Poetry and Prose from the Center for Writers
_____________________________________________________
Home | About Us | Staff | Center for Writers | English Department | Southern Miss
by CLAUDIA SMITH
Marks
They have sex without asking. His belly is soft, he has gained weight; her breasts
are sore. Their baby has been suckling, kneading, asking for them. Once, when
she swam into a man-of-war, he’d pulled her from the water and got the tentacle
out with a meat tenderizer, then kissed the wound. He was thin, thinner than she
was, even; he could wear her jeans. Sometimes he did. There is a strawberry
mark behind his left shoulder. When she traces it, he stands up and goes to lie
down on the stone floor in the bathroom. She watches him through the opened
door. When he falls asleep, she leaves and looks in on their child. Transparent hair
and blue eyes; perhaps his eyes, his hair. She would like to touch the whorl on
the back of his head, but it would wake him.
Propriety
Izzy told her students to call her “Izzy” on the first day of class. If you are feeling particularly chummy, you can even call me “Izz” she said. At her last school, the earnest students could only bring themselves to call her “Miss Izzy” but these kids have been raised differently, their progressive parents started them out in Montessori or Waldorf, and many of them have been calling authority figures by their first names all their lives. The one she thought she’d end up liking the most, Lester, a boy who sits in the back drawing baroque curlicues and insects, calls her “Izz” with such a facetious tone she almost flinches.
“There is no such thing as a perfect paper,” she tells them. And they talk about the perfect apple, how red and how luscious it would be. “Perhaps it could exist,” she says, “but it would maybe take an expert apple-orchard farmer man his whole life to make that one apple.”
“I wouldn’t want to eat it,” Paulo says, “I wouldn’t want to bite into the most perfect apple.”
“Why not?” They ask him.
“Because it would ruin the most beautiful apple,” Paulo says.
“That’s so foreign of you Paulo,” Daysha says and he winks at her.
“Okay, we digress,” Izzy says. And they read papers out loud, talking about where they could be expanded, how some of the conclusions are rushed or too pat, where the heart of the papers are. “How to polish the apple,” Daysha says. Today she is one of Izzy’s favorites. Her favorites seem to change now every class period. She can’t tell if she is good at this or not. She tries to be. Her students come to talk to her during office hours. I like this, she says to them. Here is some interesting thinking, you could go back to this and expand. This paper has some soul to it now.
It’s a new job and a new life. When she moved here a year ago she’d been amazed at how the unfamiliar surroundings had overtaken her and thought that perhaps the past could be erased with just a few smudges left. Vermont in the fall practically assaulted her eyes with its color and depth. She was newly divorced. Her baby boy had died a year before the divorce. This was her attempt at starting over.
She lives just a short drive away from the boarding school, but everything is just a short drive away in this pretty little town. There are even covered bridges here. Once home, she turns the AC on full blast for its white noise and locks the doors. She takes a pill that the doctor gave her, something she is only supposed to take when she is having “high anxiety” because Lorazepam is habit forming. She takes the pill with a glass of iced Coke, so cold it hurts her teeth. She’d like another. She could sleep through the night. She wants to dream about her dead son.
Her ex, Chris, has a girlfriend and he is starting over. Izzy doesn’t want to see him again and he doesn’t want to see her again. The last time they spoke she could hear his girl in the background saying, “Why are you talking? Stop talking to her.” Her voice was strangely melodious. She didn’t sound like a twenty-three-year-old girl, which is what she is. Izzy had hung up the phone, without comment, and poured herself a glass of flat Coke. She can’t remember now why she’d called. Probably to get him to talk to her about Gabriel. For a month or so after the move, she would call him sometimes, and then she stopped wanting to anymore. After their brief exchanges, she deliberately and carefully reminded herself of their years together. There was a late-night walk to Dunkin Donuts when she first knew him, and a stolen necklace, and an early morning proposal at IHOP. She thought of these moments, and waited for feelings of warmth and affection to overtake her. They did not.
The pills don’t put her to sleep right away. She opens the windows to the smell of wet pine. Truly this is the most beautiful, best-smelling place she has ever lived. White curtains stir in the breeze like wedding veils. And what will Christmas be like? Snowmen and sugar on snow. She might learn to ski.
