The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  “He was still asleep when I got there at ten, and I was working all morning. I checked on him around noon, but I just thought he was sleeping, and then Lucas called, and then I got caught up in Kant, and I just didn’t think to check on him again—”

  “Why were you still there all afternoon?” Like that was the significant detail here. “Where was Jill?”

  “She called and asked if I could stay longer. She said she and Dan had to talk some more.”

  “She’s still with Dan?”

  “I can’t get her. I think her phone’s off. I finally checked on him at like two, and there was vomit all over the crib. He looked all sweaty but he was still sleeping, so I rattled him just a little bit, and when I touched him, he was burning up and totally drenched. And then he started shaking all over. I think he had a seizure.”

  More crying. And seeing it in person, I realized what I couldn’t on the phone. It wasn’t friend-weeping or parent-weeping—it was blind-fear-weeping, total, all-encompassing, every toe, every hair, every day and tomorrow fear and horror. I could feel it coming on like a storm, and I struggled to keep it together long enough to get all the information I could out of Jason before it took me over too.

  “I called 911. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even put him in the car because I don’t have a car seat. Was I just supposed to lay him on the floor in the back like groceries and hope he didn’t roll around too much?”

  We exchanged horrified half laughs, reminiscent of levity though it actually bore no resemblance at all.

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.” Jason shrugged, helpless. “Back there. They rushed him out of the ambulance and now he’s back there. They said to wait here. Since I’m not the father I think.”

  A savior in scrubs came out from behind huge swinging doors. I caught a glimpse of the chaos back there—beds, stretchers, people with IVs, people running with clipboards, bandages, monitors—but no Atlas. In the—what?—maybe six strides between the woman in scrubs and us, I heard these words: I’m so sorry. There was nothing we could do. And these: False alarm. Ha ha ha. Common mistake. He’s totally fine. And these, an echo: Cancer. It’s cancer. It’s always cancer. But instead, she asked a question: “Are you the mother?” And without a thought, without a beat to consider ramifications, without, even deep in the bone, any sense it wasn’t entirely true, my answer: “Yes.”

  Back in the chaos, Atlas looked eggshell white and eggshell fragile with an IV in his tiny arm, a tube under his tiny nose, monitors on his heaving tiny chest. Again, I only caught the horrifying highlights of the explanation: flu maybe, probably had it for days with symptoms that had been ignored, dangerously high fever, dehydrated, decreased consciousness, waiting for test results.

  How long had he been running a fever? When was the last time he ate? How much? Solid food or breast milk or formula? When was his last bowel movement? When was his last wet diaper? Any vomiting or diarrhea? Had he been fussy or quiet? Real tears or just wailing? How long had he been asleep? These were what the doctor needed to know.

  Except I didn’t know. I had been in Vancouver. I had been tending to my own family when this one fell apart, when everything fell apart, when the world came crashing down. Without me, no one could take care of themselves. No one could take care of anything. Jill was so wrapped up in her drama, she didn’t notice her dehydrated baby, burning with fever. Katie was so obsessed with her wedding, she had no time for a child she didn’t even think of as her own. Atlas had been passed off, one hand to another—I don’t have time; I have better things to do; here, you take him. Warning signs like church bells pealing across silent nights, like alarms sounding in sleeping barracks, like howling dogs and angry babies and wailing widows and roaring angels, and no one, no one, to heed this cacophony. And all alone with a sick child, I could only admit that I did not know; I did not know how long he’d slept, how much he’d eaten, how often he’d cried. “I was out of town,” I stammered.

  “Who was with Atlas?”

  “Um . . . a sitter?”

  “The gentleman who brought him in? I’ll send someone to bring him back.”

  “No, no. Another sitter. Someone else.”

  “Well, you better call them.”

  “Um, I can’t. I can’t reach them . . . her . . . right now.”

