Just Shelby

by Brooklyn James

  So long as those legs don’t take me to another bathroom stall at a dorm party.

  “Mason, he was about experiences, not things, you know. Even here, he was ahead of his time.” She laughs. “Like the time he insisted on wearing a nursing bra and slipping the nipple of the bottle through the end of it so that you—and he—could experience ‘breastfeeding.’ Oh, the look on that NICU doc’s face!”

  I try to hide the horror on mine, etiquette out the window, full mouth agape. I totally would’ve been fine without knowing that.

  “Then it may have seemed odd, but not now. We see fathers becoming more involved in establishing their own kind of connection to their preemies all the time. And…the cloud cast over his murder only gave those quick to judge more ammunition.”

  “Do you believe he died over a drug deal?”

  “Define ‘drug.’ Your father made tinctures and oils which are legal in nearly all fifty states nowadays. Some may not have been then. Do I think he was ‘dealing’? Absolutely not. But I don’t know who he met at the river that day. I don’t know what their intentions were. And I don’t know why he would’ve been meeting with anyone in an undisclosed location when he was setting up shop in the city…as legitimate a shop as it could be with the laws then.”

  “A shop?”

  “Yeah, an apothecary shop. You know, natural remedies.”

  “Like mullein.”

  “Exactly like mullein.”

  “In the city?” My father was getting out after all?

  “Yes, right here in Lexington. After working out of the family distillery, basically working from home to be present after you were born, and on the heels of his tax troubles, he worked tirelessly to establish a bona fide business. I was already working here as an RN. He asked me to help him connect…network…with holistic providers. I was thrilled to. It was uncharted territory. Alternative medicine was on the cusp of yet another resurgence. There was a growing interest from patients and providers alike. Through networking, he found some backers, some naturopaths willing to chip in to have an experienced herbalist at their disposal.”

  My father, a business owner in the city.

  “Everything was in motion. And then…”

  The river.

  The tragic ending putting the kibosh on any appetite I may have left, I rinse down remnants of chicken and taco salad before asking, cautiously, “Were we part of the plan?” Mom and I?

  “Of course you were.” She sighs. “He ran into the same conundrum I did. Uprooting a family requires willingness from everyone. I never could figure out what was holding your mother back. Maybe it was the music. He was starting it up again, putting feelers out for bandmates and gigs.”

  It was definitely the music. Or Grandpa. Maybe Mom didn’t want to leave him. Who would enable her then. A business and music, revitalized dreams—I didn’t ruin his life?

  “What separates you from her?” I whisper, desperately wanting to understand but feeling unfaithful to my mother nonetheless. “You both had kids in your teens. You come from the same place. How is it that you coped, succeeded…” And she can’t.

  “Ooh, Shelby, that seems like a conversation for your mother.”

  “But I’m asking you.” Maybe this way I’ll get a straight answer, any answer. “I mean, you knew her too, right.”

  “Not as well as I knew your father.” She tosses that curl out of her eye again. “Maisy was…well, kind of like my Ace. Mysterious and moody. I don’t mean moody as in difficult, but moody as in sensitive, intuitive to the smallest stimuli. A strength, really, if one learns how to navigate and communicate those feelings. People were drawn to her. She came in this beautiful, feminine package, but she worked as a logger with your grandpa and fixed cars and played bass guitar and had the coolest, raspiest voice. She was…unexpected.”

  Obviously! My mother was a mechanic? And a logger? I just found out about the musician in her. She was a different person…before she had me. And why is she so secretive about all of this. Having me broke her so badly that she can’t even bear to remember who she was?

  “Mostly she was guarded, available to only a few.” Wren shrugs.

  Relief runs through me. I am not the only one who would describe my mother as detached—physically present yet emotionally absent all at once. Followed by sorrow that I never shared an unconditional intimacy with her. I couldn’t even tell her that Ace was my first kiss. Because I would want her to say, “Oh, honey, your first kiss. How was it?” She wouldn’t say that. She would dispassionately wave it off with some remark about young love—“lust”—and how it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  “Come.” Wren pulls on my hand. “I want to show you something.”

