The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  The celestial stream whirled past and I thought about how I’d stopped drinking coffee. Bobbi Mac had gotten me hooked when I was ten. Just a few tablespoons in the morning with lots of milk and sugar, “to get the heart started.” In Europe, Martin and I had bonded over coffee, me proving to him how inherently sophisticated I was by learning to drink it the way he did, without the three spoons of sugar and half a pitcher of cream that I liked. In Sycamore Heights, coffee became a fetish—arabica, robusta, Jamaican Blue Mountain. I could not have imagined life without coffee any more than I could have imagined life without Martin.

  And then, from the instant his sperm seduced my egg, coffee sickened me. One morning I craved it; the very next the smell nauseated me. Coffee became one more thing that Martin and I no longer had in common. In my fifth month, I tried to reclaim that bond and drank a cup of Kona Peaberry. I threw up longer and harder than I had during the morning-sickness months and never repeated the experiment.

  Sipping Earl Grey in the great room that morning last August, I thought about Martin, about the life he had denied me, and I waited to be kneecapped by the rage and the sense of betrayal that usually skulked along with the topic. As with coffee, though, my craving for such a dark brew had vanished overnight.

  Late that afternoon, Martin took a cab from the Candlewood Suites where he’d taken a long-term rental, stood on my porch, and very solemnly asked me out to dinner.

  “How about a walk?” I suggested. “Maybe we can work up to dinner.”

  Martin had let out the smallest exhalation. Just enough that I could see that he was sufficiently nervous to be relieved. “A walk would be good.”

  We ambled around the Parkhaven reservoir and Martin asked, “Remember coming here? Pushing Aubrey in her stroller? How she used to say ‘dug’ for ‘duck’?”

  The answer I would have given him on any day of the past sixteen years would have been a dark, rich house blend of rage, grievance, and sarcasm. No, there are just so many happy family memories to draw on that I lose track. Or, wounded and accusing, I would have demanded, What about all the times I was out here alone and she held her arms out to every male over ten and under seventy and said, “Daddy”? And the walk would have been ruined.

  But that day, on what turned out to be the first of many walks, I just said yes, I did remember, and was happy to have someone by my side who also remembered that our daughter used to say “dugs” for “ducks.”

  I step out of the elevator on the fifth floor, the Mother/Baby Unit. Beneath the odors of cleansers and sanitizers, machines and humans, I always catch a whiff of caramel. Though no one else I’ve ever pointed it out to can discern the sweet fragrance, I smell the caramel scent I first noticed on Aubrey’s breath, exhaled on the milky breath of all the nursing infants on this floor.

  One of my favorite maternity nurses, Celeste, a stocky Latina with the biceps of a Rumanian weight lifter, is at the nurses’ station. “Cute top,” Celeste trills. “You got a hot date after work?”

  “If you consider Martin coming over to replace the hot-water heater a date, then yes, I have a date.”

  “I do!”

  Like Janis, like the rest of my coworkers, like Dori, Celeste wants more “details” about Martin and me. They want to know what it means that I am “dating” my ex-husband, the father of my child, a man who once palled around with movie stars and who now spends his evenings repairing my hot-water heater and his days counseling a growing list of ex-Nextarians who, like Martin, hate the organization but still believe in “the tech.” He makes a living working with some of them in person, many more around the country by phone, on Skype. Apparently in this underground railroad of “neXters,” Martin has become Sojourner Truth.

  I don’t pry. I accept his life the way I’ve learned to accept Aubrey’s. The way I accept the walks we take around the reservoir; the dinners we make together and eat in the great room at the long dining table; the trip he’s planning because he wants to show me Sanibel Island in Florida; the sex—I accept it all. I can’t recall consciously deciding to trick time, but that is what has happened. Somehow Martin and I, instead of being leashed for all eternity to what happened sixteen years ago, instead of that being the huge Before and After defining my life, have been set free. Sometimes he’s the boy I met on the train. Mostly, though, he’s a man I like being with who took a different route than I did to arrive back at us together.

