Remedies

by Kate Ledger

  “He loves you a lot,” Emily said emphatically, hoping to reassure the girl that she, Emily, had no intention of edging his daughters out of the picture. She began stroking over her lips with a bricky brown color that had the effect of making her skin look paler and, she hoped, somewhat younger. She respected his relationship with his children. No, more than that, she realized, she envied it, wished she were capable of the same thing. “I’ve almost never seen a man love his daughters as much.”

  Anne dried her hands with a paper towel, looking at Emily without expression. “Be nice to him. He’s vulnerable.”

  Emily paused, her mouth open, her lipstick poised on its way to reparations, and she nodded at Anne in the mirror. Tossing the crumpled towel in a metallic wastebin, Anne turned on her heel and left the ladies’ room.

  Drunk was not cute. It was passable in the cab on the way back to Will’s apartment as they cuddled in the backseat. Anne had taken his car to move the last boxes of her packed apartment to a friend’s house, and Emily and Will had clambered into a cab. She opened the window, and giggled and snuggled against his body. Her hair blew around her face. He put his hand on her knee under her skirt, and all of it felt like being in her twenties again, taking cabs around New York, skipping out on work, dodging her father’s secretary. But she was in rare form by the time they reached his apartment in Society Hill. The cab pulled up along the colonial row houses with their short doors and their narrow windows, across the street from a cemetery with jagged, flinty tombstones that dated to the Revolutionary War—the War of Independence!—and Will had to drag her off the vinyl seat. He paid the cabbie, hooked an arm around her waist and hobbled with her up the steps of the house.

  “Put your arm over my shoulder,” he instructed. “That’s it.” They made their way together down a hall to the door of his apartment. He wasn’t able to hold her and fish through his pockets at the same time, so he leaned her gently against the door frame. She accepted the spot like an abandoned doll. Simon, she thought, would have been able to hold her up and unlock a door at the same time. That was the sort of magic Simon was capable of. She felt sorry her husband had no idea where on earth she was. Slightly evil was how she felt. Earlier she’d felt rebellious, and even righteous, but now she just felt mean. He believed her to be speaking at another conference in Philly. (“Another one?” he asked. “By God, you’re in demand these days.”)

  While she was home, Simon had babbled on about the treatment, the infusion therapy, or whatever he was calling it. A new wonder drug? Was her husband completely crocked? He needed more patients, he said, before he could make the medical community take note. “But the proof positives are still in the lead,” he said.

  She couldn’t listen to Simon. Just couldn’t listen. Here was his unproven treatment eclipsing everything. Why, he had no clue that she’d been away five of the last seven weekends and occasionally during the week. It was shit, her marriage. Will reached out his hand and helped her into his apartment. She stepped into the entryway, bumping into the coatrack inside the door.

  “I need to sit down,” she said.

  “Here.” Will led her by the hand to his couch. Ikea, she thought. Well, here was bachelorhood revisited.

  He took off her shoes.

  “I’ll get water,” he said. “You should drink.”

  She heard him opening and then closing a cabinet. She heard the tap running, the rising notes of the water filling the glass. She knew that the water would be just the right temperature, that it would be neither warm nor have ice. A man bringing a drink, not a cocktail, but a drink of water. Her throat was parched. A drink of water for the woman on the couch. Such a small, simple gesture, but so tender. The simplicity of it moved her. And here was Will appearing from out of nowhere, whose very way of being proved everything that was wrong with her life. And everything she had created with Simon—what had happened to them? When was the last time Simon had brought her a drink of water? Here she was, beginning something with Will, or was it consummating something with Will, everything was so unclear. The only truth that was evident Anne had so aptly pointed out: Emily came from a poisoned background—so much ill feeling—and could not be trusted. Sitting on the couch, she began to cry.

  “Emily?”

  Then it was pouring out of her. She was sobbing, her shoulders heaving, her mouth barely able to form words. “I’ve bungled everything. I don’t know how it happened.”

