Windfalls: A Novel

by Hegland, Jean

  After what felt like many lifetimes, a new doctor came into the room. He introduced himself to Anna with a grave formality and reached out heartily to shake Eliot’s hand. Anna tried to follow what he told them, but the few words she managed to catch made little sense, a barrage of phrases that only sounded frightening—staining below the vocal cords, supplemental oxygen, IV glucose, pneumonia, dehydration, pulmonary infection. She clung to Eliot’s hand and tried to look intelligent and pleasant and grateful for all that the doctor was doing, tried to keep from screaming, Give her back to me, tried to keep from keening, Please make her live.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Eliot after the doctor left.

  “You heard what he said,” Eliot gestured toward the door. “It was nothing anyone did. These things happen.”

  “But—”

  “It’ll be okay.” Eliot’s face was sharp and shrunken.

  “How do you know?” she snapped in instant fury. “How can you possibly say it will be okay?”

  His eyes met hers. They were bleak and dark, like holes that led nowhere. “Hope?” he said, his voice teetering between plea and irony. They stared at each other for a second, and then he shrugged helplessly, his expression melting into utter pain. With a sudden slash of insight she realized how vulnerable they were—he and she—how easily their marriage could be shredded, how thoroughly their whole world toppled by the loss of one tiny child.

  “I need to see her,” she said, struggling to her feet. Standing up, she felt as though what little was still left inside her might flop out, organs spilling down her legs onto the shining linoleum. She wove like a drunkard, and clutched at Eliot’s arm.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Eliot asked.

  She thought, Nothing will ever be okay again. “I’m fine,” she said, leading him down the hall. “I just need to see my baby.”

  Wire mesh was embedded in the windows of the neonatal intensive care unit, and the door was locked. Like a prison, Anna thought as they waited in the hall for a nurse to let them in. Inside the dim room it was unexpectedly loud with a varied cacophony of monitors and ventilators. The nurse had them wash their hands, and then she led them past an oak rocking chair, and through a labyrinth of equipment. Babies lay in some of the incubators and radiant warmers they passed along the way. Some of the babies were so impossibly small they seemed more alien or simian than human, while others looked nearly normal except for how still they lay, except for the maze of tubes and wires and probes and sensors that kept them attached to life.

  “Here she is,” the nurse said, stopping beside a radiant warmer at the back of the room and waiting for Anna and Eliot to catch up. “It’s okay to touch her gently, but don’t pick her up.”

  “When can—” Anna began, but suddenly an alarm sounded in another corner of the room. Eliot flinched, and Anna gasped, but the nurse only said, “Excuse me,” and moved off, leaving them staring down at their daughter.

  She was no longer the dead blue color of a bruise, but lying prone beneath the radiant lights she looked weary and utterly worn, like a shipwrecked traveler washed ashore in a storm. She was naked except for the huge white plastic diaper that dwarfed her bent legs. A blood pressure cuff encircled one little thigh. A needle was taped into her frail arm, a battery of probes and sensors were taped to her sides and chest, and a tube snaked into her mouth, held in place by more tape on her cheek. Her eyes were closed, and she was panting as rapidly as a dog on a hot day, panting as though simply lying there—simply living—was an exertion almost too great to be endured.

  I did this to her, Anna thought. I made her be alive. She remembered having a similar thought after Lucy was born, though then her emotions had been pride and awe, not trepidation. Tentatively, she stretched out a forefinger to touch the little shoulder, felt for the first time her daughter’s skin beneath her fingertip. It was impossibly soft, like butterfly wings, like rose petals, like tears. She ran her finger wistfully across the brief back, felt her own tears burning in her sinuses. Beneath the infant’s frail skin Anna felt her tiny ribs, and she thought of all the hardness and sadness that still waited for them, of all the sorrow they would have to endure even if the baby managed to live, to thrive, to grow into an ordinary girl. This is only the beginning, she thought, and for a dizzying moment she wished the baby were already dead, wished the worst had already engulfed them, so that the worry could be over and all she would have left to face was grief. A sob burst from her, inadvertent as a sneeze.

