The World Below (31 page)

“Oh, Robert.”

He told me she’d been born three hours earlier. Karen had come to the hospital the day before, because she started to have contractions again and they hoped they could get her under control. And they were still thinking they would be able to when he left at about ten o’clock to get some sleep. But the phone was ringing when he opened the door at home. He went back down to his car, drove to the hospital, and went straight up to the delivery room.

Karen was resting now. The baby was struggling to live, chemically forced to rest, pumped with air she couldn’t yet draw on her own. He was making phone calls. His parents. Me. His siblings. Karen’s. Their closest friends.

“Shall I come?” I asked.

“I don’t know. It’s up to you. Karen is … well, I’m not sure how long she’ll be in here. I guess she’s kind of cut up inside too. And nothing’s ready at home. I’d been planning to get to it one of these weekends.”

There was a long pause. Clearly he hadn’t imagined this, what came next for him and Karen and the baby. Then we both spoke at the same time.

“Yeah, come,” he said. “I’ll come,” I said.

Of course I’d thought of Karen often through the fall, especially after she was sentenced to bed with the pregnancy. I e-mailed her almost daily, and sent her regular care packages: books and baby things and, once, a pretty nightgown I saw in a store window in Rutland. But I hadn’t
worried
about her. Partly, I suppose, because I’d known other people who’d spent good portions of their pregnancies
in bed and delivered more or less on time, and partly because Karen herself seemed so unworried, so blasé about it. I should have known better.

Of my three children, Karen was the one most hurt—most damaged, I would say—by my divorce from Peter. But of course I would also say that she was the one most likely by temperament to have been hurt. To receive his departure as pain.

She’d always been a grave, sober child. She was bright and quick, but she somehow also felt that life was serious business. All of the tasks of childhood—now she rolled over, now she sat up, now she walked, now she spoke her first words—were accomplished by her with a labored earnestness; unlike Fiona, whose achievements at these same kinds of tasks seemed to
happen
to her—she greeted each one mildly, with good humor, with grace, with a sense of pleasant discovery—and unlike Jeff, whose impatience and frustration with himself meant we all rushed to help him and thus made everything more difficult. For Karen, each was a milestone, methodically worked for, struggled at,
done
—and then she’d move directly on and begin her struggle with the next.

For a while after the divorce, what she worked at was getting Peter back. Dressed neatly in what she thought of as her prettiest outfit, she’d be ready for his visits long ahead of time. As I chased Jeff down to get him clean and ready, I’d see her sitting on the windowsill in the living room, watching for her father’s car, and my heart would ache for her. It didn’t help that I still wanted him back then too. That, just like her, I dressed carefully before he was to come over, that I always hoped, as she clearly did, that he’d see me and be flooded with yearning for everything he’d turned away from.

He told me that she tried more than once to persuade him to let her live with him. She made a distinction between herself and Jeff and Fiona. They were little; she was big. They didn’t know how to be good, how to be quiet. She did. She also knew how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and she was learning how to
wash the dishes. When he told me this, I felt such sorrow for her that I almost wept.

But what was there to be done? Peter and I had failed. It was finished. My fault. His fault. Not hers. I told her that over and over. I explained how the divorce simply meant she couldn’t have us both at the same time anymore. But as it turned out, she could hardly have him at all.

It actually seemed to get easier for her, though, as Peter withdrew from all their lives, so that when he got a better job in Arizona and took it, I was grateful. Coward that I was, I suppose I preferred those slow wounds I didn’t have to see to her sharp, visible pain at his every arrival or departure.

But that carefulness, that observant, noticing quality, that wish to please, remained with her as she grew up. She was
nice
. Too nice. As though if she stopped being perfectly pleasant for even a moment, you’d leave. And she attached herself to Joe with an intensity that frightened me.

Though when we separated, she didn’t get angry or upset with him. No, as I’ve said, it was Fiona who swore and stamped and behaved horribly. Karen, Karen was nice even here, sympathetic and understanding to Joe. To me too, of course.

What I told myself was that this was to be expected. She was older. She was married herself. It mattered so much less to her now.

