Petals of Rain

by Rica Keenum

  I am squinting through the pain, scowling at the room. I count the stupid faces bobbing around my bed. Stupid, stupid faces. My husband is in the lobby watching ESPN. He doesn’t have the stomach for this, so I will give birth without him again. At least this time he’s not going home to sleep.

  The doctor shows his stupid face shortly before the baby comes. “Push” is all he can concoct, this medically trained robot who stands at the foot of my bed in a silk shirt and pressed pants, a stethoscope dangling from his neck like a noose just out of my reach. “One more push,” he repeats monotonously until I finally call bullshit.

  “LIAR!” I howl, arms banging on the mattress. But I continue to push on command and finally, after too many “one last pushes,” a son oozes out. He is crimson faced with a roaring mouth and fists like sturdy knobs. His head is plump and swirled with hair and when I reach for him, he lands in my arms with a thunk.

  Aside from J and KJ, my aunt is my only visitor. She brings warm chocolate chip cookies to the hospital, sits in the vinyl chair next to my bed and congratulates me. She smells like Jean Nate and I imagine the bottle with its shiny black bauble for a top. As a young girl, I spied her perfumes while she filled my bath with bubbles and toys: Red Door, Chloe and Liz Claiborne. They are ornaments in my memory now, glimmering on the knotty branches of the past. When she leans in for a kiss goodbye, I take a long whiff and savor her, then watch her go, resisting the urge to reach out.

  ***

  At home, we admire the chubby new baby boy. He is an ocean of waves in his tight blue onesie. The sleeves are too short and his head pokes out of the neckline and bobs like a tethered balloon. KJ is a proud two-year-old brother. He drapes a big-boy arm around the baby. What a pair. When they lie on the bed together, their black hair tangles like licorice twists. J is back at work and I have a few weeks to recover. Our apartment feels like a yawn, tedious and dry with a stifling heat that exhales through the vents. The baby swing clicks back and forth, and I watch my son swoosh toward me and away, his eyes sealed shut, dark lashes fanned out like wild plumage. I turn on Sesame Street and KJ plunks down in his plush Elmo chair. His little fingers drill into a plastic tube of candy and pluck out rainbow-colored morsels — red, blue and yellow. He is agile this way, the MacGyver of candy extraction. It seems like a good time to wash dishes, so I go into the kitchen and run the hot water, drizzle the soap in the sink. The crusty cups, bowls and plates disappear beneath the dancing suds. I let my hands swim, explore the smooth lip of a coffee cup and the sharp prong of each fork. I stretch my fingers out like starfish and feel the water gush around them, warm and fragrant. This is my spa. On the television, Elmo is squealing to his goldfish, Dorothy, but I manage to shrink his voice as I squeeze my eyes shut. I’m standing on the ugly linoleum in my puke-stained bathrobe with my hands in the kitchen sink, but it could be the rim of a mountain, a golden beach on an island or the little pond where Emmet splashed. I can go anywhere in my mind. Imagination has always rescued me.

  When the water begins to cool, KJ scuttles in behind me and jolts me out of my thoughts. I reach for a towel to dry my hands and knock my hip into the open silverware drawer. Why is the silverware drawer open? I find out when the baby lets out a shriek and I run to the living room. The swing has stopped moving and KJ is leaning over the baby, his little hand poised to groom his brother, but not with a hairbrush. He’s holding a utensil he swiped from the kitchen — a steak knife. The baby’s face is twisted and red, and KJ is closing in with a stainless-steel blade aimed at a silken crest of hair. I am afraid to scream so I hold my breath instead. I tip forward like a wind-blown tree and gingerly snatch the knife with one quick motion. I stand frozen, gripping the blade until my breath returns. The room pulsates as I gulp down air and then exhale. My heart begins to beat again.

  When Saturday comes, I shop for baby carriers and find a navy canvas jobber with adjustable straps and a cute galactic pattern. From now on, I will keep Sym strapped to me like a new body part.

