The World Below (32 page)

The next day, he went in to the hospital early, leaving before I was up, though I heard him in the distant reaches of the apartment, showering, drying his hair, opening and shutting drawers, the tinny bark of early-morning news on the radio.

I cleaned the house before I went out. It was a mess. The sheets needed washing, there were dishes in the sink, crumbs and driedup
spills on the table. The shelves in the kitchen were almost bare. Robert and Karen had been living a kind of reduced, catch-up purchasing life since she’d been confined to bed—buying corner-store-sized containers of Tylenol or Advil, two rolls of toilet paper at a time, getting lots of take-out food. I stopped at a supermarket on the way to the hospital and bought big. When I got home, I filled their shelves and closets with food and paper goods and drugstore supplies. The next day I went shopping again before I went in to see Karen—baby things this time: the tiniest T-shirts and gowns and sleepers I could find, which even so would swim on Jessie. And blankets and crib sheets. Rubber pads, a mobile, some soft toys.

Both days I got to the hospital around midday and stayed for three or four hours, sometimes sitting with Karen, sometimes with the baby. When I got back to the apartment, I fell asleep for more than an hour; it was somehow so exhausting just being in the hospital, always waiting to hear from one doctor or another, or for this or that test to be run or this or that result to come in.

Karen felt it too. “I’m going crazy in here,” she said on the second day. “Let’s do something dumb to pass the time. Maybe they’ve got some cards down in the gift shop.”

Of course they did, and for her last two days there this became part of our routine too. Each of us would sit with Jessie, whisper to her and carefully stroke her, and then we’d come together in Karen’s room for a cutthroat series of games of gin rummy, which, maybe because we needed to be taken away, took us away completely. She frowned and grimaced as she played. She kept up the steady, insulting patter the children had always used with one another as they competed in games: “Very
clevair
, m’sieur, but nowhere near clevair enough.” “Watch it, smarty-pants, I’m comin’ after you.”

Sometimes, as she slammed her cards down on the Formica tray table in vindictive pleasure and announced she was going down or ginning, I felt I was being useful to her at last, in a way she’d rarely left room for, growing up.

Jessie, meanwhile, was doing well—or so they said. It was hard for me to tell. She still couldn’t breathe on her own, though they’d administered a drug to help her, a surfactant, and they were steadily lowering the level of oxygen she was getting. On the third day when I went in, they’d taken her off the bright lights and put her in an isolette. This meant she didn’t have to wear eye protection anymore. Suddenly I could see most of her little bruised face, her lashless lids. Her eyes didn’t open often, though, because she was tranquilized. Babies on ventilators, I had learned, usually were.

When I sat with her, I sang very softly or held her minuscule hand between my fingers and whispered to her. I willed her to hear me, to feel my touch, and it seemed to me she did, actually. Sometimes her hands seemed to squeeze my finger with the most delicate of pressures. And the nurses agreed. They said her signs—the signs they monitored so carefully—calmed down when I was there.

The head bleed preoccupied me; just the idea of blood leaking in her brain seemed so dangerous. I talked to her doctor about it one day when I was there without Karen. He was reassuring. It had been a brief episode, he said. Her heart rate had gone down slightly, and her blood pressure up, but they got everything adjusted very quickly. She’d had no seizures, no signs of damage. All these were good, good signs.

I wanted to believe him. He was a small, gentle man. Hispanic. He spoke with a lovely accent. He called her “Chessie,” and it made her seem a person in the world to me, to have someone have his own version of her name.

My fourth day back—the day before Karen was to come home—I bought a plastic carry chair and a crib. The chair I brought up to their apartment myself and unboxed. When Robert got home from the hospital, late in the evening, he helped me unload the big, heavy flat box containing the crib from the car. We lugged it up and
into the baby’s room by stages, resting often for my sake, and cut the box open there.

