Coming Back to Me

by Caroline Leavitt

  All that day, she didn’t feel like doing anything. Luckily the baby slept late, and when he woke up, he seemed in a good mood. She fed him a cold bottle even though Gary had told her not to, and when he didn’t fuss, she nodded at him. “Good going,” she told him. She set him on a blanket in the middle of the floor, with a few rubber toys. “Amuse yourself. Be independent.” He gummed happily at a yellow duck.

  When he slept, she slept, and she didn’t realize until Gary came back and gave her that pinched look that she was still in the same clothes she had slept in, that she had forgotten to do a wash and the baby had no more clean clothes left.

  Suzanne had been living at the house for only three weeks, but Gary was starting to panic. He had made a serious mistake bringing Suzanne here. She was no help. He couldn’t count on her to do the simplest things. The laundry was never done, and when it was, the whites were streaked with pink because she never separated anything, his shirts shrunk or were dappled with bleach. And the house—the house was a wreck. Dust swept across the floor like tumbleweeds. Cracker crumbs speckled the bathtub and soda cans were stacked in almost every room. This woman was inescapably messy. He found bits of Suzanne everywhere he looked: mascara wands in the kitchen, her socks in Otis’s stroller, who knew how they got there. Her long black hairs drifted onto the living-room chairs, onto the kitchen table. She used up all the gas in the car and didn’t bother to refill it.

  And worse, she was always moping. He didn’t need that—and Otis didn’t need it, either. Hadn’t he read somewhere that babies mirrored the faces presented to them? Otis had enough to contend with with Molly not being there with him without seeing Suzanne’s sour face. Why couldn’t Suzanne behave? Why couldn’t she do what he himself did—put herself on automatic pilot, do what she had to just to get through the day? He was depressed, too, but he had Otis and Molly to think of. And so did she.

  He hated that he had to bang on Suzanne’s door every morning to get her up, and even then, he wasn’t so sure that the minute he felt, she wouldn’t crawl right back to bed. Sometimes during the day, he’d go to a pay phone and call her. “I just wanted to ask if there was any mail.” He was lying. He wanted to make sure she was up and about. He wanted to see if he could hear Otis crying in the background. “Oh, and I forgot, could you add cheese to the grocery list?” They didn’t need cheese, but he thought it would nudge her memory, it would make her remember to go shopping. “Can do,” she always said, and her can dos always turned into didn’ts. More and more lately.

  Gary was always exhausted. One evening, he was walking across the road, not thinking, when he heard a shriek of brakes, and he froze, staring at a blue car slamming to a stop. The driver, a woman in her twenties, flew out of the car, her hands waving in the air. “Oh, my God!” she screamed. “What if I hadn’t stopped?”

  Frozen, Gary let himself be led to the sidewalk. A few people stopped, staring at him. “Why weren’t you looking?” she shouted, suddenly furious at him, her face full of blame. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Gary sank onto a bench. Horrified, he gripped onto the wood. He felt the hammering of his heart, the raw scratch of his breath. “You’re not hurt, right?” the woman said. She studied him, and then turned, getting back into her car. “Next time, watch where you’re going!”

  He heard the roar of her engine, the way she peeled out into the street again. He planted his hands on his knees and hunched forward, suddenly reeling with nausea. He lifted himself up, sucking in air, forcing himself to breathe normally, to calm. I can’t be killed, he thought in sudden amazement. I have to be all right. If I died, who would take care of Otis?

  He got up, stricken. Suzanne was Otis’s next of kin. He’d be leaving Otis to Suzanne. I’m alone in this, he thought.

  He’d have to do something. He’d have to be more careful. And he’d have to have a talk with Suzanne. He’d be calm, since she got so testy if he so much as asked her to wash a dish these days. He’d lie and tell her what a great job she was doing—on the whole. She’d have to rally. She’d have to be more help because the truth was, he couldn’t do this alone. And she was all he had.

