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Best Behavior

Page 13

by Wendy Francis


  Lily can’t imagine a day when she’ll ever be less in love with Roger Landau. But will he be open to the idea of a new baby? Truly? Or does he assume that chapter in his life is closed? Alison has unwittingly hit the nail on the head: Lily can never be a true mom to Dawn and Cody. They won’t let her. But her very own baby? She has so much love to give. Maybe it’s time for her and Roger to create their very own family. There’s also a deep, almost subterranean stirring that’s risen in her consciousness over the last few months, one that she wasn’t even aware existed: she has discovered that she’s weirdly jealous of the one bond that Roger and Meredith still share: their children. Because no matter how much Roger loves Lily, no matter how much Roger and Meredith may seem estranged, they will always, always be the twins’ parents. It’s a permanent rope twinning them together till death do they part.

  Nothing Lily does can change that.

  She waits for Alison to say more, but at that moment Demi Moore sits down at her spinning wheel to mold a clay pot.

  “Oh, this is my favorite part,” her friend exclaims, and together they watch Demi rain tears all over her beautifully spun creation while Patrick Swayze attempts to reach out to her from another world, desperate to make a connection. Lily thinks she can relate.

  NINE

  Friday morning

  “Was that a raindrop?” Meredith holds out her hand, surprised. “No one said anything about rain today. Tropical temperatures, maybe, but rain? Absolutely not.” She frowns up at the sky, still sunny and blue, but turning gray at the edges, like an abstract painting.

  “Nope. Definitely not rain.” Joel is so determined that the day go smoothly, Meredith suspects he’d probably deny it if a thundercloud were to open up directly over his head.

  “No rain,” confirms her mother. “Only the humidity.”

  It doesn’t seem fair that, with everything else going on today, they should have to contend with inclement weather. Maybe it’s just her imagination playing tricks on her. They’re retracing their steps from last night, ascending the hilltop that leads to the main quadrangle on campus, where the ceremony will take place later this afternoon. Despite the swig of antacid medicine she swallowed back at the hotel, Meredith’s stomach still feels queasy from last night’s cocktails.

  She undoes the button of her blue blazer and allows herself some extra breathing room. Underneath is an ivory silk sheath, which she hopes strikes the right note of classy and elegant. Beside her strolls her mother, who is wearing her second Talbots dress of the weekend, a kelly-green tea-length dress, and her strand of pearls. Meanwhile, Joel, dressed in a navy blue sports coat and pants, definitely looks the part of a proud father.

  To glance at the three of them, people might assume they’re just another well-to-do family, come to witness the long-anticipated graduation of a namesake, a Conrad III or a Thelonious, Junior. No one would guess at the real story. The more time Meredith spends in the NICU, however, the more she realizes that most families are not as pulled-together as they might appear. She has watched the most sophisticated, elegant couples dissolve into pieces while cradling their babies in the NICU. Others, who seem inseparable and bonded by their love for their child, divorce only a few years later (she knows this because she keeps in touch with many of them through a hospital website for NICU parents). Sometimes the mothers who appear the worst off—unshowered, without a spouse, occasionally high on some unknown substance—are the ones who intuit almost immediately what their babies need. The NICU tests people like no other setting, and Meredith has watched parents struggle at their absolute nadir. It is both humbling and astonishing to bear witness to such profound heartbreak, such deep-seated love. Nursing has given her a richer appreciation for the Byzantine layers that create a person, a marriage, a family.

  “Allergies,” she says now, as she sniffles and pulls a tissue from her purse to dot her eyes. But she guesses she’s fooling no one. A mess since this morning, she can’t stop tearing up, thinking about her own babies. Waterproof mascara would have come in handy, had it occurred to her. And Visine. Perhaps some thoughtful proctor at Bolton will have left miniature fanny packs filled with such items on the parents’ graduation seats.

