However, he did keep his attention on me for a while after that. At one point, he reached for my fork and I let him touch it before pulling it back slightly. He reached out for it again, and I pulled it back again. When I did it this second time, he smiled and reached out again. I kept doing it until he moved on to something else, and I probably would have done it for hours if it had continued to entertain him.
Unlike what I experienced at work, these moments of utter normalcy were a balm. For in these, I got a glimpse of life through Reese’s eyes – how just about everything was new for him; how something simple could be so intriguing that you longed to do it over and over again; how it was a good thing that the world reinvented itself from moment to moment. And while I knew that there wouldn’t be a single second for me that ever felt like that again, I found comfort in the knowledge that life would be this magical to him for several years.
I finished my dinner and tried to feed Reese some more of his bottle. He didn’t seem particularly hungry, though.
“I’m obviously gonna have to tell Lisa to cut down on the candy and ice cream during the day,” I said.
I put him in his swing while I cleaned the dishes. During this time, he burbled and grasped at something invisible to me and at one point let out a little laugh for no discernable reason. When I finished, I went to remove him and he protested, so I started the swing again and read the sports section of the paper while he blissed out.
Spring training exhibition baseball games were in full swing and I read a Yankee box score with interest, trying to place the names of the rookies and non-roster invitees. This was always my favorite time of year to read about sports. Beat writers filled the paper with stories about promising young talents and various predictions for another winning season for my favorite team. Once the season began, things could go well or badly. They could go as predicted, or take off in surprising directions. But no other time in the baseball year held as much potential.
I glanced over at Reese, who at that moment stared intently at the floor.Would he be a shortstop like his dad? A fleet outfielder instead? Right now, he most closely resembled third base, so it was anyone’s guess what the future held. I wondered how I’d feel if he didn’t love baseball the way I did or maybe didn’t like it at all. Tanya wasn’t a sports fan and I’d been okay with that. But would I feel differently because Reese was my son?Would I feel differently because he was all I had? For now, it was only the preseason of our lives together, and we would find the answers to these questions in the fullness of time.
An hour or so later, I gave Reese another bath and then brought him to his room. I gave him another bottle, but this time I broke out the good stuff – one of the dozens of pouches of breast milk Maureen had frozen in anticipation of her return to work. He drank greedily and I tried to imagine what he thought about when he did. Did he have any sense memory of his mother? Was he more satisfied and contented with this bottle because it made him recall the brief time he’d had at her breast? I noticed tonight that my supply was dwindling, and decided to give them to him every other night thereafter just to extend this gift from Maureen a little longer.
I rocked him while he drank and he seemed groggy. Still, after I burped him, I held him on my shoulder a little longer and sang him a song. Tonight it was Suzanne Vega’s “The World before Columbus,” which she had written for her daughter. It was one of the several I “covered” at bedtime, ranging from obvious choices like Billy Joel’s “Goodnight, My Angel” and Jimmy Webb’s “Another Lullaby” to songs that were almost certainly not intended for this purpose, like Phish’s “Waste,” Marc Cohn’s “Silver Thunderbird,” and Ben Folds’ “The Luckiest.”
Reese was asleep when I put him in his crib. The pediatrician had warned me against doing this, but on most nights, I couldn’t help it. There was little in the world that matched the serenity of a baby asleep in your arms, and it was hard to believe that anything that soothed me this way, especially now, could be bad for him.
• • •
I sang lullabies like these to Tanya every night until she was eleven. Those goodnight moments were often the warmest and tenderest between us in a given day. I ceded them grudgingly to her adolescent regimen of showering, hair brushing, and reading books about teen issues to herself. After that, if I were lucky, I’d get to kiss her on the forehead before she turned off her light.
When I talked to friends about how this bothered me, they all recommended I relax. This was what preteen-agerdom was all about. Their evil twins replace them somewhere around their twelfth birthdays and then return them unharmed during their college years. I heard it enough times that I started to believe it. Tanya’s grades were great, her friends were moderately socialized, and she was still capable of true warmth and kindness. Certainly, there was no indication that this end in our bedtime ritual would lead inexorably to Mick.
Mick. Philosophy major.Malcontent. Darkener of my daughter’s soul.
I made a deplorable series of mistakes with Mick. The first was letting him into the house at all when he wouldn’t look at me and when he spoke only to the floor even when he was talking to Tanya. Another was not taking more extreme action when I learned that Tanya lied to us about her whereabouts to go on a late date with him. Yet another was listening to others (including Maureen) who told me he was “a phase” and that Tanya would move on from him soon. And the worst was watching – raging, but watching nonetheless – while my daughter lost the twinkle in her eye, became insolent and cynical, distanced herself even from her mother. All of this was directly attributable to the relationship with Mick that hadn’t gone away, and hadn’t been a phase but rather a transition.
It wasn’t until the day after Maureen told me she was pregnant that we were able to share the news with Tanya. It was the first time we could get on her calendar. She sat on the couch watching the rug, while Maureen and I sat on either side of her.
“We have some big news,” Maureen said, placing her hand on one of Tanya’s. Tanya didn’t pull away, but she didn’t grasp it either.Maureen hesitated and Tanya turned her head in her mother’s direction. “This was totally unplanned, but it’s totally wonderful. We’re going to have a baby.”