  But the night he decided to talk to her, he came home to find her sprawled on the sofa, quickly stubbing out a cigarette. Otis was lying on a blanket, in the same romper he had been wearing that morning when Gary left. “I asked you not to smoke in here.” Gary felt something boiling inside his stomach. He lifted up Otis. “He’s wet,” he accused. “How long has he been in this diaper?” Suzanne gave him a sullen face.

  He took Otis into the bedroom to change him, grabbing for the blue plastic wipes box, flicking it open with a finger. Empty. “Suzanne!”

  She came into the room, leaning against the door, her arms folded. Molly was right to have put Suzanne’s number in that acrylic puzzle. He had been the fool to break it open with a hammer.

  “Where are the wipes?”

  “They’re not there?”

  “You’re here all day with a baby and you don’t know?”

  Suzanne drew herself up. “Look, I have a lot to do around here—”

  Otis began to wail and Gary hastily picked him up and rocked him. “I am so sick of this.”

  “Fine. So am I.”

  She was leaning against the doorway, sulking. It made something rush through him in fury. “And I’m sick of you! You were brought here to help, not to be another baby I have to take care of! What do you think is going on here? I can’t take care of everything myself! I need you! Otis needs you! And so does Molly!”

  Suzanne snorted. “Molly doesn’t need me. Molly doesn’t even know I’m there.”

  “Shut up! Don’t you say that! Don’t you ever say that!” Flustered, he carried Otis to the bathroom and wiped the baby off with a washcloth. He came back into the baby’s room and set Otis down, grabbing for a clean diaper. Otis screamed. “You’re upsetting Otis!”

  “I’m upsetting him?” Her face tightened with anger. “This is hard for me, too, you know. Molly’s my sister. How do you think I feel?”

  “You can’t just sit around here and be depressed!”

  “Fine!” Suzanne whipped around. “I won’t.” She stormed out.

  “Wait! Where are you going?” Otis began to wail again, his voice rising in pitch. Gary heard Suzanne slam the door of her room. He heard her opening and closing drawers. He was so scared she’d leave that he was frozen. What was he going to do now? What was any of them going to do? And then Otis began shrieking, but it was a different kind of shriek, one he had never heard before. Otis flailed in his arms. His face was red, coiled up. And suddenly Suzanne, her face white and scared, came into the room.

  “What’s wrong with him?” she whispered.

  Gary sat in the rocker. Otis screamed even louder. Gary put one hand on the baby’s head. “He’s not hot.” Otis shrieked and balled his hands into fists. Gary looked helplessly at Suzanne.

  Suzanne warmed a bottle but when she tried to give it to the baby, he angrily batted it away. “Otis! Otis!” Gary called.

  Otis stiffened and caught his breath and screamed.

  “That does it. Something’s wrong!” Gary handed Otis to Suzanne and reached for the phone. “I’m calling the doctor.”

  He was on the phone for only five minutes. “Colic.” He shook his head in disbelief. “He says it will pass.”

  “How does he know without seeing him?”

  “He said it’s common.”

  “What causes it?”

  “Nothing. They don’t know.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Suzanne said. “There must be something we can do.”

  Otis screamed and kicked against Suzanne.

  “Gerta! Maybe Gerta knows.” He grabbed for the phone again. “Gerta?” he said. His voice was tight, desperate. He nodded at the phone.

  “Oh. All right.” He looked defeated. “You’re sure.”

  “What? What did she say?”

  “She has never dealt with colicky babies.
She told me that babies know better than to act that way with her.” He shook his head. He gave a half laugh.

  “Give me a break. What else?”

  “The baby—he—” Gary made his voice accented the way Gerta’s was. “The baby--he know his mother is ill and this is the way he pray for her.” Gary’s voice bubbled up. “She thinks Otis is praying for Molly!” He started laughing, doubling over. “This baby, he understand!” Gary laughed so hard he started to cough. Suzanne stared at him, and Otis shrieked and flailed and then, as abruptly as it started, he stopped laughing.

