That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

  “It’s a scarf.”

  “Don’t tell!” Christopher swung the pin-striped shopping bag.

  “Can we get a cookie? Daddy said we could get a cookie.”

  “Guilty. I did say that.” Christopher smiled. “Did you have a bit of a rest?”

  Maybe the holiday spirit had defeated his need for nicotine? “I did, thanks. Just sat and had a cup of tea and thought about nothing.” This was a lie, but sometimes you had to lie. The family turned around and went back toward the food hall, for the promised cookie.

  13

  IT WOULD BE GOOD, IAN HAD SUGGESTED, TO GET THE BABIES TOGETHER. Good. Rebecca was interested in doing what was good, even if it was a nuisance to stuff the boys into their winter gear and into the car. It was hard to buckle the car seat’s straps over the bulge of the infant snowsuit.

  Cheryl and Ian’s house was suffused with silence. Child care’s industry was best conducted in meditative quiet, amid the smells of talcum and soap. Rebecca curled into the crinkling leather sofa, pulling her stockinged feet up beneath her. Jacob was breaking the spell, playing a noisy game of truck. He did that: prone, cheek to the carpet, vrooming an incantation. Ian, patient Ian, on his day off, packed the big boy into the car and drove to the lot where he spent forty hours a week, with the promise that Jacob could sit inside lots of different, brand-new vehicles. Rebecca handed Andrew to his sister, and Cheryl handed Ivy to her. It was like a minuet or some other old-fashioned dance routine.

  “He’s doing well. Great, actually.” For some reason, Rebecca was whispering. “We had to bump him up to four ounces. He would finish the three and still be pulling at the bottle. And he sleeps. I have to keep him awake to burp. I know he’s a baby, but, Cheryl, I swear, he glares at me when I do it. Glares.”

  Cheryl jostled the baby. He was so fat and imperturbable he practically dared you to. Ivy was only sixteen days his junior but a different kind of baby altogether. Rebecca held on to the little thing, as brown and nervous as a common bird, all bones and heartbeat. “Good. He’s pretty damn cute.”

  “Who could disagree?”

  Cheryl yawned. “I knew I would be tired, but I didn’t think it would feel this way. I can work a double overnight and still get an IV into a vein, but this is—yesterday, I put the cordless phone in the refrigerator.”

  Rebecca laughed. Ivy flinched at the sound, and Rebecca held the child closer, rocked in that pilgrim’s rhythm that comforted an infant, and Ivy dozed. They slipped so easily from waking to sleep at this age. It made their grasp on life itself seem so tenuous.

  “Rebecca.” Cheryl held the baby, her brother, up to her mouth and kissed him quietly. “I haven’t said thank you.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “You have. Anyway. You don’t have to thank me.”

  “I do. I haven’t, appropriately. Thank you. Thank you for this.”

  “There’s nothing to—”

  “But there is.” Cheryl’s tone was sharp even as her words were not. “Please listen. Accept my thanks for this thing you’re doing.”

  Rebecca was quiet. “You are, of course, very welcome.” Cheryl was in a fragile state. She deserved to be listened to.

  “I can’t imagine the future right now.” Cheryl’s eyes were dry, but there were tears in her voice. “I’m not sure what to tell you.”

  Rebecca thought of Priscilla as a teen, severed from her own mother, then Priscilla as an adult, not quite mourning that mother. She remembered, as how could she not, her first days with Jacob, when she had felt alone in the world but for a woman at the hospital whom she didn’t know at all. “We don’t have to think about the future at the moment.”

  Cheryl was determined. “We’ll make a timetable. Three months. I know that’s a long time. But by three months—”

  “Six, even. They’re not even truly alive, awake, until then.”

  “That’s June, Rebecca. That’s awfully far away.”

  “I don’t want you thinking about timetables. Just concentrate on the matter at hand. On Ivy.” She wanted to ask, but somehow could not: How was the breastfeeding, the sleeping, the pain, the blood, the bloom of sadness, the surprise euphoria, the balancing, the business of motherhood? Somehow it was too intimate.

