by Marly Swick
***
The day they brought Teddy home from the hospital, they had sat on the front porch and taken turns taking pictures of each other holding him. After maybe a dozen pictures Ed said, “We don’t have any of the three of us, you know, together.” And he had run next door to ask old Mrs. Knapp if she’d mind helping them out. The widow Knapp, as Giselle had dubbed her, was crazy about Ed. She was always calling him over for some fresh-baked pie or bread pudding. But Mrs. Knapp’s middle-aged daughter answered the door and told him that her mother was dead. She had died of a heart attack the night before, in the same hospital where Teddy had been born. Despite Ed’s protestations, the daughter had insisted upon coming over and taking the pictures herself. Later, after the woman left, Ed said he didn’t want to get the pictures developed. He felt as if it would be bad luck. And Giselle had said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” In those days they argued constantly, about everything.
A couple of days later Giselle had dropped off the roll of film at the drugstore to be developed, and then forgot all about it in the ensuing chaos and exhaustion of new motherhood, until the drugstore called and reminded her a month or so later. The next morning she picked up the photos in their yellow envelope, distracted by Teddy’s crying in the store, and didn’t look at them until she got home and Teddy was in his crib napping. Then she collapsed on the sofa and opened the envelope, eager to see the first photographs of her beautiful new son.
But instead of a wrinkly pink infant in a blue receiving blanket, there was a tall, gangly high school boy in a mortarboard and graduation robe, grinning and waving his diploma like a blank check. Confused, she sat frozen for a moment, as if staring at some time-lapse photograph of Teddy already grown up. A sharp pang of loss shot through her, and she shuffled rapidly through the other snapshots, looking for pictures of her baby, only to find more of the graduation boy. The boy and his parents, hugging. She could almost hear the teary-eyed mother saying, “It seems like just yesterday . . .” The boy and his siblings, friends, girlfriend. The roll ended with some shots of the crowd, the stage, and what appeared to be a brand-new car — a shiny red convertible, the graduation gift, no doubt. Suddenly Giselle was sure the kid was a spoiled brat. A cocky, callow future frat boy. It was an eerie, unsettling experience. She shoved the pictures back into the envelope and checked the name on the outside label: Bettendorf, J. The frazzled clerk had grabbed the wrong envelope. A stupid, understandable mistake. Tomorrow, bright and early, she told herself, she would exchange the pictures. She had heard a whimper then and leaped up — feeling suddenly young and energetic — to check on her son, relieved that the future still lay ahead of them, that it wasn’t too late. Everything was still possible.
Teddy snapped the picture and handed the sticky camera back to Giselle. It smelled like chocolate.
“Okay, my turn,” Ed announced. “I’ll take one of you and your mom.” He motioned Teddy over to where Giselle was standing in front of some rosebushes.
“I don’t feel so hot,” Teddy said as he stood beside her. “My stomach hurts.” He didn’t protest when she brushed his sweaty hair out of his face and felt his flushed forehead.
“Ready?” Ed said. “One, two, three.” He clicked the shutter just as Teddy bent over and vomited on the grass.
“Great picture,” Ed joked. “Real nice.”
“Too much cake and excitement,” Giselle said to Ed. She was massaging Teddy’s bony shoulders, sharp as coat hangers, while he retched again, spattering her sandals. But she didn’t move away. She just kept rubbing little circles on his back and whispering soothing words: “It’s all right, you’re fine now, you’re gonna be all right.” Ed ran into the house and returned with a glass of 7-Up.
“I’m okay,” Teddy said, taking a sip and spitting it out.
“Get out of there!” Ed yelled at the dog that was sniffing around the mess on the grass. He picked up the hose coiled by the side of the house and sprayed the area clean. Giselle danced a little jig as he skittered the cold spray over her bare toes.
“Wow” — Teddy perked up — “you think we’ll actually be able to see the barf in the picture?”
Giselle rolled her eyes and Ed laughed.
It was dusk. The guests were starting to leave. “So long, Ed!” a large man with red suspenders called out. “Hell of a shindig!” Ed walked over to shake the man’s hand and say good-bye. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Sharon sidle up to them, all smiles, carrying a huge wooden bowl that had contained potato salad. Good potato salad, almost identical to Giselle’s mother’s recipe.
