Everything Here is Under Control

by Emily Adrian

  “Jack smiles now,” I say.

  Gabe laughs. “No way. Really?”

  “At me.” And at Carrie.

  “I want to see him smile at you.”

  “You will.”

  “Has Deerling been everything you wanted it to be?”

  His question is a Get Out of Jail Free card. Saying yes will be as good as saying case closed. We will quietly agree that, like a sickly girl in a Jane Austen novel, all I needed was a dose of my native air, a break from the relentlessness of society.

  A fast drive down a country road.

  Something I’ve suspected for a long time is that Gabe is always, however unconsciously, daring me to be less than satisfied with our life. The idea that he rescued me from a certain fate is one I’m guilty of perpetuating. Drunk, and in love with him, I’ve begun sentences, “If not for you, I’d be . . .”

  Married to a car mechanic. Working at the DMV alongside Jaclyn. An alcoholic.

  A single mother in Deerling, Ohio.

  Maybe that’s the truth, and maybe it isn’t. Before Gabe, I had a plan, originally inspired by Ash Dewdney but which I had since tailored to reality. I would go to the best university that offered me a scholarship (not Notre Dame, not even Ohio State). Carrie would come too and major in art or else live an ungoverned artist’s life in comforting proximity to my ordinary one. By the time we were seniors in high school, art was strictly Carrie’s thing. I had forfeited my own sporadic creativity. She had the talent; all I ever had was a reckless streak, a lack of inhibition that occasionally seemed profound.

  After college, I would get an MBA, then work in marketing or management for a large corporation. Whatever this entailed was not the point. The point was the salary. At seventeen, I dreamed of owning a dishwasher, taking vacations, buying shoes that weren’t from Payless. Specifically, I imagined reporting the balance of my checking account to my mother and watching her light up, impressed and proud and envious. A goal that raised the eyebrows of teenage Gabe.

  It baffled me how he could claim not to care about money when his family had so much of it.

  I was young.

  After we moved to New York, I meant to apply to colleges in and within spitting distance of the city, but I never did. From the outside, it probably looked as if my ambition flatlined when I met Gabe. Stick with this guy, I must have thought, and you’ll never end up in a double-wide. The other possibility—of which, I believe, Gabe and I were both aware—was that I no longer felt like I deserved to go to college.

  For a couple of years, Gabe encouraged me to try. His idea was to write my admissions essay about Carrie. “You don’t have to spill every detail, but you can describe how it felt to watch your best friend give birth and become a mother. Most people our age have no idea what that’s like.”

  Not for a second did I consider writing that essay.

  The answer to Gabe’s question is no. Deerling remains less than what I want it to be.

  Sometimes, watching the wordless intimacy between Carrie and Nina as they reach over each other to assemble their respective breakfasts or stand side by side to brush their teeth, I think Carrie might inadvertently send me home with some assurance that motherhood is worth the suffering. But then Nina berates Carrie for spreading the last of the butter on her own toast, or she says, “Mom, I hate that tattoo,” pointing to the one of her own name wrapped around Carrie’s left wrist, and I realize the suffering never ends.

  “It’s been good,” I tell him.

  “Will you pick me up from the airport, or should I rent a car?”

  A plan forms. It’s reckless, and maybe a little bit cruel, but I can’t resist it.

  “No, don’t rent a car,” I say, as if the idea offends me. “We’ll be there.”

  * * *

  After Gabe’s first semester at NYU, we went back to Deerling. He stayed with his family and I stayed with mine, an arrangement that felt like a good deed we were doing. On the morning of Christmas Eve, I drove my brother’s seafoam-green Chevy Impala to visit Carrie, who was still living with her parents. Snow covered the streets, and I had to guess at the exact boundaries of the driveway that separated the Harts’ property from their neighbors’. The whole town smelled like fresh paint and just-split firewood.

