Remarkable Baby Nurses answered on the third ring. A woman, her voice bright and lilting, announced herself as Mrs. Teasdale, and began to pepper him with questions. “How old is the baby and how long do you think you’d like one of our nurses?”
Gary fumbled. “My wife—” he said and then swallowed.
“Will this be live-in or live-out?”
He lay his hands along the counter. He studied his nails, the fraying threads of his shirt cuffs. “Newborn. My wife is hospitalized.” He swallowed again. “Live-in,” he said finally. “A month. Maybe more.”
“For live-in, it’s a thousand a week.” Her voice was pleasant, calm. She acted as if this was a perfectly reasonable request.
He sat down on the kitchen stool. He had no vacation pay, no sick days left. He had known his insurance wouldn’t cover a baby nurse, but he hadn’t thought it would be this expensive. But he had the money they had banked for him to stay out. He’d have to use that, he’d have to not think ahead. “All right.”
“And the nurse usually gets her own room.”
“All right.” They had a spare room with a small bed already in it.
“What kind of a nurse are you looking for?”
“Excuse me?”
“Strict, easygoing, a Dr. Spock or a Dr. Brazelton—”
Gary felt something cramping up along his spine. He had spent most of Molly’s pregnancy reading baby books, but now he couldn’t remember which doctor was which. “I don’t know—” His mouth felt scratchy, dry. “A good one,” he said finally. “I need a good nurse.”
There was another clip of silence. “A good nurse,” Mrs. Teasdale repeated slowly. “All right. I’ll tell you what. It’s very short notice, but we do have one woman I can send over tomorrow for you to meet. She’s very good. Very experienced. Her name is Gerta Simmons. You talk with her and then you decide. If you don’t like her, I’m sure we can find you someone else. How will that be?”
“All right. But I need to be at the hospital by noon at the latest. Can the nurse come early?”
“Is tomorrow at nine all right?”
He cleaned the house. It seemed important that the nurse didn’t think he was sloppy or uncaring. He dusted and mopped and vacuumed, and for a while, the mindless action soothed him, lulled him into not thinking about anything more than the dust sparkling under the bed, the grime layered under the toaster oven. He swept the spare room, straightened books and papers, and as soon as he was through, the clean house filled him with despair because it didn’t look as if people lived in it anymore.
Otis’s room was spotless. He looked at the daybed by the window, at the new soft blue quilt Molly had special-ordered, and it hurt so much to see it that he bent and swept it from the bed. He stuffed it into the laundry closet.
Gerta Simmons, he thought. He had no idea what a name like that might produce, and he didn’t really care, only that it was someone who might be warm and efficient and caring, someone who might know all the shortcuts he didn’t. It was funny. Molly and he had planned for three people to be in this house, only now it seemed like it was going to be the wrong three.
He ran out and bought a small coffee cake from Swenson’s Bakery.
He bought freshly ground coffee and tea. And then he came home and showered. He dressed in a clean shirt and jeans. He combed his hair as neatly as he could and then he waited to make a good impression on Gerta Simmons.
At ten-fifteen, the doorbell rang. She was late. He stood in the center of the living room for a moment, and then strode to the door and opened it. Here we go, he thought. To his surprise, Gerta was much older than he expected. Sixty, he thought. Maybe even sixty-five. She was trim and wiry, with a small foxlike face. Her hair was snow-white and clipped so short and straight, it seemed starched to her head. It was still warm outside, but she was bundled into a floor-length white coat. Her skin was so pale she looked as if someone had taken a gum eraser to her. She wore tan stud earrings, small as freckles. “Gerta Simmons,” she said in a clipped voice. She had a faint German accent. “How do you do?”
He let her in. She stamped her feet on the rubber welcome mat outside the door. She unbuttoned her coat, handing it to him carefully. She was wearing a starchy white uniform, which startled him. She looked around the room, her gaze measured, and then back at him. “Well,” she said. “They told me the baby isn’t here yet. They told me about your wife. I’m sorry.”
She sat opposite him on the couch, her hands folded in her lap.
“Would you like some coffee cake?”
She gave him a queer look.
“Tea? I have coffee? Water?” He felt like a fool.
“It’s not necessary.” She shook her head, and he sat back down on the sofa.
She riffled in her purse and handed him a thick envelope. “References,” she said. “All of them good.” He glanced at the first page, a line of print jumping out at him. Never in my life have I met anyone as wonderful and as caring as—
He blinked up at her. “I came to America from Germany twenty
years ago when I got married to an American,” she told him. “I have been tending babies since I was sixteen. I know them. I talk to them. I understand them.” She leaned forward. “And they understand me.”
Gary nodded. She was looking around the room again. He remembered something Mrs. Teasdale had said. “Do you favor Dr. Spock or Dr. Brazelton?”
“I favor Gerta Simmons. I believe in schedules and a firm, clear tone. I would never hit a child or raise my voice. I keep a notebook telling you when each feeding is, when each diaper change, and what was in it. And, very important, I know baby CPR and get recertified in it each and every year. Your child will be safe with me.”
“That all sounds fine—”
“I have to have my own room,” she announced. “And a decent bed with a firm mattress.”
“Of course.”
She seemed to relax a little. The silence wheeled around them.
“I tended triplets my last job,” she said. “The family wanted me to stay but I don’t like to stay too long because you get too attached to the babies and that’s not good for anybody, is it? You don’t want to spend your life missing people.”
Gary flinched.
“I know you must worry about your wife. But now you don’t have to worry about the baby.” She was so sure and calm and still, he felt suddenly relaxed. There was no real reason for him to, but he trusted her.
“When can you start?”
Gena smiled for the first time since she had entered his home, her mouth a semicircle of pink, her teeth small and even as corn Niblets. “Tomorrow afternoon.”
Bringing Otis home alone was the hardest thing Gary had ever done. It was nothing like the way he and Molly had planned, the way he had imagined and thought about and wondered over. The pint-sized polka-dot onesie, the matching hat and booties they had bought as a homecoming
outfit, was still tucked in Molly’s hospital suitcase. He couldn’t bring himself to get it. So he pulled something out of Otis’s drawer instead: a second choice, a yellow coverall with a tiny hood.
He had always planned to bring a video camera, to film Molly dressing the baby, Molly carrying Otis to the car and into his car seat for the first time. The instant camera was loaded with color film. He had bought a brand-new video camera and read the manual cover to cover. He left both cameras at home.
He spent all morning at Molly’s bedside, watching her chest rise and fall, watching the lighted numbers change on her monitors. He talked to her in a loud strong voice, as if she could hear him, as if things were normal. “I’m taking Otis home today.” He watched her, half expecting her to stir, to wake, to stay his hand and tell him, “Oh, no, wait, you can’t do it without me—” But she stayed motionless.
“Gerta seems fine,” he told her. “You’ll see for yourself.” He stayed, holding her hand, and then at noon, he bent and kissed her good-bye. He stopped being cheery. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and then he went to the nursery, Otis’s change of clothing balled in one hand.
There was a nurse there he didn’t recognize, but to his surprise, she seemed to know him. She waved vigorously. “So today’s the day, is it? You’re taking our Otis?”
The nurse grinned. She was tall and pretty. She had a wide gold band on her finger, and he thought: She’s happy. She has a husband. Maybe a family. Maybe the only thing she worries about is whether or not she’ll get a refund at tax time.
“It won’t be the same without him. Who’s going to show all the new babies the ropes? Who’s going to teach them all to cry and fuss and jam as many fingers as they can into their mouths?”
She put a hand on Gary’s shoulder. “You have a car seat, right? He’s not going anywhere without a car seat.”
“Brand-new.”
“You hold on, then.” She bent and picked up his son. She fit Otis into his arms. Otis stretched and yawned and blinked up at him.
She helped him put the clothes on his son. “Well, aren’t you the
cutest thing.” She gave Otis a resounding kiss. “I’ll miss you, honey bunny,” she whispered to him. Then she gave Gary a pat. “Wait,” she ordered.
