Chapter One
EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER
That was when the worlds split.
When she was open on the table, paralyzed from the waist down. When they held her child up for her to see.
You, she thought, but the sight of him, twisted rigid in a howl that never came, cut off the thought.
Then he was gone. Someone had taken him.
Instead of his cry, there was the tinny hospital PA paging one neonatal team and then another.
Instead of his cry, the voices of competent, confident people creeping toward alarm.
A doctor’s narrow head was bent in concentration, sewing her back into a body.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“They’re trying,” Adam said, from somewhere behind. Then he was just above and kissed her forehead. His lips felt dry and chapped.
The room was small, too small for all these people. She didn’t know the situation but understood that it was dire. Someone had held her child up, then taken him away, and he hadn’t made a sound yet, and the room kept filling with more people.
“It’s cold in here,” she said. “They need to wrap him.”
“It’s warm, Hannahbelle,” said Adam’s voice, but not from near her ear where she expected. “They’ve got him warm, don’t worry, they’re doing everything correctly.”
He must have been straining to see, must have been craning, she could hear it in his voice. It was happening near the door, she was almost certain, somewhere past her feet, whatever they were trying, and the door was letting in a draft; she felt it blowing over her.
She didn’t try to see. She wouldn’t have been able to, her view partially blocked by the paper draping meant to shield her from an eyeful of her insides. But also seeing had never been a part of what they shared, she and this child. In their nine months together, she had only ever seen him for an instant: tiny body twisted rigid in a silent howl, eyes not yet open. That was seconds ago or minutes or hours and every second without oxygen killed more of him, the tiny brain that had been growing all along inside her, the one she somehow felt she knew, so much so that the unfamiliar look of him surprised her. The situation seemed to her quite obviously, quite awesomely a bad one, but also somehow muted, in the way that time mutes even the worst pain. It felt to her this had been going on for longer than the life she’d lived until now.
In the corner of her vision, something moved. She tilted up her chin and caught the blur as it moved past her. Held cradled in a nurse’s arms—the blue-smudged lips, the way one tiny arm trailed as a doll’s would. The clipped, efficient sorrow in the way the nurse grabbed at the arm and tucked it in. The clipped, efficient sorrow of the quiet that descended.
Then she was looking at the obstetrician’s narrow head still bent behind the curtain, the hair so glossy black it cast its own strange dulled reflection of the overhead fluorescents.
“Is he OK?” she asked.
“Is he going to be OK?”
There was no answer.
Chapter Two
Eight months later, I stood on the top level of an open parking structure, watching fog roll in from the Oakland Hills and longing for a cigarette.
Jack was regarding me through heavy eyes. He looked like he could sleep.
I smiled at him, and then, unable to resist, though I knew it would perk him up and make a car seat nap less likely, I bent and nuzzled the top of his small head. The silky brown waves that tightened into ringlets near the base of his neck smelled of absurdly expensive baby shampoo mixed with a musk like a cat’s just-licked fur. The smell soothed my nerve endings like nicotine.
Well, not quite like nicotine. It made no sense to stand outside a car, contemplating the view from the top level of an open parking garage, if you weren’t smoking a cigarette. But so many of my habits were like this, obsolete cocoons of pre-baby behavior, the butterfly long gone.
“Get in the car, Hannah,” I said out loud because when a day has already beaten you down before nine a.m., it’s nice to have someone give you clear directions, even if it’s yourself.
But I kept on standing there. The air was the perfect cool of one foot stuck out from sweaty blankets, and with the fog now burning off in the morning glare, I felt outside of time, outside of space in the best possible way, like at the airport. Just standing there was luxurious because there was no purpose to it. I was ignoring everything I had to face about this day. I was standing there simply because I wanted to and that felt better than sex, better than drugs. Slightly less good than a massage. Nowhere near as good as four solid hours of sleep.
But Jack was fiddling with his ear now. It was one of his more urgent Tired Signs and meant I had to get him in that car seat pronto to seize the glinting, flickering portal to a better dimension known in baby-sleep literature as the Tired Window. Reluctantly, I slipped the diaper backpack off my shoulder and started rooting for the car key.
