The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  “Beth, we want to make an offer.”

  thirty-seven

  We close on the house in June, on Andrea’s thirtieth birthday, and spend the night holding paint swatches to walls, peeling back carpet, and looking at furniture online. We make a bed of blankets on the dining room floor under a window. I drift to sleep feeling safe and secure. In the morning, I wake with tight skin and a sour stomach.

  The first contractor arrives at eight o’clock. A floor guy. Then a painter, another floor guy, an electrician, a carpenter. They take measurements and give estimates. We’re looking at two months of construction before we can even think about moving in. Rent plus mortgage, plus the cost of moving and all the furniture we need, plus accoutrements for the baby, plus bills for things we never had to pay for: water, sewer, electricity, oil, propane. Plus, plus, plus. I’m going to lose my job. We’re going to be homeless—with a baby.

  I experience this weird phenomenon—it’s as if my life were an ’80s comedy and I’m watching it in fast-forward. I can see Andrea’s water break and then the two of us sloshing through a sea of amniotic fluid on the kitchen floor and racing to the hospital. I see a caravan of squad cars chasing us, along with a parade of gimmicky characters driving gimmicky vehicles—a pizza guy with a handlebar mustache in a chef uniform, shaking his fist out the window, screaming Italian obscenities, unable to see past five pepperoni pizza pies plastered to the windshield of his van, whose hubcaps detach and fly toward the cops, who shimmy and shake out of the way and, in the process, accidentally fire their guns at the clowns getting out of the VW Beetle behind the pizza guy’s van. That’s typical in the moments before everyone’s kid is born, right?

  One night, I have a dream about getting high. I’m in a room with red walls and a red velvet sofa. An antique syringe with a huge glass chamber and steel rings around the plunger goes into my arm. My brain floods with the warm feeling of relief. I wake up with the taste of dope in my mouth.

  A week later, on three consecutive nights, I dream about almost getting high. In one, I’m alone in an unfamiliar car with white vinyl everything. In the passenger seat, I hold a spoon and suck the medicine into a syringe. I make a fist, and as I push down on the plunger, I wake up, gasping. Andrea is asleep, lying on her side, the baby bump visible. The baby. Think about the baby. You’re a father. Keep your shit together.

  I recognize my father’s unmistakable loopy cursive handwriting on an envelope in the mailbox. A decade has passed since we’ve seen each other, eight years since I’ve heard from him—the letter on my twenty-first birthday. This one is very different.

  Dear David,

  It’s been a while. I hope you’re well. I’d love to see you and catch up

  if you’re up to it.

  Love, Bob

  At this point, Bob is some guy I once knew, not my father. My first instinct is to throw the letter in the trash and forget about it. Seconds later, I think about the baby. Someday, he or she will ask about his or her other grandfather. Bob.

  The letter sits on my desk for a week before I type twenty pages of stream of consciousness, recapping the past ten years. Then I delete it and start over. Then I pick up the phone and call.

  “David, my son. It’s a pleasure to hear your voice.”

  The conversation is quick, just the particulars of a date we make for the following afternoon at Starbucks in Rye.

  Andrea says, “How do you feel about seeing your dad again?”

  “I don’t really feel anything.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “No.”

  “Excited?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I find it odd, feeling nothing. When Bob strolls into Starbucks, and I see his weathered face and completely gray hair, he is just a guy and that, I realize, is not nothing. It’s huge. He’s just a guy—not my fearsome father.

  We sit and talk for half an hour. I tell him about Andrea, his unborn grandchild, Maine, my job. He listens and occasionally drops a subdued “That’s terrific.” He doesn’t tell me what I’m doing wrong or point out ways my dick will end up in a windowsill. These absences come as a relief and a reminder that he never offered fatherly advice. He commanded, decried, and scared. My kid will have a different kind of father.

  When Bob asks if I’m clean, I stick with the lie.

  “Ten years.”

  “Good for you, Dave. That’s terrific.”

  No hug at the end. We shake hands. In the coming months, we talk on the phone periodically and see each other once or twice. I wouldn’t say we buried the hatchet—more like we made a nonverbal agreement not to unearth the hatchet. As long as it’s inaccessible, no one can get hurt.