She was gone for only a minute, and when she came back she handed him a small blue case printed with yellow smiling rabbits. “Our goody bag. Diapers, formula, even a pacifier and an infant tee. Everything you need to get you started.” She gave him a half smile. “I put in some extra surprises. Nipples. Bottles. Changing pads and receiving blankets. Now you go ahead and take him before the other babies know their leader’s missing.”
In the elevator, two very pregnant women smiled and cooed at the baby. Their fingers floated up in greeting. As soon as Gary stepped outside the hospital’s revolving door with Otis, he felt the air clamp around him. “Here we go,” he said.
Otis was silent when Gary gently lowered him into the car seat, facing backward by law, which disturbed him because how could he tell if his son was all right if he couldn’t see him? He seemed too small for the car seat, sinking down, his head lolling. Gary tried to prop the baby up better. He tightened the straps.
Gary usually drove a neat, zippy speed, darting in and out of other cars, taking chances, but now he drove so slowly and carefully that the other drivers became annoyed. They honked their horns, they shouted at him. But Gary kept going slowly because even though his son was buttressed in a padded car seat, he was taking no chances.
Gary was halfway home when he began to be worried by Otis’s silence. Didn’t newborns cry and fuss and carry on? Was this normal for a newborn to be this still? Was something wrong that the hospital had missed? He began to feel a twist of fear, and then abruptly, he veered to the right, pulling over, the other cars whizzing past him. His heart knocked against his ribs. He jumped out of the car and opened the back door and leaned into the backseat of the car, over the car seat, ready to pull his son out, to give CPR or rush him back to the hospital or whatever else he needed to do, and there was his son, peaceful, mouth open, asleep, his tiny chest rising and falling.
Gary got home fifteen minutes before Gerta was to arrive. The neighborhood was empty except for Belle, jumping into a car, who didn’t see him.
“Here we go,” he said to Otis, trying to sound hopeful because he had heard somewhere that babies could read the emotion in a voice. “Home sweet home.” He bent to open the car seat, to pick him up, and as soon as he did, Otis’s small perfect face bunched into a scream.
Inside the house, Otis was inconsolable. His face pinched in misery and grew red. His hands fisted. He screamed. Gary checked his diaper, which was clean. He patted his son’s back and tried to rock him, but everything he did seemed to make Otis shriek even more. Desperate, he turned on the radio. Opera flooded the room. Verdi. He turned it up, hoping the music might soothe his son, he sang to attract his attention, but nothing seemed to calm his son’s squall. When the doorbell rang, Otis’s wails rose another decibel.
Juggling Otis, he opened the door. There was Gerta in her white coat, carrying two blue plaid suitcases. She looked from Otis to Gary and back again, and then she said something in a voice so low he couldn’t hear her. She stepped inside and clapped her hands at him. “Give him to me.”
Otis stiffened. “What should I do?” Gary said, panicked. “Should I get a bottle?”
Gerta ignored him. Instead, she reached for Otis. She started to murmur something low and soothing and pretty. She cradled him closer to her.
“What’s that?” Gary asked.
“German lullaby. Babies love it.” She looked around. “Shut off that opera, please.”
He clicked the radio off. She swayed with his son, back and forth, keeping time to the lullaby she was whispering, and after a while Otis’s
screams began to slow into sobs and then into whimpers. His fists relaxed, the red in his face began to fade into pink. She nodded at Otis. “Yes, I agree wholeheartedly,” she said. Otis whimpered once and then suddenly seemed to take note of Gerta. His eyes, grave and gray, grew rounder. He stared up at Gerta and then, to Gary’s astonishment, he yawned, and his lids fluttered shut. He slept in her arms.
Gary was astounded. “What did you do?”
Gerta glanced over at Gary. She sat down with Otis on the couch. “Babies pick things up. You were getting more nervous, so he got more nervous. I was simply calm. I am always calm.”
She stroked Otis’s hair. “And I listen to what a baby tells me. This one has told me many things already.”
“He has? What things?”
“That he needed stillness.”
Gary smiled dumbly. “How did he tell you that?”
Gerta looked down at Otis. “Babies have their own language. I just know how to translate.” She rocked Otis in her arms. “We are going to get along just fine.”
The first morning Gerta was there, the commotion in the kitchen woke him up. He felt funny about appearing before her in his robe, so he quickly showered and dressed and came into the kitchen to find her, in her nurse’s whites, which troubled him because they reminded him of the hospital. She was feeding Otis his bottle, settling him on her lap.
“Good morning.” Her voice was clipped and serious.
“Hey, how are you, Otis?” He bent to see his son, but Otis’s eyes were on Gerta.
“You don’t have to keep wearing the uniform if you don’t want to—” he started to say, but she looked at him as if he had suggested she fly to Mars.
“Certainly I do. It’s professional. Cleaner.”
He nodded. “I’d like to hold him.” Gerta frowned, but she pointed to a chair. “Sit.” She lowered Otis into his lap, and fit the bottle into
his hand. “Don’t tilt the bottle up too high.” She stood in the kitchen watching Gary and his son, her arms folded, and then abruptly she turned to the sink and began noisily washing bottles.
He wanted to be at the hospital by ten. It gave him only a few hours with Otis, and when the baby fell asleep in his arms, he couldn’t help feeling a raw despair that they were wasting time. Gerta leaned over him and picked Otis up. “He’s a good sleeper. I can tell already.” She rocked Otis for a moment in her arms. “Let’s take you to your crib.”
Gary didn’t know what to do with himself while Otis slept. He didn’t want to leave after seeing his son for only a half hour. He went upstairs to his office and tried to do some work, but he couldn’t concentrate. He kept listening for Otis’s wake-up cry. He kept straining to hear, and in the end, he clicked the computer off. He came back downstairs. He’d come back for lunch. He’d call and see if Otis was up.
He went to find Gerta, who was in the kitchen boiling bottles. “I’ll call you from the hospital.”
“Everything will be fine.”
“There’s a spare set of house keys hanging in the kitchen,” he told her. “And please, make a list of what foods you’d like for yourself, what things you might need, and I’ll pick them up for you.”
“I will be fine.”
The whole way to the hospital, he felt nipped with guilt for leaving his son. He felt eaten away with worry. What if something happened? What if Gerta stopped being concerned the moment he was out of the house? People snapped like dry twigs.
A car behind him honked and he speeded up. You’re being an idiot, he told himself, but he couldn’t help stopping at a convenience store, running out to a bank of pay phones and dialing. There was a pebble of pink gum wedged up along the metal.
“Just checking.” He tried to sound cheerful.
“Everything is fine. Otis woke and had a wet diaper. Just as he should. I’ll take him to the park later.” She was silent for a moment. “He knows you are at the hospital seeing his mama.”
“Excuse me?”
“He tells me, Mama is sick. What can I do? He is so little, it’s frustrating for him.”
After Gary hung up, he rested his head against the phone. His legs buckled beneath him and he gripped the phone for balance.
Gary called Gerta two more times that day, once when he first got to the hospital, and later when Molly was wheeled down to get another CAT scan. Each time he called, Gerta answered on the second ring, sounding more and more annoyed. “I’ll be home around one to see Otis. Will he be up, do you think?” Gary asked.
“It’s possible.”
At one, Gary drove home. He didn’t know what to expect, but as soon as he opened the front door, he nearly stumbled. She had spread a sheet across the living room, and lying across it was every single toy of Otis’s. “Hello?” he called.
Gerta came out, Otis on her hip. “I washed and sterilized the toys,” she said. “I aired out his room and washed his baby blanket.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Germs.”
“I want to take Otis for a walk.”
She nodded. “I’ll get him ready.” He trailed her into the baby’s room. He stood watching her put on Otis’s little jacket, his tiny shoes, and then he followed her out again and watched her put him in the stroller. It wasn’t until she began pulling on her coat that he realized she was coming along, too.
