13. Shane
Shane
The notebook turns out to be less useful than Tess leaning on a counter.
I’m learning how to feed my daughter, who has reflux I learn.
It’s a careful process and I fill with pride as I figure it out.
I get through half of the first question before Sadie takes the reflux syringe in the side of her cheek, holds it, waits for me to look away, and spits the entire dose down the front of my shirt.
Tess is at the sink with her back to me with her shoulders shaking.
“You can laugh.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“You’re doing the thing where you try not to laugh but it doesn’t work, you’re laughing.”
“There’s no thing.”
“There’s a whole thing, it’s happening right now.”
She turns around and it gets away from her, one note of it, and then she coughs into her fist and goes back to the sink. Sadie watches both of us with tremendous satisfaction.
“She held it in her mouth.”
“She does that.”
“You could have warned me.”
“Then you wouldn’t have learned it.”
The next bottle goes worse. I put her down flat afterward because she’s asleep and because putting a sleeping baby down seems like the obvious move, and a moment later it comes back up her whole throat and over my shoulder and into my collar.
Tess is across the room fast and then stops herself with her hands halfway up.
“Upright.”
“She was asleep.”
“Upright anyway. Twenty minutes, no matter what. Put her against you.”
“Like this.”
“Get her neck. Shane, support her neck.”
“I’ve got her neck.”
“You’ve got her ear.”
I shift her until her cheek is on my collarbone, and Tess comes over and moves my hand up between the baby’s shoulder blades, and her fingers are on the back of my hand for less than a second and my whole body notices.
“Slow circles. Slower than that. That’s a drum roll, that’s not what I said.”
“How slow.”
“Like you’re not trying to accomplish anything.”
I slow down. Gradually, the noise coming out of Sadie changes pitch and drops away.
“There,” Tess says, and goes back to the sink.
I learn things in an order that makes no sense.
She hates hats with a violence that seems disproportionate to hats.
She’ll lose entire minutes to a zipper. The medicine goes in the side of the cheek and never the middle, because if you go for the middle she’ll gag on purpose out of spite.
I learn she rolled over for the first time in January, on a Sunday, on a rug at Kendra’s apartment, and that there’s no video of it because Tess was holding a bowl of soup.
“You have to stop doing that with your face.”
“What face?”
“Every time I tell you something you go somewhere.”
“She rolled over in January.”
“Yes.”
“I was in Belgium in January.”
“Then that’s where you were.” She hands me a burp cloth like a woman closing a subject.
The first smile I get by accident. It’s on her phone and she’s scrolling for something else and it goes past, Sadie at seven weeks, gummy and cross-eyed and thrilled about it, with a rectangle of tape shine still on one cheek from the NICU. Tess catches me looking and doesn’t scroll back.
There’s a version of me from three months ago who’d have had something to say about how none of this is really about the missing, because it’s biology, they don’t remember it, she won’t know I wasn’t there.
That guy was an idiot. She won’t remember it.
I’ll remember it after she’s grown and gone, and there’s no installment plan on that.
The other thing about that house is what it does to me.
I’ve been famous long enough that I can’t describe what normal feels like anymore. It does something for you in a room. People lean toward you. They laugh a quarter second early. They let you finish a bad sentence. In Tess Broderick’s living room it’s worth nothing at all.
The kid doesn’t care. Tess stopped caring a year and a half ago and is now actively hostile to it.
Twice I catch myself doing the voice, the one that makes a story land, and both times it dies four words in and I have to sit there in the wreckage.
Somewhere in the second week I ask if there’s anything I can pay for. She doesn’t look up from her laptop.
“No.”
“It’s not a strategy. I’m not trying to buy”
“I know.”
“So what’s the problem.”
“There isn’t one.” She looks up. “You’ll set something up for her and it’ll be handled by people who are good at their jobs and I’ll never touch a dollar of it. That’s already going to happen. It’s just not the interesting part.”
“What’s the interesting part?”
“Whether you’re still doing this in November.”
She falls asleep on me at the end of the second week, and it happens by accident.
It’s late in the visit and she’s overtired and roaring, and Tess is on the phone with the insurance company doing the fourth call about a claim that’s been denied twice, and she gestures at me with two fingers without breaking stride, which is the closest thing to a permission slip I’ve had.
So I get her upright with her chin on my collarbone and I do the circles, and I walk.
Kitchen, hall, back. I don’t sing. Singing to her would be the most self-serving thing available to me, so I just do a low hum with nothing in it.
Then her whole body changes. The weight of her doubles.
She stops holding any part of herself up and the hand that was fisted in my shirt opens. I stop walking and I don’t move at all.
I’m scared. That’s the accurate word for it.
Not moved. Scared, the way you are on a ladder, because the whole thing is balanced on my not shifting my weight, and I would rather stand in this hallway until my legs fail than be the reason it ends.
Her breath goes in and out against my neck, fast, this quick little machine running.
And I start talking to her, quiet, because I think Tess is still in the kitchen.
“I’m sorry.”
Her hand twitches on my chest.
“Not for the TV. I’ll say sorry for that to anybody who asks, that one’s easy, everybody can see it.
” I have to stop. “For the thirteen months before it. When your mom was calling and I didn’t ask what she wanted.
Nobody’s ever going to put that on the news.
It’s a guy not asking a question. It’s the worst thing I did and it doesn’t even look like anything from the outside. ”
She makes an unbothered noise in her sleep.
“You were real before I believed in you,” I say. “You were mine before I deserved you. And you’re going to grow up knowing exactly what I did, because I’m not letting anybody clean it up for you, and you’re allowed to be angry about it whenever you want.”
I stand there a while longer.
“That’s the deal. You don’t owe me anything for it.”
There’s a sound behind me. Tess is in the kitchen doorway with the phone down at her side and the call still going, hold music leaking out of it, tinny, some terrible arrangement of a song I know. I have no idea how long she’s been there. Her face gives me nothing. She’s very good at that.
“She’s out,” she says. “Left side.”
She turns around and goes back into the kitchen, and ten seconds later I hear her say, in a completely level voice, “Yes. I’m still here.”