A Necessary End (15 page)

I
t could be annoying, the way no one mentioned until the absolute last minute that Michael can't leave the hospital without a car seat. But for the past two days, I've been incapable of true irritation. Michael's like Xanax for me. It was that way even before he was born: when I'd rub Leah's stomach or look at the ultrasound pictures. All along, I knew it. He's going to make me into the person I was always meant to be.

Gabe's out buying and installing the car seat, and he should be back soon. Then we'll be able to take Michael home. I can't wait.

Another thing that could be annoying is the way Gabe chose the name, but he won't say it. He says “the baby” or, worse, “the kid.”

Yeah, it's a good thing I'm impervious to aggravation, or Gabe would be working my nerves. Like before he left, we were out in the hall, saying good-bye. I felt antsy. I didn't want to leave Michael alone with Leah any longer than necessary. Gabe asked me, “Do you think something's wrong with her?” He meant Leah, of course. “She says she's fine,” I answered, “and I'm going to take her at her word.”

Over the past weeks, she's let me know, in no uncertain terms,
that she doesn't need to be mothered. She's an adult, and she'll take care of herself. But Gabe seems more preoccupied with Leah than he is with Michael.

She is acting weird, though. The TV is turned off, but she's still staring at it, like she's projecting some movie from her mind.

“I'm going to take a walk with Michael,” I say, standing up. He's been drowsing in my arms since his last bottle. I adjust his blue knit cap and temporarily lay him down at the end of Leah's bed for reswaddling. I'm an excellent swaddler. I've been practicing on a doll, but I never let Gabe know. He would have thought I was getting my hopes up, i.e. setting myself up for a massive fall like last time. But I'm the one who's ready, not him and definitely not Leah.

Leah doesn't answer.

“Do you want to come with us?” I ask. “The doctor said it's good for you to move around a little. We'll go slow. This close to discharge, you can just put your clothes on. Then you won't get a draft up your ass.” I smile to let her know I can be her friend just like Gabe can.

“I don't want to wear those clothes.”

I hate to break it to her, but she still needs to wear maternity clothes. It'll take some time to tone up. Her stomach looks almost the same as it did when Michael was inside. Granted, she was carrying small, but he's a healthy seven pounds, two ounces. What a little stallion he is. I nuzzle his cone-shaped head.

“I don't want to wear those clothes again, ever in my life.”

“You say that now.” Wow, I sound like such a mom. Wait, I am a mom! I feel myself flush with pleasure. “I just mean someday you're going to meet someone amazing and you'll want to have your own family. Things are going to work out really well for you, Leah. You'll see.”

She looks at me with wide, dead eyes.

“Come on.” I smile. “Get up. Get dressed. We'll walk together. It'll be good for you.”

Lights are on, but nobody's home. So I walk Michael out into the
hall, cradling him so that he has proper head and neck support but is facing slightly outward. His eyes don't really focus yet, and they don't stay open long. Still, I give him the tour.

“This is the hallway,” I say. Along the wall, there are a ton of pictures of babies—some newborn, some up to a year old and emblazoned on holiday cards—and I point out the cutest ones to Michael. I'm pretty sure the newborns with the perfectly shaped heads were cesarean. I kiss the top of Michael's and whisper that he doesn't need to be jealous, he'll be beautiful soon enough. He is already, in my eyes, but I'm speaking objectively here. Right now, his head looks like a gourd.

We pass the nurses' station, where I pointedly ignore the one who failed to inform me of the car seat rule until an hour ago. I take Michael's little hand and wave it at the others.

A woman is walking toward us in her gown and slippers, her husband protectively holding her elbow. She manages to smile at Michael and me in an absent sort of way. I think how lucky Michael is to have me, someone who can be fully and immediately present. How difficult it must be to bond with your little one when you're in a kind of physical shock.

I dapple his head with kisses. He blinks up at me for a second, and I think, He knows just who I am. He knows I'm Mama.

We poke our heads into the waiting room. I'm feeling cocky, like I want to show him off. There's an entire family in there: a husband, grandma, grandpa, three kids. I'm about to continue my narration when the gray-haired, bespectacled woman rises with a smile and says, “Your first grandchild?”

Have I aged that much in forty-eight hours? It seems all the more egregious to be misidentified by that woman, who is herself clearly geriatric. “No,” I say. “He's my son.”

She looks embarrassed, her eyes flicking up and down the length of me. “Oh, I didn't realize . . . you're not in a gown . . .”

“We saw you when you first arrived on the floor,” the woman's
equally elderly husband says, clarifying. “When your daughter was wheeled by. We thought she was your daughter, she looks a lot like you.”

“Such a pretty girl,” the woman adds, like that's going to make anything better.

If I go out with Leah and Michael, I bet I'll get that a lot: people commenting on how pretty my daughter is, calling me a proud grandmother. They'll think it's a compliment when they tell me what a beautiful little family I have, three generations together in Safeway.