The doctor who prescribed the meds had told her just to take half a pill, but she goes and splits another. She falls into a shallow slumber and she stirs, hears her son mumble in his sleep, Karate. Her son, sometimes he is beside her but older; sometimes he is three, four, even five. She listens for his breath and touches the back of his head lightly. If she wakes him or herself, he’ll be gone. She scratches his back and opens her eyes just enough to see the bug-bite on his small shoulder blade. It smells slightly of cortisone cream.
The bedroom lights are still on, and he is gone. It is three in the morning. She takes out her journal. Smell of Johnson and Johnson shampoo, she writes. Bug-bite on his shoulder.
She won’t sleep now.
Mornings are not too hard. It is good to have a routine. Every morning she makes herself a strong cup of coffee and goes over her lesson plans. She selects something from her closet; she mostly bought new things to wear when she moved here. She needs to ditch the underwear. She still has nursing bras, for God’s sake. She likes her new clothes; nubby skirts, turtlenecks, a pair of boots ordered from the L.L. Bean catalog. They fit into this idea of herself she has now. People think she is younger than she really is, and this, too, fits into her new idea of herself. She puts on her makeup, all beiges and peaches. Her hair is blonde. Her eyes are blue. She rolls her long hair into a loose bun.
The school’s campus is storybook pretty, climbing with ivy and surrounded by Christmas trees, buildings all named after dignified benefactors. The kids who attend are either privileged or very smart, or both. Once she arrives early, she sips from a mug of weak coffee in the teacher’s lounge. The mug has a quote from Borges, something about Heaven being a giant library. Another teacher gave it to her—a gift ordered from the PBS catalog—which teacher it was she’s forgotten. These people seem to consider her a friend. She is good at small talk, avoiding heavy politics and religion. Today they are talking about the oil disaster, and Dawn dishwashing liquid, and someone is talking about getting a group of kids to go down and volunteer. She doesn’t watch enough television but she’s read enough to keep up. Her favorite among them is a young teacher named Donald. He fought in Iraq, and he loves his wife. His nice warm brown eyes match his head full of unruly brown hair.
The principal, John Hafferty, is an enthusiastic and handsome man around fifty, who loves the school in such a way that it is hard for her to imagine him moving and operating outside of its confines. He carries Splenda packets with him everywhere and sometimes, when he talks, he takes the little packet out of his pocket and shakes it. Izzy finds this extremely annoying and wonders at it, because he seems like someone who would learn to hide his nervous tics. Other than the Splenda packets, he seems to fit into his life seamlessly. His house, a pretty white bungalow on campus, suits him; so does his wife, with her calm blue eyes and homemade Madeline’s, and her wool dresses. He drops into the lounge occasionally, for coffee or conversation.
So most of these teachers care about their work and it makes her care mostly, too. In fact the only time she really feels present is when she is in front of her kids and talking about writing or reading. Then, she knows their names, their particular gestures and levels of interest. Then, she laughs like a regular person. Today she writes a Stephen Crane poem on the board from memory.
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
The kids are quiet and she realizes it’s been awhile.
“What do you want us to do with this?” Daysha asks.
“Just write what comes to you. Do a fast-write. A free-write.”
“Does it have to be about the desert?” a voice from the back asks.
“No, just whatever comes to mind. Just write.”
“And that’s all you want us to do today.”
“Well, sure. Sure.” It is just one day, isn’t it? Izzy thinks it is not irresponsible just this once.
“Umm, okay.” Daysha’s voice.
“Thanks, Miss Izz.”
After class, when she’s handed out the graded tests, the heavy metal fan, Lester, lingers. He keeps squinting up his right eye and he says, “What does this mean, nice. What does it mean, nice, Izz?” The boy suddenly looks very ugly to her. His hair is standing up, frizzed, like plastic doll’s hair that has been over-brushed. His parents are sending him here; he’ll go to a good school no matter how he behaves as long as he doesn’t do something really criminal. She has the sudden urge to ruin his future, to call him a faker. No real nihilist would allow his parents to send him to college, she imagines telling him.
