The Winters in Bloom (13 page)

He was a veteran of the Second World War, so he knew firsthand what it was like to have someone close to you die. He wouldn’t tell his kids about the deaths he’d seen, but he did tell them stories about all the hardships the men experienced: the lack of food and sleep, the tattered clothes and boots, the cold rain that made their bones ache. But somehow, all of his stories ended up being funny, and while Sandra and Beau were laughing, her dad would shrug his thin shoulders and conclude, “Life has a way of going on.”

When Sandra was a child, she thought it was a happy saying, like “Hang in there, baby,” on the popular poster with the orange monkey hanging from a tree. Now she could feel the truth of what her father must have felt during the war, the irony behind his funny stories.

By the time the truck came, it was getting dark. David had been saying for days that it was time for Sandra to go home, and she knew he was right, though she’d been dreading this moment. Once she was back in Philadelphia, the crisis stage would be over and this would become a permanent fact of her life, something that was just true. If she were no longer able to react to it, there would be no choice. She’d have to live with it—and somehow, so would her boy.

ELEVEN

M
ichael Gabriel
Winter was born on June 23 at 2:14
AM
. He weighed 8 pounds and 11 ounces, and received a perfect Apgar score. He was absolutely healthy when Kyra and David took him home to their house in West Mt. Airy, which was like a suburb, with its yards and parks and kids and strollers, but still inside the Philly city limits. They’d bought a three-bedroom stone house with a sunroom built on the back. Kyra had placed a rocker in the sunroom, so she could nurse her baby and watch the sunrise.

The house had been painstakingly childproofed before Michael took his first breath. David had done it in the last months of her pregnancy. He’d gotten down on his hands and knees and crawled all over the house, pretending he had the eyes and reach of a toddler. Which of course Michael would not be for months, but since David couldn’t know exactly when their son would become mobile, better safe than sorry. That was pretty much a theme with him. If something bad
could
happen, they might as well expend the energy making sure it did
not
happen. Within reason, as David liked to add, though most people wouldn’t think it was reasonable to put locks on the attic windows, since even Kyra couldn’t operate the door to the attic, meaning it was unlikely that a tiny baby—or even a twelve-year-old kid—would get up there and squeeze himself into a window that was too small for anyone but a two-year-old to fit through.

When David’s sabbatical was over and he went back to the university, Kyra spent all her time with her baby, using his naps to finish work for her textbook company. The manager wanted her to come back full-time in the next few months, and she planned to. But then she and David started looking into the alternatives for daycare. They visited several places, and he took notes like a good academic. For example:

1. Home Daycare with Cindy

+ Cindy lived in Erdenheim, which wasn’t that far.

+ Cindy only took care of four children, only one of which could be under a year old like Michael.

+ Cindy’s house was thoroughly childproof. (Imagine David on his knees at the house of a woman he just met, deep into “toddler vision,” while Kyra walked back and forth with the baby against her chest, hoping to soothe his colic.)

+ Cindy had a degree in early childhood education.

+ Cindy was opposed to using “time outs.” She felt, as David and Kyra did, that it was too cruel to isolate a misbehaving child.

+ Cindy didn’t even own a television.

− Cindy let a toddler cry for too long. It was exactly forty-nine intolerable seconds—Kyra counted—before Cindy picked up a little girl, though the toddler was grabbing at her leg and sounded hysterical. (That this crying had also led to Michael starting to wail didn’t help.)

Conclusion: Michael would not be staying at Cindy’s Home Daycare.

And so it went, twelve daycare places in all, each with a fatal flaw from David and Kyra’s point of view. Some of the flaws were arguably serious—the vague smell of cigarette smoke in the kitchen, the children rewarded with junk food for staying quiet—but most were like hearing the crying toddler at Cindy’s, or watching a daycare worker at the local college center hold one of the preschool children with no visible affection, like the poor child was a sack of potatoes, David said. They just couldn’t bring themselves to let their baby be taken care of by any of these strangers. They would have to arrange something else.

Kyra told her boss she wanted to work at home for the foreseeable future. This was five years ago, when the economy was still going strong, and the manager agreed. She had to take a pay cut and change her status to “contractor,” but she didn’t object. It was doable, if not financially ideal. They were lucky they had this option.

They were lucky in a lot of ways, and Kyra never forgot it for a second. Sometimes after she put Michael in his crib for a nap, she would walk around her house, making a mental inventory of all the wonderful things in her life. Her husband’s office obviously reminded her of her fabulous husband. The guest bedroom made her think of her mother-in-law, who had come to stay with them when Kyra had the flu and had taken such great care of both Kyra and the baby. (Oh, how she wished David would let Sandra be a bigger part of their lives!) Her own office made her think of writing the tests, which she still enjoyed. The playroom made her think of her baby, of course, and his wide, toothless grin whenever he saw all those colorful toys. And her bedroom, which made her think of—having sex, which surely she and David would get back to having at some point. Parents have sex, after all; they must. How else could any family have more than one child?

By the time Michael was a year old, David and Kyra
were
having regular sex again, once a week anyway, yet they never seriously considered having another child. David would smile at Michael and say, “He deserves all our attention.” David was an only child, so he probably didn’t know how important a sibling could be. Kyra did, and it hurt her to think of the brother or sister Michael would never have—and especially the daughter she would never have—but she was not about to tempt fate by wishing for more when everything was going so well.

