An angry man passes me on Winne Street, a residential neighborhood. He flips me off, honks his horn. I wave. Kill them with kindness, my mother used to say. I want her next to me in this car, driving to my doctor’s appointment to check on the child in my belly. My mother would’ve made Ed’s absence acceptable somehow.
I should’ve asked Bonnie to come, but Bonnie has come to the last two appointments, and it’s starting to feel like she’s the other parent.
Still, she defends Ed’s absences. “You’re fine,” she tells me. “What do you need Ed here for, anyway?”
“Attention,” I told her once. “Like the kind he gave his precious Penelope.”
Bonnie has always tried to hush those concerns, too. When Penelope was discharged, she said, “See? If there’d been something going on, Ed never would’ve sent her away.”
I think we both knew she was lying.
I light a cigarette, crack the window. At the doctor’s encouragement, I’ve cut back during the pregnancy, but it’s impossible to quit entirely. Besides, the doctor is suspicious about the health risks: “Low birth weight is the only thing they’ve hit upon, and you’re a tiny woman. A smaller baby means an easier delivery for you.”
Drops dot in from outside, freckling my hand. Wood smoke hangs in the air, a scent that will last until spring. I’ll build up the fire in the woodstove when I get home. Ed loves that I know how to build a fire.
The baby moves in my stomach, a dive and roll.
“Hey, there, little man.” I sing: “ ‘Hush a-bye, don’t you cry, go to sleep, my little baby.’ ”
At the office, I’m weighed and measured—blood pressure, belly growth. “You should be gaining more weight,” the nurse says, snide and plump.
“I’m trying,” I tell her, though I’m probably not trying hard enough. The nausea of early pregnancy didn’t stop at the fourth month, as promised, and food has become a necessary annoyance I have little patience for. Everything makes me sick. Everything sounds disgusting. Only beer tastes good, wine. I force down soda crackers, homemade broth, mashed potatoes, tasteless porridge.
The nurse listens to the baby’s heartbeat, a whale’s whooshing, something for underwater caves. “Very strong,” she says, a new kindness in her voice for this skinny woman with a strong-hearted baby inside her. See? I can grow a strong child, even with little nourishment. He will feed off me, and that’s enough.
The doctor comes and presses his fingers against my rounded stomach, slides them inside me. He keeps his eyes over my head. He takes his hands away and a step back before speaking. “Everything looks perfect. You’re the model case, Laura. Wish every pregnancy were so easy.”
I ask my list of questions, tallied in the notebook I keep in my purse. Breasts ever stop hurting? Okay to eat only white food and liquid? Sex still okay?
“That baby is in the safest place possible, Laura. You and your husband can have sex right up to the delivery date. Your breasts are going to hurt even more when the milk comes in, so just get used to that one. And you know, I hate to say it because of what it means for you, but babies are parasites. They take everything they need from the mother, so the only person who’s going to suffer from a white-foods-and-liquid diet is you. Eat what you can and don’t worry. You’re doing the Lamaze class?”
“Yes.”
“And how’s your husband?”
“Fine.”
The doctor smiles and writes in my chart. I could say, My husband is a disgusting louse, and the man wouldn’t hear it. His patients have husbands, and it’s his job to ask after them. No more, no less. How the husband is doesn’t matter.
“One more appointment and then we’ll be meeting at the hospital.” He walks out, talking over his shoulder.
The nurse leaves, too, and I dress slowly, playing the sound of the baby’s heartbeat back in my mind, so different from my own. His conjures rain and waves, a great coastal storm I imagine hitting the Pacific coast, the baby and me tucked safe in a cottage as water pelts the windows and pounds the sand below us. I want to tell Ed: Our baby’s heart is a storm, a great show of power and strength. He is stronger than we are.
At home, I start a new painting. A body, hips to neck, with a huge belly and transparent skin. Inside, a baby. The baby’s body opens to the storm it carries in its chest, a great ocean breaking against rocks, rain clouds in the sky.
