“Could I see the baby?” she asked.
I shrugged and stabbed one finger at the window. Joy was in the center of the nursery. She looked less like an angry grapefruit; more like a cantaloupe, perhaps, but still tiny, still frail, still with the science-fiction-looking ventilator attached to her face more often than not. The chart at the end of her glass crib read “Joy Leah Shapiro.” She was wearing just a diaper, plus pink and white striped socks and a little pink hat with a pompom on top. I’d brought the nurses my stash, and every morning they made sure that Joy got a different hat. She was far and away the best chapeau’d baby in all of the NICU.
“Joy Leah,” whispered Audrey. “Is she… did you name her after my husband?”
I nodded once, swallowing hard around the lump in my throat. I can give her this much, I thought. After all, she wasn’t the one who ignored me, who didn’t call me, who had caused me to fall into a sink and almost lose my baby.
“Will she be all right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably. They say probably. She’s still small, and she has to get bigger, her lungs have to grow until she can breathe on her own. Then she’ll come home.”
Audrey wiped her eyes with the Kleenex she extracted from her purse. “And you’ll stay here? You’ll raise her in Philadelphia?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. Honest to a fault. “I don’t know if I want to go back to the paper, or maybe back out to California. I have friends there.” But even as I said it, I wondered if it was true. After dashing off a perfunctory thank-you note that couldn’t begin to express the gratitude I should have felt for everything she’d done for me, I’d been giving Maxi the same silent treatment as all of my friends. Who knew what she was thinking, or whether she even thought she was my friend still?
Audrey straightened her shoulders. “I would like to be a grandmother to her,” she said carefully. “No matter what happened between you and Bruce”
“What happened,” I repeated. “Did Bruce tell you I had a hysterectomy? That I’ll never have another baby? Did he happen to mention that?”
“I’m sorry, Cannie,” she said again, sounding shrill and helpless and even a little scared. I shut my eyes, slumping against the glass wall.
“Just go,” I told her. “Please. We can talk about this some other time, but not right now. I’m too tired.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “Let me help you,” she said. “Can I get you something? Some water?”
I shook my head, shook her hand off, turned my face away. “Please,” I said. “Just go.” And I stood there, turned away from her, with my eyes shut tight, until I heard her soles slap-slapping back down the hallway. That was where the nurse found me, leaning against the wall and crying, with my hands curled into fists.
“Are you okay?” she asked, and touched my shoulder. I nodded, and turned toward the door.
“I’ll be back later,” I told her. “I’m going for a walk.”
That afternoon, I walked for hours, until the streets, the sidewalks, the buildings turned into a grayish blur. I remember that I bought a Snapple lemonade somewhere, and a few hours later I stopped at a bus station to pee, and I remember that at one point the ankle I’d had the cast on started throbbing. I ignored it. I kept walking. I walked south, then east, through strange neighborhoods, over trolley tracks, past burned-out drug houses, abandoned factories, the slow, brackish twist of the Schuylkill. I thought maybe, somehow, I would walk all the way to New Jersey. Look, I would say, standing in the lobby of Bruce’s high-rise apartment building like a ghost, like a guilty thought, like a wound you’d thought had scabbed over that had suddenly started to bleed. Look at what’s become of me.
I walked and walked until I felt something strange, an unfamiliar sensation. A pain in my foot. I looked down, lifting my left foot, and watched in dumb confusion as the sole slowly peeled off the bottom of my filthy sneaker and flopped onto the street.
A guy sitting on a stoop across the street whooped laughter. “Hey!” he shouted, as I stared stupidly from shoe to sole and back again, trying to make sense of it. “Baby needs a new pair of shoes!”
My baby needs a new pair of lungs, I thought, limping and looking around. Where am I? The neighborhood wasn’t familiar. None of the street names rang any bells. And it was dark. I looked at my watch. 8:30, it said, and for a minute I didn’t know whether it was morning or night. I was sweaty and grimy and exhausted… and lost.
I dug in my pockets, looking for answers, or at least cab fare. I found a five-dollar bill, a fistful of change, and some assorted lint.
I looked for landmarks, for a pay phone, for something.
“Hey,” I called to the guy on the stoop. “Hey, where am I?”
