The Long-Desired Child

By Megan Savage
Illustrations by Clay Rodery

It was on the 72 bus line headed for Portland Nursery, for the apple tasting—I wanted to mark down every apple that was my favorite, heritage or not, those ridiculous names, because I was born in October and so apple harvest has always been synonymous with my birth—that I saw her. My daughter. 

She sat right beside me. She had green hair and round cheeks, was wearing army boots and a thin black dress. She glanced at me, then pulled a book out of her bag. It took me a while, but I was stealthy enough to spy she was reading the diary of Anaïs Nin.

Out the window, we passed a Quonset hut that was now a beer hall, and then a boxy gingerbread house behind firs, and then a penny market.

I didn’t have two nickels to rub together as my grandmother would have said. I made rent by cleaning houses and doing odd jobs. Once in a while, I sold a beanie on Etsy that I’d crocheted out of yarn from the Goodwill bins, where you could buy (by the pound) donations rejected by the upscale Goodwill stores. All the same, when I woke in the morning, my first impulse, beyond thought, was to wish I had a child. 

The angel on my right shoulder said, “Be thankful that heaven has not granted you one, when you can barely afford your light bill.” But the devil on my left said, “You’d make it work. You don’t need much to be happy. There would be a way.” Or maybe it was the devil who said, be thankful, and the angel who said, make it work. I was never really sure.

• • • •

Twenty-odd years ago, I stood on the deck of a ferry heading away from an island in the Puget Sound, beside a man I had split with two months earlier. We were coming back from his sister’s wedding. She was a Paralympian. I had no business being there, but he hadn’t wanted to tell his family we’d split, lest they consider him a failure. The wedding had been at a kind of camp in the woods, and we had stayed in a tiny cabin for two, and the rain had come down on the roof over our bed, and although I thought I would never let him inside me again… well, the rain. 

The thing is, I had stopped taking the pill because we weren’t having sex, and because I wanted to know if birth control was the reason I felt like throwing myself into traffic every now and then. I wanted to know if there was anything that could help keep me from wanting to crawl into bed and never get out. To annihilate each decade, as Sylvia Plath recited in my head those days. But, of course, the man didn’t ask—before the rain and he started—and he finished inside me all the same. Then we’d had to find a drugstore. On an island. In a tourist town with not much else but a mussels pub, a pet store, and a little yarn shop.

Waves came up furiously in the wake of the ferry, and the receding trees were shot through with gray fog. I stood on the deck, in the wind, with a bottle of water, trying to keep my hair from blowing into my mouth as I swigged down the Plan B pill. Everything churned.

• • • •

By the time the bus reached the nursery, I didn’t want to get off. I wanted to keep riding with my daughter.

She smelled like cereal. She had large holes in her ears which were filled with wooden plugs, gnarled like tiny branches. There was something knotty about her whole being, and when I looked down at my own hands, clutching my forearms tight, I saw the same knots in my knuckles. 

She wore the same Tootsie glasses, big and clear, that I had worn as a child, and when she stopped reading for a moment, perhaps to ponder the meaning of the words she had read, she tilted her head just like me. In fact, she looked so much like me as a kid, that I imagined putting her into swaddling clothes, nursing her, singing to her, smoothing her forehead. I imagined cutting her umbilical cord and listening to the voice she would use when she was screaming for me in the night.

But I didn’t have to worry about whether to stay on the bus or get off at the nursery and lose her forever, because she reached to pull the yellow cord, and the bus ground to a halt right where I was getting off.

My daughter stood, smiled at me lightly, dropped her book into her tote, and walked to the front of the bus. 

I got up behind her. She didn’t thank the driver. For a moment, I stood behind the yellow line. Then, we stepped off one after another like toy soldiers.

• • • •

Some eighteen years ago, I sat at a coffee shop in a small town with a man in a Superman sweatshirt and Japanese ocean tattoos. He had been inside me the night before, a sudden thrust of warmth. Now, the sun hit his face in a particular way. He held my feet in his lap, made jokes about my pink sneakers. 

I almost didn’t want to get the pill. He had told me what we would name a baby, if we ever had one, which is in fact what he named his baby years later, with his now-wife. They live in Richmond. He bikes everywhere. 

