“Died?” My voice was much too loud. Outside, I could still hear Tracy screaming. She’d abandoned words at that point and was just making this horrible keening noise.
Be quiet,
I thought.
Be quiet and let me listen.
“Died?”
“I’m so sorry,” said the woman holding my hands.
I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember what I said. I know that I must have asked for the details, asked how, because the nice lady police officer told me, in her gentle, soothing voice, that as best they could guess it had been sudden infant death syndrome, that Caleb hadn’t felt anything, that he’d just gone to sleep and stopped breathing. That he had gone to sleep and never woken up.
“There will be an autopsy,” she said, and I remember thinking,
Autopsy? But that’s for dead people. And my baby can’t be dead, he’s not even a person yet, he’s not even eating real food, he hasn’t learned to sit up or hold things, he hasn’t even smiled at me…
The nice lady police officer was looking at me and saying something.
A question,
I thought. She’d asked a question, and she was waiting for my answer. “I’m sorry,” I said, politely, the way my mother had taught me, when I was still Lisa, when I lived in a ranch house in Northeast Philadelphia.
Manners don’t cost anything,
she’d said over and over.
Good manners are free.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
“Who can we call for you?” she asked.
I gave her my husband’s number. Then his name. I watched as her eyes got wider. “I’m so sorry,” she said again and patted my forearm. I wondered whether his being sort of famous made her sorrier than she would have been if we were just regular people, if Caleb had been anyone’s baby.
I should ask to see him,
I thought. That’s what a grieving mother would do. The whole ten weeks of his life I’d frequently felt like I wasn’t really a mother but that I was just impersonating one. Now I’d just have to impersonate a grieving mother.
They led me through the Spanish arches, down a tiled hall, past a shelf full of faceless, eyeless mannequins, each with a different wig. There were people crowding the bedroom, EMTs and policemen, but they parted, wordlessly, as I walked past.
Turn back, turn back, thou pretty bride…
Caleb lay on the patchwork quilt, in the blue-and-white shirt with the duck in the center and blue sweatpants I’d dressed him in that morning. His eyes were shut, his eyebrows drawn down as if he’d just thought of something sad. His mouth was pursed in a rosebud, and he looked perfect. Perfect and beautiful and peaceful, the way he’d hardly ever looked in his entire ten-week life.
I could feel the air getting heavier as I walked toward him, changing from gas to a liquid, something heavy and cold. My feet wanted to stop, to freeze in place in the middle of Tracy’s beige carpet; my eyelids wanted to close. I wanted not to see this, not to be here; I wanted to rewind the clock, start the day over, the week, the month, the year over. I wanted this not to be true.
If I’d been a better mother,
I thought.
If I’d wanted him more. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to leave.
“No,” I said softly. “No,” I said again, louder, testing it out. I remembered Sam in the OB/GYN’s waiting room, his arms around me as I laughed, pleased and embarrassed.
I’ll teach him to wrestle! And dive through a wave! When we go in the mornings for our swim! His mother can teach him the way to behave, but she won’t make a sissy out o’ him. Not him!
Caleb lay there, so still, his face so still. One hand lay on his side, the other rested on his chest. I went to pick him up and hold him, but the police officers told me that I couldn’t.
“I remember how long his nails were,” I told my friends.
Becky had her face buried in a napkin. Ayinde was wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry,” Kelly whispered. “So sorry.”
I took another drink, hearing my words slurred together and not caring; thinking finally, finally, I have come to the end. “I’d been meaning to clip them, but my baby book said to do it when he was asleep, and it felt like he was never asleep. He was always waving his arms around, and then…”
I straightened my back and tried to compose my face. “And then I came home,” I said, without looking up. “And then I came here.”
In the silence I could hear each of them breathing. “It wasn’t your fault,” Becky finally said. “It could have happened even if he’d been sleeping at home. Even if you’d been holding him.”
“I know.” I took a deep breath. “I know in my head. But here…” I laid my hand on my heart. I couldn’t tell them the rest of it; my cell phone ringing and ringing while I was still in the room with Caleb, Sam’s voice on the phone, high and tense, saying the police had called and was I all right? Was the baby all right? What was going on? I opened my mouth to tell him, but no words would come out. Not that night, not for twenty-four hours, not until the funeral when I’d stood there like a mannequin while people hugged me and squeezed my hands and said words that all sounded like radio static.
