“Do what?”
I flapped my hand at her, then in front of myself, a gesture of frustration, of embarrassment at my emotional breakdown. “This. I can’t do this. I’m sorry, but I need you to go.”
She pulled free of me. “Oh!” She stood, visibly shaking, though if from embarrassment or anger or shame, I couldn’t say. I saw her trying to find inner stillness before speaking. When she did, her voice was slow, definitive, some edge of anger there. “Evangeline is here now. Emma is here.” She paused a moment. “And we are here. You and I. We are here.”
I found out the next day that she’d visited the hospital as usual but cleared out well before I arrived.
71
The first week with the baby home, Lorrie showed up twice, each time with a green salad that seemed some sort of joke between her and Evangeline. I was relieved that I hadn’t driven her away completely. But both times she left after a few minutes of cooing over the baby. Even Evangeline couldn’t coax her to stay. “Isaac made lots of chicken. Call Nells. Have dinner with us.” Lorrie would mutter she had something in the oven or a test to study for. After she’d leave, Evangeline would glare at me and stomp out of the room.
As Lorrie predicted, it was an exhausting week. On Friday night, after washing the last of the dinner dishes and checking on Evangeline, I went to bed early. It was a warm evening, one of the first days of June, and the sky was laced in descending shades of blue and deep pinks. As I fell asleep in that twilight, I thought how Evangeline was getting stronger every day, how it would only get easier from here.
At two in the morning, someone knocked on my bedroom door. I say “someone” because I was deeply asleep, and waking from that place was like rising from the darkness of an ocean floor. I struggled to orient myself as I went to the door. Yet I saw at once that Evangeline was ill. Her skin was ashen, and beads of sweat dotted her forehead. Heat poured off her, and her breath smelled like decayed meat.
“I’ll get a thermometer,” I said.
“Already took it. A hundred and three point six.”
I stopped and stared at her, fighting a terrible urge to cry. The urge mystified me. There was no reason for such worry yet.
“I’ve packed a bag. I’d better get to the hospital.”
I turned from her. I’d begun to weep—uncontrollable, ridiculous weeping. I couldn’t make sense of it. After a minute, I managed to get my breathing under control. I don’t know what Evangeline was thinking during this, but she waited quietly. I turned back to her, hoping in my sleep-dazed mind that she hadn’t noticed. But the first words out of her mouth were, “Thanks for crying.”
Such an odd thing to say, and it’s hard to describe her tone. It was tired and no-nonsense and slightly annoyed, but she meant it. She appreciated my grief; she just didn’t have time for it right then.
“I’m not dying,” she said. “Pretty sure I’ve got an infection though.”
I straightened and cleared my throat. “I’ll get the baby ready.”
“She’s ready. All we need is you.”
* * *
—
AS I DROVE THEM TO THE HOSPITAL, I told myself I wasn’t worried. The doctors would figure it out. Yet my hands vibrated on the wheel, a violent shaking like I was furious or having a seizure. I know that sounds extreme, but Evangeline, sitting in back with Emma, heard the rattling and asked how I could possibly be so cold when it had to be sixty degrees out.
At the ER, Dr. Wyman ordered blood and urine tests, followed by an ultrasound. A small, intense man, he tapped a pen sharply against his clipboard as he spoke. When the tests came back positive for infection and a large uterine abscess, he drummed his pen fiercely, insisting the abscess was “a serious but perfectly manageable situation,” as though we had argued otherwise. Evangeline needed to be admitted for surgical drainage and a five-day course of IV antibiotics. Before Dr. Wyman left, he motioned toward the baby, who’d been wailing through most of this, and said, “She can visit during the day, but she’s going home at night.”
Again I thought of Lorrie’s warning. Caring for the baby had been far more taxing than I’d remembered. Even with Evangeline handling the nursing and diapering, I was exhausted by the disrupted sleep schedule and the bouts of Emma’s crying.
Sometimes Evangeline cried too. She’d be curled in Rufus’s chair nursing the baby, sniffling and swiping at tears. When she’d see me noticing, she’d mutter, “Stupid hormones.” I knew that hormones played a role, but more was going on. The baby, with all her needs and all our incompetence, made us strange with each other. We thought we should feel like a family, we should be joyful about this new life. And we were. Of course we were. But we both felt lost and a little lonely too, the gap between what we thought was in order and what we could muster making our confused feelings worse.
We didn’t know how to think of ourselves. As much as I wanted to be, I wasn’t Evangeline’s father. And I wasn’t a grandfather either. I was in a hospital in the middle of the night, and soon I’d be leaving alone with a baby not my son’s. I hadn’t forgotten the Sunday morning after Emma’s birth, the moment I saw Daniel—saw everyone I loved—in her. I’d dedicated myself to embedding it in my heart, but it did me no good. It was a memory of something I could no longer feel, a place I could no longer access. Emma was a particular baby now, and though I felt a great tenderness toward her, when I looked at her, it was only her I saw. Sometimes, more often than I’d like to admit, I saw only what she was not.
Dr. Taylor showed up at the hospital around four, slugging back coffee, tired circles under her eyes but plenty focused, ready to “clean up what we started.” She suggested Emma and I go home, get a few hours’ sleep. She planned to run more tests and said I had three hours at least. I wanted to stay for Evangeline’s sake, but the baby hadn’t stopped crying, and I was beyond exhausted.
Before we left, Dr. Taylor suggested the baby be nursed one last time. Though Evangeline worried she’d make her sick, the doctor said, “The only things Emma will get from you are your antibodies, which are all revved up now. Besides, once we start IV antibiotics, you won’t be able to nurse. You’ll have to pump and dump if you want to keep your milk coming.”
Evangeline cried, but Dr. Taylor reassured her, saying she’d see Emma every day and could still feed her skin to skin. A guy in scrubs entered with a wheelchair to take Evangeline for one of the tests. Seeing that I was on the brink of leaving with the baby, Evangeline started rattling off when to feed Emma, when to change her diaper, burping techniques, and what it meant when she smacked her lips or grimaced in certain spectacular ways.
“We’ll be okay.”
“She doesn’t like to be left alone.”
“Of course not. I would never leave her alone.”
“I mean, she wants to be held.” Evangeline was being wheeled out now.
“Of course. Lots and lots of holding.”
“Call Lorrie,” she said over her shoulder. “Promise me that.”
I followed her into the hall. “I’ll call later this morning.”