Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  Instead, she began to cry. “I can’t do this, Jim,” she said.

  I glanced past her. She had parked her rental car in the driveway; from the doorway, I could see the car seat in the back. Was she saying she couldn’t take care of you? As much as I was not ready to be a parent, I was even less ready to slip into the role of Mr. Mom. I looked at Lou again and ordered myself to stay cool.

  “Come in,” I said, ushering the two of you into the house. “Come in, come in.”

  I kept you in my arms as I got Lou arranged on the sofa; it seemed she was in no state to take you, and anyway, I was so thrilled to see you that I wasn’t about to let you go. You had more hair than the month before, and your face already seemed so different that you could have been an older cousin or even an entirely different child.

  “What do you mean, you can’t do this?” I finally asked Lou.

  In that moment, both my fear and my resolutions went up in smoke. I wanted Lou to say she couldn’t be without me. That she had realized all along that I was the true love of her life. That if we were in for a penny, we were in for a pound, and we were going to create the full family experience, complete with loving parents who also happened to be madly in love with each other.

  You see, Emerson, I suspect that what I really wanted was to give you the life I had not had. I must have believed, at least on a subconscious level, that having this stereotypical setup would make up for the unhappy childhood I had experienced and save you from the same fate in the process. Lou’s expression alone could have told me my desires were not to come to pass, but here I was, the ultimate April fool, hope springing eternal in my irrational mind.

  “I can’t raise a child alone, Jim,” she said. “I need your help.” (And now I am crying over my keyboard; forgive me for my sappiness.)

  “You don’t have to,” I told her. “I’ll start looking for a job in New York right away, an apartment—whatever you need.”

  She shook her head. “No, I need to be here for a while. We need to. Em and me. With you. Is that okay?”

  Yes—yes—a million times yes. “Of course,” I said.

  I nestled you in some blankets on the floor, which was probably three different varieties of death trap; I knew so little about parenting. Then I went to the kitchen to put tea on for Lou and tried not to dance around in joy.

  When I returned, she was drowsy. She had a sip of tea, then placed her mug on the coffee table. “I drove through the night so that Emerson would sleep. I’m out-of-my mind exhausted. You have to go to work, though, don’t you?”

  Work . . . right. I had been on my way to the office, and in fact had a meeting with Nessa scheduled first thing, but that ship had long since left the port.

  “I’ll call in,” I said, vowing to wow my team with übercompetence sometime in the very near future. “Let me get the guest bedroom ready. Did you bring a—what do you call those baby cages?”

  She managed a small laugh. “A Pack ’n Play. It’s in the car.”

  “Got it. Do you mind if I leave Emerson with you while I run out and get it, and then you can sleep?”

  She looked deeply relieved at the suggestion of sleep. “No, of course not. Hey, Jim?”

  “Yeah?”

  She gave me a small smile. “Thank you.”

  NINETEEN

  June–August 2009

  Since when did it take two hours to pick up a pack of diapers?

  “Are you okay?” I asked as Lou let herself in through the back door. I had just put you down for a nap—finally, and clad in the very last diaper we had in the house—and was about to unwind by washing dishes, emptying the trash, and paying the rest of the month’s bills.

  “I’m fine,” she said slowly. “Why?”

  I eyed the small shopping bag she had just set on the table. “Are the diapers in the car?”

  Her hands flew up to her cheeks. “Oh my gosh.”

  “You forgot the diapers?”

  She looked mortified. “I totally forgot the diapers.”

  “Um . . . where were you all that time?” I asked.

  “I ran into one of the neighbors while I was picking out shampoo—you remember Yvonne? She runs that bookstore downtown that I love. And then we ended up chatting for a long time, and, well, you know how it goes.”

  I had forgotten how hard it was to live with someone. No—let me rephrase that. I had no idea how hard it was to live with someone, particularly when that person was co-parenting with you. For the love of all that was good and holy, why had I not appreciated how toilet paper and Q-tips magically appeared when I lived with Kathryn? How when she said she would do something, she did it? How she actually got in bed with me each night rather than retreating to the bedroom down the hall?

  Stop it, I told myself. This is the mother of your child.

  “I’m sorry,” said Lou. She looked so pathetic standing there that the only thing I could do was hug her.

  “Don’t be,” I said. “I’ll run out and get them right now.”

  “Thanks, Jim. I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’m trying.”

  I knew she was trying—and struggling, even if neither of us had fully admitted it. We three had been living together for several months, and each one had seemed to take more of a toll on Lou. She didn’t open her computer, or write by hand, or even read. She didn’t call her friends and rarely left the house; when she did, she would return with random items, like chocolate pudding, which neither of us liked, rather than the item she had gone out for in the first place. She did, however, sleep a great deal, and I would sometimes hear her crying softly before she passed out.

  But it was all perfectly normal for a new mother: this was the lie that I clung to, the leaking life raft I had precariously put our family on.

  And sometimes Lou made it easy to believe. I would come home from work and find her nursing you on the sofa, and she would smile up at me and tell me about some fantastic thing you had done while I had been out.