“Please, take a break. You must be tired.”
“Oh, no, no. I have to stop and pick up a few things at the market anyway. Plus, it looks like such a nice day. I’d like to get out.”
She put her hands on the stroller. “I’ll do it,” he said, taking the stroller from her, but as soon as he did, she moved closer to him. He felt her watching him, as if any moment she expected he might do something wrong.
He didn’t relax until Gerta stopped in front of the Thrift-T-Mart. “We’ll wait out here,” he told her. She hesitated. “It seems a shame to take him out of the fresh air.”
She nodded, considering. “I won’t be long,” she said.
Gary wheeled the stroller to a green bench and sat down, angling the stroller so he could see his son. “Let’s live dangerously.” He bent down and unhooked the straps. He lifted up Otis and held him in his lap. “Here’s Daddy.” Otis blinked at the sun. He scrunched up his face and waved his hands. Gary held the baby close to him. Molly had stopped wearing perfume because she said it confused babies, they needed to know their mother’s scent. He hadn’t put on aftershave that morning. He’d do without it from now on.
“Oh, Daddy’s a fool for his baby—” he sang and then suddenly, there was Gerta standing in front of him, a plastic bag in one hand. “How are we doing?” he asked her, teasing, trying to be light.
She studied Otis. “You’re holding him too tightly.” She reached forward, trying to adjust his grip, and Otis suddenly spit up, a rivulet of cream down his sleeve. “You see?” Gerta said.
“He’s a baby. Babies spit up,” Gary said, but Gerta bent down, examining Otis’s diaper.
“He’s soiled his diaper. Didn’t you notice?” She took Otis from him. Otis belched, loudly and noisily. Gerta smiled. “Oh, that wasn’t you, was it? That must have been the baby next door who burped so rudely.”
She turned back to Gary. “Babies tell you things. He probably made a small face, or didn’t seem comfortable. You are going to have to learn to pay more attention.”
Gary had expected there would be an adjustment, a getting used to each other, to the house, but Gerta seemed as if she had never lived anywhere else or been with any other baby. She didn’t ask Gary where the bottles were, the nipples or the toys, because she somehow seemed to know. She snapped about the house, talking constantly to Otis, singing, and when Otis slept, she cleaned bottles or napped herself in her room, the door firmly shut.
Every morning at exactly seven o’clock Gerta got up and she fed Otis and then he had his nap and then each and every time she gave
him a bottle, she marked it in a little notebook. There were pages and pages of times and ounces and none of it meant anything to Gary except that Otis had been fed.
She criticized everything. “You have the wrong bottles,” she warned.
“I do? What’s wrong with them?”
“You have to get the kind made in Germany. With a knob instead of a loop so the baby can’t grab on to it and fling it to the ground.” She hated the diapers he chose, with the Velcro close. “Cloth is handier, cleaner, and more economical.” She even distrusted the bottle warmer, preferring warming the bottles herself in a pan of hot water.
“You talk to Otis wrong,” she announced one evening. “Your tones are too low. Children like high sounds, you should raise your voice.” She shook her head. “In Germany, children are raised better. We know they try to get things over on us, and because we love them we don’t permit it. Even a newborn is manipulative. Look how little Otis cries to be picked up. You think he doesn’t know his tears can move mountains as well as hearts?”
Gary looked over at Otis who was having a sudden squall. “I think he knows only he wants to be picked up.”
“Wrong,” Gerta said triumphantly. “This baby, he understands what is going on. He knows his mother is sick. He knows you are upset. He wants to help but he knows he is just a small baby and cannot do much of anything. He tells me these things.”
Gary thought of his friend’s child Stella, balancing on her stocking legs, casually sucking her thumb as if it were fine wine. I talked to God, she had said.
Gerta nodded vigorously. “This baby prays for his mama. I hear him at night. Come home, Mama, he says. Get well and come home. I miss you, Mama.”
Gary blinked at Gerta.
“You want me to pick him up, I’ll pick him up,” Gerta said. “But you’re wrong. And you’re starting a bad habit.”
“Pick him up.”
“In Germany, things are better.”
Then go back, Gary thought, but he didn’t say it. He couldn’t risk offending her. Another nurse might be better, but she might be worse, too, and he couldn’t take that chance.
He let her do what she wanted, gave her free rein. She came back with new pacifiers, diapers, wipes, and formula. She was methodical, humorless. He couldn’t help himself, he knew it was terrible, but sometimes, watching her, he had the urge to ask her what she did during World War II, how exactly she had served the Fatherland.
Gerta kept to herself. As soon as she put Otis to bed, she went to her room and watched comedies on TV or talk shows. She was addicted to the Home Shopping Network, the jewelry and the exercise gadgets, and although he never heard her order a thing, he could hear her intakes of breath, her pleased, lingering sighs. “Oh, look at that!” she cried.
One night, Gary was coming home, bounding up the stairs when he suddenly noticed two blue casserole dishes on the front porch. There was a small white card attached to one of them. He crouched down and plucked it up. There in firm red lettering it said, “Bake half an hour in a hot oven (425 degrees).” There was no signature. No sign of whom this might be from. He picked up the casseroles, balancing them in both hands, and brought them into the house.
Gerta was in the kitchen making Otis’s bottle. Otis was napping in the bassinet beside her. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know. Neighbors must have left it.” He lifted the lids. Macaroni and cheese. Baked ziti, it looked like. “I guess it’s dinner.”
“I’ve eaten already,” Gerta said.
Gary heated up the baked ziti casserole and ate because he thought he should. The pasta was overcooked, the sauce too salty. The food warmed him. It made him feel less alone.
It began to happen more and more. Evenings, when Gary came home, there was always a covered dish on the front porch. Blue glass with an aluminum-foil lid, flower-sprigged Corning Ware with a tin pie top. There were never any notes, never anything more personal than cooking instructions.
He walked around and around the neighborhood, hoping one of the neighbors would come out. They know everything, Lisa had told them, so why didn’t they know he was walking the sidewalks with his son, that he wanted to thank whoever had given him the food?
He looked for signs of life. The neighbors had sat out nights in the summer, but now that it was fall, the street seemed empty. He could ring a bell if he saw a light. He could make some excuse.
He was walking around the street for the second time when he saw a car pull up. He took his time, he waited for the door to open, and then a burly man got out, someone he didn’t recognize.
When he came back inside, Gerta was watching Home Shopping Network, staring at a woman in a red evening gown. “Do you ever see the neighbors?” he asked Gerta.
She kept watching the TV. “Sometimes. They comment on how beautiful this baby is, they ask for Molly, and for you.”
He felt a flicker of surprise. Gerta talked to the neighbors. “Really? Who do you talk to? What do you tell them?”
She waved one hand. “I don’t remember. The woman on the right. A man down the street. I tell them everything is under control. They wanted to know who I was, what I was doing here. They were suspicious.” She looked away from him, glancing at the clock. “I’m too busy to stop and chat.”
Nothing was under control, Gary thought. Everything was flying away. “Will you thank them for me for the food? Will you tell them I want to thank them myself?”
“The people don’t want to be thanked,” Gerta told him.
He never knew what to do with the dishes. None of the neighbors ever called to ask, “So, did you like that turkey noodle stew? Did you
finish the pie?” None of them knocked on his door, apologetically asking, “Say, are you done with my blue casserole dish because I could use it to roast a chicken tonight.” The few times he spotted one of the neighbors outside, the most they ever did was nod, so swift and sure and sharp that he didn’t feel he could walk over to them and ask if they were responsible for such kindness. “You don’t want to embarrass someone who has been kind and doesn’t want to be thanked,” Gerta told him. “And worse, you don’t want to embarrass someone who hasn’t been.” Gary washed and dried the casserole dishes and the pots and set them out, empty, onto his porch. Sometimes they disappeared; sometimes, if they remained on his porch for a week, he kept them; and every time he saw them in his cabinet, he flinched because it was another unknown, another thing he had no control over.
