Belonging

by Nancy Thayer

  “Oh, Jake, I lost a little baby.”

  “I know. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Jake,” she confessed in a whisper against his chest, “I don’t know if I can bear it.” Pain pressed relentlessly against her heart.

  “I know,” Jake said. He stroked her hair.

  “It was a little girl. My daughter.”

  “That’s terrible, Joanna. It’s just completely unfair.” She felt his voice rumble in his chest with repressed anger.

  “Everyone tells me to be glad I have another child, as if one could replace the other. People tell me to ‘focus on the positive.’ It makes me so damned mad!”

  “I know. But people don’t know what to say. When Emily died, everyone said, ‘Be glad she didn’t suffer long.’ Or ‘Be glad you had such a happy marriage.’ While all I wanted to do was take apart the universe to get her back.”

  “Oh, Jake, I don’t think I was sympathetic enough when you lost Emily. Forgive me.”

  “You were fine, honey.” He patted her shoulder.

  “I thought—a lot of us thought—that you were in a bad mood for a long time, longer than you should have been.”

  “Yeah, well, I was.” He coughed. “You’ll be in a bad mood, too. I don’t think there’s an option. If you’re cut, you bleed. Same thing, but on the emotional level.”

  “So you’re still sad about Emily?”

  “I expect I’ll be sad about Emily every day for the rest of my life.”

  “Really?” A great sense of relief and rapport swept over Joanna. “Then I can be sad about my daughter. Every day. For the rest of my life.”

  “I imagine so.”

  His words seemed a kind of permission. She felt the pressure against her heart increase unbearably.

  “Jake, I don’t know if I can stand it.”

  “I know.”

  “It hurts so much.”

  “I know.” His arms were sheltering.

  It was as if a boulder lodged against her heart moved slightly; something dragged beneath her breast. Hiding her face against Jake’s shoulder, she let her face fall open in the tortured grimace caused by grief, and she cried, the high, hideous, keening cry that had been waiting in her heart. Jake did not back away in consternation. He held her tightly. A sea of grief flooded through her. The tears came so fast and hard she was blinded. She could only cling to Jake, her body shuddering and knocking against his as the sorrow poured out of her, drenching her, shaking her, scalding her muscles and nerves and bones.

  Finally she was emptied out, shivering with exhaustion. Jake’s arms were still tightly around her, holding her to him. The wool of his vest was wet and scratchy to the side of her face. She could feel his heart thudding solidly against her ear. She just lay against him, catching her breath.

  “Here,” Jake said. “You’d better drink some of this.” He poured her a glass of water from the carafe on the bedside table and handed it to her. He looked weary, almost desolate, all the lines of his face drawn downward with sympathy and with his own unforgotten sorrow.

  “Thanks.” Joanna drank the water, which tasted cool and clear all the way down her throat. She sniffed. For a few moments they only sat together in silence. “Have you seen the Swimmer?”

  “The Swimmer?”

  “My son. I call him that because I can’t think of a real name.”

  “I haven’t checked him out yet, but I will.” Reaching into his briefcase, Jake said, “Hey, that reminds me. I brought you something.”

  He placed two packages, wrapped in white, with stiff gold ribbons and bows, on the bed.

  “Jake. How nice.” Joanna opened them: a Hermes scarf for herself, and for the baby, a baseball signed by Don Mattingly.

  “My sons always preferred baseball to football,” Jake said. “It’s the more intelligent sport.”

  “This ball isn’t much smaller than my baby’s head,” Joanna observed.

  “He’ll grow. He’ll be outside throwing it through your windows before you know it.”

  A glimpse of the future—spring, a little boy in a baseball cap, perhaps a golden retriever?—flashed through Joanna’s mind.

  “Thanks, Jake. I’m so glad you came. I’m so glad you haven’t forgotten me.” Tears welled up in her eyes.

  “I’ll never forget you, kid. You know that. But I’d better go now. I don’t want to wear you out.”

  “Are you going right back to New York?”

