Windfalls: A Novel (21 page)

“Those are your sister’s,” Cerise said, stripping off his finery, dropping the bangles back in a heap on the mattress, and scooping him up. “You better leave her things alone.”

She carried him, protesting, back into their room. Plopping him on their cooling nest of blankets, she unzipped his sleeper, unpeeled the tabs on his soggy diaper, and tried to fit a dry one onto the wriggle he became each time she changed him. Then, his diaper finally fastened and his sleeper rezipped, Cerise lifted him from the mattress and carried him out to the sofa.

“Mama needs a shower,” she said, flicking the remote until two dueling space aliens appeared on the TV screen. “Be a good boy, and watch this till I’m done.”

In the shower the heat of the pounding water made her skin red, although the parts of her the water didn’t reach were puckered with cold. She’d used the last of the shampoo two days before, and now she filled the empty bottle with shower water, shook it, and poured the limp soup over her head. Wadding her heavy hair at the back of her neck, she tried to make it lather, calculating, as she scrubbed her scalp, when she’d next be able to afford shampoo.

She stepped out of the shower stall and, shivering, grabbed a towel. “Trav?” she called, “Are you okay?”

It was not yet six, and she was already late. She could feel the tension gathering in her shoulders. She had a quiz in basic English today, a child-development test tomorrow, and a report about her observations of three-year-olds due at the end of the week. She had to put in four hours at the school day care, and then had to retrieve Travis from the Happy Factory before it closed at six, had to feed and bathe him, to play the games with him that she hadn’t been able to play with him all day, had to rinse out clothes for both of them in the salad-bowl-size sink because there was no money for the Laundromat, had to nurse Travis to sleep and then study until the words on the pages of her textbooks blurred into her dreams, had to do all that today so she could do it all again tomorrow.

As she yanked on her clothes in the bedroom, Cerise could hear above the TV the electronic voice of Travis’s laser power blaster commanding,
Attention. Drop your guns. Fire,
and then, a second later, proclaiming,
Target
. It sounded a little slow, the voice wearier than it had been the day before. Even though Travis would probably have another tantrum, Cerise hoped that meant the battery Melody had got for it was finally wearing out. She hated that toy. She still resented the fact that Jake had given it to Travis instead of buying him diapers or food or clothes, and it worried her that Travis loved it so much. She wondered what it meant to him when he pointed the barrel at her and pulled the trigger. In her child-development textbook it said that toddlers had no concept of the permanence of death, that they couldn’t tell fantasy from reality. But she couldn’t figure out whether that meant that every death was pretend, or that everything that Travis imagined was real.

From the front room there was a crash, a long moment of silence, and then the inevitable exhalation of Travis’s wail. Dropping her sweater, she ran from the bedroom to find Travis flailing beneath a collapsed stack of boxes.

“Goddammit,” she screamed, snatching him up from the floor by his shoulders so that he dangled from her hands. At the sound of her anger, he cried louder.

“Look what you’ve done,” she shrieked. She wanted to shake him, to hurt or frighten him. She wanted to make him cry. For a poisonous second she wanted to drop him and walk out the door, to run off as Melody had, into a fresher, easier, more promising life. But suddenly her own tears needled their way into her eyes, and she pulled him against her chest instead, held him close while her face twisted with the effort of not crying.

Startled by her silence, Travis quit bawling to squirm around in her arms. Peering up at her in concern, he said in a worried voice, “Mama? Owie?”

“It’s okay, baby,” Cerise answered, pressing her face into his little shoulder.

“Mama? Bannay?” Travis asked. For a moment she held him close enough to feel the calm, firm bones beneath his flesh, and then, releasing her grip, she answered, “No, Trav. Mama doesn’t need a Band-Aid. It’s okay. I’m all right. Come on, buddy—we’ve got to hurry. We can’t be late.”

