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“Tiffany, I didn’t know you’d washed that hoodie already.” That’s the first thing Patricia says to me when I walk into my trailer, and she’s staring at the formula stain I got on it yesterday.
I don’t know why I’m surprised. Patricia says things like that all the time, and usually I don’t let it get under my skin. But she’s so good at them, those subtle jabs. I can’t complain to Jake, because he doesn’t see them. He grew up that way, grew up with a mom who expressed herself in haiku insults like, “Oh, good. Your skin’s really cleared up.” And she’d be referring to the big zit on his nose that was getting smaller but she’d be staring at the massive breakout on his chin, and it takes someone as naïve and docile as Jake not to see the bitterness infused into each little micro-observation.
I shrug and straighten out my milk-stained hoodie. “Yeah, well, I would have started a load of laundry earlier, but I thought you would need it this morning to dry out a few of those wrinkles.”
Jake’s not saying anything — he never does — and Patricia’s smiling so sweetly, probably because she knows she’s got perfect skin. She scrunches up her eyes, and I’m sure she’s taking in my own complexion and that’s why she purses her lips together so smugly. “I’m sorry lunch isn’t ready yet, but I had to guess what time you’d be home.”
She raises her eyebrow at Jake, still with that sucking-on-a-lemon pucker to her lips, and he just gives her a sheepish smile and says, “Sorry ’bout that.”
The food is on the table by the time I’ve changed out of my dirty sweatshirt, and Natalie’s asleep, so I know we’ll eat in peace. It’s nothing like they said it would be, this new-baby experience. The mommy magazines talked about babies demanding all your attention, but unless it’s her feeding time or she needs her airway suctioned out or her apnea monitor’s beeping at us, Natalie’s just there. Like a piece of furniture. A piece of furniture that’s cost the state over a half million dollars in medical bills by now. I’m just glad no one expects us to handle that with Jake’s thirty-hour-a-week job making change behind a grungy cash register.
Patricia’s been here for two months now, and she still hasn’t cooked the same meal twice. It sounds impressive, but she manages it so that everything tastes the same no matter what she makes. I’m serious. She’s like a short-order cook at a ho-hum diner. Did I tell you she serves rice at every single meal? It’s not even like you’d get at a Chinese restaurant where it’s all sticky and gooey and kind of sweet. Nope. We’re talking brown, long-grain, super healthy. She doesn’t add salt or anything. And it doesn’t matter what else she’s cooked. Chicken and dumplings with a side of rice. Potato and veggie casserole with a side of rice. Rice with lasagna? Yeah, that’s how we roll with Patricia in the kitchen.
So lunch today is sort of a sloppy joe casserole with pasta, and we’ve got our mandatory scoop of plain rice on the side. It’s like she’s afraid we’re all starving. She makes enough for leftovers, and then she’s got this whole system set up for who can eat what when. It’s like breaking into a bank vault just to sneak anything out of the fridge. I gave up trying weeks ago.
“So? You went to church today?” Patricia’s voice lilts upward in a little disapproving tone as she eyes her son.
Jake nods as he shoves another spoonful of rice into his face. It’s one of his quirks. He eats just about everything with a spoon. Even his spaghetti, which is about as gross to watch as it sounds.
I force myself not to squirm in my chair. I’m not a junior-high kid getting interrogated for cutting class. But Patricia’s scowling at us like we’ve been caught smoking weed in the school bathroom.
“And how did you like it?” She’s smiling at me now. When I first met her, I thought that smile meant she accepted me, that she enjoyed my company and wanted to get to know me better. I almost laugh to think about that now.
“It was pretty good.” The only reason I say this is because I know it will upset her more than if I whine or complain. Besides, I haven’t had the chance yet to sort through how I feel about that whole Grandma Lucy business.
Natalie makes a little noise from her bassinette in the living room. She’s not even fussy, but Patricia scoots back her chair with a melodramatic sigh, like she’s the Queen of stinking England forced to endure a rock concert in her honor.
“I’ll get her,” I say, and I give an attempt at that sickening sweet smile. I’m not the expert at it that she is, but I’m a fast study.
Patricia waves me away and picks up my baby. “No, no. I wouldn’t expect you to inconvenience yourself.”
I’m getting just as good at this game as she is, and I reach out and take my child. “You worked so hard in the kitchen getting lunch ready. Why don’t you let me have her for a while. It’s no trouble at all.”
