Published in Before: Short Stories About Pregnancy from our Top Writers, Emily Franklin and Heather Swain, editors.
Dean goes to the window and stares at the dark parking lot, half-looking for Lise though she won’t arrive for another ten minutes. It’s after six and the lot is all but empty, just white lines glowing with new paint. He wonders what she’s doing right now. Finishing a snack? Or already locking up and heading for the car? Or, no: gathering their bed pillows and then heading for the car. Tonight is their first childbirth class, and the flyer said to bring pillows. He imagines them piled on her backseat—flowered, lumpy, faintly scented with the deep smells of bodies asleep—and he shudders. It seems wrong somehow, a broken rule of nature: no personal bedding outside the home, please.
She pulls in right on time, her headlights sweeping the wooden fence, and he shuts down his computer and heads out to the reception area, calling goodbye to Gregor as he approaches the elevator.
“Dean, Dean, hold on.” Gregor appears in the doorway of his office with a stack of CDs in hand, an amused look on his face. “I just want to give you a little encouragement.” Incurgement is how it sounds to Dean: Gregor’s from West Virginia, which shows up in about a fifth of what he says.
“Thanks,” Dean says. “It’s nice to know you care.”
“I do—in a kindly, avuncular way.”
Dean laughs: Gregor is thirty-eight to his forty-one, blond and robust to his dark and stringy. Gregor is about as avuncular as Dennis the Menace.
“Come on,” Gregor says, motioning Dean closer. “You want to be prepared, don’t you? It’s like anatomy class. When Jan and I went the woman had big illustrations and a pointer. She said, ‘This is the uterus, these are the fallopian tubes.’”
“That was in Morgantown,” Dean says. “This is Eugene, remember? There’s practically a street named Uterus here.”
Gregor laughs, but he’s looking Dean over all the same. “Everything OK?” he asks in a carefully blended mixture of concern and nonchalance.
Dean nods.
“Sure?”
“I’m fine,” Dean says. “Lise’s waiting, I’ve got to go.”
He pounds the Down button, then doesn’t want to wait for the elevator. The fire stairs are at the other end of the hall, and he takes off at a gentle jog.
“I want a full report tomorrow,” Gregor calls. “In exchange for bearing the lion’s share of our mutual burden here.”
Dean flips the bird over his shoulder, but he’s grateful: he and Gregor run a small company that publishes software guides, and this is their busy season, galleys to look over, a tight production schedule to stick to. Gregor’ll be here until ten or eleven tonight, easy. “You can’t have a baby in the fall,” he said when Dean gave him the news. He was kidding, but only just.
Outside, Lise’s Subaru is idling at the curb. Dean slides in next to her and says, “Sorry, Gregor had to ride me a little.”
“Wimmin been birthin’ babies a long time, Dean.”
“No, it was about how Mickey Mouse the class’ll be.” He pulls her close for a kiss, then takes her hand from the steering wheel and kisses it, too, on the little valley between her first two knuckles. When she returns her hand to the wheel he notices a tiny oval sticker with the word “Kegel” printed on it, right at twelve o’clock. “Where’d you get that?”
“At my appointment today,” she says with a smile. “I got a whole sheet of them, I’m supposed to put them all over the house as reminders.”
A Kegel is a toning exercise for pregnant women: it’s like stopping your urine mid-flow, according to one of Lise’s books. For a while, Dean found himself trying it nearly every time he peed, just to see how it felt.
“I put one over the kitchen sink,” she says, “and one on my bedside table, but I figured that’d be enough.”
“Moderation in all things.”
“Right.”
He reaches for her belly and strokes it. “How was the appointment?”
“Fine, except I’ve gained five pounds. I’ve got to pace myself.”
“Like a marathoner?”
“I’ve got the carbo-loading part down anyway.”
They exchange a smile: Dean’s the runner in the family, although he’s tapered way down since their marriage. Used to be he wouldn’t miss a morning with his group, but these last two years have taught him to question pretty much everything he thought he knew about himself, like that running was the only path to well-being. Most mornings now he sleeps in, Lise breathing quietly beside him.
“Everything else OK?” he asks her.
“Yeah, the head’s down, I’ll have my internal next time probably.”
“That it?”
She doesn’t reply, and when an odd, faraway expression comes over her face he’s suddenly washed with tension, certain he knows what’s on her mind. But then she says, “And twenty, and that’s a hundred today, and that’s all I’m doing, damn it,” and he lets out a big breath. Kegels. That’s what she was doing, just Kegels, not thinking back after all.
The class meets in a church basement, in a room with plastic chairs set up in a circle and the air of having seen a lot of 12-step programs in its day. Dean and Lise carry their pillows in and take seats opposite the only other couple there yet, the woman tiny and auburn-haired, dwarfed by her belly. Lise’s small, too, but her belly is more volleyball-sized to this woman’s Great Pumpkin.
