The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  And then there was Thomas. I clench still when I remember my brother, down in the basement of the Greek Orthodox church after the burial, eating a powdered doughnut and telling Larry Penn, a guy I used to teach with, that there was a strong possibility Angela’s death had been arranged by his enemies as a warning to him. I forget whether it was the Colombian drug cartel or the Ayatollah who was pursuing Thomas that month, but I could have grabbed him and slammed him against the fucking wall when I overheard him say that—making our daughter’s death about him. I remember Larry holding me back and Leo rushing over. “What’s the matter, Dominick? What can I get you?”

  “Just get him the fuck out of here,” I said, jabbing a finger in Thomas’s face, then storming into the men’s room. When I came out again, hoarse and red-eyed and with a sore foot from kicking the shit out of the cinder-block wall, Leo was standing guard outside the door and everyone was carefully not looking at me. Ma came toward me and clasped my hand. Thomas had disappeared with Ray.

  For a month or more, Dessa didn’t want to see anybody except her mother and sister—didn’t even want to get out of bed and get dressed half the time. So I ran interference. Answered the phone and the door, did the shopping, handled the insurance and the hospital bills. My mother-in-law and Angie stayed with Dessa during the day while I was at school. Sometimes Big Gene would show up, too, in the evening. He and I would sit out in the kitchen together, talking about some new construction going up someplace in town or how the import market was killing U.S. car sales or any other subject, really, as long as it wasn’t dead babies. When we ran out of stuff to say, we’d sit there watching TV—Jeopardy! or Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or some baseball game. I was struck suddenly by the idiocy of sports: the importance people placed on a bunch of guys chasing a ball. But we watched, Gene and me, grateful because neither of us knew how to talk about it and both of us were afraid, I think, of the silence a turned-off TV made. The one time Gene said anything directly about Angela’s death was the day it happened. We “two kids” would get over our loss, he assured me, as soon as we had another baby. We should start as soon as possible. He and Thula had lost a baby between Dessa and Angie, he said; Thula had miscarried in her second month. As if that was the same thing as having her—seeing and holding and changing her and then losing her. A lot of people did that: prescribed pregnancy as the answer to our grief. People assumed the feel and sound and smell of her was disposable. Replaceable. As if all Dessa and I had to do was erase over our daughter like videotape.

  Dessa took an indefinite leave of absence from Kids, Unlimited! She resigned from the board of directors at the Child Advocacy Center where she volunteered. “I just can’t do kids right now,” she told me.

  She started taking long walks with the dog. Old Sadie. Goofus. They’d be gone for hours—whole afternoons sometimes—and then Dessa would come back with bits of dead leaves in her hair, burrs and vines in her sneaker laces. Come back in a fog, most of the time. She never wanted company, other than Sadie. Never wanted me. Never said where she was going. I followed them once—trailed them down to the river, out past the Indian graveyard and up to the Falls. Dessa just sat there for over an hour, watching the water tumble over the gorge. I was worried: it’s pretty desolate out there. Pretty isolated. I bought her a can of pepper spray in case some creep bothered her. Sadie looked more ornery than she was. If push came to shove, I didn’t want to chance that damn dog turning tail. But Dessa wasn’t interested in protecting herself. She’d forget to take her spray can more often than she’d remember it. She’d be gone all afternoon and there that little can would be—still sitting on the shelf over the washer and dryer, which is where she kept it.

  We held on for a little over a year, Dessa and me. We never really fought. Fighting took too much energy. Fighting would have ripped the scab right off the raw truth—that either God was so hateful that He’d singled us out for this (Dessa’s theory) or that there was no God (mine). Life didn’t have to make sense, I’d concluded: that was the big joke. Get it? You could have a brother who stuck metal clips in his hair to deflect enemy signals from Cuba, and a biological father who, in thirty-three years, had never shown his face, and a baby dead in her bassinet . . . and none of it meant a fucking thing. Life was a whoopee cushion, a chair yanked away just as you were having a seat. What was that old army song? We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. . . .

