“Miles I think I have to— Would you tell the doctor that I— Jesus fuck.”
The pushing was the worst part, because she was imagining the whole time—when she had the wherewithal to contemplate anything past the burning blaze between her legs—what the doctor and nurses would be like if she were delivering a live baby, a big, healthy baby like Violet’s. Even though her sister’s doctor knew that she was giving the baby up he had still been kind, heartening, making weak jokes to Violet as she got deeper and deeper into the throes of her labor and saying things like You’ve got this, Violet, and Let’s help out this beautiful baby, okay? It almost felt like a sporting event, exciting even though it was also utterly depressing, even though neither athlete nor spectators would be a part of the baby’s life beyond what took place in that room. But her own doctor looked grave and grayish and had not made any direct references to the fact that there was a human body in her birth canal, just an object, a mass, instead of who it really was: her beautiful Ivy unleashed into the outside world without a fighting chance, and it seemed so unjust, the fact that it could all be taken away like that, even when you did everything you were supposed to do.
She still expected the baby to cry when she was born. When she felt her slip out, she waited, primed—some biological conditioning, apparently, because everyone in the room seemed to be expecting it—for the sound of her wailing daughter, for the evidence that this entire terrible day had simply been a test to ensure she was cut out for motherhood. And she’d passed, hadn’t she, declining ice chips and peppermints and additional pillows, denying herself pain relief and the comforting proximity of her parents? I’m ready for you, she thought to Ivy, through the silence in the room. Look how ready I am for you. Miles was stroking her forehead.
“Is she—” she said. “I don’t— Wait.”
“I love you,” Miles whispered into her temple.
“No, but I— God. Oh, God.” Her teeth began to chatter, and she felt a rising panic as the doctor, holding the baby low enough so that Wendy couldn’t see, said, “Miles, would you like to cut the cord?”
“Sweetie?” he asked, but she didn’t answer, and she felt him stand.
She and Miles sat together for hours holding her, a new sign apparently affixed to the door because nobody so much as knocked, and she couldn’t believe how little Ivy weighed, how someone so light could still be so intricate. She was half the size of Violet’s baby but no less breathtakingly, perfectly complex, tiny eyelids and ears, the smallest knees Wendy had ever seen.
“Sweetheart, do you think you’ll be ready soon to…”
“To what?” she asked, her voice startling in the quiet. Miles put his arm around her.
“To—I’m not—say goodbye to her, honey.”
“I have to throw up,” she said, like it was a logical response, and Miles reached for the trash can beside the bed and she vomited violently, just a sick foamy bile again because her stomach was empty, devoid of everything.
What happened next—the doctor coming in, a nurse at her elbow—she refused to recall; she could only remember wailing like an animal and failing to find comfort in Miles for the first time in her life; she could not remember how her daughter stopped being in her arms; she could not remember refusing the doctor’s offer to take photos; she could not remember saying goodbye.
At some point she fell asleep and when she woke up, Miles was gone and her mother was sitting next to her bed, holding her hand.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Marilyn murmured. And Wendy replied hi and her voice sounded echoic and scary. “Miles ran home to get you a few things.” And she marveled for a second, because what things could she possibly need? What on earth could he possibly be bringing her? “I love you, my girl,” her mom whispered, reaching to smooth Wendy’s hair away from her forehead.
“Is Dad here?” she asked, and her mom shifted uncomfortably.
“He’s parking the car,” she said. “He’s nearby. How are you feeling pain-wise, sweetheart? Miles said they gave you a little morphine. Do you want more?”
She shook her head. She resented Miles for consenting to the morphine on her behalf. The pain had been her new companion, her way of honoring the tiny person she’d failed to bring safely into the world. The gaping hole where Ivy should have been was molten and pulsing, and to dull it was disloyal.
“I wish I could take it all away from you, sweet thing,” her mom said simply. It was a strange sentence, darkly poetic, one that with a subtle shift in vocal inflection could have been a curse instead of a sweet proclamation of motherly selflessness.
