Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  He downed three cups of black coffee and he tried to eat a little bit of everything to please her. He teased his eggs with the tines of his fork, he crumbled his biscuits up and scattered the pieces around his plate so it would look as if he had eaten some of the food. Every time he lifted up his fork, he would tilt it toward her, he would insist that she have some, but she always shook her head, she always pulled back.

  After he left, swooping down to kiss her, she gathered all the plates and pushed all that uneaten food, all that waste, into a big red bowl. When she went outside to get the milk from the milkbox, she would throw out the breakfast. All the time they were together, he never ate breakfast, and she never stopped cooking it.

  Isadora was born on a Friday. It was early morning and Duse was in the kitchen clearing away the uneaten breakfast when the first labor pains began. It felt like wires twisting within her. Duse experimentally sucked in her breath. The doctor had told her about timing the pains, about calling him when one pain followed on the edges of another. Martin was gone, he wasn’t there to yell at her, to pick her right up and take her to the hospital.

  Duse stood heavily and took a clean white egg from a bowl. She found the yellow cloth and carefully wrapped it about the egg, securing it with a piece of pale yellow yarn, and then she went outside. The pains were coming faster now, harder, and she was panting unevenly, the ends of her hair were damp, dark red with sweat. She sucked in a breath and threw the egg toward the back yard. She didn’t think it needed to clear the roof—the land, she reasoned, would be enough. She had to follow the path of the egg, trace it to make sure the egg was intact and uncracked. She found it in the back bushes, still whole, and she prodded it with her toe, further into the greens. It would rot unnoticed, she thought.

  She returned upstairs. She had followed Olya’s dictum for a powerful baby, now all she had to do was to somehow bear the infant. She went into the bedroom and got the piece of oilcloth she had bought a month ago at the five-and-dime for a new table cloth, and she set it by the bed. She stripped her sheets from the mattress, lumping the bedclothes on the floor. She smoothed the whole oilcloth on the bed. Duse took two scarves and tied them to the bedposts, jerking them tight, giving herself something to pull on against the pain.

  She took off her clothes and lay flat on her back, her hands on her stomach. She kept glancing at the clock, terrified Martin might come home early and find her like this, terrified that he wouldn’t. She suddenly wanted him, wanted his hands holding hers, his voice reasonable, pricking out her fear and soothing it from her. It would be good to have someone like him with her. She stared at the ceiling. She could see the kitchen phone in her mind now, she could feel the way the plastic receiver would slide in her hand. She could pull herself up, could call him, say she was afraid, say she felt something hot and crouching deep inside of her, readying itself to spring. She could call the doctor, could allow him to take her to the hospital, into all that white. A hospital might be sterile and unmystical, but it would be safe, she thought. Maybe it wasn’t such an identity sin to have your baby taken from you, to not see it being born. And then the pains began coming in earnest, and Duse lurched forward, her fingers stretching, threatening to rip right from her hands as they pulled for the scarves.

  The baby took six hours to be born. Duse was slick with sweat, her voice cracked and hoarse. She had ripped one of the scarves into long fibers with her clenching. It frayed; it was dark with her sweat and terror, stained. She was afraid someone had heard her shouting, and had called the police. It didn’t matter. She had seen her baby, had cut the umbilical cord herself with a pair of sewing scissors that she kept by her bed. She hadn’t been sure how to sever it, she had hacked at it before it cut, but the baby seemed to be fine. She peered down at the infant lying across her chest. A girl. That wet sloppy little thing was alive and it cried.

  “You hush,” she said, stroking its face with the side of one finger, crooning to it until it seemed to calm. She lifted her head up a little to look at it, shoving back handfuls of her wet tangled hair. The baby’s eyes were closed, the breath even. It was sleeping. “Little girl,” Duse said, and then she pulled a sheet from the floor and settled it over the two of them, and then they both slept.

