Early Morning Riser

by Katherine Heiny

  Jimmy was still watching her. She licked her lips and tried to think. “Where’s Freida?”

  “She went to the cafeteria,” Jimmy said. “She said she’d bring back breakfast for both of us. She called Duncan, and he said he had to stop just north of Grand Rapids, that’s how bad the storm is.”

  Jane felt something inside her relax. Duncan was safe, and the baby was here. Perhaps Jane would not always be denied the happiness that other people had. She smiled at Jimmy.

  “Wait until you see Glen!” he said. “She’s the prettiest baby in the world.”

  “I’ll bet she is,” Jane said gently. “But her name isn’t Glen. It’s Harriet.”

  Jimmy frowned. “Duncan told me you were naming her Glen, like the grocery store.”

  “That was just a joke.”

  “Oh.” Jimmy’s face fell.

  “It’s hard to tell with Duncan,” Jane said.

  “Usually Duncan tells me the truth,” Jimmy said. “Usually with him, I understand. It’s not like with other people where I get so confused—”

  “Jimmy, it’s okay, really.” Jane put her hand on his arm.

  “No, it isn’t,” Jimmy said bitterly. “I screw everything up. I got lost coming back from the cafeteria and missed the birth, and you probably didn’t even want me to stay—”

  Just then a nurse wearing purple scrubs came into the room wheeling a clear bassinet. Jane could see the baby in the bassinet, wrapped in a white hospital blanket with a blue-and-pink stripe and wearing a tiny white newborn hat.

  The nurse was wiry-haired, small-eyed, stern-faced—another reminder that just because you do this magical, mind-blowing thing of giving birth, it doesn’t mean the world is suddenly filled with perfect people from Central Casting.

  “Well, Mother’s finally awake, I see,” the nurse said. (Apparently she was also judgmental.) “Now, Mother, if you’re ready, I’ll bring Baby over and we’ll see about feeding her.”

  Jane held out her hands for the baby, but the nurse said, “First-timers do better with the football grip. Take down the right sleeve of your gown and lift your arm.”

  Jimmy retreated quickly to the sofa in the corner.

  Jane slipped her arm out of the hospital gown. The nurse pressed the baby against Jane’s side and then clamped Jane’s arm down like someone lowering a lever. “There, hold her just like you’re running a touchdown, and support her head with your hand.”

  Jane was aware for the first time that her breasts were swollen and hard, hot as baked potatoes. “Hello,” she said softly to the baby.

  “Remember to bring Baby to your breast, not the other way around,” the nurse directed. “And point nose to nipple.”

  The words breast and nipple felt like darts the nurse was throwing at Jimmy. Jane could almost hear them striking him. Thwock. Thwock. She wished he would go out in the hall.

  Jane held the baby to her breast, but the baby turned her head away.

  “Oh, now, none of that,” the nurse said. She wrapped her hand around Jane’s breast and steered the baby’s face until she began nursing. “There. That’s it. Now, Mother, you should watch Baby’s mouth to see when her tongue goes down—that means she’s ready to latch on to the nipple.”

  Tongue, latch, nipple. Thwock. Thwock. Thwock.

  “Use your other hand to support and squeeze your breast,” the nurse said. Thwock. Thwock.

  The nurse was still gripping Jane’s breast. It felt more like the nurse was giving the baby a bottle than it did like breastfeeding. The baby nursed for maybe a minute and then dropped her head back, her eyes closed. Finally, the nurse withdrew her hand. “Give her a couple of minutes and then try the other side,” she said to Jane. “Tickle her feet to wake her if you need to.”

  “Thank you.” Jane transferred the baby to her other arm and pulled her hospital gown back up.

  “I’ll be back to check on you,” the nurse said, “and they’ll be bringing breakfast around soon.” She left the room, her shoes squeaking on the floor.

  Jane settled the baby more securely into the cradle of her arm and tucked the blanket around her. The baby was sleeping now, her head tilted back, as relaxed as a sprawled teenager or exhausted partier. Jane had no intention of waking her.

