Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “Oh, thank you. I didn’t really know what else to wear.”

  “You’re stunning. Trust me.”

  “Thank you so much for having me tonight, I…”

  “We’re delighted. I’ve heard so much about you. Like you’re part of the family.”

  “Oh, that’s so sweet. Thank you so much. Hollis has been just, really too kind.”

  “Yes, well, anything to help out a friend in need,” said Susan.

  Hollis studied the two women conversing, like dogs in a park, drawn by an indivisible, instinctive blend of affinity, curiosity and territoriality. He pursed his lips in observation, rocking from heel to toe, hands in his pockets, processing the moment and gauging their reactions. If Susan was irritated with him, or if she was at all resentful of Bethany, she showed no particular sign of it now. But he knew that Susan was in entertainment mode and that she was quite capable of keeping those kinds of thoughts swimming somewhere silently beneath the surface.

  Bethany, as always, was as genuine as morning sunlight.

  “So, come in, come in. Everyone is here in the living room. Well, Mae is not here yet,” Susan said, rolling her eyes comically at Hollis as if to say what next with that one? “My son’s girlfriend. He came without her. She’s feeling sick.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  “Yes. Not so uncommon, I’m afraid. Go on in and make yourself at home. There’s wine and pupus in the dining room. Oh! I forgot. Have you seen Peppermint Grove? Tilly’s movie?”

  “Yes! It was wonderful.”

  “Great.” Susan advanced, patting the pockets of the folded apron. She extracted a pen and several slips of paper. “We’re each writing a short little review to read to her. Nothing fancy, just a couple of sentences like you might see on a movie poster.”

  “What fun. Hollis, did you do one?”

  “Oh, I’m sure Susan took care of that,” he said with a wise assurance.

  “Well, of course Susan took care of that.” Susan said with a smile altogether different than that of the hostess. “I also wrote one for David and Mae because something tells me they aren’t going to come through.” Susan winked at Bethany conspiratorially. “But Bethany and I are getting things done.”

  “I won’t let you down, Mrs. Johns.”

  “Really, call me Susan. Okay, you two head on in, I’m going out to the freezer for more ice. Unless, maybe… Hollis…”

  “Why, I’d be delighted,” he said. “Why don’t you let me take care of that.”

  “Aww, Hollis,” Bethany intoned sweetly, “what a good man you are.”

  “Isn’t he though?” said his wife, without any hint of irony, smiling so broadly that her eyes almost squinted shut.

  Hollis trundled off to the garage, leaving Bethany with Susan, who was talking about finding her a place to compose. A squall of laughter swelled out from the living room and he was overcome with satisfaction. It warmed him to be a benefactor. To give of himself so freely for Bethany, and for his friends now gathered in his home, and to be the kind of man who fetches the ice and takes out the garbage and who spends an afternoon selecting and purchasing the wine without hesitation or expectation. He did not expect any particular recognition for his generosity. It was enough to feel it in himself.

  When he returned, Bethany was sitting at the dining room table, a ray of cottony golden light amid the hummus and the crudité and the crab cakes, scribbling out her review. Hollis set the bag of ice in the sink, poured himself a glass of Cabernet and glided out into the living room.

  “There he is!”

  Harris Pinkle slapped him on the back. Harris was a tax man, one of the best he had ever known. He and his wife, Peaches she was called, had lived four doors down the street for at least fifteen years when the kids were in school and living at home. They had moved closer to Columbus several years ago, but Harris and Hollis never went more than a few weeks without drinks and a round of golf.

  Harris squeezed his shoulder and said that word was all over the Club House that Hollis no longer knew one end of a nine-iron from another; that he had gotten so arthritic that he had resorted to knocking the ball along the fairway with the side of his foot.

  “Harris, my good friend,” said Hollis loud enough for the room. “I can play eighteen holes of golf in the time it takes you to wash your ball.”

  “You’re lying again, Hollis,” Harris’ wife said, appearing out of nowhere.

  “Hello, Peaches, my lovely. Give us a kiss.” Hollis embraced the petite, hard-looking woman with an astonishingly deep voice. She swatted him on the flank and wriggled free. Hollis laughed good-naturedly.

