A Small Indiscretion (27 page)

T
HERE IS ALSO
, in the hatbox, a photo of our house, pasted onto the real estate flyer I plucked from a sign in the front yard that summer, when we stumbled into the San Francisco housing market with your Grandma Catherine’s money: “A striking classic Eastlake row house
(ca. 1885) on a tree-lined block in Noe Valley notable for its many handsome Victorian homes. The house’s façade includes a prominent columned portico, bracketed cornice, stairs with bold balustrades and newel posts. The floor plan is excellent and filled with light. 1800 square feet. Offered as is.”

There are three birth certificates in a single envelope, yours on top, with the grand name we chose for you—Robert Jonathan Gunnlaugsson—which right away in the hospital seemed too grown-up for a person so small, so we nicknamed you Robbie. There are, in that same envelope, three photographs, one of each of you, the official hospital photographs taken when you were born. Yours is the only face red from crying, presumably over the failed effort to feed during the first, difficult day of your life, when you refused to latch on.

This was unexpected. I had not even known it was possible a baby would not be able to breastfeed. We struggled in the hospital bed together, and your father lay on a cot under the single window in the hospital room in a pool of light, a magazine open over his chest, apparently fast asleep.

“Oh, dear,” the lactation consultant said, when she had pinched and squeezed and prodded. “Your nipples don’t come out easily, do they, hon? And does baby always have his tongue up on the roof of his mouth like that?”

From what pool of experience did this nurse expect me to draw an answer to that question? This was, after all, my first child. He had been born four hours ago. I was twenty years old. Was there not a note to that effect on the chart at the end of the bed?

“I wonder if you wouldn’t mind nudging my husband over there on the cot,” I said. “Maybe he can help us out.”

She looked at Jonathan, asleep in his pool of light.

“Oh, hon, let’s let him rest. He’s had a long night.”

She bent down and arranged my arms across my body, palms up, then she placed you in them and turned your tiny jaw toward my left breast.

“Will he suffocate?” I asked, suddenly afraid.

“He won’t suffocate, hon.”

Your mouth was in the right place but nothing was happening. You were not sucking because you were asleep. Another nurse arrived. She ordered me a breast pump and breast shields. The pump was to be attached to each breast for fifteen minutes every hour to train the nipples into the right shape. In between pumping sessions, I was to use a syringe to feed you sugar water from a tiny glass bottle so you wouldn’t get dehydrated. She didn’t want you having a bottle of formula or even water, because your mouth would form to the nipple and get in a bad habit. She put the apparatus over my breasts and turned the machine on. It made a sound like a sick farm animal, a sound like the end of life, not sustenance for it. When she took her leave, I spent some time staring at you. Your lips trembled in your sleep. You made little frightened noises, like the noises you made last fall, when you relived your coma dreams. Your face was all gentle curves—your arched brows, the sweep of your cheeks, the round lobes of your ears, the deep, squashed slope of your nose. You had wild dark hair sticking straight up from your head. Behind your closed lids were blue eyes, but they didn’t stay blue; they changed to a green just like mine.

Those moments watching you sleep were the first of many moments, many hours, many days, when time shocked me by changing—the minutes passing slowly and the days creeping forward, as if in conspiracy, but the years moving too fast. There was boredom, as I had never known it, alongside intense joy. Those were the bedfellows I was to carry with me through your early years, while your father went to work and came home again.

What I felt for you, then as now, was love like a kind of pain. Hot in my throat. Burning my eyes. I lay in the hospital bed and kissed your cheek hard. I was in a hurry to know you, to find out who it was your father and I had made, but I could see that I would not be able to rush you. I could see, also, that I would always be afraid; I would never again be free of worry, and that worry was necessary to keep you safe. Somehow this revelation felt like a blessing, not a burden or a constraint. How long did I stare at you that first day? So long that I worried you might have become dehydrated.

You opened your eyes, finally. I shifted you into one arm and reached for the bottle of sugar water. I opened the bottle with my teeth. I set it on the tray and it tipped over and spilled. You started to cry. Your father materialized beside the bed.

“He still won’t latch on,” I said. “Can you try to find another bottle of this stuff?”

“Um, okay. Where would I find more, do you think?”

“I have no idea, Jonathan,” I said impatiently.

He stood with his hands in his pockets and surveyed the room. Then he buzzed the nurse.

“Bring us a bottle of sugar water, would you?” he said. “Actually, bring us a six-pack.”

I handed you to your father. He laid you on the bed and unwrapped your blankets and changed your diaper and swaddled you expertly. Had he been listening, or watching, from his cot in the corner? Or maybe this was something he had learned in medical school?

“What I’m wondering …,” he said, but he didn’t finish. He hung the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the outside of the door. “Those nurses are kind of bullshit.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“It’s really a mechanical issue.”

“If you say so.”

He told me to sit up straight, and he squared my arm off at the elbow. He lifted my breast in his hand and pinched my nipple. “Hold it here,” he said, “upright.”

I did as I was told. He laid you in my arms. He held you against my stomach and turned your tiny face toward my right breast with the heel of his hand. You opened your mouth and I felt a pinch of pain and a tingling, then your lips sealed over the nipple like a plug fitting into a drain and I watched you swallow.

Your father smiled. He had not been asleep on his cot. He had been listening. He had been waiting for the right time to intervene in the care of his newborn son.

I smiled. Then I cried. Did I thank him? I don’t know. I don’t remember. But I was grateful.

Y
OUR FATHER NEVER
looks in the hatbox. He’s not sentimental. He never prays, either, as far as I know. I didn’t pray, until last fall. I don’t set out to pray now, but sometimes I find my hard hope crossing the line. In the hatbox are three baptism certificates in a single envelope, one for each of you, my reasoning being that it couldn’t hurt to usher you all into the world of faith, even if we didn’t actually believe. And it made my mother so happy.

