Hooked (19 page)

“Like it was nothing.”

“Who said it was nothing?”

“Forget it,” I said, wanting to dig our way out of the conversation. The truth was, I thought about getting married—or dreamed about it—more than I cared to admit. And I realized as I watched him, mashing crackers into the bottom of his bowl, that he did not. He looked up at me and I could tell he knew he’d been busted. But busted for what? Did the fact that he didn’t think about getting married mean he didn’t love me? The thought sent a chill through me as I watched the little tabs of phone numbers on the ads for music teachers and cleaning help flutter in the breeze from the door whenever it opened and closed.

At home Will held Ian and watched TV while I tried to catch a couple of hours’ sleep before Ian woke up again. I put the pillow over my head, but I could still hear the sounds of buildings exploding and people yelling at each other. I decided I hated TV.

“Can you turn it down?” I asked, watching as one volume bar went black on the screen. “A little more?” Two more bars. I squeezed the pillow closer to my head, starting to get pissed. He rarely offered to hold Ian during the night; come to think of it, he never did. Granted, I had the boobs, but could he
offer
? And why couldn’t he deal with the idea of getting married?

“Will, it’s too loud!” I hissed, bolting upright.

“What’s your problem?” he asked. “Is that how you ask?”

“I asked, and it’s still too loud,” I said. “I’m tired. I need to get some sleep.”

“Whatever,” he said. He turned it off and lay motionless in the dark with Ian asleep on him. “Get some sleep, then.”

“Oh, screw you, don’t make me out to be the big bad bitch.” I waited for him to say something, wondering what had
gotten into me. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said, my hand grazing his shoulder. “I’m just so tired.”

When I woke up the next morning, Will had left to register for his fall semester classes without saying goodbye. I got up, put Ian in the sack on my chest, brought the laundry downstairs, drank coffee, took a walk, went to the drugstore, talked to Mom, watched TV, changed Ian, fell asleep with Ian, went to the supermarket and came home, all the while expecting to see a “We’re okay” gesture in the form of a text on my phone from Will—which never came.

Vanessa finally came home from Vassar one weekend in September to meet Ian.

“Paposan!” she bellowed as Will opened the door.

“You’re past due,” Will said, following her in.

“What am I, a gallon of milk?” she asked.

“Mamosan!” Vanessa kissed me and I pulled her inside to where Ian was lying on the couch.

“Oh my God, he’s beautiful,” she said as I picked him up.

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean it,” she said. “He’s really beautiful, Thee.” She hugged me, sandwiching Ian between us. I hadn’t seen her since she’d left with her family in July. She looked older; her curly brown hair was longer and she had more wisps and chunks of it flying around her face. She smelled like cinnamon and trees. “I can’t believe it. Can I hold him?”

I put Ian in the crook of her arm.

“I can’t believe it,” she said again.

“I brought you a belated housewarming present.” She pointed to a large floppy rectangle in a plastic bag. “Open it.”

Will picked it up, letting the bag drift to the floor. It was a horsehair welcome mat that said
GO AWAY
in big black letters.

“Perfect,” Will said.

“I’m totally behind on Ian’s hat,” she said. “I need more yarn. Can you believe I ran out again? I need to go back to that store.”

I smiled at her, feeling resentful that she’d been too busy hanging out, eating pineapple pizza, to finish it by now. Vanessa sat down, holding Ian in the same position as I did when I fed him, which made him root around, darting his head at her chest.

“Uh! Look at that,” said Will, as if proving a point. “He wants to eat again. That’s all he ever does.” He gestured his head at me. “She’s the only thing he wants. How’s Vassar? Are you a Vassar girl yet?”

“It’s good,” she said. “Though there are a lot of wonks and posers from the Midwest. Or worse,
California
. Let’s see.” Vanessa looked over Ian and examined herself. “Black turtleneck, check. Big ass, check.” She pulled up her sleeve. “Uh! No marks! Uh, not a cutter. Guess she’s not a Vassar girl yet.”

“Ew,” I said.

“It’s all mock,” she said. “Like taking aspirin to kill yourself. Everyone is sooooo intense. Fucking Nick Cave, dude … bad seeeeeed. You guys are Little Mary Sunshines next to them. And you, little lump o’ love.” She held Ian up to her face. “Make out with me. I love his little male pattern baldness. Sooooo hot. Does he ever open his eyes?”

