The Girls From Corona Del Mar (6 page)

Except that when I saw Jim, he was in the nursery holding a tiny baby who looked exactly like Lorrie Ann, with tears of joy just streaming down his steamy, pink face. Not wanting to disturb Lorrie Ann, I had left the daisies by her bedside and gone in search of the baby. (Truthfully, it was only that once I had run out of things to fix or think about fixing, and I was left only to look at her, my Lolola, the pain of it was excruciating. I knew no answer to such pain besides action. That was what I had always done. Find your mother passed out in the bathroom? Pull her up and put her to bed, laughing to yourself because the tiles left a pink grid on her cheek, but for God’s sake, don’t think about it, don’t dwell on it, don’t allow yourself to fully know how terribly out of control your life is. It was best, in my opinion, to try to feel nothing at all.)

I was on the other side of the big glass window that separated the nursery from the hall, but Jim caught sight of me right away and raised the baby in his arms slightly, so I could see, so I could admire what looked like a perfectly normal little baby boy. Jim was smiling and crying at the same time in a way that made him look perfectly idiotic, but was also, of course, deeply touching. I had never dated a guy like Jim, a guy who was firmly “a nice guy.” For the first time, I wondered what it would be like.

When he gave the baby back to the nurse and came out into the hall, he said, “Sorry, that was just the first time they let me feed him. They just took him off the IV. And the more he suckled at that little bottle, the more I thought: He’s gonna live! He’s gonna live! It’s just been—oh, Mia.”

He threw an arm over my shoulders as we headed down the hall back to Lor’s room. “How’s Lorrie Ann been?” I asked.

“A trouper. An absolute fucking trouper. She’s doing so great.”

I understood from this more that Jim approved of Lorrie Ann’s stoicism than that she was actually “doing great.” With his arm around me, I could smell the vague mice-smell Lorrie Ann had complained about. She was dead-on: he smelled like a hamster cage.

“He kept choking, but he got some of it down. They said if he didn’t get better at it, they’d start feeding him with a tube, and we don’t want that.”

“He looks beautiful,” I said. “He looks just like her.”

Jim looked over at me. “That’s funny. Everybody says he looks like me.”

The baby looked nothing like him. He looked like a miniature version of Lorrie Ann. If he’d spent as much time perusing her baby pictures as I had, he would know that. “Well, of course he looks like you too,” I said.

I began to understand that Jim’s reality was highly dominant. Through his will, the baby was made to look exactly like him. And also through his will, what was obviously a tragedy, or at least a trauma, was transformed into a miracle. Their little boy had survived. Everything would be all right. That Lorrie Ann couldn’t yet pee on her own, or even stand up, that there was a seven-inch incision in her abdominal wall, that she hadn’t gotten to hold her baby for longer than twenty minutes, all of this was deemed inconsequential.

When we returned to Lorrie Ann’s hospital room she was awake and there was a nurse at her side.

“Mia!” she said.

“Is this your friend? Do you want her to stay?” the nurse asked.

“Yes, let her stay,” Lor said.

“You, out,” the nurse said to Jim.

“Yes, ma’am,” Jim said, and popped back out the doorway.

“She’s gonna help me stand up,” Lor explained. “I haven’t stood up yet. I can’t believe you got here so fast.”

“All right,” the nurse said. “I’m gonna put a pad down here on the floor because you’re gonna gush, all right? And you, you take her hands.”

“I know,” I said. “I got the first flight out. I was lucky.”

The nurse levered Lorrie Ann’s bed all the way up, so that she was sitting, and then helped Lor turn and put her feet on the ground. I was given Lorrie Ann’s hands to hold.

“Pull!” the nurse cried, then softer, but insistently, to Lorrie Ann: “You can do it, you can do it, you can do it.”

Lorrie Ann’s face was suddenly white and waxy, wet with sweat; she was biting her lip, but as she finally came all the way up to her feet she let out a yelp, a deformed little sound that seemed indicative of more pain than if she had been screaming. Her hands were squeezing mine so hard that our knuckles were white. She was shaking and trying to look down.

“Don’t look,” I said, and she turned her gaze up to the ceiling. Blood was running down her legs and pooling around her feet.

“Is this normal?” I asked.