  4

  Martin didn’t get home until after midnight. He had had emergency dental surgery—some scrappy-faced kid, no more than ten, had been dragged in by his mother. He was screaming, wincing, he wouldn’t let Martin near him but kept his face buried down into his chest like a nesting bird. Martin had to push him into the dental chair, had to get the story from his mother. She was embarrassed. She said that it was her fault, that he had been complaining about a tooth pain for over a month, but she had thought that he just wanted attention, that he didn’t want to have to go to school. “He’s that way,” she insisted. Martin’s dental assistant had held the boy down while Martin jabbed in the Novocain. The kid would never have relaxed enough for hypnosis. When he finally got that mouth open, he saw the abscesses, the rot. “Goddamn,” he said, and the woman fluttered her hands.

  “You sit outside,” he told her. “Read a magazine.” He couldn’t look at her. She enraged him, he didn’t want to breathe in the same air she did.

  The surgery went badly. The boy kept moving, and he ripped out one of the stitches Martin had made, and Martin had to start all over again. Gradually, the boy grew exhausted, he struggled less, drifted more, and Martin could finish some of the work up. That poor kid would be coming back for months, he thought.

  He was furious with that woman. He gave her boy back to her and handed her a card with the next appointment, but he wouldn’t shake her hand, he kept his hands flat at his side, and he wouldn’t return her smile. When she started to say how grateful she was, he turned his back on her.

  He drove home cursing, but as soon as he stepped inside that house, something softened. He wanted Duse. He needed the feel of another skin, the beat of her heart. He didn’t care whether she was sleeping or not, how pregnant she was. He went into the bedroom and reached for her in the dark, but the shape beneath his hand was unfamiliar, and he started, a queer fishy feeling swimming up inside of him.

  Martin’s hand, sightless, twitched for the light. He blinked against it. For a moment, seeing all that blood, seeing the way it greasily pooled up on the oilcloth, he saw the damaged mouth of the boy again. He was sick; he braced a hand on the nightstand and then, suddenly, he saw the baby. He was very still. He had never seen anything this new. It couldn’t possibly be his, not this little, this grimy. It had her red hair already dusted on its scalp, but the eyes were shut, scrunched up so you couldn’t see the color.

  It didn’t look the way he thought a baby would look and he was vaguely ashamed that it smelled. Its skin was coated, funny and splotchy with cheesy white material, speckled with dots of blood. He reached out a hand to touch it, to see its sex, hesitated, and touched Duse. She was hunched under a sheet, her hair tangled and matted about her shoulders, and there was a fresh cut on her lower lip. She blinked and frowned at his touch, she was sluggish. She stretched, mumbling something at him, and the baby started suddenly wailing. Martin stepped back from the bed, away from the sound that was splitting his thoughts. He needed the baby to be silent again, just for a moment, so he could place himself, so he could think. That crying was like some whirlpool sucking him in, deepening and dangerous. Duse looked down at the baby and then up at him.

  “Girl,” she said, smiling, whispering. “Oh, I love you for this,” she said.

  “Sweet God,” he said, sitting gingerly on the far edge of the bed, squinting at the two of them, his hands balled in his lap. “What in hell happened? Why didn’t you call me? Where in hell was the doctor?”

  “Hey,” she said, pulling her arms about the baby who was gasping with sobs. “You’re shouting.”

  Martin stood up. “It’s not me, it’s the baby,” he said. “What’s wrong with it, why is it crying like that? Can’t it stop? I can’t hear mysel
f thinking here.” He pushed words at her, he turned them until they were arguments. “You could have died. I scoured the city for the best damned doctor. I wanted you to have everything, everything. What were you thinking?”

  She rocked the baby. She hummed something deep and cool within her throat.

  “Animals have their babies by themselves,” he spat out. “They just go right ahead and drop them in the field.”

  She looked at him; her eyes became slits. “I was born on the kitchen floor,” she said.

  He fiddled with his hands. “I’m sorry. It—it’s just that the baby could have died. You could have died. How did you expect me to live? And Jesus, you must have been in pain with nothing to put you out, with no pain killer—”

  “I was aware,” she said.