  When they reach the quadrangle at last, Joel lets out a whistle. “Well, well. Who invited the queen?” Spread out before them is row upon row of white chairs set on a bright green lawn, pretty enough for the Princess of Wales to host a tea party. Overnight, the entire courtyard has been transformed. Large pots bursting with white tulips and lavender hyacinth dot the lawn, and the air is thick with their sweet scent. “Looks like a royal wedding.”

  “It’s lovely,” agrees Carol. “Very distinguished.”

  “And look, Mom, they even got the lawn to match the color of your dress,” teases Joel.

  Carol eyes the field and then her dress. “So they did. Well, that was good planning on my part, wasn’t it?”

  On a wide stage up front a blue banner proclaims, Congratulations Class of 2020! Flags with Class of 1990 or Class of 1965 delineate sections where alumni are supposed to sit. Meredith experiences a pinch of relief that her class isn’t celebrating a milestone anniversary this year, so there’s no pressure to sit with her classmates. Not that she’s kept in touch with any of them, anyway.

  “I’ll say this,” her mother quips. “Bolton knows how to do commencement right. Though they’ve stepped it up a few notches since your day, honey.” She fingers her pearls into a loose knot. “I don’t remember such fancy chairs, do you?”

  “No, I think we had bleachers.” Meredith is only partly kidding. It’s very possible they had bleachers; she doesn’t recall.

  The only drawback about the entire setup, as far as she can see, is that most of the chairs sit out exposed in the open, which means they’ll either be subjected to punishing sunlight or intermittent rain showers during the ceremony. Already a few families comb through the aisles, deliberating over which seats are the best. “Looks like first come, first served,” says Joel.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty much a free-for-all.” Meredith removes her jacket, suddenly feeling warm. “That’s why the kids suggested we get here early.” Right now the clock tower reads five past noon. They have nearly an hour to kill before the seats fill up. “Where should we sit, Mom? You choose.”

  “Me? Oh, I don’t know, honey. Somewhere near the front, I suppose. Preferably out of the sun.”

  “Maybe up on the right?” Meredith points to a section partly shaded by a giant oak.

  “Suits me.” Joel trots over and throws his blazer across two chairs and sets his coffee tumbler down on a third before another family can grab it. Their seats are positioned a few rows back from the cordoned-off area for graduates, and Meredith flops down in one, double-checking their sight line to the podium.

  “Perfect,” she declares.

  “Should we save some chairs for Roger and his gang, too?” Joel eyes the empty row behind them.

  “Oh, um, I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it.” Meredith thinks back to their conversation about today, but neither of them mentioned anything about sitting together for the ceremony. “I think they’re on their own. That’s okay, right? I mean, we’re going out to dinner with them afterward.”

  “That’s plenty.” Carol crosses her arms over her chest, as if to say, Why would you even consider such a thing? There’s no need to sit with your ex-husband’s family!

  Meredith and Joel exchange amused looks. “Why don’t we leave our things here to save the chairs, and then we can walk around campus, if you’d like, Mom. I know you said you wanted to poke your head into a few of the classrooms?”

  “Yes, let’s do that. Good idea.”

  They’re about to set off exploring when Meredith’s cell phone chimes in her purse. “Probably the kids,” she says, rummaging through her bag. “Wondering where to meet up.” It’s astonishing how often her phone gets los
t in her purse when it holds so few items—her wallet, hand sanitizer, a pack of tissues, some granola bars, a few pens and some old CVS receipts. (Unfortunately, she’s not one of those women who think to swap out their purse for a fancier handbag on special occasions.) But when she finally does land on her cell, she sees it’s the hospital calling. Uh-oh. “Excuse me, I better get this.” Pressing a finger to her ear, she steps off to the side for a sliver of privacy.

  “Hello?”

  “Meredith? Hi, it’s Jill. So sorry to bother you on graduation weekend. Do have a sec?”

  “Sure, what’s going on?” A slight panic rises in Meredith’s chest.