  “You heard the doctor,” Eliot said. “This isn’t all that uncommon. She has a good chance of being just fine. It’s just this next few weeks that’ll be touch and go.” He strengthened his grip on Anna’s hand.

  “But what if—” Anna faltered, unable to bring herself to find words for what could happen next. She remembered her grandmother’s daughter, the Lucy who died before she could be named. It happens, Anna thought, tearing her gaze from her baby to cast a glance at all the other struggling babies in the nursery. It happens all the time. Why did I ever think we would be spared?

  Standing above the Plexiglas box that contained her daughter, she saw what she couldn’t believe she had never seen before, how perilous life was, how unpredictable and uncertain. Always before her problems had been with the complexities of living, not with simply staying alive. It was as if she had somehow assumed that dying could be avoided—or at least postponed for so long that the fear of it had never really reached her. Dying was what people did if they were old, like her grandmother, or if they were careless enough to let bad things happen.

  But now she saw how ignorant she had been to think that way. She had been naive and stupid and insensitive, and she realized with a jolt so mean and sudden it was like a car wreck that death was always lurking behind all of them, that they were each only a breath away from darkness all the time. Standing over her panting daughter, she marveled that anything else could have ever mattered, that she could ever have cared about photography or where she lived or the color she chose to paint her living room.

  After Eliot left to pick up Lucy from the babysitter, the nurse sent Anna to her room to get some rest. She went with a reluctant obedience, in the superstitious hope that if she did what she was told, her daughter would be okay. A bouquet of homegrown roses was waiting on the tray beside her bed, and for a strange, chaotic moment, Anna thought her grandmother must have sent it. But when she read the card, she saw that it had been delivered to the wrong room, that the roses were meant for someone else.

  The room was as impersonal as a room in a cheap hotel. She missed her friends back home in Salish, missed her mother and her sister, both of whom had planned on coming later, after the baby was born. She felt like a husk, a vacant shell. She couldn’t bear to lie down, alone in her empty body. Instead she went to the window, opened the heavy plastic drapes, looked out beyond her dark reflection into the night. The city of Santa Dorothea stretched away below her, its streets aglow with yellow house lights, white and red car lights, the cold orange-violet glare of streetlights. Above her, the sky was stained with the blending of all those lights, its sickly glow saturating the blackness, concealing the stars. She thought, I live here now.

  The lights of an ambulance pulsing in the distance snagged her attention. She watched as it pushed single-mindedly up the boulevard toward the hospital, racing through the bright night with its desperate load. She could not hear its siren behind the window, but as she watched it draw nearer, she felt an answering pulse of fear. Anything is possible, she thought as the ambulance turned into the hospital drive and vanished from her view.

  Her eye was caught by a group of teenagers ambling along on the sidewalk below her. The streetlight illuminated them as though they were passing through a spotlight on a stage, and Anna could see the glint of bottles in their hands, could see the red pulse and glow of their cigarettes. Watching them, who had so recently been babies and who had now taken their lives into their own hands so stridently, she felt a panic in all her bone
s. What’s next? she wondered.

  And suddenly a million threats suggested themselves to her. It was as though she were still dilated, still open and unfiltered, as though she were a lens that admitted all possible light, and every shadow. She thought of SIDS and AIDS and hidden heart defects, of strange viruses and untended swimming pools, of childhood cancers and E. coli-laden hamburgers. She remembered all the appalling numbers that filled the newspapers, the thousands of extinctions and billions of pounds of toxic chemicals that threatened the world. She thought of global warming, nuclear winter, and silent spring. Clutching the windowsill and staring down on the city stewing in all its ugly light, she wondered how she could ever feel safe again.