Later, after a few cups of strong café con leche and some almond cookies, I walked slowly down Walnut Street. It was after eleven, but the night had gotten noisy again. The sidewalks were crowded with people: older couples on their way home from fancy dinners; girls in tight jeans and high-heeled, pointy shoes. The Internet café was still open, all six computers unoccupied. I slipped behind one of the screens and typed my husband’s name and his e-mail address.
I’m here,
I wrote. I thought that I would write, “I’m okay,” but it wasn’t true yet, so I added only one more line:
I’m home.
Lucky.
If Kelly heard the word
lucky
one more time, she decided, she would have to murder someone. Her husband, most likely.
She walked into the apartment and out of her shoes before the door closed behind her. The lamps were off in the living room, but even in the dim light that filtered through the blinds she could make out the mess—a pair of Steve’s sneakers underneath the table, one of his shirts balled in a corner on top of last Sunday’s newspapers.
“What’d they say?” Steve’s voice issued from the darkness. Kelly squinted into the gloom. He was sitting exactly where she’d left him at lunchtime, cross-legged on the floor in front of the laptop on the coffee table. Oliver was nowhere to be found. Napping. Probably. She hoped.
“They said great. I can start next week,” she answered. In the bedroom, she shucked off her pantyhose, sighing as her stomach expanded, and threw them on top of the unmade bed. She looked at her skirt and jacket before determining they didn’t need to be dry-cleaned, hung them up, and unhooked the underwire bra that had been digging into her for the entire afternoon. Then she pulled on sweats and a T-shirt, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and held her breath as she tiptoed past Oliver’s crib, still hardly believing that she’d actually spent the afternoon reinterviewing for the job she hadn’t planned on returning to until Oliver was a year old; if she ever went back at all. When she first raised the possibility of working again with Steve, she’d expected him to look at her like she was crazy and say, “Absolutely not!” She thought he’d be indignant, furious, outraged at even the hint that she had to work because he couldn’t provide for his family. And she’d thought—dreamed, really—that the outrageous, infuriating notion that she was thinking of going back to work and bringing home a paycheck because he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—would light a fire underneath him, get him off his butt and off the couch and back into an office in a week’s time.
That hadn’t happened.
“If that’s what you want,” he’d said, shrugging, effectively calling her bluff. “You know you don’t have to, but if that’s what will make you happy, you should do it.”
Happy,
she thought. The word pained her just as much as
lucky
did. But whatever hopes she harbored that her boss would be the one to tell her she was crazy to even think about working with a brand-new baby at home had been dashed the instant she’d stepped into the office.
“Oh, hallelujah, thank you God,” Elizabeth, her boss at Eventives, said, flinging her arms into the air. Elizabeth was Philadelphia by way of Manhattan, with a boyfriend in New York who took the train down, she’d say, “just enough to keep my life interesting.” She had a glossy black bob and a slick of hot-pink lipstick, and Kelly had never seen her in shoes that weren’t high heels or carrying a purse that didn’t match them. “We’ve been swamped. Drowning. Desperate! We’ve got more holiday parties than we can handle. We’d love to have you back.”
“Great!” Kelly said, trying her hardest to sound enthusiastic.
“Thing is,” said Elizabeth, perching on one hip on the corner of her desk, crossing her showy legs, dangling a lime-green snakeskin pump from her toe. “I have to really be able to depend on you. No poopy diaper emergencies, no my-baby-got-sick sick days.”
“Fine!” Kelly had said. Elizabeth had never had children. She liked to joke that she could barely commit to a coffee mug, so how could she even think of babies? Elizabeth had no idea what new motherhood was like. Kelly wasn’t sure she knew, either, although experience was showing her that there wasn’t much sleep involved, and your house was always a mess.
“I’ll start next week,” Kelly said, as she walked back into the living room, picking up the piles of newspapers and magazines on the floor, Steve’s sneakers and jacket, and his copy of
What Color Is Your Parachute?
“We’ll have to hire someone.”
“For what?”
“To take care of the baby.”
“What, I’m not good enough?” Steve asked. His tone was light, but he didn’t sound like he was kidding. Kelly felt her stomach clench.
“Of course you’re good enough, but you need to devote your time to your job search!”
And I didn’t marry Mr. Mom,
she thought. “I’ll start making calls tomorrow.”