“I want to go with you,” Teddy said to her. “Can I?”
Giselle was surprised. “You mean, spend the night?” She reached out and pushed his sweaty hair out of his eyes. His damp skin still looked faintly green.
He nodded.
“Sure,” she said. “But you better bring a sleeping bag.”
“Okay.” Teddy ran inside the house.
When Ed walked back over, she cleared her throat and said, “Teddy wants to go back to my place for the night.” She tried to sound casual — like no big deal — but her throat squeezed shut. She stared down at her muddy toes, blinking back the tears. “He’s getting his sleeping bag. Do you mind?”
Ed put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a hug. “There’s nothing like Mom when you’re feeling sick.”
Teddy ran out dragging an old faded blue sleeping bag in the dirt behind him. She thought of the matching orange sleeping bags Dan had bought them for the soccer team’s camping weekend. Just last fall. She wondered if Dan had taken his to Vermont or if it was in the storage locker.
“Jesus Christ, Teddy. Pay attention.” Ed grabbed the sleeping bag, rolled it up, and handed it back to him. “Come on. I’ll walk you guys to your car.”
The sunset was fading out, the final flickering fireworks, as they walked down the gravel drive to the magenta Tracker. Giselle had parked it off by itself where it would be safe from careless people banging into it. She was looking forward to having her own car back, even if it was just an old piece of shit — although she was dreading going back to California to get it. One day at a time, she told herself as they climbed into the jeep.
“This thing looks like a goddamned toy,” Ed said, slamming the passenger door shut. “I’ll take my chances on the Harley any day.”
“Me, too,” Teddy said.
“We’ll give you a call tomorrow,” she told Ed. Her new phone still wasn’t hooked up. The phone company had screwed up. Tomorrow, they’d said, for sure.
As she started the engine, Ed gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Sounds like crap,” he said. “Tell your sister she needs new plugs.”
“You tell her yourself,” she said, shifting the car into gear.
As they jounced along the unpaved drive, she cursed softly and winced at the loose gravel dinging the doors. She would take the car to the car wash, she thought, before she returned it to Vonnie, who had really been very generous. At the bottom of the hill, she glanced in the rearview mirror. Ed was still standing there, waving at them as they turned onto the main road. Teddy yawned and slumped in his seat.
“Big day,” she said.
He nodded and yawned again.
“You know, I’m really glad you decided to come with me.” She smiled at him. He smiled back sleepily. His eyelids seemed to descend in slow motion. He was holding his belly like a little Buddha. “How’s your tummy?” she asked.
“Okay,” Teddy said. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
***
By the time they pulled up in front of the apartment house, he was sound asleep, dead to the world. She didn’t know what to do. It had been a long time since she had attempted to lift him up; she didn’t know if she was strong enough. She ran up the steps and unlocked the door to the apartment. She had left all the windows open, and the smell of fresh paint had already begun to fade. It was a pleasant smell, like the smell of just-sharpened pencils or newly cut firewood. She went
back out to the car. Teddy moaned a little as she unbuckled his seat belt and slid her arms under him, but he didn’t wake up. She bent her knees and then slowly straightened her back, staggering a bit until she found her balance, her center of gravity. She was surprised by how easy it was. She felt as if she could carry him around the block if she had to, although she was certain she couldn’t budge a seventy-five-pound dumbbell if her life depended on it. It must be something to do with the distribution of weight, she thought, some law of physics. Or metaphysics. She remembered that phrase from the law book: the capacity to bear loss.
Inside, she set him down in one of the wing chairs next to the fireplace. Teddy frowned and mumbled something she couldn’t make out. “Shhh,” she whispered, “it’s all right. I’m going to make up your bed now.”