  Dr. Skywalker had told her once that all newborns look alike. Jane thought that was (a) not a very nice thing to say and (b) untrue. Completely untrue. This baby—Jane and Duncan’s baby—looked like no other baby before. Remarkably unique, uniquely remarkable. Her eyelids were pale peach, her eyelashes perfect tiny spikes. Her skin was the color of malted milk, her cheeks were softly rounded, and one was marked with a perfect shallow dimple. Dark wisps of auburn hair showed from under her newborn hat, and her eyebrows were finer than threads. Her lips were as full, as lush, as any movie star’s, and she had Duncan’s straight nose. Jane could never have enough of looking at her.

  She glanced up at Jimmy. He was sitting on the couch, his chin in his palm, staring determinedly out the window at the whiteness. His hair stuck up in back, and he had heathery brown stubble on his chin and cheeks—something Jane rarely saw, even though she lived in the same house with him. For once, he looked his age—more than his age. He looked old. Worn down and excluded. Excluded, as always.

  “Jimmy,” she said softly. “Jimmy, come here. I want you to be the very first person to meet Glen.”

  2016

  They were all sitting around the breakfast table—Jane, Duncan, Jimmy, Glenn, and twenty-month-old Patrice.

  “Patrice, she don’t like cinnamon toast,” Glenn said. She had a formal way of speaking, often saying “I am” or “I did” instead of yes. And she liked to form sentences in a vaguely French way: “Jimmy, he turned on the TV.” “Daddy, he went outside.”

  Glenn’s full name was Glenn Freida. Jane had insisted that they put that name on the birth certificate instead of Harriet Antonia. She didn’t want her daughter to be one of those girls who raised her hand at the beginning of the school year and said, “I go by Drew,” even though it said “Evangeline Constantina” on the attendance sheet. Duncan’s mother took the news that they weren’t naming the baby after her with her usual aplomb. “I wasn’t all that crazy about sharing my name anyway,” she said. “And Glenn is a beautiful name! With a name like that, she could be a movie star or a brain surgeon or an ambassador.”

  Jane’s money was on president of the United States. Glenn was as lovely a four-year-old as she’d been a newborn. Her wavy, chin-length hair was pale auburn and her eyes were flawless China blue. Her mouth was still a rosebud, and her face as perfectly round as a peppermint. She carried herself with poise and dignity—since babyhood, she had preferred dresses to pants, skirts to shorts, nightgowns to pajamas. She was vivacious but not attention-seeking, pretty but not vain, smart but not a show-off, popular but not bossy. The world would be good to Glenn. You could already tell.

  Then there was their younger daughter, Patrice Marigold, who was nowhere near as sunny as her name. She had the same auburn curls as her sister, but Patrice’s hair was shorter and often clinging to her scalp with dampness. Her eyes had darkened immediately to a hot, glowing amber-brown, and her cheeks were perpetually pink and chapped-looking, her lower lip almost constantly pushed out in a pout. She had spurned all of the pretty hand-me-downs from Glenn and would consent to wear only two outfits: a miniature gray terrycloth sweat suit, or striped leggings and a pink fleece hoodie with kitty ears. If neither outfit was available, she cried until mucus covered her upper lip like a banana slug. (The outfits were almost always available.) She seemed to give off a baking heat at all times, even though she rarely ran a temperature. She went through each day with every muscle tensed for either offensive tackle (should, for example, Glenn pick up the coveted lavender hairbrush) or defensive maneuver (should, for example, Jane approach with a warm washcloth). She had tremendous difficul
ty with any and all transitions. Never mind significant transitions like home-to-daycare or playground-to-car. Sweater-on to sweater-off could send Patrice into a complete meltdown. It was for this very reason that she seldom wore a coat. She was a late walker and an even later talker, although by no means a quiet child. Her tantrums were the stuff of legends already, her screams like those of a howler monkey. (Jane could imagine that, in twenty years, one of the workers at the Duck Duck Goose daycare would say, “Remember that Ryfield kid? She was the worst!” and the other worker would say, “What? I can’t hear you!”) Scratchy and out of sorts was Patrice’s default setting, and stubbornness her dominant personality trait. So why was it that just looking at Patrice made Jane’s heart, like the Grinch’s, grow three sizes and made the true meaning of motherhood shine through, until Jane felt the loving strength of ten mothers, plus two?

