Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  Bebe called me crazy and unstable, I text you. Not that I didn’t deserve it. Still, I have to admit it took me by surprise. If I’m so crazy and unstable, what was she doing here all this time? Why did she want me to stay?

  Then, I hope everything’s ok. I’m worried about you.

  Do you see how you are too good? Not answering a text within an hour makes me afraid you’re dead in a ditch. Because you’re always so Here for me. How can you be possible? I love you. I love you, my bright red meteor boy—I wish we could be sitting outside of Villa Moderne, smoking on the wooden gliders, our knees brushing as we rock.

  Where ARE you, baby? Fuck. I have something so important to tell you.

  Nick? I need you.

  Usually, I know people at this six o’clock meeting, but none of my friends are here tonight. One other person, a man about your age, is sitting through consecutive meetings, too—maybe he is three days sober; maybe he will be here all night; maybe I should talk to him, but I don’t. It’s dark when I get outside and I have nothing but an overnight bag with some black clothing and embarrassing lingerie in it and nowhere to go except Mami’s. I am thirty-one years old but here I am again.

  It’s past nine when my phone vibrates. I have it in my back pocket, close to my skin, not in my handbag, so that I can’t miss you. This gesture of hope humiliates me, even though the phone is ringing now, even though my hope has been fulfilled. Your name flashes across my phone and I clutch at it like a sweating glass, ready to gulp you down.

  I want Isabel not to be dead. I want my ovaries not to be a detonating bomb. I want any woman in my life to have loved me enough. I want you to love me enough to make up for it. I want to be somebody else.

  For a moment, as desperately as I’ve been waiting to hear from you, I almost hang up my phone.

  “Oh god,” you say, and your voice is all wrong. Despite the Klonopin I can hardly breathe. “I’m so sorry,” you say, and I get ready for the blow: you have reconsidered everything, reconsidered me, reconsidered whether I even have the right to be alive much less whether I have the right to steal your good wife’s man, go ahead, hit me, bring it on. But then I’m crying, too, because I know you’d never do that, Nick. I know that isn’t what you’ve called to say. I know you’re not capable of hurting me on purpose, and if you aren’t calling to break my heart then it has to be even worse if you sound like this.

  “Emily had a seizure.”

  I cry out to try to comfort you. I still believe, with my newfound hope, the hope you accidentally taught me, that maybe I am now in the role of the comforter, that maybe everything will be okay.

  “She was alone with Jay—the ambulance—he called. I didn’t even know he knew how to do that—I was at the stupid fucking gym, my phone was in my bag, the boys kept trying to call me—I got home . . . the ambulance—I thought it was Jay—I thought—”

  “Nick, oh god, I’m sorry—”

  But you cut me off. “No, you don’t understand—” Your voice clogs, raw again. “They don’t know if she’s going to make it . . . Emily, the baby . . . anything.”

  Of all the things I wanted, one thing I never thought, precisely: I want to take care of an infant. This thing, this clump of cells inside my stomach, could be just another grasp at salvation. Maybe a baby could love me enough to heal me. Me.

  And I never say to you, I’m pregnant.

  Perhaps that is my one humane act.

  If this were Caracas, circa 1978, maybe someone would be en route with a gun, ready to shoot me in the chest. But three decades have passed. I’m a bisexual adulterer in a Blue State whose lover’s wife is having my gay brother’s child: that’s not how we do things in our tribe. If I want to go down, I’m going to have to do it myself.

  I’m sorry, Nick.

  This is what we’ve wrought.

  MIGUEL

  Once again, Miguel is outside his body. He watches himself walking through tiled corridors, playing the role of ambassador. Other people litter the halls, strangers, but they do not register. Hospitals are like miniature worlds in that sense: so many life-and-death dramas playing out in tandem, adjacent but never touching. For that man at the vending machine, talking to the air, one reality; for the woman with balloons in the elevator, another—Miguel, too, is trapped in his inviolate, singular experience. He can see himself moving and talking, the way he remembers witnessing, from somewhere skyward, his nine-year-old self peddling chintzy faux bouquets door-to-door. He can still see himself there on his old Caracas street, the view of the basket in his hand as though he was looking straight down on it, even though he cannot envision the face of a single neighbor who pressed money in his hand, or remember what his house looked like from the outside, or recall the color of the car Papi allegedly drove off a bridge, or that they even owned a car. His childhood seemed a universe traversable by foot, as though if you ended up farther than your body could carry you, you would simply fall off the edge of the earth. Tía’s, which had seemed so far away from their own block that it might as well have been Chicago or Miami, was, Isabel told him many years later, barely half a mile away.

