This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  I try to think. The world shrinks around me. I call J.’s pediatrician. I can practically see her office from where I am right now, in the back of Tony’s car. We haven’t switched to a local pediatrician, believing irrationally in Manhattan doctors over Brooklyn doctors. While I’m on hold, I try to catch my breath, because I can’t think clearly, and my heart is going to explode, I’m going to have a heart attack right here in the back of a taxi, and that won’t do anybody any good, will it?

  Kids hit their heads all the time, J.’s doctor tells me in a professional, soothing tone, like she’s talking someone off a ledge. Tell the babysitter to put some ice on it. Is he crying? Well, that’s a good thing. It’s when they’re not crying that you worry.

  I call Michael’s cell phone. He’s at a diner, just about to go into the courthouse. And I say there’s been an accident, that it’s going to be okay, but that it appears that Marsha has slipped and fallen down the stairs while holding J., and EMS is coming, and I’m on my way home. Michael is halfway out the diner door before I’ve finished the first sentence, and is sprinting in his green army jacket to the subway. And I am somewhere on lower Broadway. Tony is weaving in and out of traffic.

  The stairs. There are eighteen. Have I mentioned eighteen? Maybe she fell near the bottom. If she fell near the bottom, on the last few steps, and landed on the small rug in the foyer, that wouldn’t be so bad. What part of his head? Babies have soft spots. All I can think about as we pass the Tower Records building and make a few quick turns and speed down the Bowery is, Please, not the curve at the top of the stairs, the place where it would be most likely to fall, the place where the steps are narrow and the dried flowers make the passage even narrower, and it’s a long, long way down. Please, not that.

  He was screaming. Screaming is good. Screaming is the best thing. That’s what you want to hear. Big, loud, shrieking sounds.

  I call my home, and a stranger answers the phone. A strange man. A strange police sergeant man. He asks me who I am. I say I am the mother. How’s my baby? He says, Ma’am, your baby has quite a bump on his head. I melt for this man, I want to collapse into his big, blue chest. His voice is not shaking, he is calm, he is imparting information to me, information I need. Quite a bump. We can deal with quite a bump.

  I call the school. I won’t be able to teach my class. Baby fell down stairs. Baby fell down stairs trumps all. Trumps viruses and flus and the dog ate my student’s homework. I call back the doctor. They’re taking him to the hospital, I tell her. She seems annoyed. After all, she’s certain that I’m a hysterical mother, that this is only a minor bump. And it occurs to me, not for the first time, that this doctor is younger than I am. When I was in second grade, she was in kindergarten. What is she doing, taking care of my son?

  I grew up in a home where prayer was where you turned in moments like these. But I have never been in a moment like this, and I do not know how to pray.

  I catch Tony’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and then notice for the first time a yellow plastic taxi, dangling there. It looks like it’s flying, floating against the pale blue sky. I keep staring at the cheerful taxi, imbuing it with supernatural powers. Nothing bad will happen if I just don’t take my eyes off the taxi and keep repeating Please God over and over again.

  We pull up to the emergency room of a hospital somewhere in downtown Brooklyn. All I have in my wallet is a twenty, and the meter is much more than that, but I hand Tony the twenty with an apology, and he turns around and looks at me like the father of four children that he is. He says, I’m not leaving until you come out and tell me about the baby.

  There were eight of us, friends and acquaintances, who were pregnant at the same time with our first babies. Something about the age thirty-six. Thirty-six means, Get serious. Thirty-six, at least in New York City, means that you’re still young enough to do it, with any luck, without fertility doctors and injections and in vitro and all the stuff of middle-aged motherhood. Thirty-six is still normal. And so I would think, sometimes, about my pregnant friends, and then I would think about statistics. Most of us would be fine: a little morning sickness, indigestion, varicose veins. Half of us would end up with C-sections. One or two would have some serious complications during pregnancy: gestational diabetes, preeclampsia. The sort of thing our mothers didn’t even know about but that we, with our shelves of pregnancy books, our middle-of-the-night online surfing, know only too well. I would think about the odds. Then, the woman whose due date was just before mine developed severely high blood pressure during her birth, and she very nearly died. I felt, in a completely unscientific way, that she had taken the fall for all of us.

