Louisa Meets Bear

by Lisa Gornick

  My mother put her hands on Brandon’s sides to pick him up. Lifting him, it was as though he had no muscle tonus, as though only the part of him that touched her fingers yielded, the rest heavy and limp.

  Not until my mother had Brandon turned toward her and fully in her arms, his head resting on her breastbone, did she realize she could not feel or hear his breath. Her heart pounded, hard, hard, as she jerked Brandon away from her body until at arms length she could see his open motionless eyes. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, she heard herself saying, and then she pulled Brandon back to her chest and began banging on his little birdcage of a back, small sharp thumps with the flat of her hand.

  There was still no breath.

  Holding the baby tight to her chest, my mother ran to the front room. She pressed her nose to the window, Please, please, Jackie, be there in the street, on the stoop, footsteps on the stairs, but there was no Jackie and then my mother remembered that there was no phone. She dropped to her knees, laying the baby on the floor, and tried to breathe into his mouth, her thumb pumping the spot she best guessed to be near his tiny heart in vague memory of a lifesaving course she had taken years before when she was pregnant with my brother.

  My mother could not say how long it was that she knelt over Brandon, her mouth over his, whether it was two minutes or five, only that her breath floated up over her cheeks, bathing her own face, the baby refusing to drink in her air, and that at one point she jumped up, grabbed her raincoat from the couch, wrapped it around and around Brandon, and ran down the stairs.

  She screamed when she reached the street, “Help! Help!” but, whereas before it had seemed like there were people everywhere, now there was only a little girl bouncing a ball.

  “Telephone, I need a telephone, an ambulance,” she yelled at the girl, but the girl looked at her uncomprehendingly, picked up her ball, and ran.

  My mother clutched Brandon to her and ran too. Wrapped in the raincoat, he felt more like a sack of flour or a bag of gardening soil than a baby. She ran to Lexington, short mincing steps in her pumps and narrow skirt, panting from the pressure in her lungs and the weight of the baby in her arms, a small sound like a whimper or a yelp coming from her throat.

  At the corner, she paused to look, and then ran left toward a storefront.

  Jackie will be there, my mother thought, Jackie will be there hanging out in the store, smoking cigarettes and joking with the other young people. She will take Brandon, unwrap him from the raincoat, and once in his mother’s arms, he will breathe.

  But there was no Jackie inside the store, only the smell of rolls warming in golden lines on bakers’ trays laid out under a picture of Jesus, cases of cakes decorated with pink and yellow and blue sugar roses, a small crowd of people waiting for cups of coffee mixed with steamed milk and rolls stuffed with melted orange cheese.

  “An ambulance,” my mother cried. “Please, please call an ambulance.”

  The woman behind the counter wiped her hands on her hips, shook her head, and stared at my mother.

  “Ambulance, I need an ambulance,” my mother half panted, half screamed.

  The woman lifted her hands so her brown palms were revealed and her fingers pointed at my mother. “No speakes English,” she said. She rubbed her hands together, and little torrents of flour fell through the air. “No speakes English,” she repeated, shaking her head slowly from side to side and then tapping her lips with her floury fingers.

  My mother leaned against the counter to steady herself. A man in worker’s garb pushed toward her. “Miss, miss,” he said, “what’s the problem?”

  “The baby. He’s not breathing.” My mother stared at the clock on the wall. Everything felt slowed down and speeded up all at once. Mostly what she was aware of was that too much time was passing. She started to cry. Brandon no longer felt human. She had the fleeting thought of setting him down amid the napkin dispensers and the boxes of coffee stirrers and running out the bakery door.

  The man touched her arm. “Lady, lady, calm down. It takes a very long time for an ambulance to come to this neighborhood. It is better to go right to the hospital.”

  The man pointed. My mother followed his finger with her eyes. “This way. Up two blocks. Then you turn left.”