“It means I liked something you said.” She says instead, and then turns out the lights and leaves him standing beside her desk.
She can’t wait to get out of there that day, to go to sleep. She passes red barns and wholesome cows, and the leaves are bright jewels that almost hurt her eyes. Her mailbox is stuffed with bills; when she opens it, she shuts it again.
Tomorrow is Saturday. She has a date.
The Weekend
Her date’s name is Trevor Vandekamp. She met him online; meeting men virtually is about all she can manage these days. He takes her to a Chinese buffet; they take both cars and meet in front. It seems to go well although she is too nervous to really take him in all at once. He is handsome, with broad shoulders and freckled arms.
The restaurant is dim and empty but Trevor tells her it is famous for its dumplings. She excuses herself, even though she doesn’t need to use the bathroom; she just wants to be alone for a few minutes. The restroom is tiny, the size of a cubicle, and has no sink. When she steps out, Trevor is there standing behind her. “Wash your hands,” he says, pointing to a low and deeply stained sink slightly to the left of the restroom door.
“Excuse me?”
“Wash your hands,” he says.
“O.K. You can trust me to wash them,” she says, straightening. “I’ll meet you back at our table, okay?”
The rest of the date continues as if the washing hands incident had never occurred. As Trevor talks about his work involving anesthesia, she thinks perhaps he had meant no offense. “It’s hard for them, going under. It’s an issue of trust. You have to be sensitive to the fact that they are giving up total control to a complete stranger,” he says. Is this creepy? Maybe not, for his line of work.
When they leave to go to their respective cars, he rests his hand on her shoulder and leans over to say, “Would you have washed if I hadn’t told you?” She can smell the ginger and garlic on his breath. He says it in an everyday tone, as if he were telling her he’d had a nice evening. She sits in her car for a while after he has pulled out of the parking lot, thinking she could smell old pop tarts and something sour when he stood too close. She’s forgotten what he looks like only a few minutes after he is gone, and thinks about her ex husband. She knew his shoe size, his social security number, the way he’d let his toenails grow so long they wore holes in his socks. But that’s all he seems to her now, a collection of details and habits.
Monday
Daysha hands in a story about a little boy with a sleeping bag that looks like a tiger. He insists on sleeping in the tiger bag every night, asking his mother to zip him up tightly inside the tiger’s belly every night. In the mornings, his hair is matted with sweat, and he clings to the tiger’s big white paws. Every day when she picks him up from preschool, he talks about the submarine they are building in his class. “A real submarine, Mom,” he says. It is his job to build the periscope. His teacher says they are talking about sea life, but are not building. “Although he does love the Legos,” she tells the mother. One morning, his mother goes to wake him and the tiger will not unzip. She rolls over, purrs, and rubs her tiger tummy.
“This isn’t a fiction class, Daysha,” Izzy tells her after class, “But thank you for sharing your creative work with me.”
The girl looks so earnest standing there in front of Izzy’s desk in her ironed blouse with its Peter-Pan collar. Fresh-scrubbed. She is used to being noticed by her peers and teachers. She wants to tell Izzy something and yes, here it comes.
“I wrote it for you, Izzy. I heard about what happened. About how your son died.”
Izzy doesn’t feel like talking about this. “Well, thank you. Thank you for your kindness Daysha. He was only a few hours old.”
“My mother is an ObGyn, you know,” Daysha says, waiting for something, Izzy isn’t sure what. Daysha is everything Izzy wanted to be when she was sixteen. She’s almost too poised to be a teenager, with her hair pulled back and up, her stiff Audrey Hepburn bangs, her talent for puzzles and leadership abilities. She smells of Ivory soap. She is in Student Parliament, Band, and she knew who Stephen Crane was before Izzy had to tell her.
“I did know. Well, she must be familiar with that sort of thing.”
“May I ask you something?” Daysha says. Izzy isn’t sure if the girl is morbidly curious, or ready to email her friends about their teacher’s sad little story. Most of the students here are boarders, but Daysha’s parents live in town and her home is a place for gathering and gossip. She can imagine it, too, girls gathered round Daysha’s—what? Swimming pool? Do they even have those in Vermont? Dipping their dainty feet in. Or maybe painting one another’s toenails. “So really tragic,” she imagines them saying. One of the girls might say something inconsiderate, callow, make a joke out of it perhaps. And Daysha would defend her. Maybe talk about raising money for the March of Dimes.
