by Lisa Gornick
“Me? Call the cops? On my own neighbor? I don’t think so, ma’am.”
She speaks directly into the camera. “A case of racial prejudice. An Iranian family mistaken for Iraqis.”
Caro turns off the television. After dinner, she calls the hospital. Talis is with the baby in the pediatric intensive care. “Don’t bother him,” Caro says. “Just tell him I called.”
She wakes early, having forgotten to pull the blackout shades, the northern light filtering through the glistening leaves of the neighbors’ maple tree, the warmth of the coming day hinted at in the sheen of the still air. Talis is lying on her bed in his nursing uniform. His hands are behind his head and his eyes are open.
She turns toward him.
“Bad?”
“Bad.” Talis blows air out of his mouth. “Three kids. No one knows how old exactly. Maybe five, three, and an infant. The father, best we can figure, grabbed the baby, put her under his shirt, and got her out. Dumped her on the sidewalk, then went back to try and get the mother and the two other kids. The kids and the mother were dead by the time the ambulance arrived. The father died in the ambulance.”
Caro touches the V of skin over the blue of Talis’s uniform. She lays her hand over the fine hairs, mostly blond but a few grays too, her fingers curling around his exposed neck.
“The baby has a third-degree burn on one foot and an arm. Which is serious at her age, especially on the foot and the inside of the arm. The skin is like paper. We don’t know how old she is, but little. Maybe eight weeks.”
Talis unfolds his arms. His hands move into fists. “Assholes,” he cries, pounding the mattress.
35
No relatives appear to claim the baby, either because there are none here or they are too frightened to identify themselves. Her foot and arm are kept in traction so she doesn’t knock off the dressings or disturb the compression bandages. It is hard to know if her screams are because of pain at the burn site or a protest about the traction. On her chart, she is identified as Baby3, the three because she was the youngest of the three children in the house. Talis names her Chicky on account of the dark curl on the top of her head.
At the end of her first week in the hospital, Chicky develops an infection in her foot. For four days, Talis fears she will lose the foot. Her fever cannot be brought under control. He refuses his two days off, not trusting anyone else to stay with her overnight. During the hours when he isn’t on the unit with her, he is on the computer reading about other cases of severe infant burns. When her fever finally breaks, she is sedated so that the dead and infected tissue can be surgically removed. A week later, the surgeon sees between Chicky’s toes the hoped-for beginning signs of epithelialization.
Once Chicky is removed from traction, the nurses hold her constantly, singing to her, cooing, kissing her miraculously unscathed forehead. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Talis agrees to switch to the short-staffed day shift. Caro does not object. She hates traveling on holidays, likes the city on summer weekends, when there are no lines for anything and the streets are empty. She meets her mother for brunch, then walks across the park with a sandwich for Talis.
Caro knows most of the pediatric burn unit day staff from Omar’s stay. She waves to the nursing supervisor, who is writing charts in the center station, says hello to one of the attending doctors. In the dayroom, Irene, a Scottish woman with five children and nine grandchildren, is rocking a baby.
Caro leans over to look. The baby is tiny, with a little tuft of black hair. She has a bandage on one arm and her foot. “Is this Chicky?”
“That’s our ducky.”
“How is she?”
“Drowsy, as always. She opens her eyes for a few seconds, and then it’s back to sleep. Once we get her out of these dressings, we’re going to have to lower her morphine, because she’s got to start exercising those arms and legs of hers.”
“Can I hold her?”
“That would be nice, dearie. I could use my afternoon tea. There’s hand sanitizer on the table.”
Caro holds the baby while Irene hoists herself up. Carefully, afraid of jostling Chicky’s bandages, Caro sits down in the rocker. The baby nuzzles against her shoulder. She tucks her knees under her so her shins are resting on Caro’s breastbone and her tush is sticking out, the curl of a baby in the womb.
Gently, still worrying about disturbing the dressings, Caro rocks back and forth. She sings “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She sings “London Bridge.” She sings “Rockabye Baby.”
