Chapter Twenty-One #2
Sari rolled her eyes. “It has been a long time since you were a teenager.”
Neither Darcy nor Alice (nor B17) returned that evening to fetch the children. Instead it was Max.
He held his tie to his chest and leaned down to kiss me hello.
I have been the short one in my family for three decades now, but Darcy and Alice are only a few inches taller than I am whereas my baby has to bend practically in half to reach my cheek.
He bellowed from my entryway, “Fledglings! We’re leaving in five! ”
“You’re dreaming,” I said as I closed the door behind him. It would take them half an hour to corral all the crap they’d strewn around the apartment, even if they started immediately and kept at it diligently. Which was never going to happen. “How was work?”
“Pointless.” He made zeros with both hands. “How are you? How do you feel?”
“I’m fine, sweetheart.”
“Not just your head. What about everything else?”
“Everything else is a little … unexpected. But I’m handling it.”
“How?”
I laughed. “By putting it out of mind for the moment.” Because I wasn’t Taylor Swift. I didn’t need to manage the press in order to maintain my boundaries while also projecting an image of accessibility. All I had to do was hide. It sounded easy enough.
“Uncle Max! Look!” Pierre bounded from the bedroom with one of the hamsters. “Can I keep her? Please?”
“What is it? A mouse? A tiny bear?”
“It’s a hamster. And it’s not an it. It’s a her.”
“How do you know?”
“Flipped her over.” Pierre did so again to demonstrate.
“I don’t know if it works that way with hamsters, Fledge. What will we do with her when your mom says no?”
“She might not say no.”
“She will definitely say no. Trust me. I’ve known her longer than you have. We’d have to put her outside. Where she’d probably get carried off by a bird.”
“My mom?”
“You wish. How about everyone find the stuff you came with instead so we can get out of here and let Grandma rest?”
“I’m not going home,” Lola said. “I’m comfy here.” At some point, she had changed into my pajamas. “I like Grandma better than my parents.”
“Well, she is much cooler,” Max allowed. “But who’s going to get blamed if I show up with only one of their daughters?”
“The other daughter?” Lola guessed.
The other daughter raised both middle fingers.
“Wrong, Sister Fledge. Me. And I’m not taking the fall for any of you.”
“Pleeease, Uncle Max,” all four of my grandchildren whined.
“Please what? What are you even asking for?”
“Hamsters,” Oliver and Pierre said together.
“Autonomy,” said Lola. “I choose Grandma.”
“Getting Lola in trouble,” said Sari. “Is that too much to ask?”
“I mean, if that’s all you want,” Max said, “just go home after school.”
“Not worth it,” Sari said. “Lola and Lucas are too naked.”
“Sari!” everyone shrieked. It was hard to know who in the room least wanted to picture this.
The boys put their hands over their ears.
Lola kicked her sister. Her sister kicked her back.
Someone’s arm knocked both boxes from the coffee table.
The cookies crumbled to the carpet, but the hamsters disappeared from sight instantly.
All four children jettisoned from their arms the few of their items they had managed to assemble so far, dropped to hands and knees, and started crawling under the furniture.
“Here, Fluffy Pants,” called Sari.
“She’s not wearing any pants,” said Oliver.
“Me neither,” said Pierre.
When had that happened?
“It’s not a dog,” said Lola. “Even if you hadn’t just made up a name ten seconds ago, it wouldn’t come when you called it.”
“Not if you keep calling her an it,” said Oliver.
“Use the cookies as bait,” Sari suggested.
“Hamsters won’t eat floor cookies,” Pierre said doubtfully.
“I will,” Oliver said, and proceeded to.
Max sighed and looked at me. “Children seem tiring.”
“Some days.” He’d spoken lightly and I replied lightly, but when I looked away from the scattered kids to my own baby boy, his eyes were red and full and tight. “What? What’s wrong?”
“You almost died,” he whispered, and even still his voice broke.
“Oh, honey, no, it was just a bump on the head.”
But he shook his own in flat refusal like he had as a little boy, and his suit and tie disappeared, and he stood before me with clenched fists, a fat lower lip, and Miss Pink, the blankie from which he was inseparable ages two to seven. “Not yesterday.”
“What do you mean, sweetheart?”
“You didn’t almost die yesterday. You almost died back then.”
Except your family. Before when I said you tell people you almost died but didn’t and everyone hears only the didn’t part? I left out a caveat. It’s not true for your beloveds.
“You can’t do it again,” Max said.
Be pregnant again? Raise a child again? Almost die but not again? “Do what?”
It took him a minute. “It would have been like you died in childbirth. For me. You know?”
I shook my aching head. I did not know.
“All those stories where the mother dies giving birth and the kid grows up with this huge absence, just a total loss. The rest of his family thinks he killed her. Maybe they don’t admit it, but they do.
And he did! At least in some ways. So he gets both short ends of the stick. Does that make sense?”
“Maybe the short ends of both sticks,” I proposed, though refinement of his idiom was probably not what he was asking.
“Everyone has the loss, but he’s the only one who doesn’t also have memories to help him through. Everyone feels sad, but he’s the only one who also has to feel like it’s his fault.”
“But I didn’t die in childbirth,” I pointed out. “And my cancer was no one’s fault, certainly not yours.”
But he shook his head again. “I wouldn’t even have remembered you if you’d died back then. There would have been a few pictures of us together, and that’s it. I would have grown up motherless. And I would never have known you.”
“But you did.”
“But I almost didn’t.” He loosened his tie but left it looped around his collar. “When I was a kid, it used to terrify me.”
“That the cancer would come back?” I felt bewildered. What did having cancer when he was a baby have to do with being pregnant—and being stuck being pregnant—now?
“It wasn’t that specific. Or that logical. I was terrified for the me in another universe, another timeline, another version of events.”
“Another version that didn’t exist.”
“Or was close enough to touch, depending on whether or not you were seven when you thought of it. Close enough to leach into this reality. Now, though, I think maybe it was a warning. A premonition.”
“About what?”
“That, just not for me. For him. This baby.” He put his hands in his pockets and rattled his keys around. “You could die before he knows you. You could die, and it would be his fault, and he wouldn’t have you to help him through.”
“He would have you,” I offered quietly. Not entirely the point, but not entirely not the point either. “He would have his big brother.”
Max’s head jerked up, startled. He would have made an excellent big brother, even if forty-three seemed late to start. But then he shook his head some more. “I wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would be enough. I can’t let that happen to him.”
I nodded to show I understood his point. We’d been here before, though. Really we’d left only briefly. What do you do when what you can’t let happen is happening anyway? “How?”
“I don’t know anymore.” Max’s hands stilled. “But I can’t stand it.”
I smiled sadly. “Which part?”
“That you might die again.”
“I haven’t died yet,” I pointed out.
“Not die again. Might die again. You again might die. And I hate it.”
I rubbed his back and made sympathetic noises and didn’t say that was true anyway, that I might die anyway, that anyone might die anytime anyway, that “might die” is just another way of saying “still alive.”