The baby, Piper, she told me, was twelve days old, born on the first of July. The woman moved guardedly, as if in pain, and I didn’t ask before she told me, “Piper was breech,” telling me how her baby was fully intent on entering the world feetfirst. “The doctors did everything they could to change that. But no such luck,” she explained, sitting softly beside me on the park bench and describing in too much detail what a C-section is like. The incision. The surgical staples. The scar she’d no doubt have. She lifted the hem of her shirt then so that I could see it myself, and I blushed at the sight of her still-pregnant belly, at the bloated butterfly tattoo that sat just inches from the healing incision, at the canvas of fair skin. She was oversharing and I blamed the newness of childbirth for it, the fact that to her it was still fresh. The only thing these days that occupied her mind.
“With Amelia it was different,” she admitted, and I made the easy assumption that Amelia was the older of the two, the little girl, maybe five years old, who Jessie made a train with at the top of the slide—wrapping her skinny legs around the midsection of a girl she hardly knew—and together they catapulted down to the wood chips below, landing on their rear ends, laughing. “Twenty-some hours of labor, three hours of pushing,” she said, going on far too long about the gush of water when her membranes ruptured, like the pop of a water balloon. Her, worried only that she might poop on the bed, as one of her girlfriends had done. The broken blood vessels left behind on her face from hours of pushing, thin, red veins that snaked this way and that across her skin. Some doctor she didn’t know delivering her baby. Her breasts engorged, her unable to produce milk following childbirth. Having to relent to formula, which her mommy’s groups abhorred.
I felt uncomfortable, if I was being honest, about this sudden revelation of information from a woman I didn’t know. But it dawned on me then that this is the type of thing women do, this is the type of thing mothers do: share their experiences, swap stories, foster camaraderie.
She looked at me expectantly, as if it was my turn to share. She was quiet, watching me, and when I didn’t respond, she prompted, “And your girl?” and I knew then that I must tell her something, that I must offer up some version of the truth. I pictured those wide hospital halls, the glaring lights. “She was a vaginal birth?” she asked, that word alone—vaginal—making me turn redder than I was before. Because these were the kinds of conversations I didn’t have. Intimate. Friendly.
Most of my conversations ended at hello.
I felt my head nod without my permission, and I knew I must say more, that a nod of the head alone wouldn’t suffice.
And so I told her about the hospital room. I told her about the huddle of people who gathered around me, the nurses clinging to either of my legs, encouraging me to push. Incanting it in my ear—push, push—as I gathered handfuls of bedding in my hands and bore down with all of my might. The epidural had worn off by then, or maybe it was never there to begin with. All I felt was pain, a pain so intense it was as if my insides were on fire, about to rupture. I was certain I would soon explode. A hand stroked the sweaty hair from my face, whispering words of encouragement into an ear as I screamed, this crude, ugly scream, but I didn’t care how crude or ugly it was. The nurses wrenched on either of my legs, stretching me apart, making me wide. Push, they said again and again, and I did, I pushed for dear life, watching as that flash of black spilled from inside of me and into the doctor’s gentle hands.
But then I remembered.
That wasn’t me.
jessie
Before I can tear my eyes from Mom’s face on the newspaper’s obituaries page, from my own circled name, the man has slipped from the garden and disappeared from sight. I attempt to run after him, barreling through the rows of hawthorn trees as quickly as my legs can carry me. But still, when I come rushing out onto Michigan Avenue, chest heaving, breathing hard, he’s gone. The sidewalk is inundated with people, with kids, a middle school field trip to the Art Institute, and they’re all lined up in two parallel rows before the museum’s concrete steps. Clogging the sidewalk. I push past bubbly preteens who are incognizant of my desperation, who don’t care. By the time I reach the other side, there’s no sign of the man anywhere. The man with the sad eyes and the untied shoe.
I stare up and down the street, completely aghast. A muscle in my eyelid twitches, a spasm. Something involuntary, something I can’t make go away though I try. It’s extremely annoying. The street is a wide six-lane divided street jam-packed with people and cars, a median strip in the center that’s plugged with flowers and trees, making it even harder to see the other side. But still I walk, searching the streets for the man.
I hurry down Michigan with a heavy, desperate tread. The wind is a wall by now, and I lean into it to walk. It’s exhausting. All the while, my eyelid twitches. I turn left at Randolph, a temporary reprieve from the militant headwind, which now comes at me from the side so that I slope laterally, a perfect seventy-five-degree angle. At Clark, I turn right, not quite knowing where I’m going, but trying desperately to find the man. I climb northward, gazing into storefronts to see if he’s there. I stare down alleyways, out of breath by the time I come to a six-story building on Superior Street, one that’s flanked with floor-to-ceiling windows and looks oddly familiar to me.
I spin in a circle, taking it in, the doorman in uniform, the sign outside that reads Spacious, Open-plan Lofts for Sale. Inquire Inside. I know where I am. I’ve been here before.
Just like that, I’m standing at Liam’s front door.
I didn’t know I was coming here. I didn’t come here on purpose. But here I am, and now that I’m here, I make an attempt to scoot past the doorman and into the building. Because maybe Liam can help me think this through. The little girl in the car accident, the man in the garden. He’ll make me see that there’s nothing sordid going on. That it’s only a coincidence.
The doorman stands on the curb, hailing a cab for a resident. “Can I help you, miss?” he asks, catching sight of me out of the corner of his eye, as he steers the resident into the back seat of the cab and closes the door for her.
He steps closer to me. “I’m here to see Liam,” I say.
His smile is mocking. Wary. “Liam who?” he asks, playing dumb, and I freeze, realizing only then that I don’t have a last name. That to me he’s just Liam. That until yesterday he wasn’t even that, because before yesterday he didn’t have a name. He was only the guy from the hospital, the one with the blue eyes.
But I also realize that the doorman knows fully well what Liam’s last name is. He isn’t curious. He’s testing me, checking to see how well I know Liam before he lets me in.
“I don’t know his last name,” I admit, feeling uncomfortable as my feet shift in place. At first he’s hesitant, not sure he wants to phone Liam or not. For all he knows, I’m someone Liam is avoiding, someone he doesn’t want to see. And that’s his job, to keep unwanted visitors at bay, unwanted visitors like me.
He sizes me up and down. He asks twice what my name is. Both times I say Jessie, though for the first time I start to doubt that it is. I feel disheveled, disoriented, and though I have no idea what I look like, I can see it in the doorman’s eyes. It’s not good. I run my hands through my hair; I rub at my twitching eyes.
“Is Liam expecting you?” he asks, and I’m not quick enough on my feet to lie. I tell him no.
“Can you call him for me, please?” I plead, the desperation in my voice palpable to both him and me.
The doorman reluctantly phones Liam for me, but Liam doesn’t answer his call. “He’s not home,” he tells me, setting the phone down. I feel the skeptic in me start to take hold. He’s lying. He didn’t call him. He only pretended he did, but he didn’t. I think that maybe the number he dialed wasn’t Liam at all, or maybe he didn’t push enough digits for the call to go through. Or he hung up before Liam had a chance to answer.
I’m about to get angry, but then I remember. The funeral. Liam’s brother’s funeral is today. He’s at the funeral. He’s not home.