  None of this can be boiled down into a coworker-ready sound bite. Celeste’s eagerness to move me from the perplexing limbo of a friend who may or may not be sleeping with her ex-husband into a known state of couplehood makes me understand how Aubrey felt when I grilled her about Tyler: It’s too soon. I don’t know. I might never know. And since I can’t not be with him, it doesn’t matter.

  Dori, meanwhile, acts like she predicted the whole thing. “I told you,” she reminds me regularly. “Didn’t I tell you about the rekindled romance? Plus, remember: They’re incredibly successful, these reunited relationships.”

  “Yeah, the mutual-delusion thing,” I tell her, not adding what a big fan of delusion I’ve become.

  Celeste, seeing that no “details” will be forthcoming, chirps, “Cute top. I love flutter sleeves. My shoulders are too broad for tops like that.”

  “Not true. Look at Michelle Obama. Show off the big guns.”

  “Well, some of us have to wear scrubs.”

  I gauge how much of a barbed edge there is in Celeste’s comment. When I stopped wearing scrubs to work some of the nurses became grumpy about my defection from the ranks. I was called in to human resources and “counseled” that street clothes were “unprofessional.” I had responded that “professional” was the last thing that a brand-new mom oozing colostrum and amniotic fluid and tears needed. If they were unhappy about my performance, I’d talk about that; otherwise, I had patients to see.

  I guess I was feeling sassy because Martin was doing the same kinds of magical things on the Web for me and my practice that he had done for Aubrey and FalaFellows and I had more new patients than I could handle. If the hospital wanted to fire me, fine. But I was through wearing scrubs.

  As I leave the nurses’ station, I flap my arms so that my sleeves become tiny wings, rising and falling against my shoulders, carrying me away. Celeste can laugh or not, as she chooses. She laughs.

  The first patient on my list is Ruth Lange. Outside Ruth’s room, I study the notes left by the labor-and-delivery nurse. Ruth, twenty-six years old, had a baby boy, Levi, her first child, last night at 9:23. Levi was forty-one weeks at delivery and a brawny nine pounds, six ounces. I check Ruth’s height and weight, five-four, 118 pounds, and wince: big baby, little mom. I note the number of poops, pees, minutes spent nursing, drop what’s left of the cookie in the trash, hit the hand sanitizer, and shoulder the door open.

  “I love that positioning,” I announce the instant I step in the room and see Ruth holding Levi in a nice, comfy cross-cradle. Ruth is propped up in bed, her surgical gown open, exposing both breasts, a paperback copy of the New Testament open beside her. For a pale blond, Ruth’s nipples are large and dark, with mud-puppy speckling at the edges. The deep blue veins running beneath her skin please me; good vascularization means a good milk supply. I’m not happy that Ruth is in bed, but we’ll get to that in a second.

  I introduce myself, ask, “May I?” and slip a finger in where Levi’s toothless gums meet Ruth’s nipple. “Oh, that is a good, deep latch.”

  Dad is seated at a small table on the other side of the room, playing a video game on his laptop. He’s hunched over, keeping the volume low, but the sound of his feverish clicking combined with mechanized beeps and explosions and a voice commanding, “Bring it on, alien scumwad!” still echoes through the room.

  It always baffles me when anyone around a newborn, barely dry after their swim from the other side, is not entranced by the only miracle they will ever be part of, yet I have witnessed more celestial voyagers welcomed into this world with Nelly
ringtones and WWE SmackDown than I can count. Trying to ignore the destruction of a distant galaxy, I concentrate on Levi working steadily at Ruth’s breast and hear the happy pattern I always want to hear—suck, suck, gasp, swallow. Suck, suck, gasp, swallow.

  “Oh, this boy knows what to do.” I lift the well-upholstered arm Levi rests lightly on Ruth’s breast and let it droop back down. “See that? See how floppy it is? A hungry baby won’t do that. A hungry baby keeps his fist balled up tight next to his face.”

  Ruth beams at her extraordinary son. Never has there been a baby like this.

  “Are you feeling some good cramping?”

  Ruth pulls her gaze from her baby and looks up at me. She has the sweet, besotted expression of a new mother insanely in love with her baby. “What?”

  “Do you need to change your pad after you nurse?”

  She nods.

