The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac

by Kris D'Agostino

  “Yeah. I haven’t been hanging out much with those guys lately. Been trying to help out the family. Things are all wacky at my house,” I say. “Plus, that salvia nightmare threw me off my game. I may never go back.”

  “Big words,” Gabby says.

  “Big man,” I say.

  “It’s all talk.”

  “I’m in a rut,” I say. As I’m talking, it dawns on me that the seed of what I’m saying has been growing in the back of my mind for a while now.

  “You need to get back on track. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “That is what they say. I think I need to make a big change. Something radical.”

  “Change is scary,” Gabby says.

  “It is,” I say.

  “Leave the country,” she says.

  “I might have to.”

  She puts her hand on the table. Not far from mine. I want to hold it but haven’t the guts.

  “You’re confused, I think.”

  “Very.”

  “You need to think about all this.”

  “I do.”

  “How’s your sister?” she asks.

  “Ready to blow.”

  “And your father?”

  “He lost his job.”

  “You must be so sick of the same questions,” Gabby says.

  “Depends who’s asking them.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Did he really shoot you?”

  “He did.”

  “It hurt?”

  “Very much.”

  The bell on the door jingles and jangles as a herd of high school kids spill in. Gabby has to go off and take orders. I watch her. She delivers a tuna melt. She delivers drinks. She grabs my veggie burger and drops the plate at my table.

  “Give me a call,” she says. “If you want.” She’s written her number on the check. I stare at her ass as she goes. I shovel fries into my mouth. When I finish eating, I stuff her number into my pocket. I leave a big tip. I leave contemplating the notion of something big happening in my life, something profound enough to shake me out of the rut I’ve fallen into.

  I get back to work just in time for the start of the afternoon session.

  << 33 >>

  I am lying on the floor listening to black metal. I listen to Tentacles of Whorror. I listen to Codex Necro. I listen to Filosofem. My mother has already come in three times and asked me to turn it down. I ignore her.

  “This is the music of insanity,” she says from the doorway.

  “Then it should replace the cuckoo clock as our family anthem,” I tell her.

  “For you,” she says, handing me the cordless phone.

  “Hello?”

  My mother is lingering in the doorway, listening. I shoo her away with my hand. She doesn’t move.

  “Hello, Calvin? Pam Kittredge here.”

  “Oh, hey, Pam.”

  “How’s everything been? How’s the family?”

  “My father lost his job. My sister’s in the hospital with pregnancy complications. I’m getting over a bullet wound. Everything’s really good.”

  There is silence on the other end of the phone.

  “I’m just kidding,” I say, realizing how insane all of that must sound.

  “Oh. Well. I thought I’d check in with you,” Pam says. “We haven’t spoken in a while and a couple of fantastic places up around Montrose have come in. I could take you around.”

  “Thanks, Pam,” I say. “I’m gonna hold off for the moment. Until everything gets settled around here.”

  “Sure thing,” she says. “Just thought I’d check in. Tell your mother to give me a call Monday—we can get started on the paperwork.”

  “What paperwork?”

  “A few things I need for the listing.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I say. I hang up.

  My mother is still in the doorway.

  “What listing, Mom?”

  My mother touches her face.

  “You’re father and I are putting the house on the market,” she says. “Your brother thinks it’s a good idea. Just to see if we get any interest. We don’t have to sell. But it’s not looking good.”

  She is clearly uncomfortable talking about this and I don’t want to get her upset. I cannot imagine what she is thinking. I’m sure it was not an easy decision for her. She has lived here, as we all have, for more than fourteen years.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I say.

  She shakes her head, says nothing more. She walks away.

  When she is gone, I turn the music back up.

  IT IS EARLY evening and I am in the kitchen when it happens. Sitting at the table skinning fruit as precisely as I can. I carefully work a paring knife around the circumference of an apple. I see how long an unbroken curl of skin I can produce.

