The Other Mother

by Gwendolen Gross

8

  Thea

  Even though everyone was recovered, back at work and at school, I still felt claustrophobic in the evenings. Though it was too late in the year, I was out in the garden again, trying to set everything to rest for the winter. Before bed, Iris had told me she wanted to sleep with Mommy, and I’d said, “No, you’re too big,” more harshly than I’d meant to. She hadn’t cried, but the quick cross of grief on her face stayed in my chest. Guilty again.

  I told myself I’d been short tempered because of the electricity of the impending storm. As I returned to the cold-nipped mums with an armload of hay, I could feel the air growing heavier with rain, the pressure like a need in my own body. The soil was damp and cold, still unfrozen, and I tucked a mum in, singing to it a little, the way I’d tucked Carra in until last year, when she decided she didn’t need me or the “dream abouts” she’d asked for since she was four, something to think of to help her fall asleep. Sometimes I used them myself: “a thin river with birds telling secrets” or “a long green field” or “eating apples,” though this last made me hungry, hungry for the crisp sour of a first Paula apple of the fall.

  The rain watered my mum, fat drops, and then the thunder started. I felt a thrill, a slight scare from the sound. The mums were getting soaked, the dirt becoming rivulets of mud as the rain intensified. Lightning split the sky, cutting across the tops of the oaks in the woods—a quick strap of light.

  I walked toward the house to get my raincoat. Through the window upstairs, I could see Caius putting Iris to bed for the third time, the form of man holding child lit like a shadow puppet.

  I fished my gloves from the half-filled wheelbarrow and searched for my clippers on the sponge of grass. It was dark outside, and all the houses were lit. I could see the TV’s glow in Amanda’s window, in the windows of the Martins’ house and Mrs. Chen’s, that oddly soothing flicker. Rooted like a peony in the mud, I saw my own family room dazzled by the light of Carra and Oliver’s last show before bed. I saw Caius back in the kitchen, dumping soup bowls in the dishwasher without rinsing, so I would have to run the machine twice. I wouldn’t say anything, it wasn’t worth it. I loved him for certain ineptitudes, and though I didn’t like to think it, I liked being needed, even for small domestic things like rewashing soup-crusted bowls.

  Storms also reminded me of my father, how he’d go out despite the rain, walking to the bus station for work with his mouse-gray trench coat and hat, carrying his newspaper outside his briefcase as if he’d forgotten rain would ruin the stories. In the summer, sometimes, he’d take a break from his equations and take us out in the backyard in the rain. Oren and I would each hold one of his hands and he’d dance us in a circle. My father was not a smooth dancer. He jerked his knees up in an odd march; he’d wave his arms at funny elbow angles like a marionette. We’d tip our mouths open while we danced, catching what raindrops we could and gargling.

  My mother would stand at the backdoor, watching us with proprietary pleasure. She didn’t tell us to put on raincoats; instead, she put towels in the dryer so she could swaddle us with them, warm and ready, when we came back inside.

  None of my children had met their grandfather or gone out dancing in the rain without their shoes. They hadn’t met their grandmother, either. They hadn’t met their uncle Oren, and the other uncles could not compensate for the loss. I carried my brother’s death with me, a gap, a hole in my fabric where I held the ends together and tried not to look at what was exposed beneath.

  The storm started to settle into a slow slog of rain, a low roll of thunder, as the time between flashes and growls spread, the electric air traveling past Sylvan Glen and on to Ridgewood, Fair Lawn, Paterson. I was past needing a raincoat; my jeans were soaked, and my sweater sagged with water. And then, as I flipped the wheelbarrow, not wanting to let it fill, the wind wrapped around the houses and knocked against me, almost like a punch, as the storm picked up again. I stumbled against the wheelbarrow, scraping my arm against the metal stays. There was a thud, and then it was dark. I looked up at the house and the lights were gone.

  Inside when the power went out, I always felt prepared. But outside it was almost as if my own house had disappeared into the storm. The rain wasn’t quaint and cozy, and I could hardly see as I sloshed toward the house. My heart worked too hard—I wanted to be inside with them, I wanted to give them safety. It was unnecessary, the weight of worry I always carried right behind my breastbone. Worry for my children, that they wouldn’t be safe without me, as if somehow my presence could keep the light on when the power was gone.

