Let Me Explain You (32 page)

In her mind, what Dina was carrying was not a baby but a car battery. Being pregnant, like being high, was just another way that electrons zigged from negative to positive back to negative. When nine months were up, what she would push out would be a black box of energy. Still, Dina told herself, “When she gets here, it will all be about her.” In three months, when her firstborn arrived, Dina would go from idle to forward. No one ever told her she could do anything, but this—this, everyone said, was automatic. It was natural for her to make children.

“A woman's thighs, there are only two reasons for them: men hold on as they're going in, and children hold on as they're coming out.” She could not remember which man in her life had said that—father, husband, father's friends, husband's friends, strangers over Greek coffee. They had probably all said it at some point.

The wonderful part about being a mother, though, was that no one treated the thing inside her like a battery and no one treated her like the broke-down car. She could feel the pride and warmth radiating from her father. He rubbed the bump of her belly as if it were the back of his grandson's head. Her husband kissed her belly button as if it were his son's sleeping eye. Her mother was over all the time, calling the baby Blessing. And then she started calling Dina Blessing, and then she used Blessing interchangeably so that Dina wasn't sure which of them she was talking to. The real blessing, Dina thought, was how happy they all were because of something she was. A state she was in: with child. All she had had to do was lie back and it happened to her, their happiness. She had never been able to do that before.

Being pregnant had softened Stavros, too. They had fights still, but the bigger she got, the better he got. He came home straight from work to lie in bed and massage away her heartburn. He rubbed the fuzz at the top of her belly and said, “I don't think it's a child in there, I think it's a goat. You have my milk in there, little
kri-kri
?”

He talked often to his mother now. Dina would wake at two in the morning to robust Greek. Their hot personalities had a chance to cool over the thousands of miles of telephone line, their voices full of excitement rather than bullying. In Crete, the animals and fields had already been watered and fed, and his mother was gossiping about the village and prodding him about Dina and work. From the bedroom, Dina watched Stavros pull at the strings on the apron folded on his lap. She heard him say things like, “There is so much land here, but they carve it up into little pieces,” and “She looks fat and beautiful.”

Yes, when the baby came, Dina was going to change. She was going to keep this Stavros.

She did not have the heart to tell him it was a girl. He was convinced—they all were—that he would have a son. Dina had passed all of his tests. The Key Test, she picked up the fat end of the key. The Dream Test, she told him it was all snakes and stairs, when really it was moonbeams turning into moaning whales and lizards simmering, their tails hanging over the pot. At one point he was discouraged, saying, “You are carrying too high.”

“This is not high. I am just short.”

A Sunday morning, he pulled her out of bed early. The moon was still a chip against the brewed sky. She wiped her eyes and padded out to the kitchen. Sleep was ringing in her ears, but she could sense how excited he was.

He said, “You are far enough along now. This will tell us for good.” He had a
briki
going. He poured her a steaming cup of thick Greek coffee. “Drink, please.”

“I won't be able to get back to sleep.”

“Of course not. Now drink, and hang the question up in your mind: Is this a boy?”

She took a sip. She couldn't stand Greek coffee, the way it left grains in her mouth. She said, “How do you know how to do this?”

“My grandmother, when I was small. I watched her read
kafemanteia
. Any Greek can do it, if he knows what he's looking for.”

He picked up Dina's cup, even though it wasn't quite empty. He said, “Whenever a girl got engaged in the old days, the married women of the village would come banging spoons against their copper
brikia
, all the way up the hill to my
yia-yia
's house. They would shout at her—like a little song—Come Out Cup-Woman, Come Around Our Coal-Fire and Look Into Your Private Cup. Yia-yia sat with them in the dirt and said somethings like,
Watch out for a bird that presents itself three times
, or
Children with speckled eyes bring good meat to your kitchen.
Also,
There is a white rat near
,
keep it nearer
—that one she said a lot. I used to watch them from a corner.”

Dina wondered what his
yia-yia
would have been able to determine about her in the coffee grains.

Stavros held the cup out, turning it three times clockwise on its side, so the sludge coated the inside of the cup. He turned the cup over on a napkin and closed his eyes. She said, “What are you looking for?”

He opened them. “Anything, but especially animals, rivers, initials. Yia-yia always wanted to find a face, but it never came up.”

“What face?”

“Let me concentrate.” Less than a moment later, he was setting the coffee cup upright. He pointed at the inside of the mug. “Symbols on the bottom are the past. Symbols on the sides are present. Anything near the top is what is approaching.”

“What's approaching?” Dina pushed herself up to see. In her head, she said,
Show him whatever he wants to see. Show him three boys, if necessary.

“This is what's approaching.” He held the mug out. She saw a smear at the bottom, where his finger touched the grains. “You see the square?”

