Chapter Thirty-Three
When I opened them again, it was to sky.
Utterly cloudless. As blank and full of promise as still-wrapped loose-leaf, azure as baby eyes.
Then my own focused, and I realized what I was looking at was blue hospital drape hiding everything below my shoulders as if it were all too horrible for anyone to see, even me.
I remembered, slowly, first jail, then blood, then what the blood meant and what had to happen—must be happening—next.
I was numb everywhere. My whole lower half, but everywhere else too.
I tried to speak and found I could not. Opening my mouth seemed a good first step, but I couldn’t manage that either.
One sometimes woke foggy or sore to a not-totally-tethered mind or an uncooperative body—at least if one was almost eighty—so I knew to breathe deeply and start with the fingers.
Pick one to wiggle, just a little at first, let the pinky explore.
And slowly, slowly, the rest of you comes back.
But now, I couldn’t nudge so much as a knuckle. I could see that false sky between myself and my body and nothing more.
But then, faces above: blurry, then familiar, then beloved.
And then, completely new.
“Our baby,” someone said. It was Moth. I had to get this from context because I didn’t recognize his voice, not because I was drugged or addled but because it was changed.
Thickened. With relief? With wonder? Different just because everything else was new so why not his voice too?
At first, I took him to mean me. I was his baby.
I was awake, alive, returned to the world.
But no. That was not what he meant.
“Our little girl,” Moth said, and I closed my eyes again and saw Max at two wearing shorts as pants because he had the legs of a toddler but the waist of a third-grader, Darcy reading Madeline to Alice and Alice correcting her when she missed words even though neither one of them could read yet.
But the baby Moth was pressing into me was nothing like the children in those bright, spinning memories.
This one was like a loaf of new bread—wrapped and warm and heavier than its smallness promised.
This one was silent and toothless, mouth opening and closing, tongue probing for something—I could not think what—with puffy, startled eyes that matched the drape over my body.
Moth looked twenty years younger, like riding in his bleeding, geriatric prom date’s helicopter from jail to hospital and witnessing her emergency C-section had unlined his face and kindled a furnace within it.
Or maybe, just as likely, it was exactly what it felt like, and somehow we found ourselves at the end of a fairy tale or the upshot of a metaphor, somewhere all the hazards turned out well, somewhere goodness and love were rewarded with more of the same—which was to say not Vista View, not Texas, not anywhere in the known world.
In this place, it was not so surprising that he was aging backward, that here time did not apply and wonders were met with further wonders.
“Look what we made, Sarge.” He held the loaf of bread against me so that, benumbed, I wouldn’t drop it.
I felt tears leave my eyes. I felt the bread loaf’s weight.
But I found I still could say nothing. I looked up from the child to the faces smiling down around me—Moth and Dr. Kim and what seemed to be nurses and doctors by the dozens—but no one seemed to find it alarming that I could not move or speak. So maybe it wasn’t.
“How do you feel, Pepper?” Dr. Kim asked.
Had I been staring at this baby, paralyzed and dumb, for minutes or days? Was I having a stroke? Would I remain here in this moment forever?
And if I did, would that be so bad? Yes, I was naked on an operating table, but still, there were worse ways to spend eternity than with someone you trusted to take care of you, another someone you trusted to love you, and a third you trusted to be yours.
But when I opened my mouth to demonstrate to the finally-paying-attention Dr. Kim that I could not move or speak, my voice worked after all. “How is … she?”
“Fine.” Dr. Kim’s eyes glittered like stars. This was not professional reassurance nor doctorly encouragement. This was jubilation. “Utterly, unremarkably fine. Small, though considering she came five weeks early that’s to be expected. But she’s entirely healthy. Perfectly ordinary. Fine.”
“Wow” was all I managed, but there were nods all around the room. Wow seemed to be the sentiment exactly.
“And you?” Dr. Kim asked again, though she didn’t seem overly concerned, seemed already, in fact, to know the answer.