  “Well, our friend Mason here doesn’t want to settle down, and I was wondering if you have any tricks you might want to share before I give up?”

  Meredith offers a silent prayer of gratitude that this is the reason Jill is calling. While many of the babies she works with are preemies—some with veins so fragile it’s almost impossible to prick them with an IV—their NICU has recently experienced an uptick in infants born to moms with addiction. Meredith knows that every twenty-five minutes a NAS (Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome) baby enters the world, yet doctors have come up with few ways to comfort these children beyond the obvious. Mason was born at thirty-eight weeks to a mom high as a kite on heroin, and Meredith is his primary nurse.

  Mason’s adorable face pops into her mind—dark curly hair, huge brown eyes—and, apparently, screaming his head off. Every baby in the NICU requires inordinate amounts of care and love, but there’s nothing quite as wrenching as watching a newborn struggle to wean himself off a drug he never asked to be addicted to in the first place. Unlike their moms, who can immediately start methadone treatments to get clean, infants have few options to ease withdrawal other than some morphine drops and as much one-on-one contact as possible. The “drug babies,” as they’ve dubbed them in the NICU, are the ones who require the most hands-on attention, who crave human touch or a lullaby. Around day three, when the drug begins to truly work its way out of their system, the hard work of getting clean commences. Mason is on day five.

  “Oh, poor Mason. Poor you,” Meredith commiserates. “You’ve tried dipping his paci in sugar water?” Meredith knows from experience that Jill will have already done this, but she’s ticking through her own mental checklist as she talks.

  “Yep.”

  “And all his vitals are fine?”

  “Everything looks good on his monitor, but he won’t stop crying.” And as if on cue, Mason’s screams ratchet up a notch on the other end. She can picture Jill calling from just outside the NICU room, where cell phones are banned. When Meredith was with him on Wednesday, Mason seemed to calm best when she gave him a sponge bath. It’s a little thing, but maybe it will help.

  “Did you try bathing him? He seemed to like the water when I had him on Wednesday.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ll try that. Anything else?”

  Meredith wishes she were there for Mason right now. What if he’s grown so accustomed to her scent over the last few days that only she can calm him? “Oh, that grandpa who volunteers on Mondays?” Meredith scours her brain for a name. “Jonathan? I think that’s his name. He seemed to work miracles with Mason when he was admitted on Monday. Sang him some kind of lullaby. What was it, again?” She stares up into the big oak, whose green leaves form a latticework overhead, and tries to call up the melody. “Oh, I know. ‘Mockingbird.’ Maybe try that? Or, even better, see if you can get Jonathan to come in today?” Jonathan is one of several elderly volunteers who visit weekly to hold the NICU babies, ensuring that they get plenty of one-on-one contact. Meredith knows the benefits of skin-to-skin contact. She has witnessed it firsthand, a stressed baby’s heart rate calming as soon as it’s held close to its mother’s chest. Conversely, she has seen new moms, tense and uptight, who send their baby’s heart rate soaring.

  “Poor Mason. Can the doctor give him any more morphine?”

  “Not likely,” Jill says. “Okay, thanks, I’ll try the bath, then Jonathan. Gotta go.” And with that, the line goes dead in Meredith’s hand.

  Joel and Carol are waiting for her at the edge of the green. “Everything okay?”

  Meredith shakes her head. “That was the hospital. One of our heroin babies is going through a difficult withdrawal.”

  Her mother lifts a hand to her chest, as if this is the worst news possible. “How awful! Do you need to go back?”

  “No, Jill’s handling it. She wanted to know if I had any special tricks for soothing him since she started caring for him today.”

  “I hate to judge,” says Carol, which fetches a laugh from Joel.

  “Who, you, Mom? Judge?”

  “But, honestly,” Carol continues unfazed, “How can a pregnant woman do that to her child? Doesn’t she know that if she’s addicted, her baby will be, too?”