The light filters through the half-closed venetian blinds of the children’s dayroom, sketching golden trellises on the linoleum floor. On the low shelves, Caro can see Monopoly, Connect 4, Clue, Uno. She played all these games with Omar during the weeks he was here. Across the room are bookshelves with Olivia, Where the Wild Things Are, Pippi Longstocking, a collection of the Harry Potter books.
She cuddles Chicky, no longer worrying that the rocking will hurt her. She sings “Hush, Little Baby,” all ten verses, the way her mother sang it.
When Caro gets to “If that cart and bull turn over, Mama’s gonna buy you a dog named Rover,” Chicky twists her head to locate the voice.
For the rest of her life, Caro will never forget the moment when Chicky’s eyes—two brown pools, not of pain, but of curiosity—first find her own. Chicky’s tiny perfect lips part and a smile breaks over her face, revealing her pink toothless gums and the crimson tip of her tiny tongue.
Caro is so stunned, her own mouth drops open. She bursts into tears, flooded with the feeling that this injured bird is hers.
36
For Talis to bring Chicky home as a foster baby would be simple. The complications would arise if they were to make an appeal for permanent placement. Translated into legal language, Caro feels the impulse of the afternoon fracturing into doubts.
“I don’t want to take her home if she won’t be able to stay with us,” she tells Talis.
“There are no guarantees. No one’s showed up now for six weeks, but anything could happen. A relative from anywhere might appear. But we’d have priority over any nonrelative.”
Talis narrows his eyes. Has he taken a baby home so many times, Caro wonders, that he can’t understand that it would be better not to take Chicky home than to have to give her back—that Caro can already imagine fleeing the country with Chicky and abandoning everyone else in her life, including him, rather than losing her?
At work, the numbers on the school’s budget spreadsheet lie inert, incomprehensible on the page. Her thoughts are caught in a spiral. If they were able to adopt Chicky, what would they tell her when she is old enough to understand? Should they try now to find her relatives in Iran? What would happen if relatives appear five years from now?
It is a relief when her father calls and asks the same questions. “You have to consult with a lawyer.” He clears his throat, unaccustomed, she knows, to giving her, his practical child, advice. “And how about getting married? Wouldn’t an adoption be easier if you were married?”
“What if,” she asks her mother the following day, “what I’ve always thought about myself, that I don’t have it in me to raise a child, is true?”
Caro can see her mother studying her anguished face. She wants her mother to tell her what to do: wear the brown or the navy shoes, choose the grilled cheese or the tuna, invite Allie or Helen for a sleepover.
“No one has it in them ahead of time. We grow into the task, grow with our child. You’re strong, darling. Stronger than you think.”
Adam takes off his glasses when she asks what he thinks. It is late, Omar asleep, Talis at work. They are in the parlor, both in pajamas. He rubs his eyes. “You’d be a fantastic mother,” he says.
Her eyes are pathetically watering. She hadn’t realized how desperate she is to be reassured. “You think so? I love Omar, but I know it’s a hell of a lot different.”
“You half-raised me. I know so. And it would be great for Omar to have a little cousin. I already ask
ed him how he’d feel. He said he’d share his room and teach her how to build Legos.”
Caro hugs her brother. Chicky and Omar look like cousins, she thinks. Both with brown skin, skin seared by fire, skin that for the rest of their lives will elicit questions about where they are from and what happened to them.
37
Rachida calls after midnight. “A few days ago I remembered that Layla has a friend who works at the Iranian embassy. I called her and asked her to see if her friend could make some inquiries.”
Caro flips on the bedside light. Her thoughts are racing too fast for her to focus on how difficult it must have been for Rachida—who, Adam has told her, has an endless loop in her head of Layla fucking the blond neurosurgeon, a sapphire ring gleaming on his pinky finger—to call Layla.
“Layla’s friend found out that the baby’s father came to Queens eight years ago. He drove a cab. He brought his wife and the two older children over sixteen months ago. That’s when they moved into the basement apartment of the house. The baby was the only one born here.”