  “Good, your uterus is contracting. That’s good.”

  Ruth dips her head, smiles at Levi as he grips her index finger. “He was turned around. They had to do a third-degree episiotomy.”

  “Oh, no. Baby.”

  Ruth gives a glum nod. “The doctor stuck the forceps in there and pulled him out.”

  “In that case, we have to get you into a better feeding position. Dad. Dad!” The father glances up from the computer screen, looks around the room, wondering why someone is calling for his father; then there is the stunned, scared look when he remembers.

  “What’s your name, hon?” I ask him.

  “Eric.”

  “Eric …” A series of explosions burst from his video game. “Do you mind?” I waggle a finger toward the laptop. Eric snaps it shut, and the otherworldly calm a room with an infant in it can take on settles over us. “Let’s get Ruth into a more comfortable position.”

  I wedge my finger between Levi’s mouth and Ruth’s breast. The suction breaks with a slurpy pop. I lift Levi away and, no matter how many hundreds of newborns I hold each year, this baby becomes Aubrey, with her furze of golden down like a halo around her head, and I am holding her again for the first time.

  The father, his eyes skittering about, stands by and watches as his wife tries to lower herself into the chair.

  “Eric, lend Ruth some of that upper-body strength.”

  Eric snaps to and helps Ruth. Awkwardly, he pokes pillows into all the wrong spots. I throw out a problem I know he can solve: “We need to get the weight off that incision. The higher you can get those knees, the better.”

  He rushes to haul over the chair he’d been sitting on to play video games and gently raises Ruth’s feet onto it.

  I nod. “Eric, that looks good.” I make serious eye contact with him and give him his assignment: “No bed feeds at home, okay?”

  “Not a problem. We’ve got this really great recliner.”

  “Good.” I tell Eric to wash his hands. When he finishes, I place his son in his arms. Eric tenses, holds his breath, but the stunned, disengaged look has vanished, along with my fears about the newest of my fathers. Like all of them, he just needs to know what to do. Once it was saving the world from invading aliens and now it will be raising a fine son. Levi starts fussing and Eric glances up, panicked.

  “Put your pinkie in Levi’s mouth.”

  Eric looks to Ruth. Nestled onto her pillows, regal as a queen, she nods her permission.

  Eric slips the end of his little finger into Levi’s mouth, and his eyes pop when he feels his son apply himself to his pinkie.

  “That is intense, isn’t it?”

  The new father nods, surrendering completely to the terrifying power of the life he created.

  “There’s your low-tech pacifier. You’ll need that. Ruth won’t want to hear Levi screaming when she goes to the bathroom. Number two is the dread of every small mom who has had a giant baby. All right, Ruth, are you ready?”

  Again the queen-mother nod and Eric, careful as a bomb squad, lowers the baby into his wife’s arms.

  When Levi is snuggled in, I coach, “Ruth, bring his chin in deep. Make sure his lower lip is out.”

  I watch for a few minutes, jot down some notes, tell the new father, “Eric, set up the perfect spot for chair feedings. Keep the weight off that incision. See to it that Ruth has plenty to drink. Mostly water. Be there to take over when Ruth needs to rest.”

  I head for the door. “I’m not worried about you three,” I say, pushing the door open with my back, but they are too engrossed in the new family they are creating to notice my benediction.

  Out in the hall, Celeste calls to me, “Mom in twenty thirty-four asked for a consult.”

  I check my list. “I don’t have her down. Did she take a class or something?”

  “Didn’t mention it. I think she’s just another Cam fan. She demanded in no uncertain terms that she had to see you and only you. Very ‘empowered,’ ” Celeste adds, hooking quote marks around the word. “Certainly fits your fan-club profile.”

  “Get out,” I protest, but it’s true. For the past few months, I’ve been even more passionate than I already was about all mothers getting what they want. My students, in turn, seem to have become equally passionate that I be part of that. The recent appearance of this “fan club” has helped me do my job the way I truly want to do it. “What ‘profile’?” I ask Celeste.

  “You know, tattoos, had to remove a piercing from a very tender place for delivery. And, uh, incidentally, ow. Anyway, you know, one of yours.”