— —
My students love my belly, and I give it over to their hands willingly. Even the clumsiest of them become elegant when they touch me, fingers suddenly fluid and controlled.
Chip screamed the first time he felt a kick. “Lau-ra tum-mee a-tack.” He pulled his hand away as though it’d touched flame.
“Sometimes he’ll push a foot against my belly so hard you can see the outline of it.”
My students’ eyes go round with the magic of it—a foot inside my belly. Pregnancy is a gift the institution doesn’t often receive.
“How get out?” Lilly asks.
“Through. The. Hoo-ha!” Eva shouts.
Everyone laughs, and I smile. Why had I assumed they wouldn’t know about sex? They are delayed and disabled but still physically whole. Still women and men.
My due date is only a month away. Ed continues to pressure me to quit teaching, and I continue to refuse. I started teaching to try to regain Ed, but it has nothing to do with him now. I come every week because I love my students. I love watching their skills improve and their subjects expand. I know it’s far easier than everything Ed must do for them, but I believe the art class has improved their lives in ways Ed’s other programs can’t.
It’s nice to beat him at something. Especially this thing.
Some teaching mornings, I say, “Fine. I’ll stay,” just to get him out the door. And then I call Sheila and Martha to assure them that—contrary to what Ed is likely to tell them—the art class will be happening as planned, and would they please help get the students up to the classroom?
This morning is one of those.
“He’s not too quick, is he?” Martha says, laughing. “I mean, he just walked in and told me you were staying put today, to call off the class. Not recognizing the patterns, huh?”
“He believes what he wants to believe.”
There have been at least two Tuesdays I’ve slipped in and out of the institution without his notice, the infraction brought up later only after he saw evidence of new art or had a conversation with one of my students.
“Dale said you were there yesterday,” he shouted at me last week.
“I was.”
Anger rose thick in his face. “There are so many pieces of this that aren’t all right, Laura. First, you lied to me in the morning. Second, you’re driving that dangerous road without anyone knowing. Third—”
“People know.”
“Third, you don’t even say hello to me when you’re there?” He heard my response only after he finished his own speech. “Who knows you’re going?”
“I always tell Bonnie. And I call Boulder. Martha and Sheila know to expect me.”
“They’re my staff!”
“I’m one of your volunteers. It’s your staff’s job to support me.” I picture the baby loaning me some of his stormy blood.
Ed always backs down, cupping my belly with his hands—his plea. Stay home for the baby. Not for me, not for him, but for the baby.
“I’m going to keep teaching until the baby comes,” I tell him. “If you want to fight every Tuesday, we can, and I’ll lie, and I’ll go.”
I love, in a deeply pitted part of me, that he can’t alter my behavior. This behaviorist, with all his training—I’ve outsmarted him, slipped his reins.
We left it at that, and I lied again this morning. “Fine. I’ll stay.”
“Are you lying?”
“No.”
“Can I trust you to tell me the truth, Laura? Will you please stay home? You’re putting the baby in danger every time you drive that road.”
“I’ll sta
y.”
To Martha on the phone, “Class is on.”
“Of course it is.”
What would Ed say of his own behavior? His need to create the fiction even when he knows it won’t come true?
Today, my students are starting new paintings. They’ve built the frames themselves, stretched and stapled the canvas—skills they can take with them. In one of the morning arguments with Ed, I used this project as an example of why my class is important. “I’m giving them vocational training, Ed. This isn’t just creative expression. We’re building things, like the school used to, like you’re pushing for.”
“You’re not a vocational therapist, Laura.”
My students are already in the classroom when I arrive, an hour early, a surprise. Sheila is there with them, attending, no surly orderly to shout commands and pull clubs. I can hear their voices from the hall, a din of excitement, and I spy from the doorway for a minute.
