Abbott Awaits

by Chris Bachelder

  27 Abbott and the Small Black Spot

  Abbott’s daughter sits on the floor across the room from Abbott. The small black spot he sees on the side of her neck belongs to one of two categories—deer tick or not deer tick. This family room is ninety miles from Lyme, Connecticut. “Come here for a second,” he says to her. “I want to check something.” The girl keeps working on her fire-station puzzle. She does not come to him. Abbott is certain that the black spot is a deer tick. As he crosses the room, though, he reasons that most black spots are not deer ticks. It’s fear, he knows, that turns spots into ticks. He expands his categories—mole, mud, magic marker. The black spot is very likely not a deer tick, he realizes. He crouches to his daughter’s neck, and so what if the spot is a tick? So what? Some deer ticks do not carry disease, and some do not carry implication. Abbott removes the tick from her skin in the proper manner. He’s not even sure it’s a deer tick. He can look that up later. At present, his daughter needs help with her puzzle. The Dalmatian is tricky.

  28 Abbott Looks out the Window

  Long after the volunteer community search party disbanded, the missing girls have been found at a rest area four states away. They’re alive. They were playing shoeless in the picnic area when an alert motorist called authorities. They’re skinny, but they have always been skinny. The sheriff’s deputy back home wept at the press conference. He said, “Most of us working on this one have kids. The ones with kids are the hardest.” He said, “You just can’t—” but he didn’t finish. Abbott leans back in his chair and tries to recall which missing girls these are. The summer is full of them. Out his window he can see a maple tree, the top of a weathered wooden fence, his neighbor’s roof and chimney. The window is divided into twelve panes, four rows of three. Abbott imagines that each pane is a framed photograph. He studies the composition of each of the twelve panes. He moves along rows, left to right, beginning with the upper left pane. A cloud of leaves and a single red brick. A squirrel on new shingles. Sky with faded contrail. There is not one pane that is not beautiful.

  29 Abbott and the Cold Shudder

  Abbott’s office is nearly a nursery. The chair and books he has already moved to the basement. Only the desk remains, crowded on one side by a changing table and crib, now assembled, and on the other side by a rocking chair and a chest of drawers filled with tidy stacks of clothing that seem too small to fit anyone. Alphabet letter-cards span the walls, spaced uniformly. A Kite likes wind. A Lamb is soft. The Moon is full. Abbott stands in front of his desk, awaits connection. The room still has the new-paint smell. Today is the anniversary of tragedy, but which day is not? Abbott’s eyesight is not what it used to be, but if he squints and leans down toward the laptop screen he can read, in the archival photographs, the messages handwritten on the signs held aloft by dark-skinned people trapped on rooftops of flooded buildings. One sign says HELP US, one says WE NEED WATER, one says PLEASE HELP. Darwin was troubled by the eye, its “inimitable contrivances.” How could natural selection, working so gradually upon only the modest, incremental variations produced by random mutation, have created something as complex as an eye? What adaptive benefit is one one-thousandth of an optical organ? Or even half of one? “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,” he wrote after the publication of On the Origin of Species. But the mechanism of the eye is the easy part to believe, as any insurance executive can tell you. “One might have thought of sight,” wrote the vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, “but who could think / Of what it sees …?” Abbott’s wife knocks on the open door. Abbott turns, keeps his body in front of the screen so his wife cannot see. “When are you going to move the desk?” she says. “Right this very instant,” he says. Abbott DISCONNECTS NOW and crawls beneath the desk with a screwdriver. He begins to take the desk apart, keeping the screws in a sandwich bag he will affix to the inside of a drawer with masking tape. On the tape he will write DESK SCREWS in black marker. At some point during the disassembly, a juncture of interest to philosophers, the desk ceases to be a desk, the office an office.

  30 Abbott on the Roof

  The stars are far behind the clouds tonight as Abbott climbs a borrowed ladder to his roof. He does not have wine or a blanket. He sits on the flat roof above his family room and rests his back against the gentle slope of the garage. He presses his palms against the shingles, still warm from the day. He knows the warmth is from the late-summer sun, but it is easy to believe that it comes from inside the house, from all the bodies and breath and motion. The heat of a family, radiating out. He does not have marijuana or an old acoustic guitar. In two minutes he’s self-conscious. In five minutes he’s bored. In eight minutes his lower back hurts. He sees a firefly blink below him, and he counts the seconds until it blinks again. He hears his neighbors through their screens: the bright clatter of silverware on plates, spouses and children calling for one another through the houses. Where are you? Can you come here for a second? Have you seen Matt? Someone is running a power saw. Someone is dragging a can to the curb, though it is not, Abbott thinks, trash night. The wind pushes small sticks and branches across the roof and off the edge. No moon, no constellations, no meteor showers. Abbott climbs back down the ladder. In the family room his wife says, “What were you doing?” Abbott fixes a drink in the kitchen. “Just checking,” he says. His wife says, “Come in here.” She is lying on the bad couch. The family room is still a mess from the day. “Let’s clean this up later,” she says. Abbott lifts her legs and sits beneath them. The veins in her ankles look terrible. You poor thing, the nurses always say. “Are you scared?” Abbott says. “Sure,” she says. “Do you wish we had done the amnio?” he says. “No,” she says, “I don’t think about that.” Abbott sees a bulging garbage bag slumped against the front door. It probably is trash night, then. “Everything is going to be fine,” he says. “Look at this,” she says. “Is that an elbow?” he says. “Either an elbow or a knee.” Abbott tries to kiss it but it’s gone. He keeps his lips on his wife’s stomach for a while, then he says, “Just a second.” He slips out from beneath his wife’s legs and gets off the couch. He leaves the family room and walks the length of the house to the bedroom. From the drawer of his nightstand he takes a wrapped gift and returns to the family room. “This is just something small,” he says. “I got you something too,” his wife says. “Go get it. It’s in my nightstand.” Abbott walks back to the bedroom and pulls a small wrapped gift from his wife’s nightstand. Then he walks back to the family room. “Did you wrap this?” his wife says, holding up the gift. Abbott shakes his head. “It’s nothing big,” he says. Abbott’s wife begins to unwrap the gift. “You know,” she says, “when I first heard you up there, I was angry. But then I realized you are not the kind of man who would ever fall off a roof.”