I smile and wave Michael's little hand at them to show all is forgiven, and we make our getaway. But I'll make sure we don't go out, all three of us, unless it's absolutely necessary.

It won't be a problem for Leah anyway. She's clearly not interested in Michael, she doesn't seem to like me much these days (if she ever did), and once she gets her strength back, she'll want to go off and have a life. We're on the same page, Leah and me.

He only needs one mom. Any more would just confuse matters.

That's why it's okay—advisable, even—for Leah not to bond with Michael. That means no breast-feeding, even if the hospital staff acts like it's a death sentence. “But he won't get the mother's antibodies!” one of them said, nearly aghast. Well, I didn't get my mother's antibodies, and that was likely a good thing. Drinking in my mother might have been toxic, have they ever thought of that?

Besides, formula today is way more advanced than it was almost forty years ago. He'll be awash in probiotics.

The main thing is, Michael is going to feel completely and thoroughly loved.

And really, even though Leah doesn't want me to, I'm looking out for her, too. She's way better off not getting too attached to a baby that isn't hers anymore.

I
've had some lonely moments in my life. But it's never been as pronounced, as unrelenting, as in the past two weeks, since the kid came home.

I was as prepared as I could be for the haze of sleep deprivation. But this feels like something else, something bigger. I've been horny practically every day for twenty-plus years, and suddenly, my libido's on vacation, or on strike. Adrienne hasn't initiated sex, and neither have I. It makes me realize how naturally it just used to happen. It didn't feel like the will of one person; it was the force of the collective. We were drawn to each other inexorably, like static electricity. But now, all that's between us is actual static.

No, this isn't just sleep deprivation. It's the start of a tsunami that's building offshore. I'm too tired to figure out how to stop it.

Adrienne says I'm hyperbolic when I'm exhausted. She might be right. But she and I have never been this misaligned before. When I cut the umbilical cord, was it really my connection to Adrienne?

I've been feeling Michael's presence. Not the kid, but the real one,
my brother. It's like he's waiting and watching. But I don't know if it's to warn me about what's coming or to gloat.

Unless that sound really was just a window slamming shut, and I'm conjuring up ghosts. The sleep-deprived mind can play plenty of tricks.

The kid's in his own room down the hall. Adrienne floated the idea of putting his crib at the end of our bed, but I told her if that's what she wanted, we could have left the pool table where it was. Now I'll be damned if I'm going to take it all apart and put it back.

Not that the pool table is the point. What was my point? I can't even remember.

I thought Adrienne would be all about women's liberation and gender equality and fairness, but no. She's fine with doing all the night feedings—all the feedings, period—and all the diaper changes. It's like he's a country she's trying to colonize. She needs to make sure her smell is in his nostrils as much as possible. She needs him to love her the best.

The funny thing is, she doesn't have much competition. Leah stays away, and the kid gives me the willies. Is it just the name thing? Is it his wizened old face? He looks at me, and I think, He knows, and I can't get away fast enough.

He cries in the night—three, four times. Adrienne goes to the nursery to feed him and always stays awhile. She sings, she talks to him, and her voice, it's just suffused with love. It hurts me to hear it. I want to feel that for him, but it's like I'm broken somehow.

The whole time she's gone, I can't go back to sleep. I miss her, and I miss my late nights with Leah, too. I can imagine that Leah's lying sleepless in bed just like I am, but I can't reach her anymore.

The first week after the birth, Leah barely left her room. She said she wasn't feeling well, but she called her doctor and it was nothing to worry about. She didn't seem to be eating. I thought she'd want to let me in (literally and figuratively) but she spoke through the closed door.

Then today, she flounces out of there, smiling, and says she has a plan. Adrienne's sitting on the living room floor with a blanket spread out and Michael on his stomach. She does that three times a day, says it helps him strengthen his neck muscles and prepares him for crawling. She reads books on infant development every chance she gets; she presents these facts to me like gemstones.

Adrienne looks up at Leah. “What's your plan?” I detect a tinge of anxiety.

“I'm going to pump my breast milk for Michael!” Leah casts the most cursory of glances down at him. “What's he doing?”

“Preparing to crawl,” I say.

Adrienne misses my irony. “You want to breast-feed? I thought we went over this.”

“No. I want you to feed him my breast milk. I can hook myself up to a machine and pump out the milk, and then you give him the bottles. I just need you to buy the machine.” She looks down at her phone and then holds it out so that Adrienne can see the screenshot. “The Medela breast pump is supposed to be the best.”

“Where's this coming from?” Adrienne asks. I can tell she's trying to sound open and friendly, but she's failing.

“It's better for him to get my antibodies and, you know, whatever else. My milk is way better than formula, they said so in the hospital.”

“They said that a week ago. Can you even produce milk now? I thought your supply dries up if you don't use it.”