He cackled laughter, rocking back on his heels. “Powelton Village! You in Powelton Village, baby!”
Okay, then. That was a start.
“Which way’s University City?” I called.
He shook his head. “Girl, you lost! You all turned around!” His voice was deep and resonant, and sounded Southern. He lifted himself off his stoop and walked over to me— a middle-aged black man in a white undershirt and khakis. He peered closely at my face. “You sick?” he finally asked.
I shook my head. “Just lost,” I said.
“You go to the college?” he continued, and I shook my head again, and he moved even closer, his expression growing more concerned.
“Are you drunk?” he asked, and I had to smile.
“No, really,” I said. “I just went for a walk and got lost.”
“Well, you better get found,” he said. For one sick, terrifying moment I was absolutely certain he was going to start talking to me about Jesus. But he didn’t. Instead, he took a long, careful inventory of me, from my falling-apart sneakers, up my scabby, bruised shins, to the shorts that I’d folded over twice at the waistband so they wouldn’t slide down off my hips, and the T-shirt I’d been wearing for five days running, and my hair that had grown past my shoulders for the first time in more than a decade, and was doing a sort of impromptu dread-lock thing in the absence of being washed and brushed.
“You need help,” he finally said.
I bowed my head and nodded. Help. This was true. I needed help.
“You got people?”
“I do,” I told him. “I have a baby,” I began, and then my throat closed up.
He raised his arm and pointed. “University City that way,” he said. “You go to the corner of 45th Street, the bus take you straight there.” He dug in his pocket, found a slightly tattered bus transfer pass, and pressed it into my hand. Then he bent and looked at my shoe. “Stay here,” he said. I stood, stock-still, afraid to move so much as a muscle. Afraid of what, exactly, I wasn’t sure.
The man came out of his house with a silver roll of duct tape in his hand. I lifted my foot, and he wrapped tape around and around it, holding the sole in place.
“Be careful,” he said. Keffel, the word sounded like. “You a mother now, you need to be careful.”
“I will,” I said. I started limping off toward the corner he’d pointed at.
As filthy as I was, with duct-taped shoes and tears cutting slow tracks through the grime on my cheeks, nobody spared me so much as a glance on the bus. Everyone was too wrapped up in their own private coming-home-from-work thoughts— dinner, children, what was on TV, the minutiae of normal lives. The bus heaved and groaned its way across town. Things started looking familiar again. I saw the stadium, the skyscrapers, the far-off glimmering white tower of the Examiner building. And then I saw the University of Philadelphia’s Weight and Eating Disorders office, where I’d gone a million years ago. When the only thing I thought I had to worry about was not being thin.
Get found, I thought, and pulled the “Stop Requested” cord so hard I thought for a moment I’d yanked it off. I took an elevator up to the seventh floor, thinking that I’d find all the lights out and the doors locked, wondering why I was even bothering.
But his light was on, and his door was open.
“Cannie!” said Dr. K., beaming. Beaming until he stood up, came around the desk, and got a good whiff of me. And a good look.
“I’m a success story,” I said, and tried to smile. “Look at me! Forty pounds of ugly flab gone in just months!” I swiped one hand across my eyes. “I’m thin,” I said, and started crying. “Yay, me.”
“Sit down,” he said, and closed the door. He put his arm around my shoulders and eased me toward his couch, where I sat, sniffling and pathetic.
“Cannie, my God, what happened to you?”
“I went for a walk,” I began. My tongue felt thick and furry, and my lips felt cracked. “I got lost,” I said. My voice had gone strange and croaky. “I went for a walk, and I got all turned around. I got lost, but now I’m trying to be found.”
He put his hand on my head, stroking gently. “Let me take you home.”
I let him lead me to the elevator, out the door, into his car. On the way out, he stopped at a soda machine and bought a cold can of Coke. I grabbed it without asking and guzzled the whole thing down. He didn’t say a word, not even when I burped hugely. He pulled into a convenience store and came out with a quart of water and an orange Popsicle.
“Thanks,” I rasped, “that’s very nice of you.” I drank the water, sucked on the Popsicle.
“I’ve been trying to call you,” he said. “At work and at home.”
“I’m very busy,” I recited.
“Is Joy home yet?”
I shook my head.