  31 Abbott Chooses a Side

  Monitored, amplified, the fetal heartbeat sounds to Abbott like the hoarse bark of a guard dog. “Or like a marching band far away,” his wife says. The nurses take her blood pressure and talk about their distant pregnancies. “Back then they just knocked you out,” says one. Then they roll Abbott’s wife out of the room. She smiles weakly and waves as she disappears. Abbott puts on his scrubs and waits. He knows that eleven thousand babies are born in the United States every day. Nothing else so ordinary is ever called miraculous. He sits, stands, walks to the window. Three stories down, morning commuters drink coffee and talk on their phones. They do not even glance up at the Childbirth Center, this hub of life. They do not seem to notice or care. Abbott surmises that he has driven past dozens of births while opening CD cases or eating crackers. He sits, stands, picks up items and puts them down. Finally someone comes for him, leads him out. His wife is at the center of the operating room with a drape over her chest. Abbott can choose which side of the drape: belly or head. He chooses head, because it is crying and because he does not want to see—ever—his wife’s abdominal wall. Her headache is caused by a rapid drop in blood pressure, and the anesthesiologist is maki
ng things better. His voice is soothing and kind through his mask. “Is it still bad?” he says. Abbott’s wife nods. “In just a second you’re going to start feeling better,” he says. There are many people in the room. The nurses and doctors joke about speeding tickets, and Abbott wishes they would be quiet. Then they all grow quiet, and Abbott wishes they would start joking again. He does not know whether the procedure has begun. He is with his wife, though it is true that the doctors on the other side of the drape are with his wife, too. He strokes her hair through the thin fabric of her scrub cap, worried that it might not be the right thing. (Later she will tell him it was the right thing.) Her arms are out to her sides. The doctors use what sounds like a vacuum. Abbott, sitting by his wife’s head, can see, over the drape, the eyes of the doctors above their masks. The birth feels secretive, covert. He can feel the hot air pooling in his own mask. The thing he’d like to tell all of them is Please be careful with this woman and this baby. It’s always possible to be a little bit more careful. He leans down to whisper to his wife. He puts his covered lips lightly on her ear and says nothing. He makes a whispering noise but not words. The doctors tug hard at the hole they have made, and here now there’s a human baby aloft over the drape, looking not at all ready for existence. Her skinny legs, for instance, are curved like parentheses. It has already happened and it is over and it has begun. The doctors begin to repair Abbott’s wife’s body. Her head is smiling, weeping. “Is she OK?” she asks. Someone says, “She looks great.” This time the camera has fresh batteries, but Abbott forgets to take a picture. Fortunately, the anesthesiologist is there to help. Here’s the red-throated howl. Here are the curled toes. Here’s the knit cap too big. Here’s the yellow cord with bright drops of blood. Here’s the pediatrician’s forearm. Here’s the scale. Here’s the wife, so close and so far away. Here’s the terror, the full and expanding heart. Here’s what happened to Abbott.