  “I could do this professionally,” I tell my mother, who is furiously cleaning the countertops with a Dustbuster, the noise of the motor all but drowning out my voice. She stops vacuuming.

  “What did you say?” she asks.

  “I said I could be a professional fruit peeler. Look at this.” I hold up a lengthy twirl of apple skin. The phone rings. My mother answers it.

  “Oh my God,” she says after a moment. She hangs up. “Okay. That was your father at the hospital. It’s time.”

  She’s frozen in the middle of the kitchen, Dustbuster in her hand.

  “Where’s Chip?” she asks.

  “At work,” I say.

  “Okay. It’s just us. Let’s go.”

  “I’ll drive,” I say. I grab the keys off the table and head to the SUV. I realize my mother has not left the house. I go back inside. She is still standing in the middle of the kitchen.

  “We gotta go,” I say. My mother looks at me. She puts the Dustbuster in the fridge. “Ma, you just put the Dustbuster in the fridge.”

  “I know. I’ll get it later.”

  She moves quickly past me.

  “Can I drive fast?” I ask as I back out into the street. “I feel like I should drive fast.”

  “Just go,” my mother says.

  “I’ll drive fast, but efficient.”

  I try to drive as fast as possible without flipping the car. From the backseat, my mother calls Chip and tells him what’s happening. He says he’ll leave work immediately and meet us there.

  “ELISSA JANE MORETTI,” our mother tells the nurse. We wait while her chart is called up. We are directed to the maternity ward, where they have moved her. Room 1256.

  My father is already with her. He is dressed in khaki pants and a polo shirt, his hair combed to one side. He looks more collected than I have seen him in a while. I hug him.

  I take her hand. My palm is damp and slippery.

  “I’m sorry about all that shit,” I tell her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says, breathing in and out quickly, trying to control the pain. “Forget it.”

  A nurse with blond hair and many earrings comes in. “How far apart are the contractions?”

  “I don’t know,” Elissa says. “Like, ten minutes?”

  My sister looks pale. She yelps.

  “All right,” the nurse says. “My name is Nancy. I’m going to ask you a few more questions so I know where we’re at. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Elissa says.

  “Looks like”—Nancy consults a chart—“your water broke an hour ago?”

  “Yes,” Elissa says.

  “Okay, good,” Nancy says. “When did you last eat?”

  “I don’t know,” Elissa says. “One o’clock maybe. Lunch. I had a sandwich.”

  “Just sit tight. We paged Dr. Fine. He’s on his way.”

  “Thank you,” our mother says. She is standing near the bed. I’m not sure any of us know what to do. Elissa cries out in pain and takes a deep breath, closes her eyes. Our mother moves closer to her, strokes her forehead.

  “I’m going to ask everyone to leave the room so we can get Elissa prepped,” Nancy s
ays.

  “I’m staying,” our mother says.

  “Fine,” Nancy says.

  My father and I head to the lounge down the hall. There are three sofas, a half-dozen cushioned chairs. A line of vending machines. A television bolted to the ceiling. DVD player on a shelf. There are videos to watch while you wait. Last year’s most popular romantic comedies, last year’s box office hits. Christmas wreaths and garlands are hanging tastefully from things. There are blinking lights coiled around the clock on the far wall. Nurses and orderlies and doctors flutter about. Carts are wheeled here and there. We are not the only family having a baby tonight. A handful of other people are here, all with the same look: false bravery in the face of the unknown.

  Twenty minutes go by and Chip shows up. He is dressed in his work attire: suit pants, white button-down shirt, black tie.

  “What’d I miss?” he asks when he comes into the room. He has a small teddy bear with him.

  “Not much,” our father says. “Doctor’s on his way.”

  Nancy comes to the lounge and tells us we can visit a little longer, but once the doctor arrives we’ll have to leave again.

  Chip and I follow our father down the hall to Elissa’s room. Our father walks to her bedside.

  “How’s my little girl?” he asks. He kisses her forehead.