  The NICU at Northwestern is the new ground zero of his life. Entire years—decades—feel like they are falling away so there was only ever That, the interior of his tiny house in Caracas, and This: the incubator where his daughter Imogen is, according to popular vernacular, “fighting for her life.” Language is coded with violence, with blame, with platitudes. Three pounds of existence and in a listless magnesium fugue, not breathing on her own, Imogen—a mass of cells now coded and quantified by the label of the name Miguel and Chad slapped upon her to pin her down and in place—is beyond their desires for sentience and intention. She has no awareness of “life” for which to “fight”—no pride to surrender in “losing.” He thinks of Isabel, and the way people spoke of her battle with cancer, a disease less sentient, even, than this small mound of humanity that is Imogen. Language, doctors, mothers, lovers, religion—everyone assigns meaning to everything. Christian mothers battle with cancer and bad drunken men drive their cars off bridges and newborns too small for the world are presumed valuable and hence fight the good fight of survival. Miguel’s head swims. God is love; God hates fags; Jesus loves the little children; there is a season for everything; when a door closes another opens; God is forgiveness; thou shalt not kill. He feels he will somehow die if this clump of neurons and fiber and beating heart does not survive, but what does his survival matter, or hers, or any of it? There is no arc to any story; there is only a beginning and an end and a million moments in between, adding up to nothing.

  His body goes on, plodding from the NICU to the waiting room where Gretchen and the Merrys huddle together, a unified front of civilized WASPs still muted in their crisis mode. He goes from there to the room where Emily is being closely monitored, Miles at bedside vigil clutching her hand while Nick seems to have fallen apart and is leaning against a wall at the end of the hall looking deranged. Miguel goes back to the NICU where Chad sits gazing at Imogen with a singular attention, occasionally raising a hand to cover his mouth, his eyes above his left hand—above his wedding band—brimming up and then freezing, static, the tears not falling. He brings the Merrys news of Imogen; he brings Chad news of Emily; he sits next to Chad while the movements of nurses lurch on around him.

  He can’t feel his own skin.

  Chad has his arm linked through Miguel’s, and slowly Miguel forces himself to concentrate on the pressure of Chad’s meat-slab limb against his own. They are all fragile meat. He imagines Imogen, her unfathomably tiny striped hat covering her head that is smaller than his palm. Her entire body is the size of a large animal’s heart. What kind of animal? Surely an elephant’s heart is much larger—a tiger, perhaps? Is his daughter the size of a Siberian tiger’s heart? He watches his hand close into a fist, comparing the size of his own heart to the size of Imogen by closing one eye and holding his fist out toward her incubator.

  “I can’t believe this is ha
ppening to us,” Chad whispers, leaning against him.

  It seems impossible to reply to this. Miguel thinks, but every possible response would be biting—You can’t? What kind of life have you led? Or, When will you understand that life’s teeth come for everyone?—and he does not wish to bite.

  “I didn’t understand,” he manages only, “how instantly you love them. Like . . . the second they come out . . . how the world would be different.”

  Chad looks at him, his expression naked and cracked apart in a way Miguel has never seen. “I knew it would be that way. I loved her when she was inside Emily—I didn’t even know Emily, but I loved her, too, I couldn’t get enough of her, because the baby was inside her.”

  “I don’t know how to do this,” Miguel says. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life.”

  “She’s going to be okay,” Chad says, but turns his eyes away. “We have to think positively. Everything will be fine. We’ll be taking her home soon.”

