Men in the Making (11 page)

Tammy swung her legs from the bed and shut herself up in the bathroom. "I'm awake," she said. "And it's not a dream. You don't know what the hell you're talking about, Raymond."

From under the door, a thin wedge of light spilled onto the bedroom carpet. Raymond hit his pillow and rolled to his side, but he knew he wouldn't sleep. He kept picturing Tammy as she was before the pregnancy, her dark hair spilling down to the narrow of her back, the way she cradled his head between her breasts and the fronts of her thighs when he tickled her, dipping his tongue into her navel. Two more months, he thought. The toilet flushed. Two more months and she'll be back to normal.

He got out of bed and leaned against the bathroom door. "Tammy?" he said. "Honey? I'm sorry, honey. Are you all right?"

"No, I'm not, Raymond! What have I been telling you?" She swung the door open and rested her hands on his waist. The air conditioner had kicked on and he felt the cool push of air from the vents. Tammy's cheeks were damp and flushed, her lips twisted into a terrible frown. Raymond pulled her head to his chest. He remembered the night of his twenty-fifth birthday, just a year after their wedding, when he'd been up all night with the flu. She had kept cool washcloths on his forehead and held him this way, his head on her chest, while his fever broke. And now? Now when she had been frightened from sleep?

Raymond put his lips to her ear, whispered, "You're gonna be just fine." She tilted her head back and her tongue split through her pasty lips. Her head dropped back into him, and Raymond felt the heat of her cheek soaking into his chest, sinking deep and expanding beneath the skin. He pulled her hair away from her neck and blew cool breath down her back. The tight hump of her belly pushed against his waist and he reached under her nightshirt, moving his fingers in slow, careful circles around her distended navel.

"That feel good?" he asked, and she nodded. "Okay, then," he said, and for a while, until morning, everything felt as it should.

 

Raymond guessed that Terence was nineteen, maybe twenty. A University of Texas cap was pushed up on his forehead, his hands raised like a surgeon awaiting gloves, wrapped and splinted from the elbows up. He smiled when Raymond filled the plastic tray with water and wrung the sponge. "No offense," he said, "but I been waiting for this and you're not exactly what I had in mind."

"You'll get over it," Raymond said, pulling the Velcro strips of Terence's gown apart at his shoulders. "We can't have you getting too excited."

Raymond worked the sponge down the boy's hairless chest, over his sternum and down onto his taut stomach. "Good to see you're awake, at least." The day before, in debridement, Raymond had struggled to keep Terence in place, his hands clasped in front of the boy's slight chest, his arms strung under Terence's stretched armpits while Doctor Dutch unwound the bandages. When the tweezers pulled a wide black layer of skin from his palm, Terence had turned his head back toward Raymond, a wet rage in his eyes. He hadn't said a word, too proud for even a whimper, and as the doctor scrubbed the backs of his raw hands, he'd passed out in Raymond's arms.

"It's the best way to go, I think," Terence said. "Wake up and it's all over."

"Might be," said Raymond. "Lean forward for me."

As Raymond washed the boy's narrow back, he worked the sponge slowly, tracing down the tight brown ridge of the kid's spine.

Before they'd married, on a scorching Saturday afternoon at Barton Springs, Raymond had watched three young boys playing in the cold water while he rubbed lotion into Tammy's back. The boys were splashing each other, karate chopping the water, slapping up arcing waves that glimmered in the sun as they fell. Raymond held thumbs on each side of Tammy's spine, counted the vertebrae as he slid his hands down toward her waist. She was so dark, shining with oil, that when Raymond circled her little moles with his thumbs—the one just under her shoulder blade, another down low on the rise of her hips—he found he was squinting. You're blinding me, he thought, and as he slid his fingers down her skin, watching the lightened trails fill in with the dark shade of blood behind tanned skin, she let out a soft, girlish moan under his weight. "I'm keeping you," she said.

After he finished, Raymond secured the Velcro holds at the shoulders of Terence's hospital gown. "Heard you got in a fight with a bonfire," he said.

Terence leaned back, his ball cap fallen over his eyes. Raymond righted it, pushing it back high on his forehead, and Terence smiled up at him. "Pretty stupid, huh?"

"Depends. What's your excuse?"

