What Comes After

by Joanne Tompkins

  “And Daniel?” I said.

  “Could I see Daniel’s Light?” She paused, considering. “Yes. I saw that big heart in him, the way he was there for Jonah after Roy’s death. He made room for Jonah in his social group, even though we all knew Jonah didn’t fit. But the adolescent in Daniel? Sometimes that guy could be a little brutal.”

  Tears wet my cheeks. She came to me, and even as my arms remained limp at my sides, she wrapped hers around me. That touch—being held after such a long time alone in my body—overwhelmed me. I collapsed against her, shaking, drawing deep, gasping breaths. She led me to Rufus’s old chair and instructed me to sit, then knelt at my side, clasping my hands.

  When I could speak without choking, I looked up, a pitiful sight I’m sure. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “This is good.”

  She thought I was apologizing to her, or perhaps that I was accepting her kind offer of help.

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do this.”

  “Do what?”

  I flapped my hand at her, then in front of myself, a gesture of frustration, of embarrassment at my emotional breakdown. “This. I can’t do this. I’m sorry, but I need you to go.”

  She pulled free of me. “Oh!” She stood, visibly shaking, though if from embarrassment or anger or shame, I couldn’t say. I saw her trying to find inner stillness before speaking. When she did, her voice was slow, definitive, some edge of anger there. “Evangeline is here now. Emma is here.” She paused a moment. “And we are here. You and I. We are here.”

  I found out the next day that she’d visited the hospital as usual but cleared out well before I arrived.

  71

  The first week with the baby home, Lorrie showed up twice, each time with a green salad that seemed some sort of joke between her and Evangeline. I was relieved that I hadn’t driven her away completely. But both times she left after a few minutes of cooing over the baby. Even Evangeline couldn’t coax her to stay. “Isaac made lots of chicken. Call Nells. Have dinner with us.” Lorrie would mutter she had something in the oven or a test to study for. After she’d leave, Evangeline would glare at me and stomp out of the room.

  As Lorrie predicted, it was an exhausting week. On Friday night, after washing the last of the dinner dishes and checking on Evangeline, I went to bed early. It was a warm evening, one of the first days of June, and the sky was laced in descending shades of blue and deep pinks. As I fell asleep in that twilight, I thought how Evangeline was getting stronger every day, how it would only get easier from here.

  At two in the morning, someone knocked on my bedroom door. I say “someone” because I was deeply asleep, and waking from that place was like rising from the darkness of an ocean floor. I struggled to orient myself as I went to the door. Yet I saw at once that Evangeline was ill. Her skin was ashen, and beads of sweat dotted her forehead. Heat poured off her, and her breath smelled like decayed meat.

  “I’ll get a thermometer,” I said.

  “Already took it. A hundred and three point six.”

  I stopped and stared at her, fighting a terrible urge to cry. The urge mystified me. There was no reason for such worry yet.

  “I’ve packed a bag. I’d better get to the hospital.”

  I turned from her. I’d begun to weep—uncontrollable, ridiculous weeping. I couldn’t make sense of it. After a minute, I managed to get my breathing under control. I don’t know what Evangeline was thinking during this, but she waited quietly. I turned back to her, hoping in my sleep-dazed mind that she hadn’t noticed. But the first words out of her mouth were, “Thanks for crying.”

  Such an odd thing to say, and it’s hard to describe her tone. It was tired and no-nonsense and slightly annoyed, but she meant it. She appreciated my grief; she just didn’t have time for it right then.

  “I’m not dying,” she said. “Pretty sure I’ve got an infection though.”

  I straightened and cleared my throat. “I’ll get the baby ready.”

  “She’s ready. All we need is you.”

  * * *

  —

  AS I DROVE THEM TO THE HOSPITAL, I told myself I wasn’t worried. The doctors would figure it out. Yet my hands vibrated on the wheel, a violent shaking like I was furious or having a seizure. I know that sounds extreme, but Evangeline, sitting in back with Emma, heard the rattling and asked how I could possibly be so cold when it had to be sixty degrees out.

