The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  What she really wanted was a full-bodied pinot noir, a gin and tonic, a pale pink raspberry martini. Doctors said alcohol would leach into her milk and dim her baby’s growing brain. They used to prescribe stout to bring the milk in, but she didn’t have those old-school doctors. So instead of a Guinness, Georgie had oxycodone and a big glass of water.

  When she asked whether oxycodone in her bloodstream was okay for the baby, the nurse said, “You wouldn’t want your baby to have a mom in pain, would you?”

  She didn’t want her baby to have a mama in granny panties, either, but there you go. Not everybody gets what they want.

  She curled a hand over her daughter’s head, cradled and covered that constant pulse of the fontanel. “We’ll be okay.” She pushed the baby blanket away from Bella’s chin. The girl’s tiny red mouth was open, her eyes closed, long lashes resting over her pale skin. Her mouth was a little heart, with all the love in the world collected there.

  Bella slept like her father. He could pass out anywhere. It was a way of trusting the universe. Georgie didn’t even trust herself.

  She flipped channels until she saw the familiar curve of a pregnant belly. The warm enthusiasm of a trained woman newscaster came in as a voice-over. “The zoo will soon welcome a new resident!”

  The flat color of local video scanned the pregnant monkey, hunched and fat. Georgie sat up straighter in bed to distinguish herself from that slope-shouldered simian. That was one difference between humans and other primates—we walk upright. Upright!

  The vial of oxycodone was still in her hand. She moved her legs and the blankets shifted, books tipped and adjusted. The news camera cut to a baby mandrill, clinging to its mother.

  The new infant would be born in December, born on the cusp of the schizophrenic season. Georgie had read all the books, the articles. She knew the threats: more schizophrenics were born in winter months, with numbers peaking in February, even bleeding into early March. Bella was born in November, just as that curve on the graph of probability started to climb. If she’d planned things better, Georgie would have given birth in August.

  Could primates even be schizophrenic?

  Any questions? Her tattoo was so cocky! With a new baby, she was all questions.

  She reached both hands around her daughter to press and turn, to coax the childproof lid off the pill vial. The camera cut away from the mother and baby. For a moment there was Sarah, on TV. Huddled near a garbage can, near a pack of teenagers.

  Sarah?

  Sarah was pale. Her hair needed attention. It was soaked, and maybe that’s just how hair looks when a person works at the Oregon Zoo in the rain. Except Sarah was wild-eyed, too, and that made it all worse. She looked a little nuts. Guilt tapped at Georgie’s chest, a reminder: Sarah’s phone calls, those kind offers to come hold the baby. Georgie wasn’t ready to see anybody, to put on pants, or even a skirt.

  Besides, Sarah could be kind of a downer.

  The thing was, Georgie felt guilty for having a baby when Sarah had only miscarriages. She’d bought Sarah a satin bathrobe after the first one. She gave her a stack of novels and a bottle of pear brandy after the second. With the third, she’d stayed around for days, made dinners, washed Sarah and Ben’s dishes. What else could she do? She didn’t promise not to have her own.

  She cupped a hand and shook the vial to tap a pill into her palm.

  Sarah started backing out of the frame, then bent and picked a pale pink flower off the macadam of the zoo path. No, it wasn’t a flower; it was a pacifier, clutched in Sarah’s pale, reddened fingers. Georgie squinted and leaned closer. As she moved, the mess of meds fell forward like too much salt from a shaker. They fell into her hand, bounced over her fingers, and scattered on the bed, on the blankets. On the baby. White pills rained down on the small, sweet, open cavern of baby Bella’s red heart-shaped mouth.

  “Fuck!” Georgie moved fast but couldn’t think. Were there pills in Bella’s mouth? That trusting, trusting, open mouth. She wanted to shake the baby, shake pills out, but you can’t shake a baby—people go to prison for that. Shaking a baby can cause brain damage and death. She held Bella closer and tried to see into the dark space between those little lips and toothless gums. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she chanted.

  The fontanel’s pulse was an accusation.

