by Kelly Harms
From my angle in the passenger seat, John looks heavier and more tired than I remember. “I wasn’t.”
“You were just pretending?” I ask him.
“I was . . . faking it until I made it,” he says.
I consider this, trying and failing to hold his words at arm’s length. “But what if we’d had that baby,” I hear myself ask. “Things would have been so different. I cannot imagine you would have left me with a two-year-old in diapers. We would have stayed together.”
John looks straight ahead. “I do think about that sometimes.”
“So if I’d stayed pregnant, you would have kept me?” The question comes out squeaky, and I can hardly believe I’ve just spoken that horrible fear aloud. But then, haven’t I wondered if it was true a hundred times?
John sighs. He seems so exhausted all of a sudden, and I flash back to the way he dragged himself through the house looking weary and sighing all the time, just before he left. “I didn’t, you know, ‘not keep you,’” he tells me. “It’s not like I returned you to the store with my original receipt.”
“Well, then, what did you do? I lost our baby, and then you left me.” My throat feels tight. I feel the hurt rushing back. I blink hard and try to swallow back tears.
“No,” John says. “I left everything. You were part of everything. You, the house, the town, my family, my friends, and yes, my kids. All of it. I thought I just needed a short break—just like you—only it took me three years to come back, not two months.”
“The two things are nothing alike,” I snap, though of course I have compared us in my mind time and time again.
John shakes his head. “No, they’re not. You’re a better parent than me. A better person. In fact, as far as I can tell, all you want to be in the world is the person opposite of me.”
I can see he is wounded. But he doesn’t stop talking.
“You see the sadness of that, right, Amy? Not only have you not moved on in three entire years, you’ve defined yourself solely and completely as the woman I martyred.”
The woman he martyred.
The words make me furious. The words are true.
“Why did you come back here, John?” I ask. I should have asked him that months ago. I should have pushed him harder. Made him explain himself. Stopped tiptoeing around, terrified of . . . what did I call it? Upsetting the applecart? The hell with the goddamned applecart. “Did you come back for me?”
He lets out a long breath. “I came back for them. Joe and Cori. And I do love you, Amy. After eighteen years of marriage, I think I’ll always love you.” He drops the wheel with his right hand and reaches over to give my arm a familiar squeeze. “I thought maybe when I was back I’d find the best thing for the kids would be to try to recover our marriage, and the idea hardly felt like a chore. You’re as beautiful as ever, and an amazing mother, and you’ve been more patient with this process than anyone else would have been in your place.”
I shake my head. It may have been what I wanted to hear at the beginning of the summer. Now it sinks like a stone. “I don’t want that, John.”
He nods, and I think I see just a trace of regret in his eyes. “I know that now. And I don’t think the kids need it either.”
He’s right. I breathe in, try hard to breathe out. “So then what?” I ask him. “What is your plan?”
He hesitates for a second. “I think when the summer’s over it’ll be time for me to head back overseas. I’ll miss the kids terribly, but I’ve got to get back into the office eventually, and there’s no question you guys will be totally fine after I’m gone.”
His words hit me like tumbling bricks. I wanted the truth. I thought I was ready for the truth. But now that I have it I feel beaten. Not just beaten. Completely taken apart. Nothing has changed. I have left behind Daniel and Talia and New York and everything I felt I could be there, to come back to the exact same way things were before John walked back into all of our lives.
Only worse, because now Joe, Cori, and I will know firsthand exactly what we were all missing.
—
For a while after that, John and I drive in silence. A city of pain built inside my heart throbs mournfully. The buildings constructed of regret and loss, the streets paved in fear. In my mind I walk through it. Wade through the hurt of what he just said, the monuments to heartbreak I have built inside me, traveling back through time.
The day I left Daniel in New York.
The day I saw John at the drugstore.
The day I found out about Marika.
The day John called from Hong Kong, saying he was never coming back.
The day I went in for my thirteen-week appointment and there was no more heartbeat.