Robert was methodical assembling it, utterly different from Joe in this regard. He gathered all the tools he thought he’d need ahead of time. He read through the several pages of instructions before he began. My job, he told me, would be to hold things in place while he tightened bolts and nuts. He was still wearing his work clothes, though he’d taken off his tie and jacket and rolled his sleeves up. His shirt was a pale blue, clearly expensive, his suit pants dark and elegant. How beautiful he was! I thought, watching his strong, slender hands at work, watching the corded muscles in his forearms leap and shift. Beautiful in a way none of the men I’d ever been involved with had been. Expensive, handsome, coiffed, reassuring. Not, I had thought, Karen’s type.

I had felt he and Karen were marrying too young. I had thought Robert wasn’t special enough for her—though that’s not how I put it. But a student lawyer! I said. A boy with such a predictable, safe life ahead of him. Karen understood that, but he was exactly what she wanted. What she said was, “I know that all my life Robert will be there for me, he’ll take care of me.”

I was appalled. “But you don’t need anyone to
take care
of you, Karrie.”

“I know I don’t. I sure don’t.” Her laugh was almost bitter. “But that’s exactly why I
want
it.”

While we worked, Robert and I talked in the easy way that’s possible when something else is taking up much of your attention. We talked about Jessie a little, about how worrisome, or not, the bleed was, about when she might come off the breathing tube, about what this doctor had said, or that one. He told me he’d already “crossed over”—that was how he put it. That Jessie was just who she was, to him, and whatever happened to her, he loved her and wanted to be sure she had the best version of her life she could have. And then he said, “But I still think she’ll be fine.” His brows were knit in concentration as he tightened a screw. “She’s a fighter, you know.”

“I do know,” I said. And it seemed to me that she was. Even drugged, Jessie
worked
so much of the time. She swam and swam.

We talked about the likelihood that they’d move within a year or so, to some place with more room, maybe a yard. We talked about Karen, about how long it had been since she’d been able to work, about how important it was to him to guarantee that she get back to her music as soon as possible.

“Maybe she won’t want to for a while, though,” I said. “Children—a child—can be mighty distracting. And Jessie … well, she’ll be especially distracting, I would think.”

“That’s fine too, of course,” he said. “But she should get to choose, that’s all.”

He asked, and I talked about myself a little, about my life in Vermont.

“What’s the verdict, do you think?” he asked.

“I don’t know, honestly. Now that I’m back here, even though I’m not in my own home, it feels light-years away. It’s as though one world sort of negates the other. I can hardly believe in any of it.”

We pushed the crib into its corner and dropped the mattress in. I ripped open a package of crib sheets and made up Jessie’s bed, while Robert untangled the musical mobile I’d bought—little wooden orchestra figures, in honor of Karen—and attached it to the headboard. Then we took the cardboard and the trash down to the garbage bins and stuffed them in. It was after eleven when we said good night. “You use the bathroom first,” I said. “You’re the one who has to get up in the morning.”

I went into the study and pulled the curtains on the twinkling lights of the city. I changed into a nightgown, thinking about how companionable Robert and I had been in our project, thinking about how pleasant it was to live with someone, thinking about how I’d missed it, even though there were things I enjoyed about my solitary life.

While I was taking my turn brushing my teeth I heard the phone ring, and when I went past Robert’s bedroom door, I could hear that he was talking to Karen—gently, reassuringly. From the study as I drifted into sleep, I could hear the faraway intermittent rise and fall of his voice, and it seemed I was somehow a child again, hearing my grandparents talking below me in the kitchen.

When Karen came home, the routines shifted. I moved out, for one thing, over to the guest room at my old friend Ellen Gerstein’s house. Now I had a daily nighttime or breakfast dose of gossip about the Frye School to listen to: the other teachers’ doings and the girls’ lives: who’d applied to what college, whose parents were getting divorced, who’d been caught smoking or drinking or illegally off campus.