  Georgie lunged out of bed. Her foot caught in the sheet. Bella was in her arms. Stray pills bounced to the floor along with the flutter of magazines. Her stitches yanked against her gut as though to hold her back, like an invisible internal seat belt. She turned on the ceiling light and tipped the baby’s head toward it, to see better inside her tiny mouth. There it was, there it was! There was a glimpse of white, a pill on her baby’s tongue. She’d thrown a bull’s-eye, made a half-court basket, sunk the eight ball, except this round she didn’t want to hit the mark.

  Georgie’s finger had never seemed so thick as it did when she tried to fish inside Bella’s mouth. She was afraid she’d force the pill down. Bella screwed up her face and pulled her hands out of the swaddling blanket. Georgie moved her finger into Bella’s mouth again. Bella tried to suckle.

  Ah! Don’t! Georgie pulled her finger away and whispered the words, a prayer, “Don’t suck anything down.” She laid the baby on her side on the bed and tried again to press a finger over those sweet toothless gums. Bella screamed. Her face turned red. She was a good screamer. Her tongue was a bird’s tongue, narrow and strong. And there was the pill, stuck to the side of her tongue. Georgie reached in, tapped, flicked, touched the pill until she managed to knock it off the side of Bella’s tongue, out of Bella’s mouth. The tablet was soggy and eroded, but otherwise whole.

  Thank God.

  Georgie picked up her whole reason for living and let the girl shriek in her ear while she collected pills from the sheets, the blankets, the floor. She counted as she found them. She reached for the phone. Then she dropped the phone and went back to counting, and she grabbed for the phone again because with her baby in her arms she didn’t have enough hands and didn’t know which to do first. She needed backup—somebody at home besides the baby. Alone and never alone: If she were really alone, there’d be no problem, no baby’s mouth, and no pills.

  But that wasn’t what she wanted. Not at all.

  She needed a team, a crew. Mostly, she needed her husband. Where was Hum? He’d taken five weeks off for paternity leave and still went out most of the day like he had somewhere to be. Georgie found two more pills on the floor. Bella yodeled in her ear. “Hush, hush, little peanut.”

  Georgie’s milk let down, warmed her boobs, made them hard and high as implants until milk spilled out and soaked her nightshirt. Doctors said the leaking would stop when her body adjusted. She was a generous fountain.

  She hoisted her shirt to let Bella latch on. Thin white milk ran in rivulets down Georgie’s stomach.

  She stood hunched over and sliced open in the middle and stitched back up; her warm daughter nursed under the drenched and clinging nightshirt. Georgie dialed the pediatrician and scanned the floor for stray drugs. She stuck the phone between her ear and her shoulder.

  There should be a book illustrating how to nurse, cradle a phone, panic, call 911, and count stray pills on a dusty floor.

  She’d started with twelve pills. She’d taken three on Saturday and one at night, and then … after that? She had five left. Was that right? Five, and one was soggy. She put the soggy pill in her own mouth and drank water to wash it down. It stuck in her throat. Or something stuck in her throat. Maybe it was guilt.

  How much of that soggy pill had seeped into Bella’s system?

  There’d be oxycodone in Georgie’s milk. Could Bella overdose now through nursing?

  She used a finger to pry the baby’s mouth off her nipple. Bella screamed louder than ever. The ringing phone tumbled from Georgie’s shoulder and knocked against Bella’s head on the way down. Shit. A red welt raised against the girl’s skin, near her hairline. Was that a problem? How protected
was a baby’s brain? If anything happened to Bella, Georgie would kill herself. She’d have to. There were so many ways to fail. All she had was good intentions; the road to hell was paved with babies.

  Giving birth was the original blood oath.

  She could still hear the phone ringing on the other end, now a tiny sound, like one an insect would make. “Just wait, wait,” Georgie whispered, and bent to find the phone on the floor. She was on her knees. She could barely hear over Bella’s howl. Three days old and the girl was a boob-aholic. A recording came on: “If this call is a medical emergency, please hang up and dial …”

  Georgie found the phone under the bed and pulled it out, covered in dust bunnies.

  Was her call an emergency? That was half the question. Bella’s wail was strong. She hadn’t passed out, anyway—always a good sign. Georgie pressed zero for pediatric advice. “Shh, shh, shh … darling, darling, darling,” she crooned against the side of Bella’s head, into the welt, now a lump, against her silky hair. “My sweet girl.”