“Are there any relatives that anyone at the embassy knows about?”
“Not here.”
“But there are in Iran?” Caro asks.
“I’m sure there are.” Rachida pauses. “Layla says you can’t send the baby back. They’d never accept a scarred girl in a rural village. It would be cruel.”
Layla is not to be trusted. She told Caro her brothers had stoned her and left her for dead in the sand. She told Rachida her panties were wet when she thought about her, and now she is sleeping with the blond neurosurgeon.
About this, though, Caro knows Layla is right. Chicky has to stay.
38
When Talis gets home from the hospital, he sits on the edge of the bed where Caro has been lying, unable to sleep since Rachida’s call. “A specialist from Boston came to look at Chicky’s foot. The dermis is basically intact. She’s beginning to grow new skin on the ball of her foot.”
Caro opens the covers and beckons Talis to come into the bed. Still in his nurse’s uniform, he climbs in next to her. He buries his nose in the hollow of her neck.
Caro strokes his hair. “Don’t you want your own baby?” she whispers.
“You mean with my genes?”
Caro nods, the top of her chin grazing Talis’s hair.
Talis turns onto his side. He smiles sadly at Caro. “Genes don’t make people belong to each other. I haven’t seen my father since I was one. If he’s still alive, if I ever meet him, I’ll probably recognize certain things about myself in him, maybe my hairline or the way my third toe is longer than the second. But he never raised me. Never taught me anything. Never made me his.”
The adoption attorney they had consulted told them that as soon as Chicky is ready to leave the hospital, they can bring her home as foster parents while their application for adoption is being processed. “Nothing is guaranteed,” he said, “but I don’t foresee any problems.” Just hearing the word “problems” had made Caro so anxious, she had to excuse herself for the ladies’ room.
Talis takes her hand. “Sometimes you just have to jump.”
39
Now, when Myra picks up Omar on Wednesdays, he asks to come straight home to see his cousin. He races to wash his hands and then flings himself on the floor to play with Chicky, who can sit up supported by pillows. Afterward, he eats the snack that Caro, on maternity leave, gives him, and goes upstairs to do his homework or play on his own for a while. Caro then commences her weekly report to her mother on the things Chicky is doing: babbling, pointing, smiling at certain books.
“I know I must sound ridiculous, as though I have the only baby in the world.”
“When you were little, Grandpa Max used to visit us on his lunch hour every Friday. I was exactly the same way: describing your and Adam’s incredible feats. Who else can you go on and on with about your children other than their grandparents?”
“You mean, with whom else can you abandon restraint and good taste?”
“You’re doing so well. It’s such hard work, taking care of a baby. And it’s doubly hard for older mothers. Not that you’re old to be a mother, especially these days. But with the twenty-two-year-old mothers, they haven’t yet developed a self they have to put aside for the baby’s sake. There’s less for them to give up.”
“Chicky couldn’t give a damn that I’ve written grants totaling nine million dollars or that I’m used to running a staff of eighteen. All she cares about is that I feed her when she wants to be fed and entertain her when she want to be entertained and hold her when she wants to be held.”
Over the years, Myra has treated half a dozen mothers unable to keep at bay the resentment of having to put her own desires on the back burner for the good of her baby. The more strongly the mother resists the immersion in her baby, the more the baby senses the rejection, the baby’s pain manifest in a disorganized flailing that the guilty mother experiences as condemnation of her, a vicious cycle of neither enjoying the other because they are profoundly out of sync. The mothers arrive in her office, so stressed they seem ready to explode, filled with inane advice from parenting magazines about taking more time for themselves. Time for exercise and manicures and romantic meals with husbands. They are shocked and often furious when Myra prescribes the opposite: more time with the baby.
Caro snaps Chicky into her bouncy seat. Chicky bats at the toy bar, squealing when the clown flips over the top. “Talis showed me something he’s been reading. There’s an idea that’s part of Kabbalist thought called tsimtsum. It has to do with the way that God had to contract himself, absent himself, in order to create the world. It made me think about Chicky—the way that I have to constrict myself, my own wishes, so as to leave her room to unfold.”