  At the ER, Dr. Wyman ordered blood and urine tests, followed by an ultrasound. A small, intense man, he tapped a pen sharply against his clipboard as he spoke. When the tests came back positive for infection and a large uterine abscess, he drummed his pen fiercely, insisting the abscess was “a serious but perfectly manageable situation,” as though we had argued otherwise. Evangeline needed to be admitted for surgical drainage and a five-day course of IV antibiotics. Before Dr. Wyman left, he motioned toward the baby, who’d been wailing through most of this, and said, “She can visit during the day, but she’s going home at night.”

  Again I thought of Lorrie’s warning. Caring for the baby had been far more taxing than I’d remembered. Even with Evangeline handling the nursing and diapering, I was exhausted by the disrupted sleep schedule and the bouts of Emma’s crying.

  Sometimes Evangeline cried too. She’d be curled in Rufus’s chair nursing the baby, sniffling and swiping at tears. When she’d see me noticing, she’d mutter, “Stupid hormones.” I knew that hormones played a role, but more was going on. The baby, with all her needs and all our incompetence, made us strange with each other. We thought we should feel like a family, we should be joyful about this new life. And we were. Of course we were. But we both felt lost and a little lonely too, the gap between what we thought was in order and what we could muster making our confused feelings worse.

  We didn’t know how to think of ourselves. As much as I wanted to be, I wasn’t Evangeline’s father. And I wasn’t a grandfather either. I was in a hospital in the middle of the night, and soon I’d be leaving alone with a baby not my son’s. I hadn’t forgotten the Sunday morning after Emma’s birth, the moment I saw Daniel—saw everyone I loved—in her. I’d dedicated myself to embedding it in my heart, but it did me no good. It was a memory of something I could no longer feel, a place I could no longer access. Emma was a particular baby now, and though I felt a great tenderness toward her, when I looked at her, it was only her I saw. Sometimes, more often than I’d like to admit, I saw only what she was not.

  Dr. Taylor showed up at the hospital around four, slugging back coffee, tired circles under her eyes but plenty focused, ready to “clean up what we started.” She suggested Emma and I go home, get a few hours’ sleep. She planned to run more tests and said I had three hours at least. I wanted to stay for Evangeline’s sake, but the baby hadn’t stopped crying, and I was beyond exhausted.

  Before we left, Dr. Taylor suggested the baby be nursed one last time. Though Evangeline worried she’d make her sick, the doctor said, “The only things Emma will get from you are your antibodies, which are all revved up now. Besides, once we start IV antibiotics, you won’t be able to nurse. You’ll have to pump and dump if you want to keep your milk coming.”

  Evangeline cried, but Dr. Taylor reassured her, saying she’d see Emma every day and could still feed her skin to skin. A guy in scrubs entered with a wheelchair to take Evangeline for one of the tests. Seeing that I was on the brink of leaving with the baby, Evangeline started rattling off when to feed Emma, when to change her diaper, burping techniques, and what it meant when she smacked her lips or grimaced in certain spectacular ways.

  “We’ll be okay.”

  “She doesn’t like to be left alone.”

  “Of course not. I would never leave her alone.”

  “I mean, she wants to be held.” Evangeline was being wheeled out now.

  “Of course
. Lots and lots of holding.”

  “Call Lorrie,” she said over her shoulder. “Promise me that.”

  I followed her into the hall. “I’ll call later this morning.”

  “Promise,” she said. “You’ve got to promise.”

  “I promise,” I said, and she vanished through the section doors.

  * * *

  —

  I SUPPOSE IT WAS UNDERSTANDABLE that Evangeline was reluctant to leave me in charge of Emma. In the prior week, I’d worked hard to take care of household chores but had done little to instill confidence in my baby-management skills. If Emma so much as whimpered, I’d thrust her back to Evangeline.

  We arrived home at four thirty, too early to call Lorrie. I put Emma down and managed a few hours of sleep myself, returning to the hospital before Evangeline was out of surgery. The repair went well, though Evangeline returned to the room woozy and slept much of the afternoon.

