The First Bad Man (16 page)

“I need that water!” I yelled.

He bent down and calmly unlaced his tennis shoe. “There’s already hot water in the bedroom,” he said, dropping his shoelace in the mug. “I don’t think you have any string, but this will do.” He was rolling up his dirty sleeves and washing his hands at the kitchen sink with brisk authority.

Clee bellowed in the other room.

“Do you really know how to do this?”

He nodded modestly. “I do.”

I studied his face. It was not soft or deranged; his eyes were clear, his brow almost hawklike, though overly tan from outside living. A fine surgeon who fell from grace—malpractice, destitution, homelessness. I didn’t verify any of this, just followed him into the bedroom. He gently placed the mug on my dresser, beside a steaming bowl. The scissors and olive oil were waiting, and a stack of towels. The floor was covered with black plastic garbage bags. I smiled weakly with relief.

“You’ve done this before.”

His brow furrowed and he started to speak, a response that already sounded terrifyingly longer and more complicated than
Yes
. Clee screamed, crawling into the bedroom on her hands and knees.

She was yelling that its crown was showing. A royal baby. She meant he was crowning, but he wasn’t.

I explained about how we were in Rick’s hands and also how he had washed his hands. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the swarm of doubt flying around the room. But she was past all that.

“Can I really push now? I want to get it out.”

My heart jumped. It. I had forgotten about the baby. Until then she had been giving birth to birth—to contractions and noises and liquids. There was someone in there.

We gave her water and Recharge energy drink and a little bit of honey. I had forgotten these things earlier but with Rick here it was easier to think. He suggested I wash my hands before the next contraction. But it was too late. She squatted and with an unearthly scream her legs slowly split apart to reveal a perfect wedge of head. Clee reached down and touched it.

“There’s no face,” she said.

Rick took my palms and squirted Purell into them. He waved his hands in the air to indicate I should do the same. We flapped our hands. Clee suddenly reclined and seemed to fall asleep. I raised my eyebrows at Rick and he made a smooth gesture with the flat of his hand, indicating that this was normal. He put his face in front of her and in a low, unfamiliar voice he said, “It comes out on this push.” Clee opened her eyes and nodded obediently, as if they shared a long history.

“Big breath in,” said Rick. She took a big breath in. “Release it with noise and push. Harder.”

It came out with a gush of fluids and Rick caught it. A boy. He looked dead, but I knew from the birth videos we watched in class that this was normal. The silence was terrible, though. And there was a foul smell. Rick tipped the baby to the side and he coughed. And then he squawked. Not like a person making his first sound ever, but like an old crow—a bit tired, a bit resigned. Then silence again. Rick lay the baby on the floor and cut the umbilical cord with a seasoned swipe of my nail scissors. He tied his sanitized shoelace onto the baby’s stub. Clee tried to stand and fell into a convulsive squat. A pile of gizzards dropped from between her legs. The placenta. She leaned back against the bed. “You take him.”

He weighed almost nothing. His legs were covered in green slime, like pea soup, and his eyes rolled upward like a drunk old man trying to get his bearings. A pale, drunk old man with floppy arms and legs.

“He’s pale, isn’t he?” I said.

I looked at Clee’s skin, tawny even now.

“You’re not pale. Is his dad pale?”

I tried to think of all the very pale men in Clee’s world. The baby was so fair it was almost blue. Who that we know is blue? Who, who, who do we know that’s blue? But this question was just a funny costume, a silly clown nose on the real thought I was having.

“Call 911,” I said.

Clee lifted her sleepy head and Rick froze.

The phone was by his knee; he picked it up slowly.

“Pea soup. We learned that in class. It means something bad. Call 911.”

The baby was darker blue now, purple almost.
Seconds
, I was thinking,
we’re down to seconds
. Suddenly there was a feathery sound like giant wet wings unfurling—it was Clee’s body unsticking from the plastic garbage bags. She was standing. Her big hand tore the phone away from Rick. She dialed and said the address, she knew the zip code, she knew the cross street, the dispatcher was giving instructions, she clearly relayed each one—“wrap him in a towel,” “cover the top of his head,” and I completed each task with an unusual fluidity, as if we’d been working on this scenario for years, this baby-saving simulation, and now was our chance to perform it. Rick watched from the corner, disheveled and shrunken; he was the homeless gardener again.

