an excerpt from
LIZ SCHEID’S
The Shape of Blue

WHAT IS THE SHAPE

of distance

I’ve been staring at the linea nigra, a bluish jagged line that connects my pelvis to belly button. At 34 weeks pregnant with my second baby, my body is scattered with blue shapes: spider veins burst along calves like webs, veins on wrists wrap around each other in deep purple lines. I don’t recognize my body. My feet look detached from legs, like two swollen entities. I trace the line separating me from my baby.

The distance between California and Wisconsin is roughly 1,800 miles. Give or take. As a child, I flew back and forth from California to Wisconsin several times a year, bouncing between states, between parents. After the divorce, my dad moved back to Wisconsin, where we started. My head pressed against the plane window as I watched the horizon collapse. I like being in flight. Time seems suspended in the sky.

of time

During pregnancy, time moves backward. Like backstroking through a dream. Things you think you know vanish—or the thought hangs in the backdrop and you can’t pinpoint the word for it. Like trying to put your hand on static in the air.

In 1962, George Kubler’s book, The Shape of Time, was released. Among other things, Kubler suggested that strings of events, which follow each other at different speeds, shape time.

During pregnancy, short-term memory disappears. In the morning, I lose my cups of tea. They seem to sink into a black hole. I make more, and later in the day I find cold cups of tea in closets, on bookshelves, atop dressers. My mind moves in a flurry.

My sister Sarah gave birth to her second child by C-section. For days after, the incision burned, slicing into skin. Her belly looked swollen and sore. She was supposed to rest. Doctors told her to stay in bed. Stubborn and driven, she lifted and bent, moved in ways she shouldn’t have. She had a three-year-old and a newborn. She tried to fight time, to move against what was pushing her back. Three months later, she died in a car accident.

of anger

In Wisconsin, my dad rented a cottage across the street from a lake. I spent summers with him, where the warm rain feels like soup. While he worked, I spent most days with a friend by the lake. We swam under the long silver pier where the water was cooler. If a fish tickled our toes, we emerged from the water, disgusted. When Dad came home, he would cook dinner, and then we would watch a movie or play basketball. Some nights, after talking to my mom on the telephone, he asked if I wanted to go for a drive. During those long rides through back roads, he said nothing. We listened to music, watching rows and rows of corn swirl past. It seemed his anger was suspended in his voice box.

These last few days, my baby has been kicking my ribs rapidly. His agitation follows these triggers: loud voices, caffeine, my lying too still.

of water

My mom loved California’s hot weather. She was tired of long, cold winters in Wisconsin. She said her skin looked gray there, her hair like ash. She wanted more color, more sun, more time out of the house. She wanted to be closer to her family. In those days I saw her as my mother/mom/mama/nurturer/caretaker. I couldn’t understand she had other needs. When she gathered us all into the living room to tell us we were moving to Fresno, I was afraid but also excited. I had never been to California, but I imagined a massive ocean with sandy beaches and seashells. I saw it as an adventure, but my siblings weren’t happy. They were afraid of the change, afraid to leave friends and familiarity. We rented a house with a black bottom pool and spent hot days floating on rafts, tipping each other over. Mom seemed to come alive again after we moved—her demeanor changed. I liked seeing her so happy. Some nights, we swam and blared the music.

Dad loved to fish, and he complained about the “man-made” lakes in the San Joaquin Valley. He called them mud holes. Early mornings in Wisconsin, when we were young, he used to take my brother and sisters and me to the lake three blocks away. He showed us how to cast a line. I didn’t have much patience. All I wanted was to swim. To keep me in the boat, Sarah told me there were piranhas in cages at the bottom of the lake, and if my feet got too close they would bite off my toes.

At this point in the pregnancy, my amniotic fluid is at its highest peak. He is swimming in it, digesting and excreting it. His muscles and bones move at ease in this watered cocoon.

of scars

Sarah had a beautiful blue scar on her elbow. When we were kids, she fell out of our brother’s tree fort and ran inside, hysterical, to show Mom, who nearly fainted when she saw the white bone in all that blood. Sarah was in the hospital for what felt like weeks. I just wanted her to come home. We visited every day, and I was jealous of all the attention she got—all of her yogurt and ice cream and balloons. Her elbow was shattered in pieces, and her wrist was broken. Surgeons had to use pins to piece the bones together. During surgery, a pin slipped and they almost had to amputate her arm. They managed to salvage it, but afterward she couldn’t straighten her arm all the way, and her sharp elbow protruded. She was always showing off her scar to a group of big-eyed neighbor boys, making them swoon with jealousy, which reinforced her wild girl/tomboy ways.

I have a scar on my mouth. The tissue runs thick inside, making it hard to pull that skin. I don’t remember the incident. I know the stories passed on to me by my parents and siblings. I’ve heard so many different versions that I imagine the truth to be a collision of them all—somewhere within the gray territory. I do know this: I bit an electrical cord. It was an old fan. Heather, five at the time, yanked the cord from my mouth. Doctors said it is amazing she didn’t also receive the shock. My great-grandma was watching us. Mom told me that she and Dad cried when they first saw my mouth, that my face looked battered, swollen, and the corner looked like a burnt marshmallow. There was also a blister on the bottom of my foot, where the electricity that surged through my small body left me. I also know I would have died had Heather not pulled the cord. I don’t know why but when I try to reimagine this day, I wonder where Sarah was. Or my brother. Were they outside? What did my great-grandma do when my sister must have come running down the stairs to tell her I was burned? Did she say I was on fire? At five, she couldn’t have known the word: electrocuted. Or maybe she did. Maybe that’s what she yelled from the third floor of our house. Such ruminations only produce more questions, more speculation and wonder. What I have left is a jagged scar. It defines me in many ways. Every time I see an uncle or aunt I haven’t seen for a while, their eyes zoom in on it as they shake their heads and tell me if I only knew what a miracle it is that I’m alive. At one time, I considered plastic surgery. I saw my scar as a flaw, a deformity. Now I can’t imagine my mouth without it. Everything I say filters through.

of dreams

My dad had the same dream several nights in a row: he’s fishing, everything begins to ascend into the air—silver fish, shadows of other fishermen, snakes—and as he begins to rise in his boat, he stops midway. Everything else rises past him as his boat hovers halfway up into the sky. When he tells me about this dream, I listen closely because usually he keeps his feelings and emotions to himself.

