In the Blood (9 page)

Of course, there are some disturbing blank spaces in my memory, places where things are foggy or black altogether. They rise up at me sometimes, white noise in my dreams, or startling flashes in my waking life. And Dr. Cooper says that it is the psyche’s nature to protect itself. She does not recommend prying into the dark places, crowbarring open the locked boxes.
When you are ready to deal with
those memories, they will come back, and we’ll work through it then. And they may never come back—which might not be a bad thing.

I’m not into navel-gazing, and I am not especially curious. In fact, I’d rather avoid all unpleasantness inside myself and without. Which might explain my lack of desire for any kind of relationship, my lily-white virginity. My parents kept their wedding photo on their dresser. In it my mother is a vision of loveliness with her blond hair pulled back tight and crowned with white roses, her blue eyes shining. My father is her contrast, his dark hair long and wild, his black eyes intense and staring. The look of love on their faces, so passionate, so desirous, so joyful—it was almost an embarrassment to behold. They went from that day of ice-cream-white love to a day that ended with my mother lying in a pool of her own ink-black blood. Every couple starts off loving each other, don’t they? It’s how a relationship ends that really defines its nature.

We talked a little more about my new job, about my classes. But my heart wasn’t really in it. My mind was on Beck, and her bag sitting out there in the night.

“Lana?”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I get it. It’s impossible not to be concerned about Beck.”

I liked how she never offered any physical comfort. I appreciate people who have a healthy respect for personal boundaries. Our culture is too touchy-feely; everyone wants a hug these days. But Dr. Cooper just sat and was present. She would let me rant and rave at her, just sat and waited as one might wait for a storm to pass. Maybe she sensed that I was uncomfortable with physical contact.
Or maybe she just felt it best to establish and keep boundaries—for herself as well as for her patients.

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to discuss,” she said. “And honestly I’ve been struggling with how to bring it up, or whether I should at all.”

That didn’t sound good. “Okay,” I said. “Go for it.”

“Your father has reached out to me via e-mail.”

My whole body froze, and I felt my stomach go hollow and wobbly. I liked to pretend that my father was dead. In fact, I was quite good at convincing myself of it. That’s what I told those people who pushed their way into my past, that my parents died in a car accident when I was sixteen. (People usually backed way off after that, except for Beck, who had only moved in closer. Tragedy turned her on.)

So, the doctor might as well have told me that she’d conducted a séance and was communicating with my father from beyond the grave. That’s the kind of jolt her news sent through me.

We sat in silence for a moment, then: “Should I go on?” she asked.

I nodded, even though I wanted to get up and run from the office.

“Am I wrong in thinking that you have a right to know about this? We can end this discussion right now. I can let your father know that I will not be reading his messages, and that you have no desire to hear from him. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.”

It was tempting to tell her that yes, that’s what I wanted. But wasn’t there a nagging curiosity, a tidal pull I still felt to him? One would think that after what he did, any bond we shared might be
severed like an umbilical cord—a harsh, irrevocable cut, two parts of the same whole that would never knit back together. But that’s just not how it works.

“What does he want?”

I could see the blood on the floor, the perfect red handprint on the white of the wall. It was all still so vivid, if I closed my eyes I could go back and live in that house, in that moment, forever.

“He wants to talk to you,” she said. “He loves you and there are things he wants you to know. That’s what his message says. The date of his execution is drawing near, and all of his appeals have been denied. He can only hope for a stay, but that doesn’t seem likely.”

I didn’t have a voice to answer with. I wondered how much worse this day was going to get.

“How does he know about you?” I asked finally. Outside the sky had gone a gunmetal gray and the dead branches outside her window quivered in a sheath of ice.

“I have no idea,” she said, with a slow shake of her head. “Who have you told about our sessions?”

“My aunt, my lawyer,” I said. “That’s it. Oh, and Langdon, my student adviser.”

“Do any of those people have contact with your father?”

“Sky Lawrence,” I said. “But he doesn’t mention it. We don’t discuss my father.”

