Belong to Me

by Marisa de los Santos

  “Maybe I’ll come a lot, if that’s okay,” he said.

  “We won’t,” Teo said slowly, “try to talk you out of leaving.”

  Cornelia said, “But—” and Teo said, “Cornelia,” as though he were reminding her of something.

  Teo went on, “But we want you here. Whenever you want to be here. Even when you don’t. Always. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Dev smiled at Teo, then at Cornelia. “Thanks. I should go now, I guess.”

  Dev turned around. Then he turned back and told Teo, “I used to look for you.”

  “You did?”

  Dev nodded. “I’m glad it’s you.” He couldn’t say “father,” yet. “Out of all those people who were the right age or in the right place or whatever, I’m glad he turned out to be you.”

  Teo’s gaze moved over Dev’s face, from his forehead to his eyes to his chin, not as though he were searching for resemblances, but more like he was learning Dev’s face, part by part. His eyes ended up looking squarely into Dev’s eyes and he smiled.

  “So am I.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Cornelia

  Childbirth is old hat, the oldest around, a story told over and over, so I will try not to give you a blow-by-blow (or breath-snatching-squeeze-by-breath-snatching-squeeze) account of my personal childbirth experience from the moment my water broke and gushed straight through the seat of my cane chair in the Thai restaurant Teo and I had gone to with Piper and Tom (although the look on Piper’s face would make a pretty great story all by itself) to the second my baby broke like a seal, almond eyed and slick, from the anonymous ocean my body had become.

  But I wanted to say something about pain. Because even though I had absolutely no use for it at the time, and, in fact, would have traded minor body parts to be rid of it (an offer I made to every medical type who entered my line of sight during labor; no takers), pain turned out to be instructive later in a way that would change the lives of everyone. Not everyone-everyone, of course, but my everyone, the people I’ve been given (and God knows it hasn’t always been my choice), the ones who are mine to love.

  “In labor,” they say. In. As though pain were a room or water or fog. In deep, I named it “a wilderness of pain,” and you don’t have to tell me that, in the wide universe of metaphors, “a wilderness of pain” shines dimly if it shines at all. Still, it was a metaphor created by me, Cornelia Brown, a metaphor maker from way back (I can’t help it; my brain just will yank dissimilar items up by their roots and knot them together, no matter how much they or anyone else protests), so, while in labor, I said it over and over, sometimes aloud, mostly not, to remind myself of myself. Lost in pain, in hopes of locating the Cornelia I knew, I shot my little piece of figurative language up like a flare.

  What I should confess right now is that I didn’t plan on pain. Are you kidding? I planned on spending the easy, breezy, early hours of labor in the comfort of my own home, with a sweetly nervous, watch-checking Teo by my side, and with Holiday (followed by The Awful Truth, followed by My Favorite Wife because if you have to endure escalating uterine contractions, why not endure them with Cary Grant?) in the DVD player, and then, once things began to get dicey, taking a leisurely drive to the hospital and putting in my demand for an epidural immediately, long before I really needed it (per Piper’s instructions), and spending the rest of labor happily pain free, only to push heroically, albeit briefly, when the time for pushing arrived.

  What I got was: small, internal unsnapping; whoosh of amniotic fluid; a plate of gai pad prik resting untouched, but for one heavenly bite, on the table in front of me. Which would have been fine, was fine, really, and which, in addition to allowing Piper the opportunity to make a hilariously horrified face, also allowed her, once she had sufficiently recovered, to note with intense satisfaction her now-seemingly-proven theory (which my doctor husband had, with an annoying air of authority, dismissed as pure mythology) that there was nothing like spicy food to jump-start labor.

  But when we got to the hospital, when the hitherto-unknown-tome doctor who examined me cheerily informed us that Piper was wrong, not even Teo had the heart to gloat. My body had thrown us a curveball (apparently under the outrageous misapprehension that when it came to curveballs, Teo and I were overdue) because while my membranes had certainly ruptured, my cervix was closed as tight as the proverbial drum. He suggested that we try to move things in an un-drumlike direction by jogging around the corridors of the hospital.