Back in the bedroom she traded Travis’s sleeper for a clean T-shirt, a pair of sweat pants, and his Batman jacket. She counted three more diapers into his diaper bag, and tried not to wonder where the next package of diapers would come from. She replenished the supply of wipes, searched for two clean socks and for his shoes while Travis practiced the words his laser power blaster was teaching him, “Tentin. Fie-o. Tawgit.”

Cerise turned on the burners of the stove and laid a slice of bread on top of each of them. When the slices were branded with the elements’ spirals, she snatched them off and wiped them with peanut butter. Travis’s she cut in strips and set on a plate for him to eat while she studied for her quiz. Hers she swallowed without tasting while she tried to memorize the rules for apostrophes.

When the phone rang, Cerise was writing “the men’s cars” in the final blank of the study sheet, and Travis was watching space aliens destroy the universe. Someone was selling something, she thought, as she rose to answer.

“Hello?” she said.

“Mom?”

Cerise made a noise into the receiver, a gasp involuntary as a belch.

“Mom?” the voice said again. “Is that you?”

“Melody?” she answered. “Where are you? Are you okay?” She clutched the receiver in both hands, careful not to drop it or make any sudden moves, as though Melody’s voice were a feral kitten she might accidentally scare off.

“I’m fine,” Melody said. “I got a lot of poison oak. But I’m fine. I’m having fun.” The phone-voice laughed, and it was both amazing and appalling that Melody could laugh, could even think of having fun.

Cerise croaked, “Poison oak?”

“I was gathering firewood,” Melody explained, “after dark.”

“Where are you?” Cerise repeated. “Where are you calling from?”

They were staying in the state park north of the city, Melody said, the whole tribe of them, in a campground on the mountain.

“It’s so beautiful,” Melody said. “Real woods, with trees and everything. You and Travie should come up sometime, and visit.”

They slept in tents and on Tree’s school bus. They ate their meals all together. The guys were talking about starting a band, and Melody had seen a deer. She’d found a puppy, a little black one she’d named Circle.

When Cerise asked how she was paying for food, Melody laughed again. Tree was giving lots of tattoos, she said, and as soon as they got settled somewhere, she was going to start painting murals. She’d realized her artwork deserved a lot of space.

“Everybody shares their food. We take care of each other,” Melody said, and added with a mixture of awe and pride, “we’re a family.”

“You left a family,” Cerise answered, coldly enough to hide her hurt.

There was a silence so long and dense it seemed that Melody had vanished once more. Then she asked, “How’s Travie? Does he miss his Meedee?”

Of course he misses you, Cerise wanted to say. But I miss you more. She wanted to say she was sorry, wanted to ask Melody to please come home. But she was afraid of how the meanings of her words would be altered once she spoke them, like the nail polish Jake had given Melody that changed color when it was exposed to light. And she was afraid of how Melody might answer, afraid of the hurt she’d have if Melody told her no.

She said, “Trav’s okay. But we’re late. I’ve got to go. We’ll miss our bus.”

D
URING THE TWO WEEKS THAT
A
NNA AND
E
LIOT SPENT ENCAMPED IN
the neonatal intensive care unit, it came to seem more like a home than the unfamiliar house they stumbled back to every night. They discovered where the quietest restrooms were, and which foods from the cafeteria were most nearly edible. They learned which babies were the sickest, which families seemed the sanest, which nurses were the friendliest. They learned what all the machines were for, learned which numbers they should hope for when the monitors gave their readings, what words to dread when test results came back. Anna even learned to find a kind of comfort in the corny posters above the nurses’ station and in the row of stuffed animals that adorned their desk.

Sally left a decorating job half finished to fly down and stay with Lucy, who was too young to be allowed in to see her baby sister. But Anna was so absorbed in her newborn’s struggle, she hardly noticed when Sally arrived. The first three days of Ellen’s life, the alarm on her respirator rang so many times that Anna got almost used to the sickening flush of terror that swept over her each time it sounded. It came to seem almost routine for her and Eliot to be shuffled into the hall until the crisis had passed, almost routine when, after a wait as excruciating as drowning, a nurse came out to tell them it was okay to go back in. Anna grew used to the sight of tears on strangers’ faces, and she became so accustomed to seeing babies attached to lines and tubes that once or twice she nearly panicked when, on her way through the hospital, she passed an open doorway and caught a glimpse of a newborn lying unencumbered in a bassinet and breathing on its own.