  ***

  In the early mornings, the sun sifts through the blinds and we lie in bed, feeding. My postpartum body is like Play-Doh, shaped anew by a flux of hormones. I am alternately sweaty and chilled as if ice courses through my veins. Baby’s mouth is a thirsty waterhole and I watch his lips pucker and suck, pucker and suck with fervor. He sinks into the crook of my arm and I conjure the way it felt with KJ. Everything is different: my body, his whimper, our bond. I look into his eyes and I see new territory. The bulk of him, the hungry animal mouth of him.

  I recall hearing mothers saying they love all their children the same. The phrase flits about in my consciousness. What does it mean? “Same,” as in equal measure? How can a mother pour her love into each child-vessel in precise doses? What happens if one child cracks and needs more love — more time, more patience, more care? I shut my eyes and feel the sticky sheets close over me like a licked envelope. No doubt I love this heaving, suckling lump. But my instincts say there is nothing “same” about him.

  Symeon: 7 pounds, 14 ounces, 21 inches long.

  ***

  Her office is sunny and comfortable, the right size for a two-way chat. I drop into a plush leather sofa. I’m hers for an hour. She sits in front of a window and I watch the light twinkle on her shoulders. She’s middle-aged, blonde, smart and kind. I am exhausted and I don’t know if I’ve even brushed my hair.

  “Chronic migraines, but it’s more than that,” I hear myself say when she asks what’s brought me in. “I feel like I just don’t care.”

  Her eyebrows sweep together, and she leans in. “Care?”

  “About keeping it together anymore — going to work, even brushing my hair,” I say. One hand rakes through a nap of curls. As we talk, I discover a tiny hole in my pants, just above the knee. You poor slob, I might have thought on another day. But today, I don’t think. I don’t cross my leg to hide my peeping flesh. I openly tug at the fabric and wriggle my fingernail into the spot. I explain that J is a Jekyll and Hyde, that he alternately loves and hates me, and I can’t crack this code. He disappears for hours, sometimes a full day. He takes the car we share and leaves me panicked when we’re out of diapers. Desperate when we’re out of milk.

  “I got a goddamn haircut,” he tells me. “I went to the mall.” Doors slam and I just want the noise to stop. I am numb, anesthetized by the sound of crying babies, my husband’s anger, and chores, chores, chores.

  Paresthesia is prolonged pressure that puts a limb to sleep, constricts the blood flow. I am a hobbling mama-limb, dead inside. I operate on autopilot. The fact that I made it into this office surprises me. It started with a flier, an employee resource letter with a list of phone numbers and corporate wellness tools. Three free counseling sessions for anyone feeling overwhelmed. That’s me, I thought. And I knew I had to come because my boys need me whole. They deserve more than this sloppy, unfeeling woman I’ve become. I fear for them because I don’t know who I might be if given more time to unravel from myself. Last week I missed three days of work because I couldn’t muster the strength to slide both feet into my shoes.

  As I sit in her office plucking at my pant leg, I don’t recall dialing the number, making the appointment, driving to her office. She asks me probing questions, about my childhood, my marriage, my babies, my job. I state everything as fact. There’s no emotion in my voice, no tears shaking my words. I wonder if she thinks I’m composed or psychotic. Am I?

  “How do I get through this?” I ask when we are nearing the one-hour mark. The room is dense with my stories, pieces of me broken off like the hard bits of a cracked nut she’s been shelling.

  “Get back to writing,” she replies.

  I don’t remember telling her what it meant to put pen to paper, but I must have expressed it somehow. Maybe I told her about poetry, about my favorite authors and the journals I used to keep.

  On my way home, I stop and buy a hardcover journal. The next day, I find myself writing as the sun comes up, and it’s like crying
through my fingers. But at least I can feel again.

  Chapter 5

  Grandma

  I was sipping lukewarm coffee near a window when Grandma died. What I learned was painful but not profound — the world keeps spinning. When loss crashes in, it spins ad nauseam.

  Her death did not surprise us. Age had eroded her slowly, the way a hillside crumbles over time, each year chipping away the soil of her strength, the clay of her memory. I was ten years old when I realized Grandma would not live forever. The sight of her poking an insulin syringe in her belly pricked me to the core. When the doctor gave her a bulky metal walker to use, I feigned excitement, hopping on the bars as if it were playground equipment. But at night, I cried when I thought about what it meant.