Gerta might have had her routines, but so did Gary. His days had a kind of rhythm, a sameness he found himself clutching at. He knew what nurse would be on duty when he got to the hospital. He knew when he went to the cafeteria to get a sandwich he couldn’t eat, there would be the same three kinds of cheese, the same yogurts, the same chicken wings. And he began to notice a kind of sameness in the visitors, as well.
While Molly was having tests, he sat in the waiting room. The waiting room at Intensive Care had regulars, and Gary started to know them all. There was a tall thin blond woman who Gary guessed must be in her early forties. She always wore high-powered dark suits and heels so high and sharp they could be used as weapons. She made Gary, who barely raked his hands through his hair, let alone a comb, who sometimes put on the same faded jeans and sweatshirt he had been wearing all week, feel like a cast-out. How did she have time to do laundry? There was a young couple who held hands, who nodded apologetically at Gary, as if his being there was somehow their fault. “My brother got in a skiing accident,” the woman blurted. “It was so stupid. Parachute skiing. Who does such a thing? Who in their right mind?” She waved one hand.
“He’s going to be fine,” the man said. He tapped a finger to his
forehead. “I know these things.” His voice was so sincere that Gary felt like asking him if he knew anything about Molly.
An elderly man came in every day at five. He always dressed carefully in a suit and fresh shirt and tie. He told Gary he came to see his wife, who had just had triple bypass and wasn’t doing very well. He leaned toward Gary and showed him photographs every time he came in. They were always of his wife when she was young, posing in white floppy shorts and a T-shirt, one hand angled behind her head, her dark curly hair ruffling about her. There was one of her rising from the sea, in a snow-white shirred bathing suit, her hair slick against her shoulders, her teeth flashing. “Ain’t she a beaut?” he said.
“She’s lovely,” Gary said.
There was a kind of etiquette in the room. No one dared to ask anyone why they were there, who they were waiting for, but if people volunteered information, then you could have a conversation. You could swap symptoms and prognosis and even make a joke or two about the doctors, though that was considered dangerous, like tempting fate. Gary listened to a man named Aaron telling the couple that he himself had had many skiing accidents and had emerged better than before. “I won my first ski race after I healed from breaking both legs,” he told them. Gary knew the rules. You didn’t have to believe what anyone told you, you only had to believe the feeling infused in the words, to try to hang on to it yourself. Anything could be hope. The way a doctor held his stethoscope. A change in hospital menu.
Gary was still. “Who is here?” the old man asked. He was breaking the rules.
“My wife,” he said finally. “She got sick after she gave birth.” The old man’s gaze was steady and serious. “They—the doctors—don’t know,” Gary admitted.
“I consider that a positive. When they don’t know, there is room for hope. My brother Abe had cancer five years ago and beat it,” the old man said emphatically. “None of the doctors thought he would make it. Every day they told me to give up, but I never did. Now he has a relapse. And you know what? He’ll beat that, too.”
When Gary went back to see Molly, there was a bag of thick cheesylooking material hanging from her IV. He stared at it in confusion. Her electronic monitors flashed numbers he didn’t understand. He didn’t know what to do with himself, what to do for her. “I’m here.” His voice cracked. “I’m right here.”
“Good. I wanted to talk with you.”
Gary started. Dr. Price, his white lab coat thrown open over a blue T-shirt and scrub pants, strode toward him. He never made eye contact with Gary anymore, which bothered Gary in some deep, undeniable way. Instead, Dr. Price looked at the IV. “We know what she has.”
Gary waited.
“In postpartum, the immune system can go a little haywire. Things for the mother are always compromised to protect the baby. In her case, she formed a protein, an inhibitor against a factor in her blood that clots it—Factor VIII. We can perhaps transfuse human Factor VIII into her to start things working again, to tip the balance against the inhibitor.” Dr. Price put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. “I would like chemo.”
“Chemo. But this isn’t cancer, is it?”
“No, but chemo works on many things. And we are talking about mild chemo.”
“Excuse me. Mild chemo?”
“Cytoxan. Not any sort of compelling dose.”
Gary shook his head. “What kind of a drug has toxin in the name?” “Tox-an. Very short-term. We could do steroids very long-term, but with the doses we’d need, we’d see all sorts of problems we might not like. And there is the factor of time.” He stared at Gary. “Chemo works fast.”
“I don’t know.”
“I recommend we start immediately.” He smiled at Gary, suddenly friendly, as if things had been settled. “I have your okay?”
Gary felt numb. It works, he told himself. It works fast. A little mild chemo.
“I feel it is best,” said Dr. Price. “Works in no time. With a minimum of side effects.”
Gary shut his eyes. In no time. No time. He nodded. “Do it,” he said finally.
That night, on the computer, at three in the morning, Gary did a search for Cytoxan. It popped up, filling two screens, and he scrolled down to read. Chemotherapeutic. Can cause massive bleeding. He stopped. Why would they give a drug that could cause bleeding to a woman who was already hemorrhaging? He printed the page out and then clicked the computer off, sick.
Frantic, Gary tried to call Dr. Price. He got the answering service and left a message. He paged him every five minutes. He didn’t care. He got to the hospital in the morning, the printouts in his hand about Cytoxan, and then he paged Dr. Price again. He used the pay phones and then a phone at the nurse’s station. He paged and paged until he saw one of the nurses picking up the phone, nodding at him, lifting one finger, trying to get a word in edgewise. Five minutes later, Dr. Price was striding down the floor. “What?” he said, furious.
“What were you thinking? Why would you give a drug that can cause bleeding to someone who can’t stop bleeding?” Gary flapped the printouts in his hands. He gave them to Dr. Price, who glanced at them and then sighed, exasperated.
“Look, this drug does good things. But it’s complicated. It doesn’t know not to do bad things in order to get the job done. This was a good thing. The chemo seems to be helping.”
He folded up the paper and handed it back to Gary. “You don’t have to bring me a paper. I’m well aware of what each and every drug we give Molly does.”
Gary stood in Molly’s room. She didn’t look any different, any better. But, he told himself, she didn’t look any worse.
Three days later, Molly was hemorrhaging. The Cytoxan was stopped. She was rushed into surgery for an angiogram, a catheter threaded through her artery, glue on her veins because they couldn’t risk cutting her open, couldn’t risk more blood.
For five hours, he waited in the solarium, afraid to move. It was empty except for the woman with a cell phone, and for the first time that he could remember, she was speaking into it. “No one knows,” she said.
He was staring at a newspaper he had already read three times when Dr. Price and a new doctor he didn’t know came into the room. “Dr. Swen. I did the operation,” he said. “She’s stable now. What we do now is watch her, and wait.” Dr. Price looked right at Gary, his face smooth and impassive and blameless. “We’ll go with the steroids after this.”
Gary couldn’t move. “And we’re putting Molly on memory blockers.” He nodded at Gary, pleased.
Gary looked at Dr. Price, astonished. He had never heard of such a thing. “But she’s anesthetized,” he said finally. “Karen told me she was in a deep-sleep state. Why would you need to make her forget?”
Dr. Price was silent for a moment. “People rouse up from sleep. They rouse up from anesthesia. We’re trying to minimize trauma. Would you want to take the chance of her remembering?”
“They rouse from anesthesia?”
Dr. Price was silent, waiting. “Think of it as a precaution.” Gary felt glued to the floor. He watched Dr. Price stride down the corridor. Good, he thought, then good. She wouldn’t remember the tubes shimmying through her. She wouldn’t remember the drainage or the pain. Sleeping Beauty. And then it hit him, with a force so terrible, his legs buckled under him and he had to sit down. She wouldn’t remember him, either, the way he was there beside her, holding her hand as if
he might never let go. She wouldn’t remember that she wasn’t alone in all this, not traveling by herself down dangerous unmapped land, full of minefelds. He felt consumed with guilt and grief, furious at himself. And he wanted to kill Dr. Price.
