Tales From the Crib

by Jennifer Coburn

  “Apparently so.”

  “So how’s it going?”

  “There are ups and downs, like anything else, I guess. I haven’t had a real date yet, while he’s been the hottest thing on the market since he took off his wedding ring.”

  As I said the final word, the phone rang. It was like musical accompaniment for the word.

  “May I speak with Jack Fenton’s next of kin please?” a woman asked.

  Next of kin? What will these telemarketers come up with next?

  “This is his wife,” I said, rolling my eyes to Zoe to apologize for the interruption.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but your husband has been involved in an accident this evening and- ”

  “Oh my God!” I shouted. “Is he okay?”

  With that, Zoe stood and took Adam from my arms while I paced the room getting details. He was at the hospital ten miles from our home, unconscious with possible brain injury and paralysis. Apparently he had a head-on collision with another driver and seconds later was hit by a minivan after his car was knocked into another lane of traffic.

  “It was a very serious accident,” the woman said. “Five cars were involved, ma’am.”

  “He’s going to be okay, though, right?” I begged urgently. At this point, Zoe was motioning frantically for information.

  “I can’t say, ma’am,” she said. “I’m sorry, but you’re welcome to come to the hospital and speak with his doctors.”

  “Just tell me this,” I began, even then knowing I was asking for answers that the present did not offer. “He’s going to survive this, right?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said with genuine sympathy. “You need to speak with your doctors about your husband’s condition.”

  In less than two minutes, Zoe and I had stocked Adam’s diaper bag, grabbed our coats, and loaded into the car. Rushing to the hospital, I realized I had to call Natalie and tell her why Jack would be tragically late for their dinner date. She asked me the same questions I did of the anonymous woman on the phone. Only then did I understand how difficult that woman’s job really was. People are at the most stressful moment of their lives and all they want is answers. And the reality is that no one has them.

  Doctors brushed by us for the next hour, politely telling me they were doing everything they could. I hated the way that sounded. It was almost like a preemptive apology for his death. We did everything we could, but the injuries were far, far too serious.

  “What do you need?” Zoe asked.

  “Call Jack’s parents,” I said, jotting their number on a piece of paper from the hospital reception area. “And my mom. Oh, and call Candace and tell her what’s going on so the stroller moms don’t wait for me at the park in the morning.”

  I looked around the sterile reception area and saw five other families that appeared to be just like ours. Some of them were older. Others had several kids. Two families looked different—one Asian, the other black. Another family looked as though they’d been through every struggle life had to offer from economic hardship to bad hair. But as we sat in the hospital waiting room, we were bonded by fear. We all looked absolutely terrified. Shocked. Drama had visited our lives as we were unexpectedly, comfortably coasting through our mundane existences. An accident like this happens in less than the time it takes you to spread jelly on roast, wash your hands, or place the DVD in the player.

  “Is he okay, Lucy?” Natalie rushed into the hospital in her casual date clothes—a white cotton oxford, Levi’s, and a violet suede jacket that came to her knees.

  “No word yet,” I clipped. “Natalie, this is my friend, Zoe. Zoe, Natalie.” The two nodded politely.

  “When are they going to know something?” Natalie rushed. Then she smiled at the sight of Adam. “Hey, you,” she cooed. He recognized her and smiled back.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “It could be a while. The doctors have been coming out every twenty minutes or so to give us an update.”

  “And what’ve they said?” Natalie asked as a doctor emerged. “Doctor, how’s Jack?” she rushed to him and grabbed his arm. He looked at her, puzzled as to who she was.

  “Dr. Friedman, this is Natalie, Jack’s sister,” I lied.

  “We’re doing everything we can for your brother,” he answered. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a few questions about your family medical history.” Natalie shot me a concerned look.

  “Natalie is Jack’s stepsister,” I backpedaled. “Their parents met late in life so she’s not going to know any of that,” I answered as though she weren’t standing three feet from me. “I can tell you what you need to know,” I said, fully aware of how horribly timed my feeling of smugness was.

