The First Part Last

by Angela Johnson

  I remember sitting here with Mary when I had a fever, needed to get stitches out, had to get a booster shot, fell into some poison ivy on vacation, and about a thousand other things that my pediatrician, Dr. Victor, took care of.

  Now I’m sharing her with my daughter ’cause I can still technically have a kid doctor for myself, even if I’m now technically a parent.

  It’s whacked, I know. And it didn’t help that yesterday something happened that kind of messed me up.

  I forgot Feather, and left her all alone.

  K-Boy called me up to hit the nets a little and I said yeah. So I grabbed my basketball, zipped up my jacket, and headed out the front door.

  Got all the way down the elevator.

  I got all the way to the street door.

  Then I was almost at the corner….

  She was still asleep as I crawled across the floor to her crib. Breathing that baby breath. Dreaming with baby eyes closed and sweet. And if she was older, just a little bit older, trusting that I’d be here for her.

  I lay my basketball down and it rolled out the door into the hall toward Mary’s room.

  And I’d almost got all the way to the corner.

  Dr. Victor picks Feather up and puts her on the baby scales. It’s the first time I’ve seen her being weighed. She’s a digital seven pounds and fifteen ounces.

  “She’s picking up weight, Bobby.”

  “Yeah, she drinks anything that you put in front of her. I mean, she’s doing good.”

  “She looks fantastic. And how are you? Tired?”

  I adjust Feather’s booties. Our downstairs neighbor, Coco Fernandez (I’ve always called her by her full name), made them out of angora (whatever that is). They’re soft on the baby’s feet.

  Then Feather stretches and yawns like she’ll never close her mouth.

  I smile at Dr. Victor.

  Damn, do I look tired? I want to say. Does it look like I’ve been up for three straight weeks with no breaks in between? I don’t say it though. I just smile and try to keep from curling up in the baby carrier with the kid.

  Won’t do any good to complain about being tired. I already tried that with my mom. She couldn’t have rolled her eyes any more than she did when I mentioned how tired I was and how maybe I wanted to go hang out awhile at the arcade.

  “Your arcade days are over, brother.” She laughed before she walked out the front door, mumbling something about going to develop some prints.

  I smile up at Dr. Victor again. “I’m okay.”

  She looks at me for a minute then walks closer and feels my neck. “I think you have swollen glands. Have you been feeling under the weather?”

  I say again, “I’m okay”

  Then I want to beg her for a note like I used to when I didn’t want to do something and a sore knee or fever could get me out of it.

  I want to say to this woman who’d always been nice to me and listened when I complained that damn it, I didn’t feel good, I was so tired, I didn’t know where I was going to lay down in a few hours, and by the way could she just write me a note and get me out of this?

  It didn’t have to be a long note.

  It didn’t have to tell anything about a medical condition.

  It just had to get me out of staying awake all night, changing diapers every hour, and doing nothing except think of the yawning little thing in the white booties, whose baby carrier was all I wanted to be in.

  I just want a note to get me out of it.

  Just one note.

  then

  I SIT WITH NIA in a waiting room, with posters of pregnant women plastered everywhere. At least it seems like they’re everywhere.

  The Health Channel is starting to get on my nerves, talking about folic acid and good prenatal care, which is what we’re here for. Damn, TV is everywhere. You can’t even get away from it at the doctor’s office. And I never thought I’d ever say that.

  Nia’s got her face in a magazine and hasn’t looked up from it since she finished filling out the two-page questionnaire the nurse gave her.

  I know she’s trying to pretend she’s not here.

  Trying to pretend it never happened.

  Trying to pretend we’re just on some field trip to the obstetrician’s office. I know I’m doing a good job of denying just about everything that’s been going on, to myself, so I figure she probably is too.

  When I told Nia I wanted to go to her first appointment, she asked, “Why do you want to go?”

  I said, “Shouldn’t I go with you the first time?”

