Chapter Four #2
“What donations does it ask for?”
She looked, then said, “The humane society.”
I felt the pang again. I thought I was going to throw up, so I leaned into the toilet, but still I couldn’t, so I cried. Joy tried to hold my hair back, but I swatted her away, so she just stood at a distance.
I barely slept for days. I spent those nights lying down in various areas of our house.
For some reason, I thought lying on the tile at the front door would help me sleep.
I tried sleeping on the floor in our closet.
For several hours, I lay with a pillow in our empty bathtub.
Drops of water from our leaky faucet soaked the ankles of my pajamas.
I kept apologizing to Joy. I knew I was freaking her out. I’m usually a composed person.
I wasn’t myself.
“January is breathing weird. We’re going to the emergency room.”
Joy is on the phone, crying.
I’m standing in the kitchen frying zucchini. I step away from the stove. I say calmly, “It’s okay, honey. Can you describe her breathing?”
Her voice cracks. “Sophie is just g-getting the keys. I-I’m in the car beside January. She’s, like, rapidly breathing.”
I say, “Okay. But she can breathe, right? There’s nothing blocking her airway?”
I look over my shoulder at the zucchini and see that somehow it has caught on fire. I make no indication of that to Joy. I hurry to turn the burner off and quietly cover the flames with a baking sheet.
She sniffs. “Yes, she’s breathing. We looked in her mouth and nose. It’s just weird breathing. It’s, like, quick.”
“Okay. I understand that’s scary, honey, but it’s okay. You’re doing everything you need to do. Breathe and try to be calm for Sophie, okay?”
“Okay,” she sniffs.
“Can I stay on the phone with you while you drive to the hospital?”
I know that she finds talking to someone helpful when she feels panicked. It distracts her.
“Yes,” she says.
“Okay. Tell me what’s happening.”
“Sophie’s running to the car,” she says.
“Is Sophie going to drive?” I ask.
“Yes. She’s in the car now. You’re on speaker.”
“Hi, Sophie,” I say. “Will Joy go into the hospital with January while you park?”
“Yeah,” Sophie says. Her voice sounds panicked too. “Because I know how the parking works, so we figured that would be fastest.”
“That’s smart,” I say. “You live close to the hospital, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s only like two minutes away.”
“Good. What’s January doing now, Joy?” I ask.
“She’s breathing. She’s looking at me.”
I say, “You guys are doing everything right.”
Sophie says, “We’re almost there now. I’m just turning.”
I say, “Okay, good.”
I hear seat belts unbuckle.
“All right, I’m bringing her in,” Joy says.
“Okay, good work.”
“I’m going to hang up now, okay?” she says.
“Okay. Keep me posted.”
“We will.”
Sophie says, “Thanks, Darcy.”
Ben was a fat baby. His dad used to show me pictures.
His mom dressed him in overalls, and for years he wore a wooden train whistle on a chain around his neck.
He loved Thomas the Tank Engine. I remember sitting in his dad’s living room with their family photo albums open on my lap, chatting about what a sweet, happy baby he was.
“He had to get eye surgery when he was two,” his dad told me.
“I remember his mother and I were waving goodbye to him as they led him on a gurney to the operating room. We were smiling, acting brave, but the second they rolled him around that corner, we were hysterical. It’s terrible having a baby in the hospital. ”
I feel the weight in my chest get heavier. I put both my hands over my face. I feel like there’s a Thomas the Tank Engine toy wedged in my throat.
It’s not my fault he died.
I’m not the reason he died.
I start envisioning a reality where I stayed with him. We have a fat baby who looks like him. I think of that baby and me sitting on the floor of his dad’s living room, calling him Papaw, playing with trains.
I still don’t know if Ben killed himself.
“Hi, buddy,” I say. Kyle is looking up at me through the window in the door to Joy’s workshop.
The glass is aged and murky, and the paint on the window frame is peeling.
I’ve come to visit him to distract myself while I wait to get an update from Joy.
I unlock the door and flip the light switch on.
A soft, yellow light spills across the cluttered, dusty room.
I’m scratching Kyle behind his ears while glancing around the shop at all the material, tools, and books Joy’s amassed. It’s a mess in here. Joy says it’s organized chaos, but I don’t think there is any order or structure in this room.
