2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  He was sitting in his first class of Geology 101 when Sarah blew into his life. A required science course Michael had neglected his first three years—pretty sad for a geology major—but he needed it to graduate.

  Sarah’s sly voice startled him out of his morning stupor. “So, you gonna help me?” He looked up past the faded jeans directly in front of him and saw a pretty girl looking down at him with a wicked smile.

  He said, “Help you what?” He was irritated by the angle his neck had to maintain to keep looking at her. She finally squatted down in front of his desk. She was less severe-looking at this angle, pretty in a fresh-scrubbed way. She had a pale complexion and freckles, a redness that threatened to rise at the least embarrassment. Her sharp nose and chin gave her a Puckish quality. One look into her quick eyes and Michael knew he’d have to stay on his toes with her. Her manner made him desperate to come up with something clever to say, which made him feel decidedly not clever. Her long blonde hair folded over on her head in an elastic at an odd angle, some stray hairs hanging loose. This and her lack of makeup revealed someone who didn’t give much care to her appearance. He found this attractive, perhaps because of the time-consuming, ritualistic care Naomi took with her grooming.

  She said, “I need tutoring for this class. You’re a geology major.”

  He asked, “Tutoring for Rocks for Jocks?”

  “Do I look like a jock?” She smiled. Michael instantly liked that smile: challenging, but honest.

  He said, “I’ve got a full course load this semester. I can’t.”

  But she kept asking. And he kept turning her down. It became a jokey routine before class started each session. When she brought him a batch of chocolate chip cookies, he finally caved.

  Sarah was a city girl, which intimidated the rural Michael. Her wry jokes frequently went over his head, making him wonder if the serious Naomi had sucked dry his capacity for humor. It didn’t take long for Michael to find his funny again and he looked forward to their study sessions more each time they met. Sarah was the ideal buddy, listening to his issues, laughing at his jokes, rolling her eyes when he was being an ass. He didn’t think of her romantically then. He acknowledged that he found her attractive, but he had the sexual part of his life sewn up. Sarah fulfilled an intellectual role in his life that Naomi didn’t. He was quite happy for a time, keeping these two lives separate and he talked himself out of his growing attraction to Sarah.

  It was soon after a study session that included a near-kiss and Michael’s almost-confession of love that Sarah started seeing a humorless (she lovingly referred to him as “humor-free”) pre-law Adonis. Michael was relieved he hadn’t declared himself, and their friendship took a new turn. Sarah and Michael started sharing stories of romantic traumas, from conversational misunderstandings to sexual escapades. He found it refreshing to talk about his love life with a girl.

  Then, in one of those weekend-long Greek dramas that can only happen at college, Sarah and Michael hooked up, their respective partners erupted, clothes were rent (Naomi), tears were shed (pre-law Adonis), sage was burned (Naomi, again), and Michael and Sarah moved on. Michael found, to his great delight, that his sexual internship with Naomi paid off when it was taken into the realm of true love-making.

  The fact that he loved Sarah more completely than anyone he’d ever met sent Michael into a brief panic; that kind of certainty is terrifying at the tender age of twenty-one. But Sarah calmly reassured him: they made sense. She knew him in a way that let him know he wasn’t a complete alien. He belonged here, in this life, with her.

  • • •

  Michael is surprised when Sarah leads him to the bedroom. She has that look in her eyes. She slowly unbuttons his shirt and loosens his belt. He thinks for a moment that he might be getting what they have always jokingly referred to as “service,” but she takes off her clothes and pulls him into bed on top of her.

  He kisses her hungrily. It’s been so long. Months now. He stops to look at her face, so worn and tired before, now momentarily lit with the flush of desire. She grins wickedly.

  He says, “Are you sure? I mean, isn’t it too soon?” He has so many questions. About the birth. Was it hard? Is she okay? It can’t possibly have been long enough since the birth, she’d need to heal. He’s aroused, which makes him ashamed. “Isn’t it too soon?”

