Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Not for this town,” I replied. I smiled and told her not to worry, that I didn’t even have a steady boyfriend. And I hadn’t, not for years. There was just me and a series of roommates in a one-bedroom apartment in Studio City. I took acting classes. I joined an improv troupe. I worked in an office that sold real estate for a little while, and I did telemarketing at night, until, after ten years of plugging away, I met Sam and landed a starring role in a movie on Lifetime, and Sam got his razor commercial, then a six-week guest shot on Friends. All of a sudden, we were flush.

  And expecting. “It was terrible timing,” I told them. “Sam and I had only been dating for eight months. We were both trying so hard to make it, and things were happening for him—for both of us, I guess.”

  In my third year of being twenty-six, I’d finally gotten to the point where I’d been recognized as myself a few times, instead of being mistaken for some other, more famous actress . . . or simply stared at by a blinking tourist who clearly thought he should have known who I was but didn’t. “It was a really good time. Before that, I was doing all of this direct-to-video stuff. Lots of sequels, lots of original cable movies. And then I had all of these possibilities. And I had Sam. I was so happy.”

  Ayinde twirled her glass in her fingers. “How old were you?” she asked. I looked at her across the table, leaning forward with her arms crossed, and got a glimpse of her in her previous life, using that same professional calm to tell Fort Worth viewers the news. Kelly was biting her lip with her pale-blond hair covering most of her face, and Becky’s hands were in constant motion as she poured more sangria and passed around more salsa.

  “Twenty-nine,” I said. “Of course, according to my agent, I was twenty-six. Out there, there’s always someone younger and prettier and probably more talented. It would have been better, career-wise, if we could have waited.” Maybe in five years, I thought, after we’d established ourselves; when Sam was old enough to be cast as Concerned but Loving Father in the car-insurance ads, and I could gain my fifteen pounds back and guest-star as Hard-Charging District Attorney Who Used to Be a Babe.

  I hadn’t counted on Sam’s delight when I told him the news, on how easily he took it. “Sure, let’s have a baby,” he said, lifting me into the air and swinging me around in a way that only made me feel more nauseous. “Let’s have a bunch.” When I’d talked about losing out on jobs, he’d soothed me, saying it would only be a year, that a baby wasn’t a life sentence, that we had money, and we loved each other, and everything would be fine.

  I toyed with a tortilla chip, bending my head over the table. Outside the high windows, the street was quiet and the sky was dark and still. The restaurant’s pumpkin walls and gold lamps made it glow with mellow light, like the inside of a treasure chest. I was remembering the day we had our ultrasound and learned that we were having a boy, and Sam sang “My Boy Bill” loud enough for everyone in the waiting room to hear. His joy had been infectious; I’d been swept away with him.

  Then came the baby. “It was so hard after he was born. I had no idea.”

  “Hah,” said Becky, leaning over to top off our glasses again. “Do you think any of us had any idea? Do you think anyone would ever have a baby if they knew?”

  “Amen,” Kelly murmured, her hands clasped on the table, her pale lashes resting on her cheeks.

  I set the chip down, wondering how things could have been different if I’d had friends out there, other new mothers who were going through the same things I was. But I didn’t. “I was all by myself. Sam had to go back to work—he’d gotten cast on Sex and the City as a premature ejaculator.”

  Becky laughed. “I saw that one!”

  “He was starting to get famous.” I looked down at my body, remembering how awful I’d felt—bloated and sweaty, my hands and feet still swollen, my hair falling out in handfuls. I’d spend all day in the same pair of underwear and T-shirt that I’d slept in because what was the point of getting dressed? Unlike my husband, I didn’t have anywhere to go.

  The world felt as though it was collapsing in on me, getting smaller and smaller until it was the size of Caleb’s room, of his crib. The books said new babies ate every three hours. Caleb ate every half hour. The books promised that new babies slept for something like eighteen hours a day. But Caleb was a catnapper. Ten minutes after he’d closed his eyes, he would be awake again, screaming. It had taken me four weeks to even find time to unpack the suitcase I’d brought to the hospital when he was born. “I felt like I was going crazy. I had these dreams . . .” I drained my glass. “I used to think about just checking in to a really nice hotel with a big, clean room and a big, beautiful bed and ordering room service and reading a book and just being by myself. Even for an afternoon. I felt like I was never going to have any time or get to be by myself again.”