  Meredith has had this conversation with enough people over the years to know better than to take offense. “It’s why they call it an addiction, Mom. These are women who often can’t afford to get help, who come in having never received any prenatal care. I’m sure if they could stop, they would, for the sake of their baby.”

  What she neglects to also say is that, in recent years, this type of drug-addicted baby has become more prevalent in their unit. New Haven prides itself on being a cultural hub with Yale University, but the seedy side of the city, which no one likes to talk about, exists, as well. New Haven holds the dubious distinction of having made the national news a few summers ago, when more than a hundred people were treated within thirty-six hours for overdosing on K2, a synthetic type of marijuana. The city’s homelessness problem only compounds the drug problem.

  In any case, Meredith’s argument clearly falls on deaf ears. As open-minded as her mother pretends to be, Carol’s opinions about mothering remain fast and true. No one should endanger a baby, which is precisely what addicted mothers do. When her cell phone rings again, Meredith remembers that Mason has a special blanket with his mother’s scent that might also help. But it’s Cody, calling to check in before he showers and heads over to Melon Hall. The graduates will be lining up for the processional, now only forty-five minutes away. Meredith drops into an empty chair on the green.

  “Good luck, honey,” she says. “We’ll be watching.”

  Her own babies are minutes away from striding across the stage, their diplomas in hand. It’s something she has envisioned only a thousand times.

  “The kids?” Joel asks when she clicks off, and she nods. “You okay?”

  She nods again. “I think so.” But that sick feeling in her stomach won’t go away.

  “Come on,” he says softly. “Your mom wants to check out the classrooms.” And, indeed, Meredith can see Carol already striding ahead, her gray hair bobbing across the lawn. Her heart in her throat, Meredith reaches for her husband’s steady hand.

  * * *

  Dawn half walks, half crawls to the shower, the only way to describe her clumsy trek to the bathroom. It’s much too early to be awake for anyone who had as much to drink as she did last night. And yet, a quick glance at the clock reveals it’s already eleven thirty. She has precious little time to get ready.

  “Claire?” she calls out. But no one answers. Probably at her boyfriend’s. Even Matt didn’t want to sleep over last night for some reason. She bangs her knee on a box blocking the middle of the hallway. Ouch! Crap! Maybe that’s why. Their room is a fortress, practically impossible to navigate with all the packed boxes lining the hallway.

  After the party, she and her friends met up with Matt and his buddies at the Burren. An Irish band was playing, and they’d stayed till closing time, throwing back beer after beer. Somewhere in the evening, right around the time Cody arrived with Brad and Toby, she remembers holding up her hand, signaling no more, but right about now, she’s pretty sure it didn’t make any difference.

  Oh, n
o! Her stomach lurches, and she barely makes it to the toilet in time. A moan escapes from somewhere deep inside her. Great. She’s done what she promised herself she wouldn’t do: given herself a fabulous hangover for graduation day. She grabs a towel and wipes down the seat. When she turns on the shower, she has to whack the handle a couple of times until a full spray shoots out. (It’s been this way the last two months, but neither she nor Claire has bothered to tell anyone because what’s the point since they’re leaving anyway?) She steps into the warm spray and steadies herself, gripping the walls for a moment.

  When she dips her head under the water and flips her hair up, a spell of dizziness slams her, and Dawn has to gently lower herself in the tub, closing her eyes until it passes. When she opens them again, a spider is dawdling in the corner. She watches it lazily make its way up the wall. If it were her roommate, Claire would scream. But Dawn doesn’t mind cohabiting with arachnids, who serve an important role in the life cycle. In her post-alcoholic haze, she wonders if spiders need water. Everything needs water, doesn’t it? But can they swim? She laments the fact that she never took biology, which might have put such details easily within her grasp. As it is, vague facts, such as female spiders will sometimes eat their mates, stay with her from a long-ago watched National Geographic show. Beyond that, the spider presents a mystery to her fuzzy brain.

 

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