  Our connection had solidified in my infancy. I was a shrieking, inconsolable savage — the sort of baby women heard about while being warned about the pitfalls of motherhood. Frazzled and worn thin, as if sandpapered by the tasks of parenting, my mother walked me down the street to Grandma’s house. I seemed to know even then how well I fit in her arms and how much we belonged together. I spent most of my time at her side, where a simple magic floated between us. When I was a child, we watched murder mysteries on television, discussed the books I was reading (books she had also read in her youth) and listened to the squabbling birds in the pine trees that towered outside her little white house on 66th street.

  She told me I was one of her favorite people, that I was smart and sensitive, her little Rica Tula. But of all the gifts she gave me, the gem of literature shines brightest in my memory. Inside the bubble of our days, the swirl of Grandma’s lilac perfume and the fairy dust of her fables drew me to her on the sofa. Tugging a curl from my head, she would examine the strand in her hand and recite a Longfellow poem:

  There was a little girl,

  Who had a little curl,

  Right in the middle of her forehead.

  When she was good,

  She was very good indeed,

  But when she was bad she was horrid.

  Then we’d read the cracked leather book she had saved from her youth, a small trove of rhythmic treasures. She’d remember those poems, even after she had forgotten my name. And I would remember the rhyme she wrote — the lines that broke my heart.

  “Write me something,” I had begged. I wrote my own poem and presented it to her, my child-hand clutching the ribbon-tied ends of my masterpiece. The next day, she called me to recite her work:

  The days are short.

  The nights are long.

  Soon I'll hear old winter's song.

  Tell me please,

  How can it be…

  I've grown so old,

  So suddenly.

  “It’s not particularly eloquent,” she said. But I began to understand the brevity of life and the way time seems to speed up in one’s later years, leaving its passengers careening frighteningly forward.

  ***

  In my teen years, Grandma pressed a wad of stiff bills into my hand, her non-negotiable reward for the dye jobs I did on her hair — summer blond. She grew up in a well-to-do-household. They were the kind of family that knew which fork to use and why. But she married my poor grandfather anyway, and never looked back. Still, her impeccable grooming always stuck, and it made me think she was celebrating life at all times — even the mundane moments. She would dress up to fetch the mail because that was reason enough for red lipstick. I massaged her scalp with shampoo over the kitchen sink and rinsed away the store-bought dye. At barely five-feet tall, she had to stand on a small, plastic stool so I could do the work efficiently. When we finished, I would twist the damp strands in a towel and walk her into the bathroom for the next phase of blow-drying and styling. She was wobbly by then, well into her 70s and with a few surgeries and heart attacks behind her. Her memory was fickle, coming in and out of frequency like an old television set with rabbit ear antennas. Some days I sat with her and chatted. After short periods of silence, she turned to me and said, “Hello dear. When did you come in?”

  Those were the first murky steps toward the slope, and I had the feeling a part of me was breaking away, like a branch snapping off during a storm.

  ***

  After Sym was born, I learned the nursing home was hiring and Grandma needed me. If I could do the clinical work and pass the state test, the education was free and I had a job. I got a note from my doctor six weeks post-delivery, and I started my training.

  The place smelled of bleach and urine. It reminded me of the word pungent, which Grandma taught me when I was a child asking how I might describe the smell of a pickle. The linoleum floors were waxed to perfection, as if a bit of shine could offset the melancholy. When I saw Grandma slumped in her wheelchair in the shared room, it was as though I was looking at somebody else’s grandmother — some gray and forlorn woman. No more summer blonde or red lipstick. No more perfume or songs. I sat down and did the only thing that felt safe in that moment — I read. At first, it was the newspaper, which was always available on her nightstand. But on other visits, I read poetry from the books I’d found at a used bookstore that carried tattered volumes of the classics. She read with me, mouthing the words in a small, stranger’s voice. Her inflection never faltered, and it was the only way I could tell that Grandma was inside there somewhere, like a stone at the bottom of a well.

