When you return to Boston the first thing you do, other than unpack your things and fill the refrigerator with fresh groceries, is get married. Because of the haste, and because as a rule neither of you cares much for fuss or ritual, the wedding is a small and secular matter, presided over by a notary whose day job is dispatching for the Boston police, witnessed only by your parents and Rodney and Amy’s brother, who since his days of smacking around their mother has quit the drugs and is now selling real estate in San Francisco. In lieu of a reception you have dinner at the Olive Garden, where you explain quietly to Rodney why you weren’t married in the church. Your father and Amy’s brother, meeting for the first time, actually seem to hit it off. You’ve never seen the old man talk so much.
A few months later you and Amy thumb-wrestle to resolve a long-standing debate over whether to learn the baby’s sex, and you inexplicably lose a best of three, so the two of you go to the OB/GYN where the tech smears Amy’s belly with gel, runs the hand unit over the burgeoning swell, and says, “It’s a girl.” These three words hit you with the sort of force you haven’t experienced since we first told you of the Destroyer of Worlds. You’re not sure if your reaction would be different if you were having a boy, but the uneasy peace you’ve made with the idea of bringing a child into a doomed world is suddenly shattered. You leave the exam room with Amy still on the table, and for the first time in this or any other life you go, as an adult, into a church. The storefront chapel down the block from the clinic is the size of a rich person’s living room, with a narrow aisle flanked by three small pews on either side, and some perfunctory stained glass. It’s a far cry from the yawning majesty of the church of your youth. You don’t know what you’re hoping to gain by coming here—enlightenment, or guidance, or courage, maybe all three—but none of those things are on offer today, at least not in the McChurch. After an hour you have no better idea than you had going in whether or not you are doing the right thing.
But ask yourself: at this point, twenty-five weeks into gestation, what does it matter? Short of a gruesome, dangerous, and morally suspect procedure onboard a specially modified former fishing boat in international waters, this thing is happening. And so your energies would probably be better spent on refining that list of girls’ names, which thanks to Amy includes such horrors as Ruby and Imogen.
Ruby Imogen Thibodeau is born by cesarean section on a rainy June morning in a birthing suite at Beth Israel. You are the fourth person to hold her, after the doctor, a nurse, and Amy, but you hold her the longest of them all. She is either the grandest thing you’ve ever done, or the cruelest.
Our contention, for the record, is that it’s possible she may be both.
Before you know it Amy and Ruby have been discharged and suddenly you are at home with fifty disposable diapers, no-tears shampoo, a handful of feeding bottles, and a seven-pound nine-ounce lump of utterly helpless flesh that relies on you practically minute to minute for its survival. No doctors. No nurses. Just you.
You feel like a fugitive. You’re convinced that every time you put your hands on Ruby you’re about to screw up irreparably. Whenever she cries, which is often, you feel to blame. When she spits up it’s because you’re feeding her wrong, and when she develops a rash it’s because you don’t change her diaper often enough. Of course, every new parent goes through this, but for you the sense of being a complete and even dangerous failure persists far longer than is normal.
For her part, Ruby does very little to help you out. Whenever she’s left with you she kicks and punches at the air, screaming until she chokes. What’s particularly vexing is that she’s a model citizen for everyone else: Amy, her girlfriends from school, even Rodney, in whose huge arms Ruby is as placid as a tranquilized turtle.
Ruby’s distaste for you is especially unfortunate because you’ve agreed to put your work with Oxfam on hold for the next year and stay at home while Amy tries to cram the rest of her graduate work into two semesters. At the end of a week you’re hoping against hope that Amy can somehow cram it into one. Out of desperation you call Rodney, whose offseason is just beginning, and ask if he’d like to come visit for a week, maybe two, a month even, or perhaps until spring training begins. He agrees, of course, because he gets lonely easily and is always looking for an excuse to come stay with you and Amy.
Still, it’s more a reprieve than a permanent solution, for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that you’d like to be able to care for your daughter with your own hands. Instead you feel like you’ve been slapped with a restraining order as you watch her luxuriating in your brother’s arms, smiling that weird toothless baby smile.