And all that was true. She did seem sealed off and protected from many of the bumps of life by her marriage to Robert. But I suspect that she was also being careful with Joe and me about this. Careful, lovable, risking nothing.

We fucked up, I sometimes wanted to say to her. I fucked up. You haye a right to be mad. Get mad.

But I didn’t. Again, I was grateful, too grateful, for her kindness, her carefulness and calm. And of course, by now they were indelibly who she was, anyway. There was no longer the possibility of an alternate Karen. A Karen who would have said to me about this pregnancy, “I’m scared, Mom,” or “I need your help.”

•     •     •

She was sleeping when I came into her room, though her door was open and there was the standard hospital traffic and noise in the hallway. I stood at the foot of her bed and watched her for a minute. She looked done in. She hadn’t been outside in months, and it showed in her face, which was as white as her hospital johnny, white as the sheets draped over her. White, with dark smudges of fatigue under her eyes. Her mouth was slightly open, her breathing deep. No makeup. She looked like an exhausted child except for the full swell of her belly and breasts under the sheets.

One bare foot stuck out from under the sheet, long and gracefully arched, the bottom of it a little grimy, the bright nail polish almost grown out, a little stripe of color at the tip of each toe. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to hold her foot. Watching her breathe, I had that feeling I think most parents get when their children are suffering, no matter what their age—the sense that we should have protected them, that somehow it was our failure that caused them to have to feel the pain of the world—even while we know this is ridiculous.

After a few moments I set my flowers down on her tray table and left the room. I asked the first nurse I saw where the neonatal intensive care unit was.

I thought I was prepared for Jessie. I wasn’t.

She was incredibly tiny. Not just small—that I’d thought of—but scrawny, her angry red flesh draped loosely over her miniature bones. What I could see of her face and shoulders was mottled with ugly purple bruises. She looked like a newly hatched sparrow, fallen out of the nest. Fallen very hard out of the nest.

She lay on a small chest-high platform crib under bright lights, naked except for a diaper and a tiny pink knitted cap. Plastic tubes or lines of different sizes ran from her every where—her navel, her foot, her mouth—to a machine that reminded me of nothing so much as the stand in a dentist’s office, the stand that holds the
fountain, the lamp, the armature for the drill. Plastic wrap lay suspended about six inches above her. She was blindfolded, as Robert had said, and somehow this seemed more terrible than anything else. Her arms and legs swam vaguely and spasmodically in the air.

A sign by her station said P
LEASE BE
Q
UIET
, I’
M
T
RYING TO REST
. A monitor above her gave what I suppose were her vital signs, pulse being the only one I could understand. The nurse who’d been sitting next to her had stood up when I approached. Now she whispered, “You’re the grandma?”

I nodded.

She whispered, “She’s doing so well, really. Would you like to touch her?”

“Can I?” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “Gently, it goes without saying. Here, I’ll shift the cover.” She lifted the plastic and I reached in and lightly laid my hand on Jessie’s belly, just above the tube strung from her umbilicus. It looked immense, my hand, a giant’s ugly, veined mitt descending onto her. Under my fingers she felt hot and dry, but her flesh quivered with life, and her arm motion speeded up.

“Ooo, she’s excited,” the nurse whispered, looking at the monitor. She was young and pretty, her long hair pinned back. She wore a vividly printed medical smock.

“Is that okay?” I asked.

“Well, a little goes a long way,” she said.

I quickly pulled my hand back, and she redraped the plastic.

“What’s that for?” I whispered.

“The plastic?”

“Yes.”

“It’s so she won’t dry out under the lights.”

“And the lights are on to keep her warm?”

“No, actually, they’re for the bruises. The light helps her body absorb the blood waste from them.”

“So is that what’s wrong with her?”

“Well. That’s one thing. She can’t breathe on her own yet. And she had a bleed too, did they tell you?”

“No, I just got here. I don’t know anything.”

We’d moved over by the door, but the nurse was still whispering. Everywhere in the large twilit room—and there must have been ten or twelve stations or insulettes where babies lay and nurses or parents hovered—there was a hush. Even the babies were hushed. No one cried. The noises were mostly electronic—the beeps and dings of monitors and machines keeping the babies alive.