  “I’m staying here overnight. I’ll come back in and see you again in the morning before I go.” Jake approached the bed and once again wrapped Joanna in his arms. For a long moment she rested against him, feeling as if she were safe inside some large and benevolent force of nature.

  “Jake. It means so much to me to have you here,” Joanna told him.

  Jake kissed her forehead. “You mean a lot to me, too, honey. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  She lay back against her pillows, nearly ill with exhaustion. Almost of their own accord, her hands slid beneath the covers and found the long ridge of scar down her torso. Its rough presence somehow was a comfort. Her loss would be like this scar, Joanna thought, the loss of the Chorus Girl would be like the long scar on her skin, always a part of her, embedded in her very life. It would belong to her. And she was glad for that. Sinking into her pillows, Joanna closed her eyes and fell into a healing sleep.

  Twenty-one

  Ten days after her son was born, Joanna and her baby were released from the hospital. There was much fussing from the nurses over the sweet blue sleeper and sweater and bonnet and blanket and how adorable the little boy looked in them. Joanna had regained much of her physical strength and had begun doing basic beginning exercises to bring her stomach back to some kind of shape, and so as she stood dressed in sweatpants and a long loose sweater and shoes instead of paper slippers, she felt for the first time in months as if she were returning to her original, capable self.

  Or, rather, a facade of her original self. Beneath the surface of her skin, a cold and obdurate scar ran across her heart. She could feel it, a ridge of sorrow beneath her breast.

  They had given her a little booklet, and inside the booklet were two photos, two copies of birth footprints, and two photos taken just after the birth of her babies. Even in the photograph the tiny girl baby looked dead, or rather not alive, very pale and perfect and infinitely still. Also in the booklet were two birth certificates, and a certificate of death.

  They had insisted that she name the babies. When she was pregnant, she’d tested many different names, cute names that made the babies sound bonded, twinned, such as Charles and Charlotte or James and Jane, and names that made them sound separate and individual such as Miranda and Bret or Jonathan and Lilly. She’d settled on Angelica and Christopher just before she went into the hospital, and now superstitiously she wondered if she’d doomed her daughter by naming her Angelica, with its taint of heaven and death and angels.

  They made a rather stately and ceremonious departure. Madaket gathered up in her arms the vases of flowers Joanna had received. Gardner came up from his office on the first floor of the hospital building to carry the suitcase and diaper bag and the canvas bag full of free baby gifts from the hospital. Both walked beside Joanna as the nurse pushed her out in a wheelchair, the tiny baby nestled in a light cotton blanket in Joanna’s arms.

  Gardner opened the hatch door and, taking the vases of flowers, put them in a cardboard box Madaket had brought along for the occasion. Madaket took Christopher from Joanna and gently tucked him into the car seat, then assisted Joanna in stepping up into the Jeep. They had to tighten the seat belt, which had been stretched to its extreme length. Gardner came around and leaned in Joanna’s window.

  “Well, there you are, happy and healthy and on your way home.”

  “Yes.” It would seem churlish to disagree.

  “I’ll stop by as often as possible to check on the little guy.”

  “Thanks, Gardner. Thanks for everything.”

&nbs
p; “And you’ll get as much bed rest as possible, right?”

  “Right.”

  Gardner looked across the seat to Madaket. “You’ll be watchdog for me, okay?”

  “Okay,” Madaket answered, smiling.

  “He’s a good baby,” Gardner told Joanna. “Look how calm he is.”

  Joanna turned in her seat to look at her son, who seemed impossibly tiny among his straps and paraphernalia. His dark blue eyes were wide and searching, as if trying to see everything at once, and his two small fists were bunched under his chin like a pair of flowers.

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “He’s a good baby.” Then she leaned back against her seat and watched the wide outside world pass by as Madaket drove them home.