That same morning, at home, while Otis napped, he called all the hospitals he knew. The Mayo Clinic. Johns Hopkins. He asked for the names of the heads of their Hematology Departments, for the phone numbers. He always got secretaries, nurses. “You’re not a patient?” they said. They didn’t want to put Gary through. They didn’t want to even take a message, not until he pleaded, not until he told them what it was Molly had, and then there was silence. “Hold on,” the voices said. “Hold on.”
He spoke to five different doctors, and all of them told him something different about treatment. They all had particular likes and dislikes and the more they talked to Gary, the happier they seemed. Two liked chemo and said Molly probably hadn’t been given enough. One liked interferon. Another liked steroids. All of them seemed to Gary to be clamoring to take Molly’s case, to see her, to consult, to take a look. They offered appointments, they gave out their beeper numbers. “Dr. Price,” the doctor from the Mayo Clinic sniffed. “I know Dr. Price. I’ve met him. Kind of a sledgehammer of a guy, isn’t he? Intractable. No sense of humor.” But Gary, listening to the Mayo Clinic doctor talk about longer, stronger doses of chemo, didn’t feel comforted. “This is a really interesting case,” the doctors all said. But none of them said a single word about cure.
It was afternoon. Gerta had taken Otis to the park. He wanted company. He wanted a calm presence telling him everything would be all right. It was Sunday. Maybe someone would be home. He dialed a few people he knew but he kept getting answering machines. Finally, in desperation, he called Brian.
“Brian.”
“Gary. What’s up?” Brian’s voice was sleepy. What’s up, Gary thought, baffled. What’s up?
“Molly just had another operation.”
Brian was silent. “You feel like grabbing a bite with me?” Gary said, trying not to make his voice a plea. “I could use the company.” He knew as soon as he said it, it was probably ridiculous. Brian didn’t socialize with the people he worked with. He held court. He organized company picnics no one wanted to go to, and the one time Gary hadn’t gone, Brian had called him into the office the next day to reprimand him. “So where were you?” Brian demanded. “Do you know how bad it looked that you weren’t there?” When morale was particularly awful, Brian made everyone go to lunchtime pizza parties, all of them herded into an overheated conference room when all anyone wanted to do was get away from work for a while, maybe have a nice quiet lunch. Gary included. But now, all Gary wanted was company. Even Brian’s. “So what do you think?” Gary said.
There was silence again. He could hear the TV blaring in the background. Sports, it sounded like. Brian must be watching the game.
“Sure, what about tomorrow?”
Tomorrow might be too late. Tomorrow might be busy. He couldn’t think that far ahead, but he was glad and grateful that at least Brian hadn’t mentioned work. “I was thinking now.”
There was a brief swell of sound from the TV. Brian sighed into the phone. “Okey dokey. You come here. We can watch the game.”
Brian lived in Montclair, in a big, roomy house surrounded by trees. Gary had been to Brian’s only once before, for an office Christmas party, before he had met Molly. Brian had money and the area was wealthy, but Brian’s house had an unfinished feel to it. It was filled with plasterboard furniture, pull-out sofas, ready-framed prints.
Brian answered the door in navy-blue sweats, a mug of beer in his hands. As soon as he stepped inside the house, Gary wanted to leave. “Sit,” Brian said. “Green Bay Packers. They’re creaming the Dolphins.” Gary didn’t tell Brian he had never much cared for sports, but he sat
down on the scratchy plaid couch. Brian nudged a bowl of chips and dip in front of him. “It’s good,” he said, but Gary shook his head. In the corner of the room were two boxes. CompUSA. “New equipment?” Gary pointed.
“It’s a PC for Candy. I’m sending it out as a present.”
Gary nodded. “Nice present.”
“She needs it. Last time I called, she was a little depressed. She hadn’t gotten an acting job she thought she had. I’ll probably set it up myself when I get out there.”
“You going out there soon?”
Brian stretched and reached for another chip. He stared hard at the TV. “Nice move!” he shouted, and then turned back to Gary. “Soon.”
For two hours, Gary sat on Brian’s couch, the game blaring about him. He couldn’t concentrate. Every few minutes Brian would slap his thigh or jump up or simply holler at the TV. “Isn’t that just the damnedest?”
“Yes,” Gary said. “It is.”
He had hoped to talk to Brian, but the only time Brian really spoke to him was during the commercials, and even then the look Brian gave him was so guarded and worried, it seemed like a warning to Gary. He had been there an hour and a half when Brian finally, reluctantly, turned to him. “So how’s Molly?” His voice deepened in concern. “How are you holding up? I don’t know how you do it. I’ve been calling Candy twice a day now because you’re on my mind so much. I keep thinking, what if it were me and Candy, and then my mind just slams shut.”
“It does that for me, too.”
“That’s why I have to get out there and see her,” Brian patted him on one knee. “Well, listen, I was thinking. Since you have your computer at home and all, think you might have a minute to do a mockup of a math textbook cover for us? Just the cover? Should be pretty easy. Just numbers. Something graphic. Right up your alley.”
Gary couldn’t speak. “You want me to do work?” he said finally.
“No, no, I just know that in my times of trouble, I personally
always find work helps me keep my mind off things. Helps me stay focused. Gives me a purpose.”
“I have a purpose. I go to the hospital, I see my son, I try to cope.”
Brian turned away from the TV. He looked at Gary with new interest. “Gary—” Brian’s voice lowered confidentially. “I thought long and hard about bringing this up. I’ve decided that I would be highly remiss if I didn’t at least mention this to you. The word from up top is that layoffs might be coming. I know how awful that would be at a time like this, and I certainly would fight tooth and nail for you. I go to bat for you each and every day. I always say, ‘The best ideas are Gary’s.’ You know that.”
Gary was silent.
“It’s important to stay visible.” Brian cleared his throat. “Walk the halls, I always say, walk the halls, pop your head into every office, give them something personal to remember you by. I can say your name until I’m blue in the face, but sooner or later someone’s going to notice the body isn’t there—or the work.”
Gary nodded, numbly. “So just get in some layouts,” Brian said, and then turned back to the television.
Gary didn’t know why, but he stayed at Brian’s for two hours, lulled into a kind of stupor. Finally, when he knew Otis would be awake, he stood up. He jammed his hands into his pockets. Brian looked at him expectantly. “I’d better get going.”
“Don’t you want to stay and see how the game ends up?” Brian looked surprised. “The Packers are winning.”
Gary wound his scarf about his neck. “I’m beat.”
Brian nodded. He kept his gaze fixated on the television as he walked Gary to the door, opening it. “You drive safe now—” he started to say and then whooped at the TV. “Go, go!” he cried.
Gary stepped out into the cold. “See you, Brian,” he said, and walked to his car to go to his son.
A week later, Gary hadn’t touched the layouts for Brian, and Molly was still critical. There were new doctors to talk to: Dr. Monroe, the critical-care specialist who was monitoring Molly for infections; Dr. Herm, another new surgeon. He began to see Dr. Price, the hematologist, more and more. Gary always felt like laughing when he heard the name, but he knew it was mostly nerves, anxiety flying up and crashing against his ribs.
“We’re going to try transfusions,” Dr. Price told Gary. “We’ve had some good results in the past. If we can stabilize her, we can start to lessen her drug dosage.”
“What does that mean?”
Dr. Price half smiled. “It means we can stop the memory blockers. It means we can try to wake her.”
Gary sat by Molly’s bedside, holding her hand. Her eyes stayed shut, her chest rose and fell in awkward rhythm. Her hair was greasy and tangled and there were new white threads spun through it. Molly’s lips were chapped.
“Molly.”
He sat with Molly, bringing the bread to her nose. “Smell,” he ordered, but she was still, her face turned from him. He told himself it didn’t matter that she didn’t show a reaction. Who knew what was going on in her mind? The night before he had looked up stories on the Internet about coma, although he knew it was not the same thing as being anesthetized. An endless sleep. What did you know, what did you feel? Did Molly rise up as if from deep water and hear his voice? Was she dreaming?