Chicky pushes against the belt of the bouncy seat. She scrunches her face and punches the air with her chubby fists. Caro unbuckles her and Myra holds out her arms to take the baby. It seems pointless to tell Caro that she, too, had once been fascinated with the same idea. Myra bounces Chicky on her knees while the child, her face now so relaxed it is hard to believe the protest was only seconds before, examines the hair on a purple giraffe.
“I have to learn to do the same thing with Talis,” Caro says. “He’s such a slob. I can have everything put away before I go to bed, and by the time he’s been home fifteen minutes, he’s left a sticky spot of orange juice on the counter and toothpaste smeared in the sink and his clothes on the floor. Before Chicky, I coped by keeping his stuff in the front bedroom, but now it’s Chicky’s room. I have to keep reminding myself that he’s the one who’s normal, that a pristine environment is what’s unnatural.”
Caro leans over and kisses the top of her baby’s head. “What in nature is pristine? The leaves fall from the trees, animals shed their skins, dead birds rot in ditches. Nothing.”
“I’m afraid you got that from me. The notion that the pristine is something to aspire to. It’s like any idea: it turns on itself. There’s that precarious line over which something worthwhile becomes a horror.”
Myra turns Chicky around so Chicky can see Caro’s face. She hooks one arm across the baby’s tummy and strokes her soft dark hair with the other. Like with Eva, she can see the scalp underneath—only with Chicky, this is because she is half-hatched.
What Chicky wants is to drink in the world. What Eva wanted was to pour herself out.
“Da!” Chicky shrieks, pointing at the giraffe she has flung to the floor. Bracing the baby against her arm, Myra retrieves the toy.
With Eva, Myra had let herself be deceived about the necessity of the boundaries she maintains with her patients, the way that the limit on their access to her serves as a firewall. Eva lit the match, but it had been she, Myra, who had laid the tinder with her foolhardy good intentions. The yes to Adam’s request to live with her, not even a request, rather an implied request—or had it even been that? had the idea, in fact, first been hers?—that should have been a no. The girl from the
Amazon who should never have come to New York. The story she should never have let Eva tell.
40
Thanksgiving morning is cold but bright. When Talis comes in, he gives Chicky her bottle and she goes blissfully back to sleep.
At nine-thirty, Caro bolts awake. Talis is asleep beside her with an arm stretched like a tree limb across the white sheets. She bounds out of bed. She told her mother, who’d promised to help with the dinner, that they would start cooking at nine. Yesterday, Talis made the pies and the cranberry sauce, but there is still the turkey to stuff and the vegetables to prepare.
She finds her mother in the kitchen mixing corn bread to put in the stuffing.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. How’d you get in?”
“Omar. He was up reading and eating cereal. I’m glad that you got to sleep in. Omar and Adam and Rachida just left to watch the parade from my apartment. Omar invited one of his friends to go with them. They plan on meeting your father at his hotel afterward.”
Rachida had come in late last night. Seeing Rachida for the first time since the summer, her hair grown out so it falls in a glossy bob, Caro did a double take. It had been Rachida, though, seeing Adam without his beard, his delicate features uncovered, who did the real double take.
“Look at you,” Rachida said, touching Adam’s smooth chin. “When did this happen?”
“Ten days or so ago. I got tired of the boys and the other teachers at the school pigeonholing me because of the beard. And,” he paused to wink at Caro, “Chicky pulling on it all the time.”
Her father, who’d taken the red-eye, should have arrived by now—Betty, off to her brother’s for Thanksgiving, not having objected to his coming East for the long weekend so he could meet Chicky. Before Chicky came home from the hospital, he’d sent Caro a check for nursery furniture, enough, she joked, to furnish the entire house. This past week, he consulted with her by e-mail half a dozen times about what kind of toy Chicky would like, until she finally wrote him: Calm down. We’re talking about a six-month-old. Just bring yourself and a wooden spoon and an old pot.