What We Have (14 page)

It was Monday, seven thirty in the morning. Jacques was officially back at work.

He’d be gone a whole work day, followed by a Boston day— seven AM till nine PM, if the planes were on time. A fortune of hours away.

I hadn’t expected this to bother me so much. We’d been over it all—Jacques actually
wanted
to be involved with Sacha as much as possible, it was part of the plan, he’s a New Model man, a doer of dishes, a walker of dogs, a rememberer of big and small kindnesses. But that morning, watching him tug his clothes on like a fireman on high alert, all warm and steamy from the shower, humming a little, hurrying, brushing his hair, pulled as if by magnetic force toward the world outside, I hated how eagerly he was thinking about a day full of things that had nothing to do with Sacha or me. Coffee, breakfast, grabbing the paper, he was dashing around so freely, so unperturbed by each of Sacha’s almost cries. Before we knew it, he was gone, one last kiss and
poof
, he was out the door, and Sacha and I were on our own.

Alone with Sacha, I’d left clock time behind, plunged back into something older and more organic—closer, maybe, to the medieval way of time reckoning, living by seasons and rounds of the day. Or even further back, time reckoned by cataclysm and upheaval. We lived together now in Sacha Time, where a minute could last anywhere from a nanosecond to a millennium.

Time slowed to a crawl. It was eight o’clock in the morning and I paced and fretted and worried about Sacha and looked at the clock and somehow it was still eight o’clock, as if we were stuck here, the two of us, immobile, while the rest of the world rushed on without us.

Being alone with Sacha made me nervous. What if something happened to her? What if she started choking? I pored over the pictures of the Baby Heimlich in
What to Expect Your Baby’s First Year
, certain I’d never get my fists in the right position if something went down her windpipe and got stuck. I knew she was months away from being able to get hold of a nut or a bead, but I worried in advance. What if I tripped, carrying her downstairs? “Nothing will happen,” Jacques said wearily when I called him at the office to be sure he was there, on constant alert. But I barely heard him. I was too busy scrutinizing Sacha, sleeping or awake. All the energy I used to pour into worrying about my own body now went into worrying about hers. Did she always make that whistling sound when she breathed? How long had she had that little rash? Was it normal for a baby to cry so much?

Annie called to check in, and I described the blister on Sacha’s lip for her in intricate detail. A few minutes of this, and she told me someone was on call waiting and she had to go.

Late afternoon and early evening were hardest. Sacha got more irritable and harder to console as the day wore on.

“Maybe it’s colic,” Julie said helpfully.

I didn’t think it was colic. I’d been reading up, and this wasn’t consistent enough. “She just gets exhausted, I think. Too much of the day builds up in her.”

“I remember that,” my mother said, when I tried to describe this to her on the phone. “We used to call it ‘the witching hour’—the time when you just couldn’t calm down.” She thought about this, from the distance of a generation. “You, more than Sara or Julie,” she added. “They were both a cinch.”

Of course. Here we were, back to the genetic lottery: Sacha had inherited this unease from me. Who could tell what else she’d gotten? I’d been studying other people’s babies and I was discovering Sacha was not a particularly mellow baby.

“Don’t compare,” our pediatrician said cheerfully, and I tried not to, but the other babies in the waiting room all looked so rosy and unperturbed.

Sacha was not, I was finding, easily settled. She was sensitive to stimuli: bright lights, clapping, high-pitched voices. If she heard a sudden noise, her eyes would widen and her jaw would quiver and a cry would come from her like a stuck alarm—a public emergency,
stop this!
kind of cry. My mother was right, afternoon into evening was the hardest, Sacha seemed to collect all the experiences of the day—the crackle of newspaper, Bacchus’s barking and scratching, the blare of a siren, and it would gather and gather in her, until by late afternoon she was inconsolable.