“Me too.” I shook my head. Not no. Disbelief. “I also feel fine.”
“Just fine?” Moth clearly felt a spilling-over joy too capacious to contain so maybe was having trouble believing I didn’t feel the same.
I thought of the conversation I’d had with Father Frank the night Dot died, the explanation this man of God had offered for the state of me.
Just fucking lucky. That was the answer to Dr. Kim’s question.
I felt lucky. Lucky, charmed, fortune-blessed, providential.
B’sha’ah tovah. How I felt was miraculous.
Instead I said, “Woozy. I feel a little woozy.”
“That’s the anesthetic.” Dr. Kim nodded. “Plus you’re on some pretty serious drugs, and you lost a lot of blood. Give the transfusion a chance to work. That lightheaded, dizzy feeling should go away in a few hours.”
But I could not imagine that it would.
Later, but not that much later, the dozens of doctors left, even Dr. Kim.
Moth stayed and stood sentinel, his whole person steadfastly there, nonnegotiably by my side for whatever might come.
But only metaphorically. Actually he was all bent over, unable to tear his eyes from the loaf in his arms, his first child, all these years later—so many years later that it was, for all intents and purposes, another lifetime. Another life.
But first child or fourth or, I’d venture to guess, fourteenth, at twenty-seven or thirty-seven or seventy-seven, this is the way with babies.
You can’t take your eyes off them. You can’t stop beholding, one moment to the next to the next, how they are tiny miracles personified.
All those thread-thin fingers and toes. Lips and eyes and hands that open and close already.
The way they yawn and cry and dream, right from the start.
The way they are a part of you, still, always, and the way they are apart from you, from now on.
No matter how miraculous the circumstances of their coming, no matter how banal, this is true for all of them.
Also, this baby was uncommonly attractive.
I thought to call the kids, the already-kids, the kids-before-this-one. Had they turned around? Were they somewhere between here and the state line? Between jail and hospital? Between pregnant elderly mother and jailed elderly mother and new-mother elderly mother? Elderly mother anew?
But just as I was summoning the energy to ask, the door opened, and they came in like a tide.
“Grandma, Lola brought her hamsters to meet the baby!” Pierre climbed up onto the bed beside me.
“But Mom said hamsters aren’t safe for babies because they poop a lot, so she made them wait at the valet station.” Oliver climbed up onto my other side.
“I poop a lot,” Pierre confided, “and she didn’t make me wait at the valet station.”
“Would that I could.” Alice installed herself next to me. “Give Grandma some space.”
“I’m okay,” I insisted. There were so many people in the room suddenly, some of them needed to be on the bed in order to fit.
Max plowed his way through the throng of family to hug me. He had on a shirt that read “Big Brother.”
“Those shirts are for toddlers with pregnant mommies,” Darcy said. “Where on earth did you find one in your size?”
“I’ve had it forever.” Max flexed his uneven biceps in it.
“Since college.” I remembered the phone call about an English department Halloween party at which he was supposed to dress as a literary character and did I have any ideas that were cheap, easy, and nonembarrassing.
I was teaching 1984 at the time and had it on the brain.
“You kept it all these years?” I was half amazed, half appalled.
“There’s a chance I’m clairvoyant.” He made big eyes at his nieces and nephews then tried to wrest the baby from Moth’s arms.
But Darcy beat him to it. “My turn first. I’m most experienced.”
“I have just as many children as you do,” Alice pointed out, but she wasn’t angling for the baby.
Amid all the hubbub and shuffling and crowding, she hadn’t moved from my side, her hand stroking my shoulder, smoothing my hair, rubbing my back.
Assuring herself I was there. Assuring herself I was whole.
Which did not, however, mean she couldn’t simultaneously fight with her sister.
Her other sister. “In fact, I had two newborns at once.”
“Yes,” said Darcy, “but I’m lowest to the ground.”
“You are very short,” Alice agreed. She was maybe an inch taller than Darcy and had been lording it over her since she’d eked it out. “Off topic, but short.”