“I just checked it out in the bathroom. I squeezed and, not to be gross or anything, milk totally spurted out!” Leah chuckles. “Plus, it'll help me get thinner quicker.”

Adrienne's expression morphs into one of understanding: So that's what this is all about, Leah wanting to get her body back, ASAP.

As if Adrienne at nineteen wouldn't have wanted exactly the same thing.

I can see Adrienne battling with herself—the stereotypical angel
and devil, one on each shoulder—knowing that breast milk is best (it was the nurses' mantra, after all) but not wanting the kid to have regular Leah infusions. After all, he already has half of Leah's DNA and none of hers. What happens, she wonders, if he keeps ingesting more Leah? What I can't tell is whether part of Leah's sudden elation is the knowledge that she's putting Adrienne over a barrel.

They might both be crazy, but someone's got to work around here. “I need to go,” I say, standing up.

Adrienne shoots me a look. She wants me to find a way out of her quandary, a loophole, a way she can be a good mother while denying her child Leah's breast milk.

I do get it. She just wants to be the kid's mother, 100 percent. But it ain't going to happen. She can't vaporize Leah—not now, not once the year's over. Leah exists, and she made the kid. If Adrienne would accept that, everyone's lives would be easier, including hers. But sometimes I think she's not interested in easier.

“I'm just so tired of being fat,” Leah says.

“You're not fat, you just gave birth,” Adrienne counters. I sense her lightly concealed irritation. She would have done anything for the chance to give birth. In her mind, it's an opportunity to prove your mettle, to be a superhero for a day.

“Yeah, well.” Leah shrugs. “Can you guys buy me the breast pump?”

Adrienne takes Leah's phone. “You did research? This is definitely the best one?”

Leah nods. “I read that breast milk can help prevent SIDS.”

Sudden infant death syndrome is on Adrienne's mind a lot. She's told me numerous times that 2,500 babies die of it every year. One day they're here, and the next—poof—they're gone, the life sucked out of them in the night. It terrifies her, the idea of no known cause, the randomness, the giveth and the taketh away. She puts the kid in something called a wearable blanket that zips up the front, so he can't get tangled and accidentally suffocate, and in his crib, he needs to be
on his back
at all times
. She says it just that ominously. I think part of why she likes the night feedings is that it's regular confirmation he's still alive.

“I'll order this for you,” Adrienne says. “Overnight shipping.”

I want to ask how much overnight shipping is, whether a cheaper model might do the job, if she thinks we're made of money, why she can't just put her ass in the car and go get the pump, but I know the most important answer. She hasn't left Leah alone with the kid yet, and she's too worried about germs to take him out anywhere, except for the fourth-day pediatrician visit. “The well-baby check,” Adrienne called it. He was well, though I know Adrienne hated having to take a backseat to Leah, who still has all the legal rights, including medical.

“You've got this under control,” I say, “so I'm going. Have a good one.”

I'm just grateful for work. No one there knows I even have a kid, and I'm planning to keep it that way. I called out sick for a week, and since then, it's been business as usual. I don't have anyone asking me how it's going with the new baby or waxing rhapsodic about the wee ones. I don't feel any pressure to lie and say he's the best thing that ever happened to me.

The kid sleeps eighteen hours a day, so he's hardly providing entertainment. He spits up every time he eats, so much that it's hard to imagine he's getting any nourishment, and he craps like eight times a day. Adrienne doesn't want me changing the diapers but she wants me to “be a part of the process,” meaning I have to hover by the changing table and consult about the size and color of his “poop,” as she insists on calling it.

She has a specific way of doing everything, and she utters it with absolute certainty. I guess she feels sure, since she's consulted five different guides to caring for your newborn. She says that we can never ever, even for a second, turn our back on the kid while he's on the changing table. I tell her he can't roll yet, where's he going to go? “That's how accidents happen,” she says, “when you think you know what they can't do, and then they surprise you.”

Funny, I could say that about wives, too.

She swears she can tell all his different cries: “I'm hungry” versus “My diaper's wet” versus “I'm hot or cold” versus “I have gas” versus “I am in some sort of inexplicable pain that will not be soothed no matter how long you rock me or sing to me.” Fortunately, we don't hear that last one too often; we dodged the colic bullet. But when he is upset, even if her ministrations don't seem to be making a damn bit of difference, she'll never put him down.

“I'm going to hold you no matter what,” she tells him. Over and over, she says, “I'm here with you.”

It seems futile, but the one time I said that, she glared at me. “He needs me.”

“What does he need you for right now? He just keeps crying.”

“He needs me to know he's not alone.”

I say, he needs to know he can pull his shit together, alone. That's what life is, and he might as well start learning it now.

But I don't say that out loud.

Adrienne thinks you can't spoil a baby. You can't make him needy, he's needy by definition; he's utterly dependent. Eerily enough, she seems to think that's one of his best qualities.