* * *
They waited three more hours. Jon mostly stared at his phone. Gail’s mom told stories about her own pregnancy that Gail didn’t want to hear. Gail’s dad remembered how to use his camera, and Gail did her best to remain in the present. It helped when her parents left for a coffee refill. She knew all the things that could go wrong, but that was one list that she refused to make. When a nurse in scrubs finally bustled through the door, she made eye contact with Gail for the briefest moment, but she gave nothing away. Gail grabbed hold of Jon’s hand, and only by squeezing it could she stay in her chair.
The nurse walked to the far corner and sat down opposite Carli’s mom. Gail stopped breathing and strained to hear, but she could make out nothing. Carli’s mom got up and followed the nurse back through the door. Paige put her knitting into her bag. First the scarf she was working on. Then the yarn. Then the needles. Gail resisted the urge to go pack the bag for her. By the time she hoisted it to her shoulder, Gail had grown dizzy. As she approached Gail and Jon, a grin emerged.
“It’s a girl,” Paige finally said.
A sound somewhere between a laugh and a hiccup escaped from Gail’s mouth. She leaned into Jon, and he squeezed her tight.
“It’s a girl,” Gail whispered.
“Everyone’s healthy?” Jon asked.
“Yes. Everyone’s healthy.”
Jon kissed Gail’s neck.
Gail whispered again, “It’s a girl.”
“I need to go do the paperwork.” Even Paige’s eyes were misting. “I need her name.”
“Maya,” Jon said suddenly.
Gail looked at him. He blinked and managed a smile. This was the first opinion about a name that he’d been able to muster, but it felt right. Love. Generosity. She turned back to Paige. “Maya.”
“Maya.” Paige let the word hang in the air for a moment, as if testing it. “Maya Durbin. That’s pretty.”
Paige carried her knitting through the door. Gail couldn’t manage any more words, but none were required. Their baby was born. After everything they had gone through, their baby was born. Gail could feel her through the walls and the doors. She was alive, and she was well, and her name meant love, and her name meant generosity. Gail squeezed Jon’s hand, and he squeezed back tightly. Their daughter was Maya.
Carli
Carli lay in the recovery room, listening to the awful chirps from the machines and staring at the photograph on the opposite wall, a close-up of a mother’s lips touching a baby’s forehead. That picture told her that she was in the wrong fucking room. Twice, she almost asked the nurse to take it down, but she couldn’t quite form the words.
She sucked ice water through a straw and tried to focus on the pain. Every time her mind started to wander, she shoved it back toward the pain of the delivery, because that pain was clear and safe. The contractions had come in waves and felt like her gut was churning broken glass. She tried to focus on the memory of the hairy mole on the forehead of the nurse who was in her face, yelling at her to breathe and to push, as if she was screwing up even that. The contractions hurt so much that in comparison, the needle in her spine felt like cool relief, and although the pain became fuzzier after the epidural, the weight of it still crushed her to the bed. As she lay there, sucking on the straw, her mind kept wandering, and she shoved it again back toward the pushing and the screaming. She couldn’t let it get near the murmurs of the doctors after the pushing stopped, after the warm, wet slurp of the birth. She couldn’t let it sneak toward that tall, skinny nurse who slipped from the room with a bundle in her arms while Carli’s body still quivered, pushing out the afterbirth. Now, everything below her belly button tingled numb, but just under that numbness lurked the fierce ache that waited for her when the epidural wore off. But the worst had already hit her—the epidural didn’t do a thing for the emptiness.
The recovery-room nurse appeared at the door with her kind smile, and Carli was finally going to ask her to take that picture down, but Marla followed with her jaw locked and her eyes hard. Carli tried to concentrate on the machine noises. The nurse looked from one of them to the other, and her smile faltered.
“I’ll give you two some time,” she said quietly as she left the room.
Carli glanced at Marla, tried to read her, but her face was locked into a mask that told Carli nothing. Marla’s gaze drifted from the machines to the extra bed to the television. Her eyes settled on the picture of the woman kissing the baby’s head. When she spoke, her words sounded all chewed up.
