The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  Tears slip out of my eyes and fall to the table beneath my head.

  Mom, Mom, Mom. Where are you?

  ON MY FIRST DATE with Greg I told him that I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to have children. Having corresponded for a long time before we actually met, I knew a lot about him, and one thing was certain: Greg wanted to be a father.

  We were walking across a bridge in Millennium Park when I told him. It was late May and summer had officially descended upon Chicago. We were holding hands, and I felt like everyone we passed could tell that we were right in the middle of falling in love.

  I’m not sure if I want to have kids, I said.

  I can’t remember what we’d been talking about before I said it. Maybe nothing. But there had been a shift, the kind where you suddenly know that there is an entire path opening up before you with this person, and I just had to tell him before we took another step down it.

  He looked at me and smiled. Squeezed my hand.

  I think he knew then that I would change my mind. In the beginning it seemed like he knew everything.

  I’m scared, I would say sometimes about how fast we were moving.

  You’ll be fine, he always said back.

  And I was.

  He said it this morning too, just before we parted ways.

  You’ll be fine.

  I think about this as the doctor begins her incision. The lower half of my body feels like dead weight, like something that isn’t mine, but as she continues I begin to feel a fierce pushing and tugging. It’s as though my abdomen is a suitcase and someone is angrily unpacking it.

  I try to take deep breaths and I stare up at the ceiling. I want to wrap my arms around me, but they are strapped down. My vision goes in and out, blurring darkly at the edges. When I tell the anesthesiologist this, he spins a dial.

  You need more fluids, he says.

  The room comes back into focus.

  I go in and out like this, and the surgery takes longer than I imagined it would. I’m having trouble concentrating on any one thing but I try to keep coming back to my breath.

  Claire? Claire?

  I can hear someone calling my name from far away. I finally realize that it is the doctor.

  Yeah? My voice is garbled and slow.

  We’re calling in an oncology surgeon to help remove the cyst. It’s a little larger than we expected.

  More shoving and tugging.

  It goes on forever.

  I’m in a daze. Breathing. Breathing.

  Breathing.

  Claire?

  The doctor’s voice again. They are finished.

  We’re just sewing you up, she calls over the divider.

  A nurse comes around and holds up a pink kidney dish for me to see. Resting inside is my cyst. It is the size of a grapefruit, smooth and pink.

  Is the baby okay? My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like my mother’s did the first time I came to see her in the hospital: rough and disoriented.

  The baby is just fine. Can’t you hear the heartbeat over the monitor?

  I listen, tuning out the other sounds in the room.

  Flump, flump, flump.

  THE RECOVERY IS much more painful than I anticipated. I was so focused on the procedure that I hadn’t imagined what it would be like if I actually got through it.

  I spend five days in the hospital while a winter storm rages outside the windows, whiting out the city. My stomach is too bloated to feel the baby kicking, but a kind nurse obliges me by letting me listen to the heartbeat once a day.

  I drink in the sound. Flump, flump, flump.

  Because I am pregnant I can’t take anything stronger than Tylenol and I spend those first few days curled on my side, trying not to move so that I can’t feel the pain of the incision.

  Late at night, after Greg has gone home and I am alone in my hospital room, the fluorescent bathroom light casting a beam across the floor, I think about my mother. I imagine all the nights she spent, just like this one.

  In the last year of her life I was convinced that she wasn’t trying hard enough. I thought that some part of her enjoyed being sick. That somehow being a cancer patient was easier than being herself.

  Lying here in my hospital bed on this snowy January night, the pain in my abdomen like hot knives, I weep for my ignorance, and for the girl who so flippantly judged her mother.

  A year or so before she died I walked into the living room one night to find her writing in a notebook. When I asked her what she was doing, she admitted that she was writing a journal for me.

  We never spoke of it again, but one night, a few weeks after she died, I turned the house inside out searching for it. My father watched helplessly from the couch as I dug through drawers and tore through closets. I was about to give up when my fingers closed around something at the bottom of my mother’s knitting basket.

  A simple spiral-bound notebook with a flimsy yellow cover. There were exactly seventeen pages filled with my mother’s looping script.

  I took it downstairs and read it on my bed, barely breathing until I got to the last page.

  December 19, 1995

  I got unplugged from chemo yesterday! A whole week without a leash. It was beginning to slow me down, me who doesn’t know the term! It’s okay though, given me some time to figure out some things in my head, which I don’t often do. Maybe my life would have been different if I had. I always either reacted to things or just rushed in on impulse.

