Smile For Me

The yellow ribbon perched in a weepy bow aside her temple. Tied to a bundle of warm toffee curls, it flailed and whipped at the wind like the cries of families below half-mast flags.

The toffee broke like harsh waves around her birch-white face, taut with sea spray and the contemplation of when her feet began to sink so far into the sand. Staring at this, and the rising water-marks against her rolled denim seams, Maura realized this was the first time the ocean and the shoreline felt so absolutely tragic.

Her lips, possessed by the early morning chill, began mulling over the inaudible thoughts of her head as her lips spouted with the slightest part but still no sound was heard.

Wouldn't they tire of parting with one another? She tugged on her sleeve. The shoreline is nothing but a breach between two completely separate worlds.

5019 hours, 210 days, 30 weeks and 7 months ago, cushioned by the thousands of sand-like seconds that slowly consumed her whole in an hourglass, Maura's life took a turn that rattled all realization that things would never be the same. And when the Twin Towers fell, the necrotic plague of her heart began.

She remembered how he stood in the vastness of their new apartment. She remembered the distant scent of smoke, the lightheadedness from the tension of her body to will itself to do anything but scream. She watched him stand in that vastness, and while his uniform and broad stance suggested the urgency of what he'd have to do in moments, his look held hers like cement hardened to the floor by the soles of his combat boots. She felt his fingertips brush her quivering lips for the last time.

Her mind wandering back to the shore, she tasted her own salty tear in the curve of her frown, and cast haunted eyes as rich as cocoa across the iron hard sky. She could feel the heaviness of her feet like the heaviness in her heart. As she wiggled her toes, Maura knew she was trying to feel them, but all that reached sensation was the sting of numbing cold and poor circulation.

"Maura!" Somewhere further down the coast, biding his way over with stress-laced shoulders, her brother Joseph began to call her.

"Maura, please, what are you doing?" He crept closer, trudging the compacted sand beneath his well-worn leather shoes and the wind cutting through starchy sleeves rolled to elbows. Joseph was bewildered, glasses forgotten on the very tip of his nose as his arms and hands worked to gesture at his baby sister in audacity and concern. If she weren't several months pregnant and not calf-deep in sand he would have swept her right up in his arms despite his exhaustion.

His firm hand caught her shoulder, offset again by its chill, "How long have you been out here?"

To his relief, she leaned into him. But only as she cast him an upward look of smoldering pain did he remember that he wouldn't have his answers.

The last time Maura spoke was the day following confirmation of her pregnancy, where she shared the news with her brother, the only family she had left, and promptly put herself in isolation that would have lasted longer than a week had Joseph's over protectiveness allowed.

She heard the doctor's struggle to find the words to explain her muteness to him. It's the result of a tragedy. It's an emotional state of protection. It's a dramatic way of coping with fear. It's something that needs time and comfort to work through.

She heard them, but she wasn't sure she understood it all. Maura felt perhaps Joseph didn't either.

Maura found herself in a room adjoined to the previous one given to her in her brother's home. The wooden floors creaked and moaned when walked on, her comforter was wadded with lint-balls, and the ceiling was a distracting array of popcorn-texture she longed to stroke with her fingertips. She'd lived with him for the past four months, but not without major altercations. Simple verbal disagreement did not happen; Maura had other ways of showing Joseph her unhappiness.

Joseph first discovered the extent of Maura's emotional illness when he found her hunched over the broken set of her television, several months ago while still living at her apartment. He had witnessed her upon visiting, holding her arms across herself, as the local New York news jostled across the screen in coverage of the recent devastation. As the flag shot across the background of the U.S. troops wary of deployment, she was overcome. Her hands latched the top of the frame, hoisting down until the black glass shattered the floor of her living room, toppled over. When her voiceless wails of frustration blossomed into face-contorting anger, she then dropped to her knees to recollect the sound of that same black glass that shattered her walls.

He cried when she denied such actions in the hospital.

More problems arose out her inability to care for herself. And even more problems arose when Joseph brought her back to live with him and his wife. By then Maura was three months pregnant, showing, and miserable. Being under the roof of everything she once had was an agony that was unavoidable. Joseph's wife was several months into her own pregnancy, an unexpected feat because of their bridge into late thirties, and a miscarriage that stalled prior attempts for a long while.

They sought to look after her although limited in space, she knew, but the first room they had given her was a mistake.

Draped in happy ornaments and stenciled daisies, the forming-baby room put-on-hold for Maura's stay was made hers. She remembered standing in the room for the first time. They hadn't finished painting, and pale yellow walls stared unfinished under her observant hands. She traced the lace of the bassinette, a matching hue of yellow with white in intricate proportion. When she nodded that this was her room, they left her.

Come morning, the bassinette was found in pieces throughout the house. Sheets hung over partitions of where the walls were painted. Decorations were shoved in empty dressers awaiting baby clothes and diapers. And more noticeably, every trace of yellow was erased from the room.

Except where a single yellow laced ribbon remained, tied at the end of her ratty braid she nestled while she slept exhausted on the dirtied floor.

Joseph had forbidden her from wandering back to the shore, and two weeks after the incident of him finding her she found herself especially disappointed at the notion. Although Maura knew it was obscene, and implausible, she'd respect it out of the concern she knew he intended. It wasn't something easily given up. The ocean brought her the reckless comfort of water and chill, which soothed any mislead thought to fire and chaos, like on that day.

She still saw smoke from her window.

And that's where she let herself drift off, looking through the panels of glass in her new make-shift room as the swells of smoke and sadness buried themselves in the contours of the sky.

She liked to think that somewhere up there, Mathew was watching over her.