“Fine, fine,” said Steve, as Kelly restacked the magazines, threw the newspapers into the recycling bin, and started washing what appeared to be her husband’s lunch dishes.
Elizabeth had agreed to let Kelly work from home—“as long as you’re getting your work done, not watching
Barney
or whatever it is the kids are into these days”—so at least she wouldn’t have to worry about buying a new work wardrobe in her new size. The truth was, she couldn’t work from home. She’d given Steve her office, so that he could have a computer and a phone line and a fast Internet connection for the job search she’d assumed would only last a few weeks. She’d take the laptop to a coffee shop with wireless access. That, and her cell phone, would get her by. She was lucky they had a second computer.
Lucky,
she thought and bit down hard on the sob that wanted to make its way out of her mouth as she dumped the books and shoes and magazines into the closet.
Oh, lucky, lucky me.
Oliver started to cry. “Want me to get him?” Steve called. “No,” Kelly called back and hurried into the nursery, scooping Oliver into her arms.
The telephone rang once, twice, three times. Kelly picked up the phone, balanced the baby on her hip, tucked a fresh diaper under her chin, and carried everything into the bedroom. “Hello?”
It was her grandmother. “You are so lucky, honey, to have Steve home to help you! In my day, you know, there was no such thing as paternity leave.”
Yeah, right,
Kelly thought sourly. Paternity leave was the fiction she’d insisted on. “No, we are not telling people you’ve been laid off!” she had told Steve. “How do you think that sounds?”
“Like I got laid off,” Steve had said with a shrug. “It happens, Kelly,” he’d said, with a crooked smile. “It’s not the end of the world.”
She pulled in a deep breath. “Laid off sounds like ‘fired.’ I just think we should put a more positive spin on this. We can just tell people that you’ve decided to make a career change and that you’re on paternity leave while you’re exploring new opportunities.”
“Whatever you think,” he’d said, shrugging again. She’d been repeating the lie since June. “Paternity leave,” she’d said, with a sappy smile plastered to her face, as if it was the most wonderful thing that any girl could hope for. “Steve is taking paternity leave, and then he’s going to start looking around for other opportunities.” That’s what she told her sisters and her grandmother and even Becky and Ayinde and Lia. Paternity leave.
The words were starting to taste like rotten meat in her mouth, but the lying felt strangely, even comfortingly, familiar. When she was a girl, she’d forged her mother’s signature on Terry’s report cards and answered the phone when the principal called.
My mother can’t come to the phone right now,
she’d say.
Can I help? I’m sorry, she’s not in right now,
she’d say, or
She’s not feeling well.
When the truth was more along the lines of
At three o’clock she starts pouring bourbon into her cans of Tab and talking to the television set,
but that wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell the principal or Terry’s soccer coach who called wondering why her mother hadn’t shown up with Gatorade and orange wedges at the last game.
I’m sorry,
Kelly would say. But she hadn’t felt entirely sorry. She’d felt a strange thrill, an odd sort of excitement. She’d felt important. She was ten years old or eleven or twelve, and her brothers and sisters all treated the house like a way station, like it was something unpleasant they had to endure only until they could escape. Kelly tried to make something out of the place. She kept the kitchen floor swept and the couch pillows fluffed while Mary and Doreen and Michael and even Maureen went in and out, grabbing things from the refrigerator, drinking milk or juice right from the carton, pulling school uniforms right from the dryer, always in a hurry to be gone again.
She was the one who had handled the phone calls, she’d forged the signatures, she’d pulled Aunt Kathleen’s knitted brown-and-orange afghan over her mother at night, easing the last can of Tab out of her hand. She’d washed the dinner dishes and straightened up the living room while her mother snored on the couch, shushing her siblings as they came in. “Shh, Mom’s sleeping.”
“Mom’s passed out,” Terry would say, her cheeks flaming pink, smelling like cigarette smoke and filled with the righteous indignation of a fourteen-year-old hepped up on nicotine speaking truth to power.
“Be quiet,” Kelly would tell her. “Go to sleep.”
So she was used to shifting the truth into a more palatable lie. She’d spent her whole childhood magically turning
passed out
into
busy
or
sick
or
sleeping.
She’d be able to turn
laid off
into
paternity leave
if she tried hard enough.
“And how are you?” asked her grandmother. “Mary tells me you’re going back to work.” Kelly knew what Grandma Pat was thinking. It was what her whole family was probably thinking. What kind of woman goes back to work twelve weeks after her baby’s born?
