Belonging (36 page)

She had never stayed with her father when she was very small, only when she was a big girl, seven or eight, and by then they were unaccustomed to each other’s presence and touch and always slightly embarrassed and even wary of each other. Her father had not been a demonstrative man. When after an absence of nine months he greeted her as she stepped off a plane in New York, he never reached for her or hugged her. He said only, “Hello, Joanna. How nice to see you again.”

Some of his girlfriends were friendly, some were even maternal toward Joanna, but by then Joanna knew better than to let herself grow fond of any of her father’s women. He was never with any one for very long, and it took all of Joanna’s emotional resources simply to keep up with the turbulence of her mother’s life. She always arrived at her father’s new place stunned and exhausted, with no reserves left over for investing emotions in women she would know only briefly in her life. The later women complained to Joanna’s father that Joanna was cold; Joanna heard what they said as she pretended to sleep, curled in a guest room or on a pull-out sofa. “She’s always been that way,” her father replied, and at first this made Joanna want to rise up from her temporary bed, wrap
a blanket around her like a protective cape, and rush in to confront her father and force him to take back his words. She was not cold! She had never been cold! In her heart she boiled with emotions, anger and love and fear and longing, oh, such a deep wide tearing desire to have her father just once in his life look down at her and say, “My daughter. My beautiful child.”

She never confronted her father. She knew too well in advance that nothing would be gained. She knew this because she’d overheard so many scenes very much like the one about which she fantasized played out between her father and one of his furiously frustrated women. “What do you want?” they would cry, or “What can I do?” “Must you go out tonight?” was the first sign; when Joanna heard a woman ask her father that, and heard her father reply with scarcely smothered fury, “I’m sorry, but I do have to meet with the hospital administrator, I never have time during the day, I’m always seeing patients or operating, if this is too difficult for you, I’ll simply have to move out, I’ve never lied to you, I’ve always told you my work must come first with me—these people, if you could only see these poor damaged people, faces scarred by fire or birth, you wouldn’t begrudge me a few hours by myself in a hospital conference room with a bunch of bald-headed old bureaucrats.” “He’s lying,” Joanna wanted to say to the woman; “he’s meeting someone else, a nurse perhaps, or a former patient, believe me, I know.” But she would never tell on her father. What good would it have done? She would instead be especially agreeable when her father’s woman offered to take her out to a movie or shopping. She would tell the woman how pretty she was.

Joanna had known that her father was an unusual man, a man with an enormous ego and voracious sexual needs. She knew other men stayed married and faithful; she saw these men occasionally; some were married to her mother’s friends. But she didn’t count on having such a man, a man both faithful and desirable, appear in her life. She had vowed to herself at an early age not to make the mistake of expecting such a miracle to happen to her.

Although Joanna had slept with men before Carter, and had even been fond of or infatuated with some of them, not until Carter had she felt that deep pull and tug of connection which she thought was love. Sometimes as they lay together in bed, legs entwined, bodies joined at the groin, lips swollen with kissing and wet with saliva, hands locked, every finger interlaced, they would look in each other’s eyes with such honesty and shamelessness that Joanna would feel that the two of them were one, one radiant
creature, joined eternally, two halves of a whole. This proud, profoundly intimate, certain love flowed in a warm dazzling liquid rush through her veins and into the smallest, most secret places of her body and soul.

Had it been false? Did Carter’s present rejection of all they had together obliterate the past?

No. The world moved on, and love between two people was after all only another kind of activity within the world. The sea might wash over a rock, but that did not mean that the rock had not once been there, was not somehow still deeply there, however hidden by salt water. Her parents had not loved each other long, but they had loved each other once, and here she was. Carter did not love her now, but he had loved her once, she believed that, and here were these living children within her. And she was strong enough to go ahead, to love her children, to be, all by herself, enough for them. She would not let the present cold cancel out past heat—the process could be reversed, she could bring warmth to what had once been chilled and shadowed. Had she not spent the past few months restoring the luster and life and dignity to her house? All by herself she’d found and paid for and restored that wonderful house, and she would inhabit it with her babies, she would live there in the present, and plan and look toward the future, and that was more than sufficient, that was everything. Time and death and darkness would eventually come for them all and dark moments and despair would wash over them as it did in the lives of all people, but she would live with her babies in her house, in their shelter, in their rock, and when the black tide of life swept over them, she would pull shut the curtains and light a fire and read her children stories, until the dark retreated and she could open her curtains and open her windows and once again let in fresh air and light.

