The Stud Book (3 page)

Thank God.

Georgie picked up her whole reason for living and let the girl shriek in her ear while she collected pills from the sheets, the blankets, the floor. She counted as she found them. She reached for the phone. Then she dropped the phone and went back to counting, and she grabbed for the phone again because with her baby in her arms she didn’t have enough hands and didn’t know which to do first. She needed backup—somebody at home besides the baby. Alone and never alone: If she were really alone, there’d be no problem, no baby’s mouth, and no pills.

But that wasn’t what she wanted. Not at all.

She needed a team, a crew. Mostly, she needed her husband. Where was Hum? He’d taken five weeks off for paternity leave and still went out most of the day like he had somewhere to be. Georgie found two more pills on the floor. Bella yodeled in her ear. “Hush, hush, little peanut.”

Georgie’s milk let down, warmed her boobs, made them hard and high as implants until milk spilled out and soaked her nightshirt. Doctors said the leaking would stop when her body adjusted. She was a generous fountain.

She hoisted her shirt to let Bella latch on. Thin white milk ran in rivulets down Georgie’s stomach.

She stood hunched over and sliced open in the middle and
stitched back up; her warm daughter nursed under the drenched and clinging nightshirt. Georgie dialed the pediatrician and scanned the floor for stray drugs. She stuck the phone between her ear and her shoulder.

There should be a book illustrating how to nurse, cradle a phone, panic, call 911, and count stray pills on a dusty floor.

She’d started with twelve pills. She’d taken three on Saturday and one at night, and then … after that? She had five left. Was that right? Five, and one was soggy. She put the soggy pill in her own mouth and drank water to wash it down. It stuck in her throat. Or something stuck in her throat. Maybe it was guilt.

How much of that soggy pill had seeped into Bella’s system?

There’d be oxycodone in Georgie’s milk. Could Bella overdose now through nursing?

She used a finger to pry the baby’s mouth off her nipple. Bella screamed louder than ever. The ringing phone tumbled from Georgie’s shoulder and knocked against Bella’s head on the way down. Shit. A red welt raised against the girl’s skin, near her hairline. Was that a problem? How protected was a baby’s brain? If anything happened to Bella, Georgie would kill herself. She’d have to. There were so many ways to fail. All she had was good intentions; the road to hell was paved with babies.

Giving birth was the original blood oath.

She could still hear the phone ringing on the other end, now a tiny sound, like one an insect would make. “Just wait, wait,” Georgie whispered, and bent to find the phone on the floor. She was on her knees. She could barely hear over Bella’s howl. Three days old and the girl was a boob-aholic. A recording came on: “If this call is a medical emergency, please hang up and dial …”

Georgie found the phone under the bed and pulled it out, covered in dust bunnies.

Was her call an emergency? That was half the question. Bella’s wail was strong. She hadn’t passed out, anyway—always a good sign. Georgie pressed zero for pediatric advice. “Shh, shh, shh … darling, darling, darling,” she crooned against the side of Bella’s head, into the welt, now a lump, against her silky hair. “My sweet girl.”

A receptionist came on. The woman asked the birth date of the patient, the patient’s name, and the patient’s doctor’s name. Then she asked, “What is the nature of the problem?”

“I have this prescription,” Georgie said. “The baby got into the prescription.” She ran a hand over the sheets as she talked, checking for more pills.

“The baby got into the prescription?” the receptionist repeated. “Tell me the child’s birth date again, please.”

The baby, Bella, was three days old. She couldn’t lift her own head. It was an accident if she found her mouth with her hand. “I mean, I spilled the pills, and the baby got ahold of them.”

“Got ahold of them?”

That baby was a precocious drug addict.

Georgie said, “I dropped an oxycodone in my daughter’s mouth. I got it out, I just don’t know anything. I don’t know what might’ve happened—”

“You’ve retrieved the medicine at this point?”

“It was pretty much whole.” Georgie was glad to say she’d done one thing right.