  “Me? A liar? Golf is nothing to lie about, you understand.”

  “Well, I don’t know about golf,” she said, turning and heading for the kitchen, “but I know Harris hasn’t washed his ball in a very long time. Now I need a drink.”

  “Oh, Peaches…” Harris called after her as she scuffed off into the kitchen. Equal parts disdain, surrender and apology, this was the familiar refrain from Harris, who had never been able to stay ahead of his wife’s crass indifference to just about everything, particularly the tedium of social decorum.

  “You do have two of them, don’t you Harris?” Hollis asked jokingly.

  “After twenty-eight years of that, I’m lucky I have any.”

  Hollis made the rounds, person-by-person, rotating through the living room, kissing, hugging, and communing. He was like a bee pollinating daffodils. He made it a point to touch each of them, physically, to embrace them as family and to make each of them laugh. He regaled them with stories and he told them jokes and he received them graciously, rising to his mantle as a beloved patriarch. He felt their affection for him, their collective gratitude for having been invited and for his own good graces.

  And the wine, if he did say so himself, was superb.

  Susan was laughing with Bill Swensen in the kitchen. His was a distinctive, trilling, slightly effete laugh not becoming an obstetrician or any man of science. Tonight, for the brief moment that Hollis bent to refill his glass, Dr. Swenson’s laugh refreshed old and timely memory. Brace yourself, he had warned with that ridiculous laugh, placing Tilly into Susan’s arms with a smile, this one’s going to be a handful. More prophetic words had never been spoken, for his daughter had, in fact, turned out to be a handful.

  At the time of that particular prophesy, however, Bill Swensen had intended only a bit of well-placed comic relief following a difficult and dicey birth. Only after nineteen hours of labor did Tilly start to crown her way into the world. And even then, she had emerged the color of glacial ice. And quiet as death itself.

  Hollis had spent every last contraction hunched over his wife from his perch on a rolling stool in a small room tucked away in the maternity wing of the Grant Medical Center in Columbus. He held her hand and stroked her arm, standing and stretching only when Dr. Swensen said it was time to rest and, even then, making sure that Susan knew he was nearby, engaging her in conversation, telling her stories.

  David had been so easy, slipping out pink and perfect, like some sort of wet, fleshy, very loud and angry lozenge. But Tilly had been difficult from the beginning; three false labors followed by knee-buckling pain in the baby aisle of the State Street K-Mart, an ambulance ride, and then eighteen more hours in a tiny, pink and yellowish, twelve by twelve closet that looked three stories down onto a gleaming wet parking lot. The windows did not open more than a few inches, but it had been enough to hear the hiss of late summer rain. That was where they had waited an eternity for her to be rolled into a proper delivery room. But Tilly had picked a night on which the hospital was full up and Dr. Swenson and his nurses had ultimately come to her in the tiny room with the window.

  The umbilical cord had been the problem. Hollis had learned this later, after everyone’s adrenaline had subsided. It had been wrapped like a noose around Tilly’s tiny neck and tightening with every grit of Susan’s teeth. Dr. Swensen told her calmly to stop pushing,
holding up a hand as though he was stopping a passing car. But there had been something in his voice that Susan had caught, some slight tension not there before.

  “What! What is it?! What’s wrong?!”

  Dr. Swensen did not answer. But amid his work, between directing nurses and contorting his own shoulders and angling ever further into the breach, he had looked up fleetingly at Hollis and Hollis, in that one look, had known then and there that his baby was not alive, or, at least, that death was in the tiny room with them.

  “What’s wrong? Tell me. Oh, God, what’s wrong?!”

  “Susan, sweetheart, let him work. Take a breath, baby, take a breath. Shhhhhh. Thadda girl. You’re okay. No pushing, baby. Just relax. Shhhhhh… Shhhhhhhhhhhh.”

  He held her head in his hands and moved his lips through the sweat that was pooling out of her brows, kissing her and whispering to her and before he knew what was happening he was crying, his tears mixing with the sweat on her hot cheeks and neck and the rain coming down in sheets outside. “It’s okay, Susan,” he told her, not believing his own words. “Don’t push, baby. Let him work. Let him work.”