  Pushing through Carrie’s front door, I was surprised by the warmth and sourness of the house. The oatmeal-colored living room rug was strewn with plastic toys, stuffed animals, bibs, diminutive socks, board books, and piles of hastily folded laundry. I navigated the mess and found Carrie in the kitchen, wrenching the lid from a small jar of puréed peas. Nina was smacking the tray of her high chair. When she saw me, she screeched and grinned maniacally.

  “Does she remember me?” I asked. Nina was six months old.

  “No.” Carrie put the peas in the microwave and set the timer for seventeen seconds. “That’s a standard greeting.”

  “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  She was.

  “Thanks.” Carrie had adopted a beleaguered way of speaking that seemed designed to excuse the unwashed dishes in the sink, the all-too-personal stains on her sweatpants. I went to hug her. I would have held on to her for a long time if the microwave hadn’t started beeping.

  From the beginning of the visit, it was clear we wanted to talk about different things. I wanted to talk about how the girls in the coed bathroom looked at Gabe and me when he squirted a glob of toothpaste onto my toothbrush; how Dawn, my boss at the wholesale jewelry company, sent me fervent, unpunctuated emails requesting I stop undermining her authority; and how my friend Paige, who was twenty-two and resembled me in no physical way, had given me her old driver’s license to use as a fake ID.

  Carrie wanted to talk about her baby.

  Compromising should have been easy. The problem was that I believed my life was inherently fascinating, whereas Carrie’s routine with the baby was monotonous. A snooze fest. Her mind may have been cluttered with Nina’s relentless needs and achieved milestones, but deep down, I believed, she wanted vicarious thrills.

  How generous of me, I thought, to drive through the snow to Carrie’s house and regale her with stories about being young, in love, and childless.

  As I spoke, Carrie spoon-fed Nina the puréed peas. Nina’s mouth popped open, birdlike, in anticipation of each bite. Closing her lips around the spoon, she would arrange her features into a deeply critical expression before swallowing and whining for more.

  This process had been repeated ten or twenty times, when suddenly, Nina brought her fists to her face and screamed. For a few seconds, I kept talking, as if Nina were a lunatic on the subway whom we ought to ignore. Carrie looked pained. I shut up.

  There was green slime everywhere—on the wall behind the high chair, on Carrie’s shirt, on Nina’s cheeks, forehead, and onesie.

  “Do you ever wish you could skip the baby phase?” I asked. “Blink and become the mother of an eight-year-old?”

  Nina was still doing her best impression of a tornado warning. Like a mom in a movie, Carrie pinched the bridge of her nose. “You don’t have to be here,” she said. “You can leave.”

  “No, no,” I reassured her, rummaging around in the fridge for a Diet Coke. “That’s not what I meant. I’m having a good time.”

  I have since considered apologizing to Carrie for what I said that morning. After Jack was born, I experienced the same moment from the other side—a friend covering her ears against Jack’s colicky cries or squealing in disgust after he spat up in her hair. The same Paige who gifted me with the fake ID insisted on coming to see Jack a week after the birth. She brought us a jar of olives and a corkscrew, two items that struck me as both extravagant and useless. Watching me breastfeed, she announced in a bored, sullen way, “Those noises he makes are pornographic.”

  When your friend has a baby, nothing more or less than unwavering admiration is required o
f you. Being kind to an infant and to that infant’s mother? It’s the easiest thing in the world.

  I have never apologized to Carrie. The time I remember is probably one of countless offenses I committed. To rehash it would be selfish—both a grab for easy absolution and an attempt to show off. Look at me now. Look how self-aware.

  Still, the shame gnaws at me.

  What did I think I had accomplished, exactly? I had fallen for a boy who pronounced my name, first and last, like it was the conclusion of his favorite novel. I had accepted the first minimum-wage job offered to me. I had learned to drink and dress and pontificate like your average college freshman, revealing only as a 2:00 a.m. punchline—a party trick—that I was not a student at all but a stowaway aboard my boyfriend’s life.

  Carrie, at eighteen years old, had fallen in love with her daughter.