  “What about Sam?” Becky asked. I looked around the table for the judgment I was sure I’d see there, but all I saw was interest. Kindness. I saw that, too.

  “He tried to help, but he was working really long hours.” I folded my hands in my lap and told them the story of the laundry, which was also the story of Caleb’s last day.

  None of us had slept the night before. Caleb started whimpering at midnight, a half hour after I fed him, swaddled him tightly, and set him into his crib. The whimpers became sobs, the sobs became shrieks, and from midnight until 2 A.M. Caleb screamed nonstop, eyes screwed up, face tomato red, a V-shaped vein throbbing in the center of his forehead, pausing only to gather his breath before starting to shriek again. Sam and I tried everything—walking him, rocking him, patting his back, settling him into his stroller and his bouncy seat and his swing. I tried to nurse him. Caleb gasped and screamed and batted at me with his fists. We burped him. We changed him. Nothing worked until finally, inexplicably, the crying fit ended as suddenly as it had started, and Caleb passed out on his back in the center of our bed. He had a pacifier stuck under his chin, but I was too scared to move it.

  Sam and I bent over him, blinking owlishly, my husband in boxer shorts and a spit-up-stained T-shirt, with an unprecedented, razor-ad-unfriendly two days’ worth of stubble on his square jaw; me in a nightshirt with nothing underneath.

  “What happened?” Sam whispered.

  “Don’t talk,” I whispered back and flicked out the light. And the three of us slept together until Caleb woke us at eight o’clock, cooing like a baby in a diaper commercial.

  “They always do that,” Ayinde said. She patted her lips with a napkin. “It’s like they know. They know exactly how much hell they can put you through before they have to give you something—a smile, or a few hours’ sleep.”

  I nodded. “I felt better when I woke up,” I told them. “And it was a Saturday, so Sam was going to be home.” At 10 A.M., I asked him to fold the laundry. I’d thrown in a load of colored clothing the night before.

  “No problem,” he said cheerfully. I could hear him whistling as he shaved—he was upstairs in the bathroom, and I was downstairs on the couch with the baby in my arms, looking at the Hollywood sign through the window, trying to figure out exactly how long it had been since I’d been in the car. “I’m just going out for a quick run,” he said.

  I gritted my teeth and said nothing, while inwardly I was seething. A quick run. I’d kill to be able to leave the house for a quick run, a quick walk, a quick anything.

  At 11:15, my husband bounded back into the house, glowing with sweat and good health. He gave me a large, smacking kiss on the cheek and bent to kiss Caleb, who was nursing. “I’m just going to take a shower,” he said.

  “The laundry,” I said, hating the shrewish sound of my voice, hating the way I sounded like my mother, like everyone’s mother. “Please, I don’t want to nag you, but I can’t . . .” And I shrugged, indicating the baby. Indicating everything and wishing I had four extra hands.

  “Oh,” said Sam, blinking. “Oh, right. Hey, I’m sorry.” He headed upstairs. I could hear the door of the dryer open, then slam shut, and I
felt myself relax incrementally.

  “Folding now!” Sam called.

  “Congratulations!” I called back.

  A few minutes went by.

  “Still folding!” yelled Sam.

  I bit my lip and looked down at Caleb, a warm, milky-lipped weight in my arms, already with the same square jaw and dimpled chin as his daddy, hating the mean thoughts that turned in my head. Like he deserves a trophy for folding a load of laundry.

  “I’d never been so mad at him,” I said. This time it was Kelly who laughed and gave a knowing nod.

  “Folding!” Sam had called again. I bit my lip even harder, closed my eyes, and counted backward from twenty. I love my husband, I reminded myself. I was just tired. We both were. I love my baby. I love my husband. I love my baby. I chanted it like a mantra with my eyes squeezed shut.

  Twenty minutes later, Sam was back downstairs, his skin still pink from the shower. “I’ll be back by three,” he said. I nodded without opening my eyes, wondering how I was going to take a shower of my own. The baby would sleep, I thought, even though Caleb had shown no evidence of sleeping so far—just eating and crying and dozing for maybe ten minutes and waking the instant I attempted to set him down and starting to cry again. But he’d have to sleep. Babies couldn’t stay awake forever. They just couldn’t.