The woman leans forward eagerly. “How far along are you?”
“Thirty-three weeks,” Lise says. “How about you?”
“The same. Looks like forty, though, huh?”
“No, you look fine.”
“I look enormous.”
Lise shrugs but doesn’t disagree. She has a knack for getting along with strangers—not so much cultivating them as keeping her distance in the most amiable possible way. Dean’s just the opposite, comes off as an asshole even when he’s thinking there might be a friendship in the offing.
“Do you know what you’re having?” the woman says.
“We decided not to find out.” Lise looks at Dean and gives his leg a pat. At the beginning, thinking it would be easier that way—easier for her—he told her that he wanted to know, but she absolutely didn’t and he’s grateful now. He likes to think of the baby living its secret life in there, waiting to surprise them.
“How about you?” Lise says, and the woman smiles.
“A girl.”
“Nice.”
“I was so nervous finding out, because I really wanted it to be a girl.” She shrugs. “I have a friend who’s pregnant with her second and she’s not finding out, either—do you have older kids?”
Dean feels his pulse quicken and he turns with concern to Lise, but she just shakes her head placidly.
“I guess you wouldn’t be here,” the woman says absently, and this time Lise doesn’t react. They’re here for him, of course.
Gradually the room fills, and soon every seat is taken. Dean’s certain he and Lise are the oldest, which shouldn’t matter but somehow does. The teacher is a tall, blousy woman with a patch of red high on each cheek. She has an easel and a stack of illustrations, but, Gregor will be sorry to hear, no pointer. When the clock over the door says seven, she picks up a piece of chalk and writes three letters on a portable blackboard: “I-N-G.”
“I’m Susan,” she says. “Welcome to everybody, especially the moms. This class is going to hopefully get you ready for childbirth, and since that’s a pretty intimate thing, I’d like us to get to know each other a little. Let’s go around the room and say our names and also something you like to do.” She points at the letters on the blackboard. “I wrote ‘i-n-g’ because I want you to tell us something you like do-ing.” She turns to the woman at her left. “Let’s start with you.”
The woman blushes. “I’m Patricia, and I guess I like gardening.” She looks at her husband, and he nods.
“Yeah, I’m Jim, and I like skiing.”
“I’m Stephanie, and I like folk dancing.”
“I’m Gary, and I like playing soccer.”
Two more people and it’ll be Lise’s turn. Dean leans close to her. “Can I say that I like be-ing alone?”
She smiles and then takes his hand and places it on her belly, just in time for him to feel the baby move. “I’m Lise,” she says a moment later. “It’s pronounced Lisa, but it’s spelled L-i-s-e.” This is something she generally tells people within minutes of meeting them; it was one of the first things Dean ever heard her say. “I like reminding myself I won’t be pregnant forever.”
The whole class laughs, and Dean says, “Yeah, I’m Dean, and I like the fact that that’s true.”
The next person starts to talk, and it’s only then that Dean realizes he didn’t use an i-n-g word. I like fail-ing to follow simple instructions.
Finally it’s the last couple’s turn. The woman says she likes making jam, and then her husband, a big guy with a florid face and a Hawaiian shirt, says, “She’s like this, so you know one thing I like doing!”
The class titters, and Lise digs her elbow into Dean’s side. Dean looks at the guy to see if he’s kidding, but the guy just seems puffed up and proud. I like fucking? This is what Dean will tell Gregor about tomorrow.
In a moment Susan starts talking about fear and pain. Fear causes tension. Tension causes pain.
“Actually,” Lise says under her breath, ”contractions cause pain.”
Susan takes up the chalk and turns to the blackboard. “OK,” she says, “let’s go over what happens during labor.”
Halfway through the class she gives them a break. While the women line up for the bathroom, Dean climbs the stairs and goes outside to get some air. It’s an early October night, still and cool, the rains a few weeks away although the air feels moist already, expectant.
After a few minutes Lise comes out to join him. For work she wears her hair pulled back, but it’s down now, and the dampness has curled the shorter bits near her face. She looks pretty in the vaguely European way she looked pretty when they met, dark tendrils and dark eyes and a small, dark-red mouth. French or Italian, he thought then, and when they started talking it was all he could do not to compliment her on her excellent English.
He reaches out and fingers a lock of her hair. “Don’t they give us milk and crackers?”
“Juice and crackers. Little paper cups of apple juice and three Ritz crackers each.”
“Dixie cups? With pastel seashells on them?”
“Exactly.”
Back inside, the basement room seems overheated. All of the women are flushed. They’ve got something like two extra quarts of blood in their bodies, a slightly unnerving figure to Dean. Think of the pressure on their veins. How could you be the same afterward, shrunk back to your usual volume?
“Let’s wind up,” Susan says a little later, “by going around the room again and this time telling about any experience you’ve had with childbirth—if you’ve ever been with a woman during labor, or if you’ve actually attended a birth. And tell us your name again.”
