Mother's Milk

by Charles Atkins

  ‘You can’t keep this up,’ Ruth said, her voice rich with the slow open vowels of rural Georgia. ‘Do you have any dark rum?’ she asked as she proceeded to throw ingredients into the mixer without benefit of measuring cups or spoons – butter, vanilla, egg yolks, flour, baking soda, salt, chopped walnuts, raisins.

  ‘Not likely,’ Barrett said, as she cradled Max, marveling at his silky hair … and not wanting to think about how he was probably too blond for people to think that he was the child of her and her half-Cuban husband.

  ‘What about nutmeg?’

  ‘Sorry. I’d have thought you’d know by now, if you don’t buy it, I probably don’t have it.’

  ‘Shameful. I know I taught you how to cook. Cinnamon?’ Ruth persisted.

  ‘Maybe, I think I made eggnog a couple years back, check in the cupboard over the silverware.’

  Barrett repositioned her chair so she could watch her mom as she fussed in the kitchen. She gently rocked and let herself enjoy the moments of peaceful nursing, a blissful island in the too-fast chaos of her life. Since returning to work two months back it had felt as though she was on some hellish treadmill and that no matter how fast she ran, she was constantly falling behind. The fact that Max was born a month premature, her water breaking in the middle of a case conference she was chairing at Croton Forensic Hospital, was almost a symbol of how everything happened just too fast.

  She rocked and marveled at the efficiency of her mother in the kitchen, like a dancer, trained by years of raising two children and dealing nightly with a bar-room full of thirsty patrons. At nearly fifty, Ruth looked like a woman in her thirties, even though Barrett knew her dark auburn hair now came from a bottle. ‘So what have you and Max been up to?’ she asked.

  Ruth leveled her gaze at her daughter. ‘Well, considering I didn’t get off work till four A.M., we took a nap until ten. I thought this afternoon we could take a walk through the park and do a bit of shopping. You in the mood for a pork roast? Or how about a spiral ham, sweet potatoes, and collard greens with bacon?’

  ‘You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you? Fried chicken last night, you’ve used my bread-maker more in the past few months than—’

  ‘Dear, it was still in the box, as was this gorgeous mixer. Which, if you’re wondering what to get me for my birthday …’

  ‘Duly noted,’ Barrett said.

  ‘You need to eat,’ Ruth said, ‘if not for yourself, for my little prince.’

  ‘So that’s what this is all about, fatten me up for Max.’

  ‘Do you know how many calories you lose through breast milk? And you were saying you were worrying that you didn’t have enough.’

  ‘Point taken, but I’m not sure the Paula Dean diet is the way to go.’

  ‘You watch what you say about Paula. I love her, in fact this banana-bread recipe is off her website.’

  ‘The woman would deep-fry water,’ Barrett said, ‘it can’t be good for you.’

  ‘Moderation,’ Ruth shot back, ‘all things in moderation,’ and then, lowering her voice, ‘Not that you’d know a thing about that.’

  ‘I heard that.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Mom, please don’t start.’

  ‘I didn’t say a word … but if I did it would be to say that you’re working too many hours and too many days, and with a new baby and no husband you’re not going to be able to keep this up. Trust me, I know.’

  Barrett shook her head, as she looked at Max, who seemed to have had his fill. She reached for one of the many blue terry-cloth nappies Ruth had whipped up out of old towels and laid it over her shoulder. She draped him over it, and ran her hand over his soft smooth back, rubbing, patting, and waiting for her reward of a juicy belch. ‘We do what we have to do. And what I have to do is work and make money to keep a roof over our heads. And don’t tell me you don’t know what that’s like.’

  ‘Of course I know what that’s like,’ Ruth said, pulling a brown-paper bag from out of a drawer. ‘I just didn’t want you to repeat my mistakes.’

  Barrett looked at the milky wet spot on the nappy and gave Max an extra few pats to see if anything more needed to come up. A random thought zipped through her head. Mission accomplished. She’d made it home, nursed; a quick glance at the clock showed she’d probably just make it back in time. ‘Mom,’ Barrett said, ‘I don’t think you really made mistakes. You married too young because you got pregnant and that’s what girls in Williamson, Georgia, were supposed to do. You had no choice, and getting me and Justine away from that place and our father was the bravest thing anyone could have done. I don’t remember a lot about him, but I know that he beat you, and that I’d hide under my bed, and I still get nightmares about that night he came and tried to take us back.’ Her eyes misted. ‘Those weren’t mistakes, if I can be even half as brave.’

  ‘Hush,’ Ruth said, wrapping biscuits in tinfoil and throwing them into the paper bag along with a bottle of iced tea, a sandwich, and something else covered in foil. ‘I was out of my mind. I don’t think I was brave, more scared than anything, and too young and stupid to realize the risks I took. I knew if I stayed with your daddy it was only going to get worse.’