  Wren holds my hand down the hall, onto the elevator, and up to the fourth floor. It’s awkward. But it’s nice.

  “You haven’t been sick lately, have you?” She asks, feeling my forehead.

  “No, ma’am.”

  She pushes the sleeves of my sweatshirt up to my elbows and leads me in the “scrubbing in” technique in the “scrub room” of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

  I thought twenty-to-thirty seconds was the rule for hand hygiene. She and I must stand there, hunched over the basin, scrubbing for two-to-three minutes.

  As we walk through the sliding glass door into the main unit, I feel like a character in a space-age novel. This is the control room. Lights flash. Technology beeps. Dissimilar to the rest of the hospital, it is warm, verging on hot. Tiny creatures—red wrinkly skin covered in fine down, fingers and toes disproportionately long, connected to tubes and wires—lie in incubators.

  Minus helmets and pressurized suits, doctors and nurses appear boxy nonetheless in personal protective equipment—gowns, gloves, caps, masks, shoe covers. The presence of rocking chairs, concerned parents, and free-flowing inspiring murals provides a humanistic feel. Reminding me that I have not left Earth.

  At this hour of the night—quiet and less inhabited—the gravity of existing is tangible. All of them cling to life.

  “I was there…here…but it’s still hard to believe that this is where you and Ace spent your first two months of newborn life,” Wren says.

  “Those must be the ‘ovens,’” I say, eyes glued to the alien-like neonates in them more so than the incubators themselves.

  “Yes.” Wren giggles. “That is how Mason referred to them. So he did tell you.”

  In the form of a triumphant and melodramatic sci-fi bedtime story, “He told me what he thought I could understand, I guess.” But who could ever grasp this. Even witnessing it, it is incomprehensible. “Will they all go home?” Alive?

  “That is the goal.”

  “They’re just babies,” I whisper, feeling a kinship to them even in my adolescent form. As though the baby in me never could get enough nurturing. Maybe it didn’t. In my father’s entertaining space opera, my mother’s character birthed the “earthling” and then pretty much disappeared.

  “Don’t underestimate them. They have the will of warriors, and night janitors!” She giggles again. “Willing to do what the rest of us couldn’t.”

  “Was Ace born in an ambulance, too?” I grew to assume that the “cuboid shuttle”—which blasted off from Poke County led by “wailing infrared light” to an “urbane universe” far far away—was an ambulance.

  “He was born in the very same ‘cuboid shuttle’ you were.” She winks, somehow familiar enough with my father’s tale to recall the spaced-out details. “Two points: Poke County needs better emergency medical services, and I failed to realize that I was in preterm labor for days before my water broke. Then again, how is a nineteen-year-old who is blindsided and maybe even a little averse to pregnancy supposed to discern between cramps and preterm labor.”

  Ace was as unplanned as I?

  “But after my water broke, there was no denying it,” Wren continues. “Ready or not, the baby was coming. I called my mother who called Miss Patterson. But your grandpa had already called
her because Maisy had gone into labor too, while logging with him. Chopping down trees, hitching them to huge horses, and dragging them from the forest, it’s no wonder. Your grandpa cursed himself for allowing her to work like that while she was pregnant.”

  “Work can cause babies to be born early?” I assumed it was my mother’s drug dependence.

  “A multitude of things, some unexplained, can cause preterm labor. You weren’t born a preemie due to drugs, Shelby. Sadly enough, her dependence on painkillers started in this hospital.”

  “Here?” But hospitals are where people go to get help, not to get hooked.

  “She’s not the only one it has happened to. It’s easy to see how it does happen. Not only were we young and scared, we had neither the education nor the proper resources. I mean, after bounding out of the hollow in Miss Patterson’s Caddy…”

  That thing has survived her driving for eighteen years!