She tries to be personable and to make jokes. Before class starts, one of them gives her a puzzle, a kind of Rubik’s Cube shaped like an apple. It’s from Sarah, one of Daysha’s friends. She has a pink stripe down a front panel of her long blonde hair. She did this to show support for breast cancer awareness month.
“I’m no good at puzzles,” Izzy says, and smiles. Why are these girls so damn nice?
“You are coming to All Hallow’s aren’t you Izzy Blanton?” Daysha says brightly. Something about the way she says it, Izzy isn’t sure if it’s sincere or a little bit mocking. Daysha smiles and her teeth are small pearls; she’s never noticed how small the girl’s perfectly even teeth are.
All Hallow’s Eve
All Hallow’s Eve is the annual Oktoberfest. She arrives late, around dusk, and immediately joins the teachers gathered around a little wooden shack, holding steaming Styrofoam cups of hot cider. “At least they don’t ruin this with maple syrup,” Nancy Ives, the art teacher, says to her. Nancy is wearing a billowy poet’s shirt the color of milky coffee. Izzy has never been so aware of other people’s wardrobes. Maybe because they all seem to dress perfectly to part here, or maybe because it’s about all she can really bring herself to notice these days.
The side of a hill is entirely lit up with fantastically carved jack ‘o lanterns. Nancy held a pumpkin-carving workshop for a week preparing for this. Daysha’s parents scope Izzy out, and she stands in between them, wrapped in a plaid scarf, sipping the hot cider made on an old fashioned press at the bottom of the glowing hill. “We’ve heard so much about you,” Daysha’s mother Christine says. “It’s a pleasure having Daysha in my class,” Izzy says.
Donald, the history teacher who loves his wife, is there and the wife is pregnant. She is round in all the right places; her brow bones shine in the dark as if they’ve been Vaselined. Her name is Angelique. She seems content and Don seems proud. Parents and teachers put their hands on Angelique’s belly. She talks about banana pancakes, milk, and some video that is supposed to teach babies to read. Teachers smile indulgently about that and hold back on what they think of infomercials and child development. Dusk is over now and the only nightlights are jack ‘o lanterns and the stars. Kids stumble in the dark, giggling. Izzy wonders if some of them are sneaking off behind trees, getting stoned. Daysha’s there with a tall boy wearing giant red 80s glasses. Could he be a love interest? Why are the kids wearing those glasses? Are they being ironic or do they actually think they are cool? Izzy once had a giant pair of pink glasses with ponies on the sides. The lenses made pink indentations across the bridge of her nose. She’d not been the sort to have boyfriends, not until college. I love my dorky dizzy Izzy, her ex husband used to say to her, kissing her nose.
Two tall basketball boys are running down the pumpkin path, and look as if they might crash. All the pumpkins are lit with electric flames, so they won’t start any fires. “Shouldn’t you slow down?” She calls up to them. “Hey, Mizz Izz,” They call down to her. Their voices sound faraway, sing-songy. This is an old school, an old festival. She imagines kids smooching in hayrides, girls like Daysha and their almost-betrothed walking the pumpkin path. Suddenly, she starts to sing her Grandpa’s favorite song.
“Shine on, Shine on Harvest Moon,” she sings. Maybe this sudden burst of bonhomie will earn her points and she won’t have to talk so much. For a second she feels foolish but then Donald and Angelique join in, and then others. Principal John Hafferty drifts over. He came without his wife; she seems to only be present for events held in his home.
“You have a lovely voice, Izzy,” Nancy tells her.
“Yeah, I can do a mean karaoke,” Izzy says.
She is tired of talking. More and more people approach her, mostly alumni since many of the parents don’t live here. More and more teachers are walking the pumpkin path. The breeze lifts Angelique’s soft hair off her neck and she smiles, close-lipped. It is almost too much for Izzy to bear.
