trimester, when her best friend came to visit from New York City and saw her naked. By then, she was about five months along with a small but rather distinct baby bump. Bea hadn’t noticed either the change in her figure or the fact that she hadn’t gotten her period since the summer. She was often irregular, and her weight had fluctuated throughout college.

She was like a girl on one of those Phil shows (Doctor or Donahue) who goes to the bathroom with a stomachache and comes out with a baby.

Her friend had insisted she call her mom, who promised not to tell her dad and arrived in Gambier the next day. Bea had never even been to the gynecologist until her mother took her then. The doctor, a warm woman with cold hands, told them all they needed to know about the adoption process in Ohio. Neither Bea nor her mother raised the possibility of keeping the baby. The father was not in the picture whatsoever and really, at twenty, Bea was just a baby herself.

The pregnancy reopened wounds she was still recovering from, compounding her regret, and fueling her anger over the circumstances of the baby’s conception. It was easier, at the time, to blame what had happened on everyone but herself.

Bea hid the remainder of her pregnancy behind big flannels and leggings and glasses of ginger ale that she passed off as gin and tonics. The warm weather made her belly harder to hide, but she had managed. It helped that her boobs had gotten so large that they extended out farther than her baby bump, distracting anyone who looked at her twice.

Her mother returned to the college a week before her due date, camping out across the street at the Kenyon Inn. Beatrix went there every afternoon after class and fell asleep beside her mother in the four-poster bed while her classmates were out celebrating the end of their four years in Gambier.

The first cramps of labor started a few days later in the middle of the night. Bea slipped quietly from her dorm room and headed to the Inn. She stood at the front door knocking like a loon, not caring who she woke as long as someone let her in to see her mommy. She still called her that at the time, making it all the more absurd that she would soon become one herself.

At the hospital, her mother filled out the paperwork.

“What is your address at school?” her mom had asked.

“Just put our home address,” Bea had replied.

“No, your school address is better,” her mother had insisted.

She remembered the day like it was yesterday. The antiseptic smell of the hospital room, the pain, the pushing, the pressure inside her that felt like a freight train barreling through a pinhole. She couldn’t believe how barbaric the whole thing was.

Early the next morning, a six-pound, three-ounce lavender-eyed girl with a tuft of dark hair like Bea’s entered the world. The nurses tucked her next to Bea in her bed, giving her achance to meet her child. For the first time during the whole ordeal, Bea fantasized about keeping her.

Not knowing what to do, and still in quite a bit of shock, Bea broke into a lullaby that her grandmother used to sing called “I See the Moon, and the Moon Sees Me.”

When she got to the second verse, the magnitude of what was happening sank in.

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