I know that Maureen said it this way to be as inclusive as possible – we were going to have the baby, all three of us. And maybe the 10-year-old, the 12year-old, or even the 15-year-old Tanya would have heard it that way. But the Tanya who sat with us was not prone to inclusion. She lowered her chin to her chest and then swiveled her head to scowl at me. It was the darkest expression I ever saw on her face.
She placed both hands on the couch and without looking at either of us said, “I should have guessed you’d come up with something like this.” With that, she picked herself up and ran up the stairs.
I seethed, staring at her back long after she disappeared. Then I stood up to go after her.
“Don’t,” Maureen said.
“That was a totally unfair thing to say to us,” I said tightly.
“I know, but just leave her.”
“How often does she get to just slap us down?”
“We caught her by surprise.”
“You caught me by surprise. I think my reaction was just a tiny bit different.”
“Your circumstances are just a tiny bit different.” Maureen slid over on the couch and drew me back down. “I’ll go talk to her in a little while. Let this sink in for a few minutes.”
I sat back on the couch and looked up at the ceiling. “That was a totally unfair thing to say to us,” I said again.
“It was. I’ll talk to her.”
An hour later,Maureen came downstairs to tell me that Tanya was crying in her arms, telling her that she was worried that the new baby was going to replace her. Maureen did everything she could to assure her that this was impossible.
I took it as a very good sign that Tanya was concerned about this. Clearly, it was an indication that the family and her place in it meant more to her than I believed.<
br />
This turned out to be another huge mistake.
• • •
I went to my library, booted up the computer, and checked my home e-mail.Mixed amongst a bunch of spam and newsletters were two personal messages, one from my mother, the other from a friend in Colorado.
My mother spent nearly a week with me after the funeral. It helped to have someone around to watch Reese while I took long walks in the biting January air or lay in my bed trying to feel Maureen next to me. But ultimately it turned out badly when she tried to convince me that Tanya needed to know about her mother and that I had to “do something about it,” as though there was anything I could do. I said a few things I probably shouldn’t have said, and she was on a plane back to my father in Florida the next day. This new message from her was stiffer and more formal than the ones she used to send. She provided basic information about what was going on with the two of them and asked after Reese and me. I knew I should reach out to her, apologize for losing my temper with her, thank her for her help, but I simply didn’t have the reserves required to do this. I knew I would eventually rebuild that bridge. I just couldn’t do it right now.
The friend from Colorado was a former Eleanor Miller colleague who wrote much more frequently since hearing about Maureen. Though we weren’t particularly close, I found I could write him at length and that he was a good virtual listener with some insightful things to say. This wasn’t the first time that the e-mail version of a relationship was stronger for me than the real thing. Obviously, some people just interacted better on the written page than they did in person. I didn’t think it made the relationship we’d developed artificial in any way, only functionally different. And I looked forward to hearing from him.
I replied to both of them, writing a much longer message to the friend than to my mother. I spent more time than I usually did telling them new stories about Reese and attached a recent digital photo of him to each message.
After that, I browsed halfheartedly through the newsletters. While I did so, a message arrived from Tanya, immediately recognizable by the FROM ME header she’d used the handful of times she’d chosen to contact us. I looked at it with a start, thinking irrationally that I could latch onto it in some way, reach through the Internet, and pull Tanya back into this house. I felt an odd frisson, as though we had somehow just passed in the ether. Tanya had just hit a “send” button somewhere out there, linking our computers temporarily.
But of course, nothing linked us. Like the others, she’d sent this message through a remailer – maybe hours ago – that made it impossible to trace. This brief interaction between a series of machines left us no more connected than we had been by the dozens, hundreds, thousands of miles between us. Though she couldn’t have possibly known that I would be sitting at this desk when the message arrived, it felt like she was baiting me, giving me a peek-a-boo glance, and then disappearing back into the mist. It was so frustrating. And yet I opened the message immediately.
M&D,
How’s the little bundle? Bet he’s keeping you up ’til all hours. Hope you’re taking your vitamins.
I saw that antiques show on television the other day and it made me think of you, Mom. It still seems totally flaky to me, but I laughed when I thought of you watching it and trying to figure out how much some old lamp was worth before the host announced it. In this one, some woman thought this creaky chair was going to make her a millionaire and she found out it was worth something like $27. Cracked me up.
Mick and I took jobs for a couple of weeks at a roadhouse. Mick bussed and I waited tables. It was a very cool experience. Not that I would want to do it for a living or anything like that, but I kinda liked talking to all the people who were passing through and getting to know the regulars. We got to crash in the spare bedroom of one of the grill cooks and we got to have all our meals at the restaurant, so we haven’t had to spend any money at all, which is cool since that means that now we can go for a while without working and not cut into any of the cash we had with us.
Last night I talked to a trucker and he told me where he was going. It sounded good, so we asked him if he would give us a ride. The owner of the roadhouse didn’t love that we were bolting on him, but we definitely never told him we’d be sticking around. For a couple of minutes, we thought he was going to stiff us our last week’s salary, but then he forked over the money.