And then John Hafferty is beside her. He is tall and seems even taller in the dark.
“Would you care to walk to pumpkin patch Ms. Blanton?” He asks.
She feels her face warming in the darkness.
“Sure.”
She keeps her hands deep in her pockets and doesn’t look up or over as they walk up the hill together, but she hasn’t been this aware of another body’s movements in a long time.
“You might find yourself wanting to stay,” he says after awhile. “I grew up here you know.”
“You did?”
“In Rutland.”
“Oh.” She is about to ask him where his wife grew up but for some reason, her first name won’t come to her and saying “Mrs. Hafferty” doesn’t seem right. She’s met Mrs. Hafferty half a dozen times, but the only name she can ascribe to her is Helen, or Ellen. She wears her beautiful silver hair pulled back in a clip, covering her ears. Ballsy of her not to dye it, don’t you think? Izzy imagines telling her ex husband.
The pumpkins cast a fairie glow over them as they walk a bit awkwardly through the winding path. His fingers brush hers and she folds her arms primly. Mr. Hafferty is probably unhappy in his marriage, she decides.
She leaves before anyone else. Once home she puts on a kettle for tea and walks outside her little house. She does not feel hungry for supper. The house makes a neat little picture in the lamplight, with its dark blue shutters and fresh white paint. Cobalt, the real estate saleswoman had called the trim There is no need for a garden here, or watering the lawn. There is a good balance of rain and shine, and the grass is forever green when it isn’t blanketed with snow.
She bought the cottage the second day she arrived here, using up almost all her savings. Before moving, she went to a counselor, a woman with a head full of wheat colored hair, a handsome profile and a name like—Helen. Ellen. She’d told Izzy to get into the rhythm of life again. Go to work. Make friends. Self-care is important. Drink plenty of fluids. Sleep at night. She did not advise Izzy to make any big changes. Izzy had come home and packed a suitcase.
She tries to think about sex; crawling under the covers, layers of blankets, and turning on her side to smile at a boy she once loved. He kept kissing her and she kept sipping peppermint Schnapps. It had meant something, of course it had. It doesn’t matter to her, if he thinks of her now or not. She’d rather not. And for Chris, all she can feel is a kind of vague nostalgia.
She’s forgotten the tea and the kettle is screaming when she comes back inside. Who is she kidding? This is a horrible little place; it feels like a hologram. There must be something ugly here. There are ugly people everywhere you go. Maybe they get ugly after snowfall, maybe that’s when they all get cabin fever and chop one another up. Lester the Goth boy could probably write her a story about crazed New Englanders.
After sipping her chamomile tea and grading more papers, Izzy puts on her new noise machine. It makes the sounds of the ocean, the tide, the occasional cry of gulls but mostly just ocean. She cooks herself instant oatmeal with maple syrup and walnuts, dried cranberries, heavy cream. Self care, the counselor Helen /Ellen had told her. There is a half a bottle of buttermilk in the back of the fridge and she finishes it off, drinking it from a cold glass. Now she is sleepy. Now she lays herself down to sleep. She tries to think of people and places. There was a part in the day when Daysha spoke to her, about the poem? What did she say? In the right kind of life changing story, they would see something meaningful in the poem to connect to their daily lives. And something about Daysha’s insights would be illuminating.
At the Oktoberfest fall thing, Daysha’s parents had talked to her. How inspiring she was. How she’d taught Daysha earnest devotion to craft. It meant so much to Daysha’s mother. Thank you, she said. Daysha’s father was a surgeon. Or an architect. Izzy can’t remember. She tries to picture Daysha now, her thick red hair, her winsome smile, the smattering of freckles over the bridge of her nose.
None of these memories seem to matter, but she retrieves them, goes over them, waiting for the accompanying feelings. They come, but muted, like memories in a film that makes you feel bittersweet for a few minutes after the credits have gone.
Gabriel doesn’t come to her that evening. She doesn’t take a pill. Instead she makes herself remember. Too soon after giving birth, Chris had sex without asking. His belly is soft, he’s gained weight. Her breasts are sore. Her breasts are aching, but not for sex. Somewhere midway through, she decides it is okay. She loves him. There is a strawberry mark behind his left shoulder. When she traces it, he stands up to go lie down on the stone floor in the bathroom. She watches him through the opened door.