I went in with Ellen one day, just to look around, just to make myself begin to think harder about what I was going to do. It was early in the morning, and the long locker-lined halls were empty; the girls were all in chapel. The English room was a mess, the chairs out of line and the blackboards unerased. On the board at the back of the room were several attempts to diagram a sentence, and on the one in front, behind the teaching desk, one of the girls had scrawled in large sloppy print,
IF THIS IS AN OBJECTIVE TEST, GUESS WHAT?!!! WE OBJECT
!!!

I was looking through the file drawers for some of my papers when I heard someone call my name in the hallway, and then suddenly five girls had surrounded me, squealing. “Miz Hubbard, ohmygod, you’re back! Ohmygod, Ohmygod!” They smelled of soap, of cologne, of coffee and hair spray and cigarette smoke. I sat down for a moment at the desk and they swarmed me, talking too fast, berating me for abandoning them in their last year. Someone leaned against my back, someone touched my face to get my attention—Lizzie Lanier. She had a recommendation she wanted me to
write. It would be late, but I
had
to do it, I just
had
to, it was like Fate that I was here today, it was so, like,
perfect.

I thought of Jessie then, of Jessie being this age, being a pest, applying to college, smelling like this, touching me.

My dreams at Ellen’s house were disordered, as so often happens when you’re sleeping in a strange bed, when your life has been turned upside down. Usually, I could tell, they were of Jessie, based on the haunting vision of her I carried with me everywhere. In my dreams, though, she took different forms. Several times she was one of my own children. Once Jeff, frantically ripping out the tubes, trying to free himself; once Fiona, comatose or dead. In these dreams I was useless, helpless—but frantic too. Often I woke up from them with my fingers scrabbling in the bedding around me, my heart lurching desperately in my chest.

I stayed on because they needed me. There was almost no time in their lives for household chores, for cleaning up and shopping and fixing meals, and those were the things I took on myself, that was what I could do for them, and I did it with as much attention and care as I’d given to the fancy meal I’d cooked in Vermont, as I used to employ cooking for friends and restaurant people with Joe.

I met Karen each day at a little café near the hospital for lunch. Then I went in to sit with Jessie for a while so Karen could take a walk or go home for a nap if she felt like it. It was only when she came back that I left, to shop and then to head to her house to make dinner.

Robert usually stopped in at the hospital on his way home from work and lingered for a little while after Karen left, to have some time alone with Jessie. Karen and I often had a glass of wine together while we waited for him. Sometimes I left when he got home, to give them time alone together; sometimes they insisted I stay on and eat with them. Often one or the other of them was leaving when I was, after the meal, to say good night to Jessie, to
hold her and beckon her toward her life with them one last time for the day.

For they could hold her now. She’d come off the ventilator, though she still had apnea, that momentary periodic forgetting to breathe that happens to premature babies because they have to learn how too soon, before their bodies are programmed to do it. But they could hold her—they were exultant, almost dizzy with it when they were finally allowed to.

And I was too, of course. The night after she’d been extubated, I went in alone after we’d all eaten. It was around nine, and the only other visitors were a young couple—parents of a new preemie—and two fathers I’d come to know over the long days. We all waved to each other in greeting, old hands in the neonatal unit.

Jessie’s nurse grinned at me. “I know what you’re here for,” she whispered.

“Damn straight,” I said.

They’d set a rocker by her isolette, and the nurse gestured me into it. She opened the side hatch and expertly slid Jessie out and into my arms. She still had a little oxygen tube in her nose, and an I.V. line in her arm, but her face was open and free for the first time: no tube in her mouth, no white tape like a milk mustache on her upper lip holding it there.

She weighed nothing in my arms and against my body, but she curled into me, and I bent over her and touched her face. Her eyes flickered once. She gave a little gasp and shook herself and then relaxed again.

I sat with her until the nurse said it was time to go, rocking her slowly and singing very softly all the songs I’d sung to my children, all the songs my grandfather had sung to me. She woke at one point, but without startling, and lay back across my forearm, her opaque dark eyes wide in the twilit room, her face frowning and concentrating on me, as if taking me in, as if really seeing me for the first time and recording me slowly and permanently into her memory.

Fourteen