It really was going well, despite how tiring it was to deal with all of David’s worries and her own. The first time they’d taken Michael to Sandra’s apartment, when the baby could barely crawl, he’d managed to get his hand stuck in Sandra’s old VCR. The hand was extracted with only the barest of scratches across Michael’s little knuckles, but David and Kyra were mystified. How could this have happened with three adults in the room, all three paying attention? David said that his mother’s house was obviously too dangerous. Sandra winced, but she only said, “I guess this is a sign that it’s time for me to throw away the VCR and move to using a DVD player like the rest of the world.” Later, David called his mom to apologize, but they begged off going to Sandra’s again for a long, long time. Her house wasn’t childproof. It was unfortunate but undeniable.

They felt safer at their own house, until Michael was fifteen months old, and he ate the little white silica packet that Kyra had casually left in the shoebox of her new black loafers. Both she and David were horrified when their baby stumbled out of the closet with white powder on his lips. Even after they called poison control and discovered that the Do Not Eat on the packet did not mean eating it would cause any harm, they couldn’t relax for days. What if it had been poison and Michael had died or gotten brain damage? They’d thought they were being vigilant, but obviously they weren’t being vigilant enough. They would just have to work harder. They would have to
imagine
the dangers before they were confronted with them.

Since David had a better imagination, he came up with many more potential dangers than Kyra did. He decided that one of the lawn chairs on their patio, for instance, had to be tossed out. The chair had an adjustable back, and
if
Michael ever got his hand caught in the metal adjustment device, he could lose a finger. The drawers of their bedroom dresser, which Michael liked to pull open—just like Hurricane Baby—had to be latched, because if Michael pulled a drawer out all the way, it might fall on him and break his foot.

Kyra wondered why Quon and Li hadn’t thought of this. She’d gone over to hang out with Li twice since Michael was a toddler, and both times she’d been surprised by how dangerous their house was. The gate on their stairs was wobbly and easy to knock over, and their oven didn’t have a safety lock. Still, she might have gone over again if Ping hadn’t knocked Michael down while the two of them were “playing.” Kyra had babysat enough to know this was normal, but she didn’t care. Four-year-old Ping looked like a giant compared to her sweet sixteen-month-old.

But it was fine really—exhausting but wonderful, too—until Michael was two and a half years old. David had been invited to give a paper at a conference in London in November. Kyra hadn’t even thought of going with him, because she knew he would be busy most of the time. Though the conference was in England, the subject was American history, his field, and his paper was on a hot topic, the rise and fall of labor unions. He was thrilled that he was finally going overseas, and Kyra was thrilled for him, if a bit jealous. They’d gotten their passports together, before they had Michael, but neither of them had had a chance to use them yet.

David had a lot of work to do before the conference. They didn’t really discuss it, and then, a week before he was set to leave, he came home and surprised her with three tickets. “I got us a little row on the plane all to ourselves,” he said, putting the tickets on the kitchen counter. “Both to London and back.” Kyra hugged him and Michael giggled and answered, “Yes!” when David asked him if he was ready to see Big Ben. “He probably thinks you mean Big Bird,” whispered Kyra. As if to confirm her hunch, a moment later, the toddler had retrieved his Elmo doll from the bottom of his toy chest.

The flight to London wasn’t as bad as Kyra had feared. It was eight and a half hours, and Michael didn’t sleep more than three, but he seemed thrilled to be allowed to watch video after video on the computer and never be told it was time for bed. Poor David had to get up the next morning to be at the conference at nine, four Philly time, but luckily Kyra was able to sleep in, with Michael snoring softly next to her.

The conference lasted five days, and each day, despite the rain, Kyra bundled up her little boy and took him to see the sights: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the London aquarium on the River Thames, Trafalgar Square, and St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Most of the time they didn’t stay nearly as long as Kyra would have liked, and even so, she had to buy a lot of toys as bribes. Michael’s favorite was the red double-decker bus like the ones he’d seen on Piccadilly. Kyra liked this toy, too, because it was made of wood by an ecologically friendly company that promised no splinters and no lead paint.

At night, they would have dinner with David: sometimes in a restaurant, but more often in the hotel, so Michael could play on the floor while David and Kyra relaxed and ate and drank a little wine. Their son didn’t like restaurants, primarily because he didn’t really like eating, but the doctor said it was normal for his age. As long as they gave him healthy foods, they didn’t need to worry. He would eat when he was hungry.

The entire time they were in London, Michael probably ate six bites of chicken, a third of a slice of bread, a half of a very small salad with everything but the lettuce removed, and two grapes. He also drank his orange juice, some of it anyway, but he refused to even sip his milk; he said it smelled “funny.” He didn’t look any thinner when they left, but Kyra thought he had to be. She also thought he seemed “off” in the cab to Heathrow airport, but she couldn’t put her finger on what was different. He was talking and pointing at the buses and other cabs. When David showed him one of the red phone booths, he laughed like he’d been told a seriously hilarious joke.

They were in the security line at Heathrow when Kyra suddenly felt sure Michael was getting sick. He wasn’t rubbing his ear or complaining about his tummy; he was just holding her hand, but that was strange enough as he never held her hand for more than a few minutes without being told to do so. And his eyes looked a little glassy. Or something. She kept looking at her son, wondering what was going on.

Her husband had a stack of articles to read before he got back to Philadelphia. They were through security and sitting near the terminal, and he was in the middle of a paper written by a woman from Harvard who disagreed with his thesis about the labor movement, when Kyra told him she was worried about Michael.

He looked up at Michael, who was sitting on her lap, holding his double-decker bus, spinning the wheels against his leg.

David said, “He seems all right to me.”

“I don’t know,” Kyra said slowly. “Maybe we should delay our flight. That way, we could see if—”

“Honey, even if he is getting a cold, flying won’t make it any worse, will it?”

“What if it’s not a cold? I asked him if his throat hurt and he said no.”