Now as she lay in the hospital, feeling beneath the dome of her body her babies move, but move less than usual, feeling her blood pressure rise with worry, she thought endlessly about these things. Her thoughts ran incessantly, engraving themselves into her very heart. As her babies moved within the vault of her body, she determined to be faithful to these children in a way her parents had never been faithful to her. She would love these babies, she would endure for them. She would close her eyes and hold very still so that the nausea would not well up within her. She would not, and did not, tell Gardner that she was growing daily more nauseated, that she could not swallow food but dumped it down the toilet or into flower vases, that she often felt faint and dizzy even when lying down. She willed herself to be all right. She demanded of herself, she
demanded of the universe, that these two babies, so little to ask after all, in a world overpopulated with children, that these two babies live and thrive and be born out of her body and into her arms and her life.

Sometimes she heard from down the hall, which in the Nantucket Cottage Hospital was not very long, the cries of a woman in labor, and then the chillingly eerie and beautiful wail of a newborn babe. Sometimes then she would shake with desire and fear and Madaket would put down her book and approach her bed and lean over and hug Joanna, whispering in her ear, “You’ll be all right. Your babies will be all right.”

One afternoon a nurse entered, checked Joanna, and left quickly, her mouth grim. A few minutes later Gardner came in. Swiftly he examined Joanna and the monitors, then took her hand and said, “Okay, Joanna, here’s the situation. We’re going to do a C-section now.” As he spoke, Madaket rose and came to take Joanna’s other hand. “We’re concerned because the heart tone of one of your babies is dropping.”

“What does that mean?” Joanna asked.

“It means a baby’s in danger.”

Her heart thumped. “Will they be okay?”

“I hope so, Joanna. We’ll do our best.”

“Can Madaket come in with me? Please? Gardner, I’m afraid.”

Gardner looked at Madaket. “All right. Go find the nurse She’ll give you some scrubs.”

Things began to blur. Joanna was lifted onto a gurney wheeled into the operating room, and moved onto a table under a bright light. Soft-voiced strangers helped her to sit and steadied her with her legs hanging down and her head slumping forward as they administered the spinal. She tried not to imagine the intrusion of the needle into her delicate core. Her mouth filled with bile, and jagged clouds of black and gray pressed against her eyes.

Madaket came in, the dark brilliance of her eyes framed by the green cap and face mask. She put her hands on Joanna’s shoulders, smiling, saying, “Isn’t this exciting. You’re about to meet your babies!” But Joanna could sense the tension in the room.

With Madaket’s help, they lowered Joanna back down onto the table. The anesthetist pierced her vein. An icy numbness spread up her legs and through her belly. Gardner worked with quick, certain movements, his blue eyes dark with concentration. A
draped section was placed between her breasts and her belly, shielding her from the sight of her abdomen being cut into and pulled apart so that the babies could be lifted out. Something deep inside seemed to tug at her heart.

She couldn’t help but sense that something was wrong. Her heart turned inside out with fear. Then the electric power seemed to fail, for the lights flared and dimmed, and appeared to be falling toward her. She called out to Madaket, “What’s happening?” but realized that her sounds didn’t form coherent words. Madaket disappeared. Faces clothed in white bent over her. Jets of icy cold spurted through her hands and feet. Her throat sucked at her mouth, pulling it down. Just before her eyes rolled back in her head, she understood that she was going into convulsions.

“Joanna.”

Faces floated at her from thick clouds.

“Joanna. Can you talk to us?”

Her eyelids were heavy. The world whirled at her with dizzying speed. She was afraid she was going to vomit. She felt sick. She wanted only to sleep.

“Joanna. Hi.”