  A little after ten that night, Candace came to the hospital and offered to take Adam home to sleep at her house. After four hours of nursing, pacing, and playing, I was ready for the break. Sure, Zoe took him on walks and St. Natalie put in her time, but Adam wanted to stretch out on the floor, roll around, and pursue his dream of sitting up. His attempts reminded me of my own crunches at the gym. I gladly tossed Candace the keys to the house, told her where she could find quarts of frozen breast milk (the freezer), and wondered how I got so lucky to find a friend like her. Not only did she take care of Adam for me that night, she drove Zoe back to the city, then the next morning stocked my fridge with dinners that she and the La Leche League mothers had prepared.

  Before I got the pleasant surprise of the Candace cavalry, Little Miss Shared History became history. Ever since she was introduced as Jack’s sister, then reduced to his late-life stepsib who had no knowledge of his medical history, Natalie grew quiet. She sat curled on the sofa of the waiting room staring blankly. At first, I thought it was because she was tired. At midnight, this excuse seemed even more reasonable. At 2:00 A.M. both Natalie and I looked like an ad for a do-it-yourself lobotomy kit. When I felt Natalie shaking my arm to wake me, the clock read 4:15 A.M. “Lucy,” she whispered. I jarred. “Sorry to wake you, but I need to get out of this.”

  “Okay, no problem,” I said groggily. “What time will you be back?”

  She hesitated. “I can’t do this anymore, Lucy.”

  “Of course, of course,” I said. “No one expects you to stay all night. Go home, get some rest, and if Jack wakes up while you’re gone, I’ll let him know when you ‘ll be back.”

  “Lucy,” she said sheepishly. “I’m not coming back.”

  It was so silent, I could hear that dull buzzing sound that’s audible only in the absolute absence of noise. At first, I thought it was Jack flatlining.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean this whole situation is too much for me,” she said, seemingly ashamed at her weakness. “I don’t know where I fit into all of this,” she gestured at her surroundings. “You’re his wife. Adam’s his son. I’m a fictitious stepsister.”

  “Come on, Natalie! I couldn’t introduce you as Jack’s girlfriend. It would seem weird.”

  “Because it is weird,” she immediately countered.

  “And you just realized this tonight?!” I asked. “You didn’t notice that things were a little out of the ordinary when you were seeing plays and renting movies and taking our son to the park?!”

  “It just hit home tonight.”

  Part of me thought Natalie was a fair-weather girlfriend who cut and ran when the going got tough. Another part believed that perhaps tonight’s incident with Dr. Friedman drove home the reality that our setup was bizarre. She would not be able to marry Jack for eighteen years. They could never have kids. And any time they ran into people we knew, they’d instantly assume she was his mistress.

  “What should I tell him?” I asked.

  “Tell him I’m sorry, but the situation is too complicated for me.” With that, I became angry. Adam and I were being characterized as complications. Screw you, bitch. You think you simplified my life when you threw your size-small panties in my hamper?!

  “You’re
sorry? That’s what you want me to tell him?” I wasn’t going to let her off the hook this easily. “Natalie, I really think you should tell him this yourself.”

  “You’re the writer,” she pleaded.

  “What?”

  “You’re good with words,” Natalie said. “I’ll just screw it up and say something dumb.”

  Like sorry about the loss of feeling in your body from the neck down, but this isn’t working for me anymore?

  “Natalie, I’m not breaking up with Jack for you. When he wakes up, you’re going to have to talk to him.”

  “If he wakes up,” she burst into tears. This woman was clearly insane. Or at least overtired.

  I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Natalie, don’t say that! Jack will wake up, and when he does, you need to dump him.” A nurse passed us and gave a look as if to say, what bitches. “Go home, get rest, and come back and talk to Jack.”

  Natalie regained composure and started nodding in agreement. “You’re right, Lucy. I’m sorry. I’m exhausted. And drained. I’ll come back this afternoon and see him then.” And with those words I knew I’d never see Natalie again.

  Chapter 27

  Three weeks later, Jack left the hospital with a nonnegotiable directive to stay off his feet most of the time and an intensive physical therapy schedule for the next year. The doctors said it was astonishing that he survived the crash. A Puerto Rican nurse nicknamed him Milagro, miracle in Spanish. No one could believe how quickly he was healing.