  Living with others is a never-ending improv, and because I was out of practice, I often fumbled my response. But I would tell Lou a story about, say, Craig’s latest attempts to woo the new hire—who clearly would have rather cuddled up to a rabid dog—and she would laugh heartily, like she used to, and I would think to myself with triumph, See? Everything is almost as it should be.

  Yes, the awkwardness that we had experienced in New York was nearly gone. We had finally established an amiable companionship, and I didn’t want to disrupt it by questioning her—not when comfort counted for so much.

  Trouble is, Lou was not actually comfortable, and I am sorry it took her sobbing in front of your crib in order for me to recognize this.

  She was in a ball on the floor making a terrible mewling noise. I had just rushed in thinking that maybe you were crying; it didn’t sound like an infant’s wail, but in my alarmed state I still thought something awful might have happened to you.

  “Are you okay?” I said to Lou as I looked in the crib. You were reaching up for the musical mobile we had installed, safe and content; something else was amiss.

  Lou’s face was streaked with tears. “I didn’t know you were home.”

  “I’m home,” I said, at once sheepish and relieved. “My meeting let out early, so I took off. Are you okay?” I asked again.

  “No,” she said, and began to cry. “I’m not even a little okay, Jim. I don’t think I should be a mother. You’re going to have to take care of Emerson on your own.”

  “What? No, no,” I told her. “You don’t mean that.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, and burst into tears again.

  I didn’t, in fact, and was forced to admit as much. It took her a minute to calm down enough to speak. “I’m not cut out for this,” she said. “I come from a long line of women who aren’t meant to be mothers, and now I’ve finally joined them. I couldn’t even give birth like a normal woman. The female body is built to birth, and I couldn’t even manage that.”

  “
Lou,” I said softly. “Don’t something like one in three women have a C-section? And you know the cord was wrapped around Emerson’s neck. You heard what your midwife said. That surgery saved her life.”

  “I somehow doubt it.”

  “You’re not feeling like yourself.”

  She wiped her face with her hands. “I am afraid that I’m feeling a whole lot like myself. I’m going to fail Emerson, and I don’t even know what to do about it. Get a place nearby but let you raise her? Find a full-time nanny who will mother her in a way that I can’t? God, Jim,” she said, putting her head in her hands. “Look at me! I’m just like my mother: unmarried, unstable, and without a real home to call my own.”

  I took her hands in mine. “Lou,” I said. “Lou,” I said again when she didn’t meet my eyes, “please look at me.”

  Reluctantly, she lifted her head.

  “Your home is here, always,” I told her. “No matter what happens, this house is yours and Emerson’s. If you decide one day that you don’t want to live under the same roof as me, then I’ll be the one to go. This place is yours as long as you want or need it.”

  “Jim, you don’t have to—”

  “I do have to, but it’s not even that,” I told her. “I want to. Let me give you one less thing to worry about.”

  She sniffed and looked at me. “Okay,” she said quietly and began to cry again.

  I wrapped my arms around her. “Lou, love, you are not your mother. Not even a little bit.”

  “I’m a terrible parent and an awful human being,” she said, still crying.

  I hugged her to me. “We screwed up, but you’re a good person and an even better mother. Remember last week, how Em was screaming her head off, and within a minute you had found and pulled the sliver from her palm? It would have taken me two days to understand what was wrong with her and another three to remove the thing.”

  “You would have figured it out,” she whispered. Even in her distressed state, she was so insistent, jutting her chin out, batting away every kind word.

  “I want you to see someone,” I told her.

  “What kind of someone?”

  “A therapist.”

  She made a face. “You know I tried that before; it only made me feel worse. If I wanted to revisit my childhood in painful detail, I’d go hang out near one of my mom’s old trailers.”

  “Last I heard, therapy doesn’t work that way.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Let’s go see your midwife, then,” I suggested. “Your primary care doctor. A psychiatrist, even.”

  “I don’t want pills.”

  Behind us, you were kicking your feet against the crib mattress, and I could smell that your diaper needed to be changed. “Please, Lou,” I pleaded. “Your hormones could be out of whack, and you don’t even know it.”

  “My brain cells are out of whack,” she said, pulling herself out of my embrace. She stood. “Maybe they’ve always been this way and I’m just realizing it. Maybe that’s why—”

  She stopped herself, but I was able to fill in the blanks: Maybe that’s why I left Rob. Maybe that’s why I had an affair with you. It was so sad I wanted to sob, too. “No,” I insisted. “You just went through a difficult divorce, and you’re raising a child with someone who isn’t your partner. It’s a lot. Enough to make a person feel awful even if she hadn’t recently given birth.”

  “I’m not depressed,” she argued. “I know what that looks like, and this isn’t it.”

  You had begun to cry, and I picked you up and put you on the changing pad that we had attached to the dresser. I was fastening a fresh diaper on you when Lou came up next to me. “You have to do it tighter,” she said quietly. She reattached the tab on one side, then did the other. “Otherwise pee goes everywhere.”

  Well, that explained why I was constantly changing diapers. “How’d you know that?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s not rocket science. And does it matter when I still don’t know how to make her smile?”

