Moonface (17 page)

“You're young, you're a new mom. You're the perfect candidate for another transplant, so I'm confident you'll get one.”

“I don't even want to think about a transplant right now,” I tell him. “I just want to get home to my baby.”

“Understandable. But, really, you should. You're not going to want to be a mother and have to go on dialysis. I'm going to recommend you to the transplant coordinator.”

Transplant, coordinator, list, whatever. I can't conceive of a transplant right now. I can't quite yet conceive the idea of someone replacing Charlie's kidney.

I tell Charlie the news when he comes in that evening.

“About time,” he says. Then he stands up and lifts the bedding off my legs. “Let's go!”

“Wait, they're getting my paperwork. They're trying to find a dialysis center for me to go to.” I'm excited to go home, but when I say this, it hits me what else I'm going home to. “Dialysis again, Charlie.”

“It might be temporary. Maybe the kidney will kick back. And if not, remember, you've got a baby girl waiting for you. She needs you right now. And dialysis—we'll get through it.” He stands there already looking exhausted, yet undaunted by what's ahead.

“Who's going to take care of her while I'm at my treatments? How am I going to get to dialysis? We'll need lots of help. I'll need help just holding her.”

“I don't care what it takes,” Charlie says. “I just want my Moonface back.”

Chapter Seventeen
The Ornithological Wonder in the Sphere of Possibility

I
am almost scared of her. My parents drive me home from the hospital, and I walk into the house that night with all my clothes in a plastic bag. The balloons Genevieve had strung along our porch for Birdie's homecoming are now deflated and barely hanging above the ground. There are packages addressed to “Nico Carmen O”Doyle” on the porch. This person gets mail. She owns things. She probably has a checkbook.

Inside, I feel like I have just missed the party, that the main attraction has come and gone. There are more boxes on the living room floor filled with tiny outfits with the tags still attached. The dog is asleep on gift-wrapping paper.

Still overweight with fluid, I cannot yet carry my weight gracefully. But I make my way upstairs, with my father's help.

“One step,” he says, one of his hands holding mine and the other one under my elbow. “Another step. Slow, babe, one step at a time.”

When I get to the top of the stairs, I see her nursery that we had painted bright orange and the crib that I had begged Charlie to assemble for months. He finally put it together one Sunday, and three days later, Birdie was born. Once, in the hospital, he said, “See, I should have waited ten more weeks.”

Her room is filled with our moving boxes that have never been unpacked, a desk, a file cabinet. Her room is not yet hers.

Our bedroom is blue, and it glows with a soft reading light in the corner. Next to the bed is the small bassinet in which someone has laid out a soft pink flannel blanket. And on the bed, Charlie lies down on his side and curls up next to Birdie's small mound. She sleeps with her nose pressed to his arm.

“Here she is! There is Mommy!” he whispers. I am scared I will make her cry, or that she will not remember me, or that maybe I am someone different now than on the day she was born. Maybe twenty-six days apart has made us strangers. But when I slide in next to her, there it is: that face! Her eyes are tiny bulges still, bubbles on her skin. Her lips are thin folds, moist with milk. Her nose is enormous compared with the rest of her features. She breathes so quietly. I hold her under her neck and under her diaper, and set her head against my chest. She rolls her face back and forth into my skin, but she does not cry.

My parents” feet are creaking on the floorboards downstairs as they escape and let us be alone together. I hold her for as long as I can before she gets hungry, and then Charlie and I spend the rest of the night hunched over her bassinet like two kids looking into a box of baby chicks.

Charlie has to go to work the next morning, and he tells me that someone will be here to help me with the baby, but they won't arrive until ten or so. “Who will it be?” I ask him.

“I don't know. The grandmothers have it worked out.”

He is supposed to leave at eight, so I have two hours of being a mother on my own, though I don't know where to begin. Charlie teaches me her morning routine. He teaches me how to be a mother. He gave her the three and six o'clock feedings the night before, and I watched him, now an adept father, hold her head in the crook of his arm and put the tiny bottle gingerly to her lips.

“Bottles first,” he says, taking little prepackaged bottles from a shopping bag and placing them on the nightstand. “She's up to ten CCs of formula. Isn't that great?”

“Yes!” I say, trying to remember how many CCs she drank in the hospital. The truth is that I don't know how much better ten CCs of formula is than what she had at the hospital. When I left her, she wasn't yet drinking from a bottle.