  A receptionist came on. The woman asked the birth date of the patient, the patient’s name, and the patient’s doctor’s name. Then she asked, “What is the nature of the problem?”

  “I have this prescription,” Georgie said. “The baby got into the prescription.” She ran a hand over the sheets as she talked, checking for more pills.

  “The baby got into the prescription?” the receptionist repeated. “Tell me the child’s birth date again, please.”

  The baby, Bella, was three days old. She couldn’t lift her own head. It was an accident if she found her mouth with her hand. “I mean, I spilled the pills, and the baby got ahold of them.”

  “Got ahold of them?”

  That baby was a precocious drug addict.

  Georgie said, “I dropped an oxycodone in my daughter’s mouth. I got it out, I just don’t know anything. I don’t know what might’ve happened—”

  “You’ve retrieved the medicine at this point?”

  “It was pretty much whole.” Georgie was glad to say she’d done one thing right.

  “Keep the pill to show doctors in case they request it.”

  “Keep it?” Georgie said. “I took it.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line. Then the receptionist said, “The advice nurse will call you back.”

  Georgie heard caution and a controlled urgency in the woman’s voice. It dawned on her: They’d call child protective services. They might. Would they?

  Shit.

  The butter pecan walls went swimmy. She sat on the side of the bed and tried to breathe. “I’m new to this.” They couldn’t take her daughter away! It was her first child, her only darling. But really, they could. That was the thing.

  The hospital had given her those pills. They’d sent her home with the baby. They’d set her up. She said, “This must happen all the time.” She tried to talk over Bella’s screams, and her voice came out high and thin and broken. Where did other people learn how to take drugs while holding a baby?

  The woman said, “Do you need a referral for a counselor?”

  “A counselor?” She was ready to cry but didn’t need a counselor. The baby was the question, the concern. Little red-faced Bella spit up on Georgie’s arm.

  The woman said, “Some new mothers have difficulty adjusting—”

  This woman would make her cry. Georgie hung up on the receptionist. The advice nurse could call back. They had her contact information.

  She carried her howling daughter to the kitchen, sang the alphabet softly, and used a dish towel to wipe the white patch of spit off her arm. Maybe that spit-up solved the drug question, like a self-induced gastric lavage?

  In the kitchen, on the counter, in a six-pack of bottles, there were six servings of formula sent home as free samples from the hospital. For all she could tell those formula samples were made by McDonald’s in a third world country using slave labor and antifreeze. They were the precursor to fast food and a slow waddle.

  At least it wasn’t organic. Organic baby formula sweetened with rice syrup was full of arsenic half the time. She’d read the reports.

  Bella started to wail again; Georgie’s milk was a drug deal that couldn’t happen. What was the advice for this?

  She and her daughter waited together, alone. They waited for the phone to ring, for Humble or a nurse to call. Georgie cracked the lid off a bottle, and it came off with a pop. She screwed the artificial nipple in place and tipped the bottle to Bella’s blessed mouth.

  Bella didn’t want it. Georgie started to pull it away, and a reflex kicked in—the girl latched on to the fake boob. Oxycodone, that opiate, eased its way into Georgie’s blood, and she started to feel lighter. The pain in her stitches backed off. She took a breath and relaxed against the counter.

  The phone rang, and caller ID showed it was the hospital. It was either the advice nurse or the baby police calling to tell her she’d failed as a mom. The baby, her living dissertation, was perfect, yes, but Georgie wasn’t.

  The phone rang again, singing its song.

  The hospital knew where they lived. They had her address, her employer, her health insurance ID numbers.

  Georgie needed to lie down. Bella was still breathing. Even the red welt on her head had already quieted.

  “We’ll be okay,” she whispered, giving voice to what she most wanted to hear. She’d be her own advice nurse. Her voice was good enough. She was in her house, in this room, on her own with her daughter, alone and in it together. One more ring and the phone would go to voice messaging. This was her job: to raise her daughter.

  The doorbell rang.