  * * *

  When Carrie gets back from the pool, she is sun-drunk and too lazy to cook. She pulls three kinds of potato chips from the pantry and cracks open a beer. Nina emerges from her bedroom and slumps way down in a chair to commence chip-eating, her movements mechanical as she reaches again and again for the bag.

  I have left Jack sleeping on the bed in the guest room, surrounded by a fortress of pillows in case he spontaneously rolls again. Already I miss the weight of his body in my lap, the curve of his skull against my lips.

  “So,” I say, “Nina’s birthday.”

  “It’s coming up,” Carrie agrees.

  “I was thinking, to get the celebrations underway, do you guys want to spend a night in Cleveland? My treat? And we can get Gabe from the airport in the morning.”

  His name is like a foreign object in my mouth.

  Nina perks up. “Yes,” she says. “Can I get my own room?”

  “No,” Carrie answers.

  Nina tries again. “Can we get a room with a minibar?”

  I say, “Yes. You’re thirteen now. You can have all the overpriced Skittles you want.”

  She turns to her mother. “Please, Mom?”

  Carrie narrows her eyes at me. “Are you just trying to get away from the fireworks?”

  Gabe’s flight lands on July fifth. On the fourth, all of Deerling will be ablaze, the hot air saturated with the fumes of Black Cats and Lady Fingers. It’s occurred to me that Cleveland’s pyrotechnics will be contained, supervised by firefighters, and over by 10:00 p.m.

  “That’s a perk but not the reason,” I say.

  Carrie frowns, working her tongue over her teeth. “Are you sure you want us to come? You and Gabe haven’t seen each other in a while. Have you ever been apart this long?”

  “Sure,” I lie.

  She’s skeptical. “When?”

  “Gabe travels. I travel.”

  “Ah. Didn’t realize you two were such jet-setters.”

  “Please, come to Cleveland with me.”

  “All right,” she says. “If that’s really what you want.”

  Nina pumps a fist in the air. She grabs her phone from the counter and begins furiously texting. I’m still curious to know what happened between her and Maxine two nights ago, causing their goodbye hug to be so solemn and prolonged. Before I can think of a delicate way to ask, I become aware of Carrie studying me. She holds her beer to her lips, obscuring her expression.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nothing. It’s weird to see you without Jack.”

  “I feel naked,” I admit. “Like when you realize you left your purse in the bar.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Carrie’s tone is more deferential than usual.

  “Sure.”

  “Is Gabe good with the baby?”

  I remember the night before I left, waiting in vain for Gabe to relieve me of our inconsolable newborn. He was tired, but he was also mean, which was unprecedented. Before the baby, we were so consistently sweet to each other that once, after Gabe called me out for underreporting the price we’d paid for a crate of organic peaches, Paige turned to the woman she was dating and snapped, “See? They fight. They’re not perfect.”

  Certainly not anymore. In the middle of the night, I would have said anything to Gabe if it meant guilt would compel him to take the baby.

  Maybe Gabe is not “good with the baby” if the standard is checking the baby’s temperature obsessively, always remembering to refill the wipes dispenser, and loving the baby’s mother exactly as much as he did before she unraveled.

  After Jack was born, the nurses were preparing to move us into a recovery room—where we would stay for forty-eight hours, a curtain separating us from some other newly acquainted mom-baby pair—when one of them mentioned that Gabe would not be allowed in the room between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m.

  To me, this seemed inhumane, but so did everything else.

  Gabe said, “Amanda’s supposed to be alone with the baby all night?”

  “Wellll,” one nurse intoned, “if she’s really having trouble, we can take him to the nursery for a bit. But we usually like to keep Mom and babe together.”

  Gabe looked down at me. I was in a wheelchair. I had tried to walk, but it hadn’t worked out.

  Over my protests, Gabe asked the nurses about a private room. I was trying to say we couldn’t afford it; I had already spent an afternoon on hold with our insurance company to confirm that postpartum privacy was not an expense they would cover. Dubious, the nurses explained that only one private room was currently empty. It was $850 a night. When Gabe stared at them, expressionless, one nurse shrugged and said, “It has a view of Central Park.”

