by Bill Heavey
Jane, Molly, and I developed rituals for Lily. We’d light a tiny candle next to the taller ones at the dinner table. We’d light one each Sunday we went to church. At Christmas we perched an angel of golden foil on the urn on the mantelpiece that held her ashes. At Christmas dinner, we counted our blessings: My parents had been spared their lives in the fire; Molly was doing well in school and had a lot of good friends; Jane and I had not fallen apart. In some ways, the year had been hardest for my father. He’d lost his house and only grandchild. Then his younger brother and only sibling, John, had died a few months later. Then Granny had finally let go. She’d lived to be ninety-nine. My father was eighty. But losing your mother makes you an orphan no matter how old you are. His doctor had suggested Dad have no more than one drink a day to cope with low blood pressure and the fainting spells he sometimes had when tired. Never one for half-measures, he’d stopped drinking entirely. At Christmas dinner in my parents’ rented apartment, we spiked his eggnog with rum. About halfway through dinner, his face lit up for the first time in months and he started telling stories. My sister and I looked at each other and winked. Liquor, in controlled quantities, can be a wonderful thing.
Before Christmas, Jane, Molly, and I also went to the NOVA SIDS Alliance memorial service, preceded by a potluck dinner, at a local church. There must have been two hundred people crammed into the downstairs activities room at dinner, some still raw and tearful from losses only a couple of months old, others commemorating children who had died more than fifteen years ago. It was like a civilian version of the survivors of D-Day, whole families who had been through the fire and lived to tell about it. It was all right to cry, to laugh, to hold the babies of people you’d never met before but who knew how badly you might need to hold one. At the service upstairs, the name of every child who had died was read aloud as each family came up to receive a glass Christmas tree ornament with the baby’s name on it. There may have been a dry eye in the house. I don’t know. I couldn’t see well enough.
Within three months after Lily’s death, Jane and I had gotten back in touch with Families for Private Adoption groups, reactivated the phone, and started running ads again. I was surprised at how much better the simple act of calling newspapers and dictating the copy felt. At an FPA meeting, I talked to a woman who had adopted through an agency in Oklahoma City run by a woman lawyer who herself had adopted two children. We called them and got the information packet. It was an agency, which meant less control. But we’d learned a lot in the past year about how little control one really has in life. Besides, if you didn’t adopt, you paid only the $150 registration fee. The deal with the agency was that you made up two booklets about yourself—a brief family story with pictures—and left it on file with them. When prospective mothers came in, they looked through the books and selected the ones they liked. By November, we had ours on file, complete with pictures of us, Molly, the house, and Snoop. We said we favored an open adoption, in which the child would have the option of contacting the mother when he or she was old enough. We figured Molly was our strongest card and played her up big-time.
Once the books were gone, I pestered the attorney, Julie Demastus, with phone calls every two weeks. Had anybody looked at our book? Did they seem interested? At FPA meetings, I kept hearing of couples whose ads in the newspapers had paid off. How had they gotten lucky and not us? You just have to hang in there, we were told. Then one morning, the phone rang. It was Julie. “I think we’ve got you a mom,” she said. Pam (not her real name) was thirty-three, seven months pregnant with a girl. Every adoptive parent hopes for that dream candidate, the honors club cheerleader who got too friendly at a keg party with the captain of the football team (who was also the winner of the science fair). The actual women putting children up for adoption tend to come from grittier circumstances. Many grew up in single-parent homes, have low-paying jobs, and have histories of medical or substance abuse problems. None of this necessarily means there will be any problems with the children. We had seen proud parents showing off impossibly healthy, beautiful babies at Families for Private Adoption meetings whose biological mothers sounded like rejects from The Blair Witch Project. Pam was a good candidate. She’d kept all her appointments with the adoption agency (a good sign), had a steady job, and was healthy. “She just doesn’t think she’s mommy material,” Julie told me. “She picked your book and wants to talk to you all.”