“Why isn’t Violet here?” she asked, and her mother adjusted one of her blankets.
“She’s—she has the bar exam coming up in a few months. She’s in her—you know, her studying mode. I’m having a little trouble pinning her down.”
It was an insultingly flimsy excuse. Studying, as though her sister had done something forgivable, as though she’d simply missed a family dinner and not the time Wendy needed her more than anything. She had wanted Violet beside her in the cab instead of Miles; she had wanted Violet to stand up to her cunt of a doctor, to whisper threateningly, Have some goddamn respect, because Violet was almost a lawyer and could do things like that. She had wanted Violet to be able to hold Ivy.
But by the time Violet got there, burst in at nearly ten at night wearing a raincoat and looking anguished, Wendy didn’t want to see her anymore. Didn’t want to talk about anything, didn’t want the vibrancy of her sister to inflict its painful glow on the dark, depressing, sadistically fancy hospital room.
“Hey,” Violet said, a crying-thickness already in her voice. “Wendy, I’m so, so sorry.” Violet sank into the chair next to her and reached affectionately to tuck Wendy’s hair behind her ear. “I’m so sorry I’m just getting here now,” she said. “I came as soon as I could.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Wendy said. “You shouldn’t have even come.” This was her strategy: mind over matter. It was all she had left and she vowed to adhere to it with militancy.
“Of course I came,” Violet murmured, and she rubbed gently at Wendy’s wrist with her fingers, touching, fretting, a raincoated bundle of anxious kinetics. “I ran into Miles in the hallway,” she said inanely.
“He just went to smoke.” She twisted toward the window, away from her sister. “I would fucking murder a chaplain if I could have a cigarette right now.”
Violet squirmed, looking at the door. “Can you—could you go outside? I could take you. I can sneak you out. You can wear my coat.”
It was then that she noticed Violet’s hands, clasped together over her chest: the glint on her left ring finger. Violet saw her looking and shoved them into the pockets of her raincoat. While Wendy was enduring the worst day of her entire life, Violet had gotten engaged.
“I can’t just leave,” she said. She probably could have, actually, but it still felt too soon, too soon to leave the last physical space she would ever share with her child. She couldn’t think about where they’d taken Ivy, what wing of the hospital had been deemed appropriate for her daughter. “Christ, Violet. It’s not that fucking simple.”
“Of course,” Violet said. “Shit, I’m sorry. I was just trying to— That was a dumb thing to offer.” But it wasn’t: it was a nice thing to offer, and Wendy wished for just a second that she could backtrack, say “sure, hand over the raincoat” even though it probably wouldn’t fit her, slip down the hallways and out through the fire escape to smoke a cigarette with her gentle, worried, perfect sister. But Wendy was angry, because Violet was so malleable. Violet had it in her to be stubborn, forceful; but she checked those things at the door whenever she was around Wendy. And perhaps it was unfair to find these things irritating, because hadn’t that been Wendy’s ultimate goal? Wasn’t that every sister’s dream from the beginnings of consciousness, to have your siblings under a spell?
&n
bsp; But this was the thing: sometimes being a sister meant knowing the right thing to do and still not doing it because winning was more important. Victory was a critical part of sisterhood, she’d always thought. And she was not winning today, by any conceivable stretch, so why the fuck not seize an easy conquest when you could?
“You can go, really. There’s no need for you to be here.”
Violet’s face fell. “Oh—sure. Okay.” She chewed on the inside of her cheek. “You know I came as quickly as I could, right? Matt and I were—” She winced. “I just got home and checked my machine. If I’d known, Wendy— I’m so sorry I didn’t know.”
“It’s fine. You should go home.” Go, go, go. Go in case I want to start crying too.
Violet grew paler. “Whatever you want, Wendy. But I’m happy to stay.”
“There’s really no reason. I mean, I have Miles here, so there’s really no point.”
“Okay, if—” Violet looked as though she’d been slapped. “I wanted to be here with you.”