  “The doctors say it’s fine.”

  He strokes her hair. It’s been awhile since she washed it, but he’s so starved for her that it only seems to intensify his desire. She smells more like Sarah. For the longest time the enormous and awkward buoy of a belly had separated them. Now he can embrace all of her. The belly has deflated, and though there’s more of it than there was before she was pregnant, it feels good to hold all of her again. Out of habit, he leans back on one elbow to survey the rest of her and she catches his chin. “No, don’t look. I’m horrid. Close your eyes.” He does and he feels her get up from the bed for a moment, and hears her draw the curtains. She turns off the light. It’s already dark from the late afternoon rain, so when he opens his eyes again, the room is dim and he can hardly see her.

  She says, “I said close ’em!”

  He laughs, closing his eyes, and soon she’s on top of him.

  Michael finds himself joyously sinking into the familiar. Sarah moans, whispering, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  All the strangeness falls away. It’s just the two of them now; no baby, no worries, no separation.

  • • •

  Sarah stays awake and watches Michael sleep. She smoothes his hair back from his forehead, where it has fallen in his eyes. He’s always had ridiculously long lashes and when he sleeps, he looks like some sort of fierce, scruffy angel reclining. Fallen angel. His brown hair has gotten shaggy again and he has a thread or two of gray in his sideburns, but his face is etched and peaceful in the light from the street. She loves him when he goes all outdoorsy, flannel and boots and walking like he owns the earth on which he treads. She feels sorry for him when he changes so drastically for work: he gets his hair shorn and puts on his suit, depleted.

  She can’t believe he’s here.

  It’s different. The sex. She’s been told that it sometimes changes after a birth, so on some level, she’d expected it to change. But she can’t feel everything she used to. Those old feelings deep inside her are something she can’t quite reach, no matter how she tries. This makes her sad, further evidence of the shift she’s experiencing. There are some things she’s going to have to let go of in her new reality.

  She’ll have to ask Greta what this means. But she’ll do it tomorrow. For now, here is Michael and she can smell him, the Michael of him. She’s so enthralled by the very here-ness of him, and he feels so miraculous, she can’t get enough of touching him. As he sleeps, she strokes his chest with the palm of her hand, feeling his weight, the power of his lungs as they rise and fall. She holds her hand over his heart and feels the thumping of life within him. Michael. She leaves her hand where it is and settles in next to him, falling into the first relaxed sleep she’s had in what feels like forever.

  • • •

  Michael wakes a few hours later and stares at the familiar orange-shadowed glow of the streetlights across the ceiling. They feel like them again as they lie here in the dark. Sarah sleeps peacefully, and with all the stress gone from her face, she looks much more like herself. He strokes her hair, then the freckles on the back of her arm. Her face is still puffy, and there are brow furrows that weren’t there before. Her belly is softer, fuller, but from Sarah’s descriptions, he thought there would be an “extra person” worth of skin lying between them. He touches it gently, the vacated house where Tim once dwelled; he expects a hollowness, but it’s supple, hers again. Sarah groans softly and rolls over. Michael realizes that he’s wide awake and the only thing he can give his wife now is undisturbed sleep. He sneaks out of bed and pulls on a sweatshirt.

  He tries to avoid the squeaky floorboards; he doesn’t want
anything disturbing the peace of their home right now. He smiles, wondering if Tim will be avoiding the same floorboards when he sneaks home too late as a teenager.

  Michael has to readjust every time he re-enters apartment life. After climbing mountains and covering great stretches of countryside, his strides need to be smaller, his arms need tucking in. For the first week home, he usually whacks his hands against doorjambs, slams his knees into table edges, lurches into walls. Sneaking over the floorboards makes him overly conscious of the enormity of his body in this boxed-in space.

  Michael stops outside Tim’s door for a moment and sees his curtain blowing, the window open. It’s cold. Too cold. Michael shivers as he creeps into the room. He tries to stay out of the line of vision of the crib, even though newborns can’t see more than three feet in front of them.