She pushed herself up in her seat, and uncrossed and crossed her legs again. She kept her eyes on me in that gentle way she had. I usually didn’t like it when people looked at me for too long, but with her I didn’t mind. There was never any judgment on her face, only intelligent concern.

“I need to think about this. Okay?” I said. I knew I seemed calm and level on the outside, but there were sirens blaring inside my head. I’m good at hiding my feelings. Really good.

“Of course,” she said. “And if you need to talk before our next session, give me a call.”

When I left her office, I looked at my phone and realized if I didn’t hurry, I’d be late getting to Luke’s house and he’d have to go into the house alone. I was worried that it looked like snow, but I hopped on my bike anyway and rode through the frigid air toward town. My face and fingers were burning with cold, and I wondered, if I had actually been capable of shedding tears, would they freeze on my face and form a mask of ice.

Dear Diary,

Then it did stop, just like they promised. And a strange silence has settled like a pall. You would think I’d be overjoyed—my husband and my mother certainly are. They are giddy with relief, hand slapping and embracing when the baby sleeps. Even my sister was so happy for me that I could hear the relief in her voice. She has always been deeply empathetic, so much so that I have leaned too heavily on her. Yes, they are all so happy. The worst is over.

Magically, he is sleeping for six-hour stretches and so are we all. The mental fog has lifted somewhat, and I am starting to remember what it was like to be me. I stare at him for the first time, as he lies quiet in his crib. We swaddle him in a fuzzy blue wrap, which we think might have been part of the solution. His pink face is wrinkled like an old man’s and his jet-black hair is a funny little helmet. I recognize his beauty, now that he has stopped screaming like a siren. He smells like a clean, powdery gift from the gods.

But when I hold him in my arms, and when he takes my nipple
in his mouth and sucks, I feel nothing, just a strange emptiness. He looks up at me with those intelligent, shining eyes—and he knows it. He squirms in my arms, takes no comfort in my body, which feels brittle and too bony. He doesn’t nuzzle and coo. He is an animatronic baby—he looks real, makes all the appropriate noises. But he doesn’t live. His stare is as flat and glittering as a doll’s, as though his eyes were made from glass.

I have made the mistake of sharing this with my husband.

“There’s something wrong with him,” I say.

It is a rare, quiet moment. My mother, who extended her stay out of concern for all of us, has turned in early. The baby is sleeping soundly in his crib, his room filled with the sound of white noise from the humidifier. And the ceiling is a field of blue and green stars from his turtle nightlight.

In our first shared moment in a quiet house, we are sitting on the couch trying to remember how to be alone together. But it feels awkward. He looks different, thin and pale with dark circles under his eyes. I am different in about a hundred different ways, jumpy and nervous, quick to snap. We are both waiting for the noises on the monitor that will send one of us up the stairs.

But when I looked at my husband, I didn’t see the mirror of my own despair. He didn’t seem shattered the way I felt. But, of course, he left for the office every day. Our front door was his portal back to the normal world where people work, and went out to lunch, and surfed the Web at their desks in the afternoon, and met for drinks. People laughed and had thoughts, important thoughts that didn’t fly out of their heads like owls delivering secret messages.

He disappears through the portal by seven in the morning (before the baby, he never left until eight-thirty at the earliest).
Sometimes he comes home as late as eight. He says he has to work more now, because of the baby, because I have decided not to go back to work and to stay home with our child. I felt the first trickle of resentment the minute he walked out the door his first day back, clutching his little book of photos. Six weeks later, my resentment has bloomed into a full-blown rage. But I bury it, deep inside. I know it is wrong. I wasn’t really angry with him, was I? After all, he was supporting us now. And it was I who had pushed for a baby.

“We had a hard few weeks,” he says. “But he’s doing a lot better, isn’t he?”

I don’t say anything. There’s a glass of wine for me on the table, but I don’t want it. If I drink it, I’ll have to pump and dump. I hate hooking myself up to that machine, sitting and listening to it sigh and whir as it drains the milk from my breasts.

“The crying,” he says. “That was so hard. But it’s stopped, other than what’s probably normal. And he’s sleeping a lot.”