You should consider the possibility that there is something wrong with you, something fundamental and hidden, detectable only by small children. What other explanation could there be? Ruby is an absolute kitten with everyone else, even complete strangers. One of Amy’s professors comes to dinner and holds Ruby up high in the air and sings songs and makes little farting noises with her lips against Ruby’s bare belly, and Ruby cackles with joy throughout. She’s so happy she drools everywhere. The professor laughs and says, “Sorry, I get carried away with the little ones,” and when she moves to hand Ruby off you recoil as if the child were a black mamba. The professor sits there holding Ruby at arm’s length for a few beats, looking ever more mortified, until Amy throws her napkin on her plate and rushes around the table to take the baby.
“You are the father, right?” the professor cracks.
“We never did a blood test,” you answer, annoyed. The professor stares at you in incredulous horror.
“You are such a jackass,” Amy says, but because she can never not appreciate a solid zinger she’s got all she can do to suppress a smile.
After a couple more months of screeching and flailing, of spilled formula and flung puree, you are filled to bursting with heartache and confusion. You begin to resent Amy, which you know is unfair without us having to tell you. At night sometimes you get up and go to Ruby’s room and watch her sleep, marvel at how calm and still and tiny she is, and you dig your nails into the palms of your hands and wonder just what the fuck is wrong with you, what you are doing wrong. To which we say: at least you are finally asking the right questions, which is a start.
Then, just as you’re prepared to raise the white flag, Ruby establishes a sort of cease-fire. Suddenly, in your arms she no longer cries out or bludgeons the air with little fists. She accepts the bottle and spoon, albeit begrudgingly, and stops fighting during diaper changes. But there is no joy between you. When your hands are on her she is stiff and silent, her eyes always avoiding yours. Worse than this, though, is the way she returns instantly to life when Amy comes home or Rodney takes her. The message could not be clearer: she tolerates you, but nothing more.
When Ruby’s first birthday rolls around the celebration is twofold, as it’s also a graduation party for Amy. Six months earlier you would have been ecstatic, but now all you feel is a sad sort of relief to be freed from Ruby’s newfound indifference to you. You dutifully snap pictures with the digital camera as Amy helps Ruby blow out the candles, and you think now at least you’ll be able to go back to work for people who are appreciative. Immediately—and, we might add, appropriately—you feel like shit for thinking such things as you watch your daughter smear cream cheese frosting on your wife’s nose.
You have no idea what to do about any of it, so you leave things as they are and go back to Oxfam. Your old position couldn’t be left vacant, so you’re working now under the purposely vague title of senior field consultant, a position created by the vice president with your unique and varied abilities in mind. The “field” in senior field consultant means, of course, that you’re required to be out of the country a lot: Africa, mostly, but also shorter stints in drought-stricken Uzbekistan, and Honduras following Hurricane Mitch.
Water is still your thing. The contradiction between the simple math—70 percent of the planet covered in the stuff, some 326 mill
ion trillion gallons—and the frequent impossibility of getting it where it’s needed in a form that won’t kill people makes you furious. Unlike the situation with Ruby, though, this is a problem you can work with. When a dysentery outbreak kills two hundred in Kampala, you hop a red-eye to Uganda and arrive at Kampala’s city hall unannounced. You force your way into the office of the mayor, Henry Muliira, and inquire after the thirty million UN dollars that were supposed to be spent on a modern water supply network. Naturally Henry is evasive, because when his government received the grant two years ago it was promptly laundered through the Finance Ministry, then deposited in the Cayman Island accounts of half a dozen city and national officials—including him. Of course Henry doesn’t know that you know this.
Getting no answers and little satisfaction, you drive with your team to the Kamwanyi slum, the worst hit of the districts, and while the medical workers hang IV bags and issue antibiotics, you hand out bottles with built-in biological filters and explain to anyone who will listen about the importance of boiling the water from Lake Victoria before using it for drinking or bathing.