  He sat next to her. “What have you bungled?”

  “All my relationships.” Her voice came out squeaky. This was terrible. She hadn’t meant to lose it completely. “Every one I’ve ever had.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” he said. He smoothed her hair. His hand on her forehead felt like a salve.

  She kept hearing Jamie’s voice, taunting, seeing the hard look before she turned and ran up the stairs. “My daughter hates me.”

  “She’s a teenager. You can’t take it personally. She has to learn her own space.”

  “No, it’s deeper than that.” She cried. She did not want to be hated. She did not deserve to be hated. Yes, she did, another voice inside her answered. All of it was her own damn fault.

  Will put his arms around her and sat silently, and she received his comfort. Finally he sat up, took a sip from her water and offered it to her. He had no tissues so he brought her a wad of toilet paper from the bathroom. Settling back down on the couch, he put his hand on her neck, under her hair. It seemed she’d never felt a human touch more supportive, that perhaps there was a secret to the back of the neck, that warm nook where sympathy could be imparted.

  “When Rachel was sixteen,” he said, “we all had a really hard time. She got in with the wrong kids. We knew she was experimenting with drugs and sex. I was out of my mind because I kept thinking about heroin and AIDS, and I was sure if we said anything, we’d inadvertently push her to do more of whatever she was doing. Maybe she’d go off the deep end, run away or something. But I did the scary thing. I took a risk and confronted her. I told her that I loved her too much to just watch. I also told her that I would drag her to rehab myself and I would handcuff myself to her wrist until she got her shit together. It got through.”

  She felt the tiniest bit pleased to hear that one of the Garth girls could have been said to have issues. But Will couldn’t see that his anecdotes had no resonance in her life. “We’ve never—it’s never been—” There wasn’t even vocabulary to describe what was missing. She had never discussed any of this with anyone. Not Janet Grove with her five fabulous, high-achieving children. Not Betsy Ebberly, who came at parenting with her psychology degree and who also happened to be teeming with good-natured patience.

  “I wasn’t ready. When she was born.” She knew it sounded like she was making excuses. Maybe she was making excuses. Something had to explain how it all got fouled up.

  “Nobody ever is, sweetheart. You can’t hold that against yourself.”

  She blew her nose. She’d stopped crying. Her eyes ached. “I was damaged. When she was born, I wasn’t—I was broken.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I was watching you tonight. The way you look at Anne, the way she looks at you. You’re her safest place.”

  “She was an easy kid to raise. Some kids are.”

  She had not planned to tell, not so soon, at least. She didn’t need for him to know how deep the canyons of muck ran. But she realized, all of a sudden, that she wanted him to know she was capable of giving more, of being more. If she let him know what she’d been through, he might be able to guide her out of the place she’d gotten herself into. That was it: More than anything in the world, she wanted his help. She closed her eyes. “I didn’t tell you this before. We had a son, Simon and I.”

  “Oh.” He comprehended. This was how you could count on Will. At the right moments, he understood.

  She was unable to look at him. She stared off toward the corner of the room, where he’d stacked his partially unpacked boxes. Clothes spilled out of
the tops of some of them where he’d obviously gone pawing for a buried item. There were his khaki shirts, that odd color and mussed fabric he liked so much. It was comforting to see his things. She felt like telling because it seemed like the only way to explain herself, but how to begin? “He was a baby, a newborn really.” She closed her eyes, feeling Will’s chest against her, rising and retreating as he breathed.

  “I didn’t know.”

  Will didn’t ask how her baby had died, but the desire to tell all about him swelled in her so strong, she could almost picture Caleb again. “He got sick,” she said, staring again, barely breathing. “A bacterial infection that developed into meningitis. It happens in newborns. He was only six weeks. It took us by surprise.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.”