The ambulance people yelled and threw equipment around like a swat team. A beige blanket was wrapped around Clee. An athletic-looking older woman was counting over the baby. Maybe keeping track of how many seconds it had been since he’d died. She would never stop, she would count forever if that’s how long he was dead for.

Rick handed me a Tupperware container just before I got in the ambulance.

“I washed it off,” he cried. “It’s clean.”

Spaghetti
, I thought.
Kate’s spaghetti in case we get hungry.

CHAPTER TEN

Something huge was inserted into his tiny throat. A cord was implanted in his raw belly button. He was covered in white stickers. A net of cables and tubes was woven between him and many loud, beeping machines. There was hardly enough baby to accommodate all the things that had to go into him.

“Do you think they know?” Clee whispered from her wheelchair.

We were gripping each other’s hands between the folds of our white hospital gowns—a small hard brain formed by our interlocking white knuckles. I peeked around at the nurses. Everyone knew that this baby was up for adoption.

“It doesn’t matter. As long as
he
doesn’t know.”

“The baby?”

“The baby.”

But there was no thought more horrible than this baby fighting for his life not knowing that he was completely alone in the world. He had no people, not yet—legally we could walk out the door and never come back. We stood there like mesmerized criminals who had forgotten to flee the scene.

My own brain and its thoughts were just distant noise. What mattered was that every few seconds she or I would tighten the fist, which meant
live, live, live
. A bag of blood was rushed in; it was from San Diego. I’d been to the zoo there once. I imagined the blood being pulled out of a muscled zebra. This was good—humans were always withering away from heartbreak and pneumonia, animal blood would be much tougher,
live, live, live
. A beefy man in scrubs motioned us over.

“He’s critically stable. If he starts to desaturate you’ll need to leave him alone.”

He showed Clee how to put her hands through the holes in the clear plastic incubator. The baby’s palm miraculously curled around her finger. That’s just a reflex, the man said.
Live, live, live
.

Clee was mumbling a rolling chant that I could barely hear; at first it sounded like a prayer, but after a while I realized it was just “Ohhh, sweet boy, oh, sweet baby boy,” over and over again. She only stopped when the head doctor came over, a tall Indian man. His face was gravely serious. Some people’s faces always look this way, it’s just how they’re raised. But as he talked it became clear he wasn’t one of these people.
Meconium
was repeated several times; I remembered the word from birth class: excrement. Meconium has been
aspirated
leading to PPHN. Or PPHM. He was talking slowly but it wasn’t slow enough.
Nitric oxide. Ventilator.
We nodded again and again. We were actors nodding on TV, bad actors who couldn’t make anything look real. He finished with the words
closely monitored
. We forgot to ask if the baby would live.

A toothy young nurse with glasses suggested Clee lie down in a receiving room on the Labor and Delivery floor. Clee said she was fine and the nurse said, “Actually, you’re bleeding a lot.” The back of her gown was soaked through. She fell back into the wheelchair, suddenly not fine at all. Her eyes were strangely sunken. They would call us, the nurse said, if anything changed. We looked at each other darkly. If we didn’t leave, then we couldn’t get a terrible phone call.

“I’ll stay,” I said, and Clee was rolled out the door.

I was afraid to look at him. There were ten or fifteen other babies, each one hooked up to a beeping machine that regularly burst into alarm; the alarms overlapped, creating an undulating chaos. On the other side of the NICU another team of doctors and nurses surrounded something small and unmoving. Its parents stood apart from each other to let all of us know the other one was to blame and would never, ever, be forgiven, for all eternity. Their prayer was rage. The mother looked up at me; I looked away.

Without Clee’s hand to hold, my thoughts were terrifyingly unbound. I could think anything. I could think:
Why am I here?
And:
This is going to end in tragedy.
And:
What if I can’t handle this, what if I lose my mind?
I started crying giant wet tears.

Ha. I was crying.