It is at this last monument—a secret known only to John and me—where I can go no further. They asked me at the time, did I want to run DNA tests on the fetus? Did I experience any cramping or bleeding? Did I want to know the gender? Were we planning to try for subsequent pregnancies? But I was so stunned it was all noise. I had never miscarried before. I’d had no reason to think I would now. I was taking folate, hadn’t had a drink since week four, was appropriately sick, tender breasts, eight pounds of new weight. I rattled these statistics off to the doctor to try to convince her that she was wrong. I told her, as if it mattered, as if she didn’t know, that I had been pregnant for almost three months. I had already started the baby’s 529 plan.
“Your phone is ringing,” says John, back in the car, back in the present, back in the place where the baby wasn’t born and the husband didn’t stay and I spent the last five years holding on to those hurts like my life depended on it.
“What?” I ask.
“Your phone. That buzzing sound, it sounds like a phone set on vibrate.”
“Oh. Yes, you’re right. It’s my phone.”
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
I don’t make any move to do so. It could be Daniel. Or Talia, home from Miami and wondering where I’ve gone. Or Matt, upset that I’ve bailed without a word. Or any number of other people I’ve let down.
Then it stops ringing and starts again. I get the phone out in time to see the voice mail pop up. An area code I don’t recognize.
The message transcribes, slowly, slowly, and at last I read it. Then I drop the phone, stunned. “John, turn the car around. Turn it around now. Cori’s been hurt.”
“What?”
“There, use that turnaround there. Go back to the college.”
“What happened?” he demands, but he is signaling left, slowing down at a sheriff’s thruway.
“We have to go to the hospital,” I tell him, and there is new terror in my voice. “It’s Cori.” I grab him by the shoulder. “She hit her head on the diving board, and she hasn’t woken up.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When Cori was newly three years old, we told her the big news. Brace yourself for a brother or a sister, we said. This is going to be exciting, but disruptive too.
At the time, Cori was speech delayed. We tried not to overreact, but we were first-time parents, and everything slightly out of the ordinary could be a portent of something dire, so I wasted hours of my life fretting and reading up on delays and harassing the poor kid with tongue exercises. Cori, the rebel that she was, responded by talking even less and pointing at things and saying, “Dat,” instead of using what nouns she actually had in her wheelhouse. The speech therapists told us to pretend not to know what she was indicating. By understanding her every whim without words, they told me, I was creating in Cori learned helplessness. Maybe so, I thought. Maybe this was all my fault, as the mother. Or maybe she just didn’t feel like talking yet, and we could all get off my back.
But I was cowed into following the experts’ rules. So when Cori pointed at my womb region and said, “Dat,” I said, “Hmm?” and she said, “Baby?” and I said, “Yes, there’s a baby in there,” and she said, “Cori don’t want dat baby.” And I told myself, well, it’s a nice long sentence, so that�
��s something. But I was scared.
With Joe, John and I hadn’t been going crazy trying to get pregnant, but it had taken longer than we’d expected for it to happen, and we’d gotten to that point right before you go to the doctor to see if something’s wrong. We actually had the appointments made. John wanted me to go first. Then if I “checked out,” he’d go. He justified this by telling me that “eggs get dusty fast,” and let me tell you, this kind of talk did not make me excited about the work that goes into conception. Sex was getting bad, and I was feeling resentful, and foreplay had transformed into comments like “Let’s get it over with” and “It’s go time, like it or not.”
Then, thank goodness, I missed my period. I took a home test, and it was positive, and we waited three months, and then we told Cori, and she told us she didn’t want dat baby. Things had been strained between me and John, and I looked him in the face and wondered if I was the only one who wanted dat baby in the whole house. It felt lonely.