I could tell right away it wasn’t there. There was only one place I ever put it, in the side pocket that was a little too narrow to hold my phone, but still my hand kept rooting, hopefully, now in the main compartment, past clean diapers, hand wipes, spare onesies (always damp for reasons I had not pinned down), down into the substrate of loose Cheerios.
Jack had started mewling experimentally.
I trilled, “Mommy forgot the car key! Silly Mommy!”
My voice was pitched halfway between fun and seriously weird because I was trying to fend off an internal chorus of fuckety fuck fuck. I was imagining lugging the stroller all the way up and then back down four flights of stairs again. The parking structure extended only three floors up the low-rise, my therapist’s office was on the seventh, and the elevator was broken because of course it was. It almost had to be on a day like this.
I felt in the diaper bag one last time, probing the refrigerated pocket where an empty, unwashed bottle festered, a relic of a time when I still hoped to convince Jack to accept something other than my breast. I did this even though I now knew exactly where the car key was: on the small side table in Dr. Goodman’s office. I’d taken it out of the pocket in order to fish for the parking ticket, then put it down while handing the ticket over to be validated. I remembered this all very precisely, so precisely I almost felt I should be able to slip a hand into that memory and pluck the key right out.
I forced myself to picture instead the viable next steps. Up and down the concrete stairs again, four flights. Was there any way around this? I wasn’t lazy, but Jack was a beast of a child, still 99th percentile in height and weight as of his last doctor’s appointment, almost a different species from me; I very much doubted I’d ever in my life broken the 20th percentile. Jack’s stroller added another fifteen pounds at least.
Options: I could try to take him out of it, risk his wrath. But he was so calm right now, still maybe looking drowsy. Like one of those magical creatures I saw in coffee shops, napping strapped to their mother’s chests, as though caring for a baby might be as simple as starting to wear silk scarves, just a matter of getting the knots right.
“Right,” I said aloud now. “Right,” I tried again in a more cheerful voice. And then to Jack, “Mommy made an uh-oh.”
Jack gurgled happily at this, recognizing the word. He didn’t seem drowsy anymore, and this was mildly dismaying. It meant no car seat nap. The Tired Window flickering shut, a portal winked out of existence. No chance to start making phone calls, sending emails, sorting out the practicalities of the bombshell Adam had dropped on me that morning. But any frustration was mostly overwhelmed by my delight at Jack’s sweet gurgle, at recognizing the great joy he took in discovering that within the buzzing, blooming noise always surrounding him there were patterns, little packets of sound that picked out little pieces of the world. It knocked my socks off, still, that babies ever managed to learn this, that he was learning it and I could actually see it happening.
“Right,” I said again, and for a moment actually managed to feel fantastic.
But there was still the problem of the car key and the broken elevator, of my exhausted, aching body. The C-section scar that still felt raw and angry eight months on. And my giant baby who might at any moment become a writhing, wriggling, shrieking torque of impressive force, frighteningly uncontainable on four flights of concrete stairs.
Without him, I could knock discreetly at the heavy door, whisper “Left my keys,” grab them through the tiny crack that Dr. Goodman would surely open—no wider—to protect the confidentiality of her next patient, then slip away almost as though it hadn’t happened.
With Jack, I threatened to make a scene. A second scene actually. Because an hour ago, when Dr. Goodman had found me in her waiting room with a baby on my lap, you might have thought from her reaction that I was cradling a fresh-plucked eyeball instead of a fat-cheeked cherub. Which, fair enough, because baby-free was a condition that Dr. Goodman insisted on for treatment. It was why I came on Wednesdays at eight a.m., before Adam had to be at work. Dr. Goodman was a specialist in postpartum mental health, so you might have thought she could cut a mother some slack.
but only if you’d never met her.