Stricken, Dean turns to Lise, but she just smiles and keeps within herself, inside the chamber where she keeps all of that.
One woman tells about having been with a friend for the first part of her labor, another says she watched her sister give birth. None of the men has anything to say.
Lise and Dean have switched seats, so Dean has to go first this time. “I’m still Dean,” he says. “I have no prior experience with childbirth.”
Then it’s Lise’s turn, and Dean feels that the whole class has been waiting for this moment, expecting it somehow. “I’m Lise,” she says. “I went through childbirth myself, eight years ago.” She turns to Dean and gives him a look that’s almost—apologetic, he finds himself thinking. She holds her eyes on his, but just as he’s finally mustering a dumb smile she turns away.
“I had a little boy,” she says to the class. “I was married to someone else then. The baby died when he was five months old.”
Dean’s lips are dry, and he licks them. He doesn’t know how she can stand this—he can’t himself stand the fact that she has to. He looks around the room: the women are staring at her, the men at their own hands. Susan clears her throat. “How did he die?” she asks in a gentle voice that makes Dean think of murder.
“He died in his sleep,” Lise says, “crib death,” and then there are no more questions, no more answers, just the sound of the clock ticking and the feel of a group of people waiting for something to be over. Dean stares into the center of the room and waits, too, moment giving way to moment until finally, mercifully, the woman next to Lise takes her turn.
In bed at home later, Dean tries to look at proofs while Lise arranges the pillows she needs for sleep. He’s used to this, but he half-watches anyway, thinking the pillows look different tonight, distorted somehow after their time in the bright lights of the church basement. Next week, Susan promised, they’ll use them.
Lise puffs a little with the effort of getting comfortable. She’s on her side with one pillow between her legs, another under her belly, and a third smaller one that she’s tucking between her breasts. “Can I get you anything?” he says, and she gives him a rueful look.
“A surrogate? I guess it’s a little late for that.”
“How about a backrub?” He gets off the bed and goes around behind her, easing himself onto the mattress. He lays his hands onto the soft flannel of her nightgown and begins kneading, pressing into her muscles with the heels of his hands. There’s more flesh than before, and it seems loose somehow, sliding across her back as if not quite a part of her but rather an extra layer of clothing.
“Right there,” she says, and he presses harder. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“The class?” he says. “It was OK. Susan’s a bit caring.”
She laughs, but he feels tense. In her dresser, in the top drawer, there’s a picture of the dead baby, and as he stares at the drawer front he can almost see it: the blond wood frame, the baby with his little topknot curl and his toothless grin, his drooly lower lip catching the reflection of the flash.
“I thought what you said...” he says. “I thought you were amazing.”
“About Jasper?”
The name gives him a tiny shock, as always. “Yeah.”
“It was fine.”
They are both silent, and for a while Dean just moves his hands across her back, kneading and pushing, pushing and kneading, until from her breathing he knows that she’s asleep. The light’s still on, but whereas before this pregnancy she was the finickiest sleeper he ever slept with, requiring perfect darkness and silence, she now falls asleep effortlessly, at will—even against her will, over books, carefully-selected DVDs, sometimes even Dean’s conversation.
He turns off the light, but rather than climb in next to her he goes to the window and looks outside. A misty night, starless, the rooflines of his neighborhood jagged against the lightish sky. What happened to her is just too horrible. It’s unspeakable—literally unspeakable, in a way: when he first heard, it became for a while both all he could think of about her and also something they couldn’t really talk about—didn’t really talk about, because what was there to say? Horrible horrible horrible horrible horrible. In some true, essential way that was all that could be said.
By feel he finds shorts and his running shoes, then makes his way to the front door. It ca-thuds shut behind him and he locks it, then slips his running key into his Velcro pocket. He does stretches on the front lawn, just a quick set to take the edge off, then he sets out, first an easy trot but soon he’s running all out, heaving hard, racing toward the University. His first run in how long—a week? Ten days? The dark feels like a material thing he has to penetrate. He passes the development office where Lise does graphic design, the science complex, Oregon Hall. On Agate he turns and presses even harder to get past the track—track town, he’s a runner in a town of runners, out here again but alone this time, legs burning, lungs burning, sweat sliding off him in streams.
That weekend, Dean and Lise are in a Thai restaurant on Willamette when Gregor and his wife, Jan, come in. Dean hunkers in his chair, but of course Gregor spots him right away. “Dean and Lise!” he booms from across the crowded restaurant, his arm moving over his head like a windshield wiper on High. “Great! What say we join forces!”
Dean groans. After five years of working with Gregor, Dean thinks of him as a family member, but the kind with whom you don’t want to be seen in public.
“It’s OK,” Lise says.