He looked at me. “Are you okay?”
“Busy,” I croaked again. My breasts were aching. I looked down and was unsurprised to see two circular stains beneath the V of sweat from my collarbone down.
“Busy with what?” he asked.
I shut my mouth. I hadn’t really planned any dialogue beyond “busy.”
At a stoplight, he looked over at me, staring at my face. “Are you okay?”
I shrugged. The car behind us honked, but he didn’t move. “Cannie,” he said kindly. A single tear trickled down my cheek. He reached out to brush it away. I jerked back as if I’d been burned.
“No!” I shrieked. “Don’t touch me!”
“Cannie, my God, what’s the matter?”
I shook my head, stared at my lap, where the ruins of the Popsicle were melting. We drove in silence for a while, the car purring beneath us, cool air whispering from the air conditioner over my knees and my shoulders.
At another traffic light, he started to talk again. “How’s Nifkin? Did he remember anything I taught him?” He glanced at me quickly. “You remember when we visited you, right?”
I nodded. “I’m not crazy,” I said. But even as I said it, I wasn’t sure whether it was true. Did crazy people know they were crazy? Or did they think they were perfectly normal, all the while doing crazy things, wandering around filthy and with their shoes falling apart and their heads so full of rage it felt as if they’d explode?
We drove for a few more blocks in silence. I couldn’t think of what to say, what to do next. I knew that there were questions I should ask him, points that I should make, but it felt as if my head was full of buzzing static.
“Where are we going?” I finally managed. “I should go home. Or to the hospital. I should go back there.”
We pulled up at a red light. “Are you working?” he asked me. “I haven’t seen your byline”
It had been so long since I’d had this kind of normal cocktail-party conversation with anyone, it took me a while to get the words sorted out right. “I’m on leave.”
“Are you eating right?” He squinted sideways at me in the dark. “Or maybe I should ask, are you eating anything?”
I shrugged. “It’s hard. With the baby. With Joy. I go to the hospital to see her twice a day, and I’m getting things ready at home I walk a lot,” I finished up.
“I can see that,” he said.
Another few blocks of silence, another red light. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “I was hoping you’d stop by, or call”
“Well, I did, didn’t I?”
“I thought maybe we could see a movie. Or go to that diner again.”
It sounded so bizarre I almost laughed. Was there a time I’d gone to dinner, to movies, when my every thought hadn’t been about my baby and my rage?
“Where were you going, when you got lost?”
“For a walk,” I said in a small voice. “Just for a walk.”
He shook his head but didn’t question me. “Why don’t you let me take you to my place? I’ll make you dinner.”
I considered this. “Do you live near the hospital?”
“Even closer than you. I’ll take you as soon as you like.”
I nodded once, giving in.
I was quiet on the elevator ride to the sixteenth floor, quiet as he unlocked his door, apologizing for the mess, asking if I still liked chicken and did I want to use the phone? I nodded for chicken, shook my head for phone, and walked through his living room slowly, running my hands along the spines of his books, considering the framed family pictures, seeing but not really seeing. He disappeared into the kitchen, then emerged with a stack of folded things: a fluffy white towel, a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, miniature bars of soap and bottles of shampoo from a hotel in New York City.
“Would you like to freshen up?” he offered.
The bathroom was big and clean. I stripped off my shirt, then my shorts, halfheartedly trying to remember when they’d been clean. From the look and smell, I surmised that it had been a while. I folded them, then folded them again, then decided the hell with it and tossed them in the trash. I stood under the water for a long time, with my eyes closed, and thought of nothing but the feeling of the water on my face. Found, I told myself. Try to get found.
When I come out of the shower, dressed, with my hair toweled dry, he was putting food on the table.
“Welcome back,” he said, smiling at me. “Is this okay?”
There was a tossed salad, a small roast chicken, a platter of potato pancakes, which I hadn’t seen anyone serve outside of Chanukah in years. I sat down. The food actually smelled good— the first time anything had smelled good to me in a while.
“Thank you,” I said.
He piled my plate high, and didn’t talk while I ate, although he watched me carefully. Every once in a while I’d look up and see him… not staring, exactly. Just watching me.
Finally, I pushed my plate away. “Thank you,” I said again. “That was really good.”