She frowns at me, but I’m holding Natalie, so what’s she going to do?
“I’m surprised you don’t have more of an appetite,” Patricia says, and that’s how I know I’ve won this round. When Patricia makes a comment about my weight or eating habits, it’s only because she’s run out of anything else to say. And it doesn’t bother me, not in the least. I read all about it in those mommy mags. By summer time, I’ll be ready to wear those cute backless tees that would make Patricia look like an AARP streetwalker if she tried them on herself. That’s why her comments about my extra baby fat mean nothing to me.
Absolutely nothing.
We chew and swallow in silence, and I only have to get up from the table three times to suction out Natalie’s throat. If you haven’t seen the kind of machine she needs, imagine a tiny vacuum cleaner connected to a long, skinny tube. The tube part’s called a Yankauer, which I never know how to spell, but the way you pronounce it is a perfect match for its job description. Just picture the Queen of England saying it in her stuck-up accent. A Yankauer. Because it yonks the saliva right out of your throat.
“So the baby’s doctor appointment is this Wednesday?” Patricia asks. She never uses Natalie’s name, which makes me happy, truth be told. Jake wanted to name our daughter after his mom, and I think he must have told Patricia that at some point because she gets the lemon face nearly every time she hears the word Natalie, and she refuses to say it herself.
Another point for me.
The funny thing is I didn’t even settle on that name until Natalie was about to undergo her surgery. She spent the first two weeks of her life as Baby Girl Franklin. That’s what the hospital HUC entered her in as on the computer system. And all of Natalie’s paperwork and medicine and even that little tag she wore around her ankle called her that.
It’s funny because I thought naming someone was some real official process, but we didn’t get around to the birth certificate paperwork until a few days before Natalie was discharged from the NICU. They were supposed to do it way back at Orchard Grove, right there at County Hospital, but having me sign a piece of paper so my baby could get her own Social Security number wasn’t high on anyone’s priority list at that point. So as far as the government is concerned, she was Baby Girl Franklin for the first six weeks of her life, even though I settled on Natalie by week two.
It came about when Jake and I were having dinner in the cafeteria, and dinner was always worse than lunch. At lunch, they made it a point to cook well for all the nurses and doctors. By the evening, the only people left at the hospital were a few night workers and folks like us, which usually meant that we got some sort of reheated leftovers. I don’t even remember what we were having that particular evening. It’s a small wonder that I complain about Patricia’s food being bland after I survived those six weeks in Seattle.
Jake and I were pretty tense that day. We’d just come out from this big meeting. When I say big, I mean just about anybody with a title was there: the NICU doctor, the charge nurse, Natalie’s primary care nurse, the social worker, the occupational therapist, the intestinal specialist, and the lung guy all met with us in this big NICU conference room. I remember thinking the decorations there were atrocious, totally out of place. It was all those staged photographs of dressed-up babies. You know the ones I mean, like when there’s a little girl with a sunflower hat sitting in a pot, or a newborn in a ladybug getup taking a nap in a pile of rose petals. The ones that really trip me out are when they dress up the babies like angels and take pictures of them sleeping on white puffy clouds. I mean, do these photographers think about what they’re doing? Do they think angel-babies are cute? Have they ever seen an unconscious newborn who stopped breathing an hour after birth?
Anyway, all these specialists wanted to talk with me, and Jake came too. I already knew what the meeting would be about, so I was ready for it. The gut guy had been lecturing me about it for a couple days now. Mansplained to me how Natalie still wasn’t able to suck on anything so it was time to put in a G-tube. It was the first I’d heard of the thing. Even at the assisted living place where I worked, by the time someone got too out of it to swallow, they were shipped off to a nursing home. In my opinion, Natalie didn’t need something as drastic as surgery until we figured out if her swallowing would improve by itself. Maybe I was in denial, I don’t know. Like you could blame me if I was. I told him I didn’t want to do the procedure, and that’s why he set up this special meeting in the board room with the creepy infant photos.
Everyone there started talking over each other, telling us what a good move it would be for Natalie to have the surgery. We could take her home sooner since otherwise they couldn’t discharge her from the NICU until she could breastfeed or take a bottle. It would be more sanitary too instead of having the nurses thread that catheter into her nose and down her throat, which always makes me gag when I think about it.