After a week, exhausted and demoralized, you call Amy. You tell her about the babies bathed in their own bloody feces, their skin shriveled from dehydration. You tell her about Henry and how you wanted to reach over the desk and dig your thumbs into his eyes, and she says, “Jesus, Junior, come home before you get yourself killed.”
The next morning you hop a scary turboprop plane to London. The earliest flight out of Gatwick with an available seat is going to Portland, so you fly there instead of Boston. By the time you touch down you’ve got six messages in your voice mail from Oxfam’s vice president, each one successively more shrill, wanting to know just what in the fuck you’re doing threatening foreign officials. You rent a car and head south on narrow, dirty Route 1, a gauntlet of filling stations, motels, Elks lodges and shuttered strip clubs. After a while you get queasy from the blowing trash and dirty half-melted snowbanks and begin to wish you’d taken I-95, but then the Boston skyline looms up gray and angular and you take the Tobin Bridge to Storrow Drive, which runs clean and brisk along the Charles, and soon you’re home.
Amy meets you at the door. She’s smiling but looks weary around the eyes. She’s got Ruby, who sports a full and lengthening head of her mother’s tight brown curls, slung over one hip. Amy wraps her free arm around your neck and hugs you hard. You lean in toward your daughter, but she turns away and you end up kissing the back of her head. She smells like A&D lotion, and under that, vanilla.
Amy invites you out for dinner to celebrate your homecoming, and you agree even though the queasiness dogging you on the drive in has blossomed, and you feel like you’ve swallowed a couple pounds of wet paper towel. She looks around for the babysitter’s phone number but you want to bring Ruby along.
“It’s getting late,” Amy says. “And she hasn’t had a nap.”
“We’ll make it quick,” you say. “I haven’t seen her for a month either, you know.”
The three of you go to the Houlihan’s at the galleria mall. It’s nothing special, but it is quick and quiet on a weekday night. Amy orders the chicken enchiladas and a beer. Though you have no intention of eating you order the bruschetta appetizer, for form’s sake. You’re more interested in feeding Ruby, who sits strapped into a high chair at the end of the booth, slapping the tabletop with the palms of her hands. She knows when it’s time to eat.
Her excitement is diminished, though, when it becomes clear that you’re the one who will be feeding her. You ask the waitress for a small bowl, whip together a combination of apple and pear purees, and offer it up. At first Ruby refuses. To the young couple in the booth adjacent to yours, it looks a lot like any other parent negotiating at dinnertime with a fussy baby, but of course both you and Amy know the subtext here. You coax, waving the spoon around, making moronic noises. Amy sips her beer and watches and resists the urge to relieve her own mild heartache by taking the bowl and spoon and feeding Ruby herself.
Eventually Ruby’s hunger wins out, and she yields with the same resentful slowness with which she accepts anything from you, from baths to bottles to Earl the plush elephant. Amy tries several times to start a conversation. She asks about Mongolia, where you were recently testing a new drip irrigation design. She tells you the nerve problem your mother was having in her shoulder has gotten worse, and the only thing the doctors can think to do is exploratory surgery. But nearly all your attention is focused on Ruby, and you barely respond, so Amy stops trying to engage you and instead gazes aimlessly around the dining room. She’s hoping that the food will show up soon so she’ll have something to occupy herself with and she won’t have to keep sitting here pretending not to notice how much Ruby loathes you, because even though life has equipped her with some fairly solid psychic armor, this has never shielded her from the rude and sorrowful shock of the fact that her daughter hates her husband. It hurts her, every time, especially when she sees how doggedly you still carry out all the simple duties of fatherhood, never wavering in your dedication to Ruby even as the kid repeatedly stomps your heart.
So this is the scene: you’re in this generic chain restaurant, waiting for a meal you don’t want, alone among the two people you love most in the world, your wife watching football highlights—football!—on the television over the bar, and your daughter displaying toward you the sort of disdain you would never before have imagined a fourteen-month-old could be capable of, when with a few loud and ominous gurgles the nauseous weight in your stomach drops violently, and you very nearly shit your pants right there at the table.