  “Well, symptoms would have been apparent for days now. How long have you been away? No one called you?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  The doctor eyed me suspiciously. “We’ve taken blood and done a tox screen. Are you still nursing? If you’re on something and he’s ingested it, you should tell me now. Time is paramount in these cases. Is the father involved? Is there anything you can tell me?”

  She was guessing. I was acting weird but why? I was on drugs and had passed them on to the baby? I was on drugs and forgot to feed him or notice whether he had a fever? I was on drugs and had left him home alone for maybe even days on end? I was on drugs and running from the law/an abusive father/a shady past?

  I was not on drugs, of course, though I realized with a start that I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that Jill wasn’t. I had been out of town with my sick grandmother, a perfectly reasonable, guiltless excuse, but one I couldn’t make because they wouldn’t let me stay if I weren’t Atlas’s mother, and since I couldn’t let him stay there alone and since I couldn’t tell her that I really was Atlas’s mother but not in an easy-to-explain way, I did the only thing I could think to do. I pretended that my strangeness was due to fear not ignorance, and then I lied.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said, shaking my head as if of internal cobwebs. “He’s been sleeping since early last night. He’s had a little bit of diarrhea, but the baby book says sometimes that happens. And some vomiting. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon—no—morning. He’s not been crying real tears. I first noticed his fever . . . this morning . . . but I thought he’d just sleep it off. I’m not on anything. I don’t think he’s ingested anything.” Worst-case scenarios mostly. I figured best to paint extremes and let the doctor take them into account than guess it was less serious than it turned out to be and have more warning signs ignored. His being so tired and cranky last night seemed normal to me because I was so tired and cranky. Since I didn’t want to eat, I wasn’t surprised that no one did. He hadn’t seemed hot. He hadn’t seemed sick. I had been in such a rush that morning. All I could do was guess.

  The doctor eyed me steadily for a long, undecided moment, finally chalked me up as a distraught parent, and told me I could stay with him while we awaited test results and that it might be a while. I squatted beside his bed, somewhere between wanting to be level with his hot little body and actual prayer. Please let this fever break; please let it be nothing; please let him wake up, see me, smile, laugh; please make it okay, make him okay, make him be okay okay okay. I prayed to no one. I could not summon God. I remembered my grandmother’s proscription. But bargains with that No One floated through my brain. Would I give him up if it would save him? If Jill married Daniel and took him far away and I could never see him again, but he would be okay, would I make that deal? Would I give up my grandmother for him? If it were his life or hers, whose would I choose? He’s not even blood, and no guarantees because that would be too easy. If I had to let my grandmother die, but that gave him a 70 percent chance of making it, versus I let her live, though she still has cancer, and his odds fall to 30 percent, what then? These were the questions my brain demanded of itself, the self who had no power to grant wishes of any kind versus the self who had no power to offer anything of significance to relinquish. I tried to put my arms around him, under IV, under tubes, tried to spoon his little body into mine, and I closed my eyes against this world—fitful dreams, fitful nightmares, a hundred hundred nagging thoughts, and no energy left to fight the gathering demons.

  I woke up because a large man with a large stick was roughly shaking my shoulder with a large and unkind hand. “Ma’a
m, you need to come with me.” My heart seized, but Atlas looked . . . exactly the same as he had. Still overwarm, still too asleep, but right there next to me and nothing changed. No, I tried to protest, explain, but the large man was dragging me up, pushing me out, and already I was across the room, far away, reaching back out to an Atlas already gone. The large man, gripping my upper arm and pushing me from behind, steered me hard down one hall, through some double doors, down another hall, and into an otherwise empty room with one hard chair in it. We both stood.

  “What is your name?” He sounded already angry, already not believing my lies.

  “Janey Duncan.”

  “Are you this boy’s mother?” Gesturing towards the door, the hallway, in, one presumed, the general direction of Atlas.

  “Yes.” I kept my voice level, made sure it didn’t rise at the end, but I still sounded defiant rather than matter-of-fact, the way I imagined one would sound if one were the boy’s mother.

  “Why does he have a different last name than you?” Who had given them Atlas’s last name? Jason must have when he brought him in.