  J. is on a tiny bed in a tiny curtained-off area in a tiny ER, and he is not crying. He is not shrieking. His eyes are closed, and he is just lying there. Why isn’t anybody doing anything? Marsha is sitting on a plastic chair by the window, a tissue pressed to her nose. Her eyes are red, and she looks like her life is over. Two police officers are standing near the door. Sit down, Mommy, one of the nurses tells me.

  I pick up my baby. He is unconscious. But he was screaming just a little while ago! Screaming is good. What happened? I don’t want to shake him. Shaking is bad, I know. I clutch him to my chest, feel his breath, whisper in his ear, “Mommy’s here. It’s going to be all right. Mommy’s here.” His eyes flutter open slightly, and he lets out a pathetic little whimper. “Look at me,” I command him, my six-month-old whose entire vocabulary consists of “Ga.”

  Michael rushes in. His face is white, his eyes are huge. He hugs me and J. together, he turns to the doctor, a Pakistani named Noah, and asks what’s going on. “We’ve ordered a CT scan,” says the doctor. “Does your baby have any allergies?”

  While J. is sedated and taken in for his CT scan, two men in suits approach me. They introduce themselves as police detectives. They are lumbering, uncomfortable. Ma’am? Can we just ask you a few questions? Your babysitter. How long has she worked for you? Two days, I say. They exchange a glance. Ma’am? You don’t think… well, you don’t think she did anything.

  Our pediatrician calls the Brooklyn hospital. She wants J. transferred to the Upper East Side hospital where she works, the hospital with the best neonatal intensive care unit in the city. Suddenly, she is no longer calling this a minor bump. She is no longer sounding annoyed. She says she’s sending an ambulance, a team.

  I don’t want to hurt Dr. Noah’s feelings. I don’t want him to think that we believe his hospital to be inferior to the Manhattan hospital where we are about to transfer our baby. Our pediatrician wants to see him, I shrug apologetically, marveling at my own ability, even in a moment like this, to be polite at all costs. It’s my nature. I have a nice surface. Dinner party, emergency room, it really makes no difference. Can I get you something to drink? You look tired. Here, put your feet up.

  Marsha gets up from her plastic chair by the window where she has been interrogated by two detectives from the 77th Precinct and walks towards me. Her whole face has crumbled, and she looks like a completely different woman. Not young. Not pretty. Her arms are outstretched, and I realize that she wants me to hug her. And so I do. I wrap my arms around this trembling woman who fell down the stairs, who doesn’t know how it happened, who was wearing socks on the slippery, slippery wood. Who let go of my baby so that he tumbled by himself from the sixteenth or seventeenth step down who knows how many steps before she grabbed onto his arm and caught him. Are you okay? I ask her.

  Tony waits outside. At least an hour has gone by, and he’s sitting there in his taxi, meter turned off.

  This is how they transport a baby in the back of an ambulance: I lie on a stretcher, and they tie me down. Then they hand me J., bundled up in the pajamas he was wearing this morning. Blue pajamas the color of the sky, printed with clouds shaped like white sheep. I cradle him in my arms, his head resting against my breast. His hair is tangled, his upper lip is rubbed raw from crying. The bump is getting bigger. The team—a driver, a paramedic, a nurse, and a do
ctor—lifts us into the back of the ambulance. I watch through the window as we are driven away from the Brooklyn hospital, siren going, through the congested streets of downtown Brooklyn, over the bridge once more, and up the East River Drive. The doctor, a lanky, dark-haired woman with a big diamond on her finger, keeps checking J.’s vitals, while I keep myself sane by asking her where she went to medical school, how long she’s been out, what she wants to specialize in.

  I don’t want to be a writer anymore. I want to be her.