At the time, I tried to imagine being a single mother to this maybe-child-inside-me. I decided against it. When the man drove away in his convertible, I went to Kroger and bought Plan B at the pharmacy. I downed it with sparkling water. I lay in my bed in the dark, under the window, listening to trucks drive too fast over the speed bump in front of my house, over and over and over.

 Ka-klunk. Ka-klunk. Ka-klunk.

• • • •

The nursery was teeming with people, as it tends to be on apple-tasting day. I followed my daughter through the gates and, though I had worried I might lose her, I could easily spot her green hair bobbing through the crowd. A band on a riser was playing old time music, accordion and upright bass, a jangly guitar and an out-of-place sax. I smelled apples, but I also smelled pizza and barbecue from the food trucks set up around the perimeter.

Over the crowd, I thought I saw a child raise its head up, and I heard a voice cry, “Mom, I want something to eat!” 

Distracted, I lost her for a moment. I scanned the long line snaking its way into the great white tent where the apple tasting was set up. I scoured the crowd of families, parents inspecting potted shrubs while their children ate popcorn or played with painted pumpkins. I even wandered over to the Food Bank area, where a canned food drive was going on. Maybe she had donations in her tote next to Nin. No luck.

Then I spotted her, buying a slice of pizza. I was overjoyed. It was not hard for me to walk alongside her into the apple line. The line was long, and what everyone was there for. It was easy to make conversation, too, as she ate her slice.

“The line seems long, but it moves quickly,” I said. “Have you been here before?”

“No, this is my first time.”

“It’s a fun family activity.”She gave me a look. “But here we both are, without families!”

“True, true. It’s a fun alone activity too. I come every year. They have apples that you can’t find anywhere else. Things I’ve never tasted.” 

“Oh?”

“Yes, but that’s the problem—if you find something you like, sometimes you’ll never find it again.”

She looked at me, brown eyes that pooled kindness. Those apple cheeks, so like my grandmother’s. She smiled and I felt something twang in me. I wanted to reach out to her then and there. “I’m not too worried about that,” she said. “I have ways.”

“You’ll have to teach me,” I laughed.

We moved through the maze of tables, tasting little cubes on toothpicks, rating each varietal. I snuck glances to see if we had marked the same favorites and dislikes. It was hard to tell. I liked the apples that tended toward sour, crisp. White, cold flesh.

• • • •

The man I almost married—he’d had a mental health breakdown. He was kind, owned a resale shop, painted interiors for extra cash. We had plans to build a tiny house, the kind that sits on a trailer chassis. We’d park it in the backyard of our friends who lived out on the edge of the city and kept bees. 

I wanted his seed inside me and wanted the child we would teach to love the world, in spite of everything. And then one night he drank too much and put his hand around my throat, and I never felt safe again. So even though I said I’d never again stop a child from taking root, I did.

Oh, bus girl, I don’t know which man fathered you. But you are mine. 

• • • •

When we had finished tasting and rating the last apple, we exited one after another to the area set up with bins full of apples for sale. But she didn’t stop tasting. As I opened a paper bag and browsed the Envies, I watched her select an apple, also an Envy, and take a bite. 

She looked at me. “Shhh,” she said and winked. Then, she put the apple back in the bin with the others.

And then she walked to the next bin. And the next. A Pink Lady. A Jazz. Each time, she turned the apple so her bite couldn’t be seen. I pretended not to watch her. I pretended not to see the staffer in the brown fleece vest approaching. 

But she was smooth as silk. “Excuse me,” she called out to the staffer. “I was wondering if you could help me. I tasted the best apple I’ve ever had. In there, in the tent. And I wanted to buy a bag to bring home with me. But I can’t seem to find it. Ashmead’s Kernel?”

“Hmmm,” the staffer said, wearing the smile of a customer service worker. “We don’t have that apple, but we might have the tree in our fruit tree section. I can check.”

“But I want the apples. What will I do with the tree?”

“You don’t have a yard? Many customers taste the apples in order to decide which to grow in their yard.”

“I do have a yard, but I don’t have time to care for a tree.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you, then.”

“Wait. Speaking of yards. There’s something else. Advice. I need an expert to tell me whether plums on a broken branch will ripen.”

“But… it’s not plum season.”