“So it’s done, then.”
“Yeah.” Carli’s own voice seemed far away, like somebody else talking.
“Where’s the baby?”
“Huh?”
“Where’s the baby?” Marla asked again, and now the words had a rumble beneath them that Carli knew too well. Marla finally looked at her, and the mask had fallen away. Her nostrils flared, and her eyes drilled Carli. Carli turned away.
“I asked you where your baby’s at.”
“I told them I don’t want to see it.”
“I didn’t ask you what you told ’em, and I don’t give a shit what you want.”
“I can’t,” Carli said, but Marla probably didn’t hear her because she said it quietly, and when Carli turned back toward the door, Marla was gone. Carli closed her eyes, tears began to leak, and the empty place throbbed.
Several minutes later Carli heard loud voices down the hall, and the loudest was Marla’s. And then it got quiet again. When Carli opened her eyes, she was startled to see Marla back in the doorway, holding a pink bundle in her arms. Carli tried to ignore what Marla carried, but she couldn’t pretend it away.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“You will.”
Carli turned her head back toward the empty bed.
“Before you give her away, you’re gonna look at her.”
She heard Marla move closer, and Carli knew that she wasn’t going to leave until Carli looked at the baby. And then she heard a crinkly sound, and she turned, and she looked, and the baby’s face was just a foot away, and its eyes were squeezed shut, and she could see a little bit of its tongue between its lips, and she smelled just a whiff of vanilla cream soda. Carli forced herself not to reach out and touch the baby’s face, and she forced herself to roll back over and stare at the empty bed across the room. After what seemed like a very long time, she finally heard the door swing shut. Carli clutched the sheets in her fist and tried to summon the memory of those moments just before the epidural, when she had felt like she was splitting apart. But that face changed everything. The pain had become useless. That face made everything real in a way that terrified her, and she knew that the pain, even at its very worst, wouldn’t be able to help her forget.
Jon
After an hour passed with no word, Jon felt as if he were floating, like he was back in that trailer waiting for his mom to stir, playing her Joni Mitchell albums to ward off the silence and the sound of that pit bull. Jon paced the room, looked out the window, came back and sat down. When an hour became an hour and a half, Gail texted Paige but got no reply. She chewed the end of her pen but wrote nothing more in her notebook. Eleanor paged through a Reader’s Digest. Paul fiddled with his camera. As the two-hour mark neared, Gail became very still.
“It isn’t supposed to take this long,” Gail said quietly.
Jon felt the urge to touch her but somehow knew that he shouldn’t. He felt like he should say something, but he knew that it would come out wrong. Gail thought it was taking too long, while Jon worried that it was all happening way too fast.
Jon stared at the chair where Carli’s mom had been. She seemed so familiar, in that way of a dream or a distant memory. He looked out the window at the rain and then back at the chair. He tried to remember without trying too hard to remember, because that sometimes worked. And then it hit him. Aqua Bay Resort. Carli’s mom looked like the woman who glared at him every time he went to the office at Aqua Bay.
*
* *
He couldn’t remember why they went there in the winter—the Lake of the Ozarks was deserted in the off-season—but he remembered that the word resort didn’t fit, and he remembered the smell of the mouse shit and cigarettes and the greasy feel of the brown shag carpet on his bare feet. It might have been in pursuit of a man or a job or just another one of his mom’s loopy ideas that never panned out. He remembered the bright blue paint peeling off the little cabin and the screen door that had no screen and the slate gray of the lake, but he couldn’t remember whether it was November or December. He remembered the heap of groceries his mom bought the day they arrived—mostly mac and cheese and hot dogs and canned ravioli—and the mounds of dirty clothes that grew as the pile of groceries shrank. He remembered the glare that the hulking woman in the office gave him when he went to buy Skittles from the vending machine with the change that he picked from the bottom of his mom’s purse. He couldn’t remember how he knew that his mom had recently gone off her meds, but he knew.