  “…to be shoved into one ambulance with one stretcher, one bench, four people, and two more on the way, ultimately to endure a complete takeover of our bodies, was unsettling to say the least. Birth is hard enough. Precipitous birth is shocking. You and Ace came too soon, and too fast. Maybe you just couldn’t wait to meet each other.” She gives me a knowing glance, her eyes smiling.

  Unaccustomed to acceptance, I look away, hoping she will attribute the glow of my face to the uncomfortably warm unit.

  “Miss Patterson and the paramedic did the best they could, but even they couldn’t hide the panic. You and Ace required resuscitation, your lungs not developed enough to breathe on their own.” She points to a breathing apparatus attached to a baby in an oven.

  Click—hah pooh. Click—hah pooh. Click—hah pooh. Never having seen the movies to confirm, I did read a few Star Wars books. The sound gives an auditory experience to the description of Darth Vader’s “mechanical breathing.”

  “They had a team waiting for us at the hospital who whisked you both away before we got to hold you, before we really even got to see you. So the bonding process was already delayed. Maisy and I just sat there, waiting for our rescue team. Our first dose of reality—life ceased to revolve around us.”

  She seems to know that I have never heard this. That I need to hear this. Affording me the opportunity to ask questions. Even the hardest one. “Which were you more scared of? That we wouldn’t make it or that we would?”

  “But you did make it,” she says, her hand clutching my elbow. “The same way these little nuggets will. And maybe therein lies the issue. We’re all guilty of it. Preoccupied with sustaining new life, we forget to address the impact that new life will have on the one who bore it.”

  “The same ‘painkillers’ were available to you?” Again, what separates her from my mother?

  She nods. “And I didn’t turn them down, at first. They definitely took the edge off. You see, there are these things called ‘risk and resilience factors’ where substance abuse is concerned.”

  “I know them by heart,” I interrupt, having memorized them from the UCAN school assembly pamphlet, mindful of my own risk.

  “Resources play a role in addiction too. We were two years older than your parents, graduated with diplomas. Boone made a good living at the mine. I had put a dent in prerequisites at the local community college. My parents and Boone’s parents got along.”

  I wonder how Enisi and my mother are getting along.

  “They were at our disposal, more excited about a grandchild than we were giving them one. I had a caregiver, a nurse, who basically dragged me by the hand to the NICU. Until I became so enraptured with it—the technology, the saving of lives, a possible future career path—that I had to be dragged out. I mean, I’m not even on shift now, but here I am.”

  “So…having Ace inadvertently gave you purpose.”

  “Eventually. In more ways than I can count.”

  What is my mother’s purpose? Why couldn’t I have given her one?

  “Mothers aren’t the only ones who have children, you know.” Wren gestures to a father sitting in a rocking chair in a medical gown. The top of the gown is open and exposing his skin to that of the child he holds, the kangaroo-esque connection as soothing to the full-grown man as to the premature infant.

  “You gave Mason purpose. And it seems as though you are inspiring Ace to find his. He says you believe he is talented enough to play music professionally.”

  “He is. I haven’t been exposed to much music…well, because, you know why. But when he plays, I get it. I can see why people would want to listen to it all the time.” Maybe because it’s coming out of his mouth, his hands, his soul.

  “Thank you,” she whispers. Eyes, threatening tears, regroup behind lingering curls and waves. “So…do you wanna hold one? Share Mason’s bedtime space opera with one.”

  “A baby?”

  “No, an oven.” She giggles.

  Thanks, but “No, thanks.”

  Surely I can find my purpose without one.

  From the middle back seat of Pop’s truck, parked in the hospital garage with the key in accessory position, I put to test Mom’s theory that classical music is the most relaxing music. It lowers blood pressure, she says. It is the only music I can solely listen to, no desire to sing or play along.

  What are they doing in there. What is my mother telling her? How am I to tell her that her “father” wasn’t murdered. Hey kid you got my guitar. The whistle-blowing secret note square, plucked from behind its label, Johnny’s label, safely hides in my jacket pocket.