  Everything Chad is saying right now is like some distilled essence of exactly why Miguel fell in love with him once—exactly why he wanted to make a life with this man, this person so capable of incautious love and hope—yet in this moment he understands fully that his youthful delusions that this would somehow rub off on him, change his own essence, was folly, and that he and Chad will live forever on opposite sides of a certain divide. Miguel cannot climb the fence, cannot claw his way in the dirt beneath it to live on Chad’s sunlit side. Inside her incubator, Imogen looks to him like a broken newborn bird on the sidewalk, shorn even of protective feathers. She looks like a thing not made for this world.

  “I don’t know if this is the right time to mention this,” Chad says. “But have you noticed that Gretchen hasn’t come in here once? She isn’t acting normal. It’s freaking me out.”

  Miguel says mildly, “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t think she’s going to try to take her, do you? What if she’s planning to take our baby away from us?”

  Miguel’s hand rubs Chad’s arm, close to the space where their bodies are linked. The machines hum and beep, the digital sound of life. “You’re just stressed out,” he says. “You’re just worried about Imogen.”

  “No!” Chad stands up, and Miguel starts, dizzily. Chad’s back is to the incubator, and Miguel sees a couple of nurses eye him, though surely meltdowns are not uncommon in here. “Imogen’s going to be fine,” Chad says, too loud. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about my sister. I know her, and she’s not acting right.”

  Miguel takes Chad’s wrist and tries to pull him back down to his seat—he has become a civilized WASP too—hissing, “You’re losing it. Maybe you need a break—get some air. Gretchen loves you . . . and look, she has her hands full with Gray and that shitstorm divorce. What you’re saying makes no sense.”

  Chad yanks his wrist back. “Since when does common sense keep anyone from wanting to keep what’s theirs? Look at Troy! Look at your family!”

  Miguel’s nerve endings race back to life with pinprick electric sparks, his entire body a foot that has fallen asleep and is now being stomped on. “Okay,” he says, trying to steady himself, “I hear you, but . . . I just don’t know where this is coming from. Just because she hasn’t come to see Imogen—people get nervous, Chad . . . around a baby who . . .” He wants to say, Around a dying baby. But he can’t—not to Chad, not even aloud for his own ears to hear.

  “It’s not only that.” Chad sits down now, voluntarily, lowering his voice. “She’s been acting skittish and cagey for a long time, almost the whole pregnancy. I just didn’t want to believe what I was seeing. I think we need to go see a custody attorney, and I mean, like, today.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Miguel says. “I’m not leaving Imogen.”

  “I think we should go together,” Chad presses. “You’re the biological father, I have no rights here at all. Our marriage isn’t legal. I’m the uncle—I’m nobody.”

  Miguel’s eyes lock on Chad. He can see Chad now, not himself—he’s snapped back into his body, though he wants out again. “I don’t want to leave her,” he says urgently. “I just . . . can’t.”

  Chad stands. “I don’t want to leave her, either. But while you’ve been running around with Lina playing detective about shit that happened thirty years ago, I’ve been here, slowly figuring out that my sister is planning to steal our baby.” He closes his eyes briefly, inhales slowly, as if he’s counting inside his head. “I’m sorry,” he says when he exhales at last. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry about Isabel. I know she practically raised you. But she wrote us off a long, long time ago, and it’s like—ever since she got sick, and especially since she died, you just seem . . . checked out. You seem like you’re not even here. We’re having a baby.” Abruptly, the tears that have been brimming in Chad’s eyes all day spill. “No . . . we had a baby. We have a baby. Imogen is going to pull through, and she is ours.”

  Chad’s body, when Miguel embraces him, bristles at first like an electric spark, then releases and he grips the back of Miguel’s shirt tightly in his fists. Miguel stands firm, Chad leaning into him so hard that if he were to move, Chad would fall over. He keeps his feet solid, absorbing Chad’s weight. “Listen,” Miguel murmurs into Chad’s neck. “You go . . . contact a lawyer on our behalf, get some information, and don’t tell anyone, you hear me? Don’t tell a soul.” He kisses Chad before pulling slightly back. “I understand that you’re doing what you need to do, and that you’re doing it for us. But I’m not afraid of this. I have to stay here, with our daughter.” He thinks, suddenly, of the Judgment of Solomon, throat constricting, staring down at baby Imogen, a world unto herself, indifferent to their cleaving.