The conversations went well. Pam was an unassuming woman of Italian-Irish ancestry, five foot four, 120 pounds. She had a smoker’s voice but said she had all but quit once she found out she was pregnant. She’d been in Alcoholics Anonymous for years and worked in a coffee shop at a hotel. She’d hooked up with a guy briefly, decided he was trouble, and dumped him. He had red hair and was of middle height. She didn’t know where he was now and didn’t want to know. She’d never really considered abortion. She was looking for parents who would expose a child to religion but not shove it down her throat. The Unitarian Church sounded good in that department. She liked how happy Molly looked. Pam had grown up with four different stepfathers. She especially liked that Jane and John had worked things out around Molly so well after the divorce. It sounded like she had limited faith in the institution of marriage.
The baby, a girl, was due in February, less than three months away. There was a lot to do before then: letters of reference, fingerprints, an updated home study, copies of our criminal and child abuse backgrounds from the state of Virginia. After two attempts at fingerprinting, the authorities gave up on Jane. Her prints were so light they didn’t show up on the most sensitive electronic equipment. “There are criminals who’d kill for your hands,” the guy operating the machine said. The baby was scheduled for Caesarean section at Mercy Health Center in Oklahoma City on February 25. Pam said it was okay if we wanted to be at the hospital. Jane could even be in the delivery room. We could take the baby immediately and spend the night in the hospital with her. Then we’d need to stay in Oklahoma City for two weeks while the interstate compact was completed, allowing us to take the baby back to Virginia pending final adoption.
We made plane reservations, found a cheap hotel with a kitchenette to save on restaurant expenses, and started throwing baby names around. We liked Emma. I told Jane I was almost afraid to get too excited about this. I was afraid it would somehow backfire, that Pam would change her mind. “I know what you mean,” she said. We called Julie Demastus for reassurance. “Look, nothing’s done until it’s done. But I wish all the girls we got in here were as stable as Pam. I think you’ve got yourself a daughter on the way.”
The baby decided she wasn’t on anybody’s schedule but her own. On the morning of February 18, 2000—a year and a day after Lily had been born—the phone rang. It was Julie. “You better get on a plane and get down here. Momma’s water just broke. We’ll be at the hospital with her. See you there.” Jane had commitments she couldn’t cancel and couldn’t get away until the next day. It took me four hours and a lot of pleading to ticketing agent supervisors, but I found a flight out that evening at five o’clock.
At 2 a.m., a cab brought me to the hospital. Five minutes later, I was holding a tiny baby girl, a pink bow in her bright red hair. A photo taken by one of Julie’s staff shows a man suddenly plucked from a sea of grief, smiling and almost crying at the same time. Pam lay in bed, exhausted, with tubes in her arm. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and she smiled. ”I am so happy to meet you,” I told her. “The baby’s beautiful. We’re gonna take the best care of her we possibly can. Jane’s flying in tomorrow.” We talked for about half an hour. The baby had been born about five o’clock and weighed five pounds, ten ounces, just two ounces above the official cutoff for “low” birth weight. She was almost as big as a loaf of bread, but squirmier, quite red in the face, and not at all pleased to have been kicked out of the womb. Finally a nurse said Pam needed to get some sleep. “I’ll come see you in the morning,” I told her. I wheeled my new daughter d
own the maternity ward in a sort of plastic tub on a trolley and into a room with a bed for me. The nurse showed me how to fold and tuck the blanket to bundle her up tight and warm, gave me some bottles of formula, and closed the door. “It’s just you and me now, honey,” I said to the baby. “You and your daddy.” I curled up on the bed in my clothes and moved the trolley so she was just inches away. Every two hours, Emma woke, her thin cries signaling hunger. She was so tiny that half an ounce filled her stomach and sent her back to sleep. I had never really seen newborns. Her vulnerability was heartbreaking. I was hooked. With Lily, who had come to us at six weeks of age, the bonds had taken some time to form. But Emma was mine from birth and I was hardwired to her cries. I had the feeling that the smallest sound from her would wake me from any sleep. She managed the trick that all newborns do, looking ancient and brand-new at the same time. I woke again and again to inspect her in the night. “Emma,” I said. “Do you like that name?”