She nodded.

“That means a new home, like a foundation.”

“So a boy?” she said.

“Yes, of course. What else could be foundation?”

The baby came two months early. Stavros raced from work to the hospital, saying to himself, “We're going to lose him.” Speeding, treating stoplights like the flat, dumb faces they were, he made a deal with God about keeping the baby safe until he got there. When he made it to the lobby, he made a deal with God about keeping the baby safe until he could pick him up.

A nurse told him that Dina was sleeping, but did he want to see his daughter?

“Daughter?”

“She's small, but she's a fighter.”

The nurse brought him to the NICU, where the preemies were lying on their stomachs, wearing diapers the size of their whole bodies. Some were more robot than human. Some had skin that was not skin; he could see shadows of organs that he should not have been able to see. He averted his eyes until they came upon the one marked with his name. A day ago, his baby had been just a bump on Dina's body. Now here she was in the world, trying to breathe with a tube taped over her mouth. Her legs were tucked under her body. Her thigh was the size of his thumb.

Stavros put his face into his hands and squeezed. His son Stavros was not in his wife's belly as he should have been. His son was a girl who had been ripped out too early and put inside a glass box to incubate, the way a baby chick might. Oh, this was not a baby. This was 3.1 pounds, this was an egg. How would she ever stand, with legs so small as that?

“You're the father?”

Stavros looked up. It was the doctor. Stavros could tell, because he wore a white coat and glasses. “Yes, I am his father.”

The doctor came around with a clipboard, rested his hands on the glass case. If there had been no glass, Stavros observed, his hands would have taken up his daughter's face. “What's her name?”

Stavros blinked. “Stavroula.”

“We're giving Stavroula two liters of oxygen until her lungs have a chance to develop.”

Stavros nodded. He could see now she had only a little bit of lung, not strong enough to take breaths without the help of some machines. “What happened? Why is she alive so early?”

“That's what I'd like to talk to you about,” the doctor said, and led him to the hall.

“Dina, she is OK?”

“At the moment, resting.”

The doctor's office was filled with plaques and degrees and he sat in a leather chair, which made it easier to listen to him even though Stavros did not understand many of the words he used. The doctor said that their “goal” was to “minimize complications and promote normal development.” Stavros nodded. He liked the word
normal
. He crossed his legs. He said, “But this does not explain me why.”

The doctor took his glasses off. He said, “How long has your wife been addicted to drugs?”

Stavros uncrossed his legs. “I don't know drugs.” He had seen her drink, not too often. Cocaine, he knew nothing about. Ten weeks early, he did not understand.

“We need to talk about getting your wife help. If she's going to be a mother, she belongs in a rehab facility.”

Stavros did not understand rehab facility, either. The only place he saw Dina belonging was a hole. A deep one, so she had to dig herself out the way his daughter was digging herself out. He said, “How do we fix Stavroula?”

“We're monitoring vitals and weight gain. She'll need to stay here for a while.”

“Can I see her again?”

“Yes. Would you like to see your wife first?”

“The baby, please.”

He could not take this. He could not have his baby be so small. He could not accept feeling so stupid in front of this man, in front of all the hospital people, because all that time he thought that the baggies from Stephanie were baggies from the doctor. He reached the door and again was let in, and again was alone with the infants too small to be real. He took a deep breath, the first since entering the hospital. He put his hand on the glass top, exactly where the doctor's had been.

He said, “Stavroula, don't be shy.” The baby did not move. He stroked the glass.

He whispered, speaking in Greek. He said, “We all have a job to do, Stavroula, in this life. I will do mine, if you will do yours. I will protect you from her, from anyone. All you have to do, little goat, is survive.”

Dina's parents came and went. Her lunch tray came and went untouched. She watched them take away the baby. She was missing her child, she could not stop missing her, but she was afraid to hold her: a baby the size of a key. A keyhole. She tried the fit of the name on her tongue and was surprised to see that she could do it. “Stavroula.”

Dina sat up. Her feet worked, they were moving her toward her child. They were stronger than her fear, they did not care about her fear. She stopped at the entry to the NICU, took a step back so she would not be seen. At the door were Stavros's shoes. He had left work to come hold their daughter. He was here, in a green gown, in his socks, kissing Stavroula, letting only his bottom lip touch the very top of her forehead. He was not afraid of how small she was. Dina wanted to rush to him. She wanted to hold her baby now, instead of him, beside him. She was going in, she was ready. But she stopped. Stavros had begun to weep. He did not stop himself from crying, which was what she was used to seeing. He kissed the baby again, and a second, a third time. Each time, his lips barely touched her. She could not break this. She could not interrupt this moment where he was seeing, just as she had seen, how small and vulnerable their baby was. And yet—he was here, holding her.