  Jack woke up two days after the accident to the sight of his mother and me peering over his hospital bed. He smiled weakly and said, “I’ve died and gone to hell.” You’ve never heard such an audible sigh of joy from two women. We hugged one another, then gingerly hugged Jack, afraid we might break him.

  “Doctor, he’s awake!” Susan shouted. “My boy is awake!” I wondered if I’d still call Adam my boy after forty-two years. Susan was on the first flight from Chicago after Zoe called her the night of the crash. My mother-in law is your standard mashed-potatoes-and-gravy kind of gal, shaped like a pear but would consider the fruit far too exotic to actually eat. Her gray hair is set weekly at a beauty parlor (not a salon) with tight hot rollers, then brushed back to create a wavy helmet. In the summer, she wears sleeveless nylon dresses with bold floral patterns and a Kleenex tucked under her brassiere (not bra) strap. In the winter, she favors dresses with white lacy collars so large, they might easily be mistaken for placemats. Susan wears bulletproof pantyhose and the low heels that were once featured in print ads where women played basketball in them. Much to my delight, Susan is a mother-in-law who’s never given me cause to write Dear Abby. She’s as hands-off as they come. Much to my disappointment, though, Susan and I never really connected on any more than a very superficial level. When I was a little girl, I’d fantasized about my husband’s mother and I sharing secrets as we sliced carrots for the Christmas dinner salad, and hatching delightfully mischievous plans against our spouses. Our mutual rejoicing over Jack’s recovery was the closest we’d come to bonding.

  The doctors ran into the room, examined Jack, and immediately began a battery of tests. He was lucky to be alive, everyone agreed. With this pronouncement, Susan burst into tears in a rare moment of emotional demonstrativeness. She informed me that she’d be staying in a hotel and coming to the house daily to help me take care of Jack. “You know I’m not pushy about visiting, but I won’t take no for an answer this time, dear,” she said. “You can’t care for the baby and Jack or you’ll wear yourself to the bone.” Not for a moment did I ever even think of declining the offer.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Susan,” I said. “But you’ll be much more helpful if you stay with us.” She smiled modestly.

  The day he woke up, Jack asked about Natalie. I was afraid that any emotional trauma might inhibit his recovery, so I lied and told him that her uncle died and she had to fly to Scotland for his funeral. It was the first thing that popped into my head because Aunt Bernice had just told me about a Scotsman’s funeral she’d recently crashed. “I didn’t want to mention it while Jack was still in the coma, but now that he’s fine, I have to tell you, those Scottish people really have very elaborate funerals. I nevah knew what a gorgeous instrument the windpipe is. When they played ‘Amazing Grace,’ it really put you in the mood for mourning,” Bernice reported.

  “I didn’t know Natalie had family in Scotland,” Jack said. Yeah, well, so much for your deep history together, I thought, before remembering that there really was no Scottish uncle. Yeah, well, bet you didn’t know she was the dump-you-through-your-wife-while-you’re-in-a-coma kind of girlfriend either, I revised.

  After three days in my home, Susan ran my household better than I ever did. Kitchen timers were ringing to announce the completion of pot roasts. Susan had a chummy (and thankfully completely appropriate) relationship with Jack’s physical therapist. Adam was a sparkling clean baby-food ad who heard well more than 3,000 words per hour as Susan read romance novels to him.

  My own mother was wonderful about sending things to Jack. Flowers arrived every few days. A cookie bouquet decorated like footballs crossed our familial end zone. Even the long-since-passe singing telegram arrived to entertain Jack into recovery. Day by day, everything showed up but her.

  Susan knocked on the door of my bedroom. Thankfully, I was able to convince her that the friends who supplied our fridge full of meals also recently moved Jack’s bed into my old office. For his medical needs, of course. She found me weeping tears into my computer keyboard after yet another unsuccessful attempt to bring Desdemona to life. Why has it taken me so many months to produce fewer than three pages of this novel? I wondered silently. Why do I have to be the one to dump Jack for Natalie?