  Hellooooo! coos the pediatrician as she parts the curtain in the ICU. Her face is scrunched into her practiced, good-with-babies grin. Let’s see that bump. Oooh, that’s a nasty bump. J. is in a hospital crib, and I have lowered the rail and crawled in there with him. If I tuck myself into the fetal position, it’s not such a bad fit. The pediatrician opens her wallet and passes around a photo of her own six-month-old daughter. The nurses coo, then hand me the photo. She’s not a cute baby, not cute at all, and she’s sitting up against one of those department-store backdrops of lollipops and balloons. I keep looking at the doctor, J.’s doctor, wishing I were the kind of person who would say, Excuse me, but what the fuck are you thinking?

  At night, friends bring bagels and lox. Chocolate bread. Cheeses, a cheese board, a knife. We have a party in J.’s room. He’s coming to, coming out of that gray place he went to. He gives everybody a weak little smile.

  The phone rings. It’s Tony, checking on the baby.

  The pediatric step-down ICU is festooned with photos of its long-term patients. Birthday parties, staged plays, tired-looking nurses wearing clowns hats. In some of the rooms there are special video monitors, so that parents and children can hook up to say goodnight. I sleep curled up with J., waking every hour as a nurse comes in to lift his lids, check his pupils, take his blood pressure and pulse. Michael wanders the corridors, talking to the children. An eleven-year-old who has lived in the hospital for nearly the past year, waiting for a heart and a liver, tells him about her seven-year-old friend down the hall, who she feels sorry for, because she’s only seven, and she hasn’t had a chance to live yet.

  J. has had a normal CT scan, but they decide to do an MRI as well. That’s why we’re here, with the big guns, isn’t it? My husband goes in with J., into the noisy, noisy room where we get three-dimensional color pictures of his brain. My husband is instructed to remove all metal from his body: watch, coins, belt buckle, wedding band. I put his ring on my thumb, twirling it around and around as I wait.

  The MRI shows a contusion on J.’s brain, just below the nasty, nasty bump. Wait a minute. Contusion is a fancy word for bruise, right? And bruises bleed. Bruise on his brain?

  We’re talking fractions, here. I was never good at math. We’re talking an infinitesimal distance between healthy baby and dead baby. That’s what we’re talking.

  Kayn aynhoreh.

  In the morning, we check out of the hospital. We are wheeled, J. and I, down the long white corridor. I’ve pulled a striped knit cap over his misshapen head, and he’s grinning, flirting with the nurses who wave and call out, There he goes! There goes our boy! like he’s on a float and this is a parade. The two transplant girls wave goodbye, too, in their robes and slippers. The head nurse gives him a kiss. They are all so happy, so happy to see him go.

  When we pull up to our house and bring the baby inside, I feel as though I’m walking into a crime scene. The police officer left his card on the kitchen table, under that jar of strained plums with a plastic spoon still stuck inside. The kitchen tap is dripping. Yesterday’s newspaper is open to the metro news. I carry J. upstairs. The steps are so old, so creaky and uneven. And the dried flowers look like tumors, like malignant growths on an X-ray, egg-shaped and prickly. I watch J.’s eyes for any flicker of fear, but he’s focused on the ceiling.

  Marsha called that night to ask how J. was doing. Michael said he was fine. He didn’t want her to worry. Then he fired her. It wasn’t easy. We felt bad about it. When she asked why, her voice gentle and resigned, the only answer—you almost killed our baby—seemed like more than could be said.

  The socks, the stairs, the dried flowers, Michael’s traffic ticket, our empty bank account, the strained plums, my subway panic. It all adds up to something. Doesn’t it? It adds up to almost died.

  Kayn aynhoreh.

  The Hollywood check finally arrived. The first thing we did was buy a very nice runner for the staircase. It’s a pale brown the shelter magazines might call “sand” or “birch,” and there are pastel stripes running up the sides. I yanked out the brown, bulbous things that hung over the edge of the cracked white urn, and pulled out some of the roses until there was nothing pushing its way out of the coffin.

  I stay pretty close to home these days. Downstairs, J. is laughing. Have I mentioned that he has the most unusual laugh? The sun is streaming through the tall parlor windows. It’s early afternoon, almost time for his nap. I can picture his sleepy eyes, the way he bangs on his plastic butterfly when he gets tired. I can’t write anyway, so I go downstairs to see him.