  Nia starts reading her English book and not looking at me. “You don’t have to, Bobby. I mean, I know how to get there by myself.”

  “Yeah, I know you know directions, Nia—I’m just trying to do the right thing. Mary says …”

  Then it’s the first time I see Nia really mad. It’s like she wants to throw me across the room.

  “So this isn’t about what you really want to do. This is all about what your mom thinks you ought to do.”

  I try to explain, but she waves me off and walks out of study hall, and I don’t have time to tell her all Mary said was that Nia’s doctor was around the corner from where she had a shoot and maybe we could have lunch afterward.

  Hell, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Nothing ever is, anymore.

  I don’t remember everything. Just sitting in the doctor’s office and looking at her skiing trophies on the shelves behind her.

  I think she talked about how this whole thing should be a partnership and how Nia was going to count on me. She talked about Lamaze.

  Nia said, “Uh, no. I do believe that all the pain medication in the world has to be used for this baby. I’m not into learning how to breathe. I do that just fine.”

  Then I stupidly say, “Maybe Lamaze would be better for the baby.”

  Nia stands up with one hand on her hip. She still only weighs about ninety pounds and isn’t showing at all. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t full of attitude.

  “Are you having this damned baby, Bobby?”

  “No. Not even if I wanted to do it and spare you.”

  Nia chills and sits back down, grabbing my hand real tight before she looks at me with tears running down her face.

  I look at the skiing trophies and think about how cool and windy it must be to go down the slopes, and how I always wanted to learn how to ski.

  The doctor, I can’t remember her name, says something in a calm voice to Nia and doesn’t look at me for the rest of the time we’re there.

  Nia keeps tapping her foot, and the doctor finally says that she needs to take Nia’s blood pressure and get her ready for her exam.

  “I don’t have to be in there, do I?” I ask.

  The doctor smiles like she feels bad for me, but not bad enough to leave the exam stuff out. But it turns out I’m wrong, because she sends me back to the waiting room to hang out till Nia is finished.

  There I sit and listen to the health channel and dream that I have just sailed into the wind on skis, way into the wind, out of reach.

  part II

  now

  THIS MUST BE IT.

  This must be what made my mom’s eyes narrow and nasty words come out of her mouth.

  This must be what helped give my dad an ulcer and that look on his face that says—what next?

  This must be it. The place where you really feel that it’s all on you and you got a kid.

  Feather spent last night in the hospital, with me sitting next to her bed all night long. I’ve had about twenty minutes’ sleep in the last three days. Almost got locked in the toilet off the waiting room ’cause I was so sleepy I hallucinated being on the subway.

  I got into a fight with a nurse.

  Left my backpack in the taxi I came to the hospital in.

  And before all of that, Feather threw up on the last clean jacket I had, and my mom is out of town and not answering her voice mail.

  Half of Pop’s kitchen staff called off and he’s up
to his ass …

  She’s sleeping now.

  They say it was just a twenty-four-hour bug, but it scared the hell out of me when I went in to get her up from her nap and she was burning up. I could feel it through her bunny-rabbit sleeper, and it totally freaked me out. When I put the thermometer cone in her ear a few seconds later, it read 104.

  It’s twenty-four hours later, and we’re home after hospital hell. I’m trying to get some sleep, but I’m too tired, if that makes sense.

  Mom finally calls. “You okay, kid?”

  She already knows Feather is okay. I’d been leaving voice mails every hour. I feel like a big old baby, but I can’t help it, and when I finally hear her voice … I start crying like one. Only quiet so she won’t know.

  I manage a “Umm huh,” and wish she’d hurry up and finish shooting fruit and vegetables at farm markets and get the hell back to the city.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she says.

  Then some leftover idiot that lives in me says, “Take your time. We’re both just hangin’ out now.”

  “Umm huh, Bobby. Remember to get Coco if you need anything.”

  I don’t say what I want, which is for her to get home before I get an ulcer or start cussing strangers.