“Keep the pill to show doctors in case they request it.”

“Keep it?” Georgie said. “I took it.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. Then the receptionist said, “The advice nurse will call you back.”

Georgie heard caution and a controlled urgency in the woman’s voice. It dawned on her: They’d call child protective services. They might. Would they?

Shit.

The butter pecan walls went swimmy. She sat on the side of the bed and tried to breathe. “I’m new to this.” They couldn’t take her daughter away! It was her first child, her only darling. But really, they could. That was the thing.

The hospital had given her those pills. They’d sent her home with the baby. They’d set her up. She said, “This must happen all the time.” She tried to talk over Bella’s screams, and her voice came out high and thin and broken. Where did other people learn how to take drugs while holding a baby?

The woman said, “Do you need a referral for a counselor?”

“A counselor?” She was ready to cry but didn’t need a counselor. The baby was the question, the concern. Little red-faced Bella spit up on Georgie’s arm.

The woman said, “Some new mothers have difficulty adjusting—”

This woman would make her cry. Georgie hung up on the
receptionist. The advice nurse could call back. They had her contact information.

She carried her howling daughter to the kitchen, sang the alphabet softly, and used a dish towel to wipe the white patch of spit off her arm. Maybe that spit-up solved the drug question, like a self-induced gastric lavage?

In the kitchen, on the counter, in a six-pack of bottles, there were six servings of formula sent home as free samples from the hospital. For all she could tell those formula samples were made by McDonald’s in a third world country using slave labor and antifreeze. They were the precursor to fast food and a slow waddle.

At least it wasn’t organic. Organic baby formula sweetened with rice syrup was full of arsenic half the time. She’d read the reports.

Bella started to wail again; Georgie’s milk was a drug deal that couldn’t happen. What was the advice for this?

She and her daughter waited together, alone. They waited for the phone to ring, for Humble or a nurse to call. Georgie cracked the lid off a bottle, and it came off with a pop. She screwed the artificial nipple in place and tipped the bottle to Bella’s blessed mouth.

Bella didn’t want it. Georgie started to pull it away, and a reflex kicked in—the girl latched on to the fake boob. Oxycodone, that opiate, eased its way into Georgie’s blood, and she started to feel lighter. The pain in her stitches backed off. She took a breath and relaxed against the counter.

The phone rang, and caller ID showed it was the hospital. It was either the advice nurse or the baby police calling to tell her she’d failed as a mom. The baby, her living dissertation, was perfect, yes, but Georgie wasn’t.

The phone rang again, singing its song.

The hospital knew where they lived. They had her address, her employer, her health insurance ID numbers.

Georgie needed to lie down. Bella was still breathing. Even the red welt on her head had already quieted.

“We’ll be okay,” she whispered, giving voice to what she most wanted to hear. She’d be her own advice nurse. Her voice was good enough. She was in her house, in this room, on her own with her daughter, alone and in it together. One more ring and the phone would go to voice messaging. This was her job: to raise her daughter.

The doorbell rang.

The doorbell? Hum wouldn’t ring, unless he’d lost his keys. It was a visitor, a stranger, maybe a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

It might be cops. Paramedics. Child protective services. Could they have gotten there so quickly? Of course they could. Georgie’s soaked nightshirt clung to her boobs and postpartum stomach in a frump’s rendition of a wet T-shirt contest.

Oxycodone slowed her brain’s synapses, let the endorphins step in, and lifted her head in a clouded way. They offered the best advice in the room: Go back to bed. She moved away from the door and windows and carried Bella to the bedroom. The doorbell rang again. Georgie’s heart knocked in response. She took a breath. She was okay, as long as she didn’t open that door.

Then the phone started again, too.

The phone, the doorbell, the phone—Georgie slunk away from them both.

This is what separates humans from animals: free will.