  “I’m very lucky.” It was true, wasn’t it, that even now, with her great bad fortune, that Cheryl was one of the lucky ones? “I know that.”

  “Just”—Rebecca felt it was simple—“put this out of your mind. Enjoy these moments. I know they’re not very enjoyable. But that’s what I found—that when I gave in to motherhood I found it a lot simpler. Until you go back to work, until you go back to real life, just let Ivy take over your reality. That’s what matters.”

  “Rebecca, you’re an idealist.” Cheryl shifted. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate it. Your optimism. It comes easily, doesn’t it? I can’t find my way to that. I guess that’s why people go to church, huh? To learn that, or to have some reason to feel the way you feel, like everything is just—going to be fine. Would you take him?”

  Rebecca reached up and now she was holding both babies. It was surprisingly, strangely, simple. Two arms, two babies. She sank back into the sofa under the insubstantial weight of these two lives. “Maybe that’s all I know how to do. Pretend like everything is going to be fine.”

  Cheryl stretched. “Whatever works. Can I take a shower? Would you mind?”

  Rebecca shook her head no. She placed Andrew, asleep, on the sofa beside her, put Ivy, asleep, into the bassinet by the fireplace. Cheryl went to take a shower and Rebecca righted the cushions, tidied the newspaper, loaded the dishwasher. She worked in silence, and it was as though a spell had been cast, the four people gathered under that roof locked in enchantment, a state of suspension.

  14

  A FEW MORNINGS—FORGIVE HER—REBECCA THOUGHT SHE HEARD Priscilla’s happy Hello at the appointed hour. Of course she did not. This psychological break was recourse, since prayer was not available to her, but no matter how fervently she wished it Rebecca could not will it to be true. Rebecca gave Andrew his second bottle of the day and the kid was stunned into sleep. She put the bottle on the table beside the rocker and eased him gently into the crib, shushing and shushing as she did. She lingered cribside, her fingers spread wide, the weight of her reassuring hand on his back, and she marked the transition from shallow to deeper breaths, the way his legs folded up under his torso and his bottom lifted to the air. She tiptoed, closed the door quickly because if you did it slowly it would creak, and once in the hallway she realized she had, once again, forgotten the dirty bottle.

  In the living room, unattended, Jacob waited. Andrew’s naptime meant Jacob’s me time. Oh, they had spoiled him with the undivided attention of three adults, and now Jacob was bereft. “Read with me!”

  She sat. Reading, fine. It was easier, because the words were within her from so much repetition, and she could lie back, hold the book so he could see the illustrations, and mumble through it like a lapsed Catholic doing an emergency rosary. She owed him her attention; Jacob had a loss, too. She’d explained it, trying for the truth. Priscilla isn’t coming back. He didn’t understand because he was a baby, too.

  “Read it louder.”

  “Shhh. Baby Andrew is sleeping.” She didn’t know if the baby could hear, and doubted it would bother him if he could, but the silence was for her. She reclined on the sofa, pulling the boy’s small body atop hers. She needed to gather her thoughts. Of these there were too many. Priscilla had managed the naptimes and the story reading, and Rebecca had given her afternoons over to thinking, and lots of thinking led to some writing, and of course, wasn’t it the way, that now she was positively pregnant (ha ha ha) with thoughts but without the time to do what came next. Well, she had been the one who lamented that nothing happened in her life. Now something had, but she certainly didn’t have time to make that into a poem.

  “I want the truck book.”

  “The truck book is—” She sighed and pushed herself up into a
sitting position. “Where is the truck book?”

  Jacob shrugged. “I want the truck book.”

  “It must be upstairs. Let’s play downstairs so we don’t wake Baby Andrew.”

  “I want the truck book!” Jacob screamed.

  “Jacob! Lower your voice this instant.” The sound of his scream was terrible, a screeching thing, full of pique, sarcastic, fake, cruel. She hated it when he did this, worried that there was in him some tendency toward hotheadedness. “The baby is sleeping. We can’t go upstairs to get the truck book. Let’s make a city with blocks.”

  Jacob pushed off the sofa and threw the basket of blocks to the ground, satisfied. “The baby is stupid.”

