“You have to be strong,” Mami says, eying him as though really looking at him for the first time. “You’re a father now. I know you’re strong. You were always the strongest of any of us, and your daughter needs you now.”
“I really have to go.” Miguel sidesteps away from her waiting arms. “If you can sit with the baby, you would . . . you’d really be helping me.”
As soon as he is far enough away that she must have rounded the corner to the NICU by now, Miguel breaks out in a run. He dashes down the corridor, toward the elevators and the men’s bathroom, flings back the door too hard and stands inside, the row of sinks wavering in his vision. He doesn’t even have to piss anymore, though back in the NICU, the need was urgent enough to drive him away from where he could keep Imogen in sight. Why did he flee here, then? He scans under the stalls for feet, but he is alone, ducks into a stall, bolts its flimsy door, sinks onto the cool tiles, trying to let the cold seep into his skin, his breathing fractured and thin.
Isabel seated calmly on Tía’s worn sofa, her back straight, a pile of blankets beside her.
Isabel staring, straight ahead, past Miguel as he raced through the front door crying, yelling at her, No one will play with me because you’re a whore with a bastard!
Isabel’s voice, far away, Go back outside and leave me alone, nobody cares about your little problems.
Miguel’s arms lurch forward, pushing the empty air.
The pile of blankets beside Isabel was red, like the curtain on Mami’s bedroom door in the old house. Or maybe Miguel’s memory only has one color . . .
Images flood and overlap. His arms pawing through the blankets as though they reached to the ceiling, when of course it was usually hot out and the house couldn’t have had more than a few blankets in it to begin with. In his mind he rummages through the pile eternally, as though he has to climb to the center of the earth to reach what he is searching for—the infant’s leg he finally touches, slippery and slick. She is crying, as wet with sweat as if Miguel pulled her from a lake. Her black thatch of hair soaking, her face as red as the blanket . . .
Isabel hit him hard on the side of the head. “Go outside, mind your own business, go back outside.”
Miguel pushed her hand away, held Angelina’s leg firmly in his slithery grasp as the baby still screamed. “You can’t do that!” he shouted at his sister. “You’re not allowed to do that. Look at her—she’s crying. You’re not allowed . . .” He sounded like an imbecile; he was embarrassed of the way he was crying. “It’s not allowed,” he finished, lamely.
“What do you know about what’s allowed?” Isabel countered, her voice utterly even, calm. “Fine, I’ll just drown her in the bath next time you’re out. What do you care, anyway?”
“You can’t do that,” Miguel screamed. In a lifetime of feeling helpless, of feeling young, of feeling small, he had never felt so much of any of those things. He was a gnat around Isabel’s head, easily batted away. He went to school every day while she was here with Angelina. He was inconsequential—nothing—next to the insurmountable will of her. He never had been. And he was nothing to her, either. That had once been different, but now, for reasons inaccessible to him, he was as expendable to Isabel as the baby screaming with her will to live on the couch.
“Don’t you dare tell Mami,” Isabel commanded. “You owe me. You left me there, with him.”
Miguel cannot breathe.
“Why are you dead?” he shouts into the echo chamber of the small bathroom. “You left me, Isabel! You’re the one who left, over and over again.”
Don’t you dare tell Mami, his once-beloved sister had instructed him. But he must have, though he has no recollection of that conversation. He must have. Because his mother took Baby Angelina and Miguel and fled to Chicago for good, leaving Isabel—Isabel the savior, Isabel the warrior, Isabel who may have killed Papi—behind.
His air is gone, the flashbulbs are popping. He hears his jagged breath fading. He’s going under. The EpiPen is in his pocket—he carries it always. But there is no cold. Just like in Miami: no stimuli, no causal force. He fumbles for the pen. Does it stop a histamine response, or does it just stop his own brain?
You were always the strongest of any of us, Mami told him. Your daughter needs you.