  Instead, I wrap Feather up tight, lock the door behind me, and thirty seconds later I’m down the iron fire stairs and at Coco’s door.

  “Come in if you’re good looking,” she yells. Then, “Come in even if you’re not. I’ll give you a makeover.”

  I walk into a powder blue apartment with squishy dark blue carpet, and pictures of her kids and grandkids everywhere. Bluegrass is playing on the stereo.

  Coco is a fiddle player in a bluegrass band.

  She’s known me forever, and comes over and starts kissing Feather before she takes her out of my arms.

  “I got your message,” she says, smiling so her whole face scrunches up. She’s got some sort of twenty-colored scarf tying all her dark hair up, and she’s wearing one of her hundred “I Luv NY” shirts with sweatpants. I’ve been taller than her my whole life, and Feather probably weighs more than her. They are the same caramel color, though.

  “I figured I’d missed you.” I yawn.

  “Yeah. We had a gig at this revival in the Village. I hadn’t seen a lot of those people since the seventies.”

  I sit down and watch the fish in Coco’s aquarium swim back and forth.

  The next thing I know, it’s six hours later and Feather is asleep beside me on Coco’s couch.

  I’ve got about three hours before school starts.

  Feather wakes up as I carry her up the fire stairs and unlock the door to our apartment.

  When I walk past my mom’s room, I miss her.

  I walk to my room, put Feather in her crib, which pisses her off and makes her scream, and then I look around my room and miss me.

  then

  K-BOY AND J. L. LEAN AGAINST THE WALL of the West Side Rec Center and don’t say anything. Then they shift their stance and look across the street while three girls cross it, talking loud and laughing. And when the girls almost get hit by a taxi, they flip the driver off and keep on walking.

  J. L. laughs and sucks down the bottle of water he pulled out of his backpack a minute ago.

  I keep waiting.

  I keep waiting for them to say anything about what I just told them. For the first time I don’t know what they’ll say. I know it’s stupid, but I’m more afraid of what they’ll say about Nia being pregnant than I was about my parents.

  J. L. is the first to open his mouth.

  “Yo, Bobby. I need some money for a phone call. You got change on you?”

  And I’m thinking, I just told him my girl is having a baby and all he wants to do is make a phone call.

  I reach into my pocket and K-Boy starts laughing.

  “What the hell is so funny?” I yell at him ’cause both of them are seriously starting to get on my nerves. What the hell, anyway?

  K-Boy stops laughing, but he really doesn’t want to.

  J. L. leans back against the Center again. “Hey, Bro, I was just going to make a call for you to 1-800-ISTUPID.”

  K-Boy looks sorry for me and starts shaking his head. I don’t know what I expected. I would have probably said the same thing.

  We all talked about this. We said only stupid people would let it get to this. ’Cause there is birth control. Lots of it.

  My mom always kept a big basket of rubbers underneath the bathroom sink for my brothers, and when they both left—just me. She said she didn’t want to have to talk about it every time she thought about it.

  So there they were.

  K-Boy and J. L. got most of their supplies from me.

  J. L. ’cause he was always broke and K-Boy ’cause his moms almost lost her mind when she found a pack of condoms underneath his bed.

  She didn’t want to hear he was being safe. She just wanted him not to do it. Didn’t want to ever know that he thought about sex, had sex, or hung out with people who might be having sex too.

  “What can I say?” K-Boy shrugged.

  “What do you want us to say?” J. L. said, looking kind of sorry he’d been an asshole a few minutes ago.

  “Nothing,” I say, and turn to watch the little kids running around the rec center playground. And I’m thinking while I’m watching how in three or four years my kid’s going to be out there screaming and falling down with the rest of them.

  J. L. picks his backpack off the ground and starts walking off. He doesn’t turn around for almost a block. When he finally does, K-Boy nods to him, and I act like I don’t even see him.

  “Shit. Never seen J. L. like that,” K-Boy says.