  As soon as he’d left the room, a nurse who looked so much like Angela Lansbury in Gaslight it was plain creepy but who was really quite nice, told us how the last couple she’d seen in our situation had eschewed jogging in favor of the nipple-stimulation route (“It took two hours, and her husband’s fingers would probably have fallen right off if he hadn’t been so distracted by game three of the NBA championships, but if you’re not the jogging type…”), a suggestion that caused Teo to begin exercising his fingers in the manner of a maestro preparing to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2.

  We jogged. Nothing.

  We took a breather, then jogged some more. Nothing.

  We jogged endlessly. I eked out a decent handful of jumping jacks and made one wildly unfruitful attempt at a squat thrust.

  Just as Teo was recommencing his finger warm-ups, Dr. Mary Follows, on whom I had actually set eyes before (my beloved Dr. Oliver had the nerve to be at another hospital, delivering someone else’s baby, but had promised to be with us soon), arrived on the scene, recommending that we chemically induce labor now.

  “Once your membranes are ruptured, there’s a chance of infection, so we could wait maybe a little longer, but not much.”

  Teo’s fingers played an imaginary scale.

  I told Dr. Follows, “Now is fine.”

  She told us that when I got to five centimeters and we were sure labor was in full swing, the epidural was mine all mine.

  “You’ll go at about a centimeter an hour. We don’t want to check you much more than we already have because of the risk of infection, so I’ll be back in a few hours. Buzz if you need anything!”

  Shortly thereafter, I entered the aforementioned wilderness. I won’t describe it in detail, mainly because I can’t. For much of it, I was pretty out to lunch (a very bad lunch served by small red imps in hell). Teo talked to me until I ordered him to stop. He held my hand and ran his fingers up and down my forearm until I ordered him to cease all touching (he maintains that I emphasized this request by biting him on the thumb). He watched television with me until I told him that if he didn’t switch the damn thing off, I would rise up and shove it down his throat.

  The important part, the part that would matter afterward, was how small I became at the end, pain paring off parts of me until I was all but gone, a tiny black comma on an immense white page. Fear went, then intelligence, worry, courage, and charm (as Teo can attest). Complex emotions evaporated. Humor vanished as though it had never been. My every neurosis went up in smoke, along with most of the English language, leaving me with nothing but a sound loop of baby, Teo, baby, Teo, baby, baby, baby playing in my head.

  Yes, pain is abominable, a nightmare, but pain reveals, when we’ve had to throw all else overboard, what is left in our personal sinking boat.

  “I love our baby,” I told Teo, eyes closed, teeth set, “I love you.”

  Teo jumped out of his seat. “That’s it. I’m getting the doctor.”

  As it turned out, in the space of time it should have taken my chemically enhanced cervix to dilate from zero centimeters to three, I’d gone the whole nine yards, zero to ten. Later, Toby would theorize that this might have had something to do with my having “the metabolism of a pygmy shrew,” and even though Teo would muddy this theory’s waters with scientific talk about the variable number and sensitivity of receptors in the uterus and so forth, my usually science-minded sister turned a deaf ear to Teo and snatched Toby’s theory up with glee: my unfair allotment of metabolism coming back, at long la
st, to bite me on the ass.

  “You poor girl,” said Dr. Oliver, who was there at last, “you skipped the easy part and went straight for transition labor.”

  “Time for the epidural,” I said, between contractions. When neither Dr. Oliver nor Teo met my eyes, I said it loudly, “Time for the epidural.”

  “Ten centimeters, sweet girl,” said Teo, apologetically.

  “Epidural,” I shouted.

  “But, Cornelia, here’s the good news,” said Dr. Oliver, brightly. “It’s time to push.”

  What struck me about the rest of it was how little I mattered. A vehicle, a means, someone else’s act of becoming. If that sounds like a complaint, it isn’t one. All I’m saying is that, from the very first push, I saw to what end I labored, not delivery, depositing a gift to me and Teo on the doorstep of our lives, but deliverance, the baby freed, pushed loose and streaming, like God, into the world.