  The doorbell? Hum wouldn’t ring, unless he’d lost his keys. It was a visitor, a stranger, maybe a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  It might be cops. Paramedics. Child protective services. Could they have gotten there so quickly? Of course they could. Georgie’s soaked nightshirt clung to her boobs and postpartum stomach in a frump’s rendition of a wet T-shirt contest.

  Oxycodone slowed her brain’s synapses, let the endorphins step in, and lifted her head in a clouded way. They offered the best advice in the room: Go back to bed. She moved away from the door and windows and carried Bella to the bedroom. The doorbell rang again. Georgie’s heart knocked in response. She took a breath. She was okay, as long as she didn’t open that door.

  Then the phone started again, too.

  The phone, the doorbell, the phone—Georgie slunk away from them both.

  This is what separates humans from animals: free will.

  She had TV. She had the comforting hand of granny panties and narcotics. Her daughter was fine—awake and nursing. Nobody looked high! Neither one was nodding off. Well, okay, Bella was nodding off, but that was normal for a newborn, right? Georgie tickled the girl’s foot and saw her eyes widen, evidence she was alert. Together the two of them climbed into the privacy of sheets that smelled like sweat, like their bodies, like milk and blood and piss and love. She climbed back into her nest of blankets and books.

  Safe.

  Where was Humble? She needed him to come home.

  A hand slapped against the bedroom window from outside. It was a hard crack, like a bird breaking its own neck against the glass. It was a bad omen, and Georgie jumped at the noise. She sat up, looked, and saw that it wasn’t a bird. Worse: it was human. There was a palm, fingers, and a thumb, splayed, for a moment flattened against the pane.

  “Ever play dead girl shots?” Humble Johnson slouched at the bar. The first wash of alcohol encouraged his brain to move gamely.

  The bartender said, “Dead girl shot?” He leaned forward to better hear over the music. The bartender was young, with hair in his eyes and in a button-down shirt. He was relaxed behind the counter, like somebody’s son hired to mix drinks for a family wedding.

  Humble said, “Shots.” He lifted his glass to illustrate. “Drinking game.”

  The bartender shook his head, tossed a damp rag into the air, caught it,
and wiped the hardwood counter down. A disco rehash blasted a rattling sound track.

  A couple sat beside Humble. The woman’s back made a wall where she turned away to share a plate of assembly line–style calamari with her date. She twisted around to look at Humble, a greasy, fried circle held between her fingers like a wedding ring. She sized him up. She swiveled away again and used her other hand to flick a strand of her long dark hair.

  Humble Johnson hadn’t played dead girl shots in years, but he thought about it sometimes. Did anyone play anymore? He’d played in college at Oregon State, in the lounge, surrounded by the smell of pressed-board furniture and the sweat of his dorm-mates.

  The bartender pulled a beer for somebody farther down the row.

  Humble hunched over his bourbon, elbows on the glossy wood of the polished bar top, what had once been a slice of the body of a massive old-growth tree. A hundred years earlier when loggers ruled, when a tree in Oregon was bigger around than an SUV and SUVs didn’t exist yet, somebody needed a place to set a drink and so felled timber big enough to knock out a neighborhood.

  This place had been a logger’s watering hole turned wino’s haven. More recently a pair of midlife bankers had bought the building and hired a Vietnamese crew to peel molding plywood off the windows. They aired out aged smoke, put up red velvet and gold-flecked wallpaper, and lined the glass shelves with a higher grade of hooch. Humble Johnson, forty-two years old, born and raised in Portland, used to ride his tricycle on the sidewalks around there. He’d waited for the TriMet bus at a bench just down the block. He’d been drinking in that bar and elsewhere for more than twenty years, maybe as long as the bartender had been alive. His history was written in dive bars, laced with malt winds off the old Weinhard’s brewery—the Swinehard’s Factory, his friends called it. The Swig Hard, the Swill. Beer foam runoff filled the streets back then.

  Nobody would put up with that shit now. Beer foam in the streets? The brewery shut down. The “Brewery Blocks” had been converted to a stretch of condos and art galleries. The old Industrial Northwest had been renamed the Alphabet District, like some kind of baby crackers or cheap soup.