Authors: Ann Packer
At a traffic light he turns and looks at Lise’s profile, her high forehead and long, narrow nose. He thinks of the woman at class tonight, her wanting to know. What he knows isn’t much: that it happened during an afternoon nap, only the second time Lise went out without him; that her husband was the one at home, the one to go in after the nap had gone on much too long. Dean still remembers the night when he heard all of this, at a little Mexican restaurant out near the airport, with red-checked oilcloths covering the tables and mariachi music coming from a radio in the kitchen. She spoke evenly as she told him about the blur after the funeral, the half-year of living back to back with her husband, the two of them moving through their house like ghosts until finally she left, taking nothing but her own clothes and the baby’s. Not because she hated her husband, she said, and certainly not because she blamed him: It was just that they couldn’t go on. She couldn’t go on.
She’s lost track of him. She doesn’t even know if he’s still living on the West Coast. There are moments, though, like now—sitting in the dark car beside her, knowing he could ask more about it all but not wanting to press, not wanting to press on the bruise—when Dean gets a sudden intimation of the man, of a guy his own age with a permanent pain wedged in his side like a runner’s stitch, and a cold fear slides through his veins.
Very early Saturday morning, Dean is woken to complete alertness by a pack of runners passing by outside, their feet slapping the road, the muted, heaving sound of their breathing checked once or twice by a low voice. Beside him Lise’s deeply asleep, her dark hair a tangle, the faint, sweet scent of her hand lotion just there under the fresh-laundry smell of the sheets. He feels as wide awake as ten a.m., but he doesn’t want to get up, doesn’t want to go running any more than he wants to be alone in the kitchen with the gray dawn lightening outside while he makes coffee and pages through the
Register-Guard
. Up against the headboard he finds a small pillow, a stray, and he rolls over and holds it against his ear. A few months ago, a friend of Lise’s from the Bay Area told him it was the early mornings rather than the interrupted nights that were hardest, but he thinks that if the baby were born already, were down the hall crying right now, he wouldn’t mind at all getting up. She was passing through Eugene, Lise’s friend, on her way to a family reunion in Portland, her husband and three kids in tow. She was an old friend, a neighbor from Lise’s old life, and her presence had an odd effect on Lise, made the color in her cheeks a bit brighter, the pitch of her voice a bit higher. Toward the end of the visit, the friend’s oldest child lifted his baby brother from the floor and flew him through the air like an airplane, and Lise said, to no one in particular, “Jasper loved that.”
When Dean wakes again it’s midmorning, he can tell by the light, by how empty the bed feels next to him, as if Lise’s been up for a while. Her nightgown is on a hook on the back of the bedroom door, and he wanders out and finds her dressed in her denim maternity overalls, standing in what will be the nursery, a small corner room with white walls and a square, jade green rug.
“What a sleeper,” she says when she sees him.
“I do my best.”
“Was there anything you wanted to do today? I was thinking we could go buy a rocking chair, maybe a few other things.”
An hour later, they borrow a neighbor’s pickup truck and drive downtown, where they buy a rocking chair, a changing table, four hooded towels, a four-hundred-dollar stroller, a package of cloth diapers, a footstool for nursing, five flannel blankets, a car seat, a stack of pastel washcloths, a Snugli, a mobile with multicolored zoo animals hanging from it, a lambskin, and the tiniest fingernail clippers Dean has ever seen. Driving home with the big things in boxes in the truck bed behind them and shopping bags strewn at their feet, Dean is exhilarated.
After lunch he mows the front lawn, and then, because it’s something he’s been meaning to do for weeks, he gathers up and takes to the supermarket several dozen empty beer bottles, which yield him for his trouble a few wrinkled dollar bills and a handful of change. Back at home he’s not surprised to find Lise in the baby’s room again, standing amid the morning’s loot. He fetches his toolbox and assembles the changing table while she comes and goes, carrying stacks of things to and from the garage: in the distance he hears the washing machine churn and drain, and the thrum of the dryer.
As he’s tightening the last screw on the footstool, she goes into the closet and reappears with a cardboard box.
“Careful, I’ll do that,” he says, but she’s already set it on the floor and crossed to his toolbox for a box cutter.
She slices open the edges of the box first, then pulls up the still-joined flaps and cuts them carefully, so the blade won’t go through what’s underneath. With a feeling of discomfort, he watches as she opens the box, and then there they are, the dead baby’s clothes.
