Say What You Will

by Cammie McGovern

  Matthew couldn’t get over the surprising shift in dynamics. It had gone undiscussed, at least with him. By the time Sue and Jim had driven down from Menlo Park to meet the family and await the birth, it didn’t matter who was the father; Matthew had become her partner in negotiating all this. Nicole stood in the background, Max behind her, as Matthew brought the couple into the room and introduced them to Amy. “Amy, this is Sue. And Jim, meet Amy.” They each stepped forward and shook Amy’s hand. Afterward he introduced her parents, almost as an afterthought: “And the grandparents, of course. Nicole and Max.”

  Had Amy made this happen by putting him in charge? He didn’t know.

  That first visit only lasted ten minutes. The magnesium sulfate Amy was getting to lower her blood pressure made her so tired, she often fell asleep in the middle of a visit.

  After they left, Matthew kept talking. As long as Amy’s head moved in response to a joke, he knew she was listening. He bent over her pillow and asked her what she thought. “Goo—” she said.

  Because her typing was so limited with her swollen hands, he’d begun to understand her speech better. He smiled. “I liked them, too.”

  For five days, they kept up a rotating vigil at her bedside—her parents, himself, Mr. Heffernan, and a random assortment of others. Chloe stopped by, as did some old teachers. Matthew called in sick to work but kept up his appointments with Beth. He needed that anchor to make sense of everything that was happening to them.

  With Beth, he surprised himself. When he got to her office, he didn’t talk about Amy or the baby he was helping to arrange a life for. He talked about what happened with Hannah. That night behind the screen when she leaned over and kissed him. For a long time he hadn’t let himself remember it, and now he couldn’t seem to forget it. It got bigger in his mind, and worse. What if the bad things that were happening now were proof that the voice was right all along? See? I told you. If you aren’t careful, Amy might get sick and almost lose her baby. If you aren’t careful, anything can happen. Logically, of course, it didn’t make sense. His voice didn’t care about girls trying to kiss him.

  But he couldn’t get his brain to understand the difference. Being scared of kissing felt as big and panicky as being scared of germs and death. “Well,” Beth said when he tried to explain this. “They both mean something dies. The person you once were—the boy too afraid to kiss a girl—dies when you do it.”

  He almost reminded her that he had kissed girls, back when he was fine, but that wasn’t the point. Beth was right. Something did die every time you changed. Amy wasn’t the same person she used to be. Neither was he. Maybe it had already happened.

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  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ONE MORNING MATTHEW ARRIVED at the hospital to the news that Amy’s blood pressure had skyrocketed and the baby needed to be delivered at once. Jim and Sue were in the room, talking to the doctors. Nicole stood on the far side. Matthew wasn’t sure if there was time for him to speak to Amy before she went into surgery. Then he heard someone call his name.

  “Matthew, we need you to suit up.” It was Max, Amy’s father.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  He saw Nicole over in the corner by the window, red-faced and weeping. She and Amy had had their fight, apparently. The one he kept expecting that hadn’t happened yet.

  “Amy wants you to go in with her,” Max said. “They’ll hang a sheet so you don’t have to see what they do. She stays awake through the procedure. You’ll sit by her head and keep her company.”

  Matthew couldn’t get over it. Amy decided this? And told her mother?

  “You have to wear a sterile outfit. Go on—hurry up—they’ll be taking her into surgery soon.”

  It happened so quickly Matthew worried about getting his brain to catch up. Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe he’d walk into the operating room, shell-shocked and empty, his mind back in the bathroom, tapping out patterns to keep Amy alive and the baby healthy. Which was more important? In a harrowing, black tunnel of uncertainty—a baby with a fifty-fifty chance of survival—was it better to stay with Amy or follow his body’s old instincts to draw up bargains with the fates who could never really be appeased? That was the real lesson he’d finally been learning. The voice in his head was never happy, even when he slavishly followed its whims. It was never happy the way Amy was happy when he finally walked back into the room wearing his sky-blue doctor’s outfit. She smiled one of her open-mouth smiles.