  “Oh dear, Lucy,” Susan draped an arm over my shoulder. “You’re exhausted.”

  “I am,” I declared, looking at her squarely, wondering if she could possibly understand the extent of my fatigue.

  “I know,” she said. What did she know? She continued. “I’m a wife and mother, too.”

  I burst into tears imagining her doing this whole domestic scene perfectly while my most recent attempt at suburban bliss occurred at a car wash. “Susan, I have to tell you something,” I began without thinking.

  “All right, dear,” she nodded for me to continue. “Susan, Jack and I, it’s not a marriage anymore. We’re just friends, living together and raising Adam. It’s not like we’re really together anymore. That’s why his bed is in the den. It’s been there for more than a year.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, blushing at being privy to her son’s sleeping arrangements. “All marriages get that way sometimes, dear. Especially after a new baby arrives.”

  “No, Susan, you don’t understand. This isn’t a phase we’re going through. Jack and I aren’t together anymore. We’ve discussed it. We’ve split up “

  “You both look like you’re here to me.”

  “Physically, but it’s only for Adam’s sake,” I explained.

  She leaned in and whispered. “Trust me, it will pass.”

  “No, it won’t!” I said a bit too loud. “We aren’t getting back together, Susan. If it weren’t for Adam, we’d be divorced.” ·

  “Well, thank goodness for Adam then,” she said, smiling.

  I hate stories where a baby saves a marriage. Kids shouldn’t be cast as the panacea for parental wrongdoings and marital erosion. At this point, a baby’s greatest responsibility should be shitting into a diaper.

  “I’m sorry, Susan. Jack and I aren’t going to have the Hollywood ending here,” I said. With a tone of disdain, I began. “It’s just so- ” I trailed off. Suburban, I finished silently. I glanced out of my window and felt I’d betrayed the children riding their bikes past my house. “I’m sorry, what I mean is that Jack and I aren’t getting back together. We’re not like that.”

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “Like- ” I groped for words, still silently apologizing to my lovely
neighborhood for my momentary possession by Anjoli.

  “Willing to stick with something when it’s hard?” Susan asked.

  “Susan, that’s so unfair,” I began. “There are a thousand good reasons couples divorce. You can’t make it sound as though we’re quitters.”

  Adam’s crying pierced through our chat. “Oh, I know, dear. Some of my girlfriends are divorced and Lord knows they tried their darnedest to make a go of it, but there are a thousand good reasons to stay together too. Let me get the baby.”

  Susan returned to the bedroom with Adam and a piece of advice. “Why don’t you take a little time for yourself and take a weekend cruise or something? I can hold down the fort here, and you’ve certainly earned some time off. Think about it—Bermuda, Jamaica, Antigua.” The words “Ann Arbor” escaped from my lips like Citizen Kane muttering “Rosebud.”

  “What’s that, dear?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, smiling. “I was just thinking of Ann Arbor. I was thinking of spending a weekend there. Are you sure you’ll be okay on your own here?”

  “On my own?!” she mock-scolded, then held Adam up and made a baby voice. “I’ve got my two best guys with me, don’t I? Don’t I?” she repeated, even more adorably each time.

  Before I left for my weekend in Ann Arbor with Zoe, I told Jack that Natalie called to say she was staying in Scotland indefinitely. “I’m sorry, but she said that being with all of her family in their homeland made her yearn for the, the, Scottish things of Scotland.”

  “Gosh, I always thought she said she was French,” he said, resigned.

  Chapter 28

  As Zoe and I drove to the University of Michigan campus in our rented yellow convertible, I enjoyed the warm breeze brushing through my hair, which I’d just had cut to my shoulders. I wore jeans and a web-thin red t-shirt with the emblem of a hip band I’d never listened to. I knew it was cool, though, because the unmarked, underground shop on St. Mark’s Place wouldn’t sell it if it weren’t. Zoe wore torn low-riders and a purposefully wrinkled sheer lime button-down top. Neither of us had to mention that we were trying to blend with our environment more than we actually did.