  On December 14, 2005, Ruby Grace Poses is born. In an instant, I know I’ll never touch another opioid for the rest of my life. I’ve never been so clear about anything.

  The umbilical cord is cut. A nurse rolls black ink over Ruby’s foot and then plants it on a birth certificate and on my shirt, which I’ll keep forever and never wash. In these first few minutes of my daughter’s life, every cliché about parenthood becomes a fact. This kind of love didn’t exist before. It couldn’t have.

  After thirty-six hours in the hospital, Andrea and I strap Ruby into her car seat and take her home. I made a CD for the occasion, starting with “Beautiful Child” by Rufus Wainwright, followed by “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes.

  Traffic is light on the Taconic Parkway. Clear skies and the temperature well above freezing. I always thought the speed limit was too low. Now it seems irresponsibly, criminally high. I see danger everywhere. Every driver is a drunken, bloodthirsty maniac.

  Ruby keeps odd, unpredictable hours, waking at all hours of the night, hungry, screaming like a maniac in a language Andrea and I don’t speak but understand fluently. Wake (the fuck) up. I’m hungry. Andrea is exhausted, but she has this indescribable glow and an ear-to-ear grin while nursing our child. We make a pact not to refer to ourselves in the third person or talk baby talk to Ruby, even when she is a baby.

  Most mornings, I lie in bed and read the New York Times while Ruby naps on my chest. Were there always this many articles about pedophiles and kidnappers? I realize Mom’s old saying—“you kill for your kids”—is figurative and literal. I think of buying a gun. Then I worry about a gun in the house with a baby.

  I take every opportunity to impart valuable life lessons as things pop into my head. “Technically, Reggiano is Parmesan cheese, but don’t call it Parmesan. Boys are evil. OK Computer is the best album ever recorded. Don’t park on the street in Manhattan if your inspection is expired.”

  Ruby’s birth announcement is a CD. Every song has her name in the title, save for Rufus Wainwright’s “Beautiful Child.” The stereo is always on. I introduce Ruby to Cat Stevens, Nick Drake, Radiohead, Van Morrison, Charles Mingus, Bob Marley. We dance together for the first time to “Is This Love?” Holding her in my arms, I sway back and forth and tell her to “take a mental snapshot so you’ll never forget this.” I catch myself saying that a lot. Ruby doesn’t understand English yet. I know she won’t remember. I will.

  Between Christmas and New Year’s, the house swells with friends and family. My parents take great pains to visit when the other isn’t here. I didn't consider the multi-generational impact of their war. How will we deal with Ruby’s birthday parties? When Daniel visits, I ask him.

  “Fuck ’em,” he says. “Invite them and say, ‘If you have a problem, don’t come.’”

  I’ve spent my life contorting, conforming, concealing, and operating from a place of fear. Daniel is, and has always been, unabashedly honest and unapologetically himself. My little brother, my hero. Sober, happy, healthy.

  The day before I return to work, we strap Ruby in the stroller and give her a tour of the village. It’s sunny and warm. Water drips off snowbanks and races down Main Street, passing anti
que stores and crap marts en route to the river.

  I carry the stroller down the stairs to the tunnel below the train tracks. On the other side, Storm King Mountain rises, making the Hudson look like a fjord. The tide pushes icebergs toward Manhattan. To the north, Breakneck Ridge and the crumbling Bannerman Castle and Civil War–era arsenal on Pollepel Island.

  Wreathes and Christmas lights stretch between telephone poles. We follow Church Street to the Tiny Tots’ Park and meet a woman and her baby daughter—the first parent we’ve met as parents. As we compare notes on sleep habits and local day care options, there’s no doubt in my mind that when she looks at me, Heather sees another parent—not a junkie.

  We take the scenic route home, past the elementary school—an old brick building on a hill with panoramic river views. Ruby begins to whimper and stir. Andrea makes soft shushing sounds in her ear.

  “We made this person,” she whispers. “Can you believe it?”

  Everything I ever wanted and never thought I’d have. I bend and kiss Ruby’s soft, chubby cheek.

  thirty-eight

  The inertia is overwhelming. I don’t know when this started or why or how to make it stop. It takes all my energy to keep everything inside. I’ve cobbled together stretches of sobriety, but I haven’t begun to recover.