Everything went fine until I saw her first bowel movement and went running down the hall for help. “Come quick,” I panted. “Something’s wrong. She just crapped and it looks like coal tar.” The nurse followed me down the hall, inspected the diaper, and cooed at the baby. “Good girl!” she said. “Your first poop!” She explained that all the stuff that accumulates in the baby’s bowel during its stint as a fetus is called meconium and that it’s supposed to look like that. That’s fine. But somebody should give fathers a heads-up. I’d thought she was defecating something EPA would have to dispose of.
The next morning, I took the baby in to see Pam, who was daubing at tears when we showed up. “I’m a mess,” she said, smoothing her hair. I told her she looked fine. Just then a nurse came in. “Stitches hurtin’ you, hon?” she asked. Pam nodded. “We’ll fix you up,” said the nurse. A minute later she emerged with a shot of Demerol. Pam rolled her eyes. “What I really want is a cigarette,” she whispered to me. I waved the nurse off and took her aside, explaining she was about to administer the wrong drug. “Gotcha,” she said. Then she went over to Pam. “Darlin’, I can’t let you smoke in here.” Pam’s face fell. “On the other hand, if you were to light one up when I walk out of here, there’s nothing I could do about it.” She winked and left. I rummaged in Pam’s purse, lit a Marlboro Light for her, and opened the window. After that she calmed down. I told her about Jane and Molly and the dog, about my work and the neighborhood and my parents. She said not to worry about her changing her mind. She was sure. “I knew as soon as you picked her up last night that you’d be a good dad,” she said. She was still crying, though. I didn’t pry about why she wasn’t keeping the baby. I figured she had her reasons.
Jane came late the next day, Saturday. The hospital wouldn’t release Emma until she downed an entire ounce of formula at a sitting. That didn’t happen until Sunday, so Jane and I spent a night with her in the hospital room before the three of us moved to the hotel we’d found out near the airport. We went to every Kmart in the greater Oklahoma City area looking for a certain baby sling that Jane had seen and wanted. We never did find it. We watched TV and took videos of the baby and tried to get her to smile at us. But Emma was tired from her journey into the world and mostly wanted to sleep. That was fine, too. We were exhausted, elated, anxious to go home and show Emma off to everyone. Her birth had delivered us back to the world of the living. It was a good place to be.
SIDS parents are understandably anxious about their subsequent children. Some of us spend thousands on high-tech monitors for our babies to wear that go off like car alarms when the child’s heartbeat becomes irregular or the child fails to breathe for a certain number of seconds. Some of us virtually put our lives on hold—not letting the child out of our sight—until that first birthday’s deliverance from the danger zone. What Jane and I learned from SIDS is that the world is a dicey place where calamity tends to blindside you. “I just figure lightning’s not going to strike twice in the same place,” Jane said not long after we got Emma home. “Otherwise, I’d go crazy with worry.” We do put Emma down on her back, though she tends to roll over almost immediately onto her stomach. We don’t put blankets, pillows, bumper pads, or anything else that she could suffocate against in her crib. Instead we bundle her in sleepers against cold nights. And we bought a two-hundred-dollar HALO mattress that has tiny holes in it and a fan that circulates air continually (it’s the only anti-SIDS product endorsed by the National SIDS Alliance). We’ve hired a wonderful woman named Nancy to come into our house and take care of Emma thirty hours a week. We let my mother babysit often. We’ve become board members of the Northern Virginia SIDS Alliance chapter and have taken a course on peer counseling so that we may one day offer hope to a couple suddenly kicked into that parallel universe of loss. That hasn’t happened yet. But enough babies still die of SIDS that we will probably need our training. The phrase “sacred duty” comes to mind when I think of helping a couple in free fall after a SIDS death.
We still light a tiny candle for Lily at family gatherings. We still have pictures of her up on the walls. We want Emma to know about her sister when the time is right. “I figure we’ll just tell her the truth,” Jane says. We recently attended the dedication of a small garden created in her honor at my parents’ church in Glen Echo, Maryland. We have yet to decide what to do with her ashes, which are still in the blue urn on the mantel.