She refused to let Violet be the one with hurt feelings. “Thanks for coming,” she said, “but I just expelled a dead baby from my vagina, so I’m not actually in the mood for company.” She saw tears spring back to Violet’s eyes, but her sister still leaned in to hug her. Wendy stiffened.
“Call me for anything, Wendy, okay? I’ll just be at home. I’ll be waiting for your call, okay? Just in case. Anything you need.”
“There’s not a single thing in the fucking world that I could possibly need.”
Violet gathered the belt of her raincoat in her hands and turned to leave. “I love you.”
Get out, get out, get out.
She paused at the door. “This is the worst thing and I’m so sorry,” she said.
Wendy waited until the door clicked closed before she finally allowed herself to fall apart.
* * *
—
In the car on the way to the hospital, through halting downtown traffic, David held his wife’s hand. He watched her sucking in her cheeks as she looked out the window, felt her rubbing her thumb against his palm. She’d been so excited. They’d both been excited, certainly, but he could tell that she was looking especially forward to grandparentage. She was not one of those women for whom the word triggered apprehension. She was fifty years old and delighted at the thought of changing diapers again, so long as she could return the wearer of the diapers to its wearied parents at the end of the day. She was thrilled by the prospect of having a tiny new person around, one who would not slam doors in her face or shun her like Gracie had begun to do as she slipped into the murky hormonal bath of early adolescence.
“We can just play with it,” she’d said to him shortly after Wendy told them she was pregnant. They were in bed and he was feeling elderly, due to the fact that his daughter, his first baby, was going to have a baby of her own. Marilyn rested a hand on his chest. “You were always so good with them when they were babies,” she said. They could smile now, at the fact that Wendy demanded, from nearly the moment she was born, to fall asleep in her father’s arms. She would keep herself awake, fussing and burbling and occasionally shrieking in Marilyn’s exhausted embrace, until David came home. And then she would snuggle into him and promptly conk out. It had made Marilyn weep on several occasions—out of fatigue and that irrational resentment that arose from being the spurned parent of a choosy infant—but that night in their bed she was charmed by the memory of his mystical baby-soothing arms. He pulled her against him and kissed her hair. “We get to do it all again,” she murmured happily into his neck. “Except we get to send it home at the end of the day.” The kids were Marilyn’s life, parasite and sustenance, and he knew how much it thrilled her to think of them having kids of their own.
He hated driving in the city. Despite his early aversion to the suburbs, he now stayed in Oak Park unless forcibly extracted, ruing the seizure of the Kennedy and the hectic sludge of the Gold Coast. Stopped at a light, he turned to study her. She’d swept her hair into a messy bun and little strands had escaped, wispy blond with glints of gray.
“Remember the day Wendy was born?” he asked. “Remember that traffic on the way to the hospital?” There had been a storm, rain turning to sleet turning to snow, and then a terrible accident that left cars stalled for blocks, among them David’s secondhand white Corvair. He’d worried about both his daughter being born in that car and himself being murdered in it, by his wife.
They glided east down Superior. She took his hand, pressing it to her cheek then holding it in her lap, rubbing at it with her thumbs as though it were some kind of anthropological artifact. Was it unseemly, thinking about that jubilant occasion amid such an awful one?
“It was a good day,” she agreed.
At the hospital, he separated from her at the elevators, mumbling that he wanted to stop and speak to someone. His wife caught his sleeve.
“Someone who?” she asked. “Who do you know here?” She sounded suspicious and he colored. She was still holding his arm. “Honey, what is it?”
“I’d just like to talk to her doctor,” he said.
“David, no.”
“Just for a few minutes,” he said. “I’d just like to know—I’d like to know what happened. Really.” Miles’s account had been brief and unsatisfying.
“You ask Wendy that,” she said, softening. “You ask Wendy that when she’s ready to talk about it. It’s an invasion of privacy, sweetie.”
“She’s our daughter.”
She hesitated.