You scramble to the bathroom and fumble with your belt and finally get your pants down at the last possible instant. You writhe and moan and press your head against the cool tile wall behind the toilet. During a glorious if brief lull in the action, as you grasp your knees and brace yourself for the second round, the cause of your sudden distress comes to you, as clear as it is obvious: you’ve got dysentery.
More disturbing still, and forgive us for pointing this out but it’s important that you know: You’ve got a strain of dysentery that in the current Ugandan outbreak is holding steady at a frightening 20 percent mortality rate. In a related item, you just finished feeding your daughter her dinner. With your bare hands.
Your head feels hot and loose on your shoulders, as though it’s about to pop off and float away, and you lean back against the wall again and try to collect yourself and think. Your brain wants to spend this crucial time chastising itself for not being more careful while you were in Kampala. Also for not taking the basic and essential precaution of waiting a few days in London to make sure you weren’t sick before coming home to your wife and baby from an outbreak zone. For God’s sake you couldn’t even find a flight to Boston; it was like someone was trying to tell you to stay away, and perhaps, we would suggest, someone was.
In any event, we understand your frustration, but you need to stop worrying about what’s done and start worrying about the current set of circumstances. The instant you do this you remember the phone in your pants pocket.
It takes Amy five rings to pick up. “Why are you calling me from the bathroom?” she asks, and then, after a pause: “You are still in the bathroom, right?”
“Yes. Listen, you need to take Ruby and go to the hospital.”
“What? I just got my enchiladas,” she says. At the mention of this you picture a plate mounded with refried beans and smeared with melted queso, and your stomach bypasses the backflip and instead performs an entire parallel bar routine. “What are you doing?”
“Listen to me. I’m calling from the bathroom because I can’t leave the toilet,” you say. “I can’t put it any more plainly than that. I’ve got dysentery and I just fed Ruby her dinner. Are you following me?”
“Oh,” Amy says. “Oh, shit, Junior.”
“Very funny. Plus I’ve kissed you several times. We held hands, et cetera. So you need to get your things together and go—” You stop
short, paralyzed by a cramp like God Himself reaching in and squeezing your guts.
“Junior?”
“I’m here,” you say. “Go to the hospital and tell them what’s happening. They need to start you both on antibiotics.”
“What about you?”
“This can’t go on forever,” you say. “At least I hope not. Sooner or later it’s got to let up some, and when it does I’ll catch a cab and follow you there. Go to Mass General. They’ve got the best infectious disease people.”
“Junior, stop being ridiculous,” she says. You hear the sound of sil verware on porcelain as she stands up from the table. “I’m coming in there. We’ll wait for this to pass and get you cleaned up. Then we’ll all go together.”
And though you didn’t want to, you now have to explain to her about the unusually high mortality rate, and how it is due in part to the fact that this strain of shigella is drug-resistant. You also have to remind her that, as with most diseases, the burden of mortality is borne in large part by two demographics: the very old, and the very young. You do not need to explain to her the significance of this last fact, as it pertains to your situation.
Amy agrees to go without you, but before leaving she says she’s going to tell the restaurant manager what’s going on, in case you need help. She hangs up before you have a chance to protest this, which is fortunate, because ten minutes later you pass out from dehydration and electrolyte imbalance, and if not for the manager reluctantly coming in to check on you who knows how long you would have sat slumped against the side of the stall.
The manager calls an ambulance and you end up not at Mass General, but Mount Auburn. The ER doctors want to ask you questions, but you’re delirious from fever and dehydration, so they hang a bag of saline and wait for you to come around. When you’re able to tell them what’s happening they decide to take a fecal culture, which afterward you wish they’d gone ahead and done before bringing you back to lucidity. While they’re waiting for the results of the culture they start you on the standard treatment for dysentery, which is ampicillin, and which you tell them is not going to work. But like most doctors they are (a) passionately in love with their protocols, and (b) deaf to most of what comes out of their patients’ mouths, so ampicillin it is.
Everything Matters! Page 31