  When she entered her house, she saw that Madaket had made it shining clean and polished. Madaket had put fresh sheets on the bed and opened the windows to let the crisp October air fill the rooms. Joanna walked through her house, just looking at it all, the gleaming windows and glowing brass of the fireplace screens and tools, the rich luster of the furniture and draperies, the intricate lushness of the rugs. She could tell with her intelligence that her house was beautiful, but she felt no sympathetic reaction to it, no visceral response. She was carrying Christopher and he had fallen asleep in her arms and so she took him into the nursery at the front of the house to lay him in his crib, and when she walked into the room, which she had decorated in a mixture of pinks and blues, she realized at once how busy Madaket had been, removing the extra crib and all the dainty pink girlish items which would have belonged to her daughter. She should have been grateful, but she felt cheated, and grief washed up against her. She lay her baby boy in his crib and watched a few moments to be sure he was truly asleep and comfortable, and then she could stand it no longer. She left the room.

  In the days that followed, Joanna felt like a long-distance swimmer flailing through a stormy ocean with her heart a heavy dragging anchor and her limbs weighted down. Sometimes she managed to force her head above water, but almost immediately a great dark wave would crash down over her, spinning her helplessly back into the depths.

  Joanna was to let Christopher nurse on demand, and because the baby was premature and his stomach tiny, the demand was often. During their first days home, night and day blurred into each other, so that she seemed always moving against a tide. Her body was exhausted by her living baby’s cries and her soul was spent and sinking in the dark, oppressive ocean of grief which thrust her continually along in a drenched darkness which was the knowledge of her daughter’s death.

  Sometimes she dreamed also of Carter. Of Carter with Gloria, both of them sleek and shining and speeding, like bullets, like gleaming submarines, silently moving past her and beyond, while she was caught in the lightless depths by the twisting ropes of her sorrow.

  Ten days after she was born, Angelica Caroline Jones was buried in a small casket in a small plot of the Prospect Hill Cemetery. The minister from the Unitarian Church officiated, saying only a few brief words to the small group gathered there: Joanna, with Christopher in her arms, and Madaket, and Gardner, and Tory and the Hoovers and the Latherns and Claude. The day was brilliant with sunshine, the air full of copper light, and the brisk smell of salt air and chrysanthemums and leaves just beginning to flame and curl. It was a day radiant and dancing with light, a day to begin life. Madaket cried, but Joanna did not. Before they left, they covered the tiny coffin with a blanket of tiny pink baby roses.

  Very quickly Joanna realized that as much as she loved her house, it was set up inefficiently for life with a baby. She could not leave her tiny son alone in the pretty nursery at the front of the house—it was so far away from her bedroom that Joanna couldn’t hear him if he cried, and it took nightmarish ages to hurry down the long hall while her baby wailed. Madaket couldn’t sleep in her room in the attic for the same reasons. So for the first two months of Christopher’s life, all three slept in Joanna’s room: Joanna in her bed, sometimes with her baby, Christopher in his crib, Madaket on the chaise longue. Wolf lay on guard at the threshold of the bedroom. Bitch scorned them all and slept in another part of the house. It was infinitely soothing to Joanna to have Madaket with her in the dark hours.

  Even though premature, Christopher was a normal baby, and as the days passed, he quickly changed from the tiny pale infant into a solid little creature with his own personality. He grew eyebrows and eyelashes and fingernails and soft pale peach fuzz all over his scalp. After the first month, during which he did very little but eat and sleep, he began to stay awake longer, to engage in communications with his mother and Madaket, waving his tiny fat dimpled hands and pursing his lips as he tried to speak.

  One day Madaket laid him on a blanket on a soft and sunny spot of the living room floor, and Wolf approached the squealing, squirming bundle, in a sideways, cautious walk, smiling his ingratiating, hopeful, dopey doggy smile. Immediately all of Joanna’s senses sprang to attention, and an electric sensation of vigilance, like a golden living wall, rose quivering within her.

  “Madaket.”

  “It’s all right.” Madaket knelt next to Christopher, poised to come between the baby and the dog if necessary.

  Joanna watched in an agony of apprehension. Extending his neck, ready to recoil, Wolf sniffed the air above the squirming baby. Christopher’s eyes grew wide as he became aware of the enormous, gentle, bestial presence above him. Christopher stopped wriggling and went very quiet.