  That he lives and breathes and gives more to thousands of fans—strangers—than he ever gave to her or her mother. That he chose it over them.

  No wonder Maisy has an ax to grind with music.

  How am I to look at him the same. Some mentor. Some idol. Look at his life. Johnny could’ve shared it with them—the journey, the good fortune, the success. Lord knows they could use it. “All for one and one for all,” my ass.

  Then again, without leaving, he wouldn’t be in such a position. And Mason who did the right thing, the noble thing, can’t do a damn thing about his position—dead in the ground, his reputation as destroyed.

  Johnny gets the glory. Mason gets the grave.

  I startle with the glaring overhead light as Shelby opens the door. She gets in beside me, remedying the truth-begging illumination by pulling closed the door behind her. Why are secrets easier kept in the dark.

  “You don’t wanna drive home?” I ask.

  “You get this tank out of the garage and out of the city, and then I will,” she says.

  “Yeah, sorry about that.” I chuckle, apologizing for being of no help in calmly instructing her through traffic and into the low-ceiling garage upon our hasty arrival. Convinced a T-beam was going to tear the “colossal” cab from over our heads, she did well, given the size of the truck and the fact that she had never driven on anything with more than two lanes, barely anything without gravel.

  “Me, too,” she chortles, “I’m going to have to get used to city driving…” committed to college, to life in the city “…preferably in something more driver friendly.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like I never gave blood.”

  “She tried to get you to hold a baby, didn’t she?”

  “‘Tried,’” Shelby stipulates, her index finger making a double point, as sharp in the air as her response. “What’s this?” That same index finger transitions, flatly, to the radio.

  “Classical. You like it?”

  “I do.” She sounds surprised.

  Strange that for a booklover she would prefer music without lyrics—words. But I get it. “It lets you fill in the space, huh.”

  “Yes. Now that I can feel in here.” She thumps her hand over her heart.

  Can you feel me in there too? I refrain from asking. “Mom says that’s the beauty of classical music. Or any music without lyrics. One piece can mean a hundred different things to a hundred different people.”

  �
�What does this one mean to you?”

  It’s Adagio for Strings. “Sadness, regret…death.” Likely because I associate it with its famous score in the less-than-cheery Vietnam epic Platoon.

  “Oh,” she says, as if she hears otherwise, but that her hearing may be off.

  “What does it mean to you?”

  “Longing and inspiration, a fog-filled morning run. How it came in softly and built up. It’s like hills waiting to be conquered, effort turned into triumph. But I’m getting the feeling it could go either way. It is suspenseful. Like this part here, where it’s climbing…”

  “The crescendo, the emotional arc.” It is climbing. For a girl who isn’t that into music, she’s spot on. And I’ve never been more attracted to her than in this moment.

  “It isn’t just running, it’s racing, going for the gold. Oh…it’s coming back down.” Her interpretation follows the decrescendo. “And…now it’s climbing back up? This isn’t longing and inspiration. This is taut, tense. And that note. It’s so final and forlorn. She doesn’t make it, does she?” She grabs my hand, squeezing it in hers.

  “Wait for it,” I say, interlocking our fingers.

  “Here comes the beginning again. We already heard this part, right?”

  “Yes, we did,” I whisper beneath the spine-tingling, looping theme.

  “Running is repetition,” she whispers too, holding out hope. As the song fades, “That’s it?” she scorns. “It resolved nothing.”

  “It’s called ending on a dominant chord. It’s perfect and purposeful instability in composing. You get to decide.” My eclipsed heart—those strings snaking around it—struggles to maintain its rhythm, as I ask the question for which it hopes yet fears the answer. “Does she make it?”

  “Does he?” she tosses the ball back in my court. Her shoulder, nestled to mine, briskly rises and falls—full of the same hope and fear. Her right hand, closest to the door, pulls on the handle. The door doesn’t budge.