  And then she couldn’t stop. She was back there on the late October afternoon. She was not the self-pitying type, but the instant she began to tell, all of it, even the dull sky, the wind picking up outside, was right there, waiting to be told. “The most terrible part”—she began sniffling again but the words were still coming—“was that he hardly even seemed sick. There was no way to know what was happening. In the afternoon, I remember”—her voice wavered, but then continued—“because he had just woken up from a nap, I was just changing his shirt, this little yellow thing with a bear on the front, and I happened to put my hand on his back, and I couldn’t tell, was he warm or were my hands cold? I thought maybe he was a little fussy, but then I couldn’t really tell about that, either. He’d been a colicky baby from the get-go. Colicky doesn’t even describe it. For almost a whole month, he cried every day for three or four hours straight. There was nothing anyone could do. Then he woke up and cried during the night. No matter what I did or how I held him. So I couldn’t tell if he was complaining for real or if it was just more of the same.

  “All afternoon, I tried to hold him, I cuddled him, and still I couldn’t really tell what was up, and I was just getting more and more frustrated. His face looked—I don’t know—just different, except I couldn’t even really describe what was different—and then again, he’d been crying for so long.”

  She sighed. “I wasn’t really good at being a mother. From the beginning. Something about me just wasn’t—I just didn’t hit the ground running. And then he was not such an easy baby. And then that afternoon, I just couldn’t tell. I took his temperature, ninety-eight point nine—what do you do with that? Even Simon said it wasn’t really fever and we should just watch and wait. So I watched, and Caleb didn’t seem any worse, but he didn’t seem any better, either.

  “We had this pediatrician at that time who had office hours in the evenings, and I called Simon, who was downstairs seeing patients, and said maybe I should call and take the baby in, you know, before night. Before the pediatrician’s office closed. Simon said”—she swallowed—“he said, ‘Ninety-eight point nine isn’t really significant, but go if it’ll make you feel better,’ and I thought, well, better to ask. So I dressed Caleb, the wind was blowing and it was getting cold, and I took him. And then, the pediatrician, oh God, it was the most ridiculous thing. He just smiled, you know that smile? Where they look at you like—like you’re overreacting—and they know ninety percent of their job is to look understanding while you’re wasting their time. And I said, ‘You can stop patronizing me. He’s been crying all day.’ The pediatrician just nodded, because at that point I could tell he thought I was overreacting and also annoying, and he did all the usual things, listened to his chest, looked in his ears, and said, ‘No temperature.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry. Babies can run a little warm. Especially if you overbundle them. Especially if they’ve been crying. And you can’t trust most thermometers anyway.’ He ordered a blood test, just to appease me, I think, because I don’t think he thought anything would turn up, and sure enough, fifteen minutes later the results from the lab down the hall came back negative. Nothing. ‘Probably gas,’ he said. He gave me some drops to put into Caleb’s mouth. And he said sometimes there are babies who just cry. ‘Your husband’s a doctor,’ he said. ‘So if anything changes, you’ll know if it’s real.’

  “So I took Caleb back home, feeling frustrated with the doctor and frustrated with the baby. Caleb just cried and cried.” Emily’s eyes began to well up again as she suddenly could picture his red face, with his toothless, coral-colored mouth agape. “It’d been hours. Really, hours. The noise. Just the sound of it, not stopping. I started to lose my patience. Simon finished with his appointments and came back upstairs, and I just stuck Caleb in his arms and said, ‘Here, you take him. I can’t stand it anymore.’ That’s what I said, ‘I can’t stand it.’ ”

  She dabbed her nose, which was running, with the wad of toilet paper. She could still remember the gesture: She had pressed the baby into Simon’s chest—hard—along with an unfinished bottle of formula. Then she had gone into the bedroom and closed the door. After all the crying, all she could hold in her head was the thought she’d had in the hospital when Caleb was first born. Maybe she’d made a terrible mistake. Maybe she was not cut out for mothering. She didn’t enjoy it. If there was some deep well of love she was supposed to draw from, it was shallow, and the bucket was tall. She was tired of Simon’s absence—his practice had only just begun to boom—and she felt alone. Bad mother, she thought just as she began to picture running away. Just walking out the front door of the house and not coming back. But of course she couldn’t do that. She would have to stay and endure it. Every thought in her head was an awful one and she had hated herself for every single one. Inside her bedroom, she’d felt better. The baby was out of earshot anyway. She was only vaguely aware when Simon finally came to bed, but she could tell he had put the baby into the crib in the nursery. And at about eleven at night, when she happened to awake, the crying had stopped.