The TV broke the first week, but his mom didn’t call the office to have it fixed, because by then she had gone quiet and still, huddled under the covers, just watching him move about the cabin. Jon wore all the clothes his mom had packed for him. He wore them three times before their stench became too much. Then he just wore his underwear, and he wrapped himself in an extra blanket he found in the closet. When he wasn’t cooking or eating or looking out the window at the cold, gray lake, he wrapped himself in the blanket and wedged himself in the crack between the bed and the wall, because the squeeze of it felt almost like a hug.
Jon knew that they were getting low on food when all he could find in the pile of wrappers and trash on the counters was canned ravioli. That night, when someone pounded on the door, Jon thought it was that terrifying woman from the office looking for money, so he stayed wedged in the crack between the bed and the wall. His mom stirred but didn’t get up. When the door opened, the cold air tickled Jon’s face. He heard the covers rustle, but for a moment nobody said anything, so he didn’t yet know who had come for them.
“Where is he?”
And then he knew it was Aunt Carol. He still didn’t say anything or move, and he didn’t know why. Jon’s mom didn’t say anything, either, but the bed creaked, and Jon imagined her propping herself up, to get a better look at her sister.
“Goddamn it, Melissa,” Aunt Carol shouted. “Where the hell is he?”
Nothing but silence for a long moment. “He’s here,” his mom whispered, her voice hoarse from disuse. Those were the first words he’d heard from her in a week. “He’s here somewhere.”
Jon didn’t know what made his aunt Carol eventually look in the crack between the bed and the wall, but he’d always remember the way his aunt’s face melted toward relief when she saw him staring up at her from the gloom. And he would never forget how strong her arms felt when she lifted his skinny little eight-year-old body and squeezed him tight to her chest. And Jon often remembered looking over his aunt’s shoulder at the rage on his mother’s face—the first real emotion he’d seen from her since they arrived at Aqua Bay.
Jon knew what would come next. After a long, quiet car ride back to St. Louis, they dropped his mom off at the trailer with a garbage bag full of her dirty clothes. And then Aunt Carol drove Jon and his own garbage bag to the tidy little ranch house on a cul-de-sac that she shared with Uncle Mark. She sent him to the shower with a clean towel and brand-new pajamas that fit him just right. When he crawled into the bed in the guest bedroom, the sheets felt so clean and crisp that they didn’t feel like sheets at all. When she came in to make sure he was asleep, he didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t move even when Aunt Carol’s papery lips brushed his forehead, because he knew that they would, because that’s how it always happened.
Aunt Carol didn’t wake him up until a little before noon the next day, and that’s how he knew it was the weekend. If it was a weekday, she would have gotten him up at seven thirty and sent him to the school near her house. Some of the kids would remember him from the last time, but none of them would talk to him much, because they knew that he would only stay a couple of weeks. That’s how long it would take for his mom to get herself cleaned up and back on her meds and her refrigerator filled, so that Social Services wouldn’t ask too many questions.
When he came out to the kitchen still wearing his pajamas, Aunt Carol was making a grilled cheese sandwich, because she knew that was what he would want. He sat at the table and watched.
“Do you want one sandwich or two?” she asked.
“Just one.”
Jon fiddled with the place mat. Aunt Carol flipped the sandwich.
“How are you feeling this morning?”
“I’m OK,” he said over the sizzle. And then, although he wasn’t quite sure why, he said, “I miss my mom.”
Aunt Carol faced the stove, but he could see her stiffen. “I know, honey,” she said. “It must be hard to be away from her.”
“She’s been gone awhile.”
Aunt Carol stopped moving for a long moment and then checked the underside of the sandwich. She slipped it onto a plate, brought it to the table, and set it in front of him. She sat down across from him, blinking. Her face looked a lot like his mom’s—the same too-small nose, thin lips, and eyebrows that almost met in the middle. The main difference was that Aunt Carol’s face moved, twisting more often into the shape of what she was feeling. Jon bit into the sandwich, closed his eyes, and bit into it again before he even swallowed. He was so hungry, and it was so good, that he didn’t hear what Aunt Carol said next. She had to repeat herself.