As she arranged his sleeping bag in the corner of his new bedroom, she began making a mental list of what she needed from the grocery store in the morning. Cereal, milk, peanut butter, bread, Oreos, noodles, apples. The list was endless. It seemed to her that they needed everything. She went into the bathroom and, as she brushed her teeth, thought: Q-tips, bubble bath, Band-Aids, ointment. She thought about looking for a scrap of paper to write the list down on. She knew she should, but somehow she didn’t feel like it. It almost didn’t matter what she wrote down. Since there was nothing they didn’t need, anything would do. She couldn’t very well go wrong. In its way, it was a comforting thought.
Even though it was still early, not long past dark, she was tired. It had been a big day and she hadn’t slept last night. She dragged the borrowed futon from her room into Teddy’s bedroom. She just wanted to be next to him. Teddy was snoring softly. His nose sounded stuffy. Children’s Tylenol, orange juice, tissues. Tonight, she had a feeling, she was going to sleep like a baby. On the street outside someone set off a burst of fireworks that lit up the window. A series of loud pops, like gunshots, followed by a long, shrill whistle. Teddy snored on, oblivious to the commotion. She thought of Koko’s Kitten, Trina’s favorite book. Koko’s full name was Hanabi-Ko, which means Fireworks Child in Japanese, and then shoved that, all of it, out of her mind. She forced herself to focus on her list. Napkins, popcorn, salt and pepper. The items formed a singsong lullaby in her mind — sugar, flour, rice — and she drifted off to sleep, still adding to the list, as if she were counting sheep.
EPILOGUE
His mother is lying in a chaise longue by the swimming pool, reading some courtroom thriller she picked up at the airport. Teddy had thought about making her reservations at an elegant B and B on Gilbert Street, just around the corner from the house he shares with three friends, including Cathleen, his now ex-girlfriend, but his mother said she would like a pool. And now he’s glad she’s not staying there, because that’s where Cathleen’s parents are staying. He still can’t believe that Cathleen picked the weekend before graduation to break up with him. He still can’t believe it, period. All weekend he has been dragging himself through the festivities, this great rite of passage, weighed down by this heaviness in his chest; he feels as if he’s sitting in the dentist’s chair with one of those lead X-ray aprons pressing against his heart. But instead of shielding him from harmful rays, it is trapping all the bad stuff inside.
His mother catches sight of him and waves her sunglasses in his direction, smiling brightly. In her black one-piece suit from this distance, she looks like a college girl. He sits down in a chair under a red-and-white umbrella, feeling constrained and conspicuous in his good khaki slacks and white shirt. He bends over and gives her a peck on the cheek. “I thought we were supposed to meet Dad and Sean at six,” he says, glancing pointedly at his watch; it’s already ten of six.
“I guess I lost track of the time. It’s so great to just relax.” She sighs and sits up, tossing her personal effects into a beach bag. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes. Meet you in the lobby or up here?”
“The lobby, I guess,” he says, watching some beautiful blonde sitting in the shallow end of the pool talking earnestly with her handsome gray-haired father. The town is overrun with graduating seniors and their parents.
His mother reaches out and touches his shoulder. “How are you doing?”
“Fine.” He shrugs. “A little tired. I was up till three.”
Even though he had been determined to hide the fact that anything was wrong, his mother had picked up on his emotional state at the airport, before her suitcase even appeared on the luggage carousel. This weekend would be the first time they were all together in five years, since the summer before he left for college and his mother moved to Phoenix. Teddy wanted it to be pleasant. When she asked him what was wrong, he said, “Nothing. I’m just tired from finals.” But he knew she didn’t believe him. And by the time they left the airport parking lot, he had confessed that Cathleen had dumped him; she wasn’t moving to Ann Arbor with him as they had planned. He was going to have to go alone. His mother had looked at him with that sad, worried look he hated. He knew she still thought of him as a child at risk, a statistical long shot.
His dad and his stepbrother were staying at the Hawkeye Inn in Coralville. His dad thought the Holiday Inn, the only hotel in Iowa City proper, was too pricey. “Let your mother, the hotshot lawyer, stay there,” he’d joked on the phone. Sharon, his father’s wife, had stayed in Lincoln with Chloe, her nubile daughter from a previous marriage, who had a big crush on Teddy. His mother’s new beau, as she called him, had also discreetly chosen to remain at home. Hal was considerably older than Teddy’s mother — though his exact age was a well-kept secret — and not much to look at. He was balding and soft around the edges but incredibly energetic and magnetic somehow — a prominent retired trial attorney who could mesmerize a jury, allegedly hold them in the palm of his hand. Teddy had to admit, when he visited them last Christmas, that his mother had never seemed so present and casually affectionate. And girlish, almost giggly.
