Our appointment was at eight. We were in the waiting room at a quarter to, me almost catatonic, Jeff’s knee bouncing up and down with excitement. The nurse called us in. I put on one of those awful hospital gowns and lay on the table.
Dr. Mayer entered the examination room—“Morning, morning”—his technician had called in sick so he was doing the exam himself, and he spread the cold, thick gel across my abdomen.
I cringed reflexively as he turned on the machine and moved the wand around. We were all staring at the screen, me, Jeff, Dr. Mayer, looking for that rapid, whooshing heartbeat, that cluster of cells taking on a proto-baby shape. After the longest minute of my life, he frowned and held the wand in place, staring at a dark spot.
“I’m sorry,” he said eventually.
“Sorry?” Jeff said. “What do you —”
I took Jeff’s hand in mine. “It’s okay. We’re going to be okay.”
It always struck me, afterwards, that he was supposed to be reassuring me, but I never gave him the chance. I’d had so much longer to prepare, you see. I was ready, in a way.
Or so I thought. Dr. Mayer booked me for a D & C the next day, and afterwards, at his and Jeff’s urging, I took the rest of the week off. The message (abnormal cells, no heartbeat, etc.) spread through our family, our life, our town. A week was enough time, everyone said, for me to move past it, to resume my life, to forget. I agreed with them because what else could I do? Tell them I’d had three months and three weeks to get over it? That now, when I put my hand on my stomach at night, I finally felt the flutter I’d been searching for, for so long?
Of course, I couldn’t. When Monday morning came, I put on a suit and ate a banana and drove my car to my office. I made it through the front door and started walking down the hall, aware of the stares, the murmurs. I felt like an arrow moving through the building, sharp and lethal.
The people around me felt my lethalness, I’m sure they did, because they moved out of my way as fast as they could. No one reached out. No one tried to stop me.
Before I knew it, I’d walked the length of the building and was outside again, through the emergency exit, gasping for air next to a big green Dumpster.
And as I count out the minutes it will take Seth to get ready, sling on his backpack, and climb onto his bus, I can’t help but wonder, Will my son be that arrow today? Or will he attract the support he needs, rather than scare it away?
CHAPTER 5
Safety Minute
After I get off the line with Julia, my phone remains eerily silent for the rest of the day. I can usually count on several emails from some overeager newbie working on a Sunday, and the inevitable reply-alls that follow, but I don’t even get any spam. The only message I receive is a straightforward text from Brian. She won! Heading back now.
Instead, I ride an emotional roller coaster, cursing myself for calling Julia in the first place. Jeff is fine, he is, and there’ll be some explanation, some funny, crazy story, about why he hasn’t answered me. We’ll laugh about it, and I’ll keep this weekend to myself.
Feeling like I’m going to jump out of my skin, and knowing the golf course doesn’t open for another week, I decide to take a hike up the mountain behind my house.
The mountains were the first thing I noticed about this town, twelve years ago, when Brian and I were trying to decide where to move when he was setting up his practice. The first thing I noticed, that is, once I could see past the sameness of the houses, the gently curving streets meant to slow down traffic to keep the children safe, the blond Scandinavian look most of the denizens seemed to have.
I already felt like my darker features made me stand out, like a Hungarian invader. And I wondered if I could ever feel at home in a place so different from the concrete modernity I’d grown up in.
The town is built in an ancient caldera, created when a meteor crashed into the earth long, long ago. The result is a round, flat plain, surrounded by mountains that must once have been craggy and sharp but are now smoothed and tame. Mountains that change with the seasons, the time of day, that cup the light and fill the eye in every direction above the asphalt roofs of the never-ending three-bedroom split-levels.
“What do you think?” Brian asked me as we stood on the steps of the fifth nearly identical house we’d seen that day. This one had a spider plant hanging from a hook at the edge of the porch roof. The Spider-Plant House, I thought, had a slightly different bathroom configuration than the Eggplant-Appliances House or the one with that strange smell in the third bedroom.