I tried my best not to compare or worry. We survived three of Jacques’s Boston Days. His first week of work morphed into the second, and little by little, Sacha Time felt less bewildering. Like jet lag, I started to get used to it. My initial panic softened to a state of restless attentiveness. We nursed, and napped, and toured, and slept, and the sink filled with cups and bowls and gunky spoons, and bit by bit Sacha’s face rounded a little, the sharp pins of her elbows and ankles filled out and softened. She wasn’t mellower, necessarily, but we were getting used to each other, she and I. Either I was getting less anxious or more accustomed to her, and somehow we found our way.

Every morning Julie called, and every morning and every afternoon my mother called, and on weekends Sara called, and my father called, and once in a while Annie called, and in between I put Sacha in her Snugli and walked to the zoo, and we looked at the flamingos preening on their skinny legs and the birds circling in their netting and little by little, I got bolder. I started to expand our excursions—we took the Metro down to the Mall, we drove to Georgetown to meet my colleagues. When it warmed up a little in the afternoons, I walked her round and round our tiny garden. Some days Julie stopped in on her way to or from running last-minute errands—she was cutting her hours back now, getting ready to move—and soon Sacha was a month old, and then she was five weeks old, and then six weeks old, and before I knew it, it was the end of January, and Julie and Jon called to tell us that they’d scheduled Mayflower to come on Saturday and pack up all their furniture and boxes and get ready for their long drive north. They wanted us to come over Saturday morning so they could give us the food they couldn’t take with them. And, of course, to say good-bye.

 

THE DAY BEFORE MAYFLOWER CAME,
I got a phone call. I was sitting in the kitchen watching Sacha, who was strapped in her baby carrier watching the pale slivers of sunlight move across the kitchen table. I listened to the phone and thought,
The phone is ringing
.
Someone needs to answer it
. On the fifth ring, the one who answered it (was there anyone else?) was me.

“H’lo,” I said into the phone, in my suspicious, I-
know
-you’re-a-telemarketer voice. The phone is always an intrusion. If I wanted to talk, wouldn’t I have called?

It was the chair of the English department from Boston.

We had a bad connection, she was clearing her throat, and I was distracted, watching Sacha’s eyelids flickering, down down down
up
, down down down . . .
up
, trying to gauge whether she was drifting off to sleep, allowing me to keep talking or—more likely—about to snap alert and scream.

“—really enjoyed your telephone interview,” the chair was saying, adding that she realized the circumstances were unusual, but now that MLA was over and the committee had met—there was a whole world out there of people going back, people meeting and making decisions while I was sitting here surrounded by gunky spoons—they’d voted, and they wanted me to come to campus for a real visit. A chance to really talk, the chair concluded. Several “reals” and “reallys” wove their way through our conversation, as if she could see straight into the unreality of my new world.

Would that be possible to arrange in the next few weeks? A visit to Boston? It would be for two days: meetings with different groups in the department, deans, and a dinner with the committee; and the next day, a presentation to the department. I’d need to give a half-hour talk, and there’d be another half hour for questions and answers.

My answer flew out right away. Yes, I wanted to come.

By late afternoon, every member of my family knew about the on-campus visit and had called to congratulate me. It was clear from the general euphoria my family had already skipped over a few steps—such as my actually getting the job. Or agreeing to take it, if I did.

Julie was overjoyed. If we moved to Boston, we’d only be two hours away from Cape Elizabeth!

“I am
not
picking my next job based on where
you’re
living, Mellie,” I said sharply, though I’d already checked the distance from Boston to Portland. 104 miles.

My mother had her own agenda. She’d started pricing airfares from Detroit to DC on Northwest, convinced Jacques would need her help while I was away.

“Of course I’m coming,” she said, even as Jacques started frantically waving his arms at me in protest from across the kitchen. “There’s no way you’re taking that baby on a plane!” Did I know that a single sneeze could hang in place in an airplane cabin for up to seventy minutes?

She’d help Jacques out here in DC, while I was gone. She could even do a little cooking for us while she was there. Freeze some dinners. I remembered the stacks of thawing dishes on the counter over the holidays.