The gut doctor expected it to be an open and shut case. He thought I’d sign off right away once I had that many people telling me what to do. He obviously had no idea who he was dealing with. We’re talking about the girl whose drunk foster dad once staggered into her room in the middle of the night and tried to shove his hard, smelly self against her. But I rolled over and hammer-fisted him in the groin and swore I’d call 911 if he came within five feet of me again, and the next day I told the school counselor and was out of that house by dinnertime. So I think I can handle myself against a sixty-year-old doctor and his room full of cronies with fancy initials after their names, titles that don’t mean their possessors have an ounce of street cred or know what’s best for my baby.
Anyway, I left that meeting still convinced we didn’t need to rush the surgery. I mean, it’s not like Natalie was in danger of starving without the tube. I think it just would have made the nurses’ job easier, and that’s exactly what I told the gut doctor and everyone else he brought in to manipulate me. But Jake, well, that was another story. I mean, we’re talking about the boy who probably hasn’t disobeyed an authority figure since preschool. That’s partly why I’m still surprised when I wake up and remember he’s my husband. What did we see in each other? I’m still not sure I’ll ever figure that one out.
Of course, he and I weren’t married yet, not when we had that big interview with all those hot shots. It reminded me of that period in history you learn about in school. You know, the Interrogation or whatever they call it. No, the Inquisition, that’s what it is. And that’s what got me mad, how forceful they’d been. Like just because they were the doctors we had to do whatever they said. Only Jake wasn’t upset, and that’s why I was ticked off at him in that empty cafeteria.
“Doesn’t it bother you they’re pushing a procedure she doesn’t even need?”
He stared at his plate and refused to meet my eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Maybe what?” I hate it when he mumbles.
“Maybe it’s a good idea after all.”
“Oh, yeah. Cutting a hole in her gut’s going to really improve her quality of life, I’m just sure of it.” I didn’t care who heard me. The only people nearby were a cafeteria worker wiping tables, another tired-looking couple with a whiny toddler, and a few single guys in scrubs.
Jake shrugged and shoveled something or other into his mouth. After growing up with Patricia’s cooking, he probably felt right at home forcing down that cafeteria food every day. “The doctors all seem to think it’s a good idea,” he said.
“I don’t care what they think.”
Didn’t he understand? Couldn’t he see? This wasn’t about what was or wasn’t a good idea. This was about who was in control of our daughter’s health. He might be ready to roll over and let someone else play God with her little six-pound body, but I wasn’t about to give up that easily. The fact that he was made me sick.
Jake didn’t say anything. That boy’s like a deer in the headlights when anyone within a twenty-foot radius gets angry. I swear, if we go out somewhere and he hears a couple shouting at each other, he wants to curl up in a fetal position and wet himself.
That’s why I had to try so hard to probe the fight out of him. “Or maybe you don’t care what happens to her.”
Low blow? Maybe. But it was necessary, even if he didn’t quite deserve it.
“Why would you think that?” he asked, and I wished he’d start yelling. Cussing. Anything to show me there was a living being with genuine emotions behind that frozen-looking face of his. “What do you think I’m doing here?”
I shrugged and glanced at the card we swiped in the cafeteria to get our daily food ration. “Enjoying free room and board?”
He was fuming in his own understated way. I could tell by the way his eyes narrowed and one of them twitched just a little. “That’s not why I came.” His voice was so steady. I would die if I had to keep such a tight lock on my emotions. I guess that’s why I’m the screamer and he’s the deflector, but man, I hate the way he tenses up whenever I get upset. It’s like he just wants the fight to be over so he’ll say anything he thinks I want to hear. Drives me insane.
“All I know is you didn’t come here for her. If you did, you’d actually hold her when you went to the NICU instead of sitting around playing stupid games on your phone.”
“It’s how I de-stress.” His voice was getting whiny, which is how I knew I was about to lose my head.
“Stress? You want to talk about who’s stressed?” One of the men in scrubs was staring at me, and the weary-looking mother gave me a sympathetic half-smile. The mommy equivalent of the black power salute. “I just squeezed a six-pound child out of my vagina,” I told Jake. “It was bloody. It was messy. It hurt worse than passing a golf-ball-sized kidney stone while getting your wisdom teeth yanked out with no anesthetic. Then I got loaded on a jet and flown here where I’m stuck until Natalie gets better. And the doctors are pushing for something that I don’t think she ...”