Maura was never one to deny when she was wrong. In her own quiet way, she sought confrontation rather than the burden of muddied water in most situations she could recall. But this was a whole new challenge. There was nothing to console her worries, and nothing validating that everything was indeed happening for a reason, a philosophy she once comfortably believed in. She wanted to feel she had reason for hope, as much as she did for mourning. Prospects of single parenthood were also ill sought, and difficult for even Maura to empathize with.

As her head tilted in disarray from the window to her bulging stomach, she held it with a new found wave of sadness.

Mathew was her everything. Mathew was the best friend, the lover, the soon-to-be father, that never made it to the next level. He would never be the fiancé, the husband, the #1 Dad sipping from a ceramic mug his child made in third grade with a big heart painted below the rim.

She had a habit of frowning, as long as she could remember. Even when Maura didn't realize it, her expression of casual encounter was met with furrowed brows and a pout that shadowed the potential happiness of an otherwise serene face.

Mathew would tease her, and insist with a firm grip to her jaw and a thumb brushing her cheek that nothing so beautiful should ever look so bothered.

"Careful, you're face is going to crack, and you're the most precious thing we own." His smile, she remembered, lit her world.

"Was I frowning again? You know I can't help it."

"Smile for me. Just like this." He would grin even larger, almost comically to jest her lips.

And she would. Just for him. And it felt so right.

He was always more to Maura. He was the air she breathed, the feet she walked with, the laughter spilling from her lips, and every cliché innuendo that might have sounded dumb and irrelevant before she or anyone else knew love.

But if someone could chose love, who would chose such exquisite pain to know heartbreak?

Her tender brown saucers surveyed the condition of her pregnant belly again. She laid a hand again on its swell, trying for the first time in a long time to feel anything but remorse over an incomplete part of the whole man she once had.

She breathed, ever so gently, with the hum of a distant light in the hallway. Tucking her legs underneath her from her place on the worn comforter, both hands resting on her belly, she thought about what she should feel.

Maura lost track of time, as the desire to focus on something—anything—from this child began to grow. The sun peaked out in farewell brilliance of colors beyond her eyelids that had now closed. She turned her low gaze back to the window, disturbed by the reds it casted behind her vision. Catching herself in an audible gasp that she long forgot was in her, she was blinded by the quickly descending beams of yellow sunshine fading into the horizon.

A slow breathlessness that began as an anxiety hit her from nowhere. Her loneliness rekindled, seeping from her pores like a smooth gel, too exhausted to rapidly overcome her like the flood it used to. She searched the sky for traces of that sweet color again, Mathew's favorite color, the color he swore to her by brought happiness to the dimmest ordeals; a beautiful color.

Somewhere she knew she could hear herself breathing. It had been so long since she could put sound in her speech, or let go of the muteness that plagued her body from expressing its pain, and it was such a milestone she knew if she concentrated on her voice she would succumb to an emotional breaking point.

She heard noises more acute than usual, sitting in her near hysterics; the sounds of closing car doors as spouses reunite with their families after work, the neighborly old woman next door walking her dog along the sidewalk, the same one that persists at growling at Maura and her looming belly, the spluttering of the coffee maker downstairs as Joseph's wife preps for an evening settling in beneath his arm on the couch, the creak of the mattress as her breathing intensifies and then a gush of inhale as she holds her breath to settle herself.

The sky had settled into a twilight navy sea, where even the smoke of the nation's disaster was blanketed from the penetrating views of those who still mourn with eyes to the Heavens. Maura searched, still searched, and needed to be with him somehow that was closer-

-She lost her breath on an exhale that left her lungs throbbing.

"What?" Her hands flew from her stomach, a jolt of excitement shaking up her spine. Her hands quickly found a place over her gaping mouth, eyes confounded and still misty from her episode.

She just spoke. She just spoke. And she just felt her baby kick with a dizzying pressure against her open palms for the first time. She felt it.

She leaned back, her arms tensely straight behind her as her palms now pressed flat and hard against the bed, propping her. From her fingertips to her toes, she felt a current that pulsated unlike any sensation she ever felt, as though her own body couldn't decide that happened. Her eyes rested so wide and targeted down on her belly, she felt the curl of her lashes tickle below her raised brows. She took one hand and returned it to numbly trace the bow of her upper lip, and the gentle O of the gape that remained in a jaw locked frozen in the moment.

"Joseph!" She couldn't break the spell. She was scared. She was excited. For some reason she felt alive.

A coffee mug went clunk against a glass saucer, followed sharply by a soprano voice of chastise, and then footsteps broke the hum of the hallway light, wooden boards creaking under heavy soles and rushed worries as Joseph stood once again bewildered at the sight of his sister.

"Maura. You, you're-you're smiling." His fingers found the doorframe.

And she could feel it. It was no longer just in the pull of her lips, or the volume in her voice, or the sorrow lifting for a moment of innocent happiness and joy with railing fear.

Her hands found her swell again, her eyes dimming with a new look of caress and warmth. The tips of her fingers still flowed with the ecstatic sensation, and she only nimbly rested them where she felt the kick as though to assure she wouldn't be caught off guard again.

Her diaphragm hiccupped on a terse chuckle that echoed in the happy awkwardness of her demeanor. Besides herself, her eyes found her brother, then propelled back to the window. Keen for a sign, she noticed the faintest of color trimmed into the bottom hue of the navy dusk. Beneath the lightest blue, a single line of yellow, kissed between the partition of earth and sky.

She felt her mouth tug slightly more.

If there is more reason to hope, than to mourn, she pondered again, there is more reason to believe he is so much closer.

She suddenly remembered her brother again, standing in the frame of the door, and she felt obliged to share in the joy of his observation.

"For him." And Maura felt her baby once more, actually felt it, and the peace of presence in her smile.