“So how are you feeling?”
“Truthfully? Needles freak me out,” I say, lifting Zerena to my shoulder. My blood streams from the nurse’s hypodermic through a thin stretch of transparent plastic tubing and into a glass test tube. I glance at it and immediately turn away, so queasy does the sight of my blood make me feel. When the first test tube fills, the nurse exchanges it for another one because multiple blood tests are needed. Either that or she gets her jollies by watching me squirm.
“Gotcha,” Dr. Magee says, writing something onto the papers on her clipboard. “Otherwise, though, you’re doing a remarkable job taking care of your little one amid this chaos.”
“I guess it’s true what they say: motherhood is all about multitasking.”
“So how are you healing?”
I tell the doctors about the fatigue and my inability to stay awake for more than an hour, how it hurts to shift my legs on the bed. Half the time, I feel feverish, and the other half I’m so cold my teeth chatter. Pus weeps from my wound, causing the bandages to become too slick to stay put, their adhesive backing no longer sticky enough to hold to my skin.
“Could you spread your legs and let us look?” Dr. Magee asks.
I stiffen. Along with multitasking, motherhood is all about indignities. It feels wrong to spread my legs and let someone, even a doctor, look at me down there while Zerena is at my breast. Dr. Magee asks a second time, stressing she wants to help me. I oblige. An ammonia-like odor wafts out as I spread my legs apart. Zerena’s nostrils flare at the smell.
Two other figures appear at the door. Neither wears a white hospital lab coat. The woman, dressed in a shapeless blue-and-white polka-dot shift, sticks her head into the room as if unsure what she’s looking for. She’s followed by a man in dungarees and a gray sweatshirt stained with mechanic’s grease. Seeing me, the woman gasps. Her front top tooth is discolored and noticeably cracked.
The man she’s with waves at me, a sheepish grin on his face. He’s no doctor. Neither is she. These people are my parents, Tully and Belinda Bloom. I haven’t seen them since police locked me up in juvenile detention as a tenth grader for helping myself to a pair of iPhones at the local Best Buy. I did it at their urging, palming items that could be pawned off to pay for their financial shortfalls. On parole themselves for a variety of offenses and fearful of what a “corrupting the morals of a minor” conviction might mean to their personal liberties, they swore to the court they had no prior knowledge of what I was doing, and I, too naive for my own good, said nothing to contradict their lies. It was my third offense in six months, a tipping point that landed me a three-month juvenile detention stint. Although I didn’t know it at the time, my parents’ own legal issues would make it unfeasible for me to be released back into their custody when I completed my initial sentence. So three months became six months. Which became a year. Which was extended until I reached my eighteenth birthday.
“Look at you!” my mother, Belinda, says, rushing into the room. Instinctively, I tense up. Though I called my parents the other night, I never believed they’d actually come here—and now I’m not so sure I want them to be here. I’ve lived for years under the assumption my parents were a pair of mean dogs I’d best steer clear of, but they look older, wiser, and less needy.
Doctors and nurses, unfazed by the disturbance, attend to me. The nurse eases her hypodermic from my arm and presses a cooling alcohol swab against the spot where the needle had been.
“My gosh, are you all right?” my mother asks, her chest heaving with concern. I can only imagine how sick I appear. Two sets of earrings are in each of my mother’s earlobes: silver hearts and a pretty pair of blue diamond studs set in white gold. Back when I was growing up, there was never enough money for her to afford jewelry. She presses a hand to my forehead, like a real mother might do if her child was feverish. “You’re sick, aren’t you? Tell me how sick you are. You didn’t have to go through with the pregnancy. If you’d called us months ago, maybe we could’ve helped pay for an abortion.”
Dr. Magee looks up at my mother sharply.
“What your mother means is that you should have come to us sooner,” Tully says. For as long as I could remember, he insisted I call him by his name. Never “Dad.” Never “Father.” Always “Tully,” which he fancied sounded more authoritative. “It broke our hearts when you wrote that letter saying you no longer wanted us to be in your life, but we forgive you. Honest. We do.”
“Wait. You forgive me?” The letter my father mentions was written while I was in juvenile detention months before my release. I had literally aced my GED while behind bars and was eager to get a fresh start to my life. “I was locked up for three years because I didn’t want you to get in trouble for sending me into stores and shoplifting things for you. Don’t you know how bad that is? To have your own daughter locked up because you can’t take responsibility for your own mistakes?”
“We all make mistakes,” Belinda says.
“Okay. Okay. So we weren’t the best parents back then. Who is? That’s why you stopped talking with us,” Tully says, slicking back his graying hair from his eyes. Age—or maybe it’s the whisky—has gotten the better of him: his face creased with worry and neglect, he’s wiry, antsy, nervous. “Everyone’s parents screw up once or twice. But we were good, mostly.”
“Once or twice?” I say, almost speechless at how hindsight conveniently allows him to forget how miserable my childhood was. My parents would go missing for days. There’d be nothing in the refrigerator. I stole apples or oranges from the school cafeteria at lunchtime, begged gumballs from friends, knowing I’d need them for dinner. “A screwup is, like, forgetting a birthday or something. Because of you, I was locked up for three years. Three freaking years!”
“What your father’s trying to say is we’re sorry.” Like my father, worry lines etch my mother’s face. She takes a deep breath, sighs, closes her eyes, and bites her lips. Her fragile tooth looks as if it’ll fall out should she chew into a Jolly Rancher or a cube of caramel candy. “Honest, we are real sorry. Both of us. We should’ve been better for you.”
“If we goofed in the past, we goofed. Don’t go digging up old bones,” Tully says. Unlike my mother, his teeth are pearly white. Somewhere along the way, he must have paid a cosmetic dentist good money to bleach his teeth. “Family’s family, right?”
While we’re staring at each other, Zerena burps a wet burp, meaning that along with her burp, she regurgitates a teaspoon or two of something onto my shoulder. Lois Belcher led me to expect this might happen, but this being the first time, it startles me. The milky-white regurgitated mucus seeps into the cloth of my hospital gown.
“Listen, your father’s right,” Belinda says, sitting on the recliner. She takes off one of her sandals, a plastic pink flower half-de-petaled over the toe strap, and, sighing, knuckle massages the sole of her foot. “Family’s family. We would’ve helped you if you’d given us a chance. You called way too late for us to help with your pregnancy. Do you think it’s too late to put the baby up for adoption? Or maybe it’s too early? Don’t give up hope! There’s got to be an orphanage in this city we can call.”
Dr. Magee lowers the skirt of my hospital gown back over my knees. I’ve caught her glancing angrily at my parents. Whatever she’s seen down there, assessing my episiotomy, has knocked the smugness right out of her monkey. She looks at me with utmost seriousness. Watching her, my parents—normally no quieter than a pair of yipping schnauzers—become silent.