The hostess leads them over, Gregor beaming, Jan just behind him with a shy look on her face, her brown hair in a new, shorter style that makes her look—there’s no other word for it—matronly. Dean knows her pretty well, from his bachelor days, when once or twice a month she’d phone the office late in the afternoon to tell Gregor to bring him home for dinner, but she and Lise aren’t well acquainted. The four of them have been out together only once before, back when Dean and Lise weren’t married yet. Jan was pregnant then, now that Dean thinks about it. Pregnant with two kids at home. She kept getting up from the table to go call the babysitter.
She sits next to Dean, leaving Gregor the chair beside Lise. He sits down and pulls forward, then gives Lise a broad smile. “I haven’t seen you in must be ten or fifteen pounds,” he says. “Are you eating everything in sight? You’re just huge.”
Lise smiles good-naturedly, but Jan gasps and blushes. ”Gregor.” She catches Dean’s eye and shakes her head apologetically. “Ignore him,” she says to Lise. “How are you? You look great.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you ready?”
Lise shakes her head. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and says, “All we’ve got is a bassinet, plus some boxes of old clothes.”
Dean swallows and stares at his placemat, the tips of his ears getting hot and, no doubt, red. The old clothes are the dead baby’s, and he’s afraid of what will happen next. Early in his relationship with Lise, he told Gregor about what had happened to her, and though he immediately felt he’d betrayed her and swore Gregor to secrecy, he can’t imagine Gregor didn’t tell Jan. He’s afraid to look up, afraid to see the sympathetic, probing look he’s sure Jan’s giving Lise.
But: “Go shopping,” Jan says, and now Dean does look up, to find Jan smiling innocently. “Seriously. Borrowed stuff’s nice to have, but you need to get your own stuff, too. I didn’t with our first, and I felt so guilty, putting him in these ratty little stretch suits. With the others I bought new stuff, and it really made a difference, really made me feel I was welcoming them right.”
“Thanks,” Lise says. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Gregor gives Dean a defiant look, and Dean shrugs. OK, so he doubted Gregor. OK, so he was wrong.
“Do you have a stroller?” Jan says.
Lise shakes her head.
“That’s where to spend some money. The expensive ones really do last a lot longer. There’s probably nothing you’ll use more.”
“OK,” Lise says. “We’ll look into that.” Under the table, she presses her stockinged foot against Dean’s ankle, and he brings his other leg forward and holds her foot between his calves until their food comes.
At childbirth class the following week, Susan has them all lying on the floor, heads on their bed pillows, tensing and then relaxing each muscle group in their bodies. Tense your toes. And now relax them. Tense your ankle. And now relax it. Dean’s nursing a cold and lying down should feel good, but the ceiling lights bore into his eyes and he can’t stop coughing.
After the break Susan shows a short movie. It features a couple straight out of the seventies—man with sideburns and a tight, striped sweater; pregnant woman with Farrah Fawcett hair and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. The film opens with them in their motel-style living room in early labor: Dean knows this because the first thing the woman does is lean back in her chair and start breathing very deliberately, as if she were following difficult instructions. Soon the couple is in their car heading for the hospital, and she’s breathing harder; next they’re in a hospital corridor, walking and then stopping and then walking; and finally she’s on the delivery table with a doctor nearby, his gloved hands ready. Dean turns away at the moment when the crown of the baby’s head first bulges out, but he forces himself to watch as it bulges again, and then the whole head appears and it’s all there, born, covered with white stuff, its arms and legs curled close to its body. Near Dean one of the women in the class sobs, and through the dark he sees Lise reach into her purse for a Kleenex and pass it to her.
Leaving the class later, the woman touches Lise’s arm. “Thanks for the rescue.”
“Oh, any time,” Lise says. “I keep one of those little boxes of tissues in my purse.”
The woman smiles and waves, but she gives Lise a curious backward glance as she joins her husband at the door, and Dean knows she’s wondering about Lise’s emotional state. He understands: he used to assume Lise thought about her baby dying all the time. She’s said it’s not like that, but every morning she opens her top drawer and looks at his picture while she’s fishing for underpants, and Dean has to fight the urge to tell her to stop. Don’t, he wants to say. That’ll just make it worse. Like pressing a bruise.
Out in the parking lot, Lise hands him her purse to hold while she pulls her sweater over her head. Actually it’s his sweater, a baggy old shetland he’s had since college, burgundy and a bit moth-eaten, and he smiles a little, remembering a line from one of her pregnancy guides.
She tilts her head to the side. “What?”
“I was thinking of that book: ‘Your husband’s closet is a great place to find maternity clothes, but be sure to ask first!’”
She grins. “Like they know you better than I do. It should be called What to Expect from an Annoying Author. That’s the same book that told me to ask myself before taking a bite of a cookie whether it was the best possible thing I could be eating for my baby. When I want a cookie I want it because it’s a cookie, not just because it’s something to eat.”
“Do you want a cookie? We could go to that café.”