“I’ll meet you in a minute.” He pressed the elevator button for her and kissed her cheek. “Tell Wendy I love her and I’m parking.” The doors slid open and she stepped in. She lifted a hand to him as they closed.
So he interrogated Wendy’s doctor, requested a meeting in the hospital cafeteria and grilled her about the specifics, about whether they’d done blood tests or planned on an autopsy, about how this possibly could have happened to such a young, healthy woman. The doctor regarded him patiently, sadly from across the table.
“Your daughter declined an autopsy,” she said gently. “And there’s no guarantee that it would be conclusive, anyway. You know that as well as I do. Wendy’s blood pressure was normal. No hydrops in the—your granddaughter. I wish I could tell you something more comforting.” She shook her head. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Dr. Sorenson. But Wendy’s going to be fine. She can try again.”
He was fairly certain she wouldn’t, though. His eldest was not fond of trying again. Quashed efforts at anything—hula hooping, long division, SAT prep—had historically reduced her to angry tears, histrionic sessions of huffing and cursing and declaring things idiotic. Wendy didn’t generally try again. She gave up and found a new thing that worked better for her, and she took that new thing and ran with it, threw herself into it with a fervor that made her forget previous failures. She’d run away from them all, from the shame of her teenage years, into the arms of Miles, and look where it had gotten her.
“I appreciate your time,” he said, and she patted his arm.
“Your family is in my thoughts, Dr. Sorenson.”
“Thank you,” he mumbled. He sank back down at the table, twisting his wedding ring. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be. Marilyn was supposed to be in her garden right now and Wendy was supposed to be safely at home with her husband and instead they were both on the second floor of this fancy downtown hospital, his girls, grieving the loss of someone neither of them had even had a chance to meet.
* * *
—
A tiny weight against her chest, avian and sleepily kinetic. The compliant pursing muscles of her mouth as she nursed. The rhythmic flexings of her star fruit fingers. The mystery of her infinite mind, housed inside her ever-growing brain. Her first daughter, the baby who’d just been given to her and David, to take home, with no considerati
on whatsoever of their ineptitude, their past darknesses, their own respective infantilities. Their Wendy Evelyn Sorenson, born at 12:26 a.m. on the fourteenth of December, nine pounds and nine ounces.
Thinking of Wendy as a baby, Marilyn sat by her daughter’s bedside, held her hand, prayed with her. And Wendy—perhaps only because she was medicated—acquiesced.
“Mom,” she said, and Marilyn turned to her on high alert, feeling an uncomely sense of pleasure given the dark circumstances because it felt like she and her daughter were connecting for the first time since Wendy’s babyhood. “Mom, she was— She had a face.” Which was a silly thing to say, perhaps, because of course a thirty-week-old baby had a face, but in the utterance of the phrase she felt her daughter’s broken heart and felt her own heart break in kind. “She looked sort of like Dad and she had a—she had an expression and I couldn’t tell what kind of face it was; I couldn’t tell what she was feeling.”
One of the perils of having a daughter who was similar to you was that you were frequently at a loss for what to say. What could you possibly offer to a statement like that?
“I’m sure she was at peace, honey,” she said, because she was—her feeble Catholicism had its merits sometimes. “How could she not be, sweetheart? Look at how much you loved her. Look at all you did for her.”
Wendy, miraculously, accepted this lame assurance, and she did not protest when her mother climbed beside her in the hospital bed and held her.
* * *
—
Grace associated the arrival of bad news with the scent of burning bread. It began, she assumed, because her mother had given her the Sex Talk when they were driving down Roosevelt Road one afternoon, coming home from the city, and just as Marilyn uttered the words making love they drove past the Turano factory and the car was suddenly filled with the pleasant scent of a-bit-too-toasted French rolls, swirling around among abject mortification and unbridled disgust. Thenceforth she remembered all bad news being imparted to her this way. She got watered-down, after-the-fact, diplomatic versions of events that were unquestionably more confusing than the true versions.
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 47