We’ll never get over losing Lily. We don’t want to. Her short life is forever part of ours. But we can remember her without automatically suffering now. We spend more time looking forward than back. Emma is learning to crawl and we are beginning to childproof the entire house. She turns her head when we call her name. And when she crawls fearlessly to the edge of our bed, sure that nothing can harm her, when we play with her in the mornings before getting up, we tug her gently back to safety and nuzzle the special spot on her neck and listen as she dissolves into low baby giggles. It is the sweetest sound on earth, a sound that binds us to this child forever, a sound that makes broken hearts whole again.
KILLING TIME
Hunker down, brother. These are the pale months, the time when Mother Nature looks over the evidence and sentences sportsmen to ninety days in the hoosegow for having had too much fun the rest of the year. So now we tough it out, waiting on April and the promise of decent fishing.
How bad is it? Put it this way: When the mail dives through the front-door slot at noon, the dog and I both bark. The day’s haul includes a death threat from the Book-of-the-Month Club, three credit card offers that no reputable institution has any business extending to someone with my history, and an ad for one of those new drugs that turn you into a babe windsurfing over an endless wheat field. I feed the dog last night’s tuna casserole, which she polishes off in three bites. For my own lunch, I nuke a small venison steak to defrost it, add butter, and slap it under the broiler. And I remember the coping mechanisms that can help get a man to spring: Tune up your fishing tackle. After years of working on today’s ever-more-complex fishing reels, I have finally perfected this technique. Get an empty egg carton. Better yet, get two. Disassemble your favorite reel. Using an old toothbrush and a rag, clean each screw and gear, then put them in sequential order in the pockets of the carton. When you’re through, carefully close the carton and put it in the trash. Order yourself a new reel.
Daydream. When winter blues render you incapable of even getting up from your chair, at least you can evoke the most memorable moments from last year’s hunting and fishing. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll find that these are generally not the hero moments of boating the bass that could swallow a cantaloupe or bagging the buck that everybody in camp hoped would be theirs. No, they will be moments of humiliation or grace or camaraderie that stick in your mind for other reasons, ones that you might not be able to explain. Here are my two.
In early October, I was on stand just at the end of legal shooting light. I’d heard a deer feeding just beyond some thick bushes, its feet
shuffling slowly in the leaves. I froze, waiting for it to come. While I was waiting, a little yellow bird flitted up from the scrub beneath my stand and landed on my chest. It stayed there for about five seconds, fluffing its feathers and whispering something to itself before flying off. I could actually feel its tiny weight against my chest. The deer never came. But I felt the heartbeat of the woods that day.
One January morning before dawn I got nailed going 60 in a 45 mph zone in a rural town on my way to the last deer hunt of the year. “What’s the hurry?” asked the cop. Since he had me dead to rights, I opted for the truth. “Just another overanxious deer hunter,” I said. He handed back my license and registration and stood there a moment. “Well,” he said at last. “You aren’t the first one I’ve caught. Just slow down, okay?” I was stunned. It was the first ticket I’d ever beaten in my life. I shot my hand out the window and shook that cop’s hand. Hard.
Oops. The smoke alarm has just gone off by the kitchen. Lunch is served. Hang in there, brother. Spring will be here before you know it.
BUBBLE BOY
Matthew, the seven-year-old son of close friends, was having trouble in school, his mother confided to me at his birthday cookout. Matthew, the kid whose IQ was pushing four digits? She saw the look on my face and rolled her eyes. “Not that kind of trouble. It’s the social part.”
He’d been different from the beginning—a grown-up intellect attached to a child’s body. Matty had the self-defense instincts of a manatee. He was the kind of boy that schoolyard bullies sharpened their teeth on. The thought of it made me wince. She told me that at recess, while the other first graders played cops and robbers, Matty tried to organize the stragglers into his current obsession: a reenactment of Stonewall Jackson’s valley campaign.