  “I’ll actually be performing the surgery,” Matthew said, bending down to whisper in her ear. “So that should make you feel better. Turns out you don’t need a medical degree at all. Just one of these outfits. I never realized that but the nurse said, yeah, that’s about right.”

  The epidural drugs must have already been making their way through her system because Amy laughed in a flutter voice he’d never heard before.

  “What was that?” he smiled. “A chipmunk? Is there a chipmunk in the room?”

  Her mouth closed and he saw her eyes go serious. A nurse rolled a blue screen of the same material he was wearing across Amy’s chest, leaving them strangely alone in the crowded room. “So maybe your mom is coming around,” he whispered. “I don’t mean to get ahead of myself but I’m a little surprised that it’s me sitting here, not her.”

  Amy looked at him so he understood: My decision. Not hers.

  “Right, right. I understand. Probably she’s a little funny about blood and operating rooms, too. See—me, I have no problem with that.”

  He saw her face change: Stop joking.

  “Fine, I’ll be quiet.”

  But that wasn’t it. He bent closer, so his paper-covered forehead touched hers. “She’ll be okay,” he whispered. “Or not okay, maybe. But no worse than us. She’ll live. You did it, Aim.”

  He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did.

  And he was right.

  She was born twelve minutes later, two pounds, six ounces.

  Her parents named her Taylor, which Matthew and Amy privately rolled their eyes at, but what name would they have liked, he wondered.

  “Maybe they’re Taylor Swift fans,” he told Amy later, sitting in her room, flipping through an old issue of Family Circle. “There’s nothing wrong with that. If I was a girl, my parents were going to name me Tennille, after Captain and Tennille. Then it turned out her name was technically Toni Tennille, which they weren’t crazy about, so they passed.”

  For three days after the birth, Amy ran a fever and had to stay in the hospital, sweating out the thirty pounds of water she’d retained at the end of her pregnancy. Her hospital gowns were always either damp or drenched depending on how recently a nurse had visited and a suggested new one. They’d been to see the baby—Matthew many times, Amy once. That time they stood together and Sue lifted her off the warming pad and held her in her arms. Because Amy still had a temperature, she couldn’t get any closer than the glass window in the hallway.

  “IT’S OKAY,” she said when they got back to the room. “I SHOULDN’T HOLD HER. I’D PROBABLY HURT HER.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. When they take her out, they wrap her in about five pounds of blankets.”

  So far, he’d been amazed at what was allowed with such a small, fragile baby—toys in her isolate, cards drawn in crayon. (Crayon, Matthew thought. Doesn’t that flake off into her tiny lungs?) Most surprising of all was Jim and Sue’s strange penchant for photographing Taylor beside ordinary objects to show just how tiny she was. Her foot smaller than the first joint of her father’s thumb, her body smaller than a ruler.

  On Matthew’s most recent visit to the window (he never went in; he wasn’t going to hold her if Amy couldn’t) Jim showed him his new “discovery”: his wedding band fit around her wrist.

  Matthew smiled and gave a thumbs-up because he couldn’t think what else to do, but
privately he was disturbed. Wasn’t it a little cruel to find ways to point out how small she was?

  As he neared Amy’s room, he saw Nicole outside, sitting in a plastic chair with her eyes closed. “I’m not asleep,” she said when he tried to walk by. “You can sit here if you’d like. They’re giving Amy a sponge bath, so you might as well wait.”

  He sat. He hadn’t talked alone with her since Amy had been found. Now was her chance to tell him flat out what was wrong with him and why he was wrong for Amy. Instead she said nothing for a long time. Finally she sighed and said, “Have you seen the baby today?”

  He nodded, surprised. Nicole didn’t go and look at the baby the way the rest of them did. “Too close to home,” she’d said the first day. Meaning: Too much like Amy’s infancy. No need to relive that.