When he falls asleep, she leaves and looks in on their baby. This is of course a dream; the child never made it out of ICU. Transparent hair and blue eyes; perhaps his father’s eyes, his father’s hair. She would like to touch the whorl on the back of his head, but it would wake him.
It is then that her cell phone starts buzzing, interrupting her spell. It is Mr. Trevor Vandekamp; why had she given him her number? He is texting her. And then again. And again. The phone keeps buzzing. The words keep coming, and because Izzy has never been able to bring herself to text without proper punctuation and spelling they seemed particularly scary. Plz wash yrself. Wash yrself. Whre. Wash yrself Wash yrself Wash yrself Wash yrself Wash yrself Was yrself hahahah whre r u.
Did he mean “whore” or “where”? She’ll have to change her phone number now. Something like that would have scared the hell out of her a few years ago. She takes her sleepy drugs. When she wakes the house seems too blurry, too bright.
She can’t remember the woman’s name when she calls in. “My son has a fever,” she says.
“Izzy, your son?” The woman’s voice is kind.
“I mean, I have a fever.”
A few days before, Mr. Hafferty had wanted to discuss something with her. She’d thought it was most likely a scolding about the fast-writes on Keats and Frost. Meetings, games, Joyce Carol Oates, the Tobias Wolff book she’d suggested for a summer class, her mug of Folgers in the teacher’s lounge, it all feels like long ago and tells herself she won’t be going back to it.
Tuesday
But she does. The very next day. Why haven’t they reprimanded her? When she walks in Laura Gonzalez smiles. That’s her name, as soon as Izzy sees her, it comes back.
In class they talk about rhetorical considerations.
“I thought that word always meant a question. Like, when you say a rhetorical question. It doesn’t need to have an answer, right?” Sara Shuman says.
Izzy is about to draw the triangle from the textbook on the board and talk about writing and context when Lester says, “The Greeks called it kairos, man.”
“Yes, Lester. Go ahead.” He never talks in class. He is looking up, alert, staring right at her.
“It means, like, propriety. The right moment to do something, right?”
“Yes. I think it carried a number of meanings in classical rhetorical theory and history, including proportion, occasion, symmetry.” She stops. Does she know what she is talking about? She should stick to the textbook today.
“I don’t believe in what’s appropriate,” Lester says. A few kids laugh softly, but Lester’s gaze is fixed on her.
She continues, talks about audience, who you are writing for, why you are writing, and in what context. Lester stares without moving, and when she dismisses class he stays seated. He is slouched, brows lifted, gazing up at her with an expression she can’t quite read.
“Don’t you need to get to your next class, Lester?” she says.
He grunts, looking away. “This is all bullshit,” he says.
“Oh not all of it,” she tells him.
“I love you Mizz Izz,” he says, his voice rough and too deep, and for a second she feels her heart beat like crazy, what? This shit has never happened to her with students.
And then she hears the words again, in her head. He probably meant them to be flat, glib. He was just being a kid.
“I’m afraid that’s an inappropriate joke to make, Lester. I’ll let it pass this time.”
“You act like everything matters to you but you don’t care about shit. I love you anyway,” he says.
“Lester I’m not going to say it again. This is not appropriate behavior.”
The boy slams his head against the desk, hard. Oh, she really doesn’t want the hassle of reporting this. When he looks up at her, his eyes are too shiny.
“You were very beautiful the other night,” he says, “with your hands jammed in your coat pockets. You looked sad.”
“Would you like us to talk to someone about this, Lester? I think you may believe what you say, but that doesn’t make it true.”
The kid stands up with a kind of flourish, drawing back his broad shoulders, and strides to the door.
“Fuck you very much,” he shouts, and before making his dramatic exit, he pauses to spit into the garbage can on the way out.
***
Izzy gave up her virginity when she was twenty, to a boy she thought she loved, under a bridge. It was cold, so they kept their clothes on. In the dark, he could have been anyone. She held onto the sleeves of his bomber jacket and wrapped her legs around his waist as tight as she could, but he kept slipping out of her. He said her name, rasping, and when he said it, she felt like someone else. Isabel, Isabel, Isabel.