So we’re off on the road again tomorrow morning. Just wanted to let you know that I’m alive and well out here. Really alive and well. Try to be happy for me.
Hearts,
T
Try to be happy for me. Tanya had no idea what she was asking. Even though she was unaware of what had happened in her absence, how could she possibly think that we could be happy for her when she just disappeared from our lives? How could she possibly think that stories of her on the road with her boyfriend – whom I also happened to despise – would bring a smile to our faces? How could she think that this was what we’d been searching for after months of desperate flailing for any clue to her whereabouts followed by the realization, though hardly resignation, that a person could truly pop off the radar if she chose to do so? I’d stopped spending a portion of every day trying to find her, not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t think of anything more to try. If I could have latched onto whatever redirected electrons had beamed this latest message to me and followed them to the original source, I would have done so instantaneously. Lacking the magic to pull off that trick, though, I could only stand in place.
No, I wasn’t happy for her. I was confounded, frightened, and horribly saddened. I wanted her back home with me. I wanted her to help rebuild our lives together. I wanted the preteen Tanya – the one who could frazzle me but who still always amazed me – back in my life. I didn’t want her riding off in the cab of a truck to some new untold destination. I could never be happy for her if she chose to lead that life.
I was angry now. Where only a short while ago I took great comfort in the sleeping form of my infant son, the digital version of my daughter had left me incensed. I couldn’t get those last words out of my mind: try to be happy for me. Was she so completely insensitive to us that she truly believed this was possible? Or had she so completely forgotten who we were that she thought we might actually find some enjoyment in her escapade? In that moment of anger, I told myself that it didn’t matter to me if I ever saw her again. Let her stay on the road. Let her become a footnote in my life. Let her dissipate into the landscape with her miserable boyfriend.
And even as these thoughts came into my head, I knew that I couldn’t really mean it.
I went into the kitchen to straighten up, even though nothing was particularly messy. I would bake or prepare something for the next night’s dinner. I just needed something to do with my hands. I needed to work off some of the negative energy generated by Tanya’s message. I cleaned out two shelves in the refrigerator before I realized how ridiculous the exercise was and I left the kitchen to settle on the couch in the family room, still feeling horribly unsettled.
It was a little after 9:30. I had no idea what to do with this part of the night, even when I wasn’t upset about something. This was when Maureen and I would do some reading, maybe catch up on some work, maybe cuddle on the couch, or maybe just shut the bedroom door for some quiet time together. This was the point when I missed her the most, and I missed her horribly tonight. Lisa’s first day, going back to work, and Tanya’s e-mail had been an onslaught for me. My entire adult life, when stress threatened to overwhelm me, Maureen comforted me. How would my mind ever rest now?
I turned on the television and flipped through the channels, not stopping on anything for more than a couple of minutes. I was too agitated to concentrate, too ill at ease to sleep. So I just kept surfing, hoping that something would placate me.
Even though there was very little chance of that.
FOUR
Unalloyed Moments
In spite of all of the gifts
Maureen and I got when Reese was born, I needed to buy him some new clothes. He had woefully little to wear on a normal day. People tend to give special occasion clothing as baby presents, assuming either that they are the only ones with this idea or that the child is going to be dressing for dinner nightly. What we really needed were some outfits he could spit up on. That Saturday, the two of us headed to the Smith Haven Mall.
In the parking lot, I attempted to figure out the intricacies of the BabyBjörn baby carrier that I used to tote Reese around, spending several minutes trying out various combinations of clasps and latches. These things had been considerably easier to deal with (though presumably not nearly as ergonomically sound) when Tanya was tiny. I grew a little frustrated and Reese squirmed in his car seat, threatening to explode into fits of screaming at any moment. This was not a happy beginning to our shopping foray.
“That one goes up and over,” a man said from a few cars down.
I looked out at him and he walked toward me.
“This strap goes up like this – do you mind?” He gestured toward the carrier.
“No, please.”
He reached out and moved a strap, clicking it into place. “I’m sure it makes sense in Sweden.”
I unbuckled Reese from his car seat. “How’d you ever figure this thing out?”
“I screwed up a lot and then my wife explained it to me. It really is kind of logical once you do it the right way.” I put Reese into the carrier facing forward. “See? That one you were having trouble with is for support. It only looks like a third leg hole.”
“Yeah, I was starting to wonder if maybe it was my son who was built wrong. Thanks for the help.”
He waved and started walking away. “Pay it forward. There are plenty of others out there just like us.”
With Reese secure in his carrier, the rest of the trip was simple.We walked through the entire mall once to identify our options. It was disappointing to discover that places like Banana Republic didn’t have baby sections – there was a marketing opportunity just waiting to happen – and the clothing in places like Gymboree just seemed too precious for words. The selection in the department stores was stale and of poor quality. And I refused to pay forty dollars at some of the boutiques for a pair of overalls he’d wear for two months. Ultimately, we settled on Baby Gap and The Children’s Place.While at the former, Reese made his first conscious buying decision, seizing on a bright orange shirt and holding it as tightly as his four-month-old fists would allow.
When You Went Away Page 4