  “But Duse—”

  “The baby’s fine. I made sure of that. I took care.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “There’s no such thing as birth insurance.”

  He reached out a hand, wanting to touch her, but when she started to laugh, his hand stilled. He could see that laugh traveling in her body, could see how it relaxed and warmed her, and then she dipped her head down toward the baby, who stopped crying. Duse laughed again and lifted up one of the baby’s tiny fists and stroked each finger out flat with her thumb.

  “Look at that palm, would you,” she said. “Innocent of any real lines yet, just these few little creases here that’ll smooth themselves right out and then develop into the real thing.” She nuzzled the open palm. “Then we’ll see,” she said.

  “We’ll see what?” said Martin. He wasn’t really hearing her. He was suddenly very tired and he sat back down on the bed again, sliding his hand toward her, an inch away from contact. Duse flattened one finger against her mouth, a vertical line of flesh. “The baby’s drifting off to sleep. Look how sweet she is, just like new milk.”

  “How would you know what new milk is like,” he said. He wanted to hold her, to be held, but she was bent over now, centering the baby on a clean edge of bed, peeling the oilcloth free. All that flesh in his bed. She was talking to it, too, but not in the kind of babytalk he heard most mothers use. She spoke to it as if it were her equal. He shifted position. Her body hid the baby from him.

  “Should you be doing that?” he said helplessly. “Don’t you want me to draw you a bath, change the sheets? Let me help. Please.” She shook him off. “Let me hold her,” he said.

  “Let her sleep,” Duse said. “There’s time.”

  He didn’t see any room for himself on the bed, and anyway, the sheets were mottled with blood from the oilcloth. He felt, too, that they were scented with birth, with something that hadn’t been there before, and it frightened him. He went into the kitchen to call the doctor, but the line rang and rang and didn’t catch and he found himself cursing. What kind of a doctor didn’t have some way to reach him, some kind of answering service? Duse was right. He didn’t think much of that doctor either. He went back into the bedroom. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he said. “I’ll bet you’ll feel better if you took a bath, cleaned yourself up.”

  “I just want to sleep,” she said. “I’ll think about being clean tomorrow.” She nestled deep into the sheets. She crooned to the baby, rocking it in the crook of her arm.

  “I should let you have the whole bed to yourself tonight,” he said hesitantly. “Shouldn’t I,” he said. When she didn’t answer, he went on. “You need lots of rest. You might sleep better alone.”

  He went to the closet and tugged down one of the heavy wool blankets. He loved the yellow ones, he called them “super covers” and he would wrap them over his head so that they heated up all the night air. Duse never liked anything that heavy on her, though, and she wouldn’t sleep with them on the bed. He took a super cover and a sheet and went into the living room and made up a bed for himself on the sofa. He straightened the sheets mechanically. They were too long for the short horsehair sofa. The sofa would scratch him right through the sheets anyway.

  When his bed was finished, he lay flat on top of it, staring at the ceiling. He waited for Duse to call him, to ask for a kiss, a hand to grip, just for a moment. He heard his own name bouncing in his head, walled in by his own skull. He got up and padded back into the bedroom. She was still fussing with the baby.

  “Duse?” he said, and she waved an arm lazily at him, her eyes still feasting on that infant. He went over to kiss her hair, her neck, he started to use force, to push her down until she had to look up at him, she had to see.

  “I’ll be sleeping on the couch in the living room,” he said. “So you can rest. But you can call me, if you need me,” he said. She nodded.

  He went back to his bed, but he couldn’t sleep. He heard the tug of the light chain from the bedroom and then he heard that low mysterious voice of hers, the code she kept in her tone. His eyes were very open, very wide, as he breathed in the night air and pushed it out again, and all the time he sensed something moving toward him in the darkness, as untouchable as any shadow, and it frightened him.