She shakes her head. “I want a quart of mocha chip ice cream, but I think I’ll just have an apple at home instead.”
They make their way across the rutted parking lot, skirting puddles, walking slowly. “She reminded me of me,” she says once they’re in the car.
Dean looks at her.
“That woman.”
His throat tightens. Was Lise crying during the movie? He was next to her the whole time, wouldn’t he have noticed? Shouldn’t he have?
“I mean the other time,” she says. “We saw a movie every week, and every single time I cried right when the baby was born.” She slides her car key into the ignition, then gives him a thoughtful look. “I don’t know why I didn’t tonight. I kind of thought I would, although I didn’t put the tissues in my purse for that very eventuality.” She smiles. “She sure thought so, though—did you see how she looked at me? Like she wondered why I needed a box, but it’s this little thing, look.” She fishes in her purse and pulls out a box of tissues about the size of a wallet. “So I blow my nose a lot.”
“People have an incurable interest in what’s not their business,” Dean says. “They want to know.”
Lise nods and then starts the engine, pulling onto the wet street with her tires swishing. Dean looks out the window at the porches going by—the big, wide porches of communal living, fraying easy chairs in front of plate glass windows, bicycles chained to railings. The kind of place he lived when he was new in Eugene. He had a bedroom on the third floor, half a shelf in the refrigerator. Fourteen years ago. What he remembers is the dankness of the bathroom, how his towel never really dried from one shower to the next.
At a traffic light he turns and looks at Lise’s profile, her high forehead and her long, narrow nose. He thinks of the woman at class tonight, her wanting to know. What he knows isn’t much: that it happened during an afternoon nap, only the second time Lise went out without him; that her husband was the one at home, the one to go in after the nap had gone on much too long. Dean still remembers the night when he heard all of this, at a little Mexican restaurant out near the airport, with red-checked oilcloths covering the tables and mariachi music coming from a radio in the kitchen. She spoke evenly as she told him about the blur after the funeral, the half-year of living back to back with her husband, the two of them moving through their house like ghosts until finally she left, taking nothing but her own clothes and the baby’s. Not because she hated her husband, she said, and certainly not because she blamed him: It was just that they couldn’t go on. She couldn’t go on.
She’s lost track of him. She doesn’t even know if he’s still living on the West Coast. There are moments, though, like now—sitting in the dark car beside her, knowing he could ask more about it all but not wanting to press, not wanting to press on the bruise—when Dean gets a sudden intimation of the man, of a guy his own age with a permanent pain wedged in his side like a runner’s stitch, and a cold fear slides through his veins.
Very early Saturday morning, Dean is woken to complete alertness by a pack of runners passing by outside, their feet slapping the road, the muted, heaving sound of their breathing checked once or twice by a low voice. Beside him Lise’s deeply asleep, her dark hair a tangle, the faint, sweet scent of her hand lotion just there under the fresh-laundry smell of the sheets. He feels as wide awake as ten a.m., but he doesn’t want to get up, doesn’t want to go running any more than he wants to be alone in the kitchen with the grey dawn lightening outside while he makes coffee and pages through the Register Guard. Up against the headboard he finds a small pillow, a stray, and he rolls over and holds it against his ear. A few months ago, a friend of Lise’s from the Bay Area told him it was the early mornings rather than the interrupted nights that were hardest, but he thinks that if the baby were born already, were down the hall crying right now, he wouldn’t mind at all getting up. She was passing through Eugene, Lise’s friend, on her way to a family reunion in Portland, her husband and three kids in tow. She was an old friend, a neighbor from Lise’s old life, and her presence had an odd effect on Lise, made the color in her cheeks a bit brighter, the pitch of her voice a bit higher. Toward the end of the visit, the friend’s oldest child lifted his baby brother from the floor and flew him through the air like an airplane, and Lise said, to no one in particular, “Jasper loved that.”
When Dean wakes again it’s midmorning, he can tell by the light, by how empty the bed feels next to him, as if Lise’s been up for a while. Her nightgown is on a hook on the back of the bedroom door, and he wanders out and finds her dressed in her denim maternity overalls, standing in what will be the nursery, a small corner room with white walls and a square, jade-green rug.
“What a sleeper,” she says when she sees him.
“I do my best.”
“Was there anything you wanted to do today? I was thinking we could go buy a rocking chair, maybe a few other things.”
An hour later, they borrow a neighbor’s pick-up truck and drive downtown, where they buy a rocking chair, a changing table, four hooded towels, a four-hundred-dollar stroller, a package of cloth diapers, a footstool for nursing, five flannel blankets, a car seat, a stack of pastel washcloths, a Snugli, a mobile with multi-colored zoo animals hanging from it, a lambskin, and the tiniest fingernail clipper Dean has ever seen. Driving home with the big things in boxes in the truck bed behind them and shopping bags strewn at their feet, Dean is exhilarated.