  “They’re doing this funny thing,” Matthew started, instantly regretting what he was about to say. It would only prove the shortsightedness of this whole plan. They’d picked bad parents, or ones with a demented sense of humor, at least. “Jim has his wedding ring around her wrist.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Nicole sighed. “That’s what you do when your baby’s three pounds. You don’t see her as three pounds. You see her spirit and she seems so much bigger than that. You have to take pictures so you remember—no, she really was this tiny thing who could sleep in your palm.” She turned and looked at him. “Have they taken one of those pictures? With her asleep in their hands?”

  He didn’t know, but probably.

  Nicole shook her head. “You can’t get over how something that is three pounds can change the whole world.” Her eyes were closed again. She wasn’t talking about this baby, he knew. “But it does. And in some part of your mind, she’ll always be three pounds.”

  “You did it, though,” he whispered. “She grew up.”

  Her eyes snapped open, the moment gone. “I suppose that’s right. It never feels over, though. I wish it did. For sixteen years, I slept with a monitor beside my bed. When she went away to school, I got a machine to make the sound of her breathing. I couldn’t sleep without it. Couldn’t sleep a wink.”

  Maybe this was how parenting worked. In a few days they’d have to walk away from Taylor. He tried to imagine not tracking the permutations of her fragile life, not knowing her weight or her bilirubin score. How he’d wonder and wonder and want to just call them and ask.

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  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  INSIDE AMY’S HOSPITAL ROOM, soft hands lifted her poor, crampy legs and wiped them down. For four days Amy had ricocheted through every emotion imaginable. One minute she was sobbing in self-pity; the next she was weepy with gratitude to Matthew for his unwavering constancy. “IT’S LIKE YOU’RE FINE,” she told him. “ARE YOU FINE?”

  She saw no signs of his old nervous finger twitching. His lips didn’t move anymore with silent incantations. For four days he hadn’t lined up a to-do list of places that needed to be tapped. Instead he lined up her water bottle, her nurse call button, her TV remote, and her Pathway. “Have you got everything?” he said every time he left the room. For his sake, she tried to keep up a front of good cheer. She didn’t sob in front of him or type what she really felt: “I’M A FAILURE! MY BODY FAILED ME! IT ALWAYS DOES!” She suspected he knew that she mostly cried anytime he wasn’t in the room.

  Once, he’d brought in fresh Kleenex without saying a word; another time, an eight-by-ten glossy of their prom picture, which she’d never seen before. They looked about twelve. His smile was huge; hers was mostly a mouth open so wide it was possible to see the fillings in their teeth. “NICE CUTAWAY JACKET,” she said.

  “I told you it was good.”

  He looked like a waiter. She looked like she was falling into his chest. Strange, she thought later, that he would bring a memento from one bad memory to mitigate this one. So much about prom seemed distant and small now. Except for Taylor, of course, nothing from that night mattered now. As enormous as it had been in their minds, they’d weathered the blow of its disappointment. Maybe that was the reason he’d brought the picture. Look, we lived through that, too.

  And they had.

  She’d so wanted to stun the world by emerging with a perfect baby she’d not only produced but was giving away. She even had a quote she was going to give the newspaper if anyone called to do a story: “I have been the beneficiary of other people’s kindness. I wanted to give back.” If anyone pushed the matter and asked why she hadn’t told anyone what she was doing, she planned to say: “I wanted a little time alone with the baby. I knew I couldn’t have it after she was born. So I did it this way.”

  It sounded nice and maybe it was even true, but no one wanted her story or was calling for a quote now. It was a failed symbolic gesture, the most embarrassing kind of all.

  The nurse wiped under her arms, down the inside of her arm, and into her palm. The water was cool enough to tingle wherever it traveled. She closed her eyes, and tears leaked down her face. Will I ever stop crying? she wondered.

  The nurse, a middle-aged black woman, tall and pretty, with hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, said out of the blue, “I did this, too. Gave away a baby. You think you’ll never get over it, but you do. It gets better. You’ll see.”

