There’s a spot on your child’s heart.

As a ten-year-old boy, I had entered a phase of gullible fascination. I believed in the Bermuda Triangle, ESP, Bigfoot, satanic possession and any other variable of chance that could be categorized as paranormal. Of course ancient astronauts had visited the Aztecs. Of course the dead stranded between heaven and hell walked among us. What further proof did a boy need beyond the night shivers of an old house, the creaking steps and wheezing pipes? The gust-rattling windowpanes? The curtains’ billowing dance?

The ultrasound—what a glorious machine! The hidden exposed! The inner revealed! Now if only we could look inside and retrieve the disjointed images of our dreams. The ten-year-old perks up at the notion, but would the present-tense me really want to revisit such pictures, scenes unfiltered by the defenses and stances it’s taken me all these years to develop? I think not. 

The summer of my wife’s pregnancy, I was haunted by petite baby hearts. The nicked golf balls I kicked back into my neighbor’s yard would be the size of his heart. In the supermarket produce aisle I became transfixed by grapes and plums. In the detachment of idle moments, I would cup my hand and study the empty air cradled in my palm, gradually drawing my fingers in, then out, trying to approximate the dimensions of that briefly glimpsed organ.

Repeating nightmares from my childhood: wandering room to room in a stripped bare house where all the windows were sealed and no door led outside; my teeth turning to candy corn and crumbling in my mouth; flames shooting out of electric outlets. The ten-year-old’s gothic imagination leaves him trembling beneath his covers, and he is certain the nooks of his room are inhabited by missing children and headless soldiers. Some nights I became so convinced of their presence I would lapse into paralysis, my stricken throat unable to mutter a syllable…yet I never shut my eyes for I secretly yearned to witness the breach that surely waited between my world and theirs.

Amazing, the amplified swoosh-swoosh of my wife’s womb. Amazing, the wonders buried beneath her skin. The curve of the spine. The hands’ tiny yet complete bones. The skull’s network of thread-like fissures. The boy’s package of turtle-shaped genitalia. Amazing!

The ten-year-old boy keeps his eyes opened in hopes of glimpsing the other side. The forty-year-old man, having finally realized his desire, wishes he’d blinked.

There’s a spot on your child’s heart. The image froze on the monitor, and the doctor pushed a button. The machine purred, and when a linked series of pictures shimmied out, I thought of a boardwalk photo booth my wife and I had crammed into years before, our skin sunburned and smelling of ocean salt.

A hot, dry summer, my wife and I sharing a lap lane at the local pool after she got off work. She shoved off first with an effortless backstroke, and I struggled in her wake with a splashing freestyle, my years of jogging and biking not translating to the demands of the water. Each night the moment came where the low sun set the surface ripples ablaze, a scintillating display that, for a few passing minutes, obscured what lay beneath. The lifeguards leaned forward in their perches, their lazy, day-long vision now tested. The children’s cries feathered over the open water—Marco? Polo!—and the daredevils yelped as they leapt from the spring-twanging boards. And in our lane, the childish antics continued for our unborn son loved the water. I finished each lap with a submerged kick, my hands outstretched and my heartbeat thudding in my ears, my chlorine-stung eyes opened wide in this hidden world. My fingers touched down on the stretched fabric of my wife’s suit where my arrival was greeted by joyous kicks and punches. 

The ten-year-old, fearful of the nebulous evil lurking in his room, can’t fall asleep, his consciousness gripped like a raft in a tempest sea. The forty-year-old rockets from fitful dreams into an even more fitful reality in the small hours after midnight. Playing in my head—a continuous loop of the ultrasound’s show, the mesmerizing four-chambered mechanics, the cadenced squish of contracted muscles, a tiny white cloud which now burned neon-bright.

In a sun-baked parking lot after our third-trimester ultrasound, my wife and I cried, a clinging pose easily mistaken for grief by passers-by. The spot had vanished, our doctor shrugging and saying these things happened…but in this world where matter can neither be created nor destroyed, what had become of the spot? Did it still exist in my child’s body, a free-floating particle of malice? Had it escaped the trappings of my wife’s belly and tumbled off on the wind like a dandelion seed? Did it follow me around, brushing against my world, showing itself as the tickle that preceded a sneeze, an irritation begging to be scratched?

Six weeks later, our son came forth in a fury of blood and pain, and within twenty-four hours of his arrival, another wondrous machine had detected the pinprick hole between the lower chambers of his heart, a murmur so benign yet distinct the staff’s pediatric cardiologist smiled as he handed us his stethoscope. Flub-a-dub sang our boy’s imperfect heart.

Images from my post-birth dreams—books with print that turned liquid, black streams running off the page and puddling in my lap; a bathroom renovation project which exposed a secret lair behind the shower’s tiled wall; a shared cup of coffee with a long-dead friend, his face obscured by the rising steam, his words instantly forgotten but the sound of his voice so unmistakable that I woke feeling reassured about life and death and my position on its heartbreaking continuum.

By six months, our boy rolled across the floor to snag the blocks and stuffed animals we were too oblivious to fetch for him. By seven months, he’d already dismantled our alphabetized collection of CDs. At eight months, he was cruising around our living room, a path of surprising ingenuity, the sofa and chairs and coffee table latched onto with the tenacity of a sailor clutching the rails of a storm-tossed ship. At ten months, he walked, four shaky steps before thumping onto his diaper-cushioned rump, and once this bit of self-propelled magic was discovered, there was no turning back, my wife and I laughing at his relentless forward-focus, the unblinking intensity of his steely blue eyes, the quivering momentum of his jowls. With each visit to the pediatrician, his murmur grew fainter.

Our one-year checkup with the pediatric cardiologist, another dimly lit room, our boy stripped to his diaper and stretched across a dwarfing examination table. He smiled at the nurse’s antics as she slathered gel on his naked belly, laughed at the slippery contact made when his fingers poked his navel, stared solemnly as the doctor lowered the ultrasound’s paddle.
     A rapid flub-flub played over the speakers, and on the monitor, a red and blue tide flowed through the chalky maze. The doctor pointed to the hole’s spritzing leak, a miniscule spray of mixed colors. The doctor was pleased, the gap now almost closed, and he predicted by next year it would be gone. For a moment, even our son seemed rapt by the monitor’s show. Amazing.
     The image blurred as our boy began to struggle. My wife and I whispered the words that normally soothed him. The nurse cooed and jangled a set of plastic keys, but our boy responded to each consoling effort with increased agitation. Deafening, his cries of displeasure and confusion. Hush, baby, please hush, yet soon our calming attempts gave way to the necessity of restraint, the nurse and my wife and I pinning his limbs as the doctor attempted one final look. Our son’s pulse quickened, a dizzying frantic sound that reminded me of the time a frightened sparrow had been trapped in my grandmother’s garage. My boy writhed against my grip, tears streaking his cheeks, his throat choked with anger. On the monitor, blips of static knifed into the image of his distressed heart.