  Gabe paid. He put $1,700 on a credit card already attached to a balance we may never pay off. In our private room with a view, Gabe was allowed to stay with me all night. Delighted by what they perceived as his selflessness, the nurses brought him a cot to sleep on—but as far as I know, he never used it. If Jack was not asleep in the hospital’s lettuce crisper of a bassinet or attacking my nipple, he was in Gabe’s arms. Gabe scooped our son up every time he cried. He changed every diaper. He did not let me get out of bed.

  In the morning, we failed to pull back the curtains and feast our eyes on the park. The hospital could have been on the side of a highway in Illinois for all we cared. I remember getting up to use the bathroom, denying my body’s urge to defecate, even though the nurses had warned me that a successful bowel movement was my only ticket home. Gabe and the baby weren’t where I’d left them. I stepped into the hall—no longer paper-gowned, but feeling svelte in my own sweatpants—and found Gabe rocking our son in his arms, singing George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” beneath his breath. I’d put the song on a playlist for Gabe when I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, and he’d fallen into the habit of listening to it every day on his way home from work, imagining, he told me, that the lyrics referred not to George Harrison’s infatuation with a Hindu god but to our own unborn son.

  Finally, they were together. I had united them, and I couldn’t look away.

  It seems neither appropriate nor feasible to explain the caliber of Gabe’s fatherhood to Carrie. All I can think to say is, “He was around Nina as a baby sometimes.”

  She shrugs. “Barely.”

  “Well, he’s good with Jack. He’s great with Jack.”

  “But?”

  I didn’t mean to imply any but. But, of course, there is one. “Day to day, I am more alone in this than I thought I would be.”

  For some reason, Carrie looks pleased. She takes a satisfied swig from her beer.

  “What—does that make you feel better?” I ask.

  She glances at Nina, whose chin is still dipped phoneward and who appears to be tuning us out entirely. “Sort of, yeah,” Carrie says.

  It’s not what I meant, but I can see how it might comfort her—the idea that she hasn’t missed out on anything.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I h
ave some idea that we will go to a nice restaurant in Cleveland—a place with a wine list, at least—but Nina has a different vision. She wants to go to Happy Dog, a bar on Detroit Avenue where you pay six dollars for your basic hot dog and then choose from an unholy list of toppings including bacon, SpaghettiOs, mac ’n’ cheese, peanut butter, fried eggs, and coleslaw. Nina has never been to Happy Dog, but Maxine told her about it. Because the dinner is ostensibly to celebrate Nina’s birthday—and because, as Carrie points out, Jack might cry throughout the meal—I concede.

  It’s about a ninety-minute drive from Deerling to downtown Cleveland. We take my car. Carrie rides up front, and Nina distracts Jack with a board book titled I Love My Mommy, in which a baby elephant and his mother have a good time. The narrative makes me vaguely uncomfortable. I feel inadequate compared to the elephant mom. Jack and I never stand beneath waterfalls or go stomping across the savanna.

  Mostly, he cries, and I beg him to stop.

  By the time we get into the city, everyone’s hungry. We delay checking into our hotel and drive straight to Happy Dog, which resembles an ordinary dive. A neon sign promises good food and chrome stools surround a polished oval bar. As we slide into a booth, Carrie slips her arm around Nina’s shoulders. For once, the two of them are getting along. They have been in good spirits since we passed another display of i’m with her signs on our way out of Deerling. The new batch, sprouting from the rock garden outside the library, may actually last a while—if anyone in Deerling County leans left, it’s the librarians.

  A server appears and asks if we want a high chair.

  “Um,” I say, holding Jack in my lap, “he’s too little for a high chair.”

  The server is bepimpled and college age, wearing a Levi’s shirt with pearl buttons. “Really? Was he, like, just born?”

  “Yes,” Carrie says. “We rushed straight here from the hospital. Amanda needed her postpartum Happy Dog fix.”