The Song She Already Knew

The baby was two days old and Maya had never seen anything so unfinished. His fingers were smaller than the toothpick she had chewed flat in the waiting room. His eyes were shut so tight they looked sewn. When the nurse set him in the plastic bassinet by the window, he did not seem to know he was in a room at all.

Her aunt was asleep in the bed, worn out. Maya's mother had gone for coffee. So it was just Maya and the baby and the beeping of a machine that measured something Maya could not name.

She leaned over the bassinet. "Hi," she said.

The baby did nothing. She had expected that. He was brand new. He knew nothing. That was the thing about babies, everyone said it, they arrive knowing nothing, empty as a fresh notebook, and the world writes on them slowly.

A man in the next bed area was talking on his phone, loud and cheerful. "Yeah, seven pounds, doing great, we're over the moon." His voice bounced off the hard walls. The baby, Maya's baby, did not stir.

Then her aunt made a small sound in her sleep. Not even words. Just a breath with a shape to it, the kind of sound a person makes turning over.

The baby's whole face changed.

Maya blinked. His eyebrows had climbed. His mouth had stopped its small working. His head, that heavy impossible head, had tipped a few degrees toward the bed. Toward the sound.

She waited. The phone man laughed his big laugh. Nothing. A cart rattled in the hall. Nothing. A nurse said good morning to someone. Nothing.

Her aunt murmured again, still asleep, still just breath.

The baby turned toward it. He was two days old. He had been in the outside world for less time than she had been at this hospital. He had heard the phone man and the cart and the nurse for exactly as long as he had heard his mother. Same amount of time out here. Same number of hours.

But he only turned for one of them.

She did the thing she always did when something did not fit. She tried to make it not true. Maybe he was turning toward any human voice. She waited for the phone man to talk again. He did. The baby lay flat and untouched, a small loaf of a person.

Maybe he liked higher voices. A nurse came in, a woman, and asked Maya softly if the baby was okay. Nice voice. Kind voice. The baby did not move a muscle for her.

Maybe it was smell, then, or warmth, or something in the air. But her aunt was across the room, behind a curtain rail, and the sound was the only thing that reached the bassinet.

Maya crouched so her eyes were level with the plastic. From here the baby looked even smaller and even more finished than she had thought. Because something was already in him. Something was already sorted. Out of every sound in this loud bright hospital, he had a favorite, and he had it on day two, and no one had taught it to him out here.

Which meant he had learned it somewhere else.

The only place he had ever been before this room was inside her aunt. And her aunt had been talking the whole time. Nine months of talking, humming, arguing with the television, singing off-key in the car. Maya had been in that car. She had heard her aunt sing badly to the radio and not thought a single thing about it.

The baby had been listening.

Not with ears the way Maya heard, at first, but through everything, through water and wall and the drum of a heartbeat, the low parts of a voice carrying best, coming through muffled and constant, the one sound that was always there. Months of it. A voice learned in the dark before there were eyes to open, before there was a room, before there was air.

He had not arrived empty. He had arrived already holding one thing.

Maya felt the hospital get bigger around her, the way a small room does when you understand it is inside a bigger building inside a bigger city. Everyone here had done this. The phone man behind the curtain. The kind nurse. Her mother getting coffee down the hall. Every single loud grown person in this building had once been a small unfinished loaf who knew exactly one sound and turned toward it. Her own mother had turned toward a voice, once, on her own second day, a voice Maya had never heard and never would.

And Maya. Maya too. Before she had a name, before she could see, before the word before meant anything, she had been learning a voice by heart. She still had it. She had had it the whole time and never once wondered where it came from.

Her aunt stirred, surfacing now, eyes opening. "Hey," she said, rough with sleep. "He behaving?"

The baby heard it and his arms came up, both of them, jerky and reaching, his mouth opening into a shape that was almost a word and was actually a search.

"He wants you," Maya said. "He knew it was you before he ever saw you."

Her aunt smiled, not understanding, reaching down into the bassinet with both hands. "Course he did," she said. "I'm his mum."

But that was not an answer, and Maya knew it, and she let it be an answer anyway, because her aunt was lifting him up now and the baby had gone quiet against her, his ear pressed to her chest where the sound would be lowest and closest and most like the place he had come from.

Maya watched the baby's small hand open and close against her aunt's collarbone, keeping time with a voice he had been learning longer than he had been alive.