  Amy had noticed something. This whole time in the hospital, people talked very little about her disability. No one marveled at her Pathway or asked silly questions about whether it had opinions of its own. It was like she’d moved on from the subject. The main topic of her life. The essay that required no research at all. Doing this, she’d moved on. New problems, new challenges. A whole new world.

  A three-pound baby had arrived and changed the world.

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  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  AMY HAD TO STAY in the hospital another three days to finish out the final round of IV antibiotics. The medicine made her groggy, but also made it harder to for her to sleep at night, which meant she spent the day too tired to type much or respond to visitors. Matthew brought in books to read aloud, which seemed to help. First he brought his copy of The Awakening, which produced a smile and then an excited croak of laughter when he started to read. As he worked his way through it, she sighed and lifted her hand as if she was thinking of what she might say.

  “‘The beginning of things, of a world especially,’” he read, “‘is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such a beginning! How many souls perish in the tumult!’”

  When he finished that (it wasn’t a long book) she asked if he would go back home with her mother and find one of her old favorite books.

  Behind her Nicole sighed. “Oh, Amy, please no.”

  “MOM MAKES FUN OF IT. SHE THINKS I’VE READ IT TOO MANY TIMES.”

  “I’ll get it, Aim,” Matthew said. “I don’t mind. What is it?”

  “TELL ME—” Her hand slipped and accidentally pushed her Pathway on the floor. It clattered noisily. Matthew bent to retrieve it. He tried to make it a point not to finish Amy’s sentences or seem impatient when it was taking her a while to type out what she wanted to say. But now she was so weak, he wondered if she’d appreciate the help. Nicole must have thought the same thing.

  “Tell Me You Love Me, Junie Moon,” Nicole said.

  Matthew laughed inadvertently. “That’s the name of it?”

  Nicole nodded and suddenly he couldn’t get over the surprise of it. Mother and daughter, staring at each other, blinking back tears. “It’s a love story,” Nicole said. “Between three people who meet in a hospital. They’re all disabled. The woman is burned with acid over her face and hands. One of the men is paralyzed; the other one . . .” She looked at Amy. “What was wrong with A
rthur?” She nodded, though Amy hadn’t indicated anything. “That’s right: he has a degenerative disease. But they’ve got high spirits and a plucky attitude and they decide to move out of the hospital and set up a little home for themselves.” She looked at Amy and remembered something else. “Oh, and they get a dog.”

  Why the tears, Matthew wondered, thinking this was the nicest conversation he’d ever had with Amy and Nicole together. Like something had changed between all of them. Nicole had stopped worrying that Matthew wasn’t good enough.

  The next day he started reading the book. Every time he stopped, Amy lifted her hand and rolled it in the air for him to keep going. Her head on the pillow, her eyes closed, she might have been asleep except for these protests if he stopped reading. Eventually he neared the end and understood what the tears had been about the day before. The trio of misfits had taken a vacation together where two of them, Arthur and Junie Moon, look at each other and realize, after a year of living side by side, that they love each other. As Matthew read, his voice grew thicker: “‘Arthur thought: I wished I had loved her right from the beginning. Now so many days are lost and gone.’” Matthew’s voice wavered but he kept going. “‘Looking at Junie Moon across the room, Arthur was overcome by such a passionate shyness that he had to turn his head. Calm your heart first, he thought, or it may have its own private fit and die. Then he thought: If I touch her we will both be blown to kingdom come.’”

  It was the end of a chapter, so he stopped reading. Instead of her hand lifting in protest, it reached over and found his. They sat like for a while, hands intertwined on top of the book. If he spoke, he knew his voice would betray him. It would crack and break and he’d start to cry. So they stayed just like that, as the light through the window drained from the sky.

  Later that night, when her parents were in the cafeteria getting dinner, Amy surprised him. He thought she was asleep, and he was reading a book. He didn’t see her typing until her Pathway began to speak.