  Sometimes at supper or up in bed, Dessa would try to talk about her feelings. Talk about Angela. Not at first. Later. Three or four months afterward. “Uh-huh,” I’d say. “Uh-huh.” She’d want me to open up, too. “What good would it do?” I told her once. “We’ll talk and cry and talk some more, and then she’ll still be dead.” I stood up and walked out of the room—got the fuck out of there before my fucking head exploded.

  On the worst nights, I’d go out to the garage and bang things. Slam things. Or else grab the keys. Get out onto the highway and crank up our ’77 Celica—go eighty or ninety miles an hour, as if putting the pedal to the metal was somehow going to blow the pain out of our lives. Sometimes I’d end up out by the river myself. Drive down there and park somewhere off the road, skirt the state hospital and the Indian graveyard. Once I even climbed the rock ledge out at the Falls the way we’d done when we were kids—when a party was your buddies and a couple of joints and a bottle of Boone’s Farm apple wine. I climbed it again, now, because I thought that maybe from that high-up perspective—the long view of things—all that crap about God’s will and God’s mercy might make more sense. But it never did. How could you make sense out of a coffin three feet long? Out of an empty crib in a room with moon-and-stars wallpaper, a mound of stuffed animals sitting and waiting for nobody?

  Sometimes I’d wake up in bed in the middle of the night and hear Dessa in the baby’s room, sobbing. One night I heard her talking to Angela—murmuring baby talk down the hall. I sat up and listened to it, telling myself that only a complete and total son of a bitch wouldn’t get out of bed, go down there and hold her, comfort her. But I just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t quite make my feet hit the floor, no matter what basic human decency was ordering me to do. So I sat there and listened to her, like she was a ghost or something: the ghost of what we’d had and lost, the ghost of our life the way we’d planned it out. I’ve wondered a million times since then if we could have salvaged things at that point—if I’d just gotten out of bed and gone to her that night I heard her talking to the baby.

  After a while, she started going to these SIDS parent support group meetings down in New Haven. Pressuring me to go, too. I went twice and then I couldn’t go back. Just couldn’t do it. Because that group pissed me off, if you want the truth—all those touchy-feely types connecting with their sorrow. Wallowing in it. The men were the worst—bigger crybabies than their girlfriends and wives. There was this one guy, Wade, who yapped so much about his pain that I felt like breaking his fucking jaw just to shut him up. At the second and last meeting I went to, this couple brought cake and ice cream with them. It was their dead son Kyle’s first birthday that week and the mother, Doreen, wanted to acknowledge it. To celebrate. So we all sang “Happy Birthday, Dear Ky-ul” and said what flavor ice cream we wanted and then chowed down. . . . The Dead Babies Club. The weekly pity party. If it helped Dessa, then fine. It helped her. But it just seemed weird to me. Ghoulish. Eating birthday cake for a dead baby. I had one bite, and then I couldn’t swallow any more.

  Dessa was always a good planner. She saw ahead of time the wallop Angela’s first birthday was going to pack and began planning accordingly. By then, she had turned her leave of absence from the day care center into a resignation. She called her parents’ travel agent and went off by herself on a trip to Greece and Sicily. She’d wanted both of us to go—wanted us to use the life insurance money we’d gotten for Angela and take that trip. (Big Gene had taken out the policy on the day the baby was born; he did the same thing for Angie and Leo’s kids.) I c
ould have gotten the time off from work, I guess, but I said no. Not then. Not before the school year was over. And when she pressed me—asked me if I’d do it for her sake—I lost my temper. Told her I thought it was sick—taking a trip financed with death money. But the unspoken truth, the thing I couldn’t say, was that I was afraid to confine myself in a ship’s cabin with her. On a ship, you couldn’t grab the keys and drive off. On a ship, you could make another baby. We’d made love maybe a dozen times in the year after the baby’s death, always with her diaphragm in, and each time I pulled out early, anyway. The thought of that trip scared the crap out of me. “Go without me,” I encouraged her. And so she called my bluff and went.