“I know, this is from last spring. My neighbor’s plum tree—a branch hangs over my yard. But the branch is broken.”

“Okay.”

“It’s going to happen again. Here, I have the photo. Are you an expert? If not, please, get one for me.”

I tried to inspect the apples and look like I wasn’t listening. Her voice had taken on a tone I didn’t care for. She rummaged in her tote, pulled out her phone, and began to scroll through the photographs on it, as the staffer waited, looking around at the growing crowd. The staffer sighed a small sigh and said, “It’s busy, but if you find it, I am happy to take a look.”

• • • •

“I want a referral to an expert.” She held the phone out and pointed, insisting. “I need to discuss the best course of action. It’s clear to me that the proper course is to prune off the heavy broken branch. Here, see here, where it’s broken?”

“Mmmmhmmm.”

“It’s weighing down the tree and sagging over my yard.”

“This is your neighbor’s tree, right? That could be one way of approaching it, but it’s really up to them.”

“But the plums, will they ripen?”

“Unfortunately, probably not.”

“You don’t sound certain. I’d like an expert.”

“The plums will not ripen. I was trying to be kind.”

“Well, then. Do you have a recipe?”

“A recipe?”

I stood, dazed or transfixed. I could not tear my eyes from the scene unfolding before me. Ordinarily, I’d have rolled my eyes and gotten as far away as possible. But this was my daughter.

“For green plums,” she explained. “Since you’re so sure these won’t ripen.”

“Well, you could, um, pickle them.”

“Pickle them?”

“Maybe Asian style? Japanese? Fermentation?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe a soup? To add a little sourness to the broth?

“No.”

“No?”

“No. No. No. That won’t do. It’s got to be sweet.”

The staffer turned away. “I’ll get you a referral number for an expert.” As the staffer walked by me, I heard her mutter under her breath, “Heaven have mercy upon us all!”

As soon as the staffer was gone, my daughter walked straight over to the caramel apple table and cut the line. She stood like a small barrel, staring up at the price list. I watched as she ordered the dessert on a stick. I watched as she bit down through the sticky unctuous coating and sank her teeth into the apple’s flesh below.

And I started to feel afraid. 

Next to the line, a little girl tugged at her mother’s sleeve, pointed at the apple in my daughter’s hand, said, “I want!”

My daughter smiled down at the girl. “Too late,” she said. “I have eaten it. And now I will eat you too!”

• • • •

I was six when my grandfather caught me with a hand in the literal cookie jar, in his marigold yellow kitchen in a state far from my own. I had been eating the chocolate cookies my grandmother had baked, she said, just for me. “You’re too skinny, hon-ey, I made these cookies for you. I want to spoil you. Eat, eat,” she had said, her hair a halo of soft red curls warming her face. My grandfather looked at me sternly. I started to feel afraid. “Do you really need another cookie?” my grandfather said. “How many of those have you eaten? You’re looking awfully chunky these days. You wouldn’t want to blow up, would you?”

• • • •

I followed her like a helium balloon, bobbing behind her waist. First, she visited the apple cider press, told the workers operating the machine that they were doing it all wrong. Then, she lectured a family, their eyes rolling, on the dangers of raw cider: E. coli and food poisoning that made you want to die.

Next, she wandered into the kids’ activity area where several youngsters were decorating gourds while a genderqueer cowboy was painting other kids’ faces.

“Paint my face,” she said to the cowboy. “I want you to make me a tree. An apple tree. I went through the tasting, and I found the Ashmead’s Kernel to be the best tasting apple. I want you to paint me as that kind of tree.”

What would I ask for? A snake perhaps, cinching its ouroboros around my neck.

“But I don’t know what that kind of tree looks like.”

“Here, I’ll Google it. You can use my phone as a reference.”

“I don’t…”

“That’s what you’re doing here, aren’t you? Making everyone happy?”

The cowboy looked pained. “Do you see this line? The children? I already have a cat and a butterfly and baby Yoda in the queue.”

“Is there a sign that says this is for children only?”

“No, but.”

“I’ll wait my turn,” she said.

• • • •

The only photograph I have of my mother’s mother shows her on a farm with her ten siblings. She wears a dress made from a potato sack and stands between the brother with dwarfism and the sister—oldest, strongest, largest—whose roof she lived under after she left the farm behind. 

