Fiction from The Literary Review
If you're content to sit there in the quarter light that panes onto the crisply-ironed dresser linen, picking apart the badly-sewn seam of your family's day, ripping with the clever little claw, or your teeth even, with bits of unraveling thread clinging to your dusty corduroy lap, go ahead, I'm happy for you.
Even I see and applaud how you love to draw your children into the kitchen, heating the stove for warmth, closing the shutters against wind. You let the children make concoctions with peanut butter and cornmeal, sugar and molasses, and you ignore the sticky blotches appearing on the chrome of the mixer, on the doors of the cabinets, down the pale skin on the inside of your arm.
Still, you listen indulgently as I tell of my struggle to be something other than mother to my children, to be my own floor, the soles of my own feet.
You call me a few days after it happened. It was something in the air, you say. He breathed in a toxin. And now oxygen comes from a can shooting through plastic into the tiny locked cabin of his chest.
Your voice is like the side of the road after the snow plow has gone through: gravel, dirt, sand hanging in the upturned white.
You say you can think of three months from now or the next five minutes, nothing in between.
He's never lost the use of his arms, you say, so we can tell when he's awake.
There's a mattress in a room down the hall, a chair, a couch.
At least he's getting my milk, you say.
And a few moments later you add, I feel good about that.
I try to imagine you: when did you last take a shower, wash your hair, read a bedtime story to your other children? Can you remember how it was to wipe crumbs off the counter, turn the knob on the dishwasher, take Colin's infant seat off the kitchen table to set it for dinner?
All those things you did a week ago, seven days ago, not knowing the poison that was moving through your son, binding to every nerve ending, in his legs, his stomach, behind his eyes, slowly giving him the kind of peace that made you notice, that made you move to the edge of your seat.
Other mothers have not noticed. They looked away for a moment, they fell back against the cushions at the wrong time.
Other doctors have not said, get in the car now, drive to children's hospital.
Other parents have not driven so fast.
So this is when it happens. Not when you might have expected it, but after.
After holding as still as a coiled pot while the long needle moved into your rounding belly.
After lying with a flowing emptiness, being stitched, your head turning and following as gloved hands wipe your fluids off him and quickly calculate his apgar scores.
After your milk comes in and he is vigorous and hungry and he grows off the chart.
After you change the diaper, apply this ointment and that cream, and use warm water instead of commercial wipes and the terrible broken skin finally heals.
After listening for his breath in every room of the house, toting him, watching him, covering him, making sure there is a rolled towel to keep his head from wobbling in the car seat.
After all this, you simply had to wait for the thing you could not plan for. The thing you could not protect him from. The thing you could not even see: spores that drifted through the air as invisibly as the smell of baking bread, traveling with grim precision to where Colin was lying in his stroller. Getting some air.
Did you sit in the backseat, your face touching his, your tears on his closed eyelids, ear to his lips, checking, was he still - ? Lifting his arm, shaking it. If you could just keep him moving, not let him go to sleep. Twisting around, spewing out your frustration over the grinding cloud of traffic ahead, looking for flashing lights, desperate now to ride within their pulsing embrace.
Did some faceless robed person outside the emergency room hail you down and with brutal concern grab Colin out of his car seat?
Leaving you behind, alone. The way a mother of a four-month-old is never alone.
Now you are learning to say it could have been worse, to ward off its becoming worse. This is an old custom among mothers.
And you stare as you have stared in the past at an empty roadway, a closed door, a list of names on which yours did not appear. Staring as an act of faith.
While you are sitting vigil in the intensive care unit, I begin to cook as if planning for a blizzard. But my family gets none of it. I pack everything, wrapping it in layers of plastic, aluminum foil, disposable containers, taking index cards, listing ingredients, expiration dates, offering opinions on freezability, tips on reheating, and I consider but stop myself from noting menu combinations.
Meanwhile, with meat ball slop under my fingernails and pale oval tomato stains like small footprints up my sleeve, I begin to wonder if people all over town are doing the same thing. How many London broils, how many quarts of soup, how many pans of lasagna will fit in one family's freezer?
I know you don't need me. You are so sure of yourself, even now. Sure that your milk has an unalloyed sweetness, a magic nourishing power. Sure that your other children will be cared for in your absence. All your friends and relatives rallying, so anxious to pay you back, one for that time you pitched in when her husband had a heart attack, another for your providing a refuge during her divorce. We all owe you something, don't we?
And you don't doubt that you bear no responsibility in Colin's illness. How could you, wrapped in the glowing hair shirt of your devotion? It was precisely your relentless, self-sacrificing attention that got Colin to the hospital alive. You are convinced that someone less alert, someone less closely attuned to her child's every breath, someone like me, would not even have noticed.
On a quiet afternoon a few days after I heard about Colin, my son has spread himself like an elegant mohair throw over the couch. Graceful bare legs are visible between the hem of the oversized polo shirt and the top of the leather elf boots that are tied snugly around his dancing ankles.
My daughter is tunneling through the covers of the bed, poking me and bellowing out a mad echoing laugh, banging the cast on her wrist against the pillow to prove her mobility now that she has been released from the sling.