  No one, not the man, not the lady, was going to take over. They weren’t going to take the baby from her. He’s one of yours, she wanted to cry, you take him, but instead she ran. Out the door, with Brandon still wrapped in her raincoat. Lexington to Park. Park to Madison. Everything’s okay, she repeated over and over as she ran, a blister now burning on her heel. Everything’s okay, okay, okay. He’s just asleep. Dear God, she prayed, let him just be deep in sleep.

  At Madison, my mother turned left. Ahead of her, she could see the hospital marquee and then green arrows for the emergency room. A fleet of red-and-white ambulances sat silently in the circular drive.

  Once inside, my mother halted: a blur of signs and lights, a television bracketed to the ceiling. People with bandages on their arms and ice packs on their ankles, and one man with a patch on his eye peered up at a game show.

  There was a drum roll, and the game show host was asking, Will the real Someone-or-other please stand up? while the camera zoomed in on three men, all dressed in what looked like mechanics’ garb. The man to the left stood, Brandon a lump inside the raincoat, and then my mother screamed. Pure sound, voice swimming through larynx, panic transmuted into tone, my mother screamed over and over until the security guard and a nurse rushed her, the nurse grabbing the bundle of raincoat and baby, pulling Brandon’s cold, stiff body out from inside, and then the nurse’s voice rising over my mother’s, “Code Blue, ER waiting room, Code Blue.”

  *

  The casework instructor volunteered to attend the funeral with my mother, but the night before the funeral my mother bolted out of sleep with a terrible nausea. From then until dawn, she vomited, more food than it seemed she could have possibly consumed during the three days since Brandon’s death (“Most likely, he was dead before you found him,” the doctor had told her at the emergency room), and by morning it was clear that the stomach virus would prevent the train trip from Dobbs Ferry to Grand Central and then the subway ride to the church on Third Avenue and 107th Street. Afraid there would be no delivery to Jackie’s apartment, my mother sent flowers to the church—an arrangement of white lilies ordered through FTD.

  Lying on the living room couch, music from the classical station blanketing the room, a cold drizzle dotting the bay window, my mother told herself that she would visit Jackie the following week and that, in fact, they would be better able then to talk about Brandon and what had happened when the police took my mother back to 105th Street to find Jackie after Brandon had been declared dead, about Jackie smashing her fist on the side of the police car and my mother then holding the big wailing girl while Denise crouched by the rear door, her thumb in her mouth, urine running down her legs.

  But the following week and then the weeks after that, my mother said, things kept coming up. You caught my stomach virus and were home from school—her words jogging my memory so that vaguely, vaguely, some dusty brain cell firing after fourteen years on the shelf, I remembered coming into the living room, where my mother lay on the couch, her eyes fixed on the huge glass window, afraid to let her know that my stomach felt funny and my head hurt. Then it was Thanksgiving and the trip to your grandparents’.

  The dean of the social work school gave my mother a leave of absence for the remainder of the term, allowing her to take incompletes in her courses until the spring. The week before Christmas, my mother mailed a red hooded jacket with white fur on the edges of the hood and the cuffs of the sleeves for Denise and a card with a hundred-dollar check inside for Jackie. The check was cashed but Jackie never wrote back.

  On the first day of the spring term, my mother dressed in wool slacks and a sweater and packed the maroon tote with her notebooks and an umbrella. I remember standing in the foyer, my mother said (poin
ting at the floor to make sure I realized that she meant here, in this house where I’d been flat on my back by then for three months), looking at the front door, unable to bring myself to push it open and go outside.

  My mother stared at the heavy wooden front door, at the frozen lawn with its patches of grimy snow, and then at the accoutrements of the front hall—the mahogany table she had inherited from her grandmother, the beveled mirror she and my father had found in a Poughkeepsie antique store shortly after they were married and then paid an exorbitant amount to have refinished, my yellow rubber boots, my brother’s ice hockey stick. She stood there for a long time looking, it seemed, at her life of little contentments, satisfaction and dissatisfaction perfectly balanced for that one morning moment, thinking about Jackie and Denise and Brandon. I hung up my coat, my mother concluded, stashed the tote under the mahogany table, took off my pearl earrings, telephoned the dean’s office, and withdrew from school.