  Have a plan, Claire, have goals, and I don’t just mean material but spiritual as well. Get to know yourself deep, deep down, where no one knows you. Listen to that well, because that’s who you are.

  I think it took cancer, me saying I want some attention, the real me, not the one I’ve presented to the world, to make this happen. My body and mind are one and they were in trouble. Now that I’m dropping baggage all over, it will be interesting to see who emerges. I have to be quiet now and listen. Don’t ever have to get a cancer of some sort as a wake up call, honey. Be as true to your inner self as you can. Listen to your real voice inside, because if you deny it, you will have to answer to it some day. I’m beginning to think that’s the basis of most illness now—the denial of that voice within.

  She ends the entire journal with this paragraph:

  I’d say I was probably two or three when I knew it was sink-or-swim time. I was alone and desperate. I couldn’t give in to my feelings because there was no one there to hold me and hear me and say it’s okay. So I killed my feelings and got cancer. I remember blurting out to Dr. Benigno when he hypothetically asked, I wonder why this nice lady got cancer: I wanted attention.

  I TURN THIRTY-ONE at the end of May, just a couple of weeks before my due date. I’m enormous, only further fueling the speculation that I’m having a boy.

  June 6 comes and goes. Greg and I go on long walks through the neighborhood. Summer has yet to bestow itself upon the city, and I wear long-sleeved shirts and shiver beneath the duvet at night.

  Labor starts just before I go to bed, four days later. The contractions are strong and regular and I sit on the couch, rocking back and forth. In some way they feel good. There is something deep and strangely familiar about them.

  Greg will later say that our drive to the hospital was like a scene in a movie. I sit in the backseat with our doula while Greg navigates the stop-and-go Chicago traffic. I am eight centimeters dilated by the time I am checked out in triage, but everything looks good and we are given the green light to use one of the suites in the natural birthing center.

  I ride the contractions like waves for what seems like an endless span of time but is really only a few hours. I am amazed by the intelligent design of them, the peak, the drop-off, how still and peaceful I feel in between them. I never once consider having an epidural.

  If this is to be part of my narrative, I want to feel every minute of it.

  FINALLY, JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT on June 10 the time comes to push.

  It is the hardest thing
I have ever done. During one of the early thrusts I feel the bones in my hips widen.

  I am tearing in half.

  I am ripping open.

  I am bearing a child.

  Greg is on my left. The doula on my right. The midwife poised before me on the queen-size bed, everyone waiting, everyone urging. And then in one final push it happens.

  I become a mother.

  Greg is there, his hands lifting our baby to me.

  It’s a girl, he cries. And then she cries too.

  Part Four

  Depression

  Invite your depression to pull up a chair with you in front of the fire, and sit with it, without looking for a way to escape . . . When you allow yourself to experience depression, it will leave as soon as it has served its purpose in your loss.

  —Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

  Chapter Ten

  1997, I’M EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD.

  I AM SITTING IN a dingy bar in Atlanta with two of my coworkers, Riley and Nathan. We have just closed up across the street at the café where we wait tables. Riley is a waifish girl who smokes more than she eats, and her roommate, Nathan, is a flamboyantly gay black guy with a ready laugh.

  We are all underage, but we hold cocktails in our hands all the same.

  Before now I’ve never really spent much time in bars. In the next year they’ll become darkly familiar places to me. I’ll know exactly which bartenders will avert their eyes when I order, not caring how old I am. I’ll learn exactly what I like to drink and how many drinks I can handle or not handle. I’ll learn how to swirl my cocktail just so, how to close out my tab at the end of the night. But right now all of this is new. I order gin and tonic because I’ve heard of it, and I lean my lithe, young body up against the edge of the bar, muddling the lime in the bottom of my glass with a little red straw.

  Riley and Nathan have a funny relationship, bantering back and forth for hours about nothing—bands, movies, common friends. They tell story after story about getting drunk, about the trouble they get into. I nod and pretend like I know about those kinds of things.

  The truth is that their world frightens me. I can’t share in their stories yet, and I am afraid to talk about the things I do know: my dead mother, how I’ve temporarily dropped out of college, or my elderly father who is at home by himself in front of the television.