  After an hour, and after peeling off my wet clothes for sweatpants and Caius’s hooded sweatshirt from college, softly shrunken and mostly mine, I was sitting on my bed with Oliver and Iris and Caius. I knew Carra wanted to be on the bed with us, but she sat in the rocking chair by the bay windows, her voice tilting back and forth as she rocked.

  We were telling a story, taking turns. Carra was pretending she wasn’t scared and Oliver was pretending he was. I could tell from the steady sound of his voice that he loved this adventure, this excuse to be all together under one blanket.

  “She didn’t know where her house was,” said Caius on his turn, talking about the bear in our story.

  “Because of the rain,” said Oliver.

  “It was my turn,” Carra mumbled.

  “But you didn’t want to go,” said Oliver.

  “So she dug in the earth looking for her house, and instead of her house she found birds,” said Carra.

  “What kind of birds?” Caius asked. I was leaning against him, so his voice vibrated in my chest as he spoke.

  “Flamingos,” I said. Caius slipped his hand inside the sweatshirt. I wasn’t wearing anything beneath it and my nipples responded to his touch. I felt warm and soothed, though this attention made a small electric current travel from my breasts to my thighs.

  The sirens had been a background to our story all along, but now they grew louder. Thunder and rain rattled the windows, pounded the roof.

  “And they sounded like sirens,” said Oliver.

  “And ravens,” said Carra. “Did you know ravens are really smart? They can hide stuff and find it later.”

  “Dat,” said Iris, pretending she’d forgotten how to say “that” it was a regular nighttime regression. She started burrowing under the covers, nuzzling my belly and interrupting Caius’s casual sexy touching.

  A police car parked on our street, lights illuminating the houses and the trees, oak leaves everywhere in the spots of red and blue light.

  “Dat,” said Iris again. She was enormously sleepy now, and everything was funny or made her cry.

  “You can say th-at,” said Caius.

  Another emergency vehicle made a blat of passing sound, and Iris commenced crying. The wind had calmed and the rain had tapered to a faint drizzle. I pushed Caius’s hands from my body and stood to look out the window. The great corpse of an oak tree lay across the power lines, pinning them down, pressing a snapped utility pole into Tia’s mother’s lawn. The tree itself had fallen right on the house. Into the house.

  Iris grabbed my leg and I eased her up onto my hip. There were wires everywhere, and a man was barking something through a bullhorn, something about the house, the word okay and the word unsafe. Tia’s mother’s house had been cracked, smashed, punched in by the tree and the pole. In the light, I could see glass on the lawn.

  “Live wires,” whispered Caius, who was standing behind Carra now, his hand on her head.

  “That looks so cool,” said Oliver. “Can we go see?”

  “No,” said Caius.

  “I’m going,” I said. I handed Iris to Caius, put on slippers, and ran down to get my raincoat, stumbling in the dark.

  Tia’s mother’s house was wrecked. Only it wasn’t Tia’s mother’s house anymore, it was Amanda’s, and Amanda had a baby, and as far as I knew, the baby had been inside the house.

  9

  Amanda

  That soft slumpi
ng sound, then the music of glass breaking, and at first I’d thought I was still in the apartment. I reached for where my lamp used to be and found a night table instead, but the light wouldn’t switch on, and I felt guilty that I’d forgotten, for just a second, about the baby. Then I was terrified that somehow Malena was being taken from me. I rushed into her room and found the crib was empty, and there was a limb of an oak penetrating one crushed wall, obscene as an old man exposing himself. But the windows were intact, though exposed bones of lathe jutted naked in the night air and there was crumbled plaster on the rug, like sand and stone. I ran frantically around the house and found Aaron downstairs, calling to me as if I were half-asleep, a lullaby of calling, and he held the baby in his casual, assured way, looking at what used to be the living room. I’d stepped on a sliver of glass and my foot throbbed, but it didn’t matter because Malena was okay.

  As I took her from him, he held us both for a minute—comforting, but a little too aggressive in his squeeze. Malena whimpered.