  My mother smiled—a sad, wry, self-deprecating but knowing gesture that seemed to contain all of her then-forty-five and my nineteen years. We looked at each other, my belly and how little I’d known about her rising between us. I rested my hands on my stomach. My baby would know even less about me, only what the childless couple from New York themselves knew—that I was a college student who couldn’t, no, wouldn’t raise a child—and it was only then that I realized that I’d decided to do it, to give up my baby.

  My face buckled and my eyes filled. All I remember, I said, is your face, lying there on the couch.

  My mother nodded. She took my hand and stroked it from wrist to fingertip, as though my hand were something separate, a wounded thing. Tears slid off my cheeks, dampening my neck. I wiped my nose on my shoulder.

  Well, she said, you were very young. Only five. Then, whoosh, my mother was up, the yellow booties dropping from her hands onto the chair as she mumbled something about the store and dinner.

  *

  My father made a respectable attempt to discuss with my mother her decision to drop out of school, but my mother could sense that secretly he was relieved. She stirred a leek bisque, a recipe she’d clipped from the Sunday magazine, while he queried her, answering each question matter-of-factly but briefly.

  Within a few weeks, my mother resumed what she’d come during her eight years of motherhood to think of as her life: tennis twice a week, an occasional coffee with a friend or neighbor, involvement in various of her children’s activities (a rummage sale for my ballet school, rotating driver for my brother’s ice hockey team).

  Still, the other mothers noticed changes. She’d lost weight—the pear bottom gone—and the gray had begun to overtake the brown in her hair. They envied the thinness. How had she done it? A diet center, a powdered shake mixed in the blender, an exercise machine bought mail-order? My father suggested a rinse for her hair. My mother bought new clothes, a size she hadn’t worn since college, but she kept the gray in her hair and stopped using curlers to make it flip up at the ends.

  Sometimes, in the middle of the night or during a shower, my mother would be seized with the thought that what she must do was leave my father. Looking at the French lace curtains that hung in their bedroom or the floral wallpaper that covered their bathroom, she would yearn for a simple room, whitewashed, with a mat on the floor and a bamboo shade, a room where there would be no objects to tend and her mind would be free. To do what? she would think, but then my mother would draw a blank and she would think of her children and how, with their toys and their books and their kicked-off shoes, no room could ever be spare like the monks’ quarters she’d seen in a book.

  A week or two before I went into labor, both of us worn out from the July heat during which I sweated so badly that sponge baths and a change of sheets morning and night were required, my mother told me she’d had the thought during those first months after Brandon’s death that it would have been easier, more just, if it had been her own child who had been taken. (Seconds after saying this, my mother startled, as though she’d just realized to whom she was talking.) My mother continued: I would feel overcome with guilt. Dear God, I would say, I didn’t mean that, please don’t think that’s what I want. Thank you, dear God, for sparing me and mine.

  At other times, more often than not during a domestic moment, her family circled around the oak kitchen table, my brother, my father, and I excited and all talking at once, a pan of lasagna or a roast in the center, my mother would feel a vague anxiety, as though she might be punished for having wished for something heightened: years ago, for something different between my father and her; more recently, for an involvement with something outside herself or her family. For having been gluttonous for life. Wandering through the house after we were all asleep, wiping off counters, picking up toys, she would wonder, even though she knew it was illogical, if it had been her greed that had led to Brandon’s death.

  When the leaves began to fall, Dobbs Ferry turning gold and orange and red, my mother became aware that she had been tracking time as the days passed since Brandon died, with the approach of one year bringing an increased sense of dread and an accelerating feeling that she should take some kind of action.

  At night, after you and Jay were in bed, my mother told me, I took to pouring brandy into a snifter, wrapping myself in an old blanket, and then moving outside to sit in one of the Adirondack chairs at the far edge of the lawn.