  We start walking down Columbus and I don’t hear the people or cars, and it’s rush hour. Everything is a blur, and the only thing I see is my feet in hiking boots and K-Boy in tennis shoes.

  K-Boy says, “Shit,” again.

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s pretty much where I’m at.”

  K-Boy brushes against my shoulder trying to dodge two kids on Rollerblades.

  “Nia okay? ’Cause I know she is seriously into the books….”

  “She’s out of it. Last time I talked to her all she could do is get out a few words. Mostly she just cries.”

  “I feel you, man. I mean I wouldn’t want to be ya, but I feel you.”

  “Hell, I don’t want to be me either.”

  Two girls pass by us and stare at K-Boy. I mean they stop in the middle of the sidewalk and stare. He smiles back.

  I grab him by the arm. “Uh huh, they are so fine, but not today”

  K-Boy laughs, looks at me, and we keep on walking.

  “So—she keeping it or what?”

  I say, “I don’t know. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She doesn’t say yes. She doesn’t say no.”

  “Bobby, what do you want her to do?”

  My stomach is hurting by the time that question is out of his mouth and into the air. I don’t say; it’s not up to me. I don’t say; whatever I want, I can’t say. My dad already told me now was the time to shut my mouth. What Nia wants is what it’s all about.

  No pressure.

  A minute later I’m puking in front of a flower shop and K-Boy is telling the owner to stop screaming at me, grow a heart, and get out of my face.

  “Shit,” I say.

  K-Boy takes a T-shirt out of his backpack so I can wipe off my jacket. We walk on and K doesn’t stop at his turnoff, but walks me the five blocks to my apartment, watches me go in, then turns and heads home.

  I sit on the stairs to catch my breath before I climb up to my floor.

  now

  I CAN HARDLY KEEP MY EYES OPEN in Brit Lit. I got so much drool on my arm I can’t even try to wipe it on my shirt. I seriously need a tissue or a paper towel.

  I was up all night with Feather, who thinks two in the morning is party time. She just smiles, though, unless you try to put her down, then she screams like it’s the en
d of the world.

  I walked her.

  I played music for her. She likes dance music and can’t stand the Bach for Babies my aunt bought her.

  When the music stopped she screamed or twisted herself up in a bunch so tight it even made me feel cranky. So I talked to her. Told her about what was going on.

  It’s cool when I talk to her. I could be saying anything. I could be talking about basketball or my bad grades in math.

  I could be telling her how she looks like her mom. And asking if she remembers her. It hasn’t been that long ago.

  As long as my mouth is moving, she’s happy. As long as sound is coming out of it, the whole world is just fine for my caramel, sweet-faced, big-eyed baby; who’s killing me, and keeping me so tired I can’t keep my eyes open.

  So in the end I’m busted by Mr. Philips, my Brit Lit teacher.

  When the bell rings, he points to me and mouths, “Stay put.”

  I do.

  And this is how it goes.

  “I hear you’re a father.”

  I rub the sleep out of my eyes, and for the first time, really the first time, notice that he’s one of the tallest men I’ve ever met. What made him want to be a teacher? Hell, he was taller than most pro basketball players.

  Why was he here? Teaching kids like me and kids who weren’t like me but must be just as bad?

  I keep rubbing my eyes ’cause it keeps me from having to talk. At least it seems that way to me. I’m sick of talking. I’ve been talking to a baby all night long and into the morning.

  I notice his khakis and then his blue polo shirt. Then I look at the way the light bounces off his almost bald head. His head isn’t shiny though ’cause he’s got hair growing in. Maybe he’s growing it back.

  Hell. Why do I care? I think I might be going crazy from lack of sleep.

  “I said, I heard you’re a father.”

  Then I wake up. “Yeah, I got a baby.”

  “The mother go to this school?”

  “She used to,” I say.

  He smiles like one of the social workers I had to talk to.

  “Did she transfer to another school?”