  “Kinda painful here, Dad,” she says.

  Chip puts the stuffed animal in her arms.

  My mother hails a nurse walking by in the hallway.

  “Where’s Dr. Fine?” she asks. “He needs to be here now.”

  “I’ll check for you, ma’am,” the nurse says.

  I slump into one of the chairs near the windows. Our view is of the Hudson River. I see the lights of houses on the far side.

  Another twenty minutes go by before Dr. Fine arrives with Nancy, the nurse, behind him.

  “Sorry for the delay,” he says. “You hanging in there?”

  “I think so,” Elissa says. She winces in pain. “That was a big one,” she says.

  Dr. Fine takes my sister’s blood pressure.

  “It’s high,” he says. He rubs his big hands together.

  “My feet hurt,” Elissa says.

  “Let me take a look,” Dr. Fine says. He pulls back the sheet. He feels her feet. “They’re swollen,” he says. “Okay, I want to get moving. We’re going to really keep a close watch on things. We may have to move quickly and take the baby sooner than expected.”

  “Is everything okay?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Dr. Fine says. “Everything’s okay.” He tells Nancy to start an IV. “A precaution against Elissa becoming dehydrated.” He checks her blood pressure again. Another nurse arrives and an ultrasound transducer is strapped to Elissa’s abdomen to monitor the baby’s heartbeat.

  “It’s time for everyone to leave,” Dr. Fine says.

  “I want Mom,” Elissa says.

  “Sure, baby,” our mother says.

  We are slow to leave—my father, Chip, and I. The men. We shuffle back to the lounge. I lie on one of the couches. Chip paces back and forth in front of the vending machines.

  “I don’t remember being this anxious when you were born,” my father tells me, taking a seat in the row of chairs across from me. It is three dismal hours before Nancy comes into the lounge and talks to us. “How is she?” my father asks.

  “Dr. Fine is doing everything he can. There’ve been some unforeseen developments.”

  “Unforeseen?” I ask.

  “The doctor is going to perform a C-section to get the baby out,” she says.

  “What are you telling us?” Chip asks, standing up.

  “I don’t have all of the information right now,” Nancy says. “More specialists are being called in to assist. I assure you I will be back to keep you updated.”

  “I want to see her,” my father says. He starts to head out of the lounge.

  “Mr. Moretti,” Nancy says, “you can’t go into the delivery room right now. We’re going to send Mrs. Moretti out here to wait as well. The doctors need space to work. I assure you that everyone is working as hard as they can to make sure Elissa and the baby are safe.”

  My father doesn’t say anything. Smile. Frown. And Nancy is gone again. We try to relax. Soon my mother is escorted into the lounge to join us. We ask her questions, trying to figure out what is happening, but she has little information to give us. Elissa’s blood pressure is too high. The doctors are doing what they can. I lie back on the couch. My shoulder aches, remembering its own recent trauma. After a long time I manage to doze off.

  I OPEN MY eyes slowly. To flaming light exploding from the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling, and then it all comes into sharp focus. My father is on his feet. He is talking urgently to the nurse in front of him. Urgency in the air. Chip looks at me.

  “What’s happening?” I ask, but my voice gets lost somewhere.

  When they come down the hall, I know. I don’t know how, but I know. Something lacking from their faces. A certain way the nurse won’t look right at us when she talks, but rather looks past us at something on the wall, some faraway speck of light only she can see. We huddle together and listen. She speaks from a place of great altitude, a place where I long to be. And still, I know. The way Dr. Fine puts his hands in his pockets. The way his eyes seem to hold maps of red inside their curving. It is complicated, he says, or rather, a complication. Preeclampsia, someone else says. They didn’t see it coming. There was no way to see it coming. Her blood pressure got too high and there was nothing they could do. The baby lived. Emergency cesarean saved the baby. A little boy.