“A bleed,” I said.

She nodded. “A head bleed.”

“Christ!” I said.

“No,” she said, touching my arm. “No, it was over very quickly. It’s not necessarily something to worry about.”

“But will she need surgery?”

“Oh, no. No. We just wait. We wait and see. Most of the time, it just resolves itself. A lot of what’s wrong with these guys resolves itself. Particularly when they’re as big as Jessie is.” There’d been a sudden sharper beeping as she spoke, and her head turned away and then turned back to me, as though she took it all in, interpreted it, and dismissed it—whatever was happening to whatever child—all in those few seconds.

“She’s
big?
” I said.

The nurse grinned. “She’s a
mother
by our standards,” she said. “Yeah. She’s big.”

When I turned to go, she was already making her way back to Jessie.

Karen didn’t wake until another nurse, a tired-looking overweight young woman, came in and loudly announced that she needed to draw some blood. I’d been sitting in the chair by Karen’s bed for more than an hour then, trying to conjure what I’d say about the baby when she opened her eyes.

But I didn’t need to say anything. Her eyes filled with tears when she saw me, and I leaned forward to gather her in. “Mom,” she said, into my shoulder.

“I can come back later,” the nurse said.

“Could you?” I said. “That’d be great.”

“Pas deproblème,”
she said. She pronounced it
paw.

But Karen had turned away from me already; she was fumbling for the box of tissues on her bedside stand. “Oh,
fuck?
” she said. “I was not going to cry again. Fuck
me.”
She blew her nose, at length, and her breathing slowly evened out. Finally she said, “Thanks
so
much for coming, Mom.”

“Oh, hon. I wanted to. Don’t say thanks.”

“Did you see the baby?”

“I did.”

“I won’t ask what you think. You think what we all think. ‘God, how awful.’ ‘God, she’s so tiny.’ ‘God.’ ”

“I think she’s beautiful, too. She’s terribly beautiful.”

She was wiping her eyes rapidly, alternating: one, then the other. Her mouth was open.

Finally she closed it. She leaned back.

“I can’t wait to hold her,” I said. “Have you held her yet?”

The wrong question. Her eyes welled again.

“Don’t ask me that,” she said.

“Oh sweetie, I’m sorry.” I watched her for a moment, trying to stay in control of herself. “Karen,” I said. “You
could
cry. God knows I wouldn’t mind.”

“I would,” she said fiercely. She looked suddenly like the child she’d been: determined, single-minded. “I would mind a lot.” She sat up and blew her nose again. “We have a daughter. A wonderful little girl. I will not cry. What a betrayal. It does her … it does no one any good at all.”

“You do have a wonderful daughter. But she’s in big trouble. She’s having to work terribly hard just to stay alive. And that’s sad. That’s awful, how hard she’s having to work. Worth crying
over—especially because you love her. That’s not a betrayal, Karrie. None. Surely.”

“I know. I know,” she said. She ran her hands through her hair. It was lank and dark. She needed a shampoo. “But what I’m afraid of, Mom, is that if I begin I’ll never stop. And then I’ll just be … useless. As useless as I’ve been lying around all these months.”

“What do you mean, useless! You’ve been gestating! You’ve been making it possible for Jessie to be born.”

“And you see what a very good job I did.” She smiled angrily.

“Karen.”

Her face shifted. She fell back against the pillows and said, “Oh, I don’t mean any of it. Don’t listen to me. I don’t. I’m tired. I’d like a good stiff drink.”

“Oh, well. Now I know what to bring instead of flowers next time.”

She laughed. And then wiped her eyes again.

I couldn’t go to my own house, of course. My tenants with their three teenage boys were there until just before Christmas. I would stay at Karen and Robert’s apartment on Montgomery Street, at least until she got home, sleeping on the pull-out couch in the study. Late that first afternoon, Robert met me at the hospital and took me to get my car from the neighbor’s garage where I’d left it. We drove back separately to their apartment, and before he left to say good night to Karen and Jessie, he showed me where the bedding and towels were and pulled the couch out for me. I was asleep before he got home.