  “Mattison is my husband’s name,” I said evenly, angry though that they’d concluded that this couldn’t be my son simply because our last names didn’t match.

  “Then why are there two people in the lobby who claim to be Atlas Mattison’s parents?”

  I had no idea. “Two people?”

  “Ma’am, I need you to be straight with me, and tell me what’s really going on here.”

  But how could I do that? So I had to keep lying. I had no choice. There was no way to explain what was really going on here. I was Atlas’s mother in all the ways that counted, and right now, Atlas needed his mother.

  “I’m his mother.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know who those people are.”

  He looked me up and down and studied my face for a while, his eyes going squinty. Then he sighed and said quietly, “One of the people out there is pretty upset. She’s done a lot of yelling. Her name is Mattison too. And she’s just left the building claiming to be on her way home to get a birth certificate. If she’s lying, we’re very sorry for this inconvenience, but, you understand, we have to be careful. There’s a lot of crazies out there. If she comes back with a birth certificate though . . .” He trailed off, so I didn’t know what would happen. I’d go to jail on kidnapping charges? I’d be denied access to Atlas? I’d be yelled at by the large man and possibly beaten with his large stick? I had no idea. But also, I didn’t care that much. It was a gnawing detail way in the back because the first thirty rows or so were taken up entirely with Atlas who was hot and sick and seizing and I didn’t know why. And next to that, nothing mattered. “We’ll keep you posted,” the guard said on his way out, neither kindly nor unkindly. “Please don’t leave.” I sat down in the chair and waited. What else could I do?

  What I always did. Analyze. Why would I lie? Especially since, clearly, they were about to find out? Admitting it when you first get caught, laughing it off as a silly accident, a harmless misunderstanding, a perfectly-understandable-if-I-see-now-totally-unacceptable error in judgment, even a halfhearted, half-muttered apology, is always, always preferable and more sensible than lying more and worse. How do I know? Because I teach film. Because I have seen this movie before. Only twelve-year-old boys and everyone in the movies think that more lying will get you out of an initial lie. Every audience member (at least every non-twelve-year-old boy) shouts at the screen, if only in their own heads, “You idiot. You are making it worse. GO BACK.” It makes audiences feel all squirmy and uncomfortable, knowing if these characters would only tell the truth, things might turn out, but since they won’t tell the truth, they are almost certain to wind up dead within the hour, never mind that it is also only in movies that lying is an offense where the narrative justice is death. I had panicked I guess. And I felt my loyalty to and love for Atlas was being questioned. And I was his mother in many ways. And I was angry at Jill. But mostly, I think, I plead Narrative Syndrome. I had film on the brain, and in film, the only way forward is deeper.

  Generally, I hate hospitals. Everyone hates hospitals I know. But of course, it’s different when it’s you. So I feel that, unlike everybody else, I really hate hospitals. They seem dirty and infectious places to me, cold and unfeeling and dangerous as hell because at any moment someone could come rushing in with a gunshot wound or drop down clutching his chest or cough until blood comes out in red chunks of—I don’t know—lung? And I don’t want to see that. And I don’t want to catch whatever’s causing it. But right then, the hospital was the most comforting place to be. They were taking care of Atlas, making him better. And they were keeping me from Jill. From Jill, from Daniel, from Katie, from everyone. And kept away was the only way I wanted to be.

  I called my grandmother, just to check in, or really, just so she could comfort me, but as soon as I had her on the phone, I realized that I couldn’t very well tell her that Atlas was sick with some as-yet-unidentified disease or that I was being held hostage in a hospital where at any moment someone could throw lung up on me. I couldn’t tell her that I might soon be carted off to jail for claiming to have mothered a boy whose mother I was technically not. Come to think of it, the large man with the large stick had not asked me if I had borne Atlas. If he were my adopted son, the right answer to the question “Are you this boy’s mother?” would clearly be yes. If he were my foster son, the answer would be yes. If he were my sister’s son but she left him on my doorstep when he was an infant on her way to checking herself into a mental institution, even if she never informed the authorities, then clearly the answer would still be yes. So we were splitting hairs here. I hoped. In any case, obviously, I could not have this conversation with my grandmother. At the sound of her voice, I started crying and couldn’t stop. But she is my grandmother, who understands without understanding, and said oh my poor baby very softly and promised it would be okay, and still, somehow, I believed her.