  Outside had come in. The television was wedged between branches, and the bark looked heavy, menacing, and beautiful. It was confusing, everything was confusing and dark, and then the sirens. I stepped out the side door onto the lawn and looked out at the front of the house, where in the gray night light I saw wires threading out of the hole in my walls. It was drizzling; power lines were spread across the lawn, debris and flashing lights everywhere. A wreck.

  They called out to us with bullhorns. There was a panic to extract us, a loud, steady call until we came, but once we emerged, we huddled under an umbrella by the police car and nothing happened.

  “No one’s hurt,” Aaron told the policeman.

  I said it aloud, twice, “No one’s hurt,” but I still shook, not sure this was true. Does “No one’s hurt” mean “Everyone’s okay”? It seemed like a math problem and I worried it, because that seemed like the right thing to do.

  The policeman was young, with a birthmark on his cheek that captivated me. It was all I wanted to look at, the size of a dime, with little lumps on the top like mouse ears and a tiny tail at the bottom. He was clean shaven in the middle of the night, he smelled like lime cologne, and all I wanted to do was look at his birthmark. I remembered the glass and my foot—which was still bare—and went to the ambulance to have the sliver tweezed out. I returned Malena to Aaron; he wrapped both arms around her. I was afraid I’d forgotten how to hold her until she started crying for food and I asked to sit in the squad car to nurse her. Someone gave me a pair of men’s slippers, and with the bandage over it, I could barely feel the tiny angry mouth of cut on my foot.

  Our neighbors emerged from their own houses in pairs, alone, and with children clinging to their legs. I sat nursing Malena, letting the nursing hormones take over—this time the surge in my body was peace, though sometimes it was sadness, sometimes pure sleep. I closed my eyes and imagined I was in the rocking chair in her room, only I still smelled the officer’s lime cologne, intensified by exposure in the car’s upholstery.

  Then someone tapped on the window. It was Thea and her husband, whom I’d only seen across the lawns. He looked at me and looked at Malena and smiled. Even inside a squad car on the night my house had been squashed by a tree, I noticed he was handsome, a man in striped pajamas and a trench coat, his jaw square, eyes blue even in the vague glow of the emergency lights, his smile as light as if we were meeting at a garden party.

  “You must be Amanda,” he mouthed.

  I knocked on the window and fumbled for a knob or button, but there was none; I couldn’t roll it down. The officer in the front seat pressed something and the window slid down to reveal their whole voices and the humid air.

  “Is everything okay?” said Thea. “I mean,” she turned to the house, “is everyone okay? I mean, obviously, everything isn’t okay. Are you okay?”

  I wondered where their kids were. I wondered if they married because their jaws matched. Thea’s hair was wet—she looked fresh from a shower. I caught her husband’s glance. He was looking at my breast, not leering but fascinated, the way many men seemed to be about nursing babies, interested and usually embarrassed, though his gaze was firm.

  “Well, the house is wrecked. We’re not allowed back in. And the tree seems to have cut off all our power. Do you have power?” I asked, feeling confused.

  I could hear the low melody of Aaron’s voice as he talked with the officer. He was joking. It made sense, though at first I was bothered by the sacrilege, but what else was there to do? We could cry, but our house was still a half-smashed hazard of broken gas and electrical connections. Our safe place was dangerous. Our nest was ruined. I shivered. It was incongruous, almost comical, how much damage a storm could do, the vast damage caused by a single fallen tree.

  “Can we help with anything?” Thea was looking at the house with an explicit sorrow.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “You don’t know a hotel we could go to, do you?” I winced as Malena started sucking again, hard. The sharp pain of it, the pleasure of the milk coming back in, coming out of the little knots inside my breast and into her. We had to find somewhere to sleep, as if sleep would ever come easy again.

  “No,” said the husband. “There’s no question. You’ll stay with us.”

  “Yes,” said Thea. “Oh, of course.” Those comforting eyes. She should work in an emergency room, I thought, or a nursery school.

  “Oh,” I said. “We couldn’t.” Take me home with you, I thought.

  “You could,” said the husband, glancing down again, approving of Malena’s work, or mine, I wasn’t sure. “And by the way, my name is Caius.”

