Holding Silvan Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Anyway, he might not even survive,” I say now.
    â€œWould it be better for him to die on his own?”
    How relieved I am that she is someone who can use that word “die.” How hard to use that word in conjunction with a baby. How wrong in a world where most babies survive. But I am beginning to suspect that he has been trying to do just that since the moment of his birth. To die. I nod.
    She says, “That feels so strange to hope for.”

I Hope Mommy Dies
    WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, WALKING UP THE HILL TOWARD home after school, or lying in my narrow bed at night, I would think, “I hope Mommy dies.” With these words, I tried to relieve the pressure of my dread, to speak the unspeakable, that primal fear, the starting point of fairytales. I wanted to trick whoever might be listening: a god, a genie. I wanted to be spared that inevitable loss by pretending not to care. But there must have been fascination, too; for though my mother remained mercifully alive, I hoarded other deaths. I spent time with my fly, his upside-down legs in the air; I collected the shells left behind by snails starting with the big, understandable ones and working down to a shell as small and translucent as a baby’s fingernail. It seemed somehow important to do this, to pay attention to death, as if I could grow into the deaths that would be most painful.
    The first human death in my life was remote. It happened to an old man named Maurice in a bank in England. Uncle Maurice as I called him was not really my uncle, nor did I know him well, but a few months before he died I had spent a week with my mother and my youngest brother Kim in England at the flat of my grandmother Chmum. Maurice was Chmum’s good friend, tall and stooped and very bald. From these simple features, I recognized him again years later in a photo album in France. My mother and I were in the apartment that Chmum had settled into in old age. We had just returned from a day spent at the nursing home where Chmum was dying, and I was pregnant.
The night before flying to France, I’d found out. “Don’t tell anyone,” David had said because he wanted time to adjust. So there we were, my mother and I, in an apartment in France surrounded by someone else’s possessions. The first picture album I flipped through was a black-and-white trip around France, after my grandparents separated, after their children were grown-up and gone. Chmum and Maurice sitting on a split-rail fence; beside their shadows wavy on a cobblestone street; leaning against a square, black car. Their faces looked the same day by day, but Chmum’s hair changed, sometimes quite extravagantly, in one photo its perfect waves piled up like a hat.
    Thinking there must have been someone else along to have taken so many pictures, I was pleased to find the photographer at last, first in a shadow on the ground, then standing on the other side of Chmum. Opening a second album, I found this man again, the same hooked nose and thick eyebrows, this time on the edge of a crowd.
    â€œDédé,” my mother said when I asked. Short for André. Chmum’s dead brother.
    I knew André only from a smiling portrait in a round frame that always stood on a shelf wherever Chmum lived, first in England, then in her native France where she returned to live at the end.
    â€œHe doesn’t look so good,” I said.
    My mother examined the photos.
    â€œYou’re right,” she said. “This is his last trip to England, right before he found out about the cancer.”
    He looks a little pale, a little swollen, but more than that: whereas the rest of the party are smiling at the camera, he is smiling but not really looking out; he stands at the edge of the frame.
    This makes me realize that there was in fact a death prior to Maurice’s that happened in my childhood, but that one never counted because I only met André once, when he was already dying, when