  Here’s how I celebrated Angela’s first birthday: I got a vasectomy. Looked up urologists in the phone book, then looked the one I’d picked right in the eye and told him there was no wife to get a consent form from—that I’d come to a conscientious decision as a single man concerned about overpopulation. That was during the preliminary visit. The list of rules the nurse gave me said you were strictly forbidden to drive yourself home from the surgery. But that’s what I did. Drove down to New London on a Friday afternoon, got disconnected, and drove home again. Went to bed with a book and an icepack on my scrotum. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was what I read. I’d always meant to catch up to that book. The novocaine wore off after the first couple of hours and I was grateful for the physical pain, which was nothing next to a year’s worth of despair. I had finally played a little defense, you know? Fatherhood had fucked me over and now I’d fucked it back. Never again, I told myself. It was a zen thing: sterility and I were one.

  I didn’t tell anyone about it. Not Dessa, whenever she called from some port or another. Not any of my buddies at school—Sully or Jay or Frank, who’d given me a blow-by-blow account of his own vasectomy the year before. Not even Leo. I hadn’t hung out much at Leo and Angie’s all that year. Couldn’t handle my larger-than-life nieces—the smell of their hair, the sounds of their voices—or the way Leo and Angie’s house was land-mined with Fisher Price toys and runaway Cheerios on the kitchen floor. Couldn’t stand Angie’s “Dominick, can I talk to you for a minute?” and then her big speeches where she invited me to get in contact with my pain. Where she tried to appoint herself my personal shrink. As if she had life all figured out. As if she didn’t have a husband who’d been porking other women behind her back since practically the month after they were married.

  Dessa came home from the Mediterranean looking tan and rested. Looking sexy. The second night she was back, we were in the kitchen, splitting a bottle of wine and looking at the first of her trip pictures when I interrupted her in the middle of some story she was telling about someone’s passport mix-up. I put my hand on her hand, my fingers in the spaces between her fingers. Leaned over and kissed her. Pushed the bangs off of her forehead. Kissed her again. I put her in my arms for the first time in a long, long time. “Hi,” I said, my lips grazing her ear.

  “Hi.”

  We went upstairs, both of us a little drunk, a little anxious. She stopped in front of the baby’s room. “In here,” she said. We lay down in the dark, hip to hip, our backs against the beige carpet of that empty room. The blinds were up. The moonlight outside half-lit things. Dessa reached over and started touching me where it counted and talking about Angela—saying that sometimes now she could remember little things about her without feeling like she’d just been kicked in the stomach. She said she could still smell her sometimes—smell the memory of baby powder and milky breath as distinctly as if Angela were still alive. Still feel the warm, small heft of her body—the relaxation of her muscles as she drifted off to sleep. Had I experienced anything like that?

  I told her no.

  She said she was glad she had. These returning memories comforted her. She said she felt they were gifts from God: He had taken Angela away from us, and now, in small ways, He had begun to give her back. It was something, she said, she could accept now. Something she could live with. We had made her; she had existed. She’d been more than just her death.

  We were half-undressed already when Dessa sat up and undressed the rest of us. She straddled me. I reached up and cupped her breasts. Reached down and fingered her. She was already wet.

  We had donated all the baby furniture to Goodwill—her stuffed animals and books and mobiles, all those shower presents. I’d been meaning for a whole year to take down the moon-and-stars wallpaper—to score and soak and strip that blue and silver paper and turn Angela’s room back into an office. But on that particular night I was glad I hadn’t—glad we were making love under those foil stars, that prepasted blue yonder. I’d put up that paper when Dessa was in her eighth month—when Angela was alive and kicking inside of her.

  She lifted herself up and then eased down again, putting me inch by inch inside of her. For a couple of seconds, we just waited like that, completely still. “We’re celebrating something,” she said. She began to rock toward me, away from me, toward, away. “Celebrating my return, the return of life. I love you, Dominick.” I couldn’t hold back. Couldn’t wait for her. Thrust three or four times and came.

  At first she just smiled. Stopped. Then her mouth turned down and she started to cry. Just a few shudders at first and then out and out wailing. Crying that claimed her whole body. She lay down on top of me, her chin in the crook of my shoulder, and held on and shook us both. I felt myself go soft, get smaller—slip out of her like a guilty intruder.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered into her ear. “I’m out of practice, that’s all. Temporarily out of synch.”