She removes a handful of little white caps and sets them aside. Next is a stack of tiny white undershirts, with shoulders that somehow remind him of the way the fly looks on Jockey underwear. Halfway across the room, he doesn’t know what to do or say. He feels grossly out of place, and beyond that boorish, and beyond that paralyzed.
“Pretty basic stuff,” she says, but then her expression brightens, and she eagerly withdraws a little one-piece yellow coverall with the head of a giraffe on the front. “Look at this,” she says, looking up at him. “I’d forgotten about this one. We always called this the giraffe suit.”
“I can see why,” he says with an idiotic smile.
She looks at him carefully. “What do you think about using some of this stuff?”
There’s no reason not to, unless it would make her feel worse. “Sure,” he says. “Whatever you want.”
She brushes absently at a spot on her overalls, then sets the giraffe suit down and rubs her lower back with both hands. “I do want us to get some new stuff,” she says, “but I feel like—I don’t know—I’d like to use some of these things, too. I mean, I saved them as Jasper outgrew them, for when he had a little brother or sister. Would it bother you?”
“Not at all.”
The doorbell rings, and he hesitates a moment, then makes his way to the front door. Outside, his neighbor’s eight-year-old daughter is standing there with a small paper bag. “Dad said you left this in the truck this morning,” she says, and Dean takes the bag and thanks her, then watches as she leaps off the porch and runs home. She goes to school just a block away: when he leaves for work each morning he sees her mother watching from the sidewalk until she’s reached the schoolyard.
In the bag are the nail clippers. Dean closes the front door and returns to the nursery, not entirely surprised to find it empty. He comes back out and hesitates outside his and Lise’s bedroom.
She’s standing at her dresser, the top drawer open. She has the picture of the baby in one hand, something small and red-and-white striped in the other. Her head is bent, her dark hair brushing her shoulders, and Dean feels sure she’s crying. He crosses the room and puts a hand on her back, and she turns. She isn’t crying, but she has an air of crying about her: of just having cried or of being about to. “Sweetie,” he says, and she looks up at him with her bottom lip clamped between her teeth.
“Do you know why he was smiling in this picture?”
Dean shakes his head.
“Because Mark had just pulled these from his feet and started tickling his toes.” She opens her hand, and the red-and-white thing unfolds into a tiny pair of socks. “He loved having his toes tickled, he’d make this little noise, like ‘Arrr.’ I remember it so clearly.”
Dean doesn’t know what to say. His throat is lumpy and he has to try a couple of times before he can swallow. At last he remembers the bag. “Look,” he says. “We left this in the pickup.”
She hesitates a moment, then turns and puts the picture away, pushing the drawer closed and pausing for a moment before turning back. She sets the socks on the dresser and looks inside the bag. “Oh, the clippers,” she says. “Good. We’ll definitely need those.”
…
Gregor calls late Sunday night, after Lise’s asleep. It’s a habit Dean and he have gotten into, to catch up on things before the start of a new week. Tonight they talk for a while, but Dean’s distracted, and soon Gregor’s voice trails off.
“What?” Dean says.
“Go on to bed, son. Get some sleep while you can.”
“That’s like telling someone to eat five dinners today because he’s going to have to fast for the next week. There’s only so much sleeping you can do. Go on, I was listening.”
“Nah, you weren’t. Everything OK? Got the bag packed for the hospital?”
“Yes, Gregor,” Dean says wearily, although in fact Lise packed it just this afternoon. The books said to take all kinds of crazy stuff—lollipops and tennis balls, as if you were preparing to sit in the audience of
Let’s Make a Deal
—but she just put in the basics.
“Don’t forget your swim trunks,” Gregor says.
“What?”
“For the jacuzzi. Jan always made me get in with her so she could lean against me instead of the porcelain.”
“You’re loving this,” Dean says. “Go torment someone else, call a catalog and pick on the operator.”
“Come on,” Gregor says. “I just want you to be prepared.”
“I am. Jesus.”
Gregor doesn’t respond.
“What? I can’t possibly be prepared, is that it? My life is going to change completely, I’ll never have a free moment again. I know that, OK?”
Gregor laughs.
“OK, I even know that I don’t really know it.”
“That’s what I want to hear,” Gregor says. Then he adds, casually, “How’s Lise? Is she—”
“She’s fine.”