But of course, half a year later, Joe was born, we all fell in love, and Cori in particular felt that Joe belonged to her. They were far apart in age, but they still were good at entertaining each other. Cori did not help with diapers willingly, but she loved feeding Joe and in fact did some midnight bottles when John traveled for work and Joe was drinking more milk than I could make myself. Half-asleep, I’d hear Joe start to stir in the bassinet next to me, but before I could even think what to do next, Cori would be awake in her room and then down in the kitchen in her learning tower, washing her hands carefully, hollering at me to come check the temperature of the bottle. Then she’d feed him while I half dozed, and while he ate, she’d chat to him using words she’d never used with me or John. “Ok, baby,” she’d say. “Time to gobble up some milk. Yummy milk. Formula. We need to be nice and quiet so Mommy can sleep. Do you have to fart?”
After the bottle was gone, Cori would set it on the nightstand, crawl over my body, and go right back to sleep on the other side of me, like this was her natural place all along. In his attached bassinet, Joe would fuss a bit. I just reached a semiconscious arm over to him and coaxed gas out, did that weird thing moms do where they check for poopy diapers by sticking their fingers right into where the poop might be, took care of any business, went back to sleep. We did this strange dance as a team, a little mother-daughter pas de deux, whenever John was gone for work, and he was gone most weekdays. We were a finely tuned parenting machine, my four-year-old and I. But John, grown man though he was, was not like Cori. He came back for the weekends too tired to do late-night bottles, and he shooed Cori back to bed whenever she got up in the night to help. During the days on weekends, John would take Cori for amazing adventures, park days and picnics and baseball games and swimming. Joe and I would sleep in, and I would tell myself how lucky I was for these much-needed breaks. But I missed Cori on those days. And I never missed John on the others.
That, the weird, involuntary shifting of affection from my husband to my children, was not uncommon, I knew. I also knew it was a phase. Women with older kids told me about romantic renaissances they enjoyed when the children were old enough for sleepovers and trips alone to Grandma’s. I tried not to beat myself up for avoiding sex in those early years, or substituting early bedtimes for date nights, or wearing quite so many holey, stretched-out sweatpants quite so many days in a row.
But when he left, did a secret, ashamed part of me believe it had been all my fault? And maybe, was it myself I was actually so mad at all this time?
As we speed toward the hospital, I think of all this. I think of Cori hurt, and every time she fell off her bike or slipped from a swing or tumbled off a ladder she should never have been on in the first place. I think with amazing clarity: Who cares who did what or why? This man and I combined our genetics to make something greater than the sum of its parts. We made two children I love more than I have ever loved anything else, and now one of them is hurt, and it doesn’t matter why, and it is no one’s fault, not John’s, not even my own. All that matters now is that we get there, and she wakes up, and when she does, she finds both her mother and father by her side.
—
There is a big beautiful hospital near campus. There are pretty bronze statues in the courtyard, and valets wait to grab our keys as we fly into the drive. Everything is clean and shining. The elevators have pictures to remind you of what floor you’re on. I ignore all of this and abandon the car and John in it and run into the emergency room. Cori has already been moved. I get into another line and shout, “Cori Byler?” and the LPN says, “TBI? Fourth floor.”
TBI. This is something that diving mothers never, ever talk about. We talk about concussions constantly. What to do, how to recognize one, where to go, what questions to ask. But the phrase traumatic brain injury is one we are careful not to utter. Concussion means rest. Benching. Weeks off from school. Athletic setback. TBI means brain damage. I burst into the fourth-floor waiting room like I am personally charged with saving Cori from a painful death. “Where is she?” I holler. “Corinne Byler, UP Health Member number 320378. Date of birth nine, twenty seven—”
“Slow down, slow down,” says a man at the front desk. “Are you the patient’s mother?”
I nod.
“We’ve been waiting for you. I can take you back to her respite area, page a doctor. Do you have any ID?”
I nearly grab the poor guy by his lapels.
“Yes,” I say. “Take me back.” I throw my license at him, and he makes me a wristband. The elevator doors open behind me, and I dimly register John getting off. I took the stairs two at a time, and I am panting. His mouth is set in a hard line. I gesture at him, telling the CNA, “That’s her dad too. Let him in. John, show him your driver’s license.”