  I rock my baby while he sucks down his bottle. The bump is gone. Sometimes, I think I can still see a bluish stain on his forehead. This is what I do, every single time I put him to sleep: I sing him three rounds of “Hush Little Baby,” four rounds of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Then I count backwards from fifty. When I get to one, I finish by saying, Thank you, God. Please keep this baby safe. Please watch over him and keep him safe. I repeat it over and over again while I rock. I can’t alter the routine, and if it’s interrupted, I have to start all over again. I imagine an invisible hand cupping my baby’s head, softening the blow by a fraction as he smashed into the corner of a stair. Whose hand? What grace?

  The house is quiet. Outside, birds are chirping, pecking at the grass seeds we’ve scattered in the backyard. I’m not sure where Michael is. He’s around here somewhere. He’s always doing something practical around the house. Maybe he’s in the basement, taking down the last of the cage I have never seen.

  Dani Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, the New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and has been broadcast on This American Life. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School, and Wesleyan University; she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. A contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveler, Dani lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

  Mother Tongue

  Jennifer De Leon

  Early one morning, a few minutes past six, I stumbled into my two-year-old son’s bedroom and as I lifted him out of his crib he announced, “I want meatballs.” This was just after I had said, “Good morning, mi amor.” Had he not heard me? “You want meatballs?” I asked, just to be sure I heard him right. He was wearing his favorite monkey pajamas. “Sí,” he said. At that moment, like any moment where he speaks Spanish, where a Spanish word instead of an English one escapes his little mouth, I instantly feel a fierce floating happiness, that all is right in the world and in my life and his life or at least in that sentence, Sí. In those moments, he could ask for anything and I would probably give it to him. Meatballs at 6 a.m. Why not?

  My first language was Spanish. Or, so I’ve been told. When I was a young child, my family and I only spoke Spanish at home. It was my older sister who brought English to our two-bedroom apartment in Boston. She was the one who diligently did her worksheets and packets of homework while seated on the plastic-covered couch. Once, I asked my mother why she didn’t know the answer to one of the worksheet questions, but my sister did. You’re old, I said, as if old people knew everything there ever was to know, as if learning stopped at a certain point, like growing in height. My mother laughs when she tells this story.

  After English invaded our
home, displacing Spanish word after Spanish word—first through those photocopied packets and later through television and eventually my own crinkly-covered library books—Spanish became the stepchild language. I didn’t want to play with her anymore. She was weird. Cartoons were in English. Movies, too. We heard English at the mall and the doctor’s office. So my sister and I spoke mostly in English. When my parents talked to us, which was always in Spanish, we replied in English. Then, we moved to a town twenty miles west of Boston where my parents bought their first house. My dad built a fence, painted it white. Bit by bit, episode after colorful cartoon episode, grade after grade in my sunny suburban elementary school, where it seemed everyone spoke in English, even the mailman, my world continued to be eclipsed with the sounds and songs and sayings of English.

  The summer I was nine years old, my parents took us—by then there were three of us, all girls—to visit Guatemala, their homeland. I can practically sip those sensory details through a straw. Thin cucumber slices sliding in bowls of lime juice and salt. The smoke-filled streets as we squatted in the back of an uncle’s pick-up truck and swished past the city and onto dirt roads bumpy as logs. The sound of iron gates opening and closing, people everywhere, in and out, hola, adiós. Then, a sudden longing on my part: how I wished to move between two languages! But my Spanish was nearly lost by then. So in Guatemala I used English whenever I could and when I was absolutely forced to speak in Spanish—say, to my thousand-year-old tías—I would do so with hunched shoulders, a lowered chin, furrowed brows. Painfully, the words would crumble out and with them my aunts would giggle like girls. I clumsily chopped verbs, failed to use the subjunctive properly, addressed elders with a casual tú instead of usted. So I began using Spanglish. And I can’t say I ever really stopped.