  “I’m so scared,” she said.

  I thought she meant scared of getting pregnant, and so I chose that moment of intimate failure to tell her what I had done. Told her about the vasectomy. She stopped crying and, for a minute or more, everything was still. Then she started punching me—flailing away at my shoulders and my face. One shot even landed against my windpipe—started me gasping and choking. It was a kind of temporary insanity, I guess. Dessa’s the nonviolent type, the kind that carries bugs outside so she won’t have to kill them. But that night she gave me a gasping attack and a bloody nose. She had wanted another kid, she said. That’s what she’d gone all the way to Italy and Greece to decide. That’s what she’d come back wanting to tell me.

  After that night, there was a couple of weeks’ worth of single syllables—lots of closet-cleaning and meals that she’d cook and then not eat. One day she rented a carpet cleaner and shampooed every rug in the house. Another time, I came home and found her stripping off the wallpaper in Angela’s room. Telephone calls went back and forth between her and her sister, between her and her friend Eileen from the SIDS group. Then, on a Saturday morning in July, she told me she was leaving me.

  I reminded her again what I’d been saying over and over for a week: that vasectomies could sometimes be reversed. That if she needed to, we could try it.

  “The vasectomy’s a symptom, not the problem,” she said. “The problem is your anger. What you did was just one expression of the anger you’ve felt through this whole thing—the blame you put on me.”

  I asked her how she knew what I felt inside, and she said she could feel it. That it seeped out of me like radiation. That I was practically toxic.

  It was a morning for metaphors. She still loved me, she said, but our marriage had become like a game of One, Two, Three, Red Light. Every time she made a half-step’s worth of progress, my anger would catch her and send her back to the starting line. “When I was away, I could feel myself getting stronger, day by day,” she said. “Really, Dominick. I thought to myself that I was finally through something. That the worst of it was over. Then I got off the plane and saw you in the airport lounge, and I was back at the starting line again. I get short of breath when I’m around you. It’s like you rob me of oxygen. So I’m going. I have to go because I have to protect myself. I have to breathe.”

  I told her I could do better. Promised her
I’d go back to the support group if that was what she wanted. I begged her. Followed her all the way down the stairs and out to the car, begging. Making promises. But there all that soft luggage was, waiting in the backseat and the opened trunk of the Celica. All those tan bags she’d bought for her trip to Greece. “Come on, Sadie,” she called, and that stupid dog of hers climbed in the front seat and Dessa got in and they left.

  They just left.

  I read for the rest of that summer. Styron. Michener. Will and Ariel Durant. I gravitated toward fat-book authors. I didn’t look up. Didn’t return calls. The day after Labor Day, I returned to my classroom. Made class lists and seating charts and gave the new kids my usual speech about high expectations and mutual respect. Only this time, I didn’t mean any of it. It felt like I was playing a record. I distributed books. Started matching unfamiliar names to new faces. I thought I was doing okay. Then one day in late September, I cried in school. Fell apart without warning right in front of my fourth-period class. Right in the middle of some stupid, innocuous instruction about how to punctuate the bibliography for their first paper: whether to put a period or a comma after the author’s name—something as safe and ordinary as that. I was at the blackboard and everything just hit me at once: I had a baby dead in the ground and a twin brother in the nuthouse and a wife who’d left me because she had to breathe. I should have left the classroom—I know I should have—but I couldn’t. I just went to my desk and sat there. Started sobbing. And the kids sat there, frozen, facing me. None of us knew what to do. Neither did the vice principal after one of the kids went and got him. Fuckin’ Aronson. For reasons I don’t understand to this day, he called the police and they came and took me away—walked me right past a boys’ gym class playing soccer and Jane Moss’s art class, outside sketching the trees, and into an unmarked cruiser. “Dominick?” I remember Jane Moss asking me, touching my sleeve. I remember the odd sensation of living in the middle of that experience and feeling, simultaneously, like it was something happening at telescopic distance. Like something I was looking at through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.