“Hang on, sir; I’ll be right back for you. Ma’am, follow me,” he says to me. He uses a key tag to get me through a set of locked doors and down a corridor of treatment rooms. He drops me off with a nurse and says, “Mother of Cori Byler, room 428,” and then turns right back the way he came.
The nurse takes me by the arm and starts to walk down another hall. “Your daughter seems to have sustained a head injury from a diving board. We are watching for mild to moderate traumatic brain injury. There is some imaging we need to do, and right now she is semiconscious, ranking pretty high on a GCS.” I don’t know what this means, but I’m too discombobulated to ask for clarification. “I will get a doctor in to talk to you as soon as possible,” he continues. “You can see her soon, but she is, as I said, pretty disoriented; think of someone who is only half-awake.”
I think of myself in the bed with Cori and Joe as babies, half-awake, listening to my speech-delayed daughter hold forth. I was still very aware of what was around me. I’m going in there now.
“This is the ICU family respite center. There’s coffee and juice, and—ma’am?”
I see Cori’s date of birth written on a whiteboard on the very next door, room 428, followed by the letters TBI. Not that tricky to discern where she is. I open the door carefully and peek inside. It’s Cori, asleep. I bust on in.
“Ok, ma’am,” says the RN sternly, following me. “You need to go to the family respite center. Ma’am, you’re going to upset yourself.”
Cori is in bed, with an oxygen mask and an IV stand with three bags hanging from it. The room sounds like a soap opera set. Bleep bleep. Whoosh whoosh. Cori’s mouth is open, and she’s drooling out of the mask. Drool means alive. I start to cry.
“It’s upsetting, ma’am. That’s why I told you not to—”
“I’m not upset,” I tell him. “Look at her—she’s breathing.”
Cori turns her head toward me. Her eyes flutter open and then closed. She can hear me. I choke some more tears down and take her by the hand and say with false cheer, “Well, there you are, drooling like a golden retriever. You had me scared, girl. You’re supposed to bounce on the board with your feet, not your skull.”
Cori’s eyes open, and there’s a twinkle in t
hem, and then they close again. I turn away.
“Are you on top of pain management?” I ask the RN sharply.
“I am quite sure we are, ma’am. But now you need to go back to the respite area. Have a cup of . . . of chamomile tea. A doctor will be in to talk to you shortly.”
This time I do as he says. I go in the waiting area. I’m the only one there. The TV is on to CSPAN. The room smells of gas station coffee. The chairs are standard-issue hospital waiting room. I sit down on one and let myself cry a little.
After a short time, John moves into the room and sits on the chair next to mine. I picked one of the double-wide ones, thinking I may be here for a while, and I am thankful John has the good sense not to try to sit in it with me. This way there is a pleasant gulf between us. I set my elbows on my knees, rest my face in my hands, and go back to my crying.
John reaches over and rubs my back absentmindedly. “Did you see a doctor yet?”
I shake my head. “Not yet. But I saw Cori. She is definitely alive.”
John makes a little choking sound. “Well, Christ, Amy, is that all we were hoping for?”
“It’s a good start,” I say. “They say she has traumatic brain injury. They’re looking at pictures of her brain to see if there’s been . . . permanent damage.” I let my voice trail off. “Is that what you want me to say?”
John is quiet.
“You know”—I suddenly feel the need to lecture him—“the kids got sick while you were gone. They got hurt. They did stupid things and had fights and got sick and needed to be rushed to urgent care and the ER and Cost Cutters.”
“Cost Cutters?”
“Lice,” I say. “I tried to give Joe a buzz cut to get them out, but I did a hatchet job, and we had to go in to figure something out so he could be seen in public again.”
“What are you talking about? What does this have to do with lice?” John asks.
“The point is I have had emergencies with these children of ours. Lots of them. And after you ascertain that everyone is alive and no one is on fire, you go ahead from there.”