There is also a photocopy of a pamphlet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that I found in the San Francisco Public Library when you were not quite a year old. I was ready to wean you by then. I was ready to sever the cord that tied what I ate, and drank, to you, but I was also terrified. Terrified to think that my body would be my own again, and that I could do with it what I wanted. I longed to be irresponsible, and free, but I was also stapled in place. I was madly in love with your bright cheeks and your ready
smile, and I was ever conscious of the bargain I’d made in the clinic before you were born. Everything, it seemed, my whole new life, with its burdens and its joys, depended on my holding up my end of that bargain.

In the pamphlet from the CDC, three definitions are highlighted, the ones I must have felt were most relevant. “Normal drinking” in women was a single drink a day, and no more than seven in a week. “Heavy drinking” was a habit of more than one a day. “Binge drinking” was four or more drinks on a single occasion. I did not highlight the definition of sobriety. I suppose I thought it would be easy enough to remember what that meant. After all, I’d been entirely sober for more than a year and a half.

A simple set of definitions from which one could derive a simple set of rules. That was the straightforward formula I relied upon to turn me into a grown-up, a normal woman. I followed the rules. I developed new habits, and the habits stuck. Not just drinking habits, but other ones, too. I learned to cook, and I put dinner on the table each night. I made it a habit to take you for a long walk across the city every day—at first in a sling, and later, a backpack. I read a half-dozen books on child-rearing, and made a point of mapping out the hours of our day so you could have regularly timed meals and naps.

I did not go to bars. I had no more than one drink a day. I found that if I was not going to have more than one drink, it was hardly worth drinking at all, and most days I didn’t. Not drinking became a habit that no longer required resolve. Over the years, it was just the person I became, and I can count on two hands the times I’ve consumed more than three drinks in a single sitting in the entirety of my marriage.

And then, in a single fortnight last year, I drank too much twice. It is a period I long to banish from the book of our history, but of
course I can’t. First, I let the flight attendant refill my glass again and again on the plane that carried me to London, and to my foolish indiscretion. Then, on the night of your accident, at the fateful dinner with Emme, I refilled my own glass too many times.

I haven’t had a drink since that night, when you flew from Emme’s car and nearly died. I wasn’t the one to put you in the car or drive it, but my lips were loosened by wine, and Emme’s temper was loosened by my words, and the memory of that dinner clings to me like a hangover that won’t end.

A
PHOTOGRAPH HAS
accidentally slipped into the CDC pamphlet on alcohol abuse. It’s the official race photo marking the first time you completed the Sharkfest Swim, across the bay from Alcatraz, when you were fifteen. I study the photo—your tanned skin, your wide smile, your arm raised in victory—and I remember how changed you were from the year before, when you had been a more careful, deliberate boy, conscientious to a fault, often worried and much too thin. Then you went away to camp that summer, and you swam across the frigid lake every morning and earned yourself a prize. You returned home with broadened shoulders and a plan to swim across the bay. Your father’s relationship with you changed. For a long time, I think he thought he could train you. He could control you with his hands, or his words, like he controlled the dogs. But now he could see, we could both see, the foreshadowing of the man you would become, a man who would take direction mostly from himself.

While you were gone that summer you were fourteen, Polly was born. You didn’t seem especially interested in her when you returned, at least not until she could talk. You had been more interested in Clara. I’d tried so hard for so long to get pregnant with
Clara; perhaps you couldn’t believe a baby finally conceived in vitro on the third try would indeed be the same as a regular baby. She was, of course. Then three years later came our splendid surprise—Polly—who was conceived without our even trying.

T
HE HATBOX IS
almost empty, now. The artifacts that remain are newer and cleaner, but still heavy with meaning and intent.

There is a photograph of the inside of the store my father took for the commercial real estate company that has let me the space for fourteen years. The photo documents the damage the claw-foot tub made when it fell through the floor in the hours before, or after, or perhaps at the exact moment of your accident. The tub was made from a single-piece casting of volcanic limestone and resin, already very heavy and made heavier by water the night of the accident. The subfloor beneath it, weakened by a leaky pipe, was further weakened when the tub overflowed. The subfloor collapsed, and the tub crashed through the ceiling, crushing the arc light, with its diamond bulbs, which had been displayed directly below. The water went on running for a day and a half, flooding most of the store.

You never saw the damage. You never knew who started the flood, or at least you never knew from us. And if you were told of her plan, the night it happened, the telling was wiped clean by the memory loss from your accident and coma. There was no reason to tell you during your rehabilitation and recovery. I’m not even entirely convinced there is a reason to tell you now.

T
HREE MORE ARTIFACTS
are all that is left.

The photo Mitch took of us at Christmas.

The letter I received two months ago, on Valentine’s Day, from
an elderly English gentleman. The one that was not the beginning of the story, but that teased out the hidden plot. The one that contained the words that made it necessary to write down all these other words.

And finally, the photograph I took at Gold Hill on the Fourth of July, of you and Emme, holding the greased watermelon between you. The only photo we ever took of Emme and the last one taken of you before your accident. A keepsake that might have told us a few things, if we’d had any idea where to look.

T
HE
F
OURTH OF
J
ULY
. Three quarters of a year ago now. You had not even been home from Northwestern a month. One of Jonathan’s authors had invited us to his neighborhood pool, in a place on the peninsula neither of us had ever heard of called Gold Hill. I might not have wanted to go if I’d known that seven months later, your father would move out of our house in the city to take over that very same author’s house and make Gold Hill his home.