  The first time I looked at the face of my child, I didn’t think “my child.” I made no claims. Transported by awe to someplace way past tenderness, I was courteous and grave, one fierce creature greeting another, newly arrived. Then Teo said, “Our daughter, Cor, our little girl,” and—wham—I bought the complete package: tenderness, yes; devotion and longing, euphoria and despair; ache and work and rage and boundless gratitude. My girl and I got it backward, backward and right. She did the claiming. I was delivered, unto her. “You are mine,” she cried, her hands reaching for my face, and nothing was ever more true.

  Too soon, they took her.

  “She’s beautiful,” I told them, “she’s perfect.”

  “She is,” agreed Dr. Oliver, “but I’m not crazy about her breathing. Or her color.”

  “You think it’s the blood?” asked Teo.

  “What blood?” I said.

  “Your blood,” said Dr. Oliver, nodding. “Fibroids are very vascular. We’ll suction her out, clean her up, and bring her back as soon as we can. And we’ll get you into a real room where you can get some rest, Cornelia. You deserve it.”

  When they took her, my arms and hands felt empty in an entirely new way.

  Teo kissed me and told me that I was a star, an angel, the love of his life.

  “Cornelia and Teo,” I said to him, “with a baby.”

  He smiled. “Who would ever have thought.”

  “I miss her.”

  “She’ll be back.” Teo’s eyes got cloudy and he rested his forehead against my shoulder. “It was hard to see you hurt like that.”

  “I know it was.”

  “You were so quiet.”

  “I promise to scream next time.”

  We sat that way until a nurse came with a wheelchair to take me to my room. When we got there, we called Toby and Clare. We called my parents and Teo’s parents and Linny. The joy we generated was intoxicating.

  “She should be here,” I said to Teo.

  “I’ll go find her.”

  “Good.”

  “You’ll be all right by yourself?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I love you. You sure?”

  “I love you. Go.”

  Five minutes after he walked out, the pain came back.

  Hemorrhage. Even the word is ugly, thick, messy with its silent second h, containing rage.

  I don’t remember much. Contractions and contractions and contractions, time expanding each time I contracted to a hot, red point. Teo back and saying, viciously, “If she says it’s not just cramping, it’s not just cramping!” Talk of an ultrasound. A wheelchair, an attempt to stand, a warm, wet rush, the bottom dropping out of everything. Then, nothing.

  A brief coming to, someone asking me to say my name.

  “Am I dying?” I asked.

  “Absolutely not,” scoffed a nurse whom I would cherish for all of my days.

  A shift from stretcher to table.

  Round lights burned like moons and then went out.

  I saw them before they saw me: Teo in a chair beside my bed, feeding our daughter with a dropper.

  I made an infinitesimal move to lift my head, but was stopped by a wedge of ax-blow headache. I waited for the static to clear, then looked again. Teo, his long fingers around the dropper, our pink-faced girl, as singular as a snowflake but durable, Rose Brown Sandoval, eating to beat the band. And then, just like that, I was there and not there, transported hours backward into the worst part of the wilderness, but floating above it, seeing myself reduced to my least common denominator, everything ripped away but my last, best thing, my connection to the people who belong to me, of whom Teo and Rose are just the beginning or the middle (it’s hard to tell, connections radiating in every direction like beams of light), but never the end.

  Out-of-body experiences, even partial ones composed mostly of memory, don’t happen every day. Mine was enough to transmute doubt into certainty, hesitation into urgency, a burden into a blessing.

  Teo glanced up and saw me, a galaxy in his eyes, a universe.

  “Cor.”

  “Teo, call him.” When you have a revelation, there isn’t a moment to lose.

  “Who?”

  “Dev. Tell him to come and meet his sister.”

  Teo’s eyes misted over, and to hide it, he bent down and kissed Rose’s round and glorious head. He stood up and placed her in her transparent bassinet, then took out his cell phone.

  “And, Teo, when they get here, say it.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Whatever it takes. Anything. Promise anything. I will, too. Anything it takes to make them change their minds. Whatever it takes to make them stay.”