  It was Suzanne’s idea to take the baby for a drive. The baby screamed and thrashed in Gary’s arms the whole way outside. “Sit in back with him,” Gary told Suzanne. She opened up the baby’s car seat and stepped aside while Gary fit him in. The baby’s arms beat like propellers against the seat. His shrieks were like a siren. This is how people go nuts, Suzanne thought. Even with her fingers poked into her ears, she could still hear him.

  Gary twisted in his seat and surveyed the two of them anxiously. “Go,” she said.

  They were only a block away when the baby snuffled and suddenly stopped crying. Suzanne took her fingers out of her ears. Gary turned and stared at him and then stared at Suzanne in amazement. He stopped the car. His eyes met Suzanne’s. The baby’s eyes flew open. His face reddened and he began to wail. “All right, all right, you’re the boss—” Gary said, and started the car again.

  He had gone only half a mile when Suzanne tapped him, pointing a finger toward the car seat. The baby was asleep.

  “Let’s just drive.” Gary said. He wound around the same route over and over again. Suzanne didn’t mind. There was something hypnotic about being in the backseat. Then he started driving farther out, past the diners, the dance joints, the bowling alleys. She looked at everything from a dreamy distance, as if she had never lived here at all. “It’s still one big mall out here, isn’t it?” Suzanne said. “I never figured Molly would stay in New Jersey.” Suzanne shook her head. “At least she got out of Elizabeth.”

  Gary turned the wheel. The baby’s mouth flopped open. “She wanted to stay in Elizabeth. Then we found our house here.”

  “No way! She was miserable in Elizabeth!”

  “Not when I met her.”

  Gary fiddled with the dials. Surprise, oh, surprise, some good old down and dirty country blues, the kind she had listened to night after night. She used to wail along to it. Gary kept talking. She was barely listening to him. She couldn’t have cared less how he met Molly and fell in love, how they found the house—all that mind-numbing suburbia life story stuff that he was telling more for himself than for her.

  “I sky-dived a few times.”

  Suzanne sat up. This was halfway interesting. “You’re kidding. You?”

  He half smiled. “Ah-ha, the truth comes out what you think about me.”

  “Why’d you stop? You got scared?”

  He shook his head. “Being scared was the point. I was testing myself. Trying to see if I could really do it. And I could. If I had money, I’d do it again.”

  Gary kept talking, changing the subject now, and Suzanne began to listen to him with a little more interest. His shtick still was pretty boring, the usual stuff about college and travel, but every once in a while, like a bright jewel in the sand, he’d say something that surprised her out of her stupor——that he had learned to drive when he was a little kid. That he liked kung fu movies. And then she would start to listen a little harder to him.

  It was four in the morning, they were both exhausted. “I guess we can go home now,” Gary said.

  The baby was still sleeping when Gary parked the car. Suzanne quietly got him out of his car seat and out of the car, and as she was standing, she suddenly felt Gary beside her. “I’ll take him,” he said, and she felt his hand, broad and smooth, along her back, and as soon as he took it away, she circled both her arms about herself. She followed Gary into the house. “I can take it from here,” Gary whispered, leaving her standing alone in the living room.

  By six in the morning, barely seconds after Gary left to go see Molly, the colic was back. Well, so what. Suzanne didn’t mind driving the baby around all day. He slept and she got to just go, she got to pick the music she wanted to blast, and she kept her cigarettes nice and handy on the seat beside her. Driving was the perfect excuse. She didn’t have to do the laundry or the shopping. Even Gary knew taking care of the baby’s colic was more important. The baby would sleep enough so she could haul him into a fast food joint with her so she could grab a burger and fries, eating quickly before he woke and started cranking up all over again. And then they’d go home and wait for Gary and he’d take over for an hour while she went to see Molly, and then before she knew it, she’d be back in the car and on the road.

  She had to admit that she liked the night drives better than the day ones. She had always thought of herself as a night person, and maybe her idea of that wasn’t exactly riding inside of a car, but at least she was out.

  Gary could drive like a pro when he wanted to, sliding in and out of lanes, speeding here and there. You had to admire driving like that. He talked and talked about a million different things, and he began to ask her questions. Not about her life with Molly, thank God. Nothing that would make her feel guilty or want to jump right out of the car. He asked her these weird questions, almost like school essays, or those dopey Reader’s Digest things: My Most Unforgettable Character, by Suzanne Goldman. “Tell me the worst customer you ever had,” Gary insisted.