Their baby had things inserted and scraped from him his entire short life. Gabriel was a listless baby, used to being poked. Izzy was careful to pump her breasts in the proper milk station. There was another woman, who always wore a veil and pumped in the milk room with her, often at the same times. They didn’t speak to one another. Izzy watched to make sure the nurse gave him her milk, even though the nurse told her all the bottles were carefully labeled.
“I read this study in France,” she told him, “that babies feel less pain if they are given a special sugar solution,” she said to the same nurse. He was handsome and seemed to be very gentle. His was the one face from that place she still remembered well; his eyes were green, his hair soft brown.
“Did you read this study or Google it?” the nurse asked her.
“Well, I looked it up on the Internet,” she admitted.
She watched everything, and although he was too young to focus his eyes, he seemed to know her voice as she sang to him. She knew him, and he knew her. That was what she told herself, but the truth was something harder. No one would know him; he was a creature in pain, and he would never know anything different. Their doctor was a slender redhead with a complicated name full of consonants running together from some war-torn country. She told them to call her Dr. K.
Dr. K talked about viability. She said many things Izzy was too distressed to retain, but she nodded as the doctor paused, like a schoolteacher, waiting for any questions. And her son became a list to remember. There is no way to weigh a baby who is too fragile to put on a scale. Dr. K could only make predictions and Gabriel’s weight could always be overestimated or underestimated. In a small premature baby, weight could be overestimated more easily. And yes there were some unpredictable differences in how rapidly children develop, and there was no way to be certain about how a baby born on the edge of viability will do.
“What do you mean by will do? Do you mean die?” Izzy asked her.
Chris showed up, rumpled, sitting on the edge of her bed. “Where were you?” she asked him tonelessly.
“It’s like a miscarriage,” he told her. “You know I read in this book about the history of the family—read it in college. About how our ideas about family were formed the 18th Century. Or maybe it was the 17th. And sometimes people didn’t name their children for awhile, and it was not uncommon for people to have several children die in infancy. I read that.”
“You read that.”
“We have two choices,” Dr. K said.
“Chris. I’m not having any fucking babies after this. I want Gabriel.”
“I want to go to sleep,” Chris said.
“Then go to sleep.”
“I keep thinking of the crickets we dissected sophomore year in high school. We did that because the parents had less of a problem with it. Than with frogs.”
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“He isn’t fully formed.”
“Get out of here, Chris,” she said.
“Okay.”
He left to get some soup and did not return. Izzy was tired. Dr. K, standing over her with red hair falling over her shoulders, looked like a blurred angel. She called Gabriel “your baby.” She said he was getting worse and would most likely never get better. They could continue doing everything possible for life support, or they could make him as warm and comfortable as possible “in the brief time that he is alive.” She said he could live for a few hours or a few days. If he died in pain, it would be the wrong choice, Izzy knew. If he died in warmth, it would be wrong.
“Warmth,” she said, “please keep him warm.”
But for a few days watching him blink, it had all seemed something to be gotten through, before she could take him home. She called Chris from the hospital and asked him to remember to feed Dandelion, the parakeet. Weeks later, after finding the bird legs-up in its stinking cage, she’d thrown it cage and all into a Hefty bag. Chris was already gone when she’d called, but she’d left a sweet message, called him Lambkin, like it would all be okay and they’d all be home soon.
She puts on the sound machine, pulls out her clothes for the next day. Lester will be there, and who knows what he’ll be like. He is smart. And she might be someone who can show him who he is meant to be. Professor Lester. That’s the best thing she’s got right now. After brushing her teeth and whispering goodnight to Gabriel, she takes the sleeping pills and flushes them. They will go down the pipes to the ocean and contribute to the destruction of someone’s immune system. Or will they? Maybe it’s only disposed antibiotics that are supposed to do that. For the first time, she turns off her bedroom lights. She’s never noticed, but there are glow-in-the-dark star stickers all over the ceiling. Maybe a kid slept here, lived here, years ago.
________________________________________________