  Sam knelt down and held my hands. “Hey,” he said. “When I come back, why don’t you go out for a while? Get a massage or have a coffee or something.”

  I shook my head, hearing the shrewish note in my voice again. “I can’t, I can’t go anywhere. You know I can’t. What if he needs to eat?”

  He blinked, nonplussed, at the question or the sound of my voice. I wasn’t sure which. “Or you could just take a nap.”

  “A nap,” I repeated. The impossible dream, I thought.

  Sam walked jauntily out the door for a lunch meeting with his agent, a tall, bald guy who called everybody baby because, I was convinced, he never bothered to learn actual names. I held the baby close against my sweating chest and dragged myself upstairs to our bedroom.

  “He folded the laundry,” I told them. My tongue felt thick in my mouth. “All of it. It was all over the bed in little piles, with his wet towel on top.”

  Ayinde sighed. Becky shook her head. Kelly smoothed her blond hair back from her cheeks and whispered, “Been there, done that.”

  I had laid myself down on the bed, right on top of Sam’s wet towel. It felt like some horrible joke, some Twilight Zone–style punch line—he folded the laundry, but he didn’t put it away! I saw my life flashing before my eyes, the next days, the next weeks, the next eighteen years, an endless blur of nursing and sleeping and walking the floors with a screaming baby in my arms, picking up after Caleb and picking up after Sam, too.

  “No,” I said out loud. I set Caleb down in the center of the bed, snug between a pile of boxer shorts and one of unsorted socks. I pulled on a nursing bra, panties, two more pads, one of Sam’s T-shirts, and a pair of elastic-waist leggings and sat there as Caleb woke up again and started to cry again.

  “I was just so tired,” I said, lifting my hands, then letting them fall onto the table. I could still remember that edgy, sand-in-your-eyes feeling of never getting enough sleep. I could feel Becky’s hand on my shoulder. I remembered the woman—Merrill—in the hospital conference room, shaking her husband’s hand away. “I thought if I pushed him around in his stroller he’d fall asleep. We ran into Tracy, our neighbor. She was maybe fifty, and she lived in the apartment down the hall from ours. She did hair and makeup for one of the game shows that taped out in Burbank. I only knew her to say hello to, and once, when Sam was in People, she came by to get his autograph.”

  Most days Tracy and I would just wave to each other as I wheeled my screaming baby past her door. But that day she stopped me. “Why don’t you let me look after Caleb for an hour?” she asked. “I’ve raised three boys of my own. I’ve got seven grandkids, but they’re all east.” She looked wistfully down at my screaming son. “I’d be so happy to hold a baby for a little while.”

  “Then you can have him,” I said. I handed him over, watching how easily Tracy settled Caleb into the crook of her arm, how his stiff body softened as he leaned against her, how she was about a hundred times better at this than I was. And then I left.

  “I mean, I didn’t just hand him over . . .”

  “Of course not,” Becky murmured, patting my hand. “Of course you’d never do that.”

  I bowed my head, even though what I wanted to do was lay it down on my folded arms right there on the table and sleep. I told them how I’d programmed my cell phone and Sam’s cell phone numbers into Tracy’s telephone. I left our pediatrician’s phone number, and wipes and diaper rash ointment even though Caleb didn’t have diaper rash. I brought over a spare outfit and the Boppy pillow and the Gymini, piling Tracy’s patchwork quilt–covered bed with blankets. “Go,” she said, laughing, shooing me out the door, with the baby still tucked against her body, looking at me with his big dark-gray eyes.

  And I went. I kissed my boy, and I went. I took the elevator down to the parking garage, retrieved my little convertible, and drove down Sunset with the wind in my hair. I went to my oh-so-Hollywood hair salon, where they had a waterfall by the front door, where the shampoo girls would bring you water with lemon or a latte or copies of the latest tabloids with circles around the stars whose hair they styled. I got a manicure and a pedicure, and I will testify before the Lord and all of His angels that it felt wonderful, and when the women brushing polish onto my fingernails looked at my ring and asked if my husband and I had any children, I lied and told her, No.