  He didn’t go to work that weekend. He pushed that worry away from him. He let Duse idle in bed with the baby and he had a new doctor come out and examine the two of them. Duse had let him sponge-bathe her earlier that morning, had even made fun of him as he dipped water on the sheets, as he struggled to clean her face, her arms. She wanted to get up and take a real bath, but he said that he didn’t know anymore if that was such a good idea, that he’d feel better if she just waited and let the doctor take a look at her first. “Oh pooh,” she said. She wouldn’t let him bathe the baby, but took the sponge and cleaned it herself, all the time humming to it.

  The doctor fussed over both of them and Martin ran out and bought a big blue enamel baby crib. He thought it would put lights into Duse’s eyes, but when he wheeled it into the bedroom after the doctor had left, she fretted. She stroked the wood, she read it like Braille, looking for splinters, for the bore marks of insects.

  “She’ll fall right through the slats,” Duse said. “She’ll feel strange sleeping in this. She’s too little, Martin. I want her in bed.”

  He wasn’t crazy about sharing his bed with a baby. He went over to Duse and teased out a piece of her hair. Like fire on his hand, he thought. “We can hold her in like human cribsides, I guess,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, pulling back, her hair sliding from his fingers, completely her own again.

  He tried, but he couldn’t relax. He lay on his back as close to the left edge of the bed as possible. The calm wood floor crept up into his field of vision. His arms were weighted against the sheets, his legs in knots. He was convinced that he might steamroll the baby without knowing it. He would prop himself up and stare in wonderment at Duse, who flapped and rolled in sleep, her face unlined and simple. He slept guiltily, jerking himself awake, half expecting to see his baby pancaked out on the sheets. This crazy fear killed his usual desire for Duse; his face became drained and fatigued, his eyes dark and bagged.

  The two of them, mother and daughter, were up before he was. He let the smell of breakfast pull him from bed into the dim morning light of the kitchen. Duse was feeding the baby a bottle. She was sitting in a wood rocker. He was suddenly giddy with feeling, with the realization that this tiny thing was part of him, that right at that moment pieces of him were moving within it. His blood, his bones, maybe his dreams, too. He felt a smear of tenderness and he reached out a thumb to stroke that pale baby cheek. He had just felt a whisper of flesh when Duse pushed his hand away. “She’s eating,” she said.

  He tended his own wounds. He made his own breakfast. He could bide his time, he thought. The baby was still a baby, still helpless. Duse couldn’t always have her arms wrapped about it like a flesh cocoon, and she couldn’t stop Martin’s eyes, either. He could capture the baby’s glance and put everything he felt into his sight. He told himself the baby understood.

  It always astounded Duse how quickly she came to love that baby, how she couldn’t
get enough of it. She was always hovering over the crib, not interfering, just watching, just being there. She stopped worrying about responsibility, about dependence—that baby was complete as far as she could see, it was perfect. It knew what it wanted, it cried for food, for a clean diaper, for a hand on its stomach. Duse became convinced that babies were just born knowing everything you needed, that it was only growing older that made that knowledge leave, that pushed it from you as the organs swelled and took up room. Everything just had to be rediscovered.

  The baby didn’t have a name. “We can call her Estella after my mother,” Martin said, but Duse made a face. “Well, what then? You choose,” he said.

  “I won’t have to,” she said. “Just give me time.”

  He didn’t question her. Instead he went to work and called midday to see what was going on. He bought a dozen pink baby announcements and sent one off to Anna with a snapshot of all three of them, neatly forgetting to put down a name, writing only Baby Michaels. He had a picture in his office, too. Evenings, he was content to watch Duse and the baby, to feel himself a father, a part of something.

  Every morning, as soon as Martin was gone, Duse studied her daughter. She trailed one hand over the surface of its skin, between its toes, through the downy hair on its head. It had a name, a name that was all its own choice. She was sure babies were born carrying their rightful name. Anna’s mistake had been in thinking that a name could shape a baby, instead of the other way around, instead of a baby shaping its name. Duse had grown into her own name and it was too late to change, but she wouldn’t cheat her girl. She’d give that baby a chance to somehow reveal to her its rightful name, its own self. It would be Duse’s job to interpret the signs. She might know the name by the way the baby flinched when she said Sue, by the way she cried if she said Merry.