  “My first thought was just relief,” she said, her voice a dull monotone. “I can’t even believe I’m saying this out loud. But that’s what I thought. Just—thank God for the quiet. It was so hard, you know? All that crying? The feeling that everything was going wrong, and that I was an awful person not to love the experience of it. I just woke up to a quiet house and my first thought was, Thank God.

  “I got up just to pee, and I just happened to peek into his room. He was lying there in his crib, breathing harder than usual. I could tell he was awake. His eyes, they were just looking upward. And I knew right then—something was just wrong. Very, very wrong. I leaned closer to look. Very carefully, I picked him up, just scooped him out of the crib, and he”—her voice trailed into a whisper, “just went limp in my arms.”

  In the shadows, or possibly because of the unnatural yellow of the night-light, every motion had seemed bogged down, as if underwater. His head wagged to one side. She looked down and saw his skin was ashen, his lips bluing around the edges. And then there were no useful thoughts. Just her heart beating. Her tongue thick. Her peripheral vision gone and her focus quavering like the camera inside a race car. No words, but every one of her senses perceiving the occurrence of that most terrible thing. Then she was staggering with him, bumbling into the hallway, practically bumping against the opposite wall, as if she didn’t have control of her feet. The braying noise she made did not sound human, but it woke Simon, who bounded from bed to her side, vaulting into action, looking at the baby and feeling for a pulse—still awake, still breathing—and rushing them downstairs, still in their nightclothes, and out the door into the backseat of the car. She was usually quick to act, but not this time. This time, she was a hulking mess, her arms gripping Caleb, uncertain which way to move, where to turn. Simon took over, was what he did. Suddenly they were in motion, heading toward help. She was wordless, knowing she’d be grateful—no, actually indebted—to him for the rest of her life, because otherwise she’d have been standing in the hallway of her house holding a lifeless child. What she feared but would never have said aloud was actually happening; she was about to lose her son, whom she would only realize later how much she lov
ed. Simon drove like a demon through the streets, to the nearest emergency room less than half a mile away.

  “They did all kinds of tests,” she said. “They did everything. They really tried. And then—” She stopped.

  His hands ceased in their rubbing and simply covered hers. “I’m so sorry.”

  She didn’t mean to laugh, but she made another sound like a short bark. Then she said aloud, “I’m a very, very bad mother.”

  “Oh, Emily—”

  “I’m not a natural. No, it’s just the truth.” It was the hardest thing in the world to confess, that she lacked a basic function. She lacked an inclination to nurture that all people—especially Will—possessed in abundance. But for some reason she now wanted to come clean. “I knew I wasn’t good at it, but I was trying to get better. It was terrible, right after, I wanted to die. I didn’t have any plan to die, but I thought maybe”—her voice changed again—“I don’t know, I thought maybe something else would take me, and it would’ve been okay with me if it happened. If I’d turned up dead, it wouldn’t have surprised me. And then—” Her voice trailed off again and then she remembered the resolve that she had summoned, the will to get over it. Deciding to move ahead had taken every power that she commanded. “We overcame it—we really did. Overcame it and moved on, but the truth was, I wasn’t ready when Jamie came along. Somehow I thought I’d repair myself. The most terrible thing had happened, and it should have been a turning point. You’d expect it to be a turning point. But when Jamie came—I was still damaged. Maybe it was just too soon. She and I just never got off on the right foot, and I haven’t been able to fix it.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” he said again. “I’m sure you’re better than you think.”