  When he gets to the window, he finds it’s curiously colder inside than out. The breeze blowing off the river is usually warm this time of year. He pulls on the sash of the six-feet-high window. It’s stuck. He knows that you have to pull and push… push to get it unstuck, pull to ensure that it doesn’t crash down on the fingers. Suffering from years of paint and missing sash weights, the window finally rumbles down, making entirely too much noise, but Michael catches it before it hits the bottom. He stops, stock still for a moment, listening, but hears only the baby breathing. He gently closes the window that last notch.

  The quilt, colorful with crudely drawn cars on it, hangs on the side of the crib.

  Michael creeps forward and slips the quilt off the edge of the crib. It’s worth the risk. It’s surely more likely that the baby will wake if he’s cold. He leans over the baby and is startled to find his eyes open. Tim is completely awake and he’s looking right at his father with more focus than Michael thought he’d be capable of at this age. Tim smiles. Isn’t it too early for him to smile? Michael’s elated. Look at this. His boy! The first time the boy has laid eyes on him and Tim seems to know him; recognition flickers in that wise, old-man gaze.

  When he grows up, will he have Michael’s short temper or his mother’s patience? Will he be good at sports like Sarah and her sister or a total geek like his father? Will he be good at music? What if he wants to be a baseball star? Can Michael cope with a jock? He laughs to himself. He will be Tim. That is the only thing for certain.

  “Hi there,” he whispers. “Hi, little man, I’m your dad.”

  The baby kicks, thrashing his arms in the air, smiling.

  “Hi! Oh, look at you.” He reaches his arms into the crib and rubs the boy’s belly. “Look at you.”

  He puts his finger into one of the boy’s grasping hands, which closes around it. Tim screams as if in pain, and launches into a horrible jerking cry.

  “Shh. shh. No, no…” The baby is quiet for a terrible second, sucking in his breath, summoning deep inside him for his next ear-splitting scream. Michael scrambles and picks him up, holding him against his shoulder. But the baby thrashes, bashing his head against Michael; he won’t settle. Michael cups Tim’s tiny back with his hand, holding him steady. His head is bobbing dangerously. He pounds his forehead violently on his father’s clavicle.

  “What are you doing?” Sarah shrieks from the doorway behind him.

  She storms toward him, a look of anger on her face he hasn’t ever seen before, and she snatches Tim from his arms. The moment Tim is in his mother’s arms, his screaming turns to a softer crying. “Shh, shh, little one.” The crying turns to soft hiccups.

  Michael says, “I’m sorry. He was crying.”

  Sarah, “Didn’t I tell you not to pick him up?”

  He’s starting to get pissed off. “No, you didn’t. You said not to wake him up. He was already awake.”

  “What were you doing in here?” she hisses, careful not to raise her voice.

  But his voice is rising now. “The window was open. It was freezing.”

  “He needs fresh air.”

  “I thought he could use his quilt.”

  “Have you not heard of crib death?” She glares at him accusingly. The room feels even colder, like a strong draft has blown through.

  Michael says, “Oh for chrissake, he’s not going to die from that quilt. It’s no thicker than a blanket.”

  Sarah soothes Tim. “Shh. Shh.” He’s stopped crying, but Sarah is still fuming. “You don’t touch him, do you understand?”

  Michael says, “He’s my son.” He doesn’t understand why he has to tell her this. How can she forbid him from touching his own child?

  Sarah says, “Who’s been here for him every moment since he’s been born?”

  “You still can’t…”

  “Can’t what?” she says in the same tone.

  He holds up his hands, exasperated. Anything he wants to say is not going to help. He walks out, slamming the door. The baby starts crying again. Okay, bad move, but Jesus, that is not Sarah in there. How did he get so suddenly put on the outside? Is this punishment for the trip or is this the way things are going to be? How can he learn to care for Tim if she won’t even give him a chance?