“I am not off topic. This is why I get to hold the baby first. So the kids can see.” Darcy dipped the bundle, and all the grandchildren crowded around to peer down at the baby.
“She’s sooo cute,” Sari cooed.
“She looks like me,” said Oliver.
“We’re adopted,” Pierre pointed out.
“So? Doesn’t mean she can’t look like me.”
Sari brought her nose to the baby’s. “She does kinda look like you.” Then, to me, “What did you name her?”
“Ophelia!” Lola guessed.
I laughed, painful—the anesthetic was starting to wear off maybe—but worth it. “We’re still working on it, actually.”
“Well, you can’t name her Hamlet,” Lola warned. “Jews don’t name babies after living hamsters. Also, it’s inappropriate. Motherhood does not come off well in that play.”
“You did read it!” I cheered.
“We had to do a video for class. I made little swords out of raw spaghetti so Hamling could challenge Hamlet to a duel. But they ate them.”
“And they say Shakespeare’s not relatable,” Max scoffed.
“Who?” I demanded. “Who says that?”
“Are you going to choose an N name?” Darcy wondered. “To complete DAMN kids?”
“Nicole,” said Sari. “No, Nora. Natasha!”
“Ninette,” said Lola, accented, taking her Model UN duties très sérieusement. “Noelle. Noémie.”
“Noliver!” said Oliver. “Or Nierre. Nolerre?”
“Nana!” said Pierre.
Oliver turned to assure me, “It’s okay because we don’t call you Nana.”
“Not after you, Grandma. After my banana.” Pierre produced it from a pocket. It was brown as a bear.
“You do love it, though,” Oliver pointed out.
“That’s true.” Pierre hugged it. It squished out either end.
A few weeks before Dot died, she had climbed into a wheelchair so we could sit outside for a while, just the two of us, for fresh air, sunshine, and remonstrations.
“Maisie gets two days to mope.” Dot shook her finger at me. “That’s it. Then she’s cut off.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, but I’m leaving you in charge.”
“Why me?”
“Moth’s too nice.”
“I’m nice!”
“Yes, but not too nice. She’s going to need a firm hand. Maybe call Father Frank.”
“Maisie’s not Episcopalian.”
“She believes in his cookies,” Dot said solemnly. “And she’s going to need someone to curse with. Father Frank can help for a couple hours maybe, but the real work will be yours. She can cry for two days then be sad for two more, then that’s plenty of mourning. Got it?”
“Ask for something easier,” I advised.
She thought about it. “Don’t name the pupacorn after me. I know it’s Jewish tradition, but you eat shrimp salad.”
“Shrimp salad is delicious,” I said. I did not say that naming the pupacorn after her was something I’d been contemplating more than idly. Would it be disquieting or a solace to know while she was still here that I was already starting to remember her, to memorialize her, to move on?
But as ever, her concerns were more practical.
“Dot’s a cute name for a baby and a toddler, even a little kid.
But it’s a nonstarter for a chief of surgery or a judge or a Nobel laureate.
No founder and president of an international chain of environmentally friendly car washes would ever be named Dot. ”
Therefore, all these quick, interminable weeks later, the obvious choice was off the table.
“Bob!” Lola shouted suddenly.
“Bob?” said pretty much everyone in the room at once.
“Because Bob’s our uncle.” Lola waved to indicate herself and Sari, Oliver and Pierre.
Moth twirled a hair triangle. “She’s a girl.”
“Probably,” Lola corrected. “You can’t assume gender based on physical observation at birth.”
“She’s probably a girl,” Moth said.
“So?”
“So she’s your aunt, not your uncle.”
“She can still be named Bob,” Lola said.
I considered this. “You can imagine the founder and president of an international chain of environmentally friendly car washes being named Bob.”
Moth blinked at me. He couldn’t argue with that.
So Bob’s your uncle, Bob it was.
Bob you are.