Let's talk, she says. So I offer them details about Colin, left in my care one afternoon, weeks before his long drive to the hospital. Showing my love for their baby selves in each move with Colin. Humming and chattering, inching my mouse paws up his tummy to tickle his chin, offering my little finger to grab, giving him his pacifier and almost that once calling him Michael instead of Colin. Unable to tell them how lying on the nubby family room rug, charming this baby I hardly knew, directed hot projector light against the back of my mind, burning white borders around fading images of Michael and Kathleen as infants. I hadn't forgotten.
And they love the whole thing about Colin's trying to get objects to his mouth - first the rattle, the slow approach, the complete miss, the almost but not quite startled reaction to being hit so unexpectedly on the forehead or cheek while the mouth was waiting, drooling for the taste. (Kathleen and Michael begin to act the scene out.) He also chewed on his fist, I say - when, that is, he could get it to his mouth - and I show how his shirt would bunch up like snow in front of a shovel as he plowed his hand up his chest and the bunch would just sit there, an insurmountable barrier between his determined fist and his hopeful mouth. I show it with my sweater and how I would tug at his shirt quickly so he wouldn't resent the intervention, perhaps would not even notice it and could be proud of his accomplishment when the gnawing gums finally closed around the red ball of knuckles.
The line of words connecting me to Michael and Kathleen is taut and I have to continue. And his room, I go on, they only had two bedrooms and three children already, so when they knew Colin was coming they had to wonder where were they going to put him. Well, they happened to have a large closet. I don't know where they put all the stuff, the boxes and hanging bags that had been in it, but now, you wouldn't believe, it is the cutest, coziest little space and everything is in there, the crib and the changing table and even a slanted ceiling!
And Michael is asking, but what if he grows in the night and when he wakes up he bumps his head? Kathleen says, what if he only has this much room? -- her thumb and forefinger practically touching. To demonstrate, Michael pulls himself up sharply, crack, and I can imagine the egg-welt pop up through the thatch of his overgrown hair.
I say that I would not be at all surprised at what might take place in the night.
In the night. It must have happened in the night, when I wasn't watching every gram of protein, listening to every decibel of sound, judging each as friend or foe to the life within me.
The critical division, the exact moment when the defect deeply embedded in the genes finally expressed itself: turning cells inside out, causing pile-ups, imbalances, gaps that it would take advanced neonatal specialists only moments to identify and label. A syndrome, an anomaly, sprouting in the night's shade, under my eyelashes.
Wrong. Something is terribly wrong. They won't tell me if it's a boy or a girl. They won't tell me anything until I go in to the office.
"Not viable," they say, although we'd all heard the heartbeat.
But the match has been lit, hasn't it? Touch the match to the end of the rope and it will burn on and on, devouring itself as it speeds over the curve of earth. You have to take scissors to the rope, or a sharp knife, a saw if necessary. After all, the risk of fire is too great, especially in light of the valuable forests through which the rope was so carelessly laid.
After the procedure, after the bleeding had stopped, I was directed to a support group, to meet other women of my kind, other women who had aborted. I stumbled in, and I saw you, there in your corduroy jumper and printed turtleneck, not yet the mother of Colin. But stalwart even then, sounding like you were ready to write an affirming book on your experience. You said you wanted others to know that it was possible to go on, to put it behind you. It was simply not meant to be. I was too desperate then to see the treachery behind those words, the conceit you had, convinced that the whole ordeal of a botched pregnancy was simply a test of your character, and, having passed it, you would go on to greater and more acclaimed reproductive achievements.
I never said it. What I thought when you told me you were pregnant with Colin. How could you? You are pushing things too far, assuming, expecting that there is a limit to bad luck, putting your faith in what, statistics? Don't you remember how different those numbers looked before and after you got the test results? Besides, I thought we had agreed that neither of us was going to have another baby. A pact.
If you were someone else, I might have hated you for going where I didn't have the guts to go. But instead I stood by, patiently admiring your growing belly, passively listening to your accounts of his early milestones, reinforcing the enthusiasm of aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, strangers and friends.
But through it all I must have been relying on an unarticulated faith in outside forces, a dim confidence that the injustice would be corrected. If so, is this kind of waiting culpable? And if not the waiting, then what about my almost imperceptible sigh when you said Colin has been sick. Sighing, ahh, it has happened...finally. Knowing then for the first time that I had been waiting. And that this was it. The bolt slammed hard into the catch: it was I who had done the right thing.
But Colin came home. And, though everyone is looking very closely, he seems normal.
Is he a little too thin? Are his muscles weak?
If he's not crying, does it mean he can't feel the pain? Will he be one of those people who can't be trusted around fire, who burn themselves because their nerves are gone?
Even you could not have gotten through this ordeal entirely unscathed. Your eyes must be scarred open, your spine a rod of alertness.
So now, when no eyes are upon you, do you set aside your stirring batter, your threading of lives, and go to where Colin is? His infant seat, with the bouncy quilted liner, the colorful ruffled edges, is on the floor near the stone hearth. Not long before, you noticed him laughing at the brilliant leaves of fire moving and crackling behind the screen, his hand reaching out, restrained only by the strap firm against his chest.
Now he is asleep. So you move stealthily, crouching to the warm hearth, tucking your cool fingers into the elastic around his ankle and lifting off one of his booties. Turning, you carefully light a long fireplace match, stare as it burns down to the wood and blow it out. Immediately, before the glow disappears, you press the red-black tip against the opal stillness of Colin's foot.Copyright 1998 Maureen E. O'Neill All rights reserved.
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