It was easy now, stupidly easy. I wiped my nose on my hands, contaminating them. I went back out to the foyer and washed them again; the hot water on my skin made me homesick. This time I was asked to sign in. For
Relationship to the baby
I wrote
grandmother
because that’s who everyone thought I was.

I forced myself to look at the tiny gray body. His eyes were shut. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t deduce, from the beeps and the sound of feet on linoleum, that he was in a hospital. He didn’t know what a hospital was. Every single thing was new and made no sense. Like a horror movie, but he couldn’t even compare it to that because he knew nothing about the genre. Or about horror itself, fear. He couldn’t think,
I’m scared
—he didn’t even know
I
. I shut my eyes and started humming. It was easier to do back at home, when he was still inside her. That time now seemed like a silly TV show, the three of us floating in a daze, believing we would always be safe. This here was real life. I hummed for so long I started to get dizzy. When I opened my eyes, he was looking right at me. He blinked, slowly, tiredly.

Familiarly.

Kubelko Bondy.

I smoothed my hospital gown and tucked my hair behind my ears.

I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know it was you until now
,
I said. He gave me the same warm look of recognition that he’d been giving me since I was nine—but exhausted, like a warrior who has risked everything to get home, half-dead on the doorstep. Now it was unbearable that he should be lying untouched except by needles and tubes. I opened the circular doors and carefully held his hand and foot. If he died he would die forever; I would never see another Kubelko Bondy.

See, this is what we do
,
I began,
we exist in time. That’s what living is; you’re doing it right now as much as anyone.
I could tell he was deciding. He was feeling it out and had come to no conclusions yet. The warm, dark place he had come from versus this bright, beepy, dry world.

Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works.
And in case he wasn’t into nature, I added:
And it’
s a really wild time in terms of technology. You’ll probably have a robot and that will be normal.

It was like talking someone off a ledge.

Of course, there’s no “right” choice. If you choose death I won’t be mad. I’ve wanted to choose it myself a few times.

His giant black eyes strained upward, toward the beckoning fluorescent lights.

You know what? Forget what I just said. You’re already a part of this. You will eat, you will laugh at stupid things, you will stay up all night just to see what it feels like, you will fall painfully in love, you will have babies of your own, you will doubt and regret and yearn and keep a secret. You will get old and decrepit, and you will die, exhausted from all that living. That is when you get to die. Not now.

He shut his eyes; I was wearing him out. It was hard to lower the pitch of my mind. The Asian nurse with the glasses went on her lunch break and was replaced by a pig-faced nurse with short hair. She looked me over and suggested I take a break.

“Get something to eat, walk around the block. He’ll be here when you get back.”

“He will?”

She nodded. I didn’t want to push it by asking if he was going to live in general, or just until I got back. And if I didn’t go would he still live?

I’m going away, but just for a short time.
It was impossible to leave him.

I left him.

My guilt was cooled by relief: it was good to be out of that terrifying, earsplitting room. I followed the signs to Labor and Delivery, dazed by the calm hallways filled with business as usual.

There was some confusion at the nurses’ station.

“What did you say her name was again?”

“Clee Stengl.”

“Hmmm. Hm, hm, hm, hm, hmmmm.” The chubby nurse clicked around on a computer. “Are you sure you have the right hospital?”

“They told her to come down here, in the NICU, she was—” I gestured to the back of my pants to indicate bleeding. I remembered her sunken eyes and suddenly felt that Clee was in great danger, fighting for her life at this very moment. An older nurse was reading a magazine and watching from a distance. I leaned my body over the counter.

“Are you searching . . . widely?” What I meant was maybe she was in an emergency operating room, or the ICU, but I didn’t want to say that. “Stengl. You might be adding a vowel between the g and the l? There’s no vowel there, she’s part Swedish. Very blond.” And just in case it would help, I added, “I’m her mother.”

The older woman put her magazine down. “Receiving,” she said quietly to the other nurse, standing behind her. “Two oh nine, I think. Home birth.”

The door to 209 was half-open. She was in a mechanical hospital bed, wearing a smock. A tube ran from her arm to a hanging bag of liquid. She was asleep, or not asleep—her eyes were fluttering.

“Oh good,” she said when she saw me. “It’s you.”