  “We can do lots of other things instead of reading.”

  Jacob sneered. “Make a highway. Make a highway for trucks.”

  Rebecca pushed off the sofa and sank to the floor. The room was a mess; she could choose not to see it, but she was still aware of it. “Let’s call our city Jacobtown.” Often, she could sit and narrate his play and this would be sufficient. But he knew when she wasn’t paying attention, when she was humoring him, and this made him angry. It wasn’t as though she could do the work she’d normally be doing, while sitting here on the floor, knees bumping up against the coffee table. Nor, though, could she give in to the reality of Jacobtown. She just shut off, or down, the way the refrigerator ceased its hum for half an hour or so when it had reached its favorite temperature.

  They played for a few minutes, then Jacob was not interested in blocks: he wanted to make a train.

  “I have an idea. Let’s go in the kitchen—”

  “No!”

  “And we can build a train track—”

  “No!”

  “That goes under the table.”

  “No!”

  “It’s a big tunnel—”

  “No!”

  “No, I’m sorry. I made a mistake. It’s a subway. A New York City subway. The J train. The J stands for—”

  “For what?” Jacob stood, his hands on his hips. It was a silly pose, but contained defiance.

  “Jacob!”

  He was mollified, especially when he dumped the box of wooden tracks onto the kitchen tile, which made a terrific clatter for which she did not even bother scolding him. Rebecca put the dirty coffee cups in the dishwasher, found a roll of paper towel with which to replace the cardboard tube that had been taunting her for days. She took the plastic mixing bowl full of Andrew’s dirty bottles to the sink and began unscrewing them. They smelled horrible, old milk and heavy metals.

  “Next stop is Tenleytown! Tenleytown.” Jacob was distracted.

  She had to move quietly, because he had forgotten her, momentarily. She set the pot to boil, scrubbed the bottles and their innards with the soapy brush, dumped the lot into the bubbling water. She marked the time on the clock on the stove, set the tip of the tongs into the water to make those sterile, too, then lifted the components out and onto a dish towel. Here was where her plan went awry, surely, because the cotton towel was clean but not sterile. No matter. It was something, and Andrew seemed healthy.

  “Mommy.” Sometimes his words were so clear, his affect so unlike the baby he’d been for so long. Sometimes he talked to her just the way her mother had talked to her, just the way Christopher talked to her. “Come and play.”

  She didn’t want to play. Play was work, a child’s work, and it was important—this was how you learned to exist in the world—but it was work that she was done with. She wanted to be alone for half an hour, and to take a shower, and come downstairs and find the place magically tidied (not spotless even; just all the wooden train tracks in a box and out of sight) and drink a cup of hot coffee and then go into her office and turn on Dvořák and sit at her desk and just—well, what would come after that didn’t even matter. “I have to finish the baby’s bottles.”

  “Don’t do bottles. Play trains. This is an express train.”

  He wasn’t whining, nor was he yelling. He was asking for what was his by right: her attention. “OK, the bottles are almost finished.” She dumped the rubber nipples into the soup and they bobbed about crazily. She had forgotten how long she was meant to boil them. She waited two minutes, then three, and that seemed sufficient to keep bacteria at bay. She plucked them out one by one, then turned off the stove.

  Those days of leaving her work as a mother for her work as a poet were behind her. Of course she could hire someone. Some efficient whisperer with a West Indian accent, some rotund nurturer who smelled of menthol cigarettes, some eager Emily with a degree in early childhood education, to build towers with blocks, to rub balm into the baby’s bottom, to ensure the bottles were germ-free, to sing songs and impart the alphabet and give baths and lead excursions to the library. That made the most sense, but it also made sense, at least to her, to choose otherwise. It wasn’t punishment, exactly, but it was something like penance: Rebecca owed something to Jacob, to Andrew, to Priscilla. She owed nothing to poetry.