The Holiday Inn pool is on an upper deck that looks out over the walking mall. Down below, Teddy sees his father and Sean walking toward the hotel, holding hands. As they near the fountain, Sean nearly trips on his shoelace on the uneven cobblestones. Teddy feels his throat knot up as he watches his dad kneeling down to tie Sean’s sneaker laces. He knows that his father saved him. His mother did her best — and Teddy doesn’t think that anyone could have done better under the circumstances — but he doesn’t think he could have made it without his dad. With his mother, there was always that shadow of tension, that hairline crack in her smile, the faint limp in her laugh. Everyone else seemed to think his mother’s recovery bordered on the miraculous. When it came to bucking up and shouldering onward, his mother was Exhibit A. He knows how much she loves him, but he also knows what an act of will that love was, how she worked at it, like an alcoholic: God grant me the serenity to love my son one day at a time. Don’t let me blame him for what happened, not even in a moment of weakness. She made him aware of the fact that the heart is a muscle. He used to imagine he could see her heart working inside her chest, pumping and flexing. For his mother, loving — at least loving him — required strenuous daily exercise. Whereas his dad just loved him. Like it was no big deal, as if he didn’t have to think twice about it.
Teddy stands up and hollers over the railing, “Hey, Dad! Sean!”
His father looks up and waves while Sean keeps scanning the sky, as if he thought a pilot in a passing airplane had shouted his name, until their father picks him up and points at Teddy on the balcony. Then Sean’s face breaks into a big grin, and he waves like mad. It breaks Teddy’s heart. Even though he is hardly ever home, Sean is crazy about him. He follows him around like a devoted puppy nipping at Teddy’s heels.
When Sean was born, Teddy was relieved that it was a boy. He thought it would be easier for his mother to take. And for him. He still dreamed about his baby sister all the time, even after a decade of therapy. Cathleen had said it was what made him special, different from the other guys, the reason she had fallen in love with him.
Despite the fact he hadn’t told her about Trina until they had already been living together for a month. And only then because he’d had a nightmare in which he’d called out her name in his sleep, and Cathleen had woken him up, demanding to know who Trina was, with such a sick, wounded expression in her eyes that he had to tell her. Then when she poured all this love and sympathy on him, he felt guilty and pushed her away. He didn’t feel right being somehow rewarded for having done something so terrible. He deserved less love, not more. It was all backward.
It was the same with his admission to medical school. On the application they asked you to write a personal essay on why you want to be a doctor. He had started out writing the standard bullshit — how he had changed his major from philosophy to pre-med because he realized he wanted to make a concrete contribution to society, blah blah blah. But suddenly he found himself writing about his baby sister: How many lives will I have to save to equal my little sister’s? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? At a young age, I learned the hard way what every doctor needs to know. That every life is unique and irreplaceable. The admissions officers fell for it big-time, not that it wasn’t true, but somehow he came away feeling like a con man. He thought about sending the essay to his mother, but he keeps putting it off.
Since Cathleen announced she isn’t moving to Ann Arbor with him, he has been plagued with second thoughts. Wild fantasies of bumming around India and South America, or buying an old Harley like the one his dad used to have and just taking off with no particular destination in mind. He envies his housemate Keith, who is going to film school in the fall, some new high-tech program near L.A. He wants to be a special effects wizard. Teddy has already put him in touch with Uncle Todd, who, as Teddy gets older, strikes him more and more like some perpetual kid with his computer models, blowing up cities, creating new galaxies. Except for the fact that the big studios are in California — a place he never wants to see again — it sounds like an appealing way to earn a living. But Teddy feels he has forfeited his right to a frivolous career. Most of the time he still thinks he genuinely wants to be a doctor for all the right reasons; other times he worries that it was just the most obvious solution to the problem of his life.