It’s a baby shower of sorts, each of my students tending to his or her gift—artwork I’ll hang in the nursery. They’ve made more canvases, working outside of class, organizing themselves somehow, getting access to the tools and supplies. Raymond’s piece is enormous, nearly the size of the table, great swirls of greens and yellows. Janet’s piece is large, too, paint and collage—a technique they all love—the images taken from National Geographic, lions and elephants in a savannah she’s painted, arid trees, pale sky. Eva has painted one glorious apple.
I turn my voice to singsong. “What do we have here?”
They scream and act as though they’ve been caught in the worst and best of indiscretions. They all want to be the one to take my hand and lead me to their offerings, and I allow them each a place around me, their fingers on my arms and shoulders, swooping me toward the tables. Sheila has a camera. “Surprise!” she calls.
Raymond insists on his first. “Beautiful,” I say, squeezing him. “It’s perfect, Raymond.” I go clockwise from there, each artist bursting with the excitement of the day. I hug them all, welcome their wandering hands to my stomach. “Beautiful,” I keep saying. “They’re all so beautiful.”
I come to a small canvas last, eight-by-ten, with no one next to it. “From. Pen,” Chip says. My husband’s adulteress, back to haunt me. It is a portrait of Ed, and it is all I can do not to smash it to pieces.
I leave it where it is and thank my students again. “These are all wonderful. I’m going to hang them in the baby’s room.”
“In your tum-mee?” Chip asks. “No fit.”
Janet squeals at the thought of it—paintings in Laura’s belly!
“My tummy is only his room for another month, Chip, and then he’ll come out and live outside me, and he’ll have his own room in our house. The paintings will be in there for him to see.”
Chip squints, unsure.
Janet chants, “Belly house. Belly house. Belly house.”
“Let’s get to work,” I say.
Sheila helps move the gifts to the side of the room. “Give me your keys and I’ll load these in your car. Raymond, will you help?”
Raymond comes eagerly. I have found that they all love jobs, work to do.
I settle the rest of the class into their seats and pass out canvases with their subjects already sketched in pencil. A road, a large triangle that might be a mountain, more grasses, a long stretch of beds. Janet hands out palettes for me, and I squeeze blobs of acrylic onto each—black, white, red, yellow, blue. Simple colors they’ve learned to use well, mixing and blending into original shades and hues.
They’ve been so focused lately that I’ve started practicing with them. I return to my own canvas on the front table, my own simple paint palette. I am painting a house I’ve never seen, thick-walled and brick-sided, strong and indestructible.
Raymond returns with my keys and sits at his spot. He’s working on new grasses, taking over where George left off.
We paint together for over an hour, stopping only when an aide bellows from the hallway, “You’re missing occupational!”
My students look panicked. “It’s all right,” I assure them. “You’re not in trouble. Head to your groups and I’ll clean up. I’ll see you next week. Thank you again for the artwork.”
This brightens their faces—they respond so well to praise.
I am sad to see them go, and I stay to work on my own piece longer than I should, as my students’ paints go hard on the palettes, their brushes stiff. Evening is coming, and I realize I am waiting for Ed, waiting for him to acknowledge that I’m here—my car in the lot filled with his patients’ artwork, my body in this room filled with his child. I will wait until he comes. I will sit here at this stained table, painting this house, until he shows up in the doorway.
My love, I imagine him saying. Why are you still here?
My love, it’s so good to see you painting. What are you working on?
My love, let’s go get dinner.
The sun sets, and dark sweeps in from the east, pocked with stars. The building quiets around me as patients finish their dinners and go off to their cottages.
Ed is not coming.
I scrape the palettes, set the brushes in soapy water to soak, leave the paintings where they lie. The hall is dark, only my classroom casting light, but I can’t leave the lights on—a waste of electricity Ed would use against me—and so I flip the switch and stand in the doorway waiting for my eyes to adjust. I feel no fear. The ghosts here are like my students—kind and gentle. They will guide me down this darkened hallway, these dark stairs, another flight, and here to the side door. I stand outside in the grass. The entire institution is quieter than I’ve ever heard it, battened down. The lot holds only the skeletal night shift’s cars, and mine stands alone in its row. Ed’s car is gone. It would’ve been nearly impossible for him not to notice mine as he left.