There was nothing on the Internet about anesthetized states, so he operated as if she were in coma. Kids had been brought out by their pet dog, smuggled into a hospital in a backpack, licking their bowners’ faces. Husbands had been brought out by a vial of their wife’s perfume set by the bed. People showed no sign of motion and then suddenly, abruptly, sat bolt upright and asked a question as if it were an ordinary day. Did you put an extra quarter in the washer? Did you start dinner yet?
He came home to find Gerta watching TV, the baby asleep. “All is fine,” Gerta told him.
He went to Otis’s room. “He’s sleeping,” Gerta warned, but suddenly Gary didn’t care. He wanted to see his son. He opened the door to the room and as soon as he did, Otis stirred and blinked up at him.
He came downstairs with Otis dressed in a jacket and hat. Gerta’s mouth formed a line. “We’re going to the park,” he said. “Alone.”
He told himself he didn’t need Gerta with him, but it was astonishing to him the things he was unsure about, the things he didn’t know how to do. When Otis cried, Gerta usually could stop him in seconds, with a bottle or a diaper. He fumbled with a pacifier and Otis spat it out. He tried to stroke his son’s head and Otis screamed louder.
There were only a few other people there: an elderly woman in a blue coat reading a newspaper and eating a muffin, and a young woman with cropped black hair, a Walkman clamped to her head. She was in sweats, stretching, getting ready to run.
He tried to reposition Otis on his lap, but the baby screamed more, so loudly the woman in sweats suddenly looked over at him. She unplugged her Walkman and walked over to him. “Burp him,” she said. Her hands flapped. “Pat his back. Bounce him a bit on your knee,” Gary bounced Otis, who erupted into a burp, and then yawned. “Told you,” the woman said. She smiled. She brushed at her hair. And then she looked down at his hand. “Oh, sorry, wedding band,” she said. “Thought you were a single dad. Just my luck, the nice, nurturing ones are married.”
He stayed out until dinner and then he took Otis to the Tastee, where he had first met and fallen in love with Molly. The waitresses made a fuss and he stayed for an hour, Otis on the leatherette seat beside him.
Gerta was furious when he came home. She plucked the baby from his arms, as if she were inspecting him for damage. She whispered to Otis. She cocked her head. “He’s telling me he was tired, that he didn’t want to go out, but you insisted, and he had no choice,” Gerta
said. She whispered to Otis again. “He said he is worried now about you, and it is too much for a baby to worry about his father and his mother both.” She held up her head, as if she were listening to Otis. “Yes,” she said. “I understand completely.”
Gary was coming home from the hospital the next day, when, to his surprise, he saw Gerta sitting on the front porch with Otis, talking with Theresa and Emma. It was the first time he had seen the neighbors, but more amazingly, it was the first time he had seen Gerta so animated. Her eyes lit like sparklers. Her free hand fluttered as she chattered, and she was relaxed. She seemed as if she was old friends with the neighbors.
As soon as Gary approached the porch, his hands awkwardly at his side, the talk stopped. The women all looked at him, expectant, and then Emma suddenly got up and came over to Gary. She wavered. Her mouth moved as if she wanted to tell him something and then she took two steps toward him and hugged him. “A million times I wanted to come over, ask what I could do, but I didn’t want you thinking I was interfering.” She nodded at Gerta, who sat there, placidly rocking Otis. “Gerta’s been keeping us all posted on how Molly’s doing.”
“On how you’re doing, too,” Theresa blurted.
Gary looked at Gerta, but she was adjusting a button on Otis’s blue striped shirt.
“We’re all so concerned,” Emma said.
Theresa nodded. “I’ve been praying for her. For all of you. Saint Jude. Saint Ann. Every day, I light a candle.”
“You tell us what you need,” Emma said. “Don’t hesitate.”
Gary looked from one face to the other. “The casseroles were so delicious.”
Theresa flushed, pleased.
“Thank you for the cards.”
Theresa nodded. “Wasn’t it a cute card?”
“Please stop. You don’t thank neighbors,” Emma said quietly.
Seeing the neighbors together like that seemed to unlock something. Where before they were hidden, they now seemed to be everywhere. He ran into Emma at the greengrocer’s. And although Theresa still didn’t speak to him when she was with Carl (and as soon as Carl saw Gary he burst into a determined, tuneless whistling that didn’t stop until he was a block away), when Gary saw her alone, as if to make up for her husband, Theresa was effusive. She always hugged him. She always kissed Otis. “How’s our baby?” she said, “how’s our Molly?” and he felt such a ridiculous flush of gratitude for the “our” that he could have wept.
At the grocer’s, he saw Emma’s husband Bill, squeezing grapefruits. He nodded at Gary. He didn’t ask how Molly was. He didn’t bend and admire Otis, but he held up a grapefruit. “This one is ripe. Why don’t you take it?”
Gary didn’t know how to repay any of the neighbors for their concern. He tried once to invite Emma and Bill to dinner, but Emma looked uncomfortable. “That’s my night to play cards,” she said, but that night, around the same time he had invited her to dinner, he saw her later in her backyard, taking wash from her line.
The next day at the hospital, Dr. Price came into the room. He had a suit on under his white lab coat, which startled Gary a little because he couldn’t imagine what it meant. Dr. Price nodded at Gary. He lifted the sheet from Molly and probed at her stomach. He whisked the sheet back over her and then frowned up at the bag of blood hanging from the IV pole.
“I don’t like her numbers.”
“Is she worse?”
“We’re going to try something else,” Dr. Price said. “Porcine Factor VIII. Sometimes it works when the human factor doesn’t. The problem is that each vial has to be separately checked, code numbers
matched up. And we need so many vials, it could take a few hours for each transfusion.” He frowned again. He looked so disturbed it made Gary uneasy.
“There’s not time?” Gary finally said, and Dr. Price shook his head. “Oh, no, there’s time. The problem is there’s no nurses. They can’t spare staff, especially two nurses, to take two hours to double-check the vials, but they’ll have to spare one. You’ll have to hire another nurse, a private one. It can be pricey, especially if we need to transfuse for any length of time, but I’ll talk to the insurance company, see if we can get them to pay for it.”
“Anything she needs,” he said.
“Good. I’ll get a nurse in here for you. We need to start the transfusions right away.”
The private nurse they sent in was a tall, silent black woman. She wore a long blue scrub belted like a dress, and tiny red glass earrings and white running sneakers. She ignored Gary completely, bending to study Molly. “Okay, honey, I’m here.” Her voice was soft and smooth. Most of the time, she simply sat by Molly’s bed, reading from a stack of magazines she brought, sometimes leaning forward and looking intently at Molly. Four times a day, she got the porcine transfusion ready.
It took her and another nurse an hour and a half to start the transfusion. They set out vials, they read off code numbers and doublechecked them, and then Gary left for the evening.
The next morning, Dr. Price came by with a team of two other doctors. They talked outside the door, their voices threaded together, tightening, and no matter how Gary strained, he couldn’t hear a thing. They came into the room and looked at Molly and then Dr. Price took Gary aside and told him there was a problem with the insurance. “I’d fight them on this,” Dr. Price told Gary. “They don’t like to pay for what they consider beyond the normal range of things. I spoke with them myself. I told them this was hardly a normal situation.” He pushed his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “I’ll be willing to bet they’ll pay for at least eighty percent.”
“All right,” Gary looked down at Molly. “Is it working better, the porcine?”
The other two doctors looked awkward. “It’s too early to tell,” Dr. Price said finally.
That night, Gary sat in front of his computer and switched it on, waiting for the green blinking cursor, for the screen saver he had recently put on: Molly, nine months pregnant in a white dress she was stretching across her belly, her head thrown back, laughing. Her hair like a long flame about her.