  He is afraid there won’t be a baby to fight over.

  Chad has been gone some two hours, texting periodically, when Miguel has to leave Imogen for the first time to take a toilet break, and collides straight into Mami in the hall, rounding a corner. He was looking down at his phone and didn’t see her coming. She yelps, and he knows the sound of her distress call before his eyes focus on her, which he has little chance to do since she immediately swoops him up in her arms, keeping him stooped over to allow her embrace.

  Then her short arm reaches up and cuffs him in the head. “So, you don’t even call your own mother when you have a baby, that’s how it is? I have to hear from your sister?”

  For a moment the words don’t connect. My sister is dead. Then he realizes that of course, Mami means Lina. Nick must have called her, amidst all his hall-pacing. Miguel supposes he should be surprised at this, but being surprised at the things Lina circuitously knows about their pregnancy has gotten old, and he can only pretend to himself for so long that he can’t connect the dots.

  Lina herself is nowhere to be seen, hasn’t called—to congratulate him or express concern, Miguel isn’t sure which would be appropriate.

  “I’m just going to the bathroom,” he tells Mami, the side of his head still smarting. “But listen, could you sit with Imogen while I’m gone?”

  “Of course, of course, where do you think I’m going?”

  “I guess Lina told you that she’s . . . that Imogen is . . .” He finds, though, that he has no words for what Imogen is. “She’s delicate,” he settles on, carefully extracting his arm from his mother. “You need to be prepared, before you go in there.”

  “She will be fine,” Mami proclaims, clap-sweeping her palms together cleanly. “God will watch out for her.”

  It is as though everyone he knows is suffering from some collective cultural and personal amnesia. If there were a god, he would be a sociopathic serial killer who pulls the strings while Rwandan children get hacked with machetes and Jewish children are rounded up for gassing and Thai children are washed from their mother’s arms in tsunamis . . . if there were a god, he watched my father beat you while Isabel and I starved. The hall seems to narrow. Miguel’s hand gropes the wall for balance. When is the last ti
me he’s eaten?

  “How is Chad?” Mami, like the hallway, seems to be growing even smaller, though she has already, at sixty-six, shrunk below five feet tall. She is still lovely beneath the worn surface of herself, but it is getting harder and harder to see through the cracks. “He isn’t as strong as you. He has no callouses on his hands.”

  “Chad is . . . optimistic,” Miguel says dizzily. “Like you.”

  “I was thinking,” Mami continues, like a woman who has all the time in the world, “how you maybe need a nanny, and, you know, why hire a stranger? I was thinking, I can come, I could go to your house, I can ride the Damen Avenue bus straight down.”

  They bought Termite Mansion before Emily was even inseminated, but Mami has never seen it. Now she is planning to bus there daily to take care of the baby she couldn’t even acknowledge aloud the night he broke the news, stuffing her mouth with hamburger?

  “You don’t have to pay me, of course! But I’ll let you buy me the bus pass. Carlos was right, I should have learned to drive.”

  “I was thinking I’d leave work,” Miguel says, though he has never thought this before, for even a fraction of a second. “I was thinking I’d stay home with her myself. I’ve never . . . liked my job.”

  “Aye,” Mami says, frowning, “they pay you good money there. Babies are expensive.”

  “I have to go,” Miguel explains desperately, scanning the fun-tunnel hallway as it expands and contracts. “I have to . . . I’ll be back in just a few minutes.” His mother’s face collapses and he quickly adds, “Maybe when I’m at home, I’ll need some time to myself so I can run errands, and . . . uh . . . go to the gym.” He wonders for a brief flash why he is placating her, this woman who couldn’t be bothered to come to his wedding or get it up for Imogen’s sonogram, this woman who abandoned Isabel and borderline kidnapped baby Angelina. And then he remembers, like an echo in his head, a heartbeat pulsing slow, Because Isabel is dead. Isabel is dead now. Because Isabel wouldn’t even see her. Because whatever our mother’s crimes, she has paid and paid some more. “I could bring Imogen to you, at your house,” Miguel says through his blocked throat. “It’s smaller so she can’t get into as much trouble.” But when Mami goes to embrace him again, he steps back so sharply he knocks into the wall.