“He doesn’t seem right,” I say. It sounds weak and a little whiny. I can’t put into words what I feel in my body. My husband stares at me in that way that he has, so present, so earnest. He has his hand on my leg.

“The labor, the C-section, the colic,” I say into the thick, expectant silence. “Maybe it hurt him.”

He is tender, tries to talk it through with me. (He’s just a baby. We’ll all adjust, because everyone does, don’t they? Maybe we got all the hard stuff out of the way, maybe we’ll sail through the terrible twos and adolescence, he joked.) But I had a feeling that we wouldn’t be sailing through anything ever again.

“My father,” I say. And I hate the words before they’ve even tumbled out of my mouth.

“No,” he says, horrified, as though the thought has never crossed his mind. “Don’t.”

“He looks just like my father.”

So much for “date night.”

The next day, he calls in sick to work. Appointments are made—not for the baby, but for me.

My ob-gyn quickly diagnoses me with postpartum depression. And my husband and I sit in her pink, sunlit office while she explains how the massive hormonal shifts that occur after pregnancy don’t regulate right away for everyone. She kept calling it the baby blues, which I think she did to take the edge off of it. Because while “baby blues” sounds soft and pastel-colored, easily managed, postpartum depression is black and red, with thick, hard edges; it bludgeons. It was likely, said the doctor, that my traumatic labor, the emergency C-section, followed by the colic, have contributed to my descent into PPD.

“It all feeds into each other,” said my doctor patiently. “And—P.S.—none of this is a walk in the park under the best of circumstances. More women suffer PPD in a given year than will sprain an ankle or be diagnosed with diabetes. So, you’re not alone.”

To my husband: “Let’s make sure Mom is getting plenty of rest. Can you take the nighttime feedings?”

“Of course,” he says. “Of course.”

And for me, a low-dose antidepressant, the decision to go to formula and stop breast-feeding—which was already on the table because the baby was gaining weight too slowly.

Another failure for me: drugs during labor, emergency C-section, colic, unable to nurse beyond two months. No wonder
my baby hates me. I have failed him in every single way and he’s not even three months old.

In the mirror, there’s no trace of the happy pregnant person I was. My ripe bosom, my glowing hair, my round belly—it’s all gone flat. I am dull and deflated, abandoned by life and joy and expectancy. I am flabby and gray.

I have started taking the pills and I pray that everyone is right, that I have been sabotaged by my own brain chemicals. And that the little blue pill is going to put things right again.

“All the hard stuff just goes away—the pain, the stress, the sleep deprivation,” my mom soothed in the car. “You just don’t remember any of it later on.”

Please, please, please, let them all be right. Let it be me. Let there be something wrong with me. Something normal that can be fixed quickly and easily. Please let there be something wrong with me, and let it not be something wrong with him.

Luke was waiting for me on the porch when I arrived. A light snow had started to fall, and I’d wiped out twice on the slick roads. I was going to need a ride home from Luke’s mom. He was sitting on the porch swing, emitting a sullen and self-pitying energy.

“You’re late,” he said as I swung off my bike. My pants were ripped, and my knee was bleeding from the second fall.

“She left you?” I said. A red Volvo usually dropped him off, waiting in the street until I opened the door. Whoever it was, a slight woman with a wild frizz of red hair, she’d never gotten out of the car. Her name and phone number were scribbled on the chalkboard in the kitchen. But it was not information I had committed to memory.

“She didn’t wait,” he said. “By the time I realized that you weren’t there, she was gone.”

“You have a key,” I said, climbing the steps.

He pumped his legs lightly and the swing emitted an irritating squeak as it moved back and forth. Something about the noise, about his pouty face, sent a skein of irritation through me. What a baby.

“I was afraid to go in alone,” he said. I didn’t buy it. I’d been spending time with Luke for about three weeks. He was lots of things—a scaredy-cat wasn’t one of them.

“Afraid of what?” I asked. I stood in front of him and gave him a light tap on his foot with my toe.

He shrugged and looked up at me. His eyes were a little damp but he wasn’t crying.