“What did you mean, by that—when you said she’s been gone awhile?”
While he chewed and swallowed, he tried to think of the right words to describe what he meant. “It’s like she’s there, but she’s not.”
Aunt Carol squinted at him. Jon tried to find more words to help her understand.
“Sometimes she’s really still and quiet, watching me all the time. Other times she can’t stop talking or moving, and she doesn’t look at me or listen to me at all.”
Jon took another big bite, and he began to wish that he’d asked for two sandwiches. Aunt Carol’s eyes got shiny.
“Which one is your mom?” she finally asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The quiet one or the one who can’t see you?”
“Neither,” Jon said immediately.
“Neither?”
“In between is my mom.”
“In between?”
Jon nodded. “When she stops taking her pills. Or when she starts. For like two days.”
Aunt Carol’s face collapsed. She swiped her eye with the back of her hand.
“For two days she can see me, and she can move, and she touches me and talks to me and listens to me, and we play games, and she plays her guitar, and we sing together, and one time we made one of those construction-paper chains that was so long it probably could have gone around the whole block.”
Jon studied Aunt Carol, hoping that his words would stop her tears. Aunt Carol pulled her knuckles out of her mouth long enough to say, “Two days?”
Jon nodded. A smile tugged at his lips as he remembered how his mom looked in those two precious days. “She sparkles.” He put the last bit of the sandwich into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “I save it up for the rest of the time.” He peered at his aunt, to make sure that she understood. “I save up the sparkle.”
* * *
By the three-hour mark, Gail had closed her eyes and gripped the arms of her chair as if she meant to break them. Jon went to the bathroom and emptied his bowels yet again. When he came back, he sat down next to Gail, put his hand on top of hers.
“This is how it happens,” Gail whispered.
Jon glanced again at the door. Yes, this is how it was going to happen.
“It’s taking too long. All the websites say this is the most dangerous time.”
“Gail—”
/> “Right after. This is when they change their minds.”
“Why are you doing this?” Jon asked. “Why do you always do this?”
But Gail just stared at the door. She didn’t say anything more. She sat very straight in her chair and just stared at the door.
* * *
Just before midnight, the door finally swung open, and Paige came through, looking wrinkled, holding a bundle in a pink blanket. Jon’s pulse doubled its pace. Gail opened her eyes and sucked in a breath. They all stood. Paige handed the bundle to Gail, and she peeled the blanket from the baby’s face. “This is Maya.”
The face blotched red, and tiny wisps of wet hair jutted from under the pink cap. Her nose was turned up at an impossible angle, her eyes were closed, her mouth open. She looked like she was about to sneeze, but she didn’t. Paul’s camera clicked and whirred, and Jon heard Paul ask them to look up and smile, but Jon couldn’t tear his eyes away from the baby’s face. Eleanor mumbled something, and the shutter clicked, and Paige said that maybe they should sit down, but they didn’t. Gail looked at Jon. Tears drained into the corners of her smile. “Wanna hold her?” she asked.
Jon said nothing, and a bubble of fear swelled in his throat. He reached out, and Gail placed Maya into his arms. Her head fit into the crook of his elbow, and she was lighter than he expected, like her bones were hollow. He swallowed, and the fear still clogged his throat. But alongside it wedged something like a giggle or a warm shower or the bass line at the start of a Doors song. Paul badgered him to look up for a picture, but Jon ignored him. His daughter. The future roared. He finally looked up, not at Paul, but at Gail, and she asked him, “What do you think?”
He looked back down at Maya. Maya. Four letters that just a week before blended in with the Emmas and Sophias and Evas that Gail had pressed upon him. When Paige asked, he’d blurted it out without thinking. It just felt right. Now his baby was named Maya, and Maya had a face, and that face was specific. It demanded his attention, and it belonged to his daughter. And that name added weight to the bundle in his arms. He was terrified that he would drop her or fail her. He looked up at Gail, and he summoned a smile.
Other People's Children Page 6