  Soon, the baby would be awake. He’d cry, then she’d go upstairs, and change him, and bring him downstairs, and he’d have another bottle and Jacob would have a peanut butter sandwich, or macaroni and cheese from a box (if you added peas that made it healthy). She’d think of something they might all do together, or she’d hold the baby in her lap while Jacob continued at his trains or his trucks, or she’d turn on a CD, or switch on a cartoon. She’d read a board book to the baby then a big kid book to Jacob, then someone’s bowels would move, or both of their bowels would move. Or someone would need a clean shirt, or spill apple juice, or fall down, or weep. Then Jacob would get sleepy, and Andrew would get sleepy, and she’d try to decide who to coax into sleep first, and Jacob would nap for an hour and Andrew would nap for two, sometimes three, their naps a Venn diagram, and Rebecca in the seed-shaped overlap at their center would sit at the table and survey the kitchen and do absolutely nothing. That was what would happen, soon, but it was not happening now, so she sat down and marveled at the trains under the kitchen table, trying not to notice that the floor was sticky with something unpleasant.

  15

  REBECCA PREVAILED UPON HER OLD COLLEAGUES TO ADMIT JACOB to school early, which was against the principles of the school, but when she told them why, those principles were set aside. Her days thereafter were the relief of discovering that instead of breaking both legs you’d only broken one. Rebecca now had to pack school lunches, but when Andrew napped (ninety minutes in the morning; two hours in the afternoon) she could crawl into bed and sleep and sometimes—shame—weep, depression sans partum. Poetry magazine bought a poem, but what did she care about poetry or Poetry?

  On a February day that was unremarkable otherwise, the sky gone purple, the world cold, they all put on nice clothes and gathered at Ian and Cheryl’s house to make conversation about nothing in particular and remember Priscilla’s life. This was a strange but necessary human ritual; Cheryl needed it to heal from death but had had to postpone it while she healed from birth.

  Rebecca wore black because she didn’t have the temerity to break with convention, but it seemed unfair, the insistence on joylessness. She thought of the way they buried people in New Orleans, with menacing jazz and furious dance. Priscilla had made her so happy it was disappointing to not be able to allude to that, now.

  Rebecca tried to make herself useful. She answered the door for neighbors, Ian’s extended family, the contingent of nurses from the hospital. She collected abandoned plates, put more crackers out, snuck into the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee.

  Cheryl was there, wiping the counter with a paper towel, distracted.

  “You OK?” Rebecca wanted to touch her but did not.

  “I’m fine.” She crumpled the towel and threw it in the garbage can. “Lost in thought, for a minute.”

  “I don’t mean to intrude. I was just going to make some coffee.”

  “Thanks.” Cheryl sat at the kitchen table.

  Rebecca filled the chambe
r of the coffeemaker. Then she turned to face her host. “What if we keep him?”

  Cheryl rapped a fist against the table. “What if.” It was not a question, there was that.

  “We could do it, Cheryl.” Such occasions, people proffered flowers, casseroles, but Rebecca had only this. “We could make some kind of arrangement.”

  Cheryl stood. “I should put out those cookies the girls brought.”

  Rebecca handed over the plate of cookies, delivered by Cheryl’s colleagues. “I’m sorry to be so abrupt.”

  Cheryl looked at her. “This is not the day, Rebecca.” She carried the cookies into the next room and Rebecca waited until the coffeemaker had finished its hissing and dripping, red-cheeked, hot with shame.

  It had settled or festered, what Rebecca had said, because Ian and Cheryl came to lunch the first warm day in March and Ian mentioned McDougal.

  “I met a man. A lawyer.” Ian sounded apologetic for changing the subject.

  Christopher toyed with his pasta. “You need a lawyer, Ian? You could have come to me. This city is lousy with lawyers.”

  Ian cleared his throat. “He does trusts. But he’s done adoptions.”

  Rebecca placed her fork on the edge of her plate. “I see.” Her heart did something now, something she had no longer thought possible. It swelled. She could fairly hear it pounding. She didn’t want to eat, she never wanted to eat again.

  “I know we talked about an arrangement.” Cheryl was concise. “Ian sold this man a car. He gave him his card. It seemed prudent. To call. So I did.”

  “An arrangement.” Christopher nodded.

  “We discussed it. Briefly.” Rebecca stood and retrieved Andrew from his little seat on the floor. “We ought to come to some kind of terms.”