The Rules of Inheritance (31 page)

THE RECOVERY IS much more painful than I anticipated. I was so focused on the procedure that I hadn't imagined what it would be like if I actually got through it.

 

I spend five days in the hospital while a winter storm rages outside the windows, whiting out the city. My stomach is too bloated to feel the baby kicking, but a kind nurse obliges me by letting me listen to the heartbeat once a day.

 

I drink in the sound.
Flump, flump, flump.

 

Because I am pregnant I can't take anything stronger than Tylenol and I spend those first few days curled on my side, trying not to move so that I can't feel the pain of the incision.

 

Late at night, after Greg has gone home and I am alone in my hospital room, the fluorescent bathroom light casting a beam across the floor, I think about my mother. I imagine all the nights she spent, just like this one.

 

In the last year of her life I was convinced that she wasn't trying hard enough. I thought that some part of her enjoyed being sick. That somehow being a cancer patient was easier than being herself.

 

Lying here in my hospital bed on this snowy January night, the pain in my abdomen like hot knives, I weep for my ignorance, and for the girl who so flippantly judged her mother.

 

A year or so before she died I walked into the living room one night to find her writing in a notebook. When I asked her what she was doing, she admitted that she was writing a journal for me.

 

We never spoke of it again, but one night, a few weeks after she died, I turned the house inside out searching for it. My father watched helplessly from the couch as I dug through drawers and tore through closets. I was about to give up when my fingers closed around something at the bottom of my mother's knitting basket.

 

A simple spiral-bound notebook with a flimsy yellow cover. There were exactly seventeen pages filled with my mother's looping script.

 

I took it downstairs and read it on my bed, barely breathing until I got to the last page.

 

 

 

 

 

She ends the entire journal with this paragraph:

 

I TURN THIRTY-ONE at the end of May, just a couple of weeks before my due date. I'm enormous, only further fueling the speculation that I'm having a boy.

 

June 6 comes and goes. Greg and I go on long walks through the neighborhood. Summer has yet to bestow itself upon the city, and I wear long-sleeved shirts and shiver beneath the duvet at night.

 

Labor starts just before I go to bed, four days later. The contractions are strong and regular and I sit on the couch, rocking back and forth. In some way they feel good. There is something deep and strangely familiar about them.

 

Greg will later say that our drive to the hospital was like a scene in a movie. I sit in the backseat with our doula while Greg navigates the stop-and-go Chicago traffic. I am eight centimeters dilated by the time I am checked out in triage, but everything looks good and we are given the green light to use one of the suites in the natural birthing center.

 

I ride the contractions like waves for what seems like an endless span of time but is really only a few hours. I am amazed by the intelligent design of them, the peak, the drop-off, how still and peaceful I feel in between them. I never once consider having an epidural.

 

If this is to be part of my narrative, I want to feel every minute of it.

FINALLY, JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT on June 10 the time comes to push.

 

It is the hardest thing I have ever done. During one of the early thrusts I feel the bones in my hips widen.

 

I am tearing in half.

 

I am ripping open.

 

I am bearing a child.

 

Greg is on my left. The doula on my right. The midwife poised before me on the queen-size bed, everyone waiting, everyone urging. And then in one final push it happens.

 

I become a mother.

 

Greg is there, his hands lifting our baby to me.

 

It's a girl, he cries. And then she cries too.

Invite your depression to pull up a chair with you in front of the fire, and sit with it, without looking for a way to escape . . . When you allow yourself to experience depression, it will leave as soon as it has served its purpose in your loss.

1997, I'M EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD.

I
AM SITTING IN a dingy bar in Atlanta with two of my coworkers, Riley and Nathan. We have just closed up across the street at the café where we wait tables. Riley is a waifish girl who smokes more than she eats, and her roommate, Nathan, is a flamboyantly gay black guy with a ready laugh.

 

We are all underage, but we hold cocktails in our hands all the same.

 

Before now I've never really spent much time in bars. In the next year they'll become darkly familiar places to me. I'll know exactly which bartenders will avert their eyes when I order, not caring how old I am. I'll learn exactly what I like to drink and how many drinks I can handle or not handle. I'll learn how to swirl my cocktail just so, how to close out my tab at the end of the night. But right now all of this is new. I order gin and tonic because I've heard of it, and I lean my lithe, young body up against the edge of the bar, muddling the lime in the bottom of my glass with a little red straw.

 

Riley and Nathan have a funny relationship, bantering back and forth for hours about nothing—bands, movies, common friends. They tell story after story about getting drunk, about the trouble they get into. I nod and pretend like I know about those kinds of things.

 

The truth is that their world frightens me. I can't share in their stories yet, and I am afraid to talk about the things I do know: my dead mother, how I've temporarily dropped out of college, or my elderly father who is at home by himself in front of the television.

 

I glance around the bar to see what the rest of my coworkers are doing. Although I've only worked across the street for a couple of weeks, coming to this bar has already become a nightly occurrence.

 

Another coworker, Lila, is over by the piano, flirting shamelessly with the balding piano player. She leans on one foot, laughing at whatever he's saying. In another corner, beyond her, I see my manager, a guy not much older than any of us, drinking whiskey with another waiter. One of them spills his drink across the table, laughs.

 

I keep scanning the room though. Looking for Colin.

 

Finally I find him sitting by himself on the other side of the bar. Both of his hands are wrapped around his drink and he's staring into space. I watch him for a moment and then push up from my seat. My body is humming from the gin and I glide across the room.

 

I ease myself onto an empty barstool next to him. He looks at me for a moment, then back at his drink.

 

We have something in common, I say. My voice feels like honey. The gin has made everything easy.

 

Oh yeah? Colin doesn't look at me, just takes a sip of his drink and waits for me to continue.

EARLIER TONIGHT A COUPLE of my high school friends had come up to the café. They recognized Colin from his picture in the paper and told me about his sister's murder. I had been captivated by the story, watching Colin as they talked, and feeling as though I was looking at someone who lives in the same solitary world I inhabit.

 

So what is it that we have in common? Colin finally asks.

 

I look down at my drink. Little bubbles from the tonic fizz upward in streams.

 

My mother died in January, I say.

 

Colin doesn't reply.

 

I heard about your sister, I say then.

 

He looks up at me, holding my gaze until I blush, look away.

 

Just then the bartender appears. What are you drinking? Colin asks me.

 

Gin and tonic.

 

He orders one and a vodka for himself.

 

When the bartender is gone and we're both sipping our drinks again, Colin looks back at me.

 

I like your teeth, he says.

 

I twist nervously in my seat, suddenly aware of how little space there is between us.

 

Um, thanks, I say.

 

He asks about my mom after that, and I tell him bits and pieces. I'm afraid to bring up his sister again. We sip our drinks and stare straight ahead as we talk.

 

Colin grew up in Texas but moved to Atlanta with his family a few years ago. He's three years older than me, which means he's actually legal drinking age. He was attending a local college and living at home with his parents but has dropped out of school and been sleeping on a friend's couch for the past six weeks. I take this to mean that he's been sleeping there since his sister died but, again, I'm afraid to ask.