“Just make sure she finishes the whole amount. She's almost five pounds, Moonface. She's getting up there. I've been telling her she's got to drink more. I say to her, ”What if you grow up and you want to be a lawyer? What are you going to do? Be a five-pound lawyer all your life? Who's going to hire a five-pound lawyer?” ”

I picture our Little Bird in a tiny business suit, toddling around on skinny legs, and holding the smallest attache imaginable. Just then, she farts loudly into my hand.

“Oh, and she farts a lot,” Charlie chuckles. “A chip off the old stinky block. Now here's how you swaddle her,” Charlie says. “We've got all these blankets that the NICU sent us home with. The nurses said that Birdie feels better when she's swaddled because it simulates the womb.”

“I hope it's a more welcoming womb than mine,” I say under my breath.

“I don't think it was your womb that was the problem, Debbie Downer. Now watch. You go like this.” He lays out a blanket in a folded triangle. “Here,” he says, reaching for our baby. I pass her to him, and the hand-off is awkward. “You put her in here.” He gently places her in the middle of the upside-down triangle, and then folds one end over the other.

“That's too tight,” I say.

“No, she likes it.” Then he hands her back to me. Her lips begin to suckle, then relax. She is still asleep and having tiny baby dreams.

“Onward! Diapers! Our moms bought a changing table. It's ugly, but we can buy another one later. Come in here.”

He walks toward her room, and Birdie and I follow. She is lying across my arms, her neck on the inside of my elbow. I trail behind Charlie, and I forget that the doorway that leads to her room is narrow. As we pass through, her head knocks against the wooden doorframe and she lets out the cry of a squeaky toy being stepped on. I don't want Charlie to hear what I've done so I cough and clear my throat until she stops.

“You okay?” he says.

“Yup,” I say, holding her head to ease her pain.

The table is ugly and not what I have dreamed for her nursery, but on it, Charlie shows me how to put the diapers on her and how to sponge bathe her. As he gives me instructions on how he prefers to do things, I think I could be the babysitter right now, the one getting the run-through of what to do while the parents are gone.

I am scared when he leaves.

“You'll be fine,” Charlie says.

I nod.

“It's easy. Just be with her. That's all you have to do. One of our mothers will be here by ten, so you'll have help. They'll know what to do.”

After he leaves, I lay her down on our bed and we sleep until help arrives.

It's a Friday, so I have the weekend to rest and be with her until my dialysis treatments start on Monday. I lie down in the bed beside her, but my mind doesn't rest trying to put the pieces of this bleak picture together. My parents have practically moved into the hotel down the street, but soon they'll have to get back home to Pennsylvania. They will have to get back to their own lives. My mother-in-law lives an hour away, but she has not yet retired from her job. Charlie has taken so many days off over the past weeks. I still can't drive because of my wound and the cumbersome fluid under my skin. I can't bring Birdie to my treatments with me. Right now, we are two needy babies; neither of us can fend for herself.

She is five pounds, but I still lift her with some effort. A lump in my arms. Because my trunk and my legs are still so watered down, I can't navigate my body like I used to before I was pregnant. In the mornings, when it's time to make a bottle for her, I hold her and we practically slide down the stairs together, my back pressed against the wall for support. Slowly we go, sidestepping the whole staircase. Our nights are broken up into three-hour intervals, and for every feeding I try to lift her out of the bassinet, almost pulling her body across the soft edge and onto our bed.

I have a dream one night. I dream that I am wading in water. It must be an ocean, but the water seems more brown than blue. There is a pier extending from the beach. I can't see Charlie or Birdie, just some men on the shore. One man has long hair and a beard. A wave rises and falls. But then another wave comes and it does not stop. I try to hold my ground, but it just keeps coming, and it seems like the rush of water is never going to end.
When will this wave break?
I think to myself, as I push against the water with my arms so my head doesn't go under. The man with the beard calls out, “Duck out, everyone!” I know at that moment that this is a tsunami and that this wave will probably not break anytime soon. My eyes must be filled with panic because the man with the beard reaches over to me, grabs my hand, and says, “This way!” We swim underneath the pier in search of an air pocket or somewhere to breathe. Soon we are underwater, and I am holding my breath. All I can see is the brown water and sand particles floating past. I am waiting for us to come up for air. Waiting, waiting, being guided by this man's hand the whole time. I'm not sure if we never come up for air or if I wake up before we have a chance to.

In the morning, I sit up against the headboard before Charlie wakes.