“Let her come,” I said to Jacques, after I’d hung up. “She’ll feel useful. She can help with Sacha. It’ll be good, you’ll have company.”

“I don’t need help,” Jacques said. “Honestly. We’ll be fine here on our own.”

There were big questions looming (was this the right job opportunity, the right time?) and there were logistical questions (should we let my mother come? how could I leave Sacha for almost two full days when I was breastfeeding?). Jacques and I focused on logistics.

“Let’s just take this one step at a time,” Jacques said, which really meant
please tell your mother to cancel her plane reservations
.

“OK,” I said, which really meant
I’ll ask Julie what she thinks
.

 

“OH, JUST LET HER COME,”
Julie said the next morning, while I made her pose in front of the Mayflower van. I snapped half a dozen pictures of her holding Sacha in front of the last tower of boxes, all marked FRAGILE—DO NOT DROP. “It’ll make her feel involved. And with Mom, it’s always better that way.”

Julie looked different to me, her skin rosy and her mood unusually good for someone about to drive fourteen hours behind a moving van. She twirled Sacha around, playfully pretending to sit her down on top of the highest box and laughing at my distress.

“What’s with you?” I grumbled, taking Sacha back from her. I could only go so far when it came to feigning enthusiasm for this move. Their house looked so forlorn, squatting behind its blue-and-yellow SOLD sign. There was nothing left inside but old phone books and a pile of takeout menus. “You’re in good spirits,” I observed. “Happy to be escaping the big bad city?”

She grinned, thought for a second, then grabbed my arm, clearly unable to keep quiet another minute. “I’m
pregnant
, Mellie,” she whispered.

I started. “You’re
what
? Why didn’t you tell me?
When?
”

“I’m already eleven weeks,” she said. Jon and Jacques were peering at the map together, plotting the best route, and she filled me in out of earshot. The baby was due August 2. They’d done a new kind of test very early—something called chorionic villus sampling, or CVS—and this time, everything was OK. No chromosomes out of place.

“It’s a girl,” she told me, eyes shining.

Of course it was.

“And Mom knows already,” she confessed, not quite meeting my eye.

Of course she did.

I hugged her and she hugged me back and we both burst into tears, Sacha—as usual—squashed between us, and Julie squeezed Sacha’s foot in its loose pink sock. “Don’t get anything on that outfit, Sacha-la,” she teased her, smoothing down the front of Sacha’s fleece coat. “Keep it nice and clean for your little cousin-to-be.”

“Hey,” Jon said, coming out of the garage with a lone rake. “We have to get going, Jules. At this rate we won’t make it to Maine till next weekend.”

My family doesn’t do good-byes well. Julie and I looked awkwardly at each other, then away. “Well,” I said, clearing my throat, and she echoed me, and we patted each other nervously on the shoulders and finally gave in and hugged each other again, and I cried a little more. So did she.

“Take care of your mom,” Julie said, sniffling on Sacha’s sleeve. “You hear me?” She didn’t look at me, just at Sacha, whose eyes were big and ponderous. “I need her to come and help me with your cousin-to-be this summer. Don’t let her stress out about the job in Boston, OK?”

Jacques and I watched as the movers put the last boxes in the van. We took a few more pictures. That was it. They got in their respective cars. In the end, we got their rake, a carton of Jon’s lactose-free milk, and a few knobby carrots.

We watched till all we could see was the empty street.

“OK,” Jacques said at last. “We should go.”

“Wait,” I said, when Jacques cleared his throat and leaned in to scoop Sacha from me.

I headed around the house, immaculate as always, to the backyard. For late January, it was warm, almost fifty degrees. The air smelled faintly of mud.

Emily’s tree was still staked to the ground on all sides. One of the strips of cloth used to wrap the trunk had come loose. No buds yet, but the branches looked strong.

“Good-bye, little tree,” I said. “Grow well.”