  “Susan.” Dr. Swensen’s voice was suddenly cold and efficient. “We’re going to deliver this baby right now. I want you to push and keep pushing. No stopping. I want you to push all the way to the finish line. I need to get your baby out right now.

  Hollis grabbed his wife’s hand and squeezed. “It’s time Susan. I know you’re exhausted. Push, honey. Give it all you’ve got.” Susan was sobbing and nearly screaming, her face a landscape of wet agony and fear as she pushed with strength she did not really have. There was some slight movement in her midsection, and then a deep, ragged hoarding of air and another push and a scream like she was on her back trying to push a mountain with her feet. But it was not enough.

  “Push harder, Susan. Time is critical. Give me a big push. Really bear down.”

  “I can’t push any harder!”

  “Yes you can!” Dr. Swensen was now making little effort to retain his lab-coated, man-of-science detachment. “Bear down and just do it, Susan. Right now!”

  Susan was sobbing and drenched with exertion. Her arms fell limp. The hand Hollis had been clutching, and that had been squeezing his own so hard now slipped out of his fingers to the bed like some multi-tendriled jelly fish slipping passively back into the sea. “It doesn’t want to come out,” she choked.

  Hollis allowed himself to do what he had resisted doing during the birth of his son. He rolled the stool towards the end of the bed and looked between his wife’s legs. Dr. Swensen did not appreciate the extra attention.

  “Hollis, she needs you up there now,” he said sharply, jerking his head toward the top of the bed. “Come on, Susan. Let’s go, now. Another big push. Help her out, Hollis.”

  But Hollis could not tear his eyes away. A dome of wet blue flesh had emerged from the recesses of his wife’s vagina, mottled with visceral reds and milky whites that in flecks and strands connected the gloved fingers of Dr. Swensen’s hands like webbing.

  A nurse came around to Hollis’ side of the bed and put a hand on his shoulder. He swatted it away.

  Blue. My God. Blue. Blue. Blue.

  “It doesn’t want to come out,” Susan sobbed.

  It. It doesn’t want to come out. They had decided to be surprised about the sex, just as they had been surprised with David. It had heightened the anticipation and sharpened their attention on the new life itself, holding at bay the rush of expectations that come, inevitably, with a particular gender. They had not been able to help selecting one name for each possibility, Malcomb after her grandfather or Matilda after his grandmother, but beyond that single concession, they had successfully fought the urge to define this child with preconceived notions before a formal introduction.

  But that triumph of will had suddenly seemed so empty and wrong-headed as he sat and stared uncomprehendingly between his wife’s legs. Susan was giving birth to… to… It. To a genderless abstraction. To a dead, blue entity.

  Hollis rolled his stool back over to his wife and grabbed her hand.

  “Come on, Sweetheart. Push, baby. Oh God, Susan, I love you. It’s a girl, honey. A beautiful baby girl. It’s Tilly, Susan. She’s coming. It’s Tilly.”

  He had no control of the forces that were forming the words that he spoke. His head buzzed and hummed and the image of blue flesh so thoroughly pervaded his consciousness that he feared for a moment he would pass out. He could, in a small corner of his inner chaos, discern a reaction from Dr. Swensen at the other end of the table, who seemed to stiffen and come out of his crouch a little at the lies Hollis was suddenly telling his wife. But if Hollis had just enough available consciousness to catch the doctor’s reaction, he did not have enough left over to care anything about what that reaction meant. He was not in control of himself or the things he was saying and that, as much as anything else, frightened him.

  “Come on, Susan,” he said, now openly crying, “let’s bring her out into the world. Today is Tilly’s birthday.”

  The impact of these words on his wife had been nothing short of electric. Susan had clenched her mouth into a tight knot of flesh, shut her eyes, gripped the bed with both hands and pushed so hard that Hollis thought she might explode. In nineteen hours of labor, that had been the longest, hardest push of them all. Everyone in the room understood that there would be nothing left of her after that push.

  Hollis spoke to her continuously, encouragement and lie and hope dissolving together into an unbroken stream of sound that he knew was his voice, but that he heard from a very long ways away.

