Would I?
I could certainly picture myself throwing his keys out the window, a casual, underhanded toss. With any luck they would land in the rain grate, wash out to sea. Or lie on the street, waiting for a stranger to pick them up; a nefarious stranger with warped intentions. He’d never know who. Nothing would drive him crazier than having a set of his keys loose in the world. He was key neurotic. It unnerved him to lose anything, but especially a key.
I lifted my hand toward the window. But I was too exhausted for the high dramatic gesture. Instead, I dropped the keys into the palm of his hand without touching him.
“Thank you,” he said. His voice was cold and formal; he seemed to resent me for putting him in the position to hurt me. I’d made him choose between his own well-being and someone else’s.
Brian stood up. “I should go.” We lingered at the door. I had no idea when I’d see him again. Did we kiss? I can’t remember. He left. I closed the door and locked it. In my bedroom I slid under the slippery white duvet, quiet. A bird was perched on the wrought-iron railing of the fire escape, twittering out a Morse code of undecipherable glee. “Shut up,” I said.
My upstairs neighbor called from her balcony, “Are you talking to me?”
“Jane,” I said. “No! I was talking to that crazy bird.”
“What bird?” she called back. “Want dinner?”
I could smell marinated meat grilling on her hibachi. I knew that if I walked upstairs, Jane would feed me. She was a born feeder of the friendless, a hospice nurse, a maker of handcrafted cards, a pioneer in the movement to destigmatize AIDS, a person who appeared with wildflowers from upstate just when you needed them most. If I caught her up on my plight, she would cluck and tut and truly care, and serve me everything in her fridge. She was an older woman with cobalt eyes, and no children, who gave her maternal love to all. Could I be that? No, too selfish. I wanted one person to devote myself to, or three. I wanted my own tribe. I was feudal at heart.
“Thanks, Jane,” I said, “I’m good.”
“You don’t sound good,” she called back. “You sound rotten. Come eat meat.”
I got up and quietly shut the window.
After about an hour, for no reason I could identify, I went out into the hall. I wasn’t going upstairs to Jane’s; I was just … going to the hall. Brian was sitting on the wide marble landing. I sat down beside him. The anger had drained out of the moment; we’d surprised each other out of it. After a while he said, “How did you know I was out here?”
“I didn’t know I knew,” I said.
If we sit here long enough, I thought, things will shift. We’ll recognize that we’re birds magnetized to the same pole. The pinging pole within me. But sitting on the steps of my landing, side by side in silence, we were the exact same people we’d been an hour ago. After ten minutes or so Brian stood up. “OK,” he said. And he left. He walked down the stairs, through the lobby, out onto Twelfth Street, and over to Sixth Avenue, where he turned north, and away.
I woke up the next day knowing I would go back to California, to the studio next door to my mom’s house. I needed my mom, like it or not. I was embarrassed to be a highly educated, unpartnered mother, but I was also hugely lucky to have support, on any coast, and it was time to move toward it. It meant accepting Brian’s no; it meant flying away from the father of this apple seed; it meant facing reality. But the alternative was to moon around Manhattan in pursuit of a phantom figure who, however much he might love me, did not want what I wanted. At least he’d given me the gift of an unambiguous answer.
*
At 6:30 every morning in the NICU, our team, the Red Team, rounded through; discussing the baby, ignoring me. By our fourth day, I was determined to insinuate myself into their private conversation.
“Her bili is down, that’s good,” said one.
“But her crit has dropped too,” said another.
I wanted to ask them to slow down, repeat, wait, how do you spell that? But their talk was like Philip Glass music, filled with repetitive, incomprehensible sounds, unstoppable and forward marching. Even when I asked, they seemed not to hear. They had eager, scrubbed faces and kept looking at the attending physician for validation. Did they know what the hell they were doing? The attending was calm, patient, a good teacher. But there was a room full of sick babies here, and she had to keep moving.
“Keep an eye on the crit, run it again in three hours,” she said. In my notebook I scribbled, “Crit low (bad), bili low (good),” hoping this would make sense later.
That night a new nurse came on duty. She wasn’t part of the usual crew and nothing like my Irish favorite. She introduced herself by saying, “These babies are so pissed off, that’s why they’re crying all the time.” I moved the baby’s box a few inches away from her.
She cracked open a small can of apple juice with vengeful force and drank it in one gulp, saying, “I need to hydrate.” Were her hands shaking? When she stumbled on the edge of a rubber floor mat and muttered, “Fuck this place,” it was so quiet I couldn’t be sure that’s what she said. And so what if she did? Could I report her for swearing? To whom? She kept encouraging me to go to bed.
If she were a cartoon character, I thought, she’d be surrounded by a visible force field of lightning bolts. In real life, she was a well-groomed brunette with razor creases in the sleeves of her uniform—evil wearing over-pressed cotton. I was aware that my impressions of her were likely exaggerated by a lack of sleep, maternal terror, and an all-vending-machine diet. That I might be using her as a totem, a repository for my rapidly iterating fears. But still, there was no way I was going to bed. I would not leave my baby under the care of a woman who interpreted the cries of the NICU as proof that the newborns sheltered here were “pissed off” rather than disoriented, fighting for their lives, or lonely for their mothers.
I pulled a rocker beside the baby’s incubator. I could sleep there. There were limits to how long I was permitted to hold her, how long she was allowed out of her box, but because I was a nursing mother, technically I couldn’t be kicked off the unit. I was dozing in the chair, struggling to stay conscious enough to notice if the wacko nurse was pinching any nearby babies, when she touched my shoulder. “I ran another crit, and it’s not good.” Crit, I’d discovered, is hospital slang for hematocrit—the baby’s red cell count was dropping again.
“How low?” I asked. No answer. In my experience, if you don’t get a factual answer to a direct question in the hospital, it means the facts are so unpleasant the staff doesn’t want to say them out loud.
I repeated my question, “How low is her count?”
“Low enough that she needs blood.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means we need to get in.”