The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,90

her that I love her no less than I love her sister. I wish I could explain to her the incredible grace, beauty, intelligence, and kindness that I already see in her despite her tender age, and I marvel with pride that I produced such a lovely, lovely being. Indeed, I love both of them without end and marvel constantly at how I could be a mother to these amazing girls. I feel a love for them I never knew possible.

But Belle’s hugs are different. When Isabelle hugs me with her more compact, stockier body (for she is all solid torso and meaty flesh, while her willowy sister is all impossibly long legs and arms), I feel her love, yes, but there is not the same neediness from her. Rather, I feel like the weight of her body holds me to this earth and to this life in those moments when I want to leave it most, as if in her embrace she is silently telling me that I must live not for her but because there is more for my soul to do and learn in this life, that I have more to give to the world before I move on, that my presence in this life has served and continues to serve a greater good than just taking care of her and her sister.

So now with all of that said, you will understand what it meant to me for Isabelle to come into my darkness that lonely, miserable night and bring me out, to extend her hand to lift me off the floor of my abyss.

I woke up the next morning, exhausted but clear-eyed and resolute. I knew that I and my family had grown tired and bored of the narrative of self-pity I had constructed for myself over the previous weeks and months. I knew that I had to do something to pull myself out of my darkness. Isabelle had offered her hand, but I had to do the remainder of the work.

31

In Which the Yips Come to America

I am sitting on my grandmother’s lap. I can feel the rocking of the boat—right now the rocking is gentle, but I know it is not always so. I can see the eerie glow of a bare incandescent bulb dangling from somewhere above and a cloudy night sky that is not completely black. I can hear the motor. Chuk…chuk…chuk. But most of all, I hear the strident voices of the people around me—there are so many people—human voices of desperation that are louder than those of the boat and the ocean. I can tell that the people are talking skyward, to something or someone in the night sky. I understand their words. They say things like “Please, God, please help us,” and “Dear God, please look after us.” And there, with my head lying on my grandmother’s chest, I, too, look toward the sky, staring at its gray-blackness, and I think for a second that I hear a voice from the clouds. But then, I think it was just my own longing to hear an answer to the prayers, because I understand instinctively that what these people are praying for is important to all of us. I understand that their prayers are about wanting to live and not die, and I want to live, too.

Then I feel the hunger gnawing at my stomach again, and I cry out for more milk, banging my empty bottle against my grandmother’s lap, fighting for food in the only way I know how, in the only way I can. My grandmother yells at me. She is angry with me.

“There is no more milk! Do you hear me? And there won’t be any milk anytime soon no matter how much you cry. So shut up!” She snatches my baby bottle from me and hurls it, spinning, into the black sea, as if doing so will make everything better. A part of me knows that she would have liked to throw me overboard instead, but she can’t.

I cry even harder. I can’t stop crying.

It is on the boat that my first real and conscious memories of the world were formed. I say real and conscious because these images and sensations are the first memories in which I recall something more than just vague flashes of color and light, the first memories that have always floated more in the realm of reality than dream, remembered by my mind and not just my soul, and