“Not so much.” Will swiveled in the chair, spinning a CD on his finger.

“He opens them,” I said dumbly, bringing a glass to the sink. Will’s plate from the previous night was still there, untouched, with dry food all over it.

“Will, this is fucking gross,” I snapped, holding it up. “If you’re not going to wash it, at least
scrape
it.”

Will and Vanessa exchanged a “What’s her problem?” glance.

“I’m sorry, but help out,” I said. “Did your mother show you how to do dishes? Let me guess the answer to that.”

“I can’t believe
you’re
a mother,” Vanessa said, quickly changing the subject.

“I know,” I said.

“No, I
really
can’t believe it. You’re, like, crazy out there now. My crazy mother friend. Are you guys all, like, walking around the Village, going to, like, tea salons? Do you wear berets? All three of you? Matching berets?”

Will and I couldn’t help smiling at each other. “Yeah, that’s us,” he said. “We’re part of the movement.”

“We’re organizing,” I said.

Vanessa and I went for a walk while Will stayed with Ian.

“So how’s it going?” she said, taking my arm in hers and moving in long strides down the street. “God, I miss New York.”

“You do?” I asked.

“Shit, yeah. There’s nothing to do up there. So navel-gazey.”

“But do you like it?”

“It’s a lot of lying around,” she said, stopping to roll up her jeans. She was wearing jeans with black flats that looked
like ballet slippers. All of a sudden I wanted to roll up my jeans too, but I was wearing clogs. It would have looked dumb. “There’s a girl, Helen, on my hall, she’s pretty cool. At first I thought she was a huge narcey-marcey. Totally self-absorbed. She sneaks into the room as if anyone in there cared, and her eyes dart around, paranoid, like you’ve been talking about her all day. But she’s funny. And she has beautiful skirts, which she wears every day. She only wears skirts. With black tights.”

“Is she your new best friend?” I asked. We’d gotten to the small park near Christopher Street and I steered her to a bench. I was so exhausted from being up all night with Ian that my tongue itched.

“I don’t know, Thee. A million times a day I wish you were there.”

“Awww,” I said.

“I’m serious.” She dug into her pocket for a shredded pack of gum and offered me a piece. “What about you? What’s going on?”

I watched a little girl in grimy pink leggings waiting by the swings with her mother. “It’s scaring me how I can love him so much, and yet every second of the day, I think about how I could lose him,” I said, taking the gum. “That’s the hardest part.”

“Will, you mean?”

I shook my head, surprising myself. “Ian.”

“Thea, you’re not going to
lose
him,” she said.

“You don’t understand, Ness,” I said. “I
could
. He could get sick, he could suffocate, he could just … slip away.” She squeezed my hand and shook her head slowly, as though she couldn’t believe the things I put myself through. Then she popped her gum and I had a sudden memory of the two of us
skateboarding down Seventh Avenue, and her stopping at a traffic light with an exploded bubble all over her face, a long, long time ago.

“Anyway, I’m trying to get him on a schedule,” I said, “like the books say. Dinner, bath, bottle, bed.”

“Almost the same as mine,” said Vanessa. “Dinner, read, vodka, sex, pot, pizza, bed.”

“Yours is more fattening,” I said. “By the way, I meant to ask you, what the hell is a schwarma?”

On the subway with Ian I overheard a woman in a fitted white shirt and piles of cool, long, gold-chain necklaces talking to someone about a miraculous all-natural sweetener.

“I’m serious, I cut out
all
sugar,” she said, fingering her chains. “I don’t miss it one bit. Whenever I need sugar for tea, or whatever, I just use this. Now I’m never tired.”

When I got up out of the subway, Ian was overdue to eat, but I
had
to get that sweetener. It was the key to quashing my unrelenting, insatiable sweet tooth and therefore the key to losing my baby weight. We trekked against the gusty October wind, a few blocks to a health food store on Twenty-Third Street, and once we were inside, Ian started with his trapped squirm thing, puffing his chest out from his stroller straps like a fat Superman. Then I moved down the aisle and the stroller got wedged in between a stack of boxes. I shoved it through hard, and Ian lost it, big bubble tears bursting out of his eyes,
his mouth eating up the rest of his face when he opened it and screamed. I gave the counter lady a bunch of singles for the sweetener and bolted without getting the change.