  As he heads to his office through the kitchen, he notices an oppressive stench. The smell of garbage that’s been sitting for quite a long time. Michael opens the cabinet door under the kitchen sink and a brick of odor hits him. There are more flies in that small space than he’s ever seen inside the apartment. He quickly cinches the bag and lifts the entire can out to take it to the garbage chute; it’s not worth the risk of the bag breaking. How hard is it to take out the goddamned garbage? He’s always taking care of the stuff that should be glaringly obvious to her: the empty toilet paper holder, the overloaded clothes basket, the endless pile of papers and unopened junk mail on the dining room table. Three boxes. She didn’t even bother to fetch the mail this time.

  He catches himself. He’s burning on pure anger now. Sarah probably hasn’t been able to take a shower, let alone take out the garbage, since she got home. He hears Sarah singing soothingly to the boy down the hall. He knows she doesn’t intend it, but her singing sounds self-consciously motherly. Forced.

  “Every dream has a name, and names tell your story, this song is your dream…” The Talking Heads. He used to sing it to her when they were first living together. He feels a pang of jealousy; the song is no longer theirs, but the baby’s.

  Michael opens the heavy fire door to the kitchen as quietly as he can and inserts a step stool to hold it open. He hoists the trashcan over the stool and through the door, heaving it down the worn red-carpeted hallway, past the elevator.

  The flickering light at the end of the hall casts an odd glow on the garbage chute door, adding to Michael’s jet-lagged, post-argument uneasiness. He laughs at himself for being foolish and pulls the heavy chute door open. He stares into the blackness for a moment, mesmerized. He’s heard about these new baby blues, that it’s hard on the father, the disruption of his ordered universe. It’s hard on the mother, as well, but she expects her world to change with the birth of a new child. The father is sideswiped. Michael’s not that fifties guy who expects the pipe, slippers, and Martini at the end of the day, but he hasn’t ever been in a place where he doesn’t know what to expect in his own home. And with Sarah, he never thought he’d signed up for the unstable shrew he just saw in her.

  Okay, unfair.

  • • •

  Sarah jerks awake, sitting up in bed. It takes her a sleepy moment to recognize that the violent sound that woke her is the baby crying. Adrenaline surges, her heart is beating wildly and she’s breathing heavily. It’s only a crying baby. This reaction to the sound of Tim’s cry is also supposed to be natural for the mother of a newborn, but she hates it. Nature implanted this reaction to get her to the baby faster, but all it does is make her angry for having been woken so roughly, resentful that she has to take care of something. And it’s always followed by guilt for that anger and resentment.

  She sits for a moment, trying to wake up and get a grip. She sees that Michael’s gone. She remem
bers their fight and the fact that he left the room, but beyond that things are fuzzy. She knows that she tended to Tim, put him down to sleep, and went back to bed. Why didn’t she look for Michael? Was she too angry? She shouldn’t have been so hard on him.

  Michael was here. She knows he was here. But it’s been days—three?—since she’s seen him. And where is Greta? Greta hasn’t come since he got here.

  Maybe he’s in with the baby. Sarah gets out of bed and runs down the hallway. She finds Tim alone in his crib, awake, kicking and crying. She picks him up. He wobbles and jerks around, looking for the comfort of the breast. She shoves her finger in his mouth to buy time as she looks around the apartment. The power of the baby’s suck on her finger is staggering, and she feels the new familiar prickle on the sides of her breasts as her milk comes in and dampens the front of her nightgown. She doesn’t understand why she can feel some things so acutely and yet something like sex is so far away.

  She’ll probably have to tell Michael everything, but she doesn’t know if she’s allowed. She’ll ask Greta.

  Greta helped her keep Tim. She doesn’t know how exactly.

  She doesn’t like to think about it… it frightens her when she does. But she has so many questions. Like, why does Tim scream when his father touches him?