This morning, though, after her initial recoil of disgust, she’d been kind about my breaking her no-baby rule. She’d have had to be a monster not to be kind about it, given why I’d brought him: I’d woken at just past four to Adam crying at the foot of our bed, telling me he was leaving me. The words “shared custody” were uttered; this wasn’t just a stressed, underslept father blowing off some steam. I’d known that things weren’t going great between us, but I hadn’t seen this coming. It was true that we hadn’t yet been able to figure out how to transition from a twosome to a threesome, how to find each other within this new world order in which the complicated needs and wants and inner lives of two adults were entirely subsumed by the demands of a delicious-smelling tyrant. But Adam was not the sort of man to cut and run when things were difficult. Adam was devoted, often to a fault. To his students, his friends, his family, to Jack. He had been so devoted to me for the past seven years that there had been times his devotion made me hate him a little. Especially in the beginning—his utter certainty in our love seemed profligate to me, given the world as I perceived it: a place where nothing was ever certain. I believed in holding things lightly enough that you didn’t mind when they inevitably slipped away. Adam believed in happily ever after. His leaving was like a square circle, it made no sense, but it was happening, so what could you do but roll with it? So I was rolling with it.
Well, mostly rolling with it. I had, after all, dragged Jack with me to therapy, thereby rendering the session all but useless on the day I probably needed it most. It’s not that Adam wasn’t willing to honor our agreement regarding Wednesdays at eight a.m. He was perfectly willing, eager even, urging me out the door as he bounced Jack a little too forcefully on his knee. But Jack’s wide-eyed stare as he watched me go was beyond what I could stand. That startled look, his rosebud mouth a perfect O that seemed to ask, How could you want to leave the perfect coziness of our union?
It was always hard for me to walk away from Jack when he made that face, but today, with the world feeling newly hostile since my four a.m. awakening, it was impossible. Adam’s bombshell reconfirmed my old belief that of course you should hold things lightly enough that you don’t mind when they inevitably slipped away; I felt like an idiot for letting Adam lull me into his happily-ever-after bullshit. My devoted husband was leaving me, and the world was not to be trusted, as I had always known before I let Adam convince me otherwise. And now I had a child. A tiny, vulnerable, perfect child who I could not, for anything, hold lightly,
and whose face asked, “How could you want to?” whenever I tried to step away, even for a moment, and so I couldn’t want to. I couldn’t want to be apart from him even for an hour. I wanted, I needed, his warm little body close, where I could keep him safe. So here Jack was with me, his mother, absolutely paralyzed by what surely had to be a profoundly simple problem to anyone with a well-slept brain: how to retrieve a car key that was waiting for you up four flights of concrete stairs.
I wheeled Jack down the parking ramp and through the sliding doors back inside the building, a soulless low-rise filled entirely with medical offices. I parked the stroller just inside the doors, below the sign—“We’re working on it!”—taped at a slapdash angle on the brushed chrome of the door to the broken elevator. It was the right spot: impossible to see from the outside, shielded from the sun. I looked Jack over and considered covering the stroller’s canopy with his blanket, a white rectangle of muslin spangled with pale stars in blue and gray. He smiled back. I didn’t cover him. He liked to take the world in.
I swung open the door to the stairway, then stopped before stepping through.
Was leaving Jack here the obvious solution, or was it unthinkable? Was I crazy for contemplating it, or crazy for worrying? I knew that one of these was true, but not which.
I slipped into the shadowed cool of the stairway, then whirled and caught the door before it could click closed. I poked my head out into the fluorescent glare, back in, back out. Jack’s face cracked wide; he laughed. He thought I was playing with him.
“Peekaboo!” I said.
It would take no more than three minutes. It was sane. I was sane, admirably sane, like a mother from the 1970s, or whenever it was supposed to be that mothers knew that worrying too much was almost as bad as not worrying at all. Like the kind of mother Adam wanted me to be. I started running up the stairs.
I knew how sane I was until I reached the first landing. That’s when I pictured Jack below, waiting, eager, thinking we were still playing and trusting me completely. That open-mouthed smile, always halfway to a laugh if it wasn’t already midscream.
Four flights of stairs with his torqueing, thrashing body against my tiny one; with my small, fat worm of a scab throbbing as though my muscles might spill out where I’d been split by the doctor’s knife; with Dr. Goodman’s look of rank distaste awaiting our arrival up above; but that was the sane choice. I saw that now and turned around.
I took the stairs back down two at a time. Grabbed for the door. Pulled it hard. Smile already plastered over my face—peekaboo!
And he was gone.
