Beauty from Ashes

by Alana Terry

  Jake shrugged and shoveled something or other into his mouth. After growing up with Patricia’s cooking, he probably felt right at home forcing down that cafeteria food every day. “The doctors all seem to think it’s a good idea,” he said.

  “I don’t care what they think.”

  Didn’t he understand? Couldn’t he see? This wasn’t about what was or wasn’t a good idea. This was about who was in control of our daughter’s health. He might be ready to roll over and let someone else play God with her little six-pound body, but I wasn’t about to give up that easily. The fact that he was made me sick.

  Jake didn’t say anything. That boy’s like a deer in the headlights when anyone within a twenty-foot radius gets angry. I swear, if we go out somewhere and he hears a couple shouting at each other, he wants to curl up in a fetal position and wet himself.

  That’s why I had to try so hard to probe the fight out of him. “Or maybe you don’t care what happens to her.”

  Low blow? Maybe. But it was necessary, even if he didn’t quite deserve it.

  “Why would you think that?” he asked, and I wished he’d start yelling. Cussing. Anything to show me there was a living being with genuine emotions behind that frozen-looking face of his. “What do you think I’m doing here?”

  I shrugged and glanced at the card we swiped in the cafeteria to get our daily food ration. “Enjoying free room and board?”

  He was fuming in his own understated way. I could tell by the way his eyes narrowed and one of them twitched just a little. “That’s not why I came.” His voice was so steady. I would die if I had to keep such a tight lock on my emotions. I guess that’s why I’m the screamer and he’s the deflector, but man, I hate the way he tenses up whenever I get upset. It’s like he just wants the fight to be over so he’ll say anything he thinks I want to hear. Drives me insane.

  “All I know is you didn’t come here for her. If you did, you’d actually hold her when you went to the NICU instead of sitting around playing stupid games on your phone.”

  “It’s how I de-stress.” His voice was getting whiny, which is how I knew I was about to lose my head.

  “Stress? You want to talk about who’s stressed?” One of the men in scrubs was staring at me, and the weary-looking mother gave me a sympathetic half-smile. The mommy equivalent of the black power salute. “I just squeezed a six-pound child out of my vagina,” I told Jake. “It was bloody. It was messy. It hurt worse than passing a golf-ball-sized kidney stone while getting your wisdom teeth yanked out with no anesthetic. Then I got loaded on a jet and flown here where I’m stuck until Natalie gets better. And the doctors are pushing for something that I don’t think she ...”

  “Wait, what did you say?” Jake’s eyes had lost their glazed-over shine, and he leaned toward me.

  “I said the doctors are a bunch of idiots full of ...”

  “No,” he interrupted. “About her. What did you call her?”

  I hadn’t realized I’d let it slip. It was Jake’s fault for getting me so worked up in the first place. “Nothing.”

  “No,” he pressed, “you called her something. What did you say?”

  I leveled my eyes at him. “Nothing.”

  If he knew anything, he’d shut up, but no. He had to keep poking. “Natalie. You said Natalie. I heard you.”

  Well it sure beats Patricia, I wanted to yell at him, but something stopped me. He’d caught me off guard. I wasn’t ready for this conversation. Wasn’t ready to share her name with anybody yet, not even her father. But I couldn’t deny it. Then I was the one staring at my plate like a guilty child caught copying down her foster parents’ ATM pin number on a piece of unfinished homework. I wasn’t sure what he’d say. He’d been pushing me to name her Patricia since we found out she was a girl, but I could never bring myself to agree. Whenever he brought it up at the Ronald McDonald house, I just pretended to be too tired to think about it. We’ll name her when she’s ready to come home, I said. A defense mechanism. Like a stray dog you bring in off the streets and your foster mom warns you not to settle on a name because someone’s going to come and claim him, and the minute you give him a name the harder it will be to let him go when the time comes.

  So I thought I’d hold off on the naming thing until she got discharged. Everyone in the NICU was happy with calling her Baby Girl Franklin, so that’s what I was going to do, too.