"No excuse, just a Fiji party. Lots of beer and food and some real honeys, Thetas most of 'em, and the fire, of course. Me and my pledge brother Andy were just goofing off, pushing each other around after he knocked a beer outta my hand." Terence lifted his elbows off the bed tray, frowned at the fingers curled toward his palms in their splints. "I just tripped, I don't know. Fell backward over the logs they had circled around the fire. Went to catch myself and planted my hands right in the coals. Next thing I know I'm in the back of this truck and I hear Andy screaming at the driver to go faster." Raymond wanted to speak, to assure the kid that he understood, but Terence was looking at his hands, shaking his head, and Raymond, managing only a slow nod, felt a pinch of inadequacy in his throat. As a teenager, after Hurricane Alicia had downed trees and power lines as far inland as his parents' house in Houston, Raymond remembered reaching across the kitchen table for the chimney of the lit hurricane lamp. He hadn't been thinking, meaning only to blow it out, but the rush of adrenaline clenched his fingers around the hot glass, and the white blisters rose even as he held his hand under cold tap water. It's not the same, he thought. The blisters had healed in a matter of days.

"I'm looking up at the moon," Terence said. "I'm thinking—just like a little kid, ya know—thinking it's following us, and there's this Theta with pigtails holding my head in her lap. She's looking down at me and almost crying, her eyes all wet and blue and she's saying to hold on. That's all I remember, her saying 'hold on' and my hands almost numb, not like a regular burn, where you touch a hot plate or something? More like my bones were baking under the skin."

Sitting on the foot of the bed, Raymond remembered the creaking of the rocking chair in the church nursery where he'd worked, the angry cries of a colicky infant he'd rocked for hours, her stomach tight against his chest. Even when she slept, Raymond thought, she seemed restless, squirming in his arms or under the cotton blankets in the crib. She'd looked healthy, her arms and legs fat and pink, but she couldn't lie still. She was always moving, her little stomach knotted inside her, cinched with spasms, refusing even in sleep to turn her loose.

"I tried to stay awake," Terence was saying. "I wanted to keep looking at her, but I kept passing out. Whenever the truck would hit a bump or brake real hard, I'd jolt awake, and I'd try to keep my eyes open. Tried hard so I could keep looking up at her, like if I closed them she'd disappear."

"Sounds like the perfect date for your next house party," Raymond said. "You'd be surprised. Sympathy dates." Even while speaking, smiling down at Terence, Raymond was imagining the girl in the pickup, her pigtails streaming behind her on some country road outside of town, the look on her face fading, growing lighter, translucent, then gone. Fading until the only thing looking down on him was the moon.

"She hasn't called," the boy said. "Don't even know her name."

"You will," Raymond said, but his mouth had grown dry, his tongue heavy and thick. He pictured the look on Tammy's face in those few minutes before they took the child away, when the nurse had held the blanket at her side before handing it, hesitantly, to Raymond. He'd been watching his wife. She was flushed, her face beaded with sweat, and though she knew the child was dead—had been told hours before—Raymond recognized her expressions: the raised brows, the muscles twitching in her long neck, the sad hint of hope in her parted lips. He remembered thinking the whole ugly world had gone silent, feeling a thankful leap in his stomach when Tammy screamed. "Aren't you even going to wash her! Clean her off, goddammit! Why don't you wash her off?" It was then, through the furious white echo of Tammy's voice, that he first knew that their nameless baby, colored with only the slightest cold tint of blue, had been a girl.

Before Raymond rolled his cart from the room, Terence asked him if he wouldn't mind coming back after lunch. "My mom's coming for a while, but she won't stay that long. So would you come by? I need kind of a favor."

Raymond gripped the cart's handle. "Sure thing," he said.

 

After lunch, Raymond waited for the nurses' lounge to clear out, and then he called. He propped his elbows on the cool Formica tabletop, held the phone tight against his ear.

When Tammy answered, her voice pulled low with the weight of drugs, he said, "Are you okay, honey?" There was breathing, the static
whish
of amplified air.

"Sleepy," she said. "My knees ache."

"That's the sedatives. Maybe we should try a day without it."

"Maybe, if you think. Would you stay home, then?"

Raymond thought of the apartment, of the way he'd paced the rooms and sat for helpless hours watching Tammy sleep. "Honey," he said. "You know I have to work."