  Barrett felt torn, desperate to get back to the office, but hungry for these scraps about her early childhood and the family her mother had left when she was only twenty, and which she rarely spoke of. ‘Don’t you ever miss them?’ she asked, having seen her mom weep over Christmas cards that arrived each year from her mother – a grandmother Barrett couldn’t even picture.

  ‘Only my mother,’ Ruth said, ‘but just like I don’t want you to repeat my mistakes – and yes, I made my choices and some were just plain stupid – I won’t repeat hers. I remember something she used to say about my father after he’d yelled at her, or called her stupid, or embarrassed her in front of company, she’d tell me, “I pick my battles.” Problem is, I don’t think she ever won any. And wouldn’t you know, the first time I fall in love, it’s with a man just like my daddy only better-looking and meaner. That night we left Georgia, I truly believed he was going to kill me. I can’t even remember what set him off. All I could think with him pounding away at me,’ she continued, now pouring batter into just-purchased loaf pans, ‘was, I’ll be dead and who’s going to take care of my girls? When he finally passed out, I just grabbed you and Justine, got in the car, and drove. I remember thinking, Please God, just let me win this one battle.’

  ‘I remember some of it,’ Barrett said. ‘Your face was horrible, by the end of the ride you had huge black eyes.’

  ‘I was a mess, twenty years old, two babies, and a Chevy station wagon that blew its transmission on the Bowery.’

  Barrett glanced again at the clock; 12:15, her paperwork was not going to get done, but she loved the next part of the story. ‘And that’s when you met Sophie and Max,’ she said, reluctantly standing, as loving memories of the elderly Polish couple – Holocaust survivors who had taken them in – flooded her. She rubbed her nose against her baby’s and put him back down in the pen. He looked at her wide-eyed, his arms reached toward her, and he tumbled forward.

  ‘I love that you named the baby after him,’ Ruth said, heading toward the door as Barrett buttoned up.

  ‘If he’d been a girl I would have called her Sophia … I miss them both so much.’

  ‘Me too,’ Ruth said, while trying to stuff the too-full paper bag into the gaping side pocket of Barrett’s briefcase.

  Barrett was about to protest – she had no time for lunch – when her eye caught the blinking light on her phone. ‘Who called?’

  ‘Someone from the hospital, some kind of review board or something.’

  Barrett’s island of calm evaporated, replaced by a dull dread. She pressed play and heard a secretary’s practiced lines. ‘Dr. Conyors, this is to inform you that the six-month review for James Cyrus Martin IV is scheduled for July 15th. If you wish to give testimony at the hearing please respond to the office of the Release Board no late
r than June 30th.’ She left the number and the machine clicked off. She looked at her mother. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I figured you’d hear it later. Will you go?’

  ‘I don’t know … I have to get back to the office, love you, Mom,’ she said, making a fast exit, running down the stairs, needing to get out of there and away from Ruth’s searching eyes. The mere mention of Jimmy Martin filled Barrett with a fear that seemed endless. And the secrets that she’d kept from her mother, who knew only that James Martin and his twin Ellen had kidnapped Barrett and her sister, and killed a number of people, including Barrett’s husband, Ralph. Barrett had killed Ellen Martin in the process of breaking free and Jimmy had been imprisoned in the forensic hospital, from which he should never have been released. And what Ruth Conyors most crucially didn’t know, and what Barrett would never tell her, was that Jimmy Martin had raped her, albeit through artificial insemination, and that he – not Ralph – was Max’s biological father.

  THREE

  With minutes to spare, Barrett made it back to her ninth-floor office with the bagged lunch her mother had stuffed into her briefcase. It was an odd mix of Barrett’s usual super-healthy regimen and Ruth’s comfort foods – a turkey and Swiss on homemade multigrain, honey-mustard oil-free dressing, lettuce, tomato, with an unsweetened bottle of iced tea, also four cheese biscuits, still warm wrapped inside the foil, and two pieces of cold fried chicken left over from yesterday. She was starving and quickly popped one of the buttery biscuits into her mouth. She could hear her mother’s voice as she savored the first bite – You’re losing the weight too fast, it’s no wonder your milk is drying up. ‘God, this is good,’ she said aloud, as she picked at the crispy skin on a chicken breast. She settled back into her chair, cracked open the iced tea, and sank her teeth into the chicken as the intercom buzzed and one of the lights lit. Her secretary and front-door watchdog, Marla, told her, ‘Dr. Houssman on line two.’

  With her mouth full of deliciously juicy chicken, she picked up. ‘Hi, George.’

  ‘I got your message,’ her eighty-something-year-old mentor started. ‘Thought I wasn’t going to call you back, didn’t you?’

  ‘One can hope,’ she said, trying to swallow and take a swig of iced tea.

  ‘Are you feeling any better?’ he asked, honing into the heart of the talk they’d been having, even before the birth of Max.