I gazed past him at the mist clinging to the mountains, thinking dreamily about how my best words always came while I was hiking somewhere, pushing my body towards something.
“I think … this is it,” I said.
“You sure?”
I kept my eyes on the mountains, mapping out a ski route on a particularly inviting slope.
“If you are.”
“I am.”
“You sure you don’t want to take that research position in Toronto?”
“Nope. Or the ER position in Chicago. Not interested.”
We’d lived in both places for a couple of years while Brian finished his training and built up his skills to the point where he felt he could go out on his own.
I turned towards him, an indulgent smile on my face. “All you’ve ever wanted to be was a real doctor. A small town jack-of-all-trades. Like your dad.”
He hated the anonymousness of the big-city hospitals, never seeing the same patient twice except for the chronic hypochondriacs and the drug-seekers.
His face lit up. “Imagine all the good I can do, really getting to know my patients, following them through their lives. But … I want you to want it too. I don’t want you to give anything up to move here.”
I let this thought trickle through my brain. Would I be giving anything up? Although I’d paid for college through a sports scholarship, golf was over for me. Natural ability and no drive, my coach always said, pun intended. And though I loved to write, poetry mostly, I wasn’t going to make a living writing shaky lines about the way my heart felt, either. The words were already coming less often, the tumult of teenage-hood giving way to the prosaicness of my mid-twenties. I’d had four jobs in four years. I was directionless. I needed an anchor, something, someone, to hold on to before I drifted any further out to sea.
And Brian, sweet, smart, determined Brian, was the steadiest person I’d ever encountered who wanted to put up with directionless me.
“I’m not giving up anything,” I said.
And in that moment, I thought it was true.
After the hike fails to calm my heart, I do the only thing left I can think of. I slip into Brian’s office and root through his medical bag. I gave it to him when he started his practice, soon after we moved here, making some joke about him being the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s stamped with the words Dr. Brian Underhill in faded gold letters. My fingers probe through its contents until I find the bottle of Ativan he keeps in it. I hold it in my hand, wondering briefly which act is worse: the stealing of the medication or the reason I need to.
I press my palm into the safety cap and twist until it releases. I shake out four pills, hoping Brian won’t notice their absence from the almost-full bottle. I hesitate for a moment, but I can’t go on feeling like this, so I swallow one down with a glass of water and tuck the remaining pills in my pocket, just in case. Then I lie on the couch and wait for the pill’s effects to start. After a while, I feel my heart start to slow and a sleepy calm comes over me. My eyes slide shut, my thoughts float away, and I know I’m asleep the moment before I am.
I’m still like that, my head to the side, a bit of drool running down my chin, when Brian and Zoey get home. I make a half attempt to get up, but Brian puts a practised hand to my forehead and professes me slightly feverish. He raises me enough to slip an Aspirin and some water into my mouth, then eases me back down and pulls a blanket over me, like he’s done with Zoey cou
ntless times.
Only tonight, I’m the one who’s helpless.
I wake early the next morning feeling groggy and disoriented till it hits me, the dread rushing back like water released from a dam.
Brian’s already up. I can hear him rattling around in the kitchen, making coffee, toast. I push my hand into the pocket of the jeans I slept in. The pills are still there. I feel relieved and ashamed, but that doesn’t stop me from breaking one in half and taking it in the bathroom after I brush my teeth.
Up in my bedroom, I dress haphazardly with the first things I come across. I twist the half pill into a Kleenex, shoving it into the pocket of my skirt, and hide the remaining two in my sock drawer.
When I go back downstairs, Zoey’s sitting at the breakfast table, the newspaper propped in front of her while she munches on a piece of toast slathered with butter and jam. She’s wearing her school uniform. Her long dark hair flows across her back in a messy tangle. I sit down next to her and apologize for not having been up to hearing about how the competition went the night before.