"I know," she said. "But it's too quiet. You're the only good thing I've heard all day—you and the yard men doing the grass. You can tell the mowers from the weedeater, even from inside. And the blower, I think it was a blower."

"I'll be home in a few hours. You have the number, right? By the phone?" Papers or sheets, something crisp, rustled on the other end.

"I've got it," Tammy said. Raymond could hear her voice rising up to its normal pitch. He wanted to know she was all right, still his. He wanted to hear her say it, to hear
I'm keeping you,
to know she was awake and curled under the pile of blankets she insisted upon even in summer. He'd shudder, he thought. His scalp would tingle at the way her voice dipped low on
keeping.
On the back of his neck, little hairs would rise, and everything would be like always.

"Is she still there?" she asked. "Have you seen her?"

"Honey," he said, gripping the phone and sitting back so he could breathe.

"The baby? Have you seen my baby?"

"You know I haven't. She's at the funeral home. Remember?"

Something was moving inside him, pushing itself forward, and he felt it all coming up, bitter and liquid in the back of his throat: the warmth and tightness of her pregnant stomach pressed under his rib cage in bed; later, in the hospital, her lips twisted with induced contractions, the blue web of stilled veins under his daughter's eyes. He swallowed, but his saliva had grown old and thick. He stood up, picturing rippled water, oil beaded on skin, until he knew he could keep it all down. "We can get her when you're ready," he said. "Her ashes."

"I know, Ray. I just thought—I mean, I keep dreaming and there she is, you know? I just thought we could hold her, honey. One more time, maybe. I don't know, Ray. I just wanted to—"

And now Raymond knew she was crying, knew by the sudden dip in her voice and the short breaths between words.

"It's okay," he said, sitting back at the table. He felt suddenly calm, and he realized he'd been waiting to hear her cry, to have her sit up in bed, finally lucid, and get some more of it out. He remembered the way she kept turning her head toward the fetal monitor that Saturday, holding his hand and giving it a little squeeze whenever she imagined something had moved. But Dr. Rusk had known, almost instantly, from the moment he applied the sensors to her swollen stomach. And Raymond knew too, from the doctor's look of failure, the drop of his eyes to the floor when the monitor, instead of pulsing to life, had remained motionless, a narrow blue line cutting straight across the black screen. Still, Tammy hadn't cried—not when Dr. Rusk explained how rare these things were, a cord winding so tight around an unborn throat so late in the term; not when he gave them the option of c-section; not during his careful suggestion, his warning that a cesarean could complicate natural births in the future. No, the tears had come later, with Tammy's uncontrollable shivering and the fierce grip of her hands and the decision cried out in the rising voice of a frightened child. Her head shook in short jerky swipes back and forth, and her eyes looked strangely intense—sharp, with too much white around the edges.

Now, on the phone, her voice was hushed and broken, and Raymond leaned hard into the receiver, wanting to be there, to feel her breath swirling inside his ear. "You're okay," he said, and he knew, for the first time in days, that if she wasn't, she would be.

"And you, honey," she said. "How are
you?
"

 

After Mrs. Lane's debridement, Raymond went to the restroom and washed his face. The woman had done better this time, no screaming. "Can you believe it?" she'd said. "Kings of England? That puzzle on
Wheel of Fortune—
what kind of silliness is that?" And when Dr. Dutch asked Raymond how he was holding up, Nurse Taylor tilted her head and said, "Raymond, we just feel terrible," and Mrs. Lane had put both hands on the arms Raymond held around her waist. Now, Raymond dried his face with paper towels and hit the oversized button on the electric dryer, standing in front of it, listening gratefully to the motor whine, letting the hot air blow under the collar of his scrubs.

In the little girl's room, Melody's mother was helping her daughter with a cardboard puzzle. Raymond stopped in the doorway. The girl's legs were bandaged completely, wrapped in stiff white up to the waist. Her dark hair was a mop of tangled curls. Before she saw him, she snapped a puzzle piece into place and applauded herself. She looked up at her mother, followed her eyes to the doorway, and reached forward with both arms, screaming. "Mommy!
No, Mommy!
" Raymond caught the woman's eyes, pointed at his watch and mouthed, "
Sorry
... Thirty minutes."