What We Have (29 page)

I glanced down at Sacha, who was pulling herself up on the kitchen chair, practicing standing up alone. Sisters or brothers.

My mother was right. That really mattered. When on earth were we going to manage
that
?

We met Cara one evening after dinner. I’d gotten ready for her. I changed my shirt, washed my face, inspected myself in the mirror.

I’d never given an interview before, I’d always been on the other side. The interview with the author at the magazine who needed an amanuensis. The fellowship interview where eight unsmiling men asked me what difference poetry would make in the event one country decided to drop a nuclear bomb on another. The interview at the New Orleans–style restaurant where, back from college one summer, I tried to convince the owner I was planning to stay on permanently, claiming I wanted to write menu copy as a career.
Chicken almondine on a tender bed of spring greens.
None of these interviews had gone my way.

Now, I wanted to ask the right questions, not give the right answers. Was that what it meant to grow up?

 

CARA WAS EASY TO TALK
to. I liked her right away. She’d studied literature in college, and we shared favorite authors—Nabokov, Márquez. She had a long list of questions for us about how we liked to handle emergencies. She had a boyfriend (safely back in Des Moines, studying engineering). She seemed perfect: low-key and responsible.

There was one catch. She hadn’t spent much time with babies before—all her references were from people with toddlers and school-age children. After we talked for a while—I liked her, Jacques liked her—we tried to get her to engage with Sacha, who’d been pulling herself up on the side of the couch and smacking Jacques and me on the legs with a book the whole time we talked.

There was no sparkle. Cara stiffened up the minute we passed Sacha to her. All her warmth and friendliness suddenly seemed shadowed by something—was it possible?—like fear.

Jacques, who interviews people all the time at work, went for the direct approach. “You seem a little tense,” he said after a few minutes. “Are you comfortable with babies?”

“Yes,” Cara said hesitantly, passing Sacha back to him like she was made of glass. Of course she liked babies! She thought about that, reconsidering.

“Anyway,” she pointed out, “they grow so fast.”

“Not the right person,” Jacques said, once we’d thanked her for coming, and Cara had closed the door behind her.

I defended her. A literature major, after all! “She just needs time to get used to Sacha,” I insisted.

But it was moot. Cara called us an hour later to say she’d decided to accept a job taking care of a three-year-old in Brookline.

We met Jamie the next night, and she seemed fine. A little on the unimaginative side, but she was a “good, solid choice,” in Jacques’s estimation.

I still wanted to meet number three.

We’d bumped Annabel O’Rourke down to third place because she was only nineteen, which I thought was too young, and she didn’t have a college degree, and everything in her file suggested a mixture of schemes half realized and still in transition. “Just what we need,” I said to Jacques, “another child to raise.” But now, I wanted to meet her. Just to compare.

We scheduled an interview for the next evening. Jacques and I were both out of sorts. We had so little time to get things done anymore! Sacha was fidgety and cross, dinner dishes piled in the sink, and Annabel seemed inconceivably young to me, more like sixteen than nineteen, her long hair the color of a leaf in flame. She was ten minutes late, not having realized our street was a one-way. She was nervous, her plans came out all in a jumble: Nick, her boyfriend (who wanted to make films) had just gotten into art school; they were looking for apartments. Every part of her life seemed in flux, still forming, bordering on chaos, her history crowded with names of aunts and uncles and cousins I was already forgetting even as I heard about them. But her manner with Sacha took my breath away. It was like the moment in
The Wizard of Oz
when the screen goes from black and white to color. Annabel asked to hold her, we said OK, she scooped her onto her lap, laughing, and Sacha gazed at her in fascination, eyes opening, arms opening, like a bud exposed to some kind of spectacular light.

Annabel was a talker. What she really wanted was to design and make clothing, she told us, but in the meantime, she needed to make money to support herself so she could join Nick at art school in a few years. She loved babies. She’d practically raised her three younger sisters herself—no self-pity here, just straight up—because her father left home when she was little and her mom had a bad car accident when she was fifteen, so as the oldest, it was up to Annabel to take over. She loved houses. She loved fixing things. She understood what we meant about the House with the Green Shag. No comment, just a complicit shrug. When she handed Sacha back to me, wriggling and laughing, her hand was unusually warm.

When we offered her something to drink, she asked for milk.

Annabel was wholesome—granted. But was she calm, I wondered. Would she have staying power when Sacha refused to nap?

Was she mature enough to handle all we threw at her? All life threw at us?

Her references, I had to admit, were more effusive than any ever written about me.

In one job, she’d taken care of four boys under the age of seven.