  ‘Well, some yes and some no, it rips me apart every morning when I have to leave. He follows me with his eyes, and he can keep his head up now. He starts to cry the second I’m out the door; it’s heartbreaking. But I have to work, I have to make money. I try not to think about how everything hangs by this tiny little thread. If I don’t bring home a paycheck, it’s like a house of cards that starts to collapse … my house, Mom’s health insurance, Justine’s apartment.’

  ‘How often are you getting attacks?’

  Barrett felt the pounding in her chest, and a lightheaded feel from starting to hyperventilate. ‘Mostly I can control it. Exercise helps, and at least when I’m back in the kung-fu studio or out running I can shut my mind down, but it never stops. It’s like when people used to talk about having nervous breakdowns, maybe there’s this edge and I feel like it’s not so far off. Problem is, I can’t afford to have a breakdown; it’s not in my schedule.’

  ‘I hate to bring this up … there are meds for this.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said firmly. ‘Even when they claim they don’t get in the breast milk,’ she said, feeling fullness in her breasts even having just nursed, ‘you know there’s some; I refuse to do that. He’s got enough going against him genetically, and I swear to God I’m not going to do anything to make it worse. And speaking of which … there was a message on my machine saying Jimmy’s six-month review is coming up next month.’

  George sighed. ‘It would have been so much better if he’d gone to trial.’

  ‘Top lawyers and a ton of money,’ she commented. ‘And he is one of the most psychically damaged people I’ve ever known.’

  ‘Are you getting any sleep?’

  ‘Some, not much. Thank God Max sleeps through the night. So I can’t blame this on him, if anything just watching him helps. Some nights I’ll just stare at him, wondering how something so beautiful could have come out of me. But I still wake up every couple hours and my thoughts go a mile a minute … and my dreams. In the morning I feel like I’ve been running laps, like I’m about to jump out of my skin. Although …’

  ‘What?’

  She took a sip of iced tea. ‘I went on an outreach this morning with one of the social workers.’

  ‘Really? You’re the director now; you could have sent someone else.’

  ‘It was one of my regulars, a young man with schizophrenia, whom I’ve known for years. Seems he picked up a dope habit. Anyway, he called in a panic and begged me to come out. Said he wanted to get back on meds and go to a hospital. I should have known something was up.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘I really like Jerod, one of these guys that under all of the badness he’s been through, and his low-level crimes, mostly to get food or drugs, you know he’s a good person. I mean half the time whatever he steals he gives away. But here’s the thing, he hates being on meds and he hates being locked up; it makes him nuts. So he wants us to meet him down in the Lower East Side, says he’s too scared to bring himself to an emergency room.’

  ‘I don’t like where this is going,’ George said.

  In spite of her funk, Barrett cracked a smile. ‘So we go down there, and we pull up to one of those buildings that if a building inspector ever showed up would be condemned. No working security door, broken steps, graffiti in the hallways …’

  ‘For the love of God, Barrett. Are you about to tell me you dragged some poor social worker into a crack house without a police escort?’

  ‘When you say it like that … what am I doing in this job, George?’

  Houssman chortled. ‘Stop fishing … no one else wanted it, or at least no one competent. So did you find your schizophrenic junkie with the heart of gold?’

  ‘His name’s Jerod,’ she said, feeling a twinge of annoyance, and not liking the way George so easily put labels on people. ‘Not then, what we did find was two suburban-looking dead teenagers, and there was someone else in that building, someone who didn’t want us there.’

  ‘So what you’re telling me is that you nearly got yourself and some poor crisis worker killed this morning, is that about right?’

  ‘The funny thing is, here I’m swimming in jitters, always feeling like I’m on the verge of a panic attack, but not when I was in that building. It’s like all of that had evaporated, and for a few minutes I started to feel like myself again.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ George said dryly, ‘mortal danger as a cure for panic disorder. You should be on meds. You breast-fed for four months, switching to formula is not going to make a hill of beans difference.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then therapy at least.’

  ‘Yeah, right. With my crappy cash flow I’m going to shell out a couple hundred bucks a week for therapy? I don’t think so. Besides, I’ve got you.’ She pictured George, sitting in the living room of his sun-drenched apartment in a dated brown suit, his eyes big behind Coke-bottle lenses, his gray hair uncombed and sticking up at odd angles.

  ‘This isn’t therapy, and you know it.’

  ‘Whatever it is, George, and I don’t tell you enough, but it helps. Ever since I became the director and not just another staff psychiatrist, everything changed here. People watch what they say around me. It’s just different.’

  ‘It has to be,’ he said. ‘That’s the downside of being the boss – lonely at the top.’

  ‘Yeah, and what’s quickly become my least favorite part of this is that all the yearly evaluations are due at the end of the month.’

  ‘Horrible stuff,’ George agreed.

  ‘It’s