  “Like Caesar,” said Aaron, referring to Thea’s husband when we were settled in their basement with Malena on the mattress between us. Malena didn’t seem to notice anything, that the whole world, her whole tiny encapsulated world of sunlight through the windows, of her crib and mobile and monitor with its red eye aglow, had changed.

  “He’s very nice,” I said.

  “I thought he was kind of stiff,” said Aaron, reaching around the baby to touch my shoulder. I was exhausted. I didn’t want to move. I leaned into the gentle cheek of sleep, trying to let go. Malena shrilled and fussed. I tried to let her nurse again, but she wouldn’t settle.

  “No,” I said. “He’s nice.” But Aaron was already sleeping.

  The next day we weren’t allowed back in, even to get baby things or clothes. It was like seeing myself in a movie—couple with baby moves into new neighbor’s house. A newsreel, a clip about hurricanes. Only this was a localized crisis, a little flood, a few trees down. The traumas were purely personal. I felt lost in the action; a pin dot stabbed into a map of motion. All I knew was how to nurse, how to watch my child’s mouth, how to concentrate on looking down for fear of what I would see if I looked up instead.

  Early that morning, the police tape was up but no one was watching. Aaron sneaked into the wreck and found two outfits for Malena, a can of formula powder, some diapers, and two of his clean work suits. Caius stood outside and high-fived him when he came out; they were like boys on the street, proud and reckless. Not stiff, I thought, but said nothing, brewing other discontents.

  I was glad of the diapers since the market was out of the small size—there’d been a run on everything, including formula. But I was furious about the suits. He didn’t get the photo album or any clothes for me, no underwear or nursing pads, no baby wipes, no nasal bulb, no perfect yellow baby nightgowns, but he got suits. It ate at me through the morning, and while we were putting Malena down for a noontime nap, we quibbled in our neighbors’ basement room.

  “Why are you so snippy?” asked Aaron, after enduring my first three attempts at argument.

  “I’m not snippy,” I said. “Our house fell down and you risked your life to get suits.”

  “It didn’t fall down, and I thought I’d spend my time off trying to get food and stuff we need for Malena instead of going out to buy new suits,” he said. “I have to ge
t back to work soon.”

  I didn’t answer, because I couldn’t imagine what he might say if I told him he would do no such thing.

  That afternoon I left her house to go see mine, like lifting the bandage soon after the wound. I had to see it. The power was still out, but even in the daylight I could see it had come back on just one block down, porch lights and some windows aglow, like a demonstration of before and after Edison. The streets were sprinkled with spectators and utility trucks. One neighbor, a man with a face wrinkled as a walnut, tall and skinny in a flapping yellow coat, biked around the neighborhood relaying gossip. Wherever there was someone working, or not working—the phone company, gas and electric, postal carriers, cable TV—the town crier man was there, slowing progress through chatter.

  The rain had stopped partway through the night, leaving muddy evidence. School was canceled due to flooding, so kids rode scooters and skateboards as close as they could to the POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape around our tree, our house, our modern ruin. Oliver, Thea’s son, pedaled his bike past me three times, aglow with boy energy.

  Walking along the street, I bounced and sang to Malena’s disgruntled animal squeaks. Nothing felt ordinary. The light was dazzling and the storm’s cool and humid bank had broken into beams of warm, clear light. The temperature belonged to early fall, wrong again. The houses in the powerless sector were disarmed without television or radios or telephones or even the casual beeping of answering machines, but still the leaf blowers made their last rounds, chewing the quiet.

  I wanted to see it from a distance, our wreck. I wanted it to feel real, what I’d lost, what I hadn’t, as I held Malena and looked at my ruined home. Trash trucks passed, overflowing with water and garbage. I watched a bag splat and split on the pavement, leaking evidence of ordinary life: banana peels, junk mail that should have been recycled, plastic packing peanuts, coffee grounds, the guts of a pumpkin. It made me sad, a quick surge, quick as a breath. The street stank of sour milk so I walked on, limping a little because of the cut on my sole. I listened to the gossip of the spectators as I neared our house.