  WHEN THE ALARM RANG, THE ROOM WAS BLACK AND COLD AND CERISE was still so tired—was always so tired—was aching with exhaustion even as she woke. It was cruelly early, but even so her first thought was that she should have been up at least an hour ago. She should have used that extra time to shower and dress and study, to assemble Travis’s diaper bag and make his breakfast and pack his lunch. She should have washed the heap of bowls and spoons and bottles that spilled out of the trailer sink and choked the tiny counter, should have tried to address the disaster in the little living room, to unpack the stacks of boxes that had sat untouched since she and Jake and Melody had heaved them there, four months before.

  She should have spent a quiet moment trying to decide what to do next about Melody. Three weeks, she thought as she clutched Travis’s sleeping body—tonight it would be three weeks since Melody had run out into the darkness, that awful teardrop bleeding on her cheek.

  Beneath the snarl of blankets, Travis began to stir. She pulled him closer, folding him into the pocket her body made when she drew her knees toward her chin. Burying her face beneath the blankets, she inhaled the scent of him, the clean, tealike fragrance of his breath, the aroma of his head like the smell inside a bakery.

  “Mama?” he asked.

  Without opening her eyes she lifted her T-shirt, thrust her chest toward him, let him nuzzle until he trapped her nipple in his mouth. With Melody, even if Cerise had not been too shy to nurse, she had never really believed that her breasts were capable of making milk. But Travis had latched on just minutes after she pushed him into her hands, when it seemed like just another miracle of birth that her body could feed his. For months he had lived on her milk alone, and she had felt a secret pride to be his only food. The blond curls that sprouted on his head, his round tummy, even the orange smears of wax inside his ears—all of him, she’d liked to think, had come from her. Now he was eating lots of other foods, and she felt a guilty compunction that she hadn’t weaned him yet. When Jake came up to help them move, he’d said, “That boy should be chewing on a steak. It’s time he left the titty to his dad.”

  She cupped the back of Travis’s head in her palm, felt the milk rising in her breast and tried to concentrate all her love for him into her wish that he would have a good day. The day care she had been able to find for him after Melody left was not a place she liked to leave him. It was loud and crowded, and more than once his diaper had been so heavy when she picked him up that she was sure it hadn’t been changed all day. Every morning, when they finally reached the Happy Factory after their long bus ride, Travis clung to her like a desperate monkey, and only her fear of being late for class would allow her to peel him from her neck and hip and race away, his final cries magnifying in her memory so that it was their sound, and the image of his tear-smeared face, that haunted her all day at school.

  Suddenly Travis pulled away from her breast, letting her nipple pop out of his mouth like a cork from a bottle. He cocked his head and laughed at the sound he’d made, at the way her nipple bobbled on her breast.

  “Meedee?” he said, pushing away from Cerise to stand teetering beside the mattress in the new gray light that entered the trailer through the high window above the crib. “Meedee?”

  “Meedee’s gone,” Cerise said, “you should know that by now.” But grinning like a drunken cowboy, Travis lurched out of their bedroom and down the miniature hall to the room at the back of the trailer that still held all of Melody’s things. Cerise sighed and heaved back the blankets. Pushing herself off the mattress, she pulled a sweatshirt over her T-shirt and set off after him.

  Melody’s room was a clutter of posters and scarves, its cold air dense with the lingering scent of incense. Travis was sitting in the half-dark on Melody’s mattress, intent as a mystic as he draped himself in beads and chains and bracelets.

  “Those are your sister’s,” Cerise said, stripping off his finery, dropping the bangles back in a heap on the mattress, and scooping him up. “You better leave her things alone.”

  She carried him, protesting, back into their room. Plopping him on their cooling nest of blankets, she unzipped his sleeper, unpeeled the tabs on his soggy diaper, and tried to fit a dry one onto the wriggle he became each time she changed him. Then, his diaper finally fastened and his sleeper rezipped, Cerise lifted him from the mattress and carried him out to the sofa.

  “Mama needs a shower,” she said, flicking the remote until two dueling space aliens appeared on the TV screen. “Be a good boy, and watch this till I’m done.”