Cooked them lunch, did their laundry—“We made a game out of it,” she said, with that self-deprecating shrug. The sorting game. Kids, she pointed out, like games. Barely done being a kid herself, it was clear Annabel liked games, too. Took mattresses off the beds and turned staircases into slides. Threw “unbirthday parties.” Or “hide the lunchbox.” The boys would run around the house, looking for their lunches—once she hid them in the washing machine. Once, she tucked them behind a pair of boots in the mudroom.

Patience?

In another job, she’d taken care of a seven-year-old girl with special needs. Took her on long rides through the neighborhood in a makeshift cart Annabel constructed out of a wheelbarrow and blankets. Wrote stories for the girl herself because the books her parents got for her—Annabel grimaced—were too difficult and boring. Braided her hair every morning and helped her wash herself. “
You
know,” she said with that deal-with-it-life-is-wonderful-even-so expression, and she teasingly referred to herself as Annabel Poppins, confessing that the year her father moved out she watched
Mary Poppins
thirty-seven times.

In case I wasn’t won over already, next came the clincher: the story of the cassettes. She mentioned it on the way out the door, having caught sight of one of Sacha’s car tapes, snaggled up in Jacques’s in-box. I’d forgotten to throw it out after it had gotten mangled in our tape player earlier that week. Annabel eyed it, smiling. She told us she’d used her mother’s iron, lowest setting, to smooth out her sister Meghan’s cassettes when the little tapes got kinked up and wouldn’t play.

“Did it work?” Jacques asked, interested. We had plenty more tangled tapes, if we could just find them.

Annabel nodded. “You just have to be careful with the heat. I used a really thin piece of cloth between the tape and the iron,” she told him.

Wow
.

What drew me to Annabel was her life force, the sheer ruddy flush of energy in her, like an electric charge. Not to mention it seemed like there was nothing she couldn’t fix.

I was pretty sure she was the one. But later, Sacha asleep, I cradled the phone to my ear, dialing, ready to describe her to my mother and ask her what she thought.

PICTURE A WOMAN WITH A
cane.

She’s fifty-eight. She’s wearing her Thoroughly Modern Millie wig, pageboy style, with bangs. Shiny and dark, with an artificial gleam that suggests vitality. In the airport you can see the wig from way off because it’s the only part of her that looks alive.

She’s rail thin and her gait has the stagger of someone who’s become incapacitated in a hurry. Age slows you down bit by bit: Arthritis eats away at a hip, maybe, and the rest of the body compensates or doesn’t, but it happens slowly. This is different. My mother has aged dramatically in the last month, like Sondra Bizet in
Lost Horizon
—the minute she leaves Shangri-La, a century hits her all at once.

The ordinary can become treacherous so quickly. A stalled escalator, metal stairs frozen, seventeen steps down to baggage claim. It may as well be the Antipodes down there. What about the cramped women’s bathroom, rosettes of discarded tissue sticking to the bottom of her Lucite cane? How to balance the cane in one hand, the handbag, how to lean against the stall’s door, panting,
he can’t come in here to help, you have to do this alone, this was your idea, you insisted on coming against everyone’s advice and orders, to see this baby.
Every step is agony. Pain pillows the vertebrae now, knives for clavicles, two hundred and six bones in the human body and so many of them hurt now. A match of small pain ignites the bigger pains nearby, until it’s all in flames, rib, spine, hip, neck,
the neck is the worst, who knew it was so hard to hold up a head, the head is so heavy, the wig is so scratchy, keep them from seeing, keep them from knowing, if I can just get these pants down this shirt up this seat down this body what was it Yeats said, about the soul being fastened to a dying animal . . . was that Yeats? Remember that class at Michigan freshman year, the one on Irish writers, the professor what was his name, big burly man from Ireland, with that wonderful accent. After Yeats, we read Joyce.
Ulysses
. Leopold Bloom. A book for every hour of the day, wasn’t that it? And there was a key. Every book was organized around an organ of the body . . . liver, he was eating liver in the first book . . .

When I was little, when my parents fought in the next room, I used to squeeze my hands tight and play a game I called The Worst. This isn’t the worst, I’d tell the cat, who sometimes liked me and sometimes didn’t. Hissed when he didn’t. What would be the worst? I didn’t have brothers or sisters, so Snowbell had to answer. My friend Linda was born without a hand, she had to wear one made of plastic. That was worse, but not the worst. The worst would be no hands or feet. The worst would be to be tied up in a room full of something horrible—snakes, I told myself. Or maybe hideous spiders, the huge kind I used to see in
National Geographic
.

These nights sleep comes hard and Which Is Worst plays all the time, like a TV channel I can’t shut off. Which would be worse: paralysis or blindness? Blindness, I think, because then I couldn’t read. Now I can still read, a little of the
New Yorker
each night. But maybe paralysis is worse because you couldn’t reach for anything—the table—the book about dying with dignity—