After lunch he mows the front lawn, and then, because it’s something he’s been meaning to do for weeks, he gathers up and takes to the supermarket several dozen empty beer bottles, which yield him for his trouble a few wrinkled dollar bills and a handful of change. Back at home he’s not surprised to find Lise in the baby’s room again, standing amid the morning’s loot. He fetches his toolbox and assembles the changing table while she comes and goes, carrying stacks of things to and from the garage: in the distance he hears the washing machine churn and drain, and the thrum of the dryer.
As he’s tightening the last screw on the footstool, she goes into the closet and reappears with a cardboard box.
“Careful, I’ll do that,” he says, but she’s already set it on the floor and crossed to his toolbox for an X-acto.
She slices open the edges of the box first, then pulls up the still-joined flaps and cuts them carefully, so the blade won’t go through what’s underneath. With a feeling of discomfort, he watches as she opens the box, and then there they are, the dead baby’s clothes.
She removes a handful of little white caps and sets them aside. Next is a stack of tiny white undershirts, with shoulders that somehow remind him of the way the fly looks on jockey underwear. Halfway across the room, he doesn’t know what to do or say. He feels grossly out of place, and beyond that boorish, and beyond that paralyzed.
“Pretty basic stuff,” she says, but then her expression brightens, and she eagerly withdraws a little one-piece yellow coverall with the head of a giraffe on the front. “Look at this,” she says, looking up at him. “I’d forgotten about this one. We always called this the giraffe suit.”
“I can see why,” he says with an idiotic smile.
She looks at him carefully. “What do you think about using some of this stuff?”
There’s no reason not to, unless it would make her feel worse. “Sure,” he says. “Whatever you want.”
A wide bar of sunlight brightens her lap, and she brushes absently at a spot on her overalls, then sets the giraffe suit down and rubs her lower back with both hands. “I do want us to get some new stuff,” she says, “but I feel like—I don’t know—I’d like to use some of these things, too. I mean, I saved them as Jasper outgrew them, for when he had a little brother or sister. Would it bother you?”
“Not at all.”
The doorbell rings, and he hesitates a moment, then makes his way to the front door. Outside, his neighbor’s eight-year-old daughter is standing there with a small paper bag. “Dad said you left this in the truck this morning,” she says, and Dean takes the bag and thanks her, then watches as she leaps off the porch and runs home. She goes to school just a block away: when he leaves for work each morning he sees her mother watching from the sidewalk until she’s reached the schoolyard.
In the bag is the nail clipper. Dean closes the front door and returns to the nursery, not entirely surprised to find it empty. He comes back out and hesitates outside his and Lise’s bedroom.
She’s standing at her dresser, the top drawer open. She has the picture of the baby in one hand, something small and red-and-white striped in the other. Her head is bent, her dark hair brushing her shoulders, and Dean feels sure she’s crying. He crosses the room and puts a hand on her back, and she turns. She isn’t crying, but she has an air of crying about her: of just having cried or of being about to. “Sweetie,” he says, and she looks up at him with her bottom lip clamped between her teeth.
“Do you know why he was smiling in this picture?”
Dean shakes his head.
“Because Mark had just pulled these from his feet and started tickling his toes.” She opens her hand, and the red-and-white thing unfolds into a tiny pair of socks. “He loved having his toes tickled, he’d make this little noise, like ‘Arrr.’ I remember it so clearly.”
Dean doesn’t know what to say. His throat is lumpy and he has to try a couple of times before he can swallow. At last he remembers the bag. “Look,” he says. “We left this in the pick-up.”
She hesitates a moment, then turns and puts the picture away, pushing the drawer closed and pausing for just a moment before turning back. She sets the socks on the dresser and looks inside the bag. “Oh, the clippers,” she says. “Good. We’ll definitely need those.”
Gregor calls late Sunday night, after Lise’s asleep. It’s a habit Dean and he have gotten into, to catch up on things before the start of a new week. Tonight they talk for a while, but Dean’s distracted, and after a while Gregor’s voice trails off.
“What?” Dean says.
“Go on to bed, son. Get some sleep while you can.”
“That’s like telling someone to eat five dinners today because he’s going to have to fast for the next week. There’s only so much sleeping you can do. Go on, I was listening.”
“Nah, you weren’t. Everything OK? Got the bag packed for the hospital?”
“Yes, Gregor,” Dean says wearily, although in fact Lise packed it just this afternoon. The books said to take all kinds of crazy stuff—lollipops and tennis balls, as if you were preparing to sit in the audience of “Let’s Make a Deal"—but she just put in the basics.
“Don’t forget your swim trunks,” Gregor says.
“What?”
“For the jacuzzi. Jan always made me get in with her so she could lean against me instead of the porcelain.”
“You’re loving this,” Dean says. “Go torment someone else, call a catalog and pick on the operator.”