“’Skay,” she says between bites of toast. “Feeling better?”
“A bit.”
“You should eat something,” Brian says, plunking down a glass of juice and a plate of toast in front of me. “It’ll settle your stomach.”
I bite off a small corner of the toast, and wash the cardboard taste out of my mouth with a sip of orange juice.
“Was it fun, Zo? Were you happy with how it went?”
“I screwed up a line in ‘Trees.’ I said, ‘The way is gracious/when your leaves tumble down’ instead of ‘The gracious way your leaves tumble down.’”
“I kind of like the new version better.”
“But that’s not what we’re being graded on. You have to stick to your original poem exactly.”
“You’ll nail it next time, Zo,” Brian says.
“And it’s not like it kept you from winning,” I add.
“Mommmm, that’s so not the point.”
Zoey was born forty weeks and a day after we moved to the “other Springfield,” as it’s called at work. She’s the result of the second honeymoon feeling that consumed us the minute we went into escrow.
Zoey was a beautiful baby. With my black hair and her father’s blue eyes, she looked like I always imagined Sara Crewe did when she was still The Little Princess. But mostly, she was an incredibly observant child. Able to hold her head steady from an early age, she would follow us around the room with her eyes, as if she was trying to figure out how we did whatever it was we were doing.
Turns out, she was. Zoey’s first word wasn’t a word, it was a sentence.
“I want milk,” she said clearly at eleven months. I nearly dropped the plate I was holding, certain I was hearing things.
Then she said it again: “I. Want. Milk.” Then she paused and added, “Mama.”
Brian was extremely excited. He’d never admit it, but he had that fear a lot of smart people have that their children won’t exhibit the same kind of intelligence they possess. So her precociousness was a relief. She spoke in full sentences before she was one. She was obviously a genius!
I met this news with wonder and trepidation. I’d been a quasi–child prodigy myself (at golf), and I knew that wasn’t always a good thing. It marked you out, kept you from hanging out with your friends, and came with expectations. At some point you grew up, and what you did, whatever it was, wasn’t remarkable anymore—unless you lived up to your full potential, which I hadn’t, not by a long shot. Another pun intended from my college golf coach. He had a bag full of them. Ha!
I read somewhere that many adults with advanced IQs are often less happy than those who test average. Like how there’s this optimal money/happiness equation. Once you pass a certain amount of household income, life isn’t any better.
Turns out money can’t buy happiness, or it does, but it costs less than you imagined it would.
Anyway, Brian was excited, I was happy but cautious, and Zoey was, well, Zoey. She’d observe, listen, absorb, then issue these comments on what we’d been doing. First in short, declarative sentences (“Mama opened the fridge.”), then increasingly in an almost lyrical way (“These blocks are beautiful.” “The sky is floating.”).
Brian taught her to read and write when she was three, and she produced her first poem at age four years and seven months. It’s framed and hanging in the stairway in between shots of her at various ages. Written in orange crayon, it reads, The rain falling against my window/is scratchy/It makes the world/blurry/It’s hard to sleep/when the rain is falling/against my window.
Four-going-on-five-Zoey wasn’t Shakespeare, but she delivered her poem with amazing force, standing in the party dress she’d insisted on wearing before reading it to us, her shiny Mary Janed feet a body-width apart, keeping her steady.
And what do you do in this day and age when your child performs some marvellous feat? You ask her to do it again, of course, and this time you make sure you have your video camera ready. If you’re me, you email that video to a few friends and family, or post it on Facebook with a proud caption. But if you’re Brian, and you’ve been tracking every sign of prodigiousness since her first demand for milk, you spend hours editing the video, buffing it here and splicing it there. You study how videos go viral, and you make sure this one does.
And you don’t tell your wife because, well, you say sheepishly when she learns what you’ve done by overhearing two people talking about it in the grocery store, you thought it would be a nice surprise, you weren’t sure it was going to work. Isn’t it amazing that it’s up to ten thousand views already?