  I had relocated from the chair to the tile floor, back against the wall, so at least I could stretch my legs and rest my head when the door flew open. The door was opened by large man, but large man immediately stepped out of the way, and two people instantly identifiable as real police officers rushed in behind him.

  “Janey Duncan?”

  “Yes?”

  “We need you to come down to the station and answer some questions for us.”

  “Am I under arrest?” They stopped mid-motion, looked half surprised.

  “Is there a reason you should be?”

  “No.” I tried to sound sure, indignant even.

  “Come with us please.” Not a request by any stretch. A command.

  In the police car, there was no talking. I sat in the back, locked in and behind wire but not handcuffed. Not yet. Inside, I followed police officer one while police officer two stayed carefully behind me. In a room just as bleak as the one in the hospital but with loads more furniture (a table and two chairs), they turned on a light bright as day, slammed the door shut, and struck up movie cop poses—one straddling the chair with its back turned forward, one with arms crossed, leaning against the wall in the corner and looking angry and skeptical.

  “Are you Atlas Mattison’s mother?” asked the sitting-backwards cop in front of me quite calmly as if she’d asked, “Do you like chocolate ice cream?”

  “No,” I said, equally reasonably, as if answering the ice cream question.

  She did not look surprised at all. She already knew this evidently. “Why did you say you were?”

  “They wouldn’t let me see him otherwise. I had to be with him.” Still calm, reasonable, confident even.

  “What is your relationship to the boy?”

  A tough question that, and I really didn’t know how to answer. “I’m his . . .” What? Mother clearly wasn’t an option anymore. Babysitter did not convey the half of it. Aunt, cousin, in-law—these rung closer to truth but were really, of course, farther away.
Friend seemed a small, cold, distant answer. And one I wasn’t sure Jill would vouch for any more than the one I’d started with. “We share custody,” I finally tried. “I live with him and take care of him.” And then, “I love him,” I added, though no one had asked that. The one cop exchanged a glance with the other and looked at me steadily, coolly.

  “Why is he sick?” she said.

  I can only imagine my face went to surprise, displaying the confusion with which my brain processed this question, because the officer softened visibly before I even answered.

  “I have no idea,” I managed.

  “Did you give the child anything?” asked the corner officer.

  “No!” Again aghast, confused, appalled as I caught on to what they were thinking.

  “When was the last time you saw the child?”

  “I’ve been in Vancouver all week, but I was with him all afternoon yesterday and last night. If anyone had known something was wrong this week, they’d have called me at my parents’ house. When I got home, he seemed fine, and no one said anything, so they must have thought he was fine too.”

  “You didn’t see him this morning?” said corner cop.

  “No. I got up early to teach then spent the afternoon in the library.”

  “Where do you teach?” asked backwards cop.

  “Rainier University.” They looked impressed. Important note: when being arrested, it is useful to have an impressive-sounding job.

  “Who is the boy’s mother?” asked corner cop.

  “Jill. Jill Mattison.”

  “And his father?”

  I rolled my eyes. I may have gnashed my teeth. I sighed and shook my head and finally admitted, “Daniel Davison,” with as much equivocation as I could shove into those two words.

  “And you and Jill are . . . lovers?” asked backwards cop.

  “No,” I laughed, and both looked confused again. Suddenly I understood that they’d worked this all out in their heads—Jill and I were lovers raising her and Daniel’s baby. Jill was undecided, thinking of going back to Daniel. I was getting the shaft, dumped by my girlfriend who was trying to take the child I had helped raise as my own. This was a lovers’ tiff. Nothing more. Silly lesbians.