“Come on,” Gregor says. “I just want you to be prepared.”
“I am. Jesus.”
Gregor doesn’t respond.
“What? I can’t possibly be prepared, is that it? My life is going to change completely, I’ll never have a free moment again. I know that, OK?”
Gregor laughs.
“OK, I even know that I don’t really know it.”
Now Gregor laughs harder. “How’s Lise?” he says casually. “Is she—”
“She’s fine.”
Gregor is silent, and Dean thinks of yesterday, all the excited shopping and then the box of clothes. “She got out his stuff,” he says, but then he stops himself. What is he doing? He doesn’t want to tell Gregor this. His heart pounds, and he adds, almost against his will, “His clothes.”
Gregor exhales. “Jeez.” He hesitates and then says, “Is she— I mean, are you guys—” He’s silent for a moment. “It must be scary,” he says at last, “to think it could happen again. Is she really worried?”
“You’d think so,” Dean says, “but she’s not.” He fingers the buttons on the phone, strokes their faint concavities. Back when they first talked about getting married and having children, she told him that she saw what had happened as a one-time thing, plain bad luck—it bothered her when people expected her to fear a repeat. She said that wasn’t how the world was—how she wanted to think of it, anyway.
As for him, he doesn’t fear crib death, he fears...what? Something.
He fears being afraid.
After saying goodbye to Gregor, he goes into the kitchen. It’s nearly midnight but he’s far too wired for sleep. He gulps a glass of orange juice, then crosses the room and opens the back door.
The backyard is small, little more than a deck and a tiny patch of grass, but it’s nicely enclosed, and last spring Lise hung Italian tiles on the fence and planted lavender and rosemary in terra cotta pots. Dean sits on a wooden bench they chose together shortly after they were married, and he leans back. The night is cool, and he feels the wind stir goosebumps from his bare arms. Overhead the half-moon looks transparent. The faint scent of lavender reminds him of a trip to Provence he and Lise took two summers ago, and he finds himself remembering an evening there, in a village near Arles. Walking after coffee in a tiny cafe, they happened upon a kind of amateur’s night at the local bullfight, and they sat and watched from rickety bleachers while boys barely old enough to shave teased and provoked bulls, then leapt to safety over the low wall of the ring. Near Dean and Lise, a small family called and cajoled to one of the boys, and when his turn in the ring was over he came and sat with them, had his head rubbed by his father and then reached to take onto his lap a little girl dressed in pink ruffles. Dean watched them openly, and when the boy looked up and met his gaze he gave Dean a look of such sweet contentment that Dean felt a rush of love not just for him but for all of them, the proud father and the fat mother, the little, over-dressed girl: love and pure longing. If it did happen again, if his and Lise’s baby died too, would they survive? Would their marriage? The thing is, there’s no telling. From where he sits, less than a month away from fatherhood, he sees that what they’ve done together acknowledges the possibility of its own undoing: that what there is to gain is exactly equal to what there is to lose.
Labor starts in the kitchen three days before Lise’s due date, with a gathering of color in her face, a low moan as she bends over the counter, her weight on her forearms. In a moment she looks up and smiles, and Dean sets down the pan he’s been drying and says the exact thing he hoped he wouldn’t say at this moment, a line out of a bad movie: “Is it time?”
It isn’t, quite. But close to midnight, after hours with his watch in his hand, timing contractions, Dean helps her to the car and they head for the hospital, Dean trying to avoid potholes while she puffs in the seat next to him, her hands on her belly.
“Jesus,” she says, “I better be fucking five centimeters dilated when we get there or I’m never going to make it.”
He reaches for her hand, but a moment later she moans and shakes him away. She’s already told him that he’s not to talk to her, touch her, or in any way get in her face while she’s in hard labor. Ice chips. That was all her first husband was allowed to do, feed her ice chips.
Up ahead the hospital looms into view, and he imagines plowing right through the double front doors—the car would just about fit. The walk from the parking area takes forever, Dean standing by while Lise staggers along, bent like an old woman. Inside, a clerk takes her name and phones for a wheelchair. The orderly pushing it doesn’t seem surprised when Lise refuses it, nor when, several minutes and only twenty yards later, she changes her mind.
Upstairs, minutes stretch endlessly while hours collapse upon themselves. There’s a period of walking in the halls, another of standing nearby while she rests her forearms on a bar and moans. Drugs are discussed, rejected, demanded. Then for a strange interlude Dean sits in a chair next to the bed and nearly dozes, only to be startled to alertness by a bright light aimed at his wife’s crotch. All the blowing and panting, the ice chips, the dial on the fetal monitor springing up and down—it’s all as he was told it would be and at the same time utterly shocking. Then suddenly Lise cries, “Oh my God, I can’t do this, I can’t do this,” and the room stills to her.
“That’s the wrong attitude,” the midwife says. “You have to think you can do it.”