“Good night, Boulder,” I say, keys in hand.
Chapter 16
Ed is in his office, a rare quiet moment at his desk, working on the revised proposal he’s going to take to the next legislative session, when Martha buzzes in.
“Ed, Mr. Gatson’s on the phone. He’s upset. Can I patch him through?”
Penelope has been out of the institution for over a month, nearly two. Ed has called to check in a couple times but gotten only brief, cold responses from her parents when they pick up. More often, he gets the answering machine, and they never return his calls.
“Mr. Gatson? How can I help you?”
“You son of a bitch. You said she was well. You said she was ready for society. You promised us this was the right thing. You want to know where Penelope is now? Up in the hospital in Great Falls. The doctors at St. Pete’s were shocked to hear that she’d been discharged from Boulder, and they sent her to the specialists up there.”
“Why was she in the hospital at all?”
“Nonstop seizures. Her mother and I didn’t know what to do. It’s never been this bad.”
“Is she taking her medications? And following the behavioral plan?”
“She said she was, but we can’t watch her every second of every day.” The man breathes heavily, an angry bull. “Listen, I have no interest in discussing this with you. Her doctors in Great Falls want to confer, so I said I’d let you know they’d be calling. Someone named Wang or something. You can be sure we’ll take no more advice from you.”
The man hangs up.
Ed knows exactly who Penelope’s doctor is in Great Falls—Anthony Wong, a friend and colleague. Ed has talked to him several times about Penelope’s case over the years. He leaves a message for Anthony and looks back down at the papers on his desk. He’d been so sure he was making progress. Caroline, the pregnant woman, had given birth to a healthy, developmentally normal baby girl. A piece of information Ed could use to dispel the lingering fear that developmentally disabled citizens beget more of their own. Boulder perpetuated the fear early on, the institution’s own literature claiming that if patients were released, the boys will become criminals
or victims of the criminally inclined, and the girls will become outcasts in society and bring more of their kind into existence.
Caroline’s parents have adopted the baby. Yes, they’re in the process of bringing suit against the state of Montana and the institution itself, but still, the baby is healthy and safe.
He’s placed three more patients in community facilities.
He’s making it home in time for dinner at least three nights a week, and Laura is softening. Just last night, they bundled up against the early winter cold and sang together on the front porch. And they had too much wine, which led them to their bed for the first time in months, and the sex was the best it’s ever been, the reality of Laura’s belly proving that the act was out of desire and in the pursuit of pleasure, procreation be damned. There is no biological reason to have sex with a pregnant woman.
And he reveled in it all, knowing that Penelope was doing well out there in the world. He let himself imagine her in the last year of high school, chatting with friends in the hallways, maybe even flirting with boys. That’s where she belongs.
But she isn’t there. She’s in the hospital in Great Falls.
The phone rings again, and Martha patches through Anthony Wong.
“Sorry we’re catching up over these circumstances,” he says. “I wish I had better news about your girl, but she’s been seizing uncontrollably for extended periods of time since she got here. We’re able to get the seizures under control with injections of diazepam, but she goes right back into another the minute the drug clears her system. We’ve reintroduced the Tegretol, but it’s not kicking in yet.”
“She was already on Tegretol.”
“It’s not showing up in her blood work. It looks like she must have stopped taking her meds at some point.”
How had Ed not thought of that possibility? He’d simply assumed she’d follow her discharge instructions: daily medication, lots of water, no caffeine, healthy foods, exercise, mental stimulation in the form of school or coursework. He’d assumed her parents would help, but they probably left her alone, frustrated by the burden of their sick child.
The Behavior of Love Page 10