  Then I had a dream one night. You probably think I’m some kind of psycho by now, some bat-crazy chick who sees visions in her sleep and hallucinates while Holy-Ghost grannies stand up and testify on Open Mic Sunday. But I’m serious. It was one of my first nights at the Ronald McDonald house, and I went to bed wondering if it would have been better if my baby had died. If she hadn’t survived the brain hemorrhaging. Because she was so weak and frail, and she didn’t even open her eyes. She was just knocked out all the time, and the neuro guy told me her brain scans were crazy irregular and it would take a miracle for her to recover from that extensive of an injury. I may not have a science degree, but I know that when a medical specialist uses a word like miracle, things aren’t looking that hot.

  So I went to bed that night thinking about how much easier life would be if she had just died while we were still at County Hospital in Orchard Grove. Easier for her, I mean, because most of the doctors assumed she was going to die anyway, and she couldn’t be very comfortable in the NICU with all those tubes shoved down her and poking into every major part of her body. Well that night I had a dream. Jake was there, and he was all excited because the doctor had just called and said they’d found a cure for our baby. The only catch was he had to take her to the hospital right away. It’s funny, looking back, because she’d been in the hospital her whole life by then, but in my dream we were home in Orchard Grove. So I let him take her, and the hospital was only a few minutes away, so I sat around the trailer waiting for Jake to come back, and I wondered what it would be like once our baby was cured.

  And then there they were, since in a dream you don’t have to wait for anything, and Jake handed me this beautiful smiling girl. He was all excited, but the minute he put that kid in my arms, I got this creepy feeling start to zing up my spine. “What’s this?” I asked, and he was grinning as big as a fool and said, “Don’t you recognize your own baby?”

  I said, “This isn’t my baby.”

  And Jake said, “Of course it is. See? The doctors healed her.” He looked all happy like a puppy about to get a treat, but I couldn’t shake that feeling of spiders crawling up my skin.

  “What do you mean they healed her?”

  Jake stopped smiling and put on his best mansplaining expression and said, “Well, when I took her to the hospital, the doctors took a blood sample to get out some of her DNA, and they cloned her. They used a special solution so she developed to the right age, and they made sure there wasn’t any brain hemorrhage this time. Isn’t it great?”

  I couldn’t even hold the thing anymore, that smiling Gerber baby with the fat legs and chubby cheeks. I dropped her in Jake’s arms and said, “Where is my daughter?” Because even though this was a dream and even though Jake obviously thought I was an idiot when it came to scientific reasoning, I understood that just because you make a clone that doesn’t mean the original stops existing. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about, and I got frantic. I was screaming and clawing at his face and screeching, “Where is my baby? Get me my baby!”

  Then I saw her. Don’t ask me how, because I was still with Jake in the trailer, and she was in the hospital. But I saw her, just lying there in a black plastic trash bag in a grimy bathroom, and she wasn’t crying because she wasn’t cured and didn’t have the lung capacity to let out the faintest little whimper, but I could sense how scared she was. How terrified and lonely. She was cold. Cold and abandoned, and even though I could see her there clear as day, I couldn’t get to her because I was stuck in that stinking trailer. I was punching Jake by then. I’ve never done that in real life, not to him,
but in my dream I was whaling on him, and I don’t even know what he’d done with the cloned baby by then because I didn’t care about her. I just wanted my daughter. And I was screaming to try to get to her.

  Natalie!

  Natalie!

  Natalie!

  I couldn’t tell you how or why that name popped into my brain, but I woke up and was still screaming it in my mind. My heart was probably going a hundred and forty beats per minute. I had sweat on the back of my neck and under my boobs, and for a minute or two I was so disoriented I thought I was still in the dream and my baby had been dumped into a trashcan in a hospital bathroom. But then I talked myself down from freaking out. Reminded myself that Natalie was in the NICU being taken care of by a team of competent nurses, and I’d go over first thing in the morning before they changed shift and get a full report about her night. But something changed after that. I stopped going down all of those what-if bunny trails. You know what I mean. What if Natalie hadn’t stopped breathing? What if I hadn’t been living in the middle of nowhere and had delivered her in a real hospital where there was a NICU ready to rescue her if something bad happened?