  I glance around the bar to see what the rest of my coworkers are doing. Although I’ve only worked across the street for a couple of weeks, coming to this bar has already become a nightly occurrence.

  Another coworker, Lila, is over by the piano, flirting shamelessly with the balding piano player. She leans on one foot, laughing at whatever he’s saying. In another corner, beyond her, I see my manager, a guy not much older than any of us, drinking whiskey with another waiter. One of them spills his drink across the table, laughs.

  I keep scanning the room though. Looking for Colin.

  Finally I find him sitting by himself on the other side of the bar. Both of his hands are wrapped around his drink and he’s staring into space. I watch him for a moment and then push up from my seat. My body is humming from the gin and I glide across the room.

  I ease myself onto an empty barstool next to him. He looks at me for a moment, then back at his drink.

  We have something in common, I say. My voice feels like honey. The gin has made everything easy.

  Oh yeah? Colin doesn’t look at me, just takes a sip of his drink and waits for me to continue.

  EARLIER TONIGHT A COUPLE of my high school friends had come up to the café. They recognized Colin from his picture in the paper and told me about his sister’s murder. I had been captivated by the story, watching Colin as they talked, and feeling as though I was looking at someone who lives in the same solitary world I inhabit.

  So what is it that we have in common? Colin finally asks.

  I look down at my drink. Little bubbles from the tonic fizz upward in streams.

  My mother died in January, I say.

  Colin doesn’t reply.

  I heard about your sister, I say then.

  He looks up at me, holding my gaze until I blush, look away.

  Just then the bartender appears. What are you drinking? Colin asks me.

  Gin and tonic.

  He orders one and a vodka for himself.

  When the bartender is gone and we’re both sipping our drinks again, Colin looks back at me.

  I like your teeth, he says.

  I twist nervously in my seat, suddenly aware of how little space there is between us.

  Um, thanks, I say.

  He asks about my mom after that, and I tell him bits and pieces. I’m afraid to bring up his sister again. We sip our drinks and stare straight ahead as we talk.

  Colin grew up in Texas but moved to Atlanta with his family a few years ago. He’s three years older than me, which means he’s actually legal drinking age. He was attending a local college and living at home with his parents but has dropped out of school and been sleeping on a friend’s couch for the past six weeks. I take this to mean that he’s been sleeping there since his sister died but, again, I’m afraid to ask.

  Colin and I don’t have any friends in common. I sneak glances at him as he talks. His eyelashes are surprisingly long and his lips are full. He keeps his hands steady around his glass as he speaks, and he takes short, deliberate sips from it. Everything about Colin is deliberate.

  The bar is closing and I am drunk. We all are: me, Riley, Nathan, Colin, my manager, and the waiter he’s been laughing with. I watch Lila stumble away from the piano. We all fall in against one another, traipsing back across the street to the café parking lot.

  I stand next to my car, waving stupidly at everyone as they climb behind the wheels of their vehicles. Colin is getting into an old Porsche, and Lila drives a station wagon, probably her mom’s. I turn to open the door of my old Saab, my hands clumsy on the handle. I sink down into the seat, turn the key in the ignition. I’ve never driven this drunk before. I watch everyone pull away, their taillights fading into the bend in the road. Finally I put my car in gear and ease my foot onto the gas pedal.

  It is four in the morning and Atlanta’s streets are empty. It is only a ten-minute drive home and I take the turns easily. The traffic lights sway in the cobalt sky, all of them a steady green. I turn up the volume on the stereo, light a cigarette, and crack open the sunroof.

  Driving feels powerful and calming. I think about Colin’s eyes, about the way his hands gripped his glass.

  At home I pull quickly up the driveway, parking beneath a fat clump of wisteria scenting the night air. Inside I walk mutely past my mother’s desk. She’s been gone for four months, but my father and I still haven’t touched her things.

  I glance at the purse still on her desk and I imagine the smell of its interior, one of waxy lipstick and cottony tissues. Mail still arrives for her, and we even get the occasional phone call from someone who doesn’t know she is gone. A few weeks after she died I found a jewelry box in the bathroom. It was full of her hair that had fallen out during chemo.

  In my room I fall across the bed, not bothering to undress. The room is spinning and it takes all my energy to sit up again, to click off the light.

  I can’t fall asleep so I lie there staring up at the ceiling. A smattering of old glow-in-the-dark stickers that I glued up there in tenth grade remains, and for a long time I just watch them come in and out of focus.