When we were house hunting, this place stood out partly because of the shop. Joy’s work creates a significant mess, and I find it hard to exist in a chaotic environment. Having this separate space where Joy can be messy was a nice compromise.
There are volumes of encyclopedias stacked beside me. They’re burgundy with gold embossing on the spine. Joy works on encyclopedias a lot. They’re sentimental to people. Before the internet, they were an important part of a lot of people’s homes.
I flip through one of the volumes. It has marbled endpapers. It’s the X volume. I pause to admire a picture of Xiphias, a genus of large, predatory fish.
The shop smells like paper, leather, and wood. The light casts long shadows on the floor. Dust motes are floating in the air. Kyle meows and leans his body against my ankles.
I watch the light in the room flicker while I pet him.
Sometimes, when I look at light bulbs, I think about how I’d never be able to discover electricity.
If someone hadn’t experimented with lightning, or whatever they did, I wouldn’t have thought to.
When I use a phone, turn on the TV, or browse the internet, it often occurs to me that I benefit from these inventions I never would have dreamed up if I relied solely on my own devices.
I doubt I’d think to grind grains to make bread.
I couldn’t invent fabric. A compass. Medicine.
Sometimes people talk about humans today as if we’re more advanced than everyone in history, but we aren’t really individually more advanced.
Collectively, because we exist on the shoulders of everyone who came before us, we’ve developed.
We benefit from the information the people before us gathered, applied, and made easier to find.
Kyle is purring.
I wish I knew what I know now when I was younger. I would have done a lot of things differently.
Kyle sneezes.
“Bless you,” I say.
I’m glad to live in a time when people can bring their babies to hospitals and get help. I assume the only reason we can do that is because someone’s baby struggled to breathe or spiked a fever in the past, though. We benefit from the struggle of the people before us.
I look down at my phone. I wish Joy would text me. I don’t like picturing her in a hospital. She hates hospitals.
When Joy and I first started dating, we took the bus to meet up with our friends Matthew and Marco for dinner.
This was before we moved in together, when we both lived downtown in Pert.
We were in the beginning stages of our relationship.
I felt a buzz in my chest when I was around her.
We had a few drinks at her apartment before leaving, and we were laughing on the bus.
She kept kissing me—quick, small kisses, like the ones you might involuntarily give a baby animal.
Her mouth tasted like white wine and vanilla ChapStick.
I kissed her back the same way, and felt bright, happy, and endeared to her. I’ve always felt this lightness around her. We were holding hands.
There was a man on the bus we noticed was watching us.
There had been other times before when people would stare if we kissed or held hands.
We’d endured it in previous relationships too.
I usually interpreted those looks as judgmental.
In some cases, with some men, the looks felt predatory, like they perversely enjoyed watching us.
This time felt different, though. This man looked angry.
Without saying anything, we both dropped each other’s hands. We looked out the bus window to avoid making eye contact with him. We reiterated things we had already discussed to appear occupied, and to offer each other a sense of reassurance and distraction from the man.
He shouted, “Oh, now you’ll stop?”
We ignored him. We pretended we couldn’t hear him. We continued to speak to each other, but Joy whispered that she was scared. She kept fidgeting with her hands.
“Can you hear me?” the man yelled. “Lesbians? Can you hear me?”
There was only one other person riding the bus, and they had headphones on.
It was an accordion bus, and we were sitting at the back.
The driver was far away, out of view. It felt like we were trapped alone with the man in a narrow, confined space—like an isolated boat at sea, or a spaceship. It was just us, and him.
When the bus stopped, the man stood up. Joy stopped fidgeting. She froze.
I sat up straight. I tried to look bigger.
I hoped he would just exit the bus, but instead he came right up to us. He said, “Are you two deaf? I’m talking to you.”
Neither of us replied. We were scared. I didn’t know what to do.
“I’m talking to you!” He jabbed a finger into the groove of Joy’s shoulder.
“Don’t touch her,” I said.
He punched me in the face, then immediately got off the bus. I covered my face with my hands. I think Joy screamed because the driver turned the bus off. She rushed toward us. When I took my hands off my face, there was blood in my palms. I thought he’d cracked something in my nose.
The driver drove us to the emergency room. I kept saying how it was so nice of her to stray from her route, but Joy barely replied. She was panicked. When we went inside the ER, she kept tapping her chest with her fist.
I asked, “Are you okay?”