In the photograph, my grandmother is a child. Seven, maybe. She looks directly into the camera, her hands clenched in fists and her feet planted, wide. In fact, each sibling has the same rooted posture: the men with bow ties and ears that stick out, the women in shirtwaists and buns, even the toddler in the ambiguously-gendered white dress of the era holds its siblings hands and stands on feet like stalks.

I used to wonder what they gave me, all of them, those strangers in my family tree.

I myself had no clan. I was sole sister to my childhood dog. An only, I begged my parents for a sibling, but what they gave me was a labrador. Lucy was truer than true, and sometimes I imagined her paws and my hands were molded from the same primordial clay. 

Lucy knew my heart, planted her young body between me and my father’s rage. 

Even when my father’s newspaper route didn’t bring home enough food for us to eat, I gave Lucy bits of my meals, Bisquik biscuits or hot dog ends, and she rested her head on my lap and told me I would never be alone.

• • • •

A girl walked by, wheeling a wheelbarrow full of straw. She stared at my daughter and the strange monstrous knots that now covered her painted face.

“What are you supposed to be?” she asked.

My daughter answered: “I am an apple tree, a carnivorous one, and I am going to eat you up.” 

The wheelbarrow girl disappeared. In her place, a man with a forklift, and on the forklift, a pumpkin as big as a child. There was nowhere for him to go, my daughter blocking the only open path to the area where I assumed the pumpkin would be displayed.

“Excuse me,” he called, but she didn’t budge. “Excuse me,” he tried again, louder. Finally, he snapped. “If you don’t get out of the way, I’ll drive over you! Fat-ass.” He lurched the forklift in her direction.

My daughter, however, did not flinch. “I have a question for an expert,” she said to the forklift man. “I need an expert to tell me whether the plums on a broken branch will ripen.”

“Lady, get out of my way.”

“Are you an expert? You don’t look like an expert.”

I didn’t want to believe anymore. It was foolish, wasn’t it? I had made her out of hope and suffering, the roots of my ancestry torn out of the ground and replanted. I had made a false family tree and even so, I felt responsible all the same. 

I needed to intervene, to protect these people somehow. I stepped to her, put my hand on her arm. “Come with me, please, let me buy you a drink,” I said. “We can talk about the plums,” I said. “I think I know what to do.”

• • • •

So we wandered over to the hard cider tent, showed our IDs, and found a place to lean by the makeshift bar, where barrels were set up to serve as seats. The bartender brought out a basin of cider. She ladled some of the cider into plastic cups and handed one to each of us.

“You didn’t have to buy me a drink,” my daughter said. “And we don’t have to talk about plums.”

“It’s just nice to find companionship in these times. As you said, we are both here without our families.”

“Yes,” my daughter said. “Do you have any children?”

“I wasn’t blessed,” I said.

“Here’s to not being blessed,” she said, and raised her glass to me. She drank the cider, all of it, down in one swing. And then she ordered another, which I paid for, and then she said she wanted something more to drink. I was surprised. What, my god, have you not yet had enough? “It’s the last,” she said, “to celebrate our acquaintance on this perfect autumn day.”

And so I ordered again, and she took one more swig of cider. Then, at last, she stood up, this carnivorous tree-being I had perhaps dreamed forth into the world. She clambered to stand on the barrel that had once been her seat. She raised her arms into the air, her thin black dress whipping around her tattooed calves. 

The whole place settled, hushed, even the voices of children. She was a spectacle, awesome and terrible. She raised her glass. To me. To me. Looked me in the eye. “Cheers,” she said, and spoke:  

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair   

And I eat men like air.

And then I knew with horror that she was mine. Only mine.

And I split in half, just like an oak struck by lightning. And out of me tumbled my childhood dog, Anaïs Nin, my grandmother’s cookies, all the yarn I’d ever bought, the waves from the ferry, washing out Tootsie glasses, my ex-boyfriend, who chased my dog away, the girl with the wheelbarrow, the Trimet bus, and four perfect apples. 

The next morning when I woke, my first impulse, beyond thought, was not to wish I had a child. Instead, the taste of unripe plums, cold and sour and bitter and hard, danced across my tongue.

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