“I’m just gonna wipe you down, okay?” the nurse said. “This is totally normal. Then we’ll get you in the shower and your friend can help you get cleaned up.”

“I think I’m going to pass out,” Lor said softly.

“You’re not gonna pass out,” the nurse said, as she swabbed down Lorrie Ann’s legs and folded up the pad soaked with blood. “So are you her friend? Did you say you flew in?”

“Yeah, I flew in,” I said.

The nurse glared at me and made a motion with her hand to keep going. “It was an easy flight,” I said, “but it was so weird to be in California again. It’s snowing in New Haven. You know, everything feels so familiar that it’s like I never left, and yet I’ve missed it all so much that it almost hurts to look at things. I was getting weepy just driving on the 405.”

“You were?” Lor asked.

“Oh yeah. And I had the Beach Boys playing in the rental. I was a wreck. You should have seen me, you would have cracked up.”

The nurse pushed the IV pole toward me after she hooked the catheter bag on. “Just make sure she doesn’t get tangled,” she said, and moved out of the way so that Lorrie Ann and I could scoot toward the bathroom.

Every step, I could tell, was its own agony, but she made it to the bathroom. The nurse had gotten the hot water running in the shower, which was really just part of the room, so Lor could walk right into the spray once she got her hospital gown off. As I was untying the little ties behind her back, Lorrie Ann said, “I’ve missed you.”

I put my mouth against the back of her neck. “I’ve missed you so much it feels like it’s crushing my internal organs.” I could also smell the unique smell of her skin, which of course I had memorized deep in the cells of my childhood, but had not been conscious of until now: the smell was sweet, like baby powder, and faintly bitter, like Swiss chard.

“I’m so scared,” she said. “I’m so scared that this is normal. That you can just have all your organs unpacked from your torso and a baby ripped out and then you are expected to stand up and take a shower. The surgeon wasn’t nice. Did you know that? That they can just be rude to you right after they do that to you? It’s insane. I’m on a lot of painkillers. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “Let’s wash your hair.”

I helped her pull down the weird mesh disposable underwear and get rid of the monster pad that had done nothing to absorb all that blood but just sat there between her legs like a fucking sofa. I could tell she started feeling better when we got her in the water. She actually laughed when I first lathered up her hair. “This feels so good. I didn’t think anything could feel good ever again.”

I tried not to look at the staples that went up her belly like she was some Frankenstein office document. They weren’t gory or anything. Really, it was their neatness that was upsetting, their inorganic regularity.

I got completely wet helping her shower, but I didn’t mind. To feel the lather, thick and sweet in her long hair, to help her turn under the hot spray, to watch her splash her face again and again like a duck diving down underwater, to help her become clean so that no part of her was bloody or oozing, all of this was more intimate and more satisfying even than sex.

When we got her out of the shower, the nurse gave me a fresh hospital gown, and we dressed her, then got her into bed. She closed her eyes the minute her head hit the pillow. “I’m not sleeping,” she said, “I just have to close my eyes.”

“All right,” I said, as I pulled her hair out behind her so that I could comb it out, “keep them closed.”

“I’m not sleeping,” she said again, just before she fell asleep.

“Of course not,” I said, and kept combing.

The baby. Zach. What to say about the baby? He seemed just as much the hairless, pink neonate as any other recently born being. His legs were a little stiff, and his fists were always clenched, but most babies clench their fists. The stiffness would only get worse; Dana would jokingly call him the Christ child because his natural position was highly reminiscent of crucifixion. But when he was first born, he really did seem almost completely normal. The only noticeable, really noticeable, difference was that when he drank from a bottle he splashed and sputtered and choked and gasped and managed to get formula absolutely all over his face. But we all thought it was kind of cute. I don’t think any of us really knew what was coming. Not really. Not even after the brain scan came back bad. The doctors kept making seesaw motions with their hands: it was impossible to know how completely Zach would recover. Some babies suffered massive traumas and grew up normal; others suffered seemingly minor brain injuries and wound up with debilitating cerebral palsy. In the face of such endless equivocation, Jim’s reality became our reality: there had been a miracle. The boy had lived.