The kind of woman who needs to pay the rent, that’s who,
she wanted to scream.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Steve traipsed into the bedroom while Kelly and her grandmother talked about the weather. Her husband was wearing an undershirt and the same stained pair of jeans he’d worn all week, the ones with the fly that seemed permanently stuck at half mast. His suits and ties appeared to be on permanent hiatus. After the sixth night in a row of staring at the crotch of his boxer shorts, she snapped. “Are you auditioning for the role of Al Bundy?” she’d demanded. He sat up straight from where he’d been slumped on the couch, channel surfing, one hand toying with the zipper tab, and blinked at Kelly. “What are you so mad about?” he’d asked.
Are you kidding?
she wanted to say. That and
How much time have you got?
“It looks sloppy,” she said. And then she went back to what she’d been doing. Washing the dishes. Folding the laundry. Feeding the baby. Paying the bills.
“And how’s that baby of yours?” her grandmother cooed.
“Oliver is wonderful,” Kelly recited.
“And that handsome husband?”
“Very busy,” she said, wishing it were true. “He’s looking at all kinds of different opportunities.” Steve didn’t meet her eyes. He was anything but busy, and Kelly knew that she’d started to sound like a nagging mother in her ongoing efforts to prompt him toward action and then, she fervently hoped, employment.
Who did you call today? Did you send out any résumés? Did you make any calls? Did you visit that website I told you about?
And if she was turning into a nagging mother, Steve could, at times, play the sullen teenager, given to monosyllables and grunts.
Yes. No. Fine. Okay.
After one particularly grueling day in August—a day when they were both staggering around like the living dead because Oliver had been up half the night—he’d yelled at her. “Nobody’s hiring! It’s summertime, and nobody’s hiring! Would you lay off of me for ten minutes? Please?”
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t lay off, she couldn’t relax, and she couldn’t tell him the thought that terrified her and haunted her dreams—what if she’d married a loser? A loser, like her father? A man who didn’t care if his kids went without vacations and wore hand-me-downs and drove around in a van the church had given them? Instead, she muttered an apology and went to give the baby a bath.
“We’re all just fine,” Kelly told her grandmother. She brushed past her husband, walking into the bathroom, the phone tucked under her chin and Oliver in her arms, and squatted down to gather Steve’s dirty socks and underwear and dump them into a laundry basket. “We’ll talk to you soon.”
She hung up the phone, changed Oliver’s diaper, and kissed his belly and his cheeks as he waved his hands in the air and chuckled at her. In the living room, Steve was planted in front of the laptop with his fly down and the ESPN website pulled up. Fantasy baseball. Excellent. As he heard Kelly approach, he clicked guiltily over to monster.com and hunched his shoulders as if he was afraid she was going to hit him.
“How’s your grandmother?” he asked, without turning around.
“Fine,” she said, opening the refrigerator, where she was greeted by the bleak vista of two-week-old orange juice, two withering apples, and bread that looked like a science experiment, with each slice jacketed in blue-green fuzz.
“Want to order Chinese?” Steve called. Kelly closed her eyes. Chinese food was thirty dollars, which was nothing when Steve was working, but now that he wasn’t, the takeout dinners were adding up. But the thought of defrosting one of the hearty, wholesome meals she’d frozen back when she was still pregnant, back when Steve was still employed, made her feel like crying.
“Sure,” she said instead. “Get me chicken and broccoli, okay?”
They ate, as they did most nights, without much conversation.
Pass the duck sauce,
Kelly would say.
Could I have more water?
Steve would ask. It reminded her so painfully of her dinners at home, struggling to make conversation and not mention the most obvious and wrong thing in the room—her mother, swaying almost imperceptibly in her chair at the foot of the table and her father, glaring at all of them from the head.
Oliver blinked his long lashes at them from his bouncy seat. Underneath the table, Lemon rolled onto his back. Steve yawned and stretched his arms over his head. “Ooh, big yawn! Daddy’s sooo tired!” Kelly said to Oliver.
After another long day of doing nothing!
she managed not to add. Oliver smacked his lips, following their every mouthful with his eyes.
“Are you hungry, big guy?” Steve asked, beaming as he scooped Oliver into his lap, letting him play with the chopsticks while Kelly held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t shove one of them up his nose or into his eye. She got up to clear the dishes.