  I held Emma a good eight hours that day. During that time, she and I came to an understanding. She would gaze at me with wonder-filled eyes, she would share her heartfelt pain and hunger and moments of baby bliss, she would treat me as a familiar—not the slightest bit embarrassed by any of her bodily functions—and she would bless me by sleeping contentedly in my arms. I, in turn, would love her.

  Late that afternoon, when Evangeline was fully lucid and had fed the baby, she kissed one of Emma’s tiny hands and said, “I’m surprised Lorrie hasn’t come by. Isn’t this her day off?”

  “She’s got a lot on her plate,” I said.

  “What’d she say when you called?”

  I hesitated.

  “You didn’t call?” She was incredulous. “After you promised?”

  “I can handle Emma.”

  Her face snapped with anger. “You act like you’re the only person who lost a child. Well, you’re not!”

  “What does that have to do—”

  “You blame her. You blame Lorrie for Daniel’s death.”

  “No. I don’t blame her. Not for that.”

  “What then? Tell me.”

  “I’m not getting into that.”

  She studied me a long time, and I had a feeling she knew more than she let on. “So,” she said, “whatever this thing is between you two, you’re going to keep Lorrie from me? From Emma? We have to pay the price?”

  “And what about me?” I said, the sharpness of my tone surprising me. “What about this ‘thing’ you have with Lorrie, this insistence on forcing me to see her? It’s about Jonah, isn’t it? Because he’s the father?”

  If a whisper can be a scream, she managed it, “No! Oh my God. The baby isn’t Jonah’s. It isn’t Daniel’s. You know that.”

  I repeated her words in my head, and even then I didn’t understand. “Jonah isn’t the father?”

  “You know that. You asked about the due date, and I told you.”

  I thought back. “You told me Daniel wasn’t the father. I assumed it was Jonah. I never knew of anyone else. How would I?”

  Even as I said this, I realized how my behavior the past week was all the more despicable for it. I saw my rage at Lorrie for having a grandchild when I did not, saw how I’d wanted to deprive her of the child in punishment for her son having deprived me of mine.

  Evangeline, who had tensed forward, relaxed back. “Okay. Yeah. I guess I never told you too much about that.”

  “Does Lorrie know neither boy is the father?”

  She nodded. “That day you came to the hospital and found us talking. I told her then.”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  Evangeline frowned. “You hardly look at her. You know that, right? You used to at least fake being nice, but now you don’t even do that. You’re just plain rude to her. Besides, she said I needed to tell you. That same afternoon you asked about the due date, and I told you. Lorrie doesn’t care who the father is. She still loves me. She loves the baby.”

  I wanted to ask about the father. She must have seen it in me, because she said, “The father isn’t around, and he won’t be. Call Lorrie if you need to know more, tell her I said it was okay for her to tell you. And while you’re at it, decide if you’re going to let Lorrie and Nells into our lives. And I don’t just mean letting her stop by for two minutes to drop off a salad. You have to decide if you’re going to force me to choose. Because I will, you know. Choose.”

  She stopped, tucked the blanket around the squirming baby. “I want you to go now.”

  I stood but didn’t turn to leave. Evangeline wiped some drool from Emma’s chin.

  “Well?”

  “I need to bring Emma home, remember?”

  Evangeline glared at me. “She’s going home with Lorrie tonight.”

  “Lorrie doesn’t even know you’re here. It might not be a good time for her.”

  She thought about that. “I’ll call her as soon as you leave. Do you think for a second she won’t come? If you’re worried about Emma being a burden to her, if you really are, then call her and work something out.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  She shook her head and refocused on the baby. I waited for her to relent. When she didn’t, an agitation—something near panic—attacked my lungs, made it hard to breathe.

  “How about this,” I said. “When you talk to her, ask her to stop by the house with Emma tonight.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” she said, not bothering to look up.

  “You’re being unreasonable. What more do you want of me?”