  In the shower the heat of the pounding water made her skin red, although the parts of her the water didn’t reach were puckered with cold. She’d used the last of the shampoo two days before, and now she filled the empty bottle with shower water, shook it, and poured the limp soup over her head. Wadding her heavy hair at the back of her neck, she tried to make it lather, calculating, as she scrubbed her scalp, when she’d next be able to afford shampoo.

  She stepped out of the shower stall and, shivering, grabbed a towel. “Trav?” she called, “Are you okay?”

  It was not yet six, and she was already late. She could feel the tension gathering in her shoulders. She had a quiz in basic English today, a child-development test tomorrow, and a report about her observations of three-year-olds due at the end of the week. She had to put in four hours at the school day care, and then had to retrieve Travis from the Happy Factory before it closed at six, had to feed and bathe him, to play the games with him that she hadn’t been able to play with him all day, had to rinse out clothes for both of them in the salad-bowl-size sink because there was no money for the Laundromat, had to nurse Travis to sleep and then study until the words on the pages of her textbooks blurred into her dreams, had to do all that today so she could do it all again tomorrow.

  As she yanked on her clothes in the bedroom, Cerise could hear above the TV the electronic voice of Travis’s laser power blaster commanding, Attention. Drop your guns. Fire, and then, a second later, proclaiming, Target. It sounded a little slow, the voice wearier than it had been the day before. Even though Travis would probably have another tantrum, Cerise hoped that meant the battery Melody had got for it was finally wearing out. She hated that toy. She still resented the fact that Jake had given it to Travis instead of buying him diapers or food or clothes, and it worried her that Travis loved it so much. She wondered what it meant to him when he pointed the barrel at her and pulled the trigger. In her child-development textbook it said that toddlers had no concept of the permanence of death, that they couldn’t tell fantasy from reality. But she couldn’t figure out whether that meant that every death was pretend, or that everything that Travis imagined was real.

  From the front room there was a crash, a long moment of silence, and then the inevitable exhalation of Travis’s wail. Dropping her sweater, she ran from the bedroom to find Travis flailing beneath a collapsed stack of boxes.

  “Goddammit,” she screamed, snatching him up from the floor by his shoulders so that he dangled from her hands. At the sound of her anger, he cried louder.

  “Look what you’ve done,” she shrieked. She wanted to shake him, to hurt or frighten him. She wanted to make him cry. For a poisonous second she wanted to drop him and walk out the door, to run off as Melody had, into a fresher, easier, m
ore promising life. But suddenly her own tears needled their way into her eyes, and she pulled him against her chest instead, held him close while her face twisted with the effort of not crying.

  Startled by her silence, Travis quit bawling to squirm around in her arms. Peering up at her in concern, he said in a worried voice, “Mama? Owie?”

  “It’s okay, baby,” Cerise answered, pressing her face into his little shoulder.

  “Mama? Bannay?” Travis asked. For a moment she held him close enough to feel the calm, firm bones beneath his flesh, and then, releasing her grip, she answered, “No, Trav. Mama doesn’t need a Band-Aid. It’s okay. I’m all right. Come on, buddy—we’ve got to hurry. We can’t be late.”

  Back in the bedroom she traded Travis’s sleeper for a clean T-shirt, a pair of sweat pants, and his Batman jacket. She counted three more diapers into his diaper bag, and tried not to wonder where the next package of diapers would come from. She replenished the supply of wipes, searched for two clean socks and for his shoes while Travis practiced the words his laser power blaster was teaching him, “Tentin. Fie-o. Tawgit.”

  Cerise turned on the burners of the stove and laid a slice of bread on top of each of them. When the slices were branded with the elements’ spirals, she snatched them off and wiped them with peanut butter. Travis’s she cut in strips and set on a plate for him to eat while she studied for her quiz. Hers she swallowed without tasting while she tried to memorize the rules for apostrophes.

  When the phone rang, Cerise was writing “the men’s cars” in the final blank of the study sheet, and Travis was watching space aliens destroy the universe. Someone was selling something, she thought, as she rose to answer.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Mom?”

  Cerise made a noise into the receiver, a gasp involuntary as a belch.