Amaya tells me she dreamed about yellow hummingbirds. Everywhere. She was so small, she could ride them.

During pregnancy, I dream a lot about my sister. At some point in every dream, I realize it isn’t real, that I’m dreaming, that she’s dead, and I ask her what she’s doing here. She never answers, and then I wake up and everything feels distorted again. Like she keeps dying over and over.

of bruises

At first, my parents thought they wanted an open casket. They thought it might bring closure. It never felt like any of us were making any conscious decisions in the immediate days after her death. I remember clutching Mom’s arm as we all walked down the stairs of the morgue. No one wanted to look at the shiny caskets on display. We didn’t move forward. I think we picked the one closest to where we were standing. It was silver and engraved with roses. There’s something disconcerting about standing in a basement with open caskets on display—you can’t help but think of your own mortality or your own stiff body inside. When someone so close to you dies so suddenly, you obsess so much more.

There is no way to prepare yourself for viewing a loved one’s body in the casket you helped pick. Mom fell on the floor beside her, folding her head into her lap, saying, “This isn’t her. She’s not here.” Dad walked in, held his breath and all his emotion, and walked out. I’m not sure if I ever saw him exhale. I stood back for a while, in Bret’s embrace. I wanted to see Sarah’s hands because mine were eerily similar—long skinny fingers, inherited from Mom’s side. Music teachers used to beg us to play the piano. I’ve been warned by doctors about arthritis. Someone had folded hers like a paper fan. There was a yellow bruise between her left thumb and index finger. I stared hard, losing myself in its shape, wondering how she got it. She must have been gripping the steering wheel when her car flipped. When did she let go? I have obsessed about when she let go, how she let go, a million times over, what song was playing on the radio, what was the last image she saw. If you tell yourself to stop thinking morbid thoughts, you think them all the more.

Lately, my body bruises easily. All the pressure on veins and lack of iron. Amaya traces a small bruise on my arm with her finger. She tells me it’s shaped like a heart and asks if I know that all bruises are blue hearts.

of loss

Shortly before the divorce, my parents went on a retreat to try to reconcile. There was a distance between them, and Mom said they had trouble communicating. Silence is the worst kind of anger because it drowns out all other sounds. The retreat was in the mountains, and they took walks up hills, up paths with overgrown flowers and weeds, and they rested on rocks. Dad wrote her a beautiful letter with beautiful words. She said it was long and heartfelt, and she never knew he felt so strongly. She says she touched each word with her finger. It’s almost as though they did this subconsciously to make peace before letting each other go. I know there’s so much more to their story I’ll never learn, not just because of what they don’t share but because it belongs to them.

The semester she died, Sarah was enrolled in a nursing program. We tried to convince her to slow down, take the semester off, but she was determined to move forward. She had a vision, a goal, and she wasn’t about to let her pregnancy deter her. She felt guilty because she had her first son so young, causing her to postpone college for a period. Now that he was in preschool, she was motivated to finish her degree. I scheduled my own classes around hers, so I could watch my nephews for her. I remember seeing her in blue scrubs in those early mornings with her cup of coffee in hand. She looked so beautiful, professional, happy. I use this word sparingly, but she was happy. She had always been more domestic than I was, but she was so much more than an amazing mother. She was a smart woman. She was far more hands-on than I’ll ever be. She could take things apart, put things back together. Whenever I would get a new dresser or shelf, I would have her put it together. Maybe that’s why she chose nursing. It embodied the best of both worlds: intellect and physicality. I hated blood. She wasn’t afraid of it. I wanted to be fearless like her. She convinced me to take an evening class with her that semester: The Psychology of Crime. It was everything it suggests: disturbing, mind-blowing, alluring. We became obsessed with serial killers: Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer. We shared the desire, the obsession even, to know how and why someone could be driven to that kind of madness. At the end of the semester, we worked hard on our research papers, calling each other late at night to find out what page each one of us was on. I proofread hers. We turned ours in together, but she never saw her final score. She died a week after she turned it in. The professor of the course came to the wake, offered his condolences and handed me her graded essay: “I graded this before she died. I thought you should know. It was a great paper. I thought you should have it.” His eyes were red. I save her paper in a blue box of other treasures I’ve kept: letters, perfume, lotion, pictures, notebooks. I trace my finger over her blue-inked words and doodles, glimpsing how her mind moved in those present seconds and feel like I’m with her again.

On Sundays, my dad fishes in the early mornings. He anchors his boat in the most secluded spot, just above all the weeds. I’ve been with him—and it’s beautiful—the boat’s hum, whistling cicadas, black lake, distant porch lights. The shaping of a day. Like you’re sitting inside a pool of loss. There are no words. It encircles you, and everything feels watered. Like the mind during pregnancy. You tell yourself to move forward. Something pulls you back.