And he looks so excited, so proud, this man you love, who loves your daughter more than anything, that you squash down the anger that’s been building since the produce aisle and you smile and say, of course it’s a great surprise, and wow, that’s amazing.
So that’s what I did. And I did it again when he showed me the spoken word competitions he’d found, a couple of them really close by. They weren’t beauty contests, he was quick to assure me. No tiaras. No spray tans. Only the spoken word, spoken by our daughter. He was excited, she was excited, I couldn’t say no.
We went. Zoey back in her party dress, her hair French-braided, our video camera at the ready.
She lost.
I was worried she’d be devastated, but instead of turning her off the whole thing, which I think I was secretly hoping for, it made her more determined. I’d find little scraps of paper scattered around the house full of misspelled words and half-rhymes written with thick coloured markers, and it wasn’t long before she started winning those competitions, her room filling up with ribbons and trophies.
I’m not sure when I became less involved. Maybe it was always essentially her thing with Brian. I went to those early competitions, my stomach clenched as she spoke. I dried her tears and shared her joy. But it was Brian who planned for the next one, who knew the other competitors, who strategized her rise through the ranks.
The irony of it being Brian who was the one who encouraged her writing came up during our first interview with the local morning news show. Zoey was eight. She’d just won the National Spoken Word Competition in her age category. We were sitting on a three-seater couch, the arc lights above us casting a hot glow. The host, who looked handsome and young for his age on television, but grubby and older up close, leaned forward.
“I understand Zoey gets her talent from you, Mrs. Underhill?”
I blinked a few times, caught off guard. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Aren’t you the poet in the family?”
“No, I—”
“You were the editor of your college poetry journal, right?”
“Yes, that’s true, but—” I stopped myself from saying, “She’s so much better than I was.” I’m not sure why, exactly. Maybe I wanted to protect the teenage/college me.
“Yes?” the interviewer prompted.
“I meant … I can’t take c
redit for what Zoey’s done. What she’s doing. She does it all on her own, truly.”
I could see the skepticism in his eyes, could tell he believed me to be the worst kind of stage mother. But until that moment, I’d never connected my poems, which I hardly ever wrote anymore, with Zoey’s. She was passionate, directed, focused, while I started and abandoned career after career.
There was no contest, really.
I go to the office, driving cautiously, conscious of the fact that I’m not completely in my body. I’m almost late for an early department meeting. There’s another round of cuts coming, Art Davies was just the beginning, and we have to establish what our severance strategy will be.
Why we have to have a meeting about this every time we start a round of layoffs is beyond me. Our severance strategy is always the same. Offer enough money so the majority of the employees being cut will accept the offer, no questions asked. Set aside a contingency fund for the small percentage who seek legal advice and demand more. Have a firm ceiling above which you cannot rise during your negotiations with said lawyers. Make it clear that you will see them in court if necessary. Chance that someone will institute litigation, according to the consultants: 0.02 per cent.
I wish I could skip the whole thing, but what choice do I have? So here I am, completely freaked out, half an Ativan in the bag, skulking into the conference room with the rest of my department.
I take a seat next to my supervisor, Lori Chan, a tiny woman with straight black hair who’s been at the company about as long as I have, just in time for the Safety Minute presentation—the SMP.
If these meetings are pointless, the SMP is in a category all its own. Implemented two years ago when, as Jeff would say, the consultants started taking over, every meeting begins with one. A minute-long presentation about safety in the workplace. It’s why all the cars are parked ass inwards in our parking lot. Why you’ll see employee after employee swing their legs out of their car and make sure both feet are planted firmly on the ground before exiting their vehicle. That, and an infinite number of other acts of conformity that are supposed to make us safer, but only make me think of the Two Minutes of Hate in Nineteen Eighty-Four every time I’m forced to listen to one of them.
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