  Evangeline started humming to the baby. When it became clear she would refuse to further acknowledge me, I said firmly, “That baby needs me.”

  She looked at me then, searched my face. I think she was trying to decide whether I’d insulted her. She must have seen the truth, that I needed the baby at least as much as the baby needed me.

  In the end, she said, “Maybe she does. All the more reason you need to get your shit together.”

  72

  Evangeline held Emma high before her. After a second, the baby’s eyes half closed, her mother having disappeared into the blur of distance. “Baby,” Evangeline whispered.

  Emma’s eyes widened and tried to focus, so Evangeline drew her closer, and closer again, until Emma’s gaze hooked into hers with surprise, as if her mother had appeared out of nowhere.

  “Lorrie is coming,” she said. “We should give her a name, shouldn’t we? Nana? Mimi? Got any ideas?”

  The baby blinked, and Evangeline nestled her against her chest, breathed in her sweet baby smell, as intoxicating as sun-dried cotton. “We’ll come up with something. We’ll ask Lorrie what she’d like, okay?”

  A floor nurse came in, the one who seemed in charge of aggravating patients. She began setting up an infusion of antibiotics. “This little one’s going home, right? I saw Isaac leave ten minutes ago.”

  “Emma’s going home with Lorrie tonight. She’ll be here any minute.”

  The nurse stopped her bustling, placed a gentle palm against the baby’s back, and said, “You have a lot of people who love you, don’t you, little girl?”

  Evangeline didn’t mind the nurse so much after that.

  * * *

  —

  SHE HADN’T PLANNED TO SEND ISAAC AWAY WITHOUT THE BABY. But she had trusted him to tell Lorrie she was here. Things had gotten serious. She had almost died. Yes, she’d told Isaac she wasn’t going to, but that was because he was a mess and she needed him to calm down for Emma’s sake.

  In truth, when she woke in a sea of sweat with a fever of over a hundred and three and her skin turned gray, she knew her body was under a fierce assault. And the doctor told her after the surgery how terribly sick she’d been. So when Isaac hadn’t called Lorrie, hadn’t so much as let her know where Evangeline was, she was filled with a kind of fury she’d never known, a fury no
t for herself but for her baby.

  She wasn’t going to let Isaac keep Emma from someone who would love her, would care for her, because Emma, with an abandoned sixteen-year-old girl as her mother and no father around, hadn’t exactly been dealt a great hand, had she? Evangeline would tear apart anyone who attempted to interfere with love from any source.

  Sure, she was scared. What did she know of being a mother? All the more reason she wasn’t going to let Isaac drive away the only woman who’d acted as one to her this past year. Evangeline had been watching Lorrie with Nells for months, saw when Lorrie reached out or held back, when she pulled up firm or softened, how she held the reins of distance between herself and her daughter. At first, Evangeline thought it was a formula she might learn. But it didn’t take long to understand that there was no recipe or equation. Parenting was a river of moment-by-moment decisions, intuitions, a balancing of one’s own needs, which did factor in somehow, with those of the child. But mostly it was being there, truly there, with all your senses. Trusting the heart knowledge that arises with full attention. Lorrie had that. She had a gift for attention of the heart.

  As for Isaac, Evangeline trusted he wouldn’t leave her. She believed this despite knowing the anger he had to battle. Lorrie had told her about burning Jonah’s clothes, about Isaac seeing. She’d told her not to burden her but so Evangeline would know “who to blame” for Lorrie’s prolonged absence in her life. “I can’t live with any more secrets,” she’d said.

  Evangeline didn’t blame her. Or Isaac. Even in these first days with Emma, the love that rose up nearly choked her with its abundance, and she knew anything would be possible in defense of her child. With a love like that, she might have done what Lorrie did. And if she were Isaac, she might not forgive. She saw the impossibility of the four of them together, her and Isaac, Lorrie and Nells. Which is what she wanted. Yet she refused to believe it so. The baby had lit her on fire with love, and how could that not make the impossible possible?