  Susan did not open her eyes until the shoulders had passed. The physical relief of that moment, tremendous as it was, had lasted only for the few seconds it took for her eyes to refocus and to catch a glimpse of the still blue mound of flesh in Dr. Swensen’s hands as he turned his back in a huddle with two other doctors who had entered the room well outside Hollis’ conscious perception. Susan gasped as her baby disappeared behind a wall of green-scrubbed men hunched intensely over a small padded table the nurses had rolled in hours ago, when the world was still a fair and happy place.

  Hollis pulled Susan’s limp body up into his arms and squeezed her to his chest.

  “She’s blue,” she said, her lips right at his ear. “Oh, no… Hollis, she’s blue.”

  She. Hollis suddenly could not help but think that the dead blue baby was a boy. That he had been wrong and that this would somehow end up injuring Susan even further, scarring the trust between them. A boy. Not Matilda, but Malcomb. What had he done? He thought of his living son, David, at home with Hollis’ sister who had driven down from Cincinnati to help out. Little David, the only child, certainly asleep and dreaming of a new life that would now never come.

  But it did come. After a long and terrible eternity of minutes, it did come, with sharp, tiny bleating cries of life from the corner of the small yellowish room, and with palpable swells of relief from the huddled wall of green-scrubs, and with the recomposed professionalism of Dr. Swensen who turned to face them with a smile on his face and a crying, twitching bright red infant in his hands. A girl. Tilly.

  “Brace yourself,” Dr. Swensen had said with that ridiculous laugh, “this one’s going to be a handful.”

  Bill Swenson caught Hollis staring and raised his glass. Hollis set down the bottle, returned the gesture and moved on, crossing the living room toward his son.

  “You hogging the Shiraz?” he asked David, pointing to the bottle on the table at the end of the couch. David was leaning against the window looking out into the back yard. The lawn was dark except for a pale trapezoid of warm light that stretched out across the grass from the direction of Ben’s room.

  “Huh? Oh, no. It was just sitting here.” David handed over the bottle and Hollis refilled his glass. “Ben in his room?”

  “Yeah.”

  Hollis nodded.

  “Sorry about all the concern the other night.”

&nb
sp; “What concern?”

  “When I snuck Ben out to a movie.”

  “Ahhh.” Hollis waved his hand in irritation.

  “I didn’t mean to alarm anyone.”

  “No one was alarmed. Forget about that. That’s just your mother overreacting. She’ll be fine. She just needed something to be upset about. She’s fine. Mae’s sick?”

  “Stomach thing. She said she would try to be here.”

  “You two okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Fine.”

  “Mmm. How’s the school this year so far?”

  “Oh, okay. New crop of freshmen.”

  “You whipping them into shape?”

  “Trying.”

  “Well, keep at it. Given any thought to setting your sights at the college level?”

  David sighed. Hollis could feel the conversation with his son slip suddenly into that familiar, lifeless rhythm, in which nothing that passed between them was new or spontaneous or infused with anything approaching genuine interest. David explained in unnecessary detail, the practical differences in teaching history at the high school and college levels, the relative lack of opportunity at the college level, and so on.

  “…are too many petty agendas at work in college faculties, and unless you are incredibly diligent about kissing the ass of the right people…”

  The words came out of him in a thin whine, like air out of a tiny hole in a tire. David always saw the problem, never the opportunity. If David spent only half the time looking for ways to better himself that he normally dedicated to marshaling reasons against change, against extra effort, against personal investment, then he would have long since been a wealthy and respected man.

  “…said that the university was the last bastion of true liberalism is full of crap.”

  The sad fact was that his son had settled in life and that settling had always been David’s natural inclination. David was a person who settled. Hollis was not a settler. Hollis was a doer; a conqueror of new things, new experiences. Always forging new ground; collecting new knowledge. New experiences. Hollis was an astronaut, driven to explore new worlds and to reach ever-greater depths of wisdom. David stuck to the safe and familiar. He never took any chances. He did not have that hallmark hunger of youth to stake a claim; to be somebody. David was an incurable pessimist with little sense of life’s bigger picture. He expected the worst and it was making him old.