  Abbott’s syllabus is six pages, single-spaced. It is thorough and exact, and in its very form suggests the comforting notion that the world can be known. Additionally, the detailed schedule of readings and assignments should serve to ward off catastrophe until mid-December, at least. The teetering planet cannot collapse on October 14; there is an essay due that day. The white sheets of the syllabi are still faintly warm from the copy machine, and Abbott always feels, as he distributes them, that he is giving students something nourishing, something prepared, some baked good. He imagines a professor’s apron and mitts. Abbott plans to speak for just ten minutes or so about the class, but he speaks for thirty-five minutes. He plans to be stern and intimidating, but he isn’t. He plans not to allow any students to add the course, but he admits four students without even asking for their hard-luck stories. He erases the blackboard and walks to his office. Colleagues in the hallway shake his hand and congratulate him, and Abbott makes jokes about sleep. In his office he stands in front of his bookshelves. Often he has the feeling, looking at his books, that they somehow represent his own achievement. He wipes the dust from his desk with a tissue and then sits down, his back to the doorway. Through his window he can see students playing Frisbee in the bright grass. Abbott knows about the empty pie tins of the Frisbie Pie Company (1871–1958), and so he has no need to research the origins of the pastime. He is free just to watch, and he does. One must of course be cautious in making any broad assertion about human nature, but it seems to Abbott that humans like throwing and catching things in the sun. He turns on the lamp that he found beside a dumpster. Occasionally a student comes by, knocks timidly on the open door. The students are nervous and sincere. Over the summer they read the books that Abbott recommended, and they loved them. They have busy semesters, jobs. Their parents don’t want them to change majors again. Abbott remembers their names. They all speak in a rush, stop abruptly, and ask if Abbott had a good summer. Yes, thanks, Abbott says, very good. He walks across campus, and the day is so beautiful that he notices it. On his skin he feels sun and breeze, the counterpoise of seasons. He is not thinking much of anything. In the parking lot he walks up and down the rows, up and down, searching for his car. Eventually he finds it. He drives, engaging the clutch, depressing the brake, tapping the turn-signal wand. At a crosswalk he looks for his sunglasses and can’t find them. The car takes him right to his driveway. Inside the house he changes clothes and takes his elder daughter outside to walk around the block. The girl walks twenty-five feet past the driveway and stops at the grate. Abbott picks up a small rock, puts it in his palm, and extends his palm toward his daughter. His daughter pinches the rock between her thumb and forefinger, then holds it over the grate for a moment before dropping it in. Abbott and his daughter listen for the sound of the rock hitting water—a faint, high-pitched bloop that reverberates in the dark tunnel. The girl laughs when she hears it. A spry, gray-haired woman walks up. She asks about the baby. She says many years ago her children used to sit right here and drop rocks down this same grate. “What a blessing,” she says, and then she walks off. Abbott and his daughter drop a few more rocks, enjoying the sound of the rocks hitting the water. Then they walk around the block. Precisely halfway, the girl asks to be picked up, so Abbott picks her up and carries her back to the house. “You’re getting so big,” he says over and over. The baby is asleep, and Abbott’s wife tells Abbott to take a nap if he wants. Abbott sleeps for twenty minutes and wakes up disoriented. In the bathroom he does not look in the mirror. The baby is up now, and he holds her in the family room while his other daughter plays with a blue tractor and his wife makes dinner. With one hand he helps his daughter make a ramp out of a large book, and they roll the tractor down the ramp. He helps her make a wall of blocks, and they roll the tractor down the ramp and into the wall of blocks. She puts four necklaces on Abbott and tries to put one on the baby. “Let’s not do that,” Abbott says. Then the girl pinches her finger in the jewelry box and cries. “Ouch,” Abbott says. “Let’s take a look at that.” At dinner, the baby lies quietly in the bassinet while mowers drone outside. “This is not a good dinner,” the girl says, but she eats quite a bit. “These are the last of the great tomatoes,” Abbott’s wife says. After dinner, the girl jumps on her new trampoline and then takes a bath. Abbott sits on the floor of the bathroom beside the tub. The tub has a shower door that slides on a track, so he can’t sit on the edge. He examines the frame of the sliding door, wondering how difficult it would be to remove. He can only imagine what has grown beneath the metal. He could remove the frame, clean the tub beneath, install a hanging rod and shower curtain. It would be a nice surprise for his wife, who hates this shower door. The girl drinks bathwater out of colored plastic cups. There are at least twenty-five plastic animals in the water, representing numerous epochs and ecological zones. All of them sink except, inexplicably, Big Zebra. Abbott is not worried, at present, about lead paint on the animals leaching into the water, in effect creating a toxic lead bath. He dries the girl off and then puts on her diaper and pajamas. Abbott’s wife puts the girl to bed. The baby is happy in her bassinet, so Abbott cleans up the bathroom and then the kitchen. The dishwasher is old and ineffective, so he has to scrub the plates and glasses thoroughly in the sink before loading them. The falling sun slants through the window above the sink and illuminates the plastic oral syringes on the sill. When he’s finished with the dishes, he wipes down the counters. He needs a haircut. His wife walks gingerly through the kitchen and pats Abbott on the hip. “How do you feel?” he says. “Not bad,” she says. She turns on the girl’s monitor and then, grimacing, lifts the baby out of the bassinet. “You should let me do that,” Abbott says. He sniffs the sponge and props it against the Cold knob in the sink. Abbott’s wife nurses the baby while Abbott feeds the dog and the cat, then cleans up the family room. He puts the jewelry in the box, the buttons in the coffee can, the stuffed animals in the crate. On the monitor he can hear his daughter singing an English folk song about the bubonic plague. He lies on the carpet, listening. The sun goes down and the room grows dark. Abbott
gets off the floor and turns on a lamp. Then he sits on the couch next to his wife and helps her stare into the baby’s face. It’s a second conception—together they bring her into the world.