He was about to go onto the Internet, which he did every night, to look and see if he could find anything new about Molly’s condition, when the phone rang. He picked it up. No one would call this late except the hospital, who thought nothing of calling in the middle of the night. Sometimes they wanted him to sign papers for another procedure, another operation, sometimes they just told him what they were doing. Half the time he didn’t recognize the doctor calling him. “Gary Breyer.” His voice sounded strange in his own throat.
“Gary! Did you get my messages?”
Gary slumped back in his chair. “Brian. I didn’t see any messages.” The chair rolled on the floor, and he stopped it with his feet. He remembered the work he was supposed to do for Brian, work he hadn’t even thought of.
“Oh, I left them on the machine, I thought. Maybe it didn’t pick up.” Brian’s breath moved like a slow tide. “Hey. It was good to see you last week.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“What a game, right?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s Molly?”
“The same.”
“Oh.” Brian was silent for a moment. “Well, listen, I really hate to do this over the phone. But maybe there’s no good way to do it.”
“Do what?”
“There have been cutbacks. Downsizing.” The line popped and hummed. Brian cleared his throat. “I got to have people I can depend on here. I’m firing you, Gary.”
Gary heard his breath moving in and out of the phone.
“Look, if you want, you could think of it as a blessing. Now you have the time you need to tend to your wife.”
“You really have to do this now?” Gary said.
Brian cut him off. “Hey, don’t put this all on me,” he said, his voice taking on an edge. “I gave you a chance, Gary. I told you to get the layouts in. I told you what was going on here. Be reasonable.”
Reasonable. Brian was still talking but Gary couldn’t hear what he was saying anymore. He lowered the phone, gently replacing it in the cradle.
Math texts, he thought. Environmental series. He thought of the ocean. He thought of a fish, bright and silvery and ready to spawn, a gleaming hook caught in its throat, rushed into a hospital and saved by modern medicine, brought back to his family in their ocean home. He saw suffocating nets. He felt salt water choked into lungs that could no longer breathe air or water or earth.
Survival rates are not optimistic. He clicked the computer off. He cupped both hands over his face.
He went to the kitchen to make himself some tea. Strong and hot enough to burn the fear from him. He put the kettle on. In the other room, he could hear the Home Shopping Network. “Isn’t that lovely?” a woman’s voice throbbed. “Wouldn’t you want that in every color?” He clicked on the dishwasher, which whirred and fretted and whined and died. He opened the door. Water pooled along the dishes and sloshed onto the floor. He took the dishes out and did them in the sink, and shut the dishwasher. He mopped up the water with a dish towel. He couldn’t afford to fix the dishwasher. He didn’t know what he was going to do.
He looked out the window. There wasn’t another light on in the whole neighborhood. There wasn’t a house he could go to and bang
on the door. He couldn’t ask his friends for money. They had wives and families of their own, they had bills.
Bills, he thought. The mail was on the table. He hadn’t even thought to look through it yet this week. He sat down and siphoned the mail into piles. Junk mail, bills, letters, glossy magazines. The bills were the largest stack. The mortgage. Gerta. The private nurse. The hospital.
He found his bank statement in the pile and tore it open. They had saved ten thousand dollars for them both to take time off to be with Otis. Their mortgage was two thousand a month; the rest of the bills, credit cards, utilities, were another three thousand. They had thought with careful planning, with some freelance they both could do, they’d be fine. But now, there were other things. Gerta was a thousand a week. The private nurse was five hundred a day and the insurance company didn’t want to pay for her. And he had no money coming in except for unemployment, which would barely keep him afloat. He couldn’t go and get a full-time job when he had to spend most of his time at the hospital, with his son. Who would hire someone who could only work at odd hours in the middle of the night, who, even then, had to be on call to leave at a moment’s notice? Well, he wasn’t proud. He’d do anything if someone would only let him.
He stared at the bank statement. There was only four thousand left. He couldn’t afford Gerta anymore. He couldn’t even afford this month’s expenses.
The kettle whistled. He shut off the gas. He left the kettle on the burner. He took all the piles of bills and muddled them together. He put them back into the mail basket, and then, panicked, he stood in the center of the kitchen. He’d have to do something. And fast.
He tried to think, but his mind seemed to be caught in a stopper. His friends. Which of his friends could he call? Allan was having some money problems himself. Ada worked. The neighbors all had family of their own. Who? Who? It was like a drumbeat in his head, growing louder and more insistent.
Cinda, Molly’s teacher friend. She was single. She worked only
three days a week teaching music. She always used to call Molly complaining how bored and lonely she was, how teaching wasn’t enough for her. Maybe she could help out, spell him here and there out of friendship. He cleared his throat. He hoped she wouldn’t weep on the phone the way she had the last time he had called to tell her about Molly, that she wouldn’t keep apologizing, as if Molly’s illness were her fault. “I need your help,” he told her.
Cinda didn’t cry when she heard his voice, but her voice began to lose its lilt. She spoke in a hushed, reverential tone. “I’d love to help out. You know I’d do anything for Molly. But I work,” she said. “Maybe I can baby-sit a few hours after school—” she said doubtfully. Then she brightened. “I know some real good baby-sitters.”
“But that’s the point. I can’t afford the nurse anymore. I can’t afford baby-sitters. I need friends.”
“Maybe you just need to get a group of people together,” she said cheerfully. “Have a kind of round robin of free baby-sitters.”
“Why, what a good idea,” he said flatly. He felt disgusted. He could kill Cinda. He hung up and tried to think what to do, but all he saw was his bank account dwindling, the baby needing food and diapers and Molly needing him. And then suddenly, a thought blurted into his head. He knew what he had to do. The only thing left.
He went into the bedroom and crouched down to Molly’s dresser and yanked open the bottom drawer. He dragged out the blue box, tossed off the lid, and grabbed out the acrylic puzzle. There inside that small white strip of paper was Suzanne’s phone number and address.
She was Molly’s sister, no matter what Molly said, no matter what had gone on before. Surely that mattered. He’d scrounge up money to pay her airfare. If she was with some boyfriend, well, he could come, too. Anyone could come, her cats, her dog, anyone, as long as they got here to help him.
He pivoted the acrylic puzzle cube in his hands, moving some of the pieces experimentally. The steel balls zinged to a corner and stayed there. Goddamn. He didn’t have time for this. He jerked at the cube. It was a kid’s puzzle. It shouldn’t be so difficult. He had figured out the Rubik in less than two weeks; surely he could figure this out. Gary
studied the acrylic block. He moved the puzzle so one of the balls got into the hole. He felt so nervous, as if this were some great test he had to pass. He moved the cube, trying to roll another of the balls toward the hole, and then, just as he almost had it, the first ball spilled out again.
He bolted up. No. He yanked at the cube, getting more and more frustrated. He was sweating, his hair prickled. He tried to roll the balls toward the hole again, and they all suddenly flew in different directions.
He stared at the cube.
He went into the kitchen and banged open one of the drawers and grabbed out the big utility hammer. He set the cube on the floor and then he lifted the hammer and smashed and smashed at the cube until it broke open, Suzanne’s number unfurling before him like a sail.
The phone rang six times, and then just as he was about to give up, a woman’s voice, raspy, exhausted, sounding nothing like Molly’s, said, “Yeah?”
Gary swallowed. “Suzanne?”
“You got her. Is this for an appointment?”
“This is Gary. Molly’s husband.”
There was a clip of silence. “And—” she finally said.
“I’m calling because—because Molly’s really sick. She’s in the hospital.”
There was that silence again. Gary was suddenly furious. He didn’t want to be doing this in the first place, and she wasn’t helping him. Why wasn’t she asking a million questions? Why wasn’t she asking what was wrong with Molly or if she was going to be okay? “She had a baby.”
“A baby,” Suzanne said flatly. “So how come she’s sick?”
“Her blood’s not clotting. She’s comatose.”
He could hear Suzanne’s breathing now. Harder. Sharper. But still, she wasn’t saying anything.