He doesn’t feel strong. He never has. He has substituted cynicism, sarcasm, anger, denial, sublimation, Chad . . . anything at his disposal, anything he can find, in the space where his strength should be, just to keep himself alive, sometimes without even knowing why being alive was the goal. Only that the will to keep going was primal, like Angelina’s smothered screams, like Imogen still hanging on by an invisible thread . . .
You’re a father now. But fathers are the opposite of strong. Fathers are the ruin of everything. Still Mami believes. In Carlos, who drank and seemed a train wreck, but then got sober and took care of them, who still takes care of Mami, who parented Lina the best he could amidst the maelstrom of her, and is a good man. Still Mami believes, in Miguel who saved baby Angelina’s life, and on whom she has never turned her back despite his deviance from the rules of her god. Still, Mami believes, still Chad believes, still Lina believes, and Emily believed, enough to offer her body up to his dreams. Now Imogen, too, if only she survives, will have no choice but to believe. He has not been worthy of their belief—of any of it—but somehow, unless he wants to leave wreckage like his father did, somehow he will have to be.
He poises to stab the pen hard into his leg. He has come to love the rush of it: his breath, his heart, sounds and colors and walls popping back to place. But his hand stops mid-thrust, less than an inch above his thigh. There is no cold. Whatever this seemed at first, cold urticaria, a real condition apparently, Miguel does not have That Thing. Miami, here—there is no cold. There is no bridge. There is no Isabel. There is no resolution. All he has is this bathroom. All and everything he has is his newborn daughter, fighting for her flimsy beautiful life.
The still-full EpiPen clinks to the floor, rolling away like from an unconscious junkie. Miguel watches it depart. Hears his own sobs, wrenched up from the center of the earth, the center of him, filling the bathroom, stripping back everything but this.
If he can sob this way, it means he is breathing. On his own steam, he is breathing.
“Please,” he begs god and the walls and his dead sister, “you don’t owe me anything, but please let her live anyway.”
He can’t sit here much longer. He has to compose himself, accept the air into his lungs as, if not his birthright, if terrifyingly impermanent as all things are impermanent, then at least, today, under his own control. He has to check in with Chad, to take the threat his husband has perceived seriously. He has to go back to the NICU and sit with his mother and his daughter, bearing witness to whatever is about to transpire—he cannot hide from it any more than he can fix it. Fixing things was supposed to be Isabel’s job, but she was only thirteen, and it broke her. Miguel is a grown man—a father—but nobody can fix unfixable things. He can only stand by the people he loves, and brace his feet against the ground to absorb their weight the best he can.
Even knowing this, he remains immobile on the cold tile until he hears the bathroom door open. The stranger, some other man dragging his own scars and demons through the world, upon hearing Miguel’s private, wracked sobbing, rushes off, the door closing slowly on its springs. Only then, once there has been some kind of witness to Miguel’s memories, his moment, his existence, is he able to get to his feet and make his way back down the corridor toward his daughter, and whatever the future holds.
GRETCHEN
Gretchen’s efforts to see Emily alone feel as complex as robbing a bank. She isn’t even sure why she feels the need, but it scrapes away at her, makes her leave her parents sipping their Au Bon Pain lattes with their shallowly funereal air, and wander to where Emily can only have one visitor at a time—where clearly there is no reason, amidst chaos and emergencies, that the one visitor would ever be Gretchen.
Emily’s freakishly good-looking son, who at fourteen is already taller than Gretchen despite the fact that neither Emily nor Nick is tall, sits at his mother’s bedside clutching her hand. It seems impossible to imagine Gray behaving so protectively, even as a near adult. Gretchen is aware that she has become one of those people—that just a year ago, she was not someone who immediately translated every situation to her own, so as to compare and find her life lacking. There is a word for this, she knows: bitter. She is on the brink of forty-three, still young enough that a baby born of her egg has now joined the world (but for how long?)—still, she feels so bitter she could pucker faces. So brittle she could crack into jagged pieces and make Miles, the handsome, devoted son, sweep the shards of her into the trash so as not to disturb his saintly mother.