As to the details of what happened to Lorrie Ann, what had happened
during Zach’s birth, I didn’t understand enough about labor and delivery then to ask intelligent questions and piece together what had gone wrong. I knew that she had been induced and that her labor had stalled and that then she had passed out and an emergency C-section had been performed. That was why her stitches went straight up her belly instead of side to side. The only hint I really had about how awful things had been was from Dana.

We were eating chili fries together in the hospital cafeteria. Jim was upstairs napping with Lorrie Ann. Zach was, of course, in the nursery. There was a lot less to actually do than I had imagined, and it was still only the first day. By day three, I would begin to feel completely useless. But at that moment, it felt profound to be eating chili fries with Lorrie Ann’s mother in the hospital. Perhaps the word “profound” makes me seem immature or egocentric, but I was immature and egocentric. I was only eighteen. I felt like a grown-up in a way I never had before. It was quietly, tightly thrilling. I wanted so badly to be capable, capable of being Dana’s confidante, capable of being Lorrie Ann’s true friend.

“I swear,” Dana said, “hospitals just weren’t like this when I had Lorrie Ann and Bobby. Something’s not right about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just, I seem to remember my doctor being there for, not my whole labor, but definitely long stretches of it. Her doctor came only to perform the surgery. Otherwise, it was just this silly little nurse. Sweet thing, but couldn’t have been older than twenty and not exactly bright.”

I would find out later from Lorrie Ann that this nurse had been wearing shimmery purple eye shadow that reminded her of My Little Pony. The girl had been almost completely incapable of getting the fetal monitors that were strapped to Lor’s belly to pick up anything. Every time Lor shifted in the bed, they would go offline and the girl would come and tighten, always tighten, the elastic bands. Lor had bruises and even small lacerations on her belly from these straps, that’s how tight the girl had them, and still she couldn’t pick up the baby’s heart rate clearly. Several times an older nurse had to come in and do it for her.

Dana stared off into space for a bit, twisted free a chili fry. “It was like
being in a nightmare,” she said finally. “A nightmare where everyone is trying to be polite and doesn’t know what to say.”

For some reason this observation frightened me in a way that no amount of Lor’s blood in the shower ever could.

“Poor Jim is ready to declare that asshole surgeon some kind of saint,” Dana said drily. “Sweet boy, but—”

“A little eager to please,” I supplied.

“Exactly,” Dana murmured, then pushed the chili fries away from her. “Stop me before I finish these. Jesus, I love chili fries.”

Perhaps the most disorienting thing about that trip was seeing my own family. I hadn’t told my mother I’d be coming. In fact, I hadn’t even really planned on seeing them. I hadn’t thought about where I would be staying, having just assumed that I would be somehow needed at the hospital twenty-four hours a day. When Jim and Dana made it clear at the end of the first day that I should go “home,” I began to wonder exactly where home should be. I knew vaguely that I could pay for one or two nights on what was left of the new credit card’s available balance, but I couldn’t afford at all the two weeks I planned to stay. The only sensible thing to do was go home-home, and yet I did not want to.

Though Lor and I had always joked that I had a stone for a heart, I knew really that what I was trying to describe was a profound fickleness, a weird detachment from reality and other people. I could love someone profoundly and still hurt that person mortally. I had to actively, consciously try not to hurt the people I loved. I was, in some sense, simply too free. It was easy to not tell Lorrie Ann I was applying to Yale. It was easy even, in a mechanical sense, to schedule that abortion and break my toe. It was easy to wash down Lorrie Ann’s blood-crusted and bloated body, to gently soap her bruised hips.

But what had not been easy, even for me, was to leave my brothers. Every day I kept myself from imagining what might be happening to them. I trusted my mother to take care of them not at all. The moment
my mind landed on Max or Alex, when I remembered something they said or did or a look they often gave, my inner self would leap back as if burned. I did not want to go home to my mother’s because I was afraid that their clothes would be dirty, that she wouldn’t be home or if she was that she would be passed out, that they would hug me too tightly and whisper-beg, as they had when I first left, for me to please please stay. If what was in my mother’s house was too bad, I would not be able to return to Yale at all. I could leave once, but it would be beyond even me to do it twice. I knew all this as I pulled up in front of my old house in the little green rental car, which had an engine as high-pitched and feeble as an ailing mosquito.