  “Lie down, Wolf,” Madaket said softly, and Wolf obeyed, placing his huge doggy feet just inches from the baby’s body and dropping his great head down to rest. As he did, his breath ruffled Christopher’s white T-shirt and his whiskers ever so slightly brushed the baby’s hands and Christopher looked startled, then grinned a wide and genuine grin and chuckled with glee. Wolf wagged his tail.

  From that day on Wolf and Christopher were great friends, and as the baby began to differentiate the personalities of the creatures who lived around him and played with him, he continually doted on the dog and laughed with delight when Wolf came near—and timid Wolf came near only when invited by Madaket or Joanna.

  During the days the baby was winsome and fascinating, and Joanna began to feel that perhaps she had done one thing in the world right. Then toward his sixth week, Christopher became fussy at night, every night, whimpering and crying and finally wailing inconsolably for hours. Joanna nursed him, and tried to give him a bottle of lightly sweetened water when he furiously turned his little face away from her breast. Madaket walked and rocked him. Gardner checked him, and said he was all right, and that probably he had a touch of colic, that inexplicable ailment, as prevalent and infuriating as the common cold, which came and went among babies without any seeming reason. He would get over it, Gardner said. Perhaps they should try music or taking him for a ride in the car.

  Joanna thanked Gardner for his help and didn’t tell him what she thought the problem might be. But that night, as she sat in the rocking chair in the nursery, with the north wind rising and beating steadily against the house, she admitted the truth, her truth. Madaket had already spent an hour trying to soothe Christopher with sugared water and lullabies and a drive in the car, and now she had gone up to the attic to try to grab some sleep before relieving Joanna. Wolf remained as Joanna’s companion. He worried terribly when the baby cried continuously like this, and paced the floor with Madaket or Joanna, and wagged his tail and whimpered in distress. Now, exhausted, he lay in the threshold to the nursery, eyes wide and fixed on Joanna, ready to spring to her bidding.

  “Wolf gives you pure, wholehearted, uncomplicated love,” Joanna spoke aloud. Looking down into the pinched and wrinkled face of her crying son, she whispered softly, “Wolf can, and I can’t.” She brought her baby up against her chest and nestled her chin against his tiny hot head, and lightly kissed the infinitely soft peach fuzz on his tender scalp. “But I want to love you that way,” she whispered.

  Joanna had told the Snowmen to postpone their work on
the house until she and the baby were on some kind of schedule that revolved around sleeping at night; she didn’t want the sound of hammers and chain saws to interrupt what precious moments of sleep she could grab during the day. Even though Madaket never complained, Joanna suspected that it was hard on her to go for so many days without seeing Todd, but she didn’t care. She had no energy for that kind of caring. Sometimes she thought all her kindness had dried up inside her.

  “Please, Joanna, come along. It will do you good to get out and see the island. It’s so beautiful now. The moors are all orange and red.”

  Joanna sat by an open window in a rocking chair, her son cradled in her arms. It was morning, a particularly lovely late October morning, with the warm golden air disturbed by only a hint of coolness from the autumn breeze which brushed over her skin like invisible scarves. Yet she disdained it. She was too tired for beauty.

  “Christopher’s too fussy. I want to rock him and put him down for a nap and get some sleep myself.” Joanna felt especially grubby and vile as she sat in her favorite, most comfortable, long cotton nightgown, which was stained, in spite of all of Madaket’s best attempts to wash it. Her heavy breasts, thick with milk, hung down in their nursing bra like sullen objects. She didn’t have the energy to change clothes simply to ride in the car while Madaket went in to get groceries.

  Madaket persisted. “We could put Christopher in the baby car seat. The movement might help him fall asleep.”

  Christopher stirred against her breasts and made a small mewing noise.

  “He’s almost asleep. I’m sorry, Madaket, I only want to go back to bed.”

  Madaket opened her mouth to object, then decided against it. “All right. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”