  What if I hadn’t messed everything up?

  What happened to my daughter was a tragedy and a mistake, and if I ever figure out that the doctor or the hospital did something wrong, you can bet your leather-bound Bible that I’m going to sue the shirt off their backs. I guess in a way, that dream helped me come to terms with the fact that my baby girl was sick and that there was no such thing as a miracle cure. But it did something else, too. All day I kept thinking about the way I’d screamed her name when I saw her lying there all cold and abandoned.

  Natalie. Where in the world had my mind come up with that? I didn’t know anybody called Natalie. I can’t even remember any movies or TV show characters with that name. But from then on I thought of her as Natalie, which is how I got in trouble with Jake.

  Of course, when I slipped up and used her name while we were having dinner, I didn’t tell him about the dream or anything like that. I tried to play it down and just said something like, “I don’t know. It’s just something that’s kind of been growing on me.”

  I was expecting him to whine about how he really thought we should name her Patricia after his mom, who I hadn’t even met by then, but he didn’t. He had this strange expression on his face, so for a minute I almost expected him to start blubbering. Instead he pulled himself together and then reached for his phone. I rolled my eyes. It was so like him to give up right in the middle of an argument and hide behind that tiny plastic screen. I was still mad, but I didn’t have the energy left for a proper fight, so I just planned to finish dinner and get back to Natalie’s bedside by shift change. But after swiping a few things, Jake said, “Here, I want to show you something.”

  He passed me the phone, but it wasn’t one of his stupid candy games. It was some kind of note-taking app. And just a quick glance was all it took for me to see that he’d made probably a hundred different entries in the past two weeks.

  “I started writing her letters,” he told me. “I was going to make a record about her time at the hospital, and when she got discharged I was thinking of having a copy printed. Maybe give it to her for her sweet sixteen or something.”

  Every once in a while, even now that we’re married, I look over at Jake and have this kind of freak-out moment like Holy cow, I don’t even know who this man is. It happened to me there in the cafeteria. The letters he wrote our daughter were really private. I couldn’t bring myself to read a full paragraph. He had all kinds of pet names for her, ended just about every single sentence with one, actually. Honey, princess, baby girl. But then something caught my eye.

  “Natalie?”

  He was blushing now and squirming in his seat across from me. “I didn’t know what name you’d settle on, so I figured I’d just throw something in there, and then when she came home I could replace it with her real one.”

  “So you picked Natalie?” I had goosebumps on my back again, except they weren’t the creepy sort this time. He looked at me, and something passed between us, which sounds silly to say, but there’s no other way to describe it. We didn’t talk about the surgery anymore that night, but the next day when the gut guy came by to pressure me yet again about the surgery, I told him I’d go ahead and sign the consent form.

  And then I went over to the HUC at the front desk and asked her to change my baby’s ankle tag from Baby Girl to Natalie.

  CHAPTER 15

  Patricia is cleaning the dishes after lunch, which is always a fun little skirmish. It usually involves me offering to help and her refusing three or four times, each of us on our best behavior. The ritual inevitably ends with her complaining about how she’s the only one who does any work around the house. Of course, in true Patricia style, she never actually complains, and she manages her not-complaining in such a polite, gracious manner that if you get mad at her or annoyed, you’re the wicked witch instead of her.

  “It will be nice for Tiffany when your daughter gets big enough to help out around the kitchen.” She’s not really talking to me, but she’s not talking directly to Jake either, so neither of us respond. Unfortunately, Patricia doesn’t take easily to being ignored. “When the twins were born, my mother had already died, and my mother-in-law never ate properly so was too sickly to travel. I sometimes wonder how young people manage these days without any outside support.”

  Of course, we all know she doesn’t really wonder that, because when Jake and his sister were born, Patricia’s husband spent his eighty hours a week at the office (not that I could blame the poor fool), and there was nobody else around to help her out.