  Sleep is elusive. I have practically no appetite. I can’t drive anywhere without looking at every tree and bridge support, gauging their potential for a fatal crash.

  On a Saturday, Andrea waves me out of a trance at the bottom of the snow-covered hill.

  “It’s the weekend,” she says. “You’re sledding with your wife and daughter in the most beautiful place in the world.”

  I turn and force my frozen lips to curl into some approximation of a smile.

  Ruby shimmies and shakes in a long red plastic sled. “Bees,” she says. “Dada. BEES!” She’s two years old, but she can’t quite say “please.” I pull her up the hill and we take another run. Up and down and up and down and up and down, doing everything in my power to appear in the moment.

  At dusk, I pull Ruby home in the sled on unplowed roads. Andrea walks alongside and teaches her to catch snowflakes on her tongue. They giggle, and I wonder why I get to raise my family in a real-life Norman Rockwell painting, but other people live in the apartments you see from the last exit on the New York side of I-95 before the George Washington Bridge. The bricks, obviously beige at some point, are now mostly black from years of continuous car and truck exhaust.

  As the weather warms up, I start getting nosebleeds, like when I was a kid. They quickly increase in frequency and severity.

  One night, when I come home from work with yet another bloodstained shirt and tie, Andrea says I should look for a therapist and another job and find a creative outlet. She hires a contractor to convert our backyard shed into a deluxe writing cabin. Electricity, insulation, a space heater, two big windows. It’s maddening—to have so much and see it so clearly and feel so unworthy.

  Later, when Andrea and Ruby are on the couch watching Dora the Explorer, I’m on the floor to the side, researching shotguns on my laptop. In the kitchen, I measure the distance from my shoulder to my index finger—I want to make sure I won’t have trouble pulling the trigger.

  The sick irony isn’t lost on me—suicide would be less of a stigma than using heroin to avoid killing myself.

  An ear, nose, and throat doctor says a deviated septum is causing my nose to bleed. Surgery will resolve the problem. I schedule it in August, days before we depart for our first family vacation—a week in a rented house in Camden.

  Rows of flowers line the cobblestone path to the front steps, and a rope hammock and small round table with wiry cafe chairs sit on the wraparound porch. Archetypal Downeast oceanfront style: wide-pine flooring, turquoise paint on the wainscoted underside of the vaulted ceiling. The view is stunning—from the harbor and the islands in Penobscot Bay to the outline of Castine in the distance. We schlep our luggage inside and go for a walk.

  On Sea Street, Andrea points to number twenty-eight, a green Federalist-style home with black shutters. “Ruby, that’s where Daddy and I lived when we first got together. A taxi driver named Ali told Daddy to move here.”

  I turn away and close my watery eyes as Andrea tells the story. I see her in Kevin’s office at the Workshops eight and a half years ago—when she entered and I thought, Someday I’ll tell her the Ali story, and someday, she’ll tell our kids.

  “Bees, Mama. BEES!”

  Ruby angles her body at the tall wooden masts rising from schooners in the harbor. We did promise her a boat ride. We board the Mary Day, and I hoist Ruby onto my lap and wrap my arms around her. A low, thin rope is the only thing keeping us from falling overboard.

  The salty air is especially pungent as we sail past the lighthouse on Curtis Island. The water gets choppy. For two hours, my brain bakes in the sun. When we disembark, Andrea wants to hike up Mount Megunticook. I want to lie down in a dark, quiet room. I push myself, not uttering a word about my headache.

  “This,” Andrea says, freeing Ruby from her car seat at the mountain’s base. “This is what I’ve been looking forward to most.”

  We take turns piggybacking Ruby to the summit, where there are blueberries—if you know where to look and you’re not too distracted by the view: 360 degrees of ocean, islands, mountains, and lakes. Andrea picks berries sparingly in consideration of other hikers.

  “I so miss it here,” she says, laying an arm around my shoulder.

  “Me too.”

  I put Ruby on my shoulders and spin around. I tell her this is one of those mental-snapshot moments.