  I worked the night shift and got used to the odors and the nonstop blinking and buzzing of call lights — a chaos like rush hour traffic. After my shifts, I crept into Grandma’s room, leaned over her sleeping body and tucked the blankets beneath her chin as if to repay the favors of my youth. One morning, her eyes flashed open and she shrieked at the sight of me, a stranger in her slow-fading universe.

  “Get out,” she hollered. Devastated, I ran from the room, straight through the sliding glass doors and into the dark wet parking lot. I stood there and let the rain pelt me until my clothes were heavy and my hair was slicked against my neck. The next day, I made a transfer to another unit.

  On the day Grandma died, my aunt called with the news. It was as though a song of 80 plus years had abruptly stopped playing — the cadence of her breath, the tempo of her heartbeat. But the orchestra of life droned on.

  I could not attend her funeral. I didn’t need to see Grandma’s decked out bones, boxed up like department store shoes. I held her where I needed her — in the place she held me best: on that sofa near the window in her house, where the sun spun gold and nothing seemed impossible.

  ***

  I groped for meaning after Grandma died. At night, I’d watch the moonlight spilling into the room and feel the weight of the day on my chest. “Breathe,” I’d tell my lungs. That’s when I started to pray.

  At first, I didn’t understand it, didn’t know to whom I was praying or whether I was doing it right. Fold your hands? Kneel in the dark? Cross-legged, head bowed?

  I thought about what I’d learned at youth services on Wednesday nights when Mom took turns carpooling with the neighbors. She watched Miami Vice at home while my siblings and I ran relay races in the gymnasium and sang songs at St. John’s during Awana services. A Christian group, Awana kids wore vests and accrued patches for reciting scriptures and doing good deeds. Having been churched throughout her childhood, Mom wanted to give us the gift of God without cracking a Bible or sitting on a pew. But religion remained a distant cousin for me, an entity outside of the household. I only prayed sporadically and without much intent. But now I longed for certainties, for the grace and assurances I lacked in real life.

  It wasn’t just Grandma’s death that piqued my interest in religion. Life felt especially flimsy. My marriage was falling apart, and crime was ramping up in my neighborhood. A strange man chased me from my car to my doorstep on a sticky night in July, then someone tossed a brick through my windshield. This was life, rife with death, failing marriages and flying bricks. Who was going to keep us safe? When a coworker at the nursing home invited me to her church, I bought a massive l
eather-bound Bible with gold gilded pages. Heavy as an anchor, it was the kind of book I hoped could keep a family grounded. With J off at work, I dressed the boys in collared shirts and slicked back the tufts of their wild hair. We drove twenty miles or so to the little brick church on a rural road, beside sagging barns and rusted-out Fords. It was midwinter in Wisconsin and the air was frigid and opaque.

  The parking lot was crammed with cars when I arrived 10 minutes late. I found a spot in the back and we sloshed toward the double doors, icy puddles breaking loose beneath our church shoes. A woman greeted us and handed me a pamphlet. Music rose up from the sanctuary, a halo of delicate hymns. We ducked inside behind the crowd and found seats near the back, a place where I could dip one toe in the action but remain close to the door. If the boys decided to fight, scream, or pick their noses bloody, I could scoop them up and make a quick exit.

  Thirty minutes in, I felt light, like a cotton dress on a clothesline in the sun. But then, as if all of heaven had punked me, I spotted KJ. He’d slipped out of his seat and onto the carpet. I watched his little fingers work and realized he was no longer playing with the Matchbox cars he’d shoved in his pockets that morning. He looked up at me, face awash with mischief. He’d successfully tied a woman’s sneakers together. Shoe to shoe, via the bunny-ears method. The woman stood up and pointed a long, angry finger across the pew. “Look what he did,” she said, gesturing toward her knotted-up sneakers, my wayward kid and me.

  Looking back now, I feel empathy for that woman who made such a fuss about child’s play. As I recall, she was alone that day and had probably come in floundering, just as I had. But when she aimed her finger at me, it might as well have been a gun, and I didn’t have the capacity to feel anything other than shame. I don’t recall how, but I had punished my son and it must have been severe because his reaction is seared in my memory — his contorted little face, swollen with remorse. When a child looks at his mother that way, something inside her cracks open. Like a broken tooth exposed to the air, her whole soul begins to ache.