  Patrice was wearing the pink hoodie now, and it was getting a bit small for her, making the kitty ears sit too far back on her head. She looked like an annoyed cat who was ready to swipe someone with her claws out. She sat in a high chair between Jane and Duncan, and every few minutes, one of them would put a small number of Cheerios on her tray, or a few banana slices, or a tiny fistful of raisins. If they put too much food on the tray at once, or a piece of food Patrice did not approve of, she would clear the decks with a swipe of her chubby forearm.

  “No, Patrice doesn’t like cinnamon toast,” Jane said. They had learned that the hard way.

  “Aggie’s here,” Jimmy said, and they all looked out the window. Aggie was parking her giant custard-blue SUV in the driveway.

  “Agg-ee,” Jimmy said to Patrice. “Can you say ‘Agg-ee’?”

  “Ghee!” Patrice shouted.

  “How about that!” Jimmy said. “Isn’t that something?”

  He said these exact same sentences whenever either Glenn or Patrice did or said anything. Literally anything. After four years, it had begun to wear on Jane’s nerves. But Jimmy had proved to be better with babies and toddlers than she had dared hope. He’d lost his fear of dropping them almost immediately and had carried them everywhere—even now he carried them home from the park or playground if they asked—and the strength and endurance in his slight body surprised Jane.

  “Ghee!” Patrice shouted, and clenched her fist around a banana slice. “Ghee!”

  “How about—” Jimmy said, but the sound of the front door opening interrupted him.

  The front door banged shut—Aggie never knocked—and a moment later, Aggie appeared in the kitchen doorway. She was wearing a ruffled white blouse and a full red skirt and should have looked like a waitress in a German restaurant, but instead she looked as she always did: flaxen-haired, creamy-skinned, freshly ironed. Jane was suddenly conscious of her own faded blue bathrobe and unbrushed hair.

  Aggie stood in the dining room doorway. “I have the worst news.”

  “Good morning to you, too,” Duncan began. “Come on in and—”

  “Rusty Benson died yesterday,” Aggie said.

  Duncan grew very still. It seemed to Jane that every cell in his body dimmed for a moment. “I’m very sad to hear that,” he said at last.

  Aggie sighed. “Tiny Abbot told me on Facebook this morning.”

  Jimmy frowned. “Who’s Rusty Benson?”

  “More!” Patrice shouted, and Jane absently set some Cheerios on her tray.

  “He introduced me and Duncan back in high school,” Aggie said. “And now he’s passed away. Tiny said he complained of chest pains and told his wife—Duncan, you know he married that girl from Houghton—that he felt more comfortable sitting up and that he’d sleep in his recliner, and she came down the next morning and he was dead of a heart attack.”

  She sat down abruptly in the only free chair at the table, which was next to Duncan. “I’m just so upset, I don’t know what to think. It seems impossible that we’ll never see him again, or talk to him, or hear his voice on the phone.”

  “Oh, well, now, you haven’t spoken to Rusty since we got divorced in nineteen ninety-one,” Duncan said. He had picked up his fork and sounded like his usual self again. “You said back then that you were sorry you’d ever met him and that you’d never forgive him for introducing us.”

  “I know,” Aggie said. “But I thought he would always be there, waiting to be forgiven.”

  Duncan took a drink from his coffee cup. “Mighty thoughtless of him to die before you got around to that.”

  “Don’t be awful,” Aggie snapped. “You know what I mean.”

  “How did he introduce you to Duncan?” Jimmy asked.

  Aggie looked slightly mollified and settled into her chair a little. “Well, Rusty had asked me to a party, and on the way there, he said he wanted to buy some beer. We were both seventeen, but Rusty said that he knew someone over twenty-one, a man who would buy alcohol for underage kids.”

  Jane had never heard this story. She wished with all her heart that it surprised her.

  “So Rusty took me over to Duncan’s apartment,” Aggie continued. “And there was Duncan, sitting on a ratty old beanbag chair. He said he couldn’t buy beer for us because the folks down at the party store had gotten wise to it and refused to sell to him and now he had to drive clear to Copper Falls for alcohol.”