Gregor is silent, and Dean thinks of yesterday, all the excited shopping and then the box of clothes. “She got out his stuff,” he says, but then he stops himself. What is he doing? He doesn’t want to tell Gregor this. His heart pounds, and he adds, almost against his will, “His clothes.”
Gregor exhales. “Jeez.” He hesitates and then says, “Is she—I mean, are you guys—” He’s silent for a moment. “It must be scary,” he says at last, “to think it could happen again. Is she really worried?”
“You’d think so,” Dean says, “but she’s not.” He fingers the buttons on the phone, strokes their faint concavities. Back when they first talked about getting married and having children, she told him that she saw what had happened as a one-time thing, plain bad luck—it bothered her when people expected her to fear a repeat. She said that wasn’t how the world was—how she wanted to think of it, anyway.
As for him, he doesn’t fear crib death, he fears … what? Something.
He fears being afraid.
After saying goodbye to Gregor, he goes into the kitchen. It’s nearly midnight but he’s far too wired for sleep. He gulps a glass of orange juice, then crosses the room and opens the back door.
The backyard is small, little more than a deck and a tiny patch of grass, but it’s nicely enclosed, and last spring Lise hung Italian tiles on the fence and planted lavender and rosemary in terra cotta pots. Dean sits on a wooden bench they chose together shortly after they were married, and he leans back. The night is cool, and he feels the wind stir goose bumps from his bare arms. Overhead the half-moon looks transparent. The faint scent of lavender reminds him of a trip to Provence he and Lise took two summers ago, and he finds himself remembering an evening there, in a village near Arles. Walking after coffee in a tiny café, they happened upon a kind of amateur’s night at the local bullfight, and they sat and watched from rickety bleachers while boys barely old enough to shave teased and provoked bulls, then leapt to safety over the low wall of the ring. Near Dean and Lise, a small family called and cajoled to one of the boys, and when his turn in the ring was over he came and sat with them, had his head rubbed by his father and then reached to take onto his lap a little girl dressed in pink ruffles. Dean watched them openly, and when the boy looked up and met his gaze he gave Dean a look of such sweet contentment that Dean felt a rush of love not just for him but for all of them, the proud father and the fat mother, the little, overdressed girl: love and pure longing. If it did happen again, if his and Lise’s baby died, too, would they survive? Would their marriage? The thing is, there’s no telling. From where he sits, less than a month away from fatherhood, he sees that what they’ve done together acknowledges the possibility of its own undoing: that what there is to gain is exactly equal to what there is to lose.
Labor starts in the kitchen three days before Lise’s due date, with a gathering of color in her face, a low moan as she bends over the counter, her weight on her forearms. In a moment she looks up and smiles, and Dean sets down the pan he’s been drying and says the exact thing he hoped he wouldn’t say at this moment, a line out of a bad movie: “Is it time?”
It isn’t, quite. But close to midnight, after hours with his watch in his hand, timing contractions, Dean helps her to the car and they head for the hospital, Dean trying to avoid potholes while she puffs in the seat next to him, her hands on her belly.
“Jesus,” she says, “I better be fucking five centimeters dilated when we get there or I’m never going to make it.”
He reaches for her hand, but a moment later she moans and shakes him away. She’s already told him that he’s not to talk to her, touch her, or in any way get in her face while she’s in hard labor. Ice chips. That was all her first husband was allowed to do, feed her ice chips.
Up ahead the hospital looms into view, and he imagines plowing right through the double front doors—the car would just about fit. The walk from the parking area takes forever, Dean standing by while Lise staggers along, bent like an old woman. Inside, a clerk takes her name and phones for a wheelchair. The orderly pushing it doesn’t seem surprised when Lise refuses it, nor when, several minutes and only twenty yards later, she changes her mind.
Upstairs, minutes stretch endlessly while hours collapse upon themselves. There’s a period of walking in the halls, another of standing nearby while she rests her forearms on a bar and moans. Drugs are discussed, rejected, demanded. Then for a strange interlude Dean sits in a chair next to the bed and nearly dozes, only to be startled to alertness by a bright light aimed at his wife’s crotch. All the blowing and panting, the ice chips, the dial on the fetal monitor springing up and down—it’s all as he was told it would be and at the same time utterly shocking. Then suddenly Lise cries, “Oh my God, I can’t do this, I can’t do this,” and the room stills to her.