She had TV. She had the comforting hand of granny panties and narcotics. Her daughter was fine—awake and nursing. Nobody looked high! Neither one was nodding off. Well, okay, Bella was nodding off, but that was normal for a newborn, right? Georgie tickled the girl’s foot and saw her eyes widen, evidence she was alert. Together the two of them climbed into the privacy of sheets that smelled like sweat, like their bodies, like milk and blood and piss and love. She climbed back into her nest of blankets and books.

Safe.

Where was Humble? She needed him to come home.

A hand slapped against the bedroom window from outside. It was a hard crack, like a bird breaking its own neck against the glass. It was a bad omen, and Georgie jumped at the noise. She sat up, looked, and saw that it wasn’t a bird. Worse: it was human. There was a palm, fingers, and a thumb, splayed, for a moment flattened against the pane.

“E
ver play dead girl shots?” Humble Johnson slouched at the bar. The first wash of alcohol encouraged his brain to move gamely.

The bartender said, “Dead girl shot?” He leaned forward to better hear over the music. The bartender was young, with hair in his eyes and in a button-down shirt. He was relaxed behind the counter, like somebody’s son hired to mix drinks for a family wedding.

Humble said, “Shots.” He lifted his glass to illustrate. “Drinking game.”

The bartender shook his head, tossed a damp rag into the air, caught it, and wiped the hardwood counter down. A disco rehash blasted a rattling sound track.

A couple sat beside Humble. The woman’s back made a wall where she turned away to share a plate of assembly line–style calamari with her date. She twisted around to look at Humble, a greasy, fried circle held between her fingers like a wedding ring. She sized him up. She swiveled away again and used her other hand to flick a strand of her long dark hair.

Humble Johnson hadn’t played dead girl shots in years, but he thought about it sometimes. Did anyone play anymore? He’d played
in college at Oregon State, in the lounge, surrounded by the smell of pressed-board furniture and the sweat of his dorm-mates.

The bartender pulled a beer for somebody farther down the row.

Humble hunched over his bourbon, elbows on the glossy wood of the polished bar top, what had once been a slice of the body of a massive old-growth tree. A hundred years earlier when loggers ruled, when a tree in Oregon was bigger around than an SUV and SUVs didn’t exist yet, somebody needed a place to set a drink and so felled timber big enough to knock out a neighborhood.

This place had been a logger’s watering hole turned wino’s haven. More recently a pair of midlife bankers had bought the building and hired a Vietnamese crew to peel molding plywood off the windows. They aired out aged smoke, put up red velvet and gold-flecked wallpaper, and lined the glass shelves with a higher grade of hooch. Humble Johnson, forty-two years old, born and raised in Portland, used to ride his tricycle on the sidewalks around there. He’d waited for the TriMet bus at a bench just down the block. He’d been drinking in that bar and elsewhere for more than twenty years, maybe as long as the bartender had been alive. His history was written in dive bars, laced with malt winds off the old Weinhard’s brewery—the Swinehard’s Factory, his friends called it. The Swig Hard, the Swill. Beer foam runoff filled the streets back then.

Nobody would put up with that shit now. Beer foam in the streets? The brewery shut down. The “Brewery Blocks” had been converted to a stretch of condos and art galleries. The old Industrial Northwest had been renamed the Alphabet District, like some kind of baby crackers or cheap soup.

When did people get so delicate?

It’s a special crowd that settles in to the amber candlelit glow of booze and mirrors before mothers of the neighborhood call their children home to dinner, before a standard workday ends. Humble was part of that crowd. It warmed the cockles of his heart, whatever the hell cockles were. In this haunt, on a strip of northeast Portland, the new owners had added three flat-screen TVs. One, almost overhead, showed the news. Another, just past the pool table,
CSI
reruns. The third was a string of ads.

He watched TV, all three of them, and waited for a girl to die.

Bourbon coated his tongue and burned its way down his
throat. He watched the news. His guess? Dead local girl inside of fifteen minutes, almost to the weather report, halfway to sports. He would’ve laid that bet.