  For a long time, my mother said, I stuck to that one snifter of brandy every night. Then, that last year before I left, it crept up—two, then three snifters before bed. Your brother, I’m sure, had noticed.

  My mother sighed. For a moment, I thought it was about some conundrum concerning the nearly finished yellow booties.

  What would Dad say? I asked.

  Oh, your father was hardly ever home. And he’d long lost patience with me. Time to let it go, he said to me around the time of the second anniversary. Time to let go of this obsession with those people. The kid died. These things happen.

  *

  Once, near the end of my pregnancy when I was too big to sleep well, I woke in the middle of the night to hear something that sounded like groans and creaks coming from my father’s room. A few moments later, a toilet flushed and I thought I heard my mother’s voice. If so, if indeed my parents had resumed lovemaking during my mother’s stay, in the end it didn’t change anything between them in a permanent way.

  I had the baby, a girl, at five o’clock on a Sunday morning. I saw her for only a few minutes. Then she was gone.

  *

  I named my daughter Brianna. When my mother asked me what name I’d put on the birth certificate, her eyes welled and I could hear her in her mind whispering the two namesakes: Brandon and her sister, Anna.

  A few days after I left the hospital my mother flew back to Berkeley, and in the fall I returned to Yale. Because I’d left school before I had begun to really show, all but my closest friends assumed I’d been on a semester abroad or some such thing.

  That first year, I woke every morning at four. Lying in my dorm room bed, Miriam lightly snoring across the hall, I would wonder why I’d given up my daughter. It wasn’t as though either of my parents had pushed me to do so. It wasn’t as though a Yale degree were a necessity. Then I’d feel a surge of anger at my mother for having told me about Brandon, as though learning about his death had tipped the scales.

  Did she think we owed a baby back?

  Did she put the yellow booties on my baby’s feet or have the social worker hand them over with the paperwork?

  The nice couple from New York—it was a long time before I could call them her parents—wrote me that they had decided to keep the name I’d chosen so that later in life, if Brianna were to decide to meet me, they and I would both know her by the same name. In the only letter I ever sent them, forwarded to them by my father’s law partner, I wrote that when they thought Brianna was old enough to understand, I hoped they would tell her that I would always love her and always welcome seeing her but tha
t I would leave it to her to make that decision.

  The summer after I graduated, my father remarried—a stylish (but I thought hardened) woman in her thirties who was an associate at his firm. A couple of months later, my brother followed suit, eloping with a Brazilian model whose parents opposed the marriage due to Jay not being a Catholic. My mother finished her degree and took a faculty position in the school of social work at Sacramento State.

  After two years kicking around at odd jobs in various parts of the country—editing a trade publication for the Idaho Association of Plumbing Supplies Distributors, keeping the books for an ostrich-breeding farm outside of Austin, teaching English as a second language at a Korean community center in Spokane—I came back East to go to law school. I direct a program that runs halfway houses for women with chronic mental disabilities. We pride ourselves on finding them meaningful work and fostering in the houses a sense of family. As for what my alumni fund questionnaire calls my “personal life,” I live with a man who has an odd sleep disorder such that he sleeps during the day and stays awake all night. He supports himself on the interest from a trust fund and is working on a book on probability theory and games of chance. Our living room is stacked with DVDs of people playing roulette and blackjack.

  Until Brianna was fifteen, I received a letter from her parents every Christmas. In their last letter, they told me that Brianna played on a travel soccer team, sang in her school choir, and loved to read. In the summer, they would go to Italy. They planned to show Brianna my letter around her birthday, and after that it would be up to her if she wanted to be in touch with me.

  Although my brother and I both followed our father into the practice of law, my mother is fond of remarking how much my brother is my father’s son—the implication being that I have in some way taken after her. It’s not that I’m dismayed that she is, in fact, right (the area of law that I practice is essentially social work) but rather that I am troubled that this is so—troubled that those fourteen years the four of us lived together could have set the direction of either my brother’s or my pursuits.