  And when you see your sister and she is in front of you one minute and behind a curtain the next and gone the next, you are suddenly reminded how nothing is ever the same for very long, and all those things you dwelled on yesterday are today just empty, trivial irrelevancies. All your worries are taken from you and replaced with what feels like a heart attack, a power outage of all the things you’re made of. You try to get through the swinging doors and into the room where you last saw her. They are wrong. It’s someone else. You’ll show them. You’ll find her and she’ll be sitting there in the bed and you’ll point and say, See, that’s her. She’s fine. But you know. And no one saw it coming. Hypertension and special surgery and words you don’t know the meaning of and then you can never say another thing to her. The hospital becomes a different world. This is the way it goes. You are looking at the linoleum tiles. Green and white and green and white. You think of all the days to follow. How will you fill them up?

  Imagine the scene in any number of ways. However it’s supposed to play out. Picture these things if it helps. Make a list so you won’t ever forget: Mother collapsing into Father’s arms. He tries his best to hold her up with what strength he can gather, he himself not terribly far removed from the hospital. Some other family’s congratulatory balloons are suspended in the air and they seem like laughter. Taunting, joking laughter. All sound is going away now. Brother is crying. He is in the corner crying so that maybe no one will see. There is a failure of bravery now. We are not so strong.

  I ASK HIM, “Are we going to make it?”

  I ask him again and again.

  I keep asking, and he tells me, “I think so.”

  In the hospital, we stand for a while. The two of us. In front of the glass wall that separates outside contagions from the newborns, rolled in white cloth, their faces scrunched and pink, eyes clamped shut, dealing with the shock of being squeezed from their safe, dark void. Slowly grasping the fact that they’ll never be so comfortable again.

  We stand awkwardly.

  “It doesn’t seem real,” he says.

  “No,” I say. “It doesn’t.”

  “Which one?” he asks. “I can’t read from here.”

  I scan the names.

  “He’s that one there.” I point to the second crib from the left.

  I look at my father. His mustache is tidy and handsome. His face has most of its roundness back
, most of its color. His hands seem like the hands of a man who is getting older, but they no longer look like the hands of sickness. More and more he is starting to get his looks back, his old self. The man I’ve known all my life. Only now his eyes are filled with sadness. A new pain he hadn’t known existed up to this point.

  And here we are. He looks over at me and does the half smile, half frown I have come to know so well in twenty-four years. His mustache twitches, and after a while he turns back to look at the babies. His hand finds its way to my shoulder, where it stays for a long time.

  And then, surprisingly, there is silence. Silence for a long time. Silence in the car coming home from the hospital. Quiet, dark houses drifting by. A silence in the driveway, where I hear our footfalls on gravel. And in the house, in the living room, on the stairs, to the bedrooms. Stillness echoing and deep. It is like coming home after a long trip, a readjustment to something familiar but at the same time foreign and distant and cold. I walk from room to room, touching things. We are home, but home is a loaded, relative word and it doesn’t really feel like home at the moment. It feels like someone else’s home. And the silence only leads to more silence. My mother sits in her bedroom with the television on mute. My father sits in the family room with the television on mute. Chip stays longer at the gym. My grandmother cleans around us, trying to maintain some level of normalcy in the house. No one has much of anything to say. It takes too much effort to think of anything to talk about except the one thing. But when it comes to her, what is there to say?

  Take-out food and casseroles from friends and from people on the block and movie rentals and condolences at the supermarket and time off from work and all of us silently blaming ourselves, thinking we could have done more or said more or stepped in on her behalf somehow. I listen to records without hearing the words. I dwell on this fact: the last real conversation I had with her was an argument.

  << 34 >>

  For two weeks, most of what happens has an unnatural fluidity. I don’t go to work. They are very understanding. Arham is placed in the hands of a substitute. The baby, a little boy, James Jr., like she wanted, comes home after spending his first three days in a neonatal incubator. He is healthy, they say. My father hangs the mobile from the ceiling. It dangles above the crib, which we have set up in her room.