Maybe I’d been viewing his resistance too narrowly. Maybe Brian’s fear of being a father was not about losing his identity as a writer. Maybe he was afraid to love another human being as profoundly as one loves a child. He was empathic in the extreme; his child’s worries, his child’s trials, would be Brian’s, millisecond by millisecond. It would be as if they shared a central nervous system. Such a symbiotic existence sounded almost unbearable, even to me. Maybe he was accepting himself for who he was, someone with finite limits in the realm of human attachment.
Brian had once told me about a dream in which he’d dug a moat around his house in order to protect his “fallen self.” Good luck constructing a moat, I thought, big enough to protect you from this delicate, microscopic nervous system already under way.
*
After the 3 a.m. change of shift in the NICU, things got very, very quiet. Even the machines dozed. The baby made her high-pitched, barely audible squeaks. I believed I could recognize that singular sound from a million squeaks. As much as I enjoyed the more subdued hours in the NICU, it was also the time of night when the truth of the place grew loudest. Embedded in the soft purr of the distant generators, the muted thud of the nurses’ rubber soles against the floor, the doctors’ whispered instructions, the occasional blaring alarm, was this: your child could die.
Looking around that room, it was easy to list grievances with God: for-profit health care to the suffering of innocents, fluorescent light, the suffering of innocents, plastic footwear, the suffering of innocents, the suffering of innocents, the suffering of innocents.
When I could no longer hold my eyes open, I walked across the hall to the strange, skinny room I’d been assigned to sleep in. It was a cast-off room, oddly oblong, closet-sized, and off the grid; it wasn’t nearly big enough to be a lobby or a lounge. It held just one narrow plastic couch and a single chair. I suspected this was the room where they took parents to deliver bad news. The worst news. I resolved to spend as little time there as possible, so as not to tempt fate.
The next morning the residents rounded through, a flock of uncertain birds clad in white, peering at my girl as if she was a mathematical problem they were tasked with solving. But not one of them could figure out why her red cells wouldn’t hold together. This was “the Red Team,” the group of doctors in training assigned to us, for whom I felt an immediate and irrational allegiance. “Go Red Team!” I semi-shouted when I saw them later in the day. One of them gave me a what’s-with-you look; the rest kept on scribbling on their identical pads. No jokes in NICU. Write that down. Nothing is funny here.
*
Maybe if I’d been more patient, Brian would have figured things out. But pregnancy has a way of forcing the point, and I was getting more pregnant by the sliver of each second. One night after dinner I said, “I think I should go home.”
“You mean to California?” Brian said. He sounded half panicked, half relieved. I had only meant downtown, to Twelfth Street. But he had a point. Why was I still in New York if his mind wasn’t changing?
I would return to my apartment as a first step, a pause to give Brian a chance to turn this immense boat around in the water. And if he didn’t, then California.
On the subway back down to my apartment, I took stock of my resources: I could rent out my apartment for a lot more than the mortgage, plus my dad’s mom, bless her, had recently begun to gift money annually to each grandchild. Between grandmother money and Twelfth Street rent, I could patch things together in California without working for a time. Especially if my mom were willing to give me a deal on her studio. Which she would, of course she would. I’d be OK until the baby was born and Brian began to pay child support, if it came to that. I knew for certain that, no matter who we became to each other, he’d take full financial responsibility. So I could do it. I could go back to California. Only I didn’t want to.
When I arrived on Twelfth Street, I looked east toward Sixth Avenue and west toward Seventh, beautiful, marbly prewar architecture in both directions. Brian had once told me that after we met, every time he stepped onto this block he thought of the song “On the Street Where You Live.” For there’s nowhere else on earth that I’d rather be …
My apartment smelled empty and stale, a cardboard box thinning in hot attic air. It had sagged into a funk of neglect. I opened all the windows and lay down on my bed. The cover was white crinkly fabric, very slippery. I’d once thought this duvet made my entire apartment more stylish. Now I could see its total impracticality; a baby would slide right off. I turned my head into the soft gauze and cried over the stupidity of my former self for buying such an item, the stupidity of my present self for continuing to care what my apartment looked or smelled like, and the stupidity of my future self for the myriad fuckups she doubtless had in store.
I tried to reverse the tide. I was not just a pregnant person whose partner wanted no part of her; I was other things. I was the daughter of an uber-caring mother. Beloved friend of a handful of warm, funny people. Someone who, at twenty, had lived in a Nepali village for three months, the only foreigner for fifty miles. I had two master’s degrees. Count them, two!
I was a performer who’d trained in physical theater and improvisation for ten years. I had stood up on an empty stage, many times, without a script or a plan and made theater out of my imagination and an agile body, presto. I wasn’t afraid to do that. In fact, it brought me joy.
But this—mothering alone—I was not made for this.
I cried until I ran out of energy, then got up and poured myself a glass of water. There was nothing in the fridge but a moldy lemon and a jug of apple juice with yellowish film on top.
I suppressed a wave of nausea and tried not to turn on the computer. If I didn’t check, there was a chance that an email from Brian was waiting, saying, I’m sorry, I’m in a cab, I’ll be there in five minutes. If I did check, the chance was nil.
My in-box held two notes from Suzi: One said, Eat fruit first, then an egg. The other, Try not to be sad, Heath. Think about the wiggler. The wiggler deserves to have a good day. There was a short note from my dad: Take good care of yourself, kiddo. And take good care of my kiddo’s kiddo. There was an offer from a local theater inviting me to perform in the spring. In the spring I would likely be the sole parent of an infant; could such a person perform?
I wrote Brian an email saying, I’m sorry we can’t seem to understand each other. And deleted it. I wrote him another: What an asshole you’ve turned out to be. And deleted it. I wrote him a third: Art and parenthood aren’t enemies. Duh. And deleted it. The fourth note said, Sonogram is scheduled for Wednesday, if you want to come. I sent it.
He called me. “I can’t do the sonogram with you; that doesn’t feel right. But I’d like to know how you are feeling.”
“How superkind and amazing of you to ask,” I said. “I am FANTASTIC. These have been the best few fucking weeks of my entire life, you phenomenal asshole.”