Page 204 of Incompatible

I wait and wait, and finally Lake begins to speak, soft and slow. He tells me how he met Albert Strada in a prenatal yoga class. How one day their car broke down and Albert offered them a ride. How bad his husband, Max, looked and how silent he was the entire way home. Then he tells me about the accident and I tremble, just tremble…

Then he begins to talk about the birth. His voice cracks when he reaches the part where he saw that I was being born too.

A long silence follows, and then he says it.

"You were stillborn."

Now it’s my turn to be quiet. The story feels unreal. My dad never mentioned any of this. And suddenly, there’s this whole hidden layer?

"What does that mean?" I whisper. "Maybe I just wasn’t breathing. Plenty of babies have trouble breathing at first. Their lips can be bluish…"

Another patch of silence. I feel like this entire conversation is made of pauses more than words.

Then Lake finally speaks again.

"I could tell you it was just a brief stop in breathing, I could say something comforting to make it all sound normal, but then I wouldn’t be completely honest with you." He takes a deeper breath. "You looked like you had been dead for a while. You had large bruises on your body, maybe the car belt pressed into your dad’s abdomen during the crash and crushed you. You were gray, you were not breathing, your heart was not beating, and your body was already cooling. I held you in my arms. I wanted to give you something human, a little warmth, before they… buried you."

My knees weaken, and even though I am leaning on the kitchen counter, I drop to the floor, pressing my free hand to my forehead.

"Then how is it possible that I am alive now?"

Lake lets out a trembling exhale.

"When your body and Bay’s body touched, something strange happened. There was a flash of light that stunned me, and when I came to, you were alive, the color was back in your cheeks. A miracle."

What the hell… I try to process it all. Was Bay really there for me from the beginning? Emotions erupt within me.

"Hold on, I am alive because of Bay?"

"That is what it looks like. When your bodies made contact… something miraculous happened."

"Like a resurrection? How’s that possible, for fuck’s sake… I do not understand anything," I mutter nervously, rubbing my temples, forgetting not to curse on the line.

Lake clears his throat.

"For years… I built a theory in my mind about what happened."

"What do you mean…?" I whisper, constantly dizzy. I have to pull out my inhaler as I start wheezing.

"I kept thinking about it, analyzing it for years, and eventually I came up with a theory, though I cannot say how true it is."

"Tell me. Tell me what you came up with," I beg, my voice shaking, desperate for some explanation that might give me peace, that would make sense!

"I imagined that Bay’s soul must have split that day."

"What…?"

My hands shake, no, my whole body shakes, because this feels like one of those moments in life when you know you are about to hear something that affects your very being.

"Your original soul was gone long before we woke up, maybe an hour, I do not know how long we were unconscious."

"An hour? That’s long! Are you telling me I am some kind of zombie?"

"I really do not know."

"A revenant? Like those undead creatures from folklore…"

"I do not know, Alex! I doubt there is a word for what you are, and maybe do not give yourself one. There is no need to torture yourself."