Henry had stopped looking for giants around every corner. Instead of giants, we were looking for miracles. It’s strange, the more we looked the more we found, and Henry kept an ongoing, detailed log of our finds and recited them every day.
MILLIE’S LABOR LASTED a long time. Too long. But we made it. We all made it. Millie handled it like a champ, which wasn’t surprising; she was good at almost everything she tried. He was a big boy—nine pounds, eight ounces, twenty-two inches long and he looked so much like me I could only laugh . . . and cry. He was completely bald, which made him look even more like me. I’d lost all my hair with the radiation, and had kept it short ever since. Henry just nodded sagely like our resemblance was a given.
Millie thought we should let Henry name him, and I braced myself for a son named after Japanese beef or something equally exotic that would sound ridiculous on a little white boy. Instead he thought carefully and pronounced him David Moses, which worked for me. Interestingly enough though, Millie, who’d never warmed up to my nickname, called him Mo. She said I was her David, and the little guy needed his own identity in the house. She was certain Moses wouldn’t mind sharing his nickname, and when Moses heard the news, he said little Mo could have it, he didn’t want it. He hated it when I called him Mo. But I knew he was secretly thrilled.
Little Mo might have been a big baby, but he was still so small we held him for three days straight for fear we would lose him if we laid him down. Millie broke down a few days before he was born, telling me how afraid she was that she wouldn’t be able to take care of him, but I never doubted her. She was a natural. What she didn’t know, she figured out, and she figured it out quick. She approached motherhood with the same attitude she approached everything, and she’d been mothering Henry for a long time. She wasn’t exactly new to the job.
I wondered how many blind mothers there were in the world. I knew there were some, even if there weren’t many. She demanded that I describe every minute detail as she ran her hands over his tiny body and traced his miniature features—his button nose, and his bow-shaped lips, his little ears, and his paper-thin eyelids. His fingers, his toes, the bumps of his spine, the slope of his belly. I’d caught her lovingly exploring him many times since his birth, as if she was determined not to miss a thing. It made me ache for her that she couldn’t see him, that she would never see her son’s face. She would never see my face, for that matter. But Millie was convinced that if she could see, she would know us immediately. Maybe she was right. Maybe she actually saw us better because she took the time to touch us, to feel us, to find us, to know us.
Millie was asleep now, and in the soft moonlight streaming through the window in our room, I could see the pale length of her arm and the dark pool of her hair against the white pillow. She was a worker, my Amelie, very well-named. She’d been true to her word, and had matched me stride for stride and taken care of me easily as much or more than I’d taken care of her.
I sat watching my wife sleep, holding my two-week old son against my chest, my hand on his tiny back, feeling the rise and fall of his little body as he pulled life into his lungs and let it go again. His fat cheek lay against the opening of the V in my shirt, and I could feel that he’d drooled on me, or drizzled. He’d fallen asleep while nursing, and I’d eased him out of Millie’s arms to burp him so that she could rest, and so I could hold him. He ate constantly, and I was convinced it was just because he liked where the milk was coming from. What was it with boys and boobs? He would cry when we forced him to detach, and I had started saying “Mo wants mo’, which had inspired the Mo wants Mo’ slogan I was now going to market with my Tag Team clothing line. Maybe there would even be a kid’s line—Mo & Co or a maternity line, Millie & Mo. I liked that even better.
“Mo always wants mo’, don’t you, big guy?” I whispered, kissing his soft head. He smelled like boobs. In other words, he smelled like heaven. He sounded like heaven too, even when he cried. Millie declared his lusty cry one of her favorite sounds the moment he came into the world, bellowing like his life was over instead of just beginning.
“Daddy wants mo’ too. More, and more, and more,” I murmured, still watching his mother.
I had started making him tapes. I could have moved on to a digital recorder. But the tapes worked for me. I liked how tangible they were. Millie said she was going to take them all and have the contents transferred onto discs, and I said that was just fine. But I kept making the tapes, and I had a big stack of them, a verbal journaling of the last year, the days of my life, the days of our life together. Now I was making them for little Mo.
“David?” Millie asked drowsily. She carefully patted the space beside her.
“I’ve got him. Go back to sleep, Silly Millie.”
I thought she had, she was quiet for so long. We were both tired. Exhausted. The last year had been heaven and hell. Music and misery. It had not been an easy battle, and I still wasn’t cancer free. But I wasn’t losing the battle either. I might lose the war. Eventually, I might lose. But we didn’t think about that.
“Now I’ve got that song stuck in my head,” she said suddenly, startling me. I jerked and Mo stuck out his lips and let out the saddest cry known to man.
Millie and I sighed together, a synchronized, “awwww,” that lifted on the end and conveyed our shared sentiment that he was the cutest thing in the universe. The cry turned into panicked suckling, his little head bobbing over my chest, his mouth wide in search of something I couldn’t help him with, and I had to turn him back over to his mother.