  EPILOGUE

  TEN MONTHS LATER

  Cornelia

  We are all here, in our backyard, noisy under the tulip tree and the wash of blue sky and the white party tent we rented for the day of our baby’s christening. I say “our baby,” mine and Teo’s, but really Rose is everybody’s baby. She walks through the party the way she walks through the world, making her headlong, wobbling way, not brushing a pants leg or grabbing a skirt for balance without a palm resting on her warm head or someone kneeling to greet her, eye to eye. Now that she’s mobile, if she’s held, she won’t stay for long, except with Toby, who lifts her only to toss her—flying child against the bright sky—or tickle her or turn her upside down, her pink skirt flopping to bell around her head, like the belled blossoms of the tulip tree, as though she is just another living bloom in springtime, which of course she is. Lucky baby.

  We are all lucky today. It is one of the days when we make it look easy, and trust me when I tell you that we have our hard days, too. Hard weeks. But I’ve found that if you insist on goodwill, if everyone insists on it together, goodwill comes. I’ve found that love can be a decision. Forgiveness, too.

  Clare and Dev are radiant against the white backs of the Adirondack chairs. Dev is stretching out his long legs so that Rose can climb them, scramble up them like a squirrel, and all the children are like squirrels, scurrying past, crisscrossing through the forest of adults. Jasper on all fours, Emma, Peter, Carter, Meredith with her hands full of cookies, Rafferty’s daughter, Molly (newly back in Lake’s life, Rafferty keeps to the edge of the crowd, uncertain if he’s there to stay). The children are loud: piping, screeching, chattering like jays. Ollie’s baby is due next month; he will add his voice to the rest. She sits under the white tent, feigning grumpiness the way she always does when she’s happy, a demeanor she’ll drop once she and Dev get started talking science, unraveling the sticky mysteries of genes.

  Now Rose zigzags toward me, throws her pretty arms around my leg, and allows me to lift her. With the weight of her against my hip, with her face near mine, I am perfectly balanced, as firmly planted on the earth as I had ever hoped to be. My baby has my nose and chin, but the rest of her face is Teo’s, his eyes, his forehead, his smile, which are also Dev’s eyes, forehead, and smile. The resemblances don’t stop there. She has Toby’s daring and Piper’s imperiousness, Clare’s sweetness and my fat
her’s laugh, Ingrid Sandoval’s glamour and my mother’s straight back, my temper and Lake’s stubbornness. She spots something else she wants and begins to wriggle in my arms. I put her down and she is off.

  Piper unlinks her arm from Tom’s (she’s told me how she cannot stop touching him, her hand on his forearm, his shirt collar, a finger hooked around a belt loop; “It’s ridiculous. It’ll drive the poor man crazy,” she said, not believing it for a second) and walks toward me across the yard, her Delft blue eyes matching the scarf around her neck, not a wrinkle in her linen dress. Last week, she and Tom put both their houses on the market, and put a bid on another one in our neighborhood.

  “Were you tempted to leave town?” I’d asked her. “Start fresh someplace else?”

  “Hell, no,” she’d scoffed.

  Now she says, “I think we know the real reason Lake decided not to move.” Her tone is pure Piper, approving and disapproving at the same time. “That woman is head over heels for your little girl.”

  It’s true. Love can be a decision, but Lake did not decide to fall in love with Rose. She was ambushed, swamped. I saw it on her face in the hospital. “A total body slam,” as my poetic brother would say. I will never forget that morning: Dev holding his sister, time standing still. None of us was going anywhere.

  Lake is winding one of Rose’s silvery curls around her finger (the blondness, the curls, are a genetic improbability, Ollie tells me, and likely won’t be around for long, temporary gifts, babyhood’s sleights of hand). It’s a thing that Lake has given me and I have given her: permission to love each other’s children, a free pass. She reserves her territoriality, her assertions of parental primacy, for Teo, who for all his quietude and kindness, can be as fierce as anyone. What saves them every time, what drives them into truces, compromises, and listening, is Dev, tall, brave boy, who wants them both, wants them with his father’s generosity and his mother’s grit, and a deep, smart, sweet-souled decency that is uniquely his.