  One of mine.

  “Sorry, haven’t even finished charting her yet. Basics are prima gravida. Five, fourteen. Not eating.”

  “Thanks.” I hurry off, knowing that 2034 is a first-time mom who had a scrawny five-pound, fourteen-ounce baby that doesn’t want to nurse. Outside her room, I rub in sanitizer, shove the door open with my hip, and meet my next patient.

  The new mother—young, painfully young; lovely copper-colored hair twisted into dreadlocks that droop from her head like a jester’s cap; plump arms sleeved with tattoos of anime princesses and a wizard trailing stardust—has her head down and doesn’t notice me enter. Her breasts, rosy as Pink Lady apples, are exposed, offered to the infant in her arms. She lifts her head. Fairy wings beat in my memory and a little girl with a voice like Ethel Merman, as dreamy as she was brassy, looks up at me. My head fills with the smell of cinnamon, sugar, and butter from the endless pieces of cinnamon toast with the crusts cut off that I made for her and Aubrey to eat.

  “Twyla, you came home.”

  Twyla nods, holds her free arm out to me, and I hug Dori’s daughter and Dori’s granddaughter. Twyla smells of labor, the hard, painful work of dragging a new soul onto this earth. Her baby smells like the reward. Running beneath both those scents is a fragrance as essential as newly cut wood that defined Twyla for me from the instant I first put my nose into her auburn curls a dozen years ago.

  “You have a baby.”

  “Yeah, you pretty much have to have one to get in here.” Twyla has grown into her husky voice; it fits her now. “I remembered that this is where you worked. I waited until my baby was already coming, so they had to admit me. I wanted to get her started right.”

  “Can I have a look?”

  She nods, and, gently, I peel the soft flannel of the receiving blanket away from Twyla’s daughter’s face. She has given birth to a fairy baby as enchanted as the ones she and Aubrey once pretended to be. Her tiny lips are a perfect Gummi Bear pucker of cherry. Her squinted eyes twitch as she follows the dreams of a newborn waking to an unimaginably alien life.

  “Oh, Twyla,” I whisper. “She’s beautiful.”

  A princess released momentarily from an evil spell, Twyla sheds the jittery rage she had once been armored in and glows with a simple serene radiance.

  “What’s her name?”

  Tenderly as if she were stroking a soap bubble, Twyla runs the backs of her fingernails against her baby’s cheek. “Aubrey. I always liked that name.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Do
esn’t she remind you of Aubrey? The way she used to be? All shy and delicate.”

  “She does.”

  “I know she’ll change, but who she is, right now, that’s never really going to change, right?”

  I think how whole and entire every newborn I’ve ever seen has been. The ones who enter the world, mouths open, howling, ready to devour whatever life brings their way. The ones who question and hold back. Aubrey showed me everything I needed to know about her from the first instant we met. Though it will take me what is left of my life to fully understand what that was, Aubrey was Aubrey from her first breath.

  I tell Twyla, “No, that’s never really going to change. Does your mom know you’re here?”

  “Uh-uh. I can’t deal with her energy right now. She’s so hectic. Does Aubrey still say ‘hectic’ all the time?”

  Before I can answer, Twyla announces, “I’m going to be the kind of mom you were.”

  “What kind of mom was I?”

  “Calm. You were always calm. Calm Cam.”

  “Cammando”? Now this? Calm Cam? I can’t recall one moment of calmness while Aubrey was growing up that I didn’t fake.

  “You probably want to know what happened with my dad,” Twyla goes on. “I left there months ago. He’s an asshole. My mom got that much right.”

  “So you’ve …”

  “Pretty much been on the street.”

  “Oh, Twyla.”

  “Then there was this little niblet.” She lowers her nose to baby Aubrey’s head, closes her eyes, and breathes. “So I went to Snowflakes, this Christian adoption agency. I had to tell them that if they didn’t take me, I’d get an abortion. They still wouldn’t let me in, though, until I signed a paper promising that I’d give my baby up to a ‘fit Christian family.’ That was fair. Seven months ago? I shouldn’t have been raising an iguana. In fact, I tried to raise an iguana.”