I sat next to her, feeling strangely meek and nervous. Her hair was in two braids—I’d never seen it like that. I thought of Willie Nelson or a Native American person.

“I guess he’s okay for right now. A nurse said I should go.”

“They told me.”

“Oh.”

It seemed like she had been in this room forever and knew everything about the hospital whereas I had been staggering around like a beggar.

“What’s that bag?”

“It’s just saline, I was dehydrated. Dr. Binwali checked me. He said I’ll be fine.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah.”

I looked at the ceiling for a minute. Now that crying was easy, it was too easy.

“I thought maybe”—I laughed a little—“you were dying.”

“Why would I be dying?”

“I don’t know. You wouldn’t be.”

It wasn’t an exchange we would have had before, but now we’d ridden in an ambulance together, listening to the siren from the inside. That’s when she’d first grabbed my hand.

A nurse came in.

“You pressed the call button?”

“Can I have some more water?” Clee asked.

The nurse went off with the pitcher, leaving a weird metallic smell.

I felt we couldn’t say anything, knowing she’d be back. She banged in again with the pitcher, her coppery smell redoubled. I waited, first for the nurse to leave and then for her scent to follow her.

“Can you get me something?” Clee asked. “That Tupperware?”

Kate’s spaghetti. It was on a plastic chair.

Clee peeled the lid off and lowered her head, sticking her mouth down into the container. She made her hand shovel-like and started pushing the food into her mouth. It wasn’t the spaghetti. Of course it wasn’t—Kate’s visit was months and months ago. I stood up and faced the window so I wouldn’t have to look at it. I could still see her in the reflection but not the bloody thing she was eating. What happens when you eat that much of yourself? She was leaning back now, just chewing, chewing, chewing. She had gotten too much in her mouth and now she had to catch up with it. The glass had an amber tint or film that made her look old-fashioned. It was mesmerizing, how different this woman was from Clee. Now she carefully shut the container, click, wiped her hands on a napkin, drank a glass of water, and leaned her head back on the angled bed. Her braids lay on her chest and she looked leaden with sorrow, like a picture from the Dust Bowl. You just knew her whole life was going to be hard, every second of it.

“If he lives,” she said, “will he be messed up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Amy and Gary won’t want him,” she said slowly. “What happens to babies like that, if they’re not adopted?”

She was looking at me now, in the glass. I was the same sad sepia color.

I sat with Kubelko Bondy through the evening, staring at his miniature fingers wrapped around my thumb. I knew it was a reflex—their hands would curl around a carrot—but I had never been held so steadfastly for so long. He grabbed at the air when I gently pulled away.
I’ll be back in the morning.
For now this was true.

I slept on a metal cot between Clee’s bed and the window. A baby cried in the night, on and on without stopping, and then was abruptly silent. A cart rattled down the hall and someone said, “Who?” and someone replied, “Eileen.” An alarm rang and was shut off and rang again before it was finally shut off for good. I slept for a minute or two and woke up as the old me, untroubled and dumb, until it came back like a floating carcass. Leaving him would be like killing someone and getting away with it. I’d be haunted forever. What was this life even for? It was over.

He was up there, alone. Maybe not even alive. I wanted to wail. Where was the real grandmother, the pastor, the chieftain, God, Ruth-Anne? There was nobody. Just us.

The cot was impossible. I sat up and put my feet on the floor; the mattress made a V shape around me.

“Are you leaving?” she whispered. “Please don’t go.”

“I’m not leaving.”

She raised her bed up. The motor sound was too loud.

“I’ve been having some bad thoughts,” she said.

“I know. Me too.” It was not a scenario where something comforting could be said, like
Everything will be okay
. Nothing would be okay, that was the problem. I stood up and reached for her hand; maybe we could make the fist again. She grabbed my whole arm.

“Really, don’t leave me here.”

Her eyes were huge, her teeth were chattering. She was in a mad panic. I pulled the blanket off my bed and draped it around her shoulders, turned the thermostat up though I wasn’t sure it was connected to anything. I filled the pitcher with hot water from the bathroom and made steamy compresses with the white hospital washcloth.

Clee wondered if she should call her parents.

“I think that’s a good idea.”

“You do?”