Gretchen loiters. Nick, who Gretchen takes for being, as a matter of course, a shiftless good-for-nothing and probably a cheat, will be expected to put in appearances in Emily’s room, too, so at some point Miles has to leave and there will be a changing of the guard. She waits, pacing, finally sitting on the scuffed tiled floors in a way that would desperately alarm Elaine Merry were she here, and so Gretchen doesn’t get up, even though the floor is uncomfortable and she feels silly. She can’t bring herself to go to the NICU with Miguel and Chad—she’s festering in the juices of her own shameful duplicity—so instead she sits on the floor outside Emily’s room and, sure enough, eventually Nick himself comes and asks, in a voice that seems theatrically reverent and sad to Gretchen, if Miles would be willing to “come talk privately for a minute.” Miles makes a big show of kissing his mother’s forehead and assuring her that everything will be all right before he walks stiffly away with Nick, leaving Emily unguarded, alone.
The truth is, Emily is barely conscious. She may not even know Miles has been there so long. She may not even recognize Gretchen, who hasn’t seen her in months and has been a pretty insignificant player in this Community Baby drama—never mind me, that’s just my egg. Ever since getting the call down to Northwestern, to Prentice Women’s Hospital where Emily was already in distress and being loaded up with magnesium, Gretchen has had the sense of herself as being in the late stages of a film, when one of the good guys suddenly pulls off a mask or steps forward with a gun and reveals himself for what he really is. Her legal paperwork could scorch right through the tasteful beige Italian leather of her handbag and drop out onto Emily’s thin white blanket. It has never occurred to Gretchen before: the balls-out courage it takes to be the Big Bad Wolf. Everyone rallies blindly around the pigs. No one cares that a wolf needs to feed, too.
Emily is watching her with eyes swollen nearly to slits. Gretchen smooths the legs of her pants compulsively, trying to think of what to say, before she realizes that—no—Emily isn’t looking at her at all. She is just one of those people who sleeps with her eyes partially open, or at least she does right now, from all the drugs. Gretchen smiles forcibly at her, but Emily does not respond. She waves her hand in front of Emily—far enough away to pass for an actual wave—and it clearly doesn’t register. What passes over Gretchen is such a mixture of disappointment and relief simultaneously that it feels like her skull could split in two with the fracture. She is here for a reason, though she has no idea what such a reason might be. She wants to talk to Emily, though she does not like Emily, and has not one single thing to say for herself that anyone on earth would want to hear.
She slinks into Miles’s abandoned chair.
She is a sham.
Even being here, out of . . . what? . . . concern for Emily? . . . is flimsy at best. She should be in the NICU with her brother and Miguel; this subterfuge is nothing but a clutter her splitting head is creating, to distract her from the fact that her daughter is probably going to fade quickly from the world, and that Gretchen will have spent Imogen’s brief hours of life hanging out with her parents in a “family lounge” like a freaking distant relative from out of town. She can’t face it, not any of it: her own intentions if the baby lives, or the baby’s death, either, on top of so much else gone wrong. Imogen’s dying before even living would be the pièce de résistance of Gretchen’s every shattered dream.
What were her dreams even? It’s impossible to remember. The woman she used to be didn’t think of such things often, didn’t want—in Gretchen’s memory of her own Former Self—anything all that intensely. It was more that she took for granted certain unalienable rights that . . . included things many people want intensely. A well-mannered husband who would treat her in the decent way people were supposed to treat each other—who would earn money and not attempt to steal hers. A child who would behave like an adult’s concept of “a child,” who would love her with a childlike ferocity that it would be her prerogative to entertain or dismiss as her busy adult schedule allowed, the way her parents once had with her and Chad. A home in which all these unalienable rights of hers would live, under one roof that no one was trying to sell out from under her and keep the spoils. She does not suppose that this Former Gretchen thought much about whether or not she would feel passion for her job—it seemed lucky that such a thing had been entertained in her brief foray as a professional athlete, though if she is real about it she never loved tennis, either, it was merely something she was good enough at to enjoy the praise until she proved not good enough and smoothly detoured into some alternately acceptable route. Her life was meant to follow a formula, and when Gray arrived and deviated from that formula, the fissures beneath the surface immediately began to show. His Grayness brought out the truth of her and Troy, which was that they were nothing at all.