  “They banned me from the store entirely,” Duncan said in a faintly aggrieved voice. “I tried to reason with them, saying, ‘Okay, look, how about I buy a case every other day? Then you’ll know it’s just for me,’ but oh, no, they wouldn’t listen.”

  “Anyway, Duncan said we could stay at his apartment and help him drink what beer there was,” Aggie said. “So we did, and Rusty got very drunk and passed out on the couch. Duncan had to drive me home, and we stayed in the car outside my house until my father began flashing the porch light on and off, and the next day we were a couple.” She shook her head, evidently at her own foolishness, but she looked faintly nostalgic, too.

  “I had to go to senior prom when I was twenty-five years old,” Duncan said to Jane. “Felt like a damn fool.”

  “Oh, honestly, can you ever think of anyone but yourself ?” Aggie’s voice was sharp. “Who cares about prom now that Rusty’s dead? His funeral is Friday. His funeral.”

  Her voice broke on the last word, and her eyes grew very shiny.

  “Oh, now, Aggie, don’t cry,” Duncan said, and he put his hand on her arm.

  In all the time Jane had been forced to spend with Aggie—years and years of meals and movies and house-hunting and cocktails and picnics and random meetings—Jane had never seen Duncan touch her. He’d never kissed her cheek or shaken her hand or helped her on with her coat, and now here he was touching her bare arm! Jane felt an actual pain in her chest, as though a drop of hot oil from a frying pan had landed there, sizzling.

  “It’ll be all right,” Duncan said. “Is the funeral in Eagle River?”

  Aggie blew her nose on a paper napkin. “Yes.”

  Duncan’s hand was still on Aggie’s arm. “Then we’ll go and pay our respects,” he said firmly. “Of course we’ll go.”

  * * *

  —

  It seemed to Jane that when Duncan had said we’ll go to the funeral, he could have meant a lot of things. It could be that Duncan meant he and Jane and Glenn and Patrice and Jimmy and Aggie and Gary would go. But there was no reason Jimmy would go to the funeral of someone he didn’t know. The girls wouldn’t go because Patrice didn’t do well on long car journeys—Eagle River was a six-hour car ride—and Glenn wanted to have a perfect attendance record at preschool, so someone would have to stay home with them. (Someone who wasn’t Jimmy.) And anyway, Jane’s class had a field trip on Friday, and she never missed a field trip. So it quickly became apparent that only Duncan and Aggie and Gary would go.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” Duncan kept asking Jane.

  “No, o
f course I don’t mind if you go to your friend’s funeral,” Jane said. Which was true. Or sort of true. You know, in theory, it was true. What she minded were all the texts Aggie was sending Duncan.

  His phone kept making its double glass-clinking sound, and Duncan would pull it out of his shirt pocket, read the text, grunt noncommittally, and put the phone back in his pocket. Or roll his eyes and turn the phone off completely. Or smile a little and text something back, and then leave it out on the counter where Jane could grab it as soon as he left the room and read the texts herself.

  Arvid Ballard is coming.

  Clancy Gross will be there if he can get off work.

  Misty and Silas McKinny will be there.

  Scratch Thompson is inviting people over after the wake.

  Nixie Singleton and Skipper Mendez are going to do the readings.

  Clove Everett has reserved a block of rooms at the Holiday Inn.

  Summer Barnes is arranging for flowers to be sent in everyone’s name.

  Jane gave a sort of righteous snort. First of all, why did everyone have such idiotic names? Who the fuck names their child Scratch? And did Duncan really need to know all this? Or even if he did need to know it, did he need to learn it from Aggie? Did she—

  Duncan’s phone rang just then. It was Aggie. Jane answered just to remind Aggie who was in charge here.

  “Hello, Jane, dear,” Aggie said. “I was calling to talk to you, actually.”

  “Oh,” Jane said. (Aggie could cut the legs right out from under you sometimes.)

  “It’s about the funeral,” Aggie continued. “You know Gary’s not going—”

  “Gary’s not going?”

  “Oh, no,” Aggie said. “He never goes to the Upper Peninsula. It confuses him.”

  “Why—”

  “And then there’s his bursitis,” Aggie said.