Adrenaline kept her body jangling with unspent tension, but instead of fighting or fleeing, instead of building a palace in a single day or slaying a dragon or separating kernels of wheat from grains of rice, she could only fit the shields of the hospital’s milk pump over her stiff breasts and let it suck her empty. She could only stroke Ellen and whisper that she loved her. She could only wait and hope. But surrounded by sick babies and their frightened parents, she began to wonder if hope were any more than desperation’s twin. After days of incessant hoping, hope seemed like the hardest labor yet, more harrowing and demanding than giving birth had ever been.

Then suddenly the neonatologist was signing the papers to send Ellen home. “She’s basically a healthy little girl,” he explained to Eliot and Anna as he passed Ellen’s chart to her beaming primary nurse. “But her lungs will still be susceptible to infection for a year or so. You’ll need to try to limit her exposure to viruses. Keep an eye on her, and she should be just fine.”

“We’ve been very lucky,” Anna answered, gratefully bending to claim Ellen from the bassinet she had graduated to once she proved she could breathe on her own. Anna and Eliot thanked the nurses with hugs and candy, said good-bye to the other parents, and then left, walking out of the hospital into the blaze of midmorning sunshine, the first living light that Ellen had ever seen.

But surviving a catastrophe meant that life went on. Sally flew home the next day, and Eliot, who had stolen time he could not spare from his new job to keep the vigil beside Ellen’s isolette, vanished into his work.

“Now you can go back to your normal life,” Ellen’s primary nurse had exclaimed as she hugged Anna good-bye. But alone in a strange city with a weak-lunged newborn and a lonely first-grader, Anna realized she had no normal life to return to. Stranded in a house that did not feel like hers, in a place that was a thousand miles from her home, it was hard for her to keep in mind how lucky they had been.

On the websites Eliot found about meconium aspiration syndrome, other parents had written that having a sick baby had shown them how truly precious life really was, how they should never take a single second for granted. But instead it felt to Anna as if life were now too precious to relax into, too precious to be enjoyed. Home from the hospital, everything still felt dire and off-kilter, as though another greater crisis were looming.

“Look at me!” Lucy announced on Monday morning as Anna was leaning against the counter, buttering a toasted bagel for Lucy’s breakfast. She looked up to see Lucy entering the kitchen, wearing the dress Eliot’s mother made for her sixth birthday party instead of the school clothes Anna had set out for her.

Ellen had been awake since two, and Anna had been awake with her, rocking her and nursing her and trying not to panic when Ellen cried so hard that she began to cough. Now, at seven-thirty, Ellen had at last fallen into a fretful sleep, and Anna had just managed to ease her out of her arms and into the baby seat on the counter. “Shhh,” she said to Lucy, casting a fearful glance in Ellen’s direction. “That’s a lovely dress,” she added softly. “But you can’t wear it to school.”

“Why not?” Lucy asked, spreading the pink skirt like wings between her outstretched hands and bending her head to study it. A panel of smocking lay across her flat chest, and a wide pink ribbon encircled her sweet belly. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, she was so beautiful, so purely and unabashedly herself, that for a moment Anna was almost able to lose herself in admiring her daughter. But then she remembered that school started in less than an hour, that traffic could be bad on Monday mornings, that Lucy hadn’t yet had breakfast. She remembered what happened the last time Lucy wore a special dress to school, and she said, “You’ll ruin that dress if you wear it to school.”

“No, I won’t,” Lucy answered passionately. “I love this dress. I wouldn’t never ruin it.”

“Keep your voice down,” Anna said. She felt thin and gritty and bubble-headed. “You wouldn’t mean to ruin it. But it would just happen. Remember when you wore your Christmas dress to kindergarten?”

“I was a baby then,” Lucy said indignantly. “And besides, it was a accident.”