  Come on, she thought. But she found herself talking to him, telling him about the high-priced call girl who paid extra to have her pubic hair dyed, about the biker who wanted KILL FOR THRILL shaved into his hair. She had never talked about her work all that much to Ivan. She used to cut his hair, taking extra pains, making sure it looked good because she knew how important that was to him. But afterward, he’d get up and fuss with it. Once, she saw him nicking at the sides with a nail scissors. “A monkey could do what you do,” Ivan had once said. But Gary paid attention. He whooped and laughed and asked questions. He was such a good audience that he made her want to talk even more. He made her remember an eighty-year-old woman who wanted her hair spiked and punky, a kung fu teacher who kicked in her wall when she refused to take a free lesson instead of payment. Gary laughed and hit the steering wheel in appreciation.

  “Hold on.” Gary pointed to a diner. “I’ll be right back.”

  He wasn’t gone long, but when he came back, he had an ice cream cone and an ice cream sandwich. He handed her the cone, strawberry, her favorite.

  “How did you know I liked strawberry?” she said.

  “It’s the only ice cream you buy.”

  She looked at him, checking to see if he was being sarcastic, but all he was doing was taking bites from his sandwich.

  Gary drove, half paying attention, bopping one hand on the steering wheel to the music. Suzanne began to like best the times around three or four in the morning, when there was hardly anyone in the road, when it seemed like there was hardly anyone in the world except for them, sitting in the car, telling stories to each other and laughing. She could have driven all night then.

  The baby had the colic for two weeks. And counting. And then one afternoon, when Suzanne was driving around, when she stopped to try to get a hamburger, the baby woke up and for the first time in a long while, the kid wasn’t crying. He blinked at her, as if he were awakening from a very long dream. “Well, if it isn’t Rip Van Baby,” Suzanne said. He was good in the stroller. He was good when she wheeled him into the diner, and good while she ate her burger and fries. He was so good she decided to go check out the record store next door, and he didn’t cry there either.

  All that afternoon, Suzanne braced for the baby to start screaming again. She drove for an hour and then, as a kind of experiment, took him home. He yawned and batted his hands against her. She set him in his playpen and he cooed at his toys. And when Gary came home,
the baby was calmly examining his toes, blinking up at Gary as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Gary crouched down beside the baby. “Does this mean what I think it means?” Gary looked at Suzanne.

  “Well, hallelujah!” Suzanne said. But her voice sounded hollow to her, like the inside of a metal can.

  chapter six

  Suzanne began to feel as if all her senses had been thrown right out of whack. Her morning coffee tasted like straw. Her favorite perfume smelled so much like oven cleaner, she instantly scrubbed it off. Gary could be at his computer, but she swore she saw him in the doorway, watching her, waiting. She swore she heard him right behind her, saying something to her in a low voice that made her shiver.

  Usually, she could sleep until noon, but suddenly, without even trying, she jumped out of bed at six, the same time Gary did. Coincidence, she tried to tell herself, as she rushed to dress, pulling on her prettiest dress, grabbing for her brush, and snapping it through her locks so fast she brought up small sparks of light. Just whom did she think she was brushing her hair for? Why was she slashing on lipstick, coating on mascara? What in the world was she doing?

  Gary was her sister’s husband, a man so not her type it wasn’t even funny.

  She was scared about Molly, the same way he was. That was all it was that was bonding them. She was lonely. Sleep-deprived. Sexdeprived. Love-deprived. Look at Patty Hearst. Women fell in love with their captors all the time. Maybe this wasn’t the same thing, but it almost was. This was a crush, and she’d just have to get over it the same way she’d get over a cold, and that would be that. She’d have to find more things to keep her busy, to keep her mind off him. She had the house under control. She and Otis were doing fine, working on a kind of schedule. Maybe she could get clients, cut some hair. Get her mind on work instead of Gary.