  “They say that mothers have a sixth sense about when something’s wrong with their baby,” I told them, “but I didn’t.” I started to cry. “There was an earthquake . . .”

  “You feel that?” the girl painting my nails had asked, and I shook my head.

  “Little earthquake,” she told me and bent her head back over my feet. “They happen all the time. I hardly even feel them anymore.”

  That was the first sign, but I didn’t see it. The second one was that the security gate in front of our driveway was wide open, and there were two police cars parked in front of the building. Two police cars and an ambulance. I walked right by it. I only started to hurry when I saw the cluster of men and women in blue uniforms in front of Tracy’s door and Tracy herself out in the high-ceilinged hallway, standing at the center of them, wailing. Shrieking. That’s when I started to run.

  I remember a police officer catching me by the forearms and holding me still. I remember Tracy’s face looking as if it had aged a fast twenty years, like a newspaper left out in the sun, and how she wailed an inhuman sound, like an animal being run down in the road. “Oh, God,” was what she kept saying. “Oh, God, oh, no, oh GOD.”

  “Ma’am,” said the policeman holding my arms. “Are you the baby’s mother?”

  I stared at him openmouthed. “What happened?” I asked. “Where’s Caleb?”

  The officer nodded over my head, and another officer, a woman, took my other arm. The two of them led me inside to Tracy’s living room, where there was a glass-topped coffee table and a cream-colored sectional couch. I remember thinking how strange this was, how I’d never been inside Tracy’s place even once before in all the time we’d lived here and how now I’d been inside twice in one day. I remember thinking that I would never own a cream-colored couch in my whole life or at least not during the next few years of it. I remember looking down at my toenails and seeing that they hadn’t smudged, even when I’d been running. “Is Caleb okay?” I asked. And that was when the officer who’d been holding one of my arms got up and left and was replaced by a lady officer in her forties, thick-hipped and tanned, who held both of my hands in hers and told me that he wasn’t okay and that they weren’t entirely sure what had happened but that Caleb had died.

  “Died?” My voice was much too loud. Outside, I could still hear Tracy scre
aming. She’d abandoned words at that point and was just making this horrible keening noise. Be quiet, I thought. Be quiet and let me listen. “Died?”

  “I’m so sorry,” said the woman holding my hands.

  I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t remember what I said. I know that I must have asked for the details, asked how, because the nice lady police officer told me, in her gentle, soothing voice, that as best they could guess it had been sudden infant death syndrome, that Caleb hadn’t felt anything, that he’d just gone to sleep and stopped breathing. That he had gone to sleep and never woken up.

  “There will be an autopsy,” she said, and I remember thinking, Autopsy? But that’s for dead people. And my baby can’t be dead, he’s not even a person yet, he’s not even eating real food, he hasn’t learned to sit up or hold things, he hasn’t even smiled at me . . .

  The nice lady police officer was looking at me and saying something. A question, I thought. She’d asked a question, and she was waiting for my answer. “I’m sorry,” I said, politely, the way my mother had taught me, when I was still Lisa, when I lived in a ranch house in Northeast Philadelphia. Manners don’t cost anything, she’d said over and over. Good manners are free. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  “Who can we call for you?” she asked.

  I gave her my husband’s number. Then his name. I watched as her eyes got wider. “I’m so sorry,” she said again and patted my forearm. I wondered whether his being sort of famous made her sorrier than she would have been if we were just regular people, if Caleb had been anyone’s baby. I should ask to see him, I thought. That’s what a grieving mother would do. The whole ten weeks of his life I’d frequently felt like I wasn’t really a mother but that I was just impersonating one. Now I’d just have to impersonate a grieving mother.

  They led me through the Spanish arches, down a tiled hall, past a shelf full of faceless, eyeless mannequins, each with a different wig. There were people crowding the bedroom, EMTs and policemen, but they parted, wordlessly, as I walked past. Turn back, turn back, thou pretty bride . . . Caleb lay on the patchwork quilt, in the blue-and-white shirt with the duck in the center and blue sweatpants I’d dressed him in that morning. His eyes were shut, his eyebrows drawn down as if he’d just thought of something sad. His mouth was pursed in a rosebud, and he looked perfect. Perfect and beautiful and peaceful, the way he’d hardly ever looked in his entire ten-week life.