Gretchen doesn’t know how it can turn out to be a “mistake” that she dared to want out of a marriage in which her husband not only didn’t love her but seemed to actively dislike her, but it has been the worst mistake of her life. Troy is trying to bury her, and she was unprepared. She didn’t know anyone would dare act this way, publicly, without regard for how he was perceived, for how they as a family were perceived. She thought she was safe behind some screen of propriety, but the notion that her reputation was once her biggest concern is laughable to her now.
In the world of divorce, everything is inverted.
Troy’s shiftlessness translates as: Stay-at-Home Parent. As: Primary Caregiver. Gretchen has worked seventy-hour weeks, supporting the family alone, and that translates as Troy having the right to long-term alimony (“maintenance,” the courts call it), and half of everything she is worth even beyond her income. Russian escorts, it turns out, are fairly irrelevant in the world of divorce—though in fairness so are the darts Troy has attempted to hurl her way about vodka and psychoanalytically distant mothers; about embarrassing wardrobes and high-fructose corn syrup. The law is cut and dry, and if you work, if you have money, if you are out of the home more often, you are fucked. Troy is bound to end up with at least fifty-fifty custody of Gray, but he is aiming for more and could, conceivably, get it, and she will be separated from her son and have to pay Troy child support for the privilege.
This is true: that asshole actually got to stop fucking Gretchen for years, spend that time insulting her makeup and making snide remarks about her weight, and now he is going to waltz away without ever having to work again, because everything she owns is a joint marital asset. The house will be sold, the proceeds divided.
The only thing they may not split straight down the middle is Gray, who Troy wields like a blunt instrument, tormenting her son in various fashions to torment Gretchen vicariously, like some dictator who does not know he has already won the war. Troy’s latest fetish has been to trot Gray around to new doctors, claiming to be a widower and solely responsible for Gray, and asking for strange medical tests that terrify Gray and expose him to X-rays, blood work, and radioactive dye, for symptoms the hapless boy does not possess. This seems to be some kind of game to Troy, who knows Gray will not speak up in the doctors’ offices. Gray is barely able to convey the facts to Gretchen when she interrogates him, driving her to a
hysteria that makes her weep and then feel like a heinous monster for badgering her already-terrified son. Last week, still on his soccer kick, Troy called Gretchen from Gray’s soccer practice and told her in a frantic tone that another child had accidentally knocked Gray’s eye out in a particularly vigorous game, and that they were all searching the playing field to find the eye in hopes of saving it—Gretchen, in the dentist’s chair waiting for her cleaning, started screaming, only to hear Troy cackling on the other end and calling her “unstable” for her inability to take a joke.
It cannot be real. This cannot be real. This cannot be her life.
Every night Gray is gone, Gretchen is awake until 3:00 a.m., spinning with worry, with grief over the loss of his precious, eccentric presence she so long took for granted. Every night Gray spends with her, she is awake until 3:00 a.m. with the dread of returning him to his father. She has—Jesus, the pitiable fact that she once would have loved this—dropped twenty pounds from stress. The bags under her eyes are deeper than her father’s.
“You probably don’t want to visit me,” Emily says, and this jolts Gretchen so she actually makes a squeak of fear. She is not just bitter, but jumpy—she is something not fit for public consumption. Emily sniffs and wipes her eyes, and it’s clear to Gretchen she’s been crying quietly beside her—possibly for some time?—and that Gretchen, in her self-involvement, didn’t notice.
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