  She lets out a dramatic sigh. “It’s a good thing I’ve been taking calcium since I was a teenager. My sister never got in the habit, so now her osteoporosis is so bad she has to hire a girl to do her cleaning for her.”

  In Patricia’s mind, any housewife who hires someone else to do the cleaning for her, whether by choice or laziness or sickness, isn’t even worthy of her title. Neither is a mom who sends her kid to daycare. Fortunately, this is one of those times when Patricia is just happy to have a captive audience. We don’t have to engage with her or even agree as long as we let her vent.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling Abby ever since she got so serious with that computer science boy.” Abby is Jake’s twin sister, who thankfully is enough of a black sheep that she absorbs the bulk of Patricia’s ire. Not that I get how a first-year law school student could turn into such a disappointment while Jake the convenience store cashier is Patricia’s pride and joy. Or maybe she complains to Abby just as much about him. It wouldn’t surprise me.

  “I told her that she needs to focus on her studies. That boy is nothing but an unhealthy distraction.” This rant is familiar enough that I already know about that boy and how he’s doing some sort of postgraduate work in computer science and probably has a higher IQ than me, Jake, and Patricia combined.

  “They’ve only known each other for three semesters, and they’re already talking about getting married once she’s out of law school.” Her eyes are wide as she shakes her head in convincing bewilderment. I find this somewhat humorous given the fact that Jake and I hooked up, shacked up, got pregnant and then hitched all in the same calendar year.

  I feel sorry for Abby, truth be told. From what I gather, Patricia pegged her daughter as the smart one and Jake as the disappointment before the kids were toilet trained. Patricia pushed Abby, which explains the first-year law student status, and basically ignored Jake, which explains the nine-dollar-an-hour cashier job. The downside to being the genius in the family is that Abby will never live up to Patricia’s expectations. I’ve never even met the poor girl, but I see it so clearly. Eventually Abby’s going to marry and have kids, whether with this computer science genius or someone else. And Patricia will shake her head and cluck that overused tongue of hers and say, “It’s just so sad that Abby has to be away from the children.
When the twins were that little, I refused to work outside the home.” And if by some insane chance Abby postpones her law degree or takes time off work to be that stay-at-home Martha Stewart wanna-be that Patricia expects of her, there will be just as much headshaking and just as much tongue clucking, except this time it will be, “When I was raising the twins, I kept up my nursing license. I didn’t put my whole life on hold. That’s the reason why so many children are growing up spoiled.”

  Thankfully, Patricia isn’t as talkative today as she can sometimes be. When the dishes are done and my kitchen is scrubbed senseless, she reminds me that it’s almost time for my daughter’s tube feeding, then she takes Natalie and retreats to her room, and I can finally breathe again.

  CHAPTER 16

  It’s like kicking off your sneakers and unsnapping your bra after an eight-hour shift at the old-people’s home. That’s how I feel when Patricia takes her once-a-week nap. She’s not religious or anything. I’m sure that woman would find fault with Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus if she got the chance. But every Sunday, she sets her timer and takes an hour-long nap. Not fifty-nine minutes. Not sixty-one.

  It’s the most relaxing hour of my entire week.

  Natalie’s had her formula and is quiet for the most part. She’s got her apnea monitor on, and I don’t expect her to need anything for another thirty minutes or so. That’s usually when she has to be suctioned out after a tube feed. The doctors think she has some reflux, which is bad for her long-term lung health, but there’s not much they can do about it right now. We have her in her car-seat insert by our bed so Jake’s mom can nap quietly in her room. It’s funny how fast we stopped calling it the nursery as soon as Patricia moved in.

  Jake and I are snuggling under the blankets. He’s the big spoon, even though I’m two inches taller and about twenty pounds heavier. At least I am right now, but that will change eventually. There’s no rush. If I can wear my swimsuit by Fourth of July, I’ll be content. Maybe I’d be a little more freaked out about things if Natalie hadn’t gone through what she did, but when you’ve seen your kid at all the possible variations of blue-gray on the spectrum, that extra baby fat doesn’t seem like the death sentence you once thought it would be.