“You okay?” he says as he stretches and yawns. “Is it nine o'clock already?” He looks over me and into Birdie's bassinet. “Is she breathing?”

I shake my head, but not at his question. “I just can't believe it. I can't believe I'm on dialysis again. I can't believe the kidney failed. How did this happen?” I say.

“Well,” Charlie says, pulling himself upright, “you'd better believe it. You're on dialysis for now. You've got to accept it, Moony. I feel bad about it. I'm so sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?” I say. “I'm sorry.”

“Because my kidney didn't make it. The little German didn't pull through. It's a shame.”

“But that's not your fault,” I tell him.

“Yeah, well, it's not your fault either. It just happened. Things have to happen to make room for other things.” He stretches and yawns again, still trying to wake up.

I am not consoled. Why can't things just happen and everything be healthy and well for once? I want to say this out loud, but I know that he doesn't want to hear it.

“Think about it this way,” he says. “What is the best thing that ever happened to us?”

“Birdie.” I say it quickly. Then I think back on every little thing that has happened to us. Every trip, every dance, every kiss. The answer is the same. “Birdie.”

“I'd say the same thing: Birdie,” he agrees, looking into her bassinet just in case she hears us talking about her. “And if it weren't for my kidney in your body, then she wouldn't be here. If you didn't have that kidney from the moment she was conceived to the moment she was born, there would be no Birdie. The little German did exactly what he needed to do. Unfortunately, he wasn't interested in overtime.”

“I guess, Charlie. And she's brilliant and perfect. Even growing in my weird-ass, messed-up body. But with the dialysis and all, I guess I'm just surprised about how it all turned out.”

“Surprised? Really, Moonface?” he says, seeming surprised himself by my answer. “Our life has been nothing but an endless stream of things going differently than we imagined. Don't you think?” he says.

“For real,” I say.

“You know what it's like?” he says. He gets up on his knees in the bed. “It's like a circus that goes horribly wrong. Or a variety show full of bombs. It's one spectacle after another. Thank god you're always here so I can follow your cues.”

“My cues?” I say, a little confused. “I thought I was the straight man.”

“What?” he says, looking confused. “I thought I was the straight man.” He points at his chest. “No, I am.”

“No, me,” he says, digging his nose into my neck.

I pull his body closer. “I'll give you a cue to follow,” I say, grabbing his face and kissing his lips. I scream when he tries to bite my face and we almost wake the baby.

The entire family is helping us. My mother-in-law comes and stays with Birdie every other afternoon while I'm at my treatments. Sometimes, my parents drive four hours to be with her. And Charlie sometimes leaves his job early, and his bosses understand.

It's a complicated and taxing situation. But maybe my dialysis schedule will become more convenient. Maybe the little German will eventually pull through. There are reasons to think it might. A nurse at the dialysis center tells me to hold on—she's seen one guy's kidney bounce back after six months on dialysis. “He was there one day, and then we never saw him again,” she tells me.

Most days after the treatments, I'm tired and I just want to come home and sleep beside Birdie. Thankfully, she sleeps as much as I do in a day. On the days I have off, though, I have more energy and a clearer mind. I stare at her all day, feed her bottles, change her diapers, sing her songs. I do the things that a mother should do. I like to take off her Onesie sometimes and just look at her bare body. I hold my hand against her chest and feel her heart beating, her chest rising and falling, her fingers wrapping around my thumb, and all her parts moving and working. I like to think that maybe I am sick so she doesn't have to be, that maybe somewhere in the pregnancy, I took it all for her. That something magical transcended the umbilical cord, the uterus, all of it. And for that reason, I would do it over and over and over again for her. I hold my breath so she can breathe.

One day, I come home from dialysis and Charlie is on the couch with her. Birdie is dressed in an outfit that Charlie has picked out, and I take one look at it and know that I have to change her immediately, because no baby of mine will be seen in a bright orange Onesie and purple pants.

“She's a trendsetter,” Charlie protests.

Her delicate bones resist ever so slightly when I slide them into sleeves and through leg holes of tiny pants. She pushes my hand away when I try to fasten a snap on her Onesie. These days, Charlie and I wait for her to open her eyes because she keeps them open only for short periods of time. The minute she looks up at us, we call out, “Open!”

I tell Charlie she looks like me: “Everyone is saying so. Same hair, same eyes, same nose.” Birdie lies between us on the bed. She is sleeping with her tiny hand against her cheek.

“Ah, but those eyebrows,” Charlie says. “They are all me.”