Before me was a long stretch of hallway, low-pile carpeting in an industrial shade of gray, bright light spilling from the windows at both ends. The same hallway I’d just left. But Jack wasn’t in it.
I spun. Took in every inch of the empty hallway. As though I might see—what? Some person wheeling my child away? Some kidnapper who’d just been waiting for the moment a feckless parent left their child unattended in a low-rise medical building?
I was on the wrong floor. Obviously. I had popped through the wrong door in my anxiety to undo my mistake. This was very clearly the explanation, but as I raced back down another flight of stairs it felt as though the steps were pillowy and unsupportive, tipping me off them before I’d landed. I took the last step as a painful skid against the wide plane of my foot, then yanked open the door to the second floor so hard it hit the wall behind. The lump of fear in my throat swelled into a ball it was difficult to breathe around. No Jack. No Jack here in this hallway either.
I started calling out his name. I wasn’t sure he knew his name, but he knew my voice, and wherever he was, maybe he’d answer with a cry. I was calling loudly enough that doors to the other doctor, dentist, or therapist offices should have swung open. They stayed closed. I hated them fiercely as I raced back up to the fourth floor, which was obviously the right one. I couldn’t have overshot by more than one floor.
The same empty stretch of hallway. I had to grab the wall for balance.
Just to get my lungs to fill and my heart to beat the way it needed to, I had to give myself a talking-to. Calm down, Hannah. The last thing Jack needs is for you to panic. That’s how you end up leaving him alone for even longer on whatever floor you’ve left him.
But panic was already edging in on my vision. I could see only a very narrow view in front of me as I raced up another flight of stairs. And then another. And another. And another. And then back down. Opening each door onto each identical stretch of hallway. Eight floors in all. None of them had Jack. My body felt like it was moving quickly, but to my eyes I was barely moving. As though the atmosphere were wrong, too little oxygen or else too much. Not as though. The atmosphere was wrong here. I felt it in the air, I really did: It was an atmosphere without Jack. Not that he was missing. More than that. There was no Jack here. There simply was no Jack. I could feel it.
I missed the second to last step on the bottom floor and slammed onto the last one, ankle twisting underneath me. My cheek hit hard against
cement. I lay there, cheek pressed to floor, my breath coming so shallow now I couldn’t get the air I needed to push myself back up. Those first long minutes of Jack’s life when they couldn’t start him breathing, when the neonatal team kept on expanding, when the CPR wasn’t working because they hadn’t yet discovered the little plug of mucus inside his tiny airway. That blur rushing past me, a nurse holding a baby. Blue-smudged lips, arm dangling. I’d seen it. Adam swore I hadn’t. Adam swore I couldn’t have because it never happened. And of course he was right. Of course I hadn’t. Because they’d found the plug of mucus in Jack’s airway. They’d found it, and he was fine. He’d had just enough oxygen in his cord blood to carry him through those terrible ten minutes.
Still sprawled on the concrete beneath the banks of stairs, I caught my breath, counted to four, then counted to five as I exhaled. I realized I hadn’t been thinking straight until now. I’d left him on the third floor. Of course I’d left him on the third floor, because that was where you came into the building if you were coming from the top level of the parking garage. How many times had I been in this building now, and somehow I’d forgotten this. Somehow I had skipped the third floor. I had to have skipped it, because the third floor was where Jack surely had to be.
I pushed into a crouch, then stood, and climbed back up two flights with a calm determination I didn’t feel at all. I pulled open the door. And felt the breath knocked out of me. Another empty stretch of hallway lined with dead-eyed doors.
Except. Except! There was no sign on the elevator. I forced my jelly legs to move and went to touch the smudged chrome. No sticky residue. There had definitely been a sign here. “We’re working on it!” taped at a slapdash angle. Now there was no sign and it looked as though there had never been. This one detail relieved me so much I didn’t even need to count to slow my breathing. It meant there was a mistake. This was all some mistake. I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes, as though I could reboot the scene.
When I took my palms away, I was staring at my own blurred reflection in the sliding metal doors. I looked unwell. My hair was a wild halo of blond tangles. My cheeks were drained of color. My gray-green eyes looked hollow, ...
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