“I know things haven’t been right between you two,” Gary said, “and I wouldn’t call if I had any other options. I’m at my wit’s end.
I need someone to watch the baby so I can be at the hospital. Look, I’ll fly you in. I’ll pay for you to come here. You won’t have to spend a dime the whole time you’re here.” He felt the panic rising in his voice. “Please.” He was begging now. “I’ll do anything. Please.”
She was quiet again. “Please,” Gary repeated.
“Wire me the money,” Suzanne said abruptly. “And I’ll come.”
He hung up the phone. His heart was beating so fast he stood up and then sat down again. Suzanne would come.
He waited until the next evening to tell Gerta. Gerta had finished putting Otis to bed. She was scrubbing bottles in the sink before boiling them. “Gerta?”
She kept washing the bottles. “Yes, I can hear you.”
“I’m not going to be needing you after this week.”
She shut the water off and turned to him. Her hands were dripping and she wiped them off along the sides of her uniform.
“I’m not doing a good job with Otis?”
For the first time that Gary could remember, Gerta looked vulnerable. Her lashes flickered, her mouth twitched at one corner. “You’re doing a wonderful job. Otis loves you.”
“But you don’t like me? You’d prefer someone else?”
“No, it’s not that—” he said, and then realizing what that sounded like, shook his head again. He tried to clear his throat and felt something stick in it.
“It’s money. I don’t have any to pay you,” he said finally. “I haven’t worked. I don’t have vacation or sick days. The bills are piling up. I don’t know what to do.”
Gerta blinked and stayed silent.
“I don’t have money coming in,” Gary said.
“Who will care for Otis?”
“My wife’s sister. I’m flying her in. She’s coming in two days.”
Gerta’s shoulders untensed. Her spine lengthened “Ah, family,” she said, nodding, as if that explained everything. “That’s all right then.”
“Am I leaving you in the lurch?”
Gerta straightened. “I’m always in demand. The agency will have something for me.”
By the next afternoon, Gerta already had a new job. “Twin baby boys,” she exulted. “I start in two weeks, so I can have some time at home with my husband.”
“You’ll stay until Friday, when Suzanne arrives?”
“Absolutely.”
Gary watched her. Now that she was leaving, she slowly, slowly began to disengage. She stopped washing Otis’s toys every night. She grew laxer about scrubbing his bottles. Even her voice, when she talked to Otis, was more distant. “I expect great things from you,” Gerta told Otis.
That night, when he was upstairs at his computer, he heard her feet on the stairs. She appeared at his door, a little out of breath. “Otis needs to be fed soon. You should make up his bottles.” She leaned against the doorjamb. “It’s better to keep Otis with what he is used to.”
She stood over him, watching, scolding him when he didn’t leave the bottle in the warm water for the full seven minutes. She monitored the way he held his son, she adjusted his grip, and when he was finished, she told him she was leaving him her notebooks. “Everything you need to know is in there,” she said. “When to feed him, when to get him to sleep, I wrote down all my trade secrets.”
The Friday Suzanne was due to arrive, Gary left the hospital at five. In the car on the way home, Diana Ross wailed about her Love Child. If Gary had a time he liked the least, it would be driving home from the hospital. It was always the hardest because then he felt himself to be in a kind of limbo, neither with his wife nor with his son. The car didn’t handle right. He had never been in an accident in his life, but now the wheels skidded, the steering wheel felt jerky. Gary clicked
on the radio. “Because you care—” a voice, deep and sonorous, intoned, “1-800-REST IN PEACE.” Gary snapped to another station.
Gary pulled into the drive. He fit the key in the lock and opened the door. The house felt yellow with light. Gerta appeared, an old blue apron of Molly’s tucked about her. Because I’m the Cook. That’s Why was scribbled across the front in bright red embroidery. The house was fragrant with garlic and the sizzle of meat, which shocked Gary because he never once saw Gerta eat anything, other than a cracker, and because he was a vegetarian. “As of right now, I no longer work for you. So now, you can eat with me.”
Gary was dumbfounded. He wasn’t hungry at all, but he followed her to the dining room where she had set the table with a red cloth and matching napkins and good china service for two, where there were the pewter candlesticks and two white candles already lit, and even a small startling bowl of yellow flowers.
Gerta folded her hands across her belly and for the first time, Gary noticed she wasn’t wearing her white uniform. No, she was in a blue printed dress with a matching belt, and small gold hoop earrings. Her hair was faintly curled about her ears. She had put on perfume, too. He could smell the scent, lily of the valley. “Well, it’s a special occasion,” she said to him.
“Dinner smells terrific,” Gary lied.
“Lemon chicken,” she said proudly.
Gary didn’t have the heart to tell her he didn’t eat meat, that he was too nerved up to eat anything. He sat down, unfolding his napkin. “I can’t wait,” he said.
“Otis is sleeping.” Gerta said. She dashed into the kitchen and brought out a steaming white tureen, ladling big chunks of chicken onto his plate. Gary knew enough to realize how difficult it must be for Gerta to not only have cooked in his house, but to dine in it as well, and to dine with him. He told himself to think of it as the mock yam concoctions some of the Chinese restaurants in the city served. Think of it as tofu, pounded and dried, masquerading as meat. He took a bite. It won’t kill you, he told himself, and tried an old trick he
used to ply as a boy—not breathing while you ate, which rendered any food tasteless.
Gerta took a voracious bite, smacked her lips, and said, “It’s good, isn’t it? My husband Benjamin loves it.”
“Delicious,” Gary said. He looked at Gerta. “It must be hard for your husband when you’re on a job.”
Gerta shrugged. “It’s sometime good for couples to be apart.” She picked at her dinner. “Sometimes.”
Gary ate, knowing he’d probably be ill later, the way all vegetarians are after they chance meat, but he didn’t care. He cut the meat up in tiny pieces and tried to fork it to the edge of his plate. “Otis is so quiet,” Gary said.
“He’s been sleeping so much today. He knows I’m going and he doesn’t want to be awake for it. He might be angry for a few days, but let him express it and then it will pass.”
For dessert there was apple pie, flaky and delicate, clouded with cream. He wolfed his piece down and Gerta stood up, gathering plates.
She wouldn’t let him help her clean up. “No, no,” she said, when he started to bring his dish to the sink. “I like to do them.” She got a soft dish towel out of the drawer and lay it along the counter. She put a skin of plastic wrap over the leftovers and set them in the freezer, and when she was finished, the kitchen smelled of lemon cleanser and Fantastik. It looked as if no one had ever been in it at all, let alone cooked an entire meal. She rubbed her hands briskly together and glanced at the clock. Nine-thirty. “Your Suzanne is late,” she announced. “And I had better go call a cab.”
She went upstairs, got her suitcase, and came down to call a cab.
“Ten minutes, he said,” she told Gary. She gave an odd little smile and then thrust her hand forward and slid something into his palm. “My number. You call if you need advice on anything.” She nodded. “You don’t forget. Otis is a good little boy and he knows what’s going on. He tells me. Every night he prays for his mama and a baby’s prayers go right to God before anyone else’s. Even the pope’s.”
Usually Gary would have rolled his eyes, but this time, he stepped forward and hugged Gerta. At first she was stiff, but he kept holding, and then her body relaxed and swayed against him, and then, to his surprise, she lifted her arms and hugged him back.
“Well,” she said, disengaging. “Don’t forget the things I taught you and you should be fine. You have the notebook.” She straightened. “You relax, you listen hard. Otis is speaking to you, too.”
He nodded dumbly. “I need one more look at my boy,” she said.
He followed her into Otis’s room. Otis was on his back, a striped blue blanket about him, a pacifier in his mouth. Gerta leaned over the crib. She whispered something he couldn’t hear, something that sounded German, something he couldn’t be privy to. And then she glided out of the room, and he followed her, and it wasn’t until they were both back in the light of the hallway that he saw that her eyes were damp.