  My headache gets worse over the next few days. I drink a lot of water and take a lot of Advil as we show Ruby the area’s greatest hits: walking around Beauchamp point, the Belted Galloway cows, Owl’s Head’s rocky beach. We drive down the St. George peninsula to Port Clyde, picnic on Rockport Harbor behind the Maine Photographic Workshops, and walk up Main Street in Rockport.

  On Thursday, I wake to the feeling of ice picks stabbing my eyes from the inside. I finally say something to Andrea. We think it’s the surgery. I call Dr. Grossman.

  “I’ve performed this procedure thousands of times,” he says, dismissively. “Never had an issue before.” He tells me to avoid the sun and to switch to Motrin.

  Twenty-four hours later, my brain is skewered. Intense pain shoots down my back and arms to my fingertips. I spend the day—our last—inside, feeling guilty beyond words. In the morning, we say goodbye to Camden.

  The sun is a strobe light, blasting through leaves on the trees on the side of the road. I feel it, even with my eyes closed, in the passenger seat while Andrea drives. When we get home, she helps me into bed and looks up my symptoms in Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life.

  “Headaches: ‘Invalidating the self. Self-criticism. Fear.’ Back problems: ‘Guilt.’”

  Sunday morning. Everything is blurry. Ice picks continue to stab my eyes. I roll out of bed and blood gushes out of both nostrils. I open my mouth to speak. No words come. We get in the car.

  My mom is waiting at the hospital when we arrive. She takes Ruby’s hand and whisks her away as a nurse hustles me into a small triage area. She asks if I’m allergic to any medications. Andrea says no, barely restrained terror in her voice. The nurse gives me a shot of morphine. No effect on the pain, no euphoria.

  A neurologist appears. Dr. Baudelaire. He peels back my eyelids and shines a flashlight in my eyes as Andrea lays out the sequence of events. “This has to be related to the surgery, right?”

  “Eh, no,” Dr. Baudelaire says, with confidence and a heavy French accent. “Seems like a transient ischemic attack.” He orders a CAT scan, MRI, blood work, and a spinal tap.

  Please, don’t let this be something terminal. Don’t make Andrea a widow. Don’t make Ruby grow up without a father. I don’t know who I’m addressing.

  The nurse pushes me into the hall in a wheelchair. Andrea walks along
side, holding my hand, sobbing. In a dark room, the nurse draws what feels like every drop of blood in my body, then hits me with another useless shot of morphine.

  “Hang in there,” she says. I picture the cheesy poster of a kitten clinging to a tree branch. We go from one scan to the next. Then I’m on a gurney. A soft male voice says to lie on my back. I open my eyes. The guy in the lab coat doesn’t look old enough to drive. He futzes with a machine that resembles the X-ray camera in a dentist’s office: a long telescoping arm that narrows at the end.

  “We’re going to do a spinal tap, or ‘lumbar puncture,’” he says. “I’m going to insert a needle into your spinal canal and collect some cerebrospinal fluid. You shouldn’t feel anything because of all the morphine in your system.”

  Wrong. And spinal tap is a misnomer. Lumbar puncture is generous. I howl in pain as the cold, fat needle jackhammers my spine. In and out.

  In and out. In and out. Laughing nervously, Doogie Howser apologizes for “missing.”

  The nurse wheels me down a long corridor. We pass through a wide door and into a double-occupancy room split in half by a maroon shower curtain. My roommate is watching Judge Judy on TV and talking about a “gabagool sangwich.”

  Lying facedown on the bed by the window, I wince as the nurse swabs the inside of my elbow with rubbing alcohol and pushes in the IV. It connects to two tubes. One goes to three bags of fluids and the other to a padlocked red box. A long gray cable runs from the box to a remote, which the nurse places in my hand.

  “Press this when you’re in pain,” she says. “It controls the morphine.”

  I press. One dose comes out. I hold the button. Nothing happens.

  Andrea counts fifty-five holes in a wide swath of bruised skin on my lower back. She takes pictures and says we should sue the hospital. I fantasize about quitting my job and moving back to Camden to write books for the rest of my (hopefully) very long life. Then I think to stop thinking about lawsuits to avoid jinxing myself.