“I can do this, I can do this,” Lise cries; and then she does.
Lise in the rocking chair with Danny curled in her lap. Danny asleep in the very center of Dean and Lise’s huge bed. Lise on her side on the couch with Danny next to her, his mouth around her nipple. Danny staring at Dean while Dean stares at Danny. Every moment feels consequential, essential to preserve somehow and yet also infinitely repeatable. Dean watches Lise watching Danny, and his eyes brim and overflow. Lise watches Dean watching her, and tears stream down her cheeks.
Dean has never been so tired in all his life. Midnight, two fourteen, three forty-five, five oh three. Walking, walking: his shoulders have never felt so sore, his upper arms. Danny wants to be held. He’s five days old, seven, and Dean still hasn’t set foot in the office. Gregor and Jan arrive one afternoon while Lise is asleep, and answering the door with Danny in his arms, Dean hardly hears their greetings and exclamations, his only thought that at last he can go to the bathroom. They’ve brought gifts for Danny—a navy blue sleepsuit, a copy of Goodnight Moon and three different lullaby tapes, but the thing that touches Dean is a huge dish of lasagne, good for at least four dinners. He hugs them both.
The day of Danny’s two-week check-up arrives and Dean is ready with a list of questions for the doctor. The blister on Danny’s upper lip, the sucking blister—could it pop and what would happen if it did? The spitting up—is it normal for there to be so much of it? The cradle cap, the hiccuping, the way one of his toes sort of curls under the one next to it....
In the living room, getting ready to go, Dean buckles a sleeping Danny into his car seat, drapes a blanket over the handle because it’s misting a little outside, and turns to Lise just as she’s zipping the diaper bag.
“I’ll go start the car and get the heater going.”
“Good idea.” There are rings around her eyes, a small smear of what looks like mustard near the cuff of her white Oxford shirt, which is actually his: since Danny’s birth she’s been living in his shirts—for their looseness, for how easy they are to unbutton for nursing. She follows his glance to the smear. “Oops,” she says.
“Tough times call for tough people.”
“Still, I think I’ll change. There’s no one at a pediatrician’s office who won’t know what that is.”
She heads for the bedroom, and Dean takes the blanket off the car seat to look at Danny. He’s still asleep, one round cheek resting on his shoulder: his drunken-old-man look. “You nailed Mommy,” Dean says. “What a thing to do.”
The doctor’s office is crowded, full of small children swarming all over a colorful plastic play structure or tapping insistently on the glass of a large aquarium. Dean sets Danny’s car seat in a relatively quiet corner, and he and Lise sink onto the bench next to him, each of them sighing a little as they sit down.
Lise picks up a magazine, and Dean rests idly for a moment, then stretches across her to look at Danny. He touches Danny’s forehead, his cheek, his impossibly tiny fist. Danny’s fingers scare Dean, how fragile they are: little matchsticks in flimsy padding.
A nurse comes into the waiting room and says “Daniel?,” and Lise’s on her feet waiting well before Dean gets it. He lifts the car seat and follows her and the nurse back to a small examining room, where the nurse asks questions about feeding and sleep and then tells them to undress Danny. She leaves and reappears when they’ve got him down to his diaper, which she untapes, then she carries him to the scale, whisks the diaper out from under him, and slides the scale’s weights around until she’s arrived at his.
The pediatrician comes in a little later. He asks Dean, who’s been holding Danny, to set him on the examining table, and then he listens to Danny’s chest, rotates Danny’s legs, presses his giant fingers into Danny’s abdomen. Dean stands just to the side, so alert he realizes he’s waiting for Danny to learn to roll over and to roll to the edge of the table: if he does this, Dean will be ready to catch him. Danny’s awake now and quiet, and when the doctor finishes his examination and loops his stethoscope around his neck, he and Dean and Lise gather and stare at Danny, watch as his ocean-deep eyes move from one of them to the next.
“Can I hold him?” the doctor asks Lise, and while Dean’s wondering what’s odd about this, Lise nods, and the doctor lifts Danny and cradles him against his chest. “He’s a nice little bundle,” the doctor says, and all at once Dean understands that what he’s feeling is the awe of ownership, amazement that permission is his and Lise’s to give or refuse. Just two weeks and he’s an expert on Danny, on his Dannyness, each day placing into an infinitely expandable container every new thing he knows to be true about his baby. He thinks of what he knows about the dead baby—about Jasper—and it’s next to nothing: he liked to be flown through the air like an airplane, he loved to have his father tickle his toes. Dean’s had it all wrong: it isn’t that Lise had a baby who died, but rather that she had a baby, who died. He looks at her, creases around her eyes as she smiles at Danny, and he feels a little space open up in his mind, for all she can tell him about her firstborn.
The doctor turns to Dean now, holding Danny out like an offering. “Dad?” he says. “Do you want him back now?”