I was pissed when I got home, the usual thing, how Ian ruled and how I couldn’t do something I wanted to for three seconds without him flipping out, how I was stuck with him all the time while in the meantime everyone else on the planet had a life. It was harder when Will went back to school—school felt more threatening to me than his dumb summer job, maybe because his job seemed like real life and school seemed more like a “lifestyle.” Everyone shuffling around in their flip-flops, off to class with their Clif Bars. I put Ian in his bouncy seat on the kitchen counter and filled a pot of water to boil some penne. I dumped some butter in a plastic container of leftover peas and nuked it. When the pasta was done, I reached across Ian with the pot in one hand to get the salt, because Dad always throws salt on pasta when he drains it. Then my cell phone rang in my coat, making me stop short. The pasta water spilled all over Ian’s leg and seeped through the bouncy seat, a steamy puddle rising on the counter.

Whenever his screams get too loud in my head, and they still do, even now, I try to remind myself that I actually dealt that day and that we didn’t just both fall down and die right there. I remembered Dad was a paramedic after college and called him at work. I had to run into the bathroom to hear him. The thought occurred to me that maybe I could just go downstairs, out into the street, away.

“Run the shower and put him under it,” he said. “Not too cold, or he’ll go into shock. Keep him there for a few minutes if you can. Then get him to the hospital.”

I held Ian under the shower by the armpits, almost grateful
he was screaming and crying so much because it meant he wasn’t dying. At the same time, I noticed a weird thing happening to me, which was that I wasn’t panicking. It couldn’t have been more black-and-white to me: he was going to be okay. The driver turned off the radio the second we got in the taxi and got us to the hospital. I had no money. He took us anyway.

They pried Ian out of my arms when we got there and disappeared, which was a huge relief. I stood in the hall, pinching the skin on my neck, saying to myself, Please God, please God, please God, please God. The doors swung open and it was Dad.

We followed purple footprints down the hall and around a corner, over to a woman in green scrubs standing by a cot with metal rails.

“I’m Dr. Lyons,” she said. “I’m a resident here. Have you given him anything?”

“I tried to get him to swallow some, you know, liquid aspirin,” I said.

“You gave your baby aspirin?”

“Tylenol, I mean.”

“Good,” she said. “You should never, ever, give your child aspirin. It can really mess with the growth of their brain, not to mention it can cause them to bleed internally. So no aspirin. Acetaminophen only. Tylenol is fine.”

Ian wailed and writhed on the cot. I waited for the doctor to stop looking at me.

“Got that?” she asked.

“She gave him Tylenol, did you hear her?” Dad shouted. He pushed his hands together, breathed. “Let’s have a look at the leg, shall we?”

“What about the pain?” I asked, pinching my neck. “Is there something stronger you can give him?”

Dr. Lyons straightened Ian’s leg. They’d stripped him naked.

“Easy,” she murmured. She grabbed some gauze pads off the counter and started dabbing. “It looks like the burns are second degree. That’s good news. But I want to have someone else check.”

Ian started screaming like he had screamed at home and trying to bend his leg under her grip.

“Is there something you can give him for the pain?” I asked again, frantically.

“We can give him something, yes.” She pulled a tube out of a drawer. “This is a topical analgesic. It will numb the area for a while, as well as disinfect it.” Ian screamed bloody murder, but as soon as Dr. Lyons was done, he calmed down. She looked up at me again.

“Can you tell me exactly how it happened?”

“Well, I was boiling some …”

“On second thought,” she said, raising her hands to stop me, “I think I should go find someone who can talk to you … privately.”

“I spilled water on him,” I said. “Boiling pasta water.”

“Let’s wait, please.” She tried to smile, but her smile was urgent and then gone immediately and that’s when I realized she thought I did it on purpose.

Dad cleared his throat. “That’s fine,” he said. “We’ll speak to whomever you need us to speak to.”

“Are you nursing him?” she asked.

“I am.” I picked him up as carefully as I could.

“I’ll be back in a flash,” she said.

“I’m going to step out there and call Will,” I said, reaching into my jeans for my phone.

“Go ahead,” he said, pulling out his BlackBerry.

“We had an accident,” I said, the hallway doors swinging behind me. “But he’s going to be all right.”