  “Sure you do,” I said. I’d seen you smile at Lou earlier that very morning.

  But she just shook her head. “A four-year-old can diaper a baby.”

  It was not just the diapering, though. It was that she knew one burp was not enough; you needed two or three in order to not spit up ten minutes later. She knew the kind of cry you made when you were hungry, and the type you made when you were tired. She was a natural, intuitive mother. I only wished she could see it.

  As it so often happens, things got worse first. I had to push Lou to see her doctor, who prescribed her an antidepressant and told her to walk for half an hour every day. Lou began taking you out in the stroller more often, but her pill bottle remained full.

  “Rumor has it you have to actually swallow them for them to work,” I joked one morning as I pointed to the container on the counter.

  She shot me a look that would have made a raisin out of a grape. “I don’t want to take them while I’m still nursing.”

  “The doctor said they were safe.”

  “The doctors said that about Thalidomide at one point.”

  “Lou.”

  “Jim.”

  “Are you feeling any better?”

  “Sure.”

  The only sure thing was that she was still crying in the bathroom while the shower ran, thinking I couldn’t hear her. That the gifts her friends sent stacked up in the dining room until I opened them. That sometimes, when you would giggle, she would smile but didn’t laugh back, even though your laughter was the most contagious sound.

  After you stopped nursing and switched to formula and solid food at the end of the summer, Lou switched from water to wine. She would have a glass as I was making dinner—fine, I would think—but then a few more glasses would follow, and by the time we said good night there was a wobble to her walk.

  And what could I say? What could I do? It was such a strange space, to be living and co-parenting with someone who was not actually my life partner.

  “Lou,” I said once when she emptied a bottle of wine into her glass. She raised an eyebrow at me and I quickly muttered something that had nothing to do with alcohol or the sadness in her eyes. Maybe I had no right to speak up, I told myself. Maybe Lou just needed time.

  Late one night, so late it was almost morning, I got out of bed to get a snack and found Lou at the kitchen table. She held a glass nearly filled to the brim with white wine and was bent over a black-and-white composition book, which she liked to write poems in. But the page beneath her was blank.

  She looked dazed as she glanced up at me. “I’ve lost myself, Jim,” she whispered. “I don’t remember who I am, all I can think about is that I feel like I’m going to die, and I’m not even sure that’s the worst outcome.”

  I took the wineglass out of one of her hands and the pen from the other. Then I picked her up—she was so light, hardly heavier than a child—and hugged her to me, almost like she was a child. My eyes filled with tears, and I was glad she couldn’t see; I didn’t want to make it any worse. “This is so hard, isn’t it?” I whispered.

  “The hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “And yet the best. Our girl is amazing.”

  “No thanks to me.”

  “Lou.” I said her name over and over, like a chant, as I stroked her head. “Emerson is amazing because she is you. We are going to get you through this. We are going to get us all through this. You have to trust me.”

  “I do trust you,” she said into my neck.

  I had an urge to kiss her, which took me by surprise. But it passed as quickly as it had come on. Yes, she was too frail and vulnerable, curled up in my arms. It was more than that, though. When I had visited her in New York after your birth and noticed that my desire had waned, I assumed it was temporary. This no longer seemed to be the case. As much as I loved Lou, she was now but one part of my world, instead of the entirety of it.

  As I pulled a blanket over her on the bed and closed the door quietly
behind me, it struck me that this was not a disappointment, but rather an incredible relief.

  TWENTY

  Winter 2009–2010

  “How’s that book coming along?” asked my father. He was sitting at our kitchen table, jiggling you on his knee.

  I was at the counter chopping peppers for fajitas. I paused, my knife suspended in midair. “What book?”

  “You know,” he said as you patted his cheek with your hand. He pretended you had slapped him, and you giggled. Then he turned back at me. “The one you were writing.”

  I turned back to the peppers. “There is no book.” Yes, I had been keeping a journal of sorts, but it had been more than two years since I had attempted a word of fiction.

  “What do you mean, ‘there isn’t’? You were working on one. What happened to it?”

  I shook my head, thinking it had been a mistake to invite him over. Since Lou had been feeling better, we were trying to be more social; the doctor she was seeing said it was important for her to reconnect with people and the aspects of life that did not include bibs and baby talk. So we hired a sitter and went to dinner with Pascal. We invited Nessa, her partner, and their two children over for brunch. The Jennifer who had been with Lou at your birth, and who had made no effort to hide how baffled she was by our living arrangement, even flew in for a weekend.

  But then Lou decided that it would be good to have my father over more regularly. “He’s the only grandparent Emerson has,” she said when I explained that I didn’t really want to see him outside of, say, major holidays.

  As far as I was concerned, he already came over too often. He was thrilled to have another grandchild, just as he said he would be, and expressed this by showering you with gifts and grandparenting with an enthusiasm that bore no resemblance to his performance as a father. Objectively, I understood that these were good things. But I was irritated over the way he had reacted to Lou’s pregnancy and my having had a child with her. And now there he was, asking me about my writing.