As the room swam into view, she realized that it was night, for through the window the sky showed black. She couldn’t imagine how she’d slept so soundly in a room blazing with so much white light. Even the people gathered around her seemed to be iridescent, flickering. Madaket was there, and a strange nurse, and Gardner. And a shadow, a dark blur, like a blot in the air.

“My babies?”

She spoke before she thought, and as she spoke, she looked down. She was tucked quite tidily into soft blankets and so she imagined rather than saw her body, sliced and stapled, bathed and bandaged. She was in pain, she was groggy, and there were still IVs in her arms.

But where were her babies?

“Hold out your arms.”

She did as directed. A nurse folded pillows beneath her arms to support them. Gardner handed her a small soft bundle.

Inside the blankets, a small rosy face gleamed. Two dark blue eyes looked up at
her with an expression of infinite calm. The baby’s tiny fists rested beneath its chin, and as Joanna studied it, the baby stretched its limbs in a long, languorous, fluid movement, then nestled against Joanna, its serene face turning toward Joanna’s breast.

“Meet your son,” Gardner said.

Tears flooded Joanna’s eyes. “It’s the Swimmer!” she said. “Oh, isn’t he perfect!”

“He is. Four pounds eight ounces. A healthy size. He’ll need a little time in the incubator before you take him home. He’s a preemie and needs to build up his lungs. But other than that, he’s a healthy baby.”

Joanna looked up at Gardner. “And where—?”

She saw the tears well in Madaket’s eyes and didn’t need to finish the sentence.

“She didn’t make it, Joanna,” he said. “I’m sorry. There was nothing we could do. The umbilical cord was around her neck.”

“It was a girl?”

“Yes.”

“It was the Chorus Girl!” Joanna cried. “Oh, no!”

“I’m sorry. She was stillborn.”

“Can I see her?”

Gardner nodded. A nurse left the room. Another nurse took the Swimmer from Joanna. The nurse returned with a bundle and handed it to Joanna. Opening the blankets, she looked in to see a perfect baby, tiny, exquisite, lovely, and blue.

“Her color is off because when the cord was wrapped around her neck, she was deprived of oxygen,” a nurse informed her.

“That was why she was kicking so,” Joanna said. “She was trying to change positions—but there was no more room—”

“There are many different reasons for this,” Gardner said. “It’s something we can’t control.”

Joanna wrapped her hand around the Chorus Girl’s fist. It was cold, hard, a little ridged stone. But she could not stop looking at the baby, as if the warmth of her love, and the sheer enormity of her longing, would make the baby come back to life. Pulling back the blankets, she saw that the nurses had dressed the baby in a white cotton sleeper, and that human gesture, of garbing the stillborn child for its few moments on earth, twisted Joanna’s heart.

She closed her eyes. Let this not be real. Let it all go back to yesterday. Please.

“Your little boy’s fussing a bit. Would you like to try nursing him?” the nurse asked.

“Not yet. I’m still—” She stroked the pale cold face. She bent her head and nestled her warm cheek against the tiny lifeless perfect head.

“Joanna. You need to take care of your baby now.” Gardner reached out to remove Joanna’s dead daughter from her arms.

“No. Not yet.”

“Joanna, you can see her again. But your little boy needs you now.”

“No,” Joanna insisted. “I want to keep her.” She clutched the baby against her, and for a moment was overcome with a rushing flood of longing to have this baby, her little girl, back inside her again, safe, alive, kicking. Peering up at Gardner and Madaket, she recognized concern in their eyes.

“You can give her a name,” the nurse said. “For the birth certificate.”

“Thank you,” Joanna said. Somehow, oddly, that helped. She surrendered her daughter to Gardner, who accepted the baby as carefully, cradling the little head in his hand, as if she were alive, as if it mattered if her tiny neck wobbled.

As the Swimmer was settled back in her arms, a cold and numbing despair wrapped around her heart. This was the wrong child to live, she thought, I would have liked the Chorus Girl better. I wanted a daughter. What will I do with a son?—then she hated herself for such thoughts and tried to shut them away from her consciousness.

“What are you going to name your baby?” Gardner asked.