“Wait, what did you say?” Jake’s eyes had lost their glazed-over shine, and he leaned toward me.
“I said the doctors are a bunch of idiots full of ...”
“No,” he interrupted. “About her. What did you call her?”
I hadn’t realized I’d let it slip. It was Jake’s fault for getting me so worked up in the first place. “Nothing.”
“No,” he pressed, “you called her something. What did you say?”
I leveled my eyes at him. “Nothing.”
If he knew anything, he’d shut up, but no. He had to keep poking. “Natalie. You said Natalie. I heard you.”
Well it sure beats Patricia, I wanted to yell at him, but something stopped me. He’d caught me off guard. I wasn’t ready for this conversation. Wasn’t ready to share her name with anybody yet, not even her father. But I couldn’t deny it. Then I was the one staring at my plate like a guilty child caught copying down her foster parents’ ATM pin number on a piece of unfinished homework. I wasn’t sure what he’d say. He’d been pushing me to name her Patricia since we found out she was a girl, but I could never bring myself to agree. Whenever he brought it up at the Ronald McDonald house, I just pretended to be too tired to think about it. We’ll name her when she’s ready to come home, I said. A defense mechanism. Like a stray dog you bring in off the streets and your foster mom warns you not to settle on a name because someone’s going to come and claim him, and the minute you give him a name the harder it will be to let him go when the time comes.
So I thought I’d hold off on the naming thing until she got discharged. Everyone in the NICU was happy with calling her Baby Girl Franklin, so that’s what I was going to do, too.
Then I had a dream one night. You probably think I’m some kind of psycho by now, some bat-crazy chick who sees visions in her sleep and hallucinates while Holy-Ghost grannies stand up and testify on Open Mic Sunday. But I’m serious. It was one of my first nights at the Ronald McDonald house, and I went to bed wondering if it would have been better if my baby had died. If she hadn’t survived the brain hemorrhaging. Because she was so weak and frail, and she didn’t even open her eyes. She was just knocked out all the time, and the neuro guy told me her brain scans were crazy irregular and it would take a miracle for her to recover from that extensive of an injury. I may not have a science degree, but I know that when a medical specialist uses a word like miracle, things aren’t looking that hot.
So I went to bed that night thinking about how much easier life would be if she had just died while we were still at County Hospital in Orchard Grove. Easier for her, I mean, because most of the doctors assumed she was going to die anyway, and she couldn’t be very comfortable in the NICU with all those tubes shoved down her and poking into every major part of her body. Well that night I had a dream. Jake was there, and he was all excited because the doctor had just called and said they’d found a cure for our baby. The only catch was he had to take her to the hospital right away. It’s funny, looking back, because she’d been in the hospital her whole life by then, but in my dream we were home in Orchard Grove. So I let him take her, and the hospital was only a few minutes away, so I sat around the trailer waiting for Jake to come back, and I wondered what it would be like once our baby was cured.
And then there they were, since in a dream you don’t have to wait for anything, and Jake handed me this beautiful smiling girl. He was all excited, but the minute he put that kid in my arms, I got this creepy feeling start to zing up my spine. “What’s this?” I asked, and he was grinning as big as a fool and said, “Don’t you recognize your own baby?”
I said, “This isn’t my baby.”
And Jake said, “Of course it is. See? The doctors healed her.” He looked all happy like a puppy about to get a treat, but I couldn’t shake that feeling of spiders crawling up my skin.
“What do you mean they healed her?”
Jake stopped smiling and put on his best mansplaining expression and said, “Well, when I took her to the hospital, the doctors took a blood sample to get out some of her DNA, and they cloned her. They used a special solution so she developed to the right age, and they made sure there wasn’t any brain hemorrhage this time. Isn’t it great?”
I couldn’t even hold the thing anymore, that smiling Gerber baby with the fat legs and chubby cheeks. I dropped her in Jake’s arms and said, “Where is my daughter?” Because even though this was a dream and even though Jake obviously thought I was an idiot when it came to scientific reasoning, I understood that just because you make a clone that doesn’t mean the original stops existing. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about, and I got frantic. I was screaming and clawing at his face and screeching, “Where is my baby? Get me my baby!”
Then I saw her. Don’t ask me how, because I was still with Jake in the trailer, and she was in the hospital. But I saw her, just lying there in a black plastic trash bag in a grimy bathroom, and she wasn’t crying because she wasn’t cured and didn’t have the lung capacity to let out the faintest little whimper, but I could sense how scared she was. How terrified and lonely. She was cold. Cold and abandoned, and even though I could see her there clear as day, I couldn’t get to her because I was stuck in that stinking trailer. I was punching Jake by then. I’ve never done that in real life, not to him, but in my dream I was whaling on him, and I don’t even know what he’d done with the cloned baby by then because I didn’t care about her. I just wanted my daughter. And I was screaming to try to get to her.
Natalie!
Natalie!
Natalie!
I couldn’t tell you how or why that name popped into my brain, but I woke up and was still screaming it in my mind. My heart was probably going a hundred and forty beats per minute. I had sweat on the back of my neck and under my boobs, and for a minute or two I was so disoriented I thought I was still in the dream and my baby had been dumped into a trashcan in a hospital bathroom. But then I talked myself down from freaking out. Reminded myself that Natalie was in the NICU being taken care of by a team of competent nurses, and I’d go over first thing in the morning before they changed shift and get a full report about her night. But something changed after that. I stopped going down all of those what-if bunny trails. You know what I mean. What if Natalie hadn’t stopped breathing? What if I hadn’t been living in the middle of nowhere and had delivered her in a real hospital where there was a NICU ready to rescue her if something bad happened?
What if I hadn’t messed everything up?
What happened to my daughter was a tragedy and a mistake, and if I ever figure out that the doctor or the hospital did something wrong, you can bet your leather-bound Bible that I’m going to sue the shirt off their backs. I guess in a way, that dream helped me come to terms with the fact that my baby girl was sick and that there was no such thing as a miracle cure. But it did something else, too. All day I kept thinking about the way I’d screamed her name when I saw her lying there all cold and abandoned.
Natalie. Where in the world had my mind come up with that? I didn’t know anybody called Natalie. I can’t even remember any movies or TV show characters with that name. But from then on I thought of her as Natalie, which is how I got in trouble with Jake.
Of course, when I slipped up and used her name while we were having dinner, I didn’t tell him about the dream or anything like that. I tried to play it down and just said something like, “I don’t know. It’s just something that’s kind of been growing on me.”
I was expecting him to whine about how he really thought we should name her Patricia after his mom, who I hadn’t even met by then, but he didn’t. He had this strange expression on his face, so for a minute I almost expected him to start blubbering. Instead he pulled himself together and then reached for his phone. I rolled my eyes. It was so like him to give up right in the middle of an argument and hide behind that tiny plastic screen. I was still mad, but I didn’t have the energy left for a proper fight, so I just planned to finish dinner and get back to Natalie’s bedside by shift change. But after swiping a few things, Jake said, “Here, I want to show you something.”
He passed me the phone, but it wasn’t one of his stupid candy games. It was some kind of note-taking app. And just a quick glance was all it took for me to see that he’d made probably a hundred different entries in the past two weeks.
“I started writing her letters,” he told me. “I was going to make a record about her time at the hospital, and when she got discharged I was thinking of having a copy printed. Maybe give it to her for her sweet sixteen or something.”
Every once in a while, even now that we’re married, I look over at Jake and have this kind of freak-out moment like Holy cow, I don’t even know who this man is. It happened to me there in the cafeteria. The letters he wrote our daughter were really private. I couldn’t bring myself to read a full paragraph. He had all kinds of pet names for her, ended just about every single sentence with one, actually. Honey, princess, baby girl. But then something caught my eye.
“Natalie?”
He was blushing now and squirming in his seat across from me. “I didn’t know what name you’d settle on, so I figured I’d just throw something in there, and then when she came home I could replace it with her real one.”
“So you picked Natalie?” I had goosebumps on my back again, except they weren’t the creepy sort this time. He looked at me, and something passed between us, which sounds silly to say, but there’s no other way to describe it. We didn’t talk about the surgery anymore that night, but the next day when the gut guy came by to pressure me yet again about the surgery, I told him I’d go ahead and sign the consent form.
And then I went over to the HUC at the front desk and asked her to change my baby’s ankle tag from Baby Girl to Natalie.