Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
At the river’s edge I watch and listen to the moving water for a while.
Am I absolutely sure I wasn’t under the influence when it happened?
Would it dishonor Niko if I lied to Sparks?
I close my eyes and take myself back to that afternoon when I got my first glimpse of him, on a screen in Dr. Delgado’s office.
We knew by then that we were having twins, each of them in their own amniotic sac.
During a previous visit, I’d asked the doctor if he thought they had any awareness of each other.
He turned the question over to Emily. “What do you think, Mama? You’re the expert on these two.
” She smiled at me and said she was sure they did.
As we watched the blurry ultrasound movie, I was moved by the miracle of a rapidly beating heart. “Is that the boy or the girl in front?” I asked Delgado’s nurse. “The boy,” she said, pointing at something. “There’s his little penis.”
The night Emily’s water broke, I drove her to the hospital.
Held her hand as they wheeled her to the delivery room, then suited up in the paper gown they handed me.
Stretched the gloves over my hands. She worked so hard, so bravely, all night long to push our two children into the world.
She’d read all the baby books and was determined that both would have vaginal births.
She didn’t want to take an anesthetic because she wanted to be alert and ready to see them and hold them as soon as they appeared.
At last, in the first light of morning, I saw between Emily’s legs the crowning of a small head with its dark matted hair.
The firstborn twin: who would it be? “Breathe, Emily. Now push. Deep breath. Smaller push.” Out came more of the head, then the neck, the top of a shoulder.
It amazed me that some version of what I was witnessing was how everyone, past and present, entered the world. It was profound.
“One last push now, Emily!” and the rest of our daughter slid out in a whoosh of blood and fluid.
Her body was bluish and I was afraid something was wrong.
Then she squawked and, as her lungs took in air, she turned pink, her head first, then little by little the rest of her, down to her toes.
The baby nurse—her name was Maureen—placed her on Emily’s chest and, turning to me, asked whether Maisie was a keeper.
“Hell, yes,” I told her, laughing as my tears fell. Emily was laughing and crying, too.
I open my eyes now and start hiking along the riverbank, following the direction of the rushing water.…
As Maisie was carried to the other side of the room to be cleaned up and bundled in a warm blanket, Dr. Delgado turned his attention to delivering Niko.
But there was a problem: he’d shifted and was positioned now to come out bottom first, knees bent.
Emily’s exhaustion was a concern at this point, plus there was the complication of what would be a breech delivery unless he could be turned.
Doctor Delgado made two unsuccessful attempts to shift him when Maureen said the heartbeat was weakening and dropping quickly.
Dr. Delgado decided an emergency C-section was necessary; Emily sobbed and protested but I managed to talk down her opposition.
It all happened so fast! Emily was rushed to an operating room and I followed.
Another nurse put up a screen to block my view when I saw the doctor grab a scalpel.
As his hand disappeared behind the screen, I got weak-kneed.
“You all right, Dad?” the nurse asked. I nodded, embarrassed to have any attention on me.
Seconds later, Niko was wailing away, pink and perfect. My son! I had a son!…
The riverbank turns sandy for a while, then gives way to a stretch that bulges with wild vegetation: arborvitae, hemlock, skunk cabbage, forsythia.
Somewhere nearby a woodpecker is tap-tapping away, hunting for insects, eggs, and larvae.
They also peck to declare their territory or drum for a mate , I hear my father say—a remnant of some long-ago walk in the woods when I was seven or eight.
Those nature walks were one of the few aspects of my dad’s parenting that I’d been looking forward to replicating with my daughter and son once they were old enough.
A day or so after we brought the babies home from the hospital, Niko gave us another scare, and as first-time parents, Emily and I were worst-case-scenario worriers.
Maisie took to breastfeeding right away, but Niko was cranky and jittery and didn’t seem to get the hang of sucking.
His skin and the whites of his eyes were turning yellowish and we grew scared.
We drove to Dr. Delgado’s office without an appointment.
The nurse practitioner said words like “bilirubin” and “jaundice,” and the next thing we knew, Niko was demoted back to the hospital for treatment under a phototherapy lamp.
His yellowish cast faded away soon after and, home again, he suddenly mastered his mother’s nipple and established himself as the chowhound twin. He began to thrive.
Emily and I were fascinated with every stage of the kids’ development during that first year.
Their growing awareness of each other. Their smiles in recognition of our faces, our voices.
Their ability to turn over and then creep.
The days when Maisie, and then her brother, let go of the furniture and took their first wobbly steps before falling into my open arms. In all these achievements, Maisie led and Niko followed.
But there was one exception. Niko was the twinkly-eyed scamp who taught his more serious sister the pleasure of laughter.
Maisie thought he was hilarious and we did, too.
I took a cell phone video of him swaying and dancing to some song on the radio, another of him deliberately teasing us.
The twins were exhausting but fascinating, too; each day brought new discoveries, new mastery of skills, as they learned how to negotiate their world.
One night, I heard Emily call me from the twins’ room.
“I want you to see something,” she said.
She was standing at the crib. “Look at them, Corby.” They were sleeping side by side, sucking each other’s thumb.
I put my arm around her and pulled her closer. “We made these two,” she said.…
Now I wipe my eyes on my shirtsleeve. Tell myself to turn around and drive back home.
Instead, I keep walking. Is what I did going to destroy our marriage?
Mom said I need to figure out how to forgive myself if I’m going to move forward.
But what if I can’t? What if Emily decides she wants to move forward without me?
I pick up a flat stone at my feet and pitch it into the water.
Watch it jump along the surface once, twice, three times before it sinks.
Skipping stones was one of the boyhood skills my father taught me, a pleasure Niko will never know—one of the thousands of things I’ve deprived him of.
I see him lying in the driveway, breathing bravely, just minutes away from dying in the back of that ambulance.
How can I not blame myself? How can I have failed my son far more disastrously than my father failed me?
I’ve been hiking for about a mile when I come upon a boulder lodged in the middle of the river, the water churning and rushing around it.
A large, long-beaked, spindly-legged bird—an egret?
—stands atop the rock, still as a statue as it watches the water.
I stop. Stare at it as I speak to my dead son.
“Hey, little man, can you hear me? Where did you go?” I drop to my knees at the water’s edge and begin to cry.
“You had so much of your life left to live, Niko, so much waiting for you. How can I still be in the world when you’re not?
I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but if I could know that… somehow…”
I plunge my hands into the cold water and claw the bottom. Scoop up handfuls of gravel and fling them at my face. Make a fist and punch myself in the chest. Do it again, harder. The hurt of it feels right.
“Niko, what’s going to happen if I tell the truth?
Will your mother leave me? Will I go to prison?
” I deliver another punch, harder still.
“But how can I live inside my skin if I keep lying about why you died? If I devalue your life like that?” I slam my knuckles against my forehead once, twice, three times.
“I don’t want to lie anymore, Niko, but I’m scared of losing them both. What should I do?”
I don’t realize I’m shouting the last, pleading with my dead son, until I see that bird on the rock turn its head and look across the rushing water at me.
Then with slow, deep wingbeats, it takes flight, its neck tucked into its body, its legs trailing behind it.
It’s not an egret. It’s a majestic great blue heron.
I watch it soar, flying farther and farther away from me until all I can see are the indifferent clouds and the hard blue sky.
I hike back to where I parked Emily’s car. Get in, grab my phone, and text her: Coming home now. Should be back in time.
At the funeral home, we’re met by solicitous husband-and-wife morticians who make no references to the circumstances of our son’s death but mostly address Emily.
I just sit there, one hand cupped around my wife’s shoulder, the other fisting the tissue they’ve offered me.
I nod in agreement with whatever Emily decides: a private, secular service; no calling hours; no to embalming; no to cremation.
He is to be buried in the forty-two-inch “Precious Moments” casket—twenty-inch gauge steel construction, blue crepe interior, embroidery on the inner lid. Ours for $1,999.
On the way back to the house, I ask how Maisie’s been that morning. “She kept saying his name,” Emily says. “Looking for him. It’s been brutal.” She drops open the glove compartment and grabs some napkins. Wipes her tears, blows her nose.
“Did she ask where I was?”
“Once,” she says. “It was mostly about him.”
“Who’s with her?” I ask.
“My mother.”
I pull in behind Betsy’s car and keep the motor running. Emily gets out and comes around to the driver’s side. “You coming in?” she asks. I tell her I have to do something first. She nods and starts toward the house.
I roll down the window and call her name.
When she comes back, I say there’s something I need to tell her.
She waits. I take a deep breath and say, “I started drinking during the day a while back. Liquor, not just beer. In the afternoon and the morning both, hiding the bottles from you. And I’ve been lying about looking for a job.
I kind of gave up on that a while ago. Surrendered, I guess you’d say.
And that prescription I got for my anxiety?
I’ve been overdoing that, too. I think I may be addicted. I’m sorry.”
She just stands there, wide-eyed, trying to take it in.
“Yesterday? When it happened? I was already kind of wasted. I was… I started drinking when I was making breakfast. My lawyer has an idea about how I might beat getting charged, but I can’t lie anymore. Not to you, not to the police.”
She doesn’t cry or yell or call me a son of a bitch. Her face betrays no emotion whatsoever when she says, “I can’t have you living here anymore.”
“You mean temporarily, right? Can we discuss it?”
“No. I’ll pack some of your things and you can pick them up.” She turns away and walks toward the house. After the front door closes, I back up, put the car in drive, and head to the police station.
In the parking lot, I pull into one of the visitor spaces and head toward the building.
Halfway there that falling sensation comes over me again and I have to stop and put my hand on someone’s truck fender to steady myself.
It passes quickly and I keep going. I see Detective Sparks walking in ahead of me.
She’s holding a coffee in one hand, her cell phone in the other.
“No means no, Chanel,” I hear her say. “I don’t care what your boyfriend wants. ”
I follow her into the lobby. Call her name. When she turns around, she says, “Oh, hi. You’re early. We agreed that you’d come in later this afternoon. We’re still waiting for those results to come back from the lab.”
I tell her there’s no need. “You were right. I’d been drinking and drugging yesterday morning when I got in the car. That was why I didn’t check the back seat before I started backing up. Why he died. I guess you better arrest me.”