A Necessary End (14 page)

It goes on for a while, a half hour at least: the command to push, and then the pushing, and still no baby. I want to ask if this is normal; I can't tell if anyone is concerned behind their masks.

Leah falls back against the pillow, clearly exhausted. Sweaty wisps of hair have escaped her bun.

Gabe strokes the hairs back and whispers something to her. She nods, eyes closed, and then she pops up, sudden as a jack-in-the-box, and says, “Fuck this, I'm just going to push the whole time, until he's out.”

“Of course,” Katrina says. “You don't have to wait for the contractions.”

“Why the fuck didn't anyone tell her that?” I'm surprised by the magnitude of Gabe's anger. I suspected but never knew for sure how much he cares for Leah. Now it's on full display.

Leah bares her teeth and lets out animal cries that correspond to each push. She wasn't kidding, she's going for it. It's a bravura performance and I have to admit, even though I slammed her for the epidural, she's admirably balls-to-the-wall now.

Another five minutes, and the doctors are saying, “He's almost here, one more good push,” and Leah's a bug-eyed maniac, and Gabe's literally shouting encouragement (“You're doing it!” “Good job!”), and I'm swept up in the excitement, in the romance even, and then
he's here,
slick with blood and mucus. Red-faced and screaming. My beautiful boy. I feel my knees buckling; I'm weak with love.

Leah's crying and telling Gabe, “Do it, do it,” and I can't focus on what she means, I just keep staring at
him,
at my little one. My arms are involuntarily outstretched; I can't wait much longer. I'm crying, too. Only Gabe is dry-eyed.

“Do it,” Leah says, and then I get it. Dr. Florian hands Gabe a scissors, guides him to the right spot, and he cuts the cord. Yet another intimacy he and I can never share. But the important thing is, Leah and the baby are separate entities for the first time. They've been severed.

Then the baby is whisked off for a full wash, the works. “He's perfect, he's healthy,” Dr. Florian is reporting. Leah nods, but she looks spent, husklike.

He's swaddled in a blue blanket and placed on Leah's chest. Katrina says, “He's hungry,” and Leah gets what she means and begins to frantically waggle her head.

“No, no,” she says. “Give him to her.” She indicates me, and Katrina takes it in stride, as if mothers are always pawning off their newborns on the aunt.

I thought Leah had forgotten I was here, even I'd forgotten myself for a minute in all of it, but here he is, in my arms. My baby—cone-headed and fuchsia and caterwauling at the shock of his emergence into the world—and I'm spurting like a fountain. Gabe comes and puts his arms around me, around both of us, and says, with great intensity, “This is Michael, he has to be Michael.”

We haven't seriously talked names, or even gotten the clearance from Leah to do the naming, but it's all been accelerated. Gabe's never said “Michael” before, and now he seems so certain. “What does Leah think about that?” I ask, though I'm not sure what I think myself. It could be exactly perfect or entirely wrong. Our baby, named after Gabe's brother, who loved me, who took his own life. Our baby named after an angel, just like Gabriel.

“Leah already agreed,” he says. “We talked about it before you got here.” He couldn't have mentioned that sooner, maybe during the credits of
Blade Runner
?

I glance over, wondering if she knows the whole story of Gabe's brother, the story of the three of us. She's on her side in bed, collapsed. Whatever she knows, she's in no position to tell.

I think, without malice or gratification, that she's feeling it now, the pain. But there's a rightness to that. Epidural or not, you shouldn't relinquish a child and feel nothing. That would make you a monster, a Patty.

No, her name should not be in this delivery room, not even in my head. I never need to think of her again. I'm a mother now.

I turn back to Gabe, and to my baby, and I feel something I've never felt before.

W
e're at the hospital practically round-the-clock for the forty-eight hours until Leah and the baby are discharged; Adrienne won't have it any other way. She's determined to prevent them from bonding.

It doesn't look like she has much to worry about. Michael's rooming with Leah in his elevated glass cube, but she stares past him, over him, at the TV, or out the window. I think she might be depressed.

After the privacy and spaciousness of the delivery room, the postpartum room seems cruelly cramped. It's got light brown walls, speckled Easter-egg floors, striped flame-retardant curtains, and it's shared, demarcated by a blue curtain. We get the window, they get the door. The bathroom is equidistant, but it still requires that Leah exit our small sanctum. Adrienne and I go down the hall to the visitor restrooms.

Adrienne sits in the brown pleather recliner by the window, where she feeds Michael formula from bottles and he sleeps against her chest. I've never seen her so contented.

“You should hold him,” she tells me. So I do. I have. I try to look
fatherly, though I sure don't feel it, but Adrienne is painfully eager to believe.

He doesn't cry much, except when I hold him. The few times Leah has held him at the urging of the nurses, he's stared up at her soberly, curiously, like he thinks they just might be related. Or he thinks Adrienne's suddenly shed almost twenty years.

I don't know what he thinks. I can't get comfortable with this strange being, with all his untransmittable thoughts.

“He's so tiny!” Adrienne says all the time, breathless with love, sotto voce so she won't disturb him as he nestles in the vicinity of her collarbone (he's asleep 90 percent of the time, it seems like). For Adrienne, tiny equals adorable. By that calculus, we could have bought a box of raisins and been done with it.

I sound heartless. Am I heartless?

Adrienne says that with vaginal births, babies tend to come out a little misshapen and bruised. Think about passing a large melon through a narrow canal; it wouldn't make for the prettiest produce. Hopefully, I'll love him later, when he's grown into a nice honeydew, though that wouldn't say anything very complimentary about my character.

It was a mistake, naming him Michael. It creeps me out every time Adrienne says it. But she's come to think it's the ideal way to honor my brother. Leah thought the same thing, and that's why she agreed. I must have thought it, too, in those couple hours when Leah and I were alone together. A lot of things seemed like good ideas then.

Leah hurts. She walks to the bathroom gingerly, and she comes back looking like she's been crying. I pulled a nurse aside and asked if that's normal, all the pain, and she said definitely, it's a swollen mess down there.

Three different lactation consultants have “stopped by.” That's what they say: “Just stopping by in case you have any questions!” They're obviously the ones with the question: “Why won't you even
consider breast-feeding, for the greatest start in life you can possibly give your little one?” Leah acts like an obstinate deaf-mute during these encounters, staring into the middle distance and shaking her head convulsively. It's the adult equivalent of putting your hands over your ears and chanting, “I can't hear you, I can't hear you!” So they start proselytizing to Adrienne and me instead. Adrienne nods pleasantly and agrees to take their pamphlets, humoring them as she would a Jehovah's Witness. Me, I keep out of it.

On the other side of the curtain, there's a family that's acting just the way they're supposed to. The mom is always breast-feeding (I know because their lactation consultant keeps showing up with remedies for sore, cracking nipples), and the dad is often singing to the kid (whom he calls “little man”), and their family and friends come by with balloons and flowers to have insipidly normal conversations (“It doesn't get any better than this, does it?” “It sure doesn't!”).

Meanwhile, our side of the curtain is often silent, except for Adrienne's occasional off-key lullabies and the low rumble of television. Leah's watching
Blade Runner
again, for the third time. I've offered to go out and buy her any DVD she wants (I'd welcome the errand), but she says she likes the repetition. Despite the fact that it's one of my favorite movies, I suspect I'll never watch it again.

Thankfully, all is well with mother and baby, so we're getting discharged in the next couple of hours. Another day, and I might have died of claustrophobia.

“Leah?” A woman of indeterminate age with lank hair has walked around the curtain. Her eyes are an extreme blue, in marked contrast to her overall nondescript appearance. Colored contacts, probably. “I'm Veronica, one of the hospital's social workers.”

“Yeah?” Leah eyes her with wariness and reluctantly pauses the movie.

“This must be Michael.” Veronica smiles over at Michael, who's taking a bottle from Adrienne.

“Yes, this is Michael.” Adrienne sounds as proud as if she gave
birth to him herself. She's proprietary already, and that makes me worry for her. He's not ours yet, though I have to admit, Leah's not showing any signs that she's going to take him back. She doesn't look like she's got anywhere near that much fight in her. With Adrienne, it would be gladiatorial, no doubt.

Veronica transfers her smile to Leah. “How's Mom doing?”

Radio silence. Leah's not making eye contact, and Adrienne looks none too pleased with Veronica's nomenclature.

“How are you, Leah?” Veronica tries again.

“Glad I'll be out of here soon.”

“Was there something wrong with your stay?”

Leah shrugs.

“If you don't mind my asking,” Adrienne says, smiling sweetly, “what does a hospital social worker do?”

“We do all sorts of things,” Veronica answers. “It's standard operating procedure for me to stop by before discharge.”

Again with the stopping by. “So you can . . . ?” I say. Her obtuseness is grating on me.

“So I can give Leah resources. There are postpartum groups she can attend, for example. Also, I'm here to assess.”

“Assess for what?” Adrienne and I ask at once.

“You're her aunt and uncle, correct?” We both nod. “I see that you're very involved. It's good to have family support.” Veronica casts a meaningful look at Michael, resting on Adrienne, having fallen asleep on the bottle. “But Leah's the mother, and I need to make sure that she has all she needs to take care of her baby.”

“We'll see that she does,” Adrienne says. “She'll be living with us for the next year.”

Veronica jots that down. “And the baby's father?” She's looking at Leah, but Adrienne answers.

“He's not in the picture.”

“I have to be honest,” Veronica says. “There have been some concerns. About the dynamics.”

I'd suspected the staff found our triad strange. So they've sent in the woman with the fake eyes to be real with us.

“What about the dynamics?” Adrienne asks, keeping her voice even. She's treading lightly.

“Well, what I'm witnessing right now. Leah's detachment. From the baby, from what's going on in the room.”

I look at Leah. She's either incapable of speaking or unwilling. I can't entirely blame the staff. She does seem detached, almost to the point of catatonia.

“Leah. Do you believe you can care for your son?” Veronica says it loudly, overenunciating. Of course it's the moment when the revelry on the other side of the curtain has ceased.

“I can care for him,” Leah says. “I just don't want to right now.”

Veronica clearly didn't expect that answer. I see her writing it down. “If you're depressed, that's not uncommon. We can get help for you.”

“It's not that.”

“What do you think it is, then?”

Leah looks at Adrienne and then at me. “I'm just going to tell her. Then she'll go.” To Veronica, “They're not my aunt and uncle. They're the adoptive parents.”

“It's an unusual arrangement.” Adrienne slips into the breach, her tone conciliatory, like we're so very sorry we didn't clue Veronica in to our personal business sooner. “Leah felt embarrassed, and we wanted to respect her wishes. She felt more comfortable calling us her aunt and uncle.”

“Adoption is nothing to be ashamed of,” Veronica says. “Many beautiful families are formed that way. It's not unusual, either.”

“Our arrangement's not the norm, though.” Adrienne smiles. She likes the thought of us forming a beautiful, not-unusual family. “Leah is going to live with us for a year, like I said. She wants to build a life for herself in California, and we're going to help her with that.” As if it's altruism on our part. I wonder if she's managed to convince herself that it is, if that's the story she wants to tell Michael someday.

Veronica pauses. That, her face says, is unusual. “Won't that be”—she feels around for the word—“confusing for everyone? Including Michael?”

“We're going to have very clear boundaries,” Adrienne says. “I'm a second-grade teacher, and I believe in boundaries.” It's something of a non sequitur, designed to establish her bona fides as a professional maternal figure.

“We've got this under control,” I say. “Leah knows we're going to look after her, and we're going to take great care of Michael. Look at my wife. She's already bonded with him.” Adrienne gestures toward the serenely sleeping Michael with her chin. “We've got a lawyer who's handling the contracts. There's nothing for you to worry about.”

Veronica doesn't like that answer. She stands up. “I have to run this past my supervisor. She'll help me decide whether social services should be involved.”

“Involved how?” Adrienne looks slightly alarmed. “There's no abuse here.”

“I didn't say there was abuse. I just . . .” She smooths her black pants. “I know you say the dynamics aren't concerning, but Leah seems depressed—”

“If she's depressed,” I say, “we'll see that she gets help. You're not listening. We care about Leah. She's been living with us for a while.”

“Oh.” Veronica isn't sure if that makes our situation more or less troubling. I can see her making a mental notation—more unusual behavior.

Leah looks straight at Veronica for the first time. “Have you ever had a baby?”

“No. But I've been working here for three years and—”

“So you've seen a lot, but you don't
know
a lot. I've been through, like, bucketloads of shit, and I don't get depressed; I handle it. You don't need to worry about me, or my baby. Gabe and Adrienne are my family now.”

It's the most Leah's said for the past forty-eight hours. It's practically
a soliloquy. I'm proud of her for standing up for herself, and for us, but I glance at Adrienne and she's feeling something entirely different. I don't know if it's that Leah called us her family or that she said “my baby.”

“I'm just going to page my supervisor,” Veronica says, “and I'll be back in shortly.”

“Is there a chance that Leah won't be discharged today?” I ask.

She must be able to hear my desperation. Fortunately, she seems to mistake it for a passionate desire to have Michael home with us. “No, they'll be discharged. Really, the most that'll happen is that social services will stop by your home periodically.”

More stopping by. At least we'll have our own door instead of a curtain.

But I notice Adrienne looks almost pleased at the thought.