Above the Church

By Barbara Lucas

Mom, when you were a baby Grandma nearly drowned you in a kitchen sink above the church in Pontiac, Michigan. It’s a story Grandma repeated often and proudly: you were a tiny, hairless newborn balled up like a wrinkly rock in lukewarm water. She was, according to the story, just another good Christian mother.

The place above the church in Pontiac was small, barely an apartment, with just two rooms and a makeshift dinette. It’d been built to house a single preacher, not a family. Grandpa was away that night, either visiting parishioners in the hospital or praying with families fallen on hard times. Grandpa was a seed planter—a good-looking and charming young pastor fresh out of Bible School, groomed rigorously by the Assemblies of God to plant and grow Hispanic churches across the Midwest.

My twin uncles would have been two at the time. Even in pictures, I can see the mischief on their faces. They were a pair of rambunctious toddling boys sporting identical piles of black, wavy hair. You were the family’s first girl, and, at the time, Grandma Isabelle’s third child under the age of three. In a few years, you would be the middle child of six. 

You must have been tiny. Your Easter dress, passed down through three generations, is the littlest thing I’ve ever seen. The first time I dressed my daughter, Ava, in it, her brown baby fat bulged out of its crisp capped sleeves. I could barely close the pearly clasp under the slippery rolls of her neck. Of course, Ava’s always been more like me—a brown-eyed Amazon from birth.

I still remember sifting through your closet in middle school and realizing mournfully none of your vintage outfits would ever fit me. It was your blue suede skirt that killed. Sewn with thick grey stitches in perfect straight lines, you bought it from a hippie boutique in Houston during a weekend trip with Darlene. It was the showcase piece of your early twenties, the skirt you wore when you saw Foreigner at the Cotton Bowl. To me, it was the coolest thing on the planet: the ultimate accessory to freedom, love, and rock and roll. It was also eternally out of my reach in an impossible-to-squeeze-into size 6. I used to imagine you were wearing it when you met Bruce, the Norwegian fiance you had before you met Dad.

You and Bruce dated for two years. You met at Harris Hospital working the 3-11 shift on the 3rd floor of Jones Tower, known to the orderlies as “3 West.” He was handsome, funny, kind, and a great dancer. But six months before your wedding Bruce’s addiction was getting worse, not better, and morphine was going missing from the hospital. It broke your heart, but you did what you had to. You changed shifts before you ended it. He would ultimately get help, but not before losing his license and charming his way through half a dozen run-ins with the law. Four decades later and I can still hear the wistful sound in your voice every time you utter his name.

You didn’t stay single for long. Dad actually took over your shift, but he worked so many doubles you ran into each other constantly. He likes to claim he swooped in and rescued you. “When we were first married, your mother would take her pile of bills at the end of the month, throw them in the air, and pay whichever ones landed on the counter,” he would say. It’s a funny story. But the truth is you’d been living on your own for years by that point, and it was Dad who moved into your place while he finished grad school, not the other way around.

Your wedding in Kansas City was tiny. The move to Kansas City for Dad’s residency was a big step in your relationship. But you followed through. The only person you knew in town was the church pastor and his wife. She’d insisted you stay with them the night before the wedding. In your wedding photos, Dad looked trim, proud, and goofy in his yellow Coke-bottle glasses. You look like a tan Disney Princess with long black hair in a pile of white taffeta, purposely chosen because it reminded you of Princess Diana’s wedding dress.

It was a rough marriage. By the time you discovered you were pregnant with me, you and Dad had been separated for two months. Dad wanted you to have an abortion. But his best friend, Norman, who wanted children but was married to a schizophrenic, talked him down. The two men were working on their motorcycles after racing, tightening whatever bolts and brake pads they’d managed to knock loose on the Black Jacket Circuit that weekend. Dad complained he was still in school and between the wedding, the separation, and now this unexpected pregnancy, he was worried his parents would cut him off completely. But Norman would hear none of it. 

Both you and Dad were in a strange city, hundreds of miles from home, miserable, alone, and barely scratching by. You called your mother, broken-hearted and pregnant. She stayed up praying that whole night and called you back in the morning. God said to keep the baby. Everything would be all right. This was my divine story, or at least the way it was told to me: in a moment of low human despair, you very nearly ended my life. But God, in His infinite grace and wisdom, intercepted to save me. 

Your baby story is meant to be similar, I suppose. Standing in that tiny kitchen in Pontiac, Michigan, Grandma was filled with a cold and terrible fear as she held you over the sink. What if this child strayed from the Lord? “Dear Heavenly Father,” she repeats while telling the story. “If this baby is destined to live for Satan, give me a sign, and I’ll deliver her to you now.”

I used to wonder how long she waited for a sign. Was it seconds or minutes she stood over you? Was your little bald head clasped in her hand? What would have happened if lightning had struck? Or a rogue cloud had passed over the church? Would you or I or Ava still be here?

I used to think Christianity needed to answer for this recklessness. After all, it was Grandma who compared her story to Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac—another questionable story of God’s audacity toward children. But now that I have my own daughters, I realize religion can’t speak to what she almost did that day. In fact, none of our baby stories have anything to do with God. I know because I’m a mother myself now.

There is a Mexican folktale called La Llorona. It predates the Conquistadors and Christianity. In the story, a beautiful peasant woman falls in love with an aristocrat. She has his child, then is spurned by the man. Distraught, she drowns the baby and herself after. The afterlife rejects her: “Find your child. Then you may enter.” But she can’t. They say you can still spot her wandering near rivers and lakes. I used to think about that story sometimes. Why did God save Grandma’s child and your child, but not Llorona’s or any of the other desperate mothers throughout time? All of their babies—you, me, Ava—were all equally innocent, fully-fledged souls brimming with infinite possibilities. Right?

I know what Grandma would say: God has a plan. It’s not our place to question it. But I don’t think she’s right anymore. I don’t think there was ever any god making these decisions. 

I remember the first time Ava fell and scraped her knee. It was summer. She was 18 months old and wearing shorts outside. I remember lifting her from her stomach and seeing the gash—an angry screaming mess of bright red blood and clumping gravel. The pain and confusion on her face were horrible to see. I knew what she was thinking, even though she barely had any words to express it herself. “Why does it hurt, Momma? When does the pain stop, Momma?” The awareness of my cosmic powerlessness at that moment was almost more than I could bear.

I did what I could—carried her inside, cleaned and bandaged her scrapes. And then I told her a lie, Mom. I told her a kiss could make it all better. And because I think I was calm and smiling when I did it, the lie worked. I think it worked because she believed in me.

I think maybe destiny and religion are similar kinds of lies: they work because we believe in the people who tell them to us. In a way, that’s beautiful, isn’t it? A testament to the power of human faith and relationships. 

So, no—I don’t think it was a god who saved us anymore. And I also don’t think it’s inhuman for a mother to consider the alternative. The line between a hopeful and hopeless existence is a uniquely dotted one. I doubt if its flimsiness is ever more apparent than to a young woman carrying new life in its most fragile form. 

There are questions so large their answers demand more than humanity can offer. We need a supernatural guarantee. Without it, the world is too fearsome for the things we have to entrust within it. Scared and in pain, Ava looked to me for comfort. The reason wasn’t important; it just needed to work. I think there are times when we need the same … a kiss from a god to make it all better. 

I get it, Mom. I really do.

Barbara Lucas is a Mexican-American writer. Born in Texas and a graduate of the University of Alabama, she met her African American husband during a hurricane blackout. Now married eleven years, they have two wonderful daughters and over a dozen flashlights. Mrs. Lucas currently lives in Northern California where she writes and teaches. Her most recent fictional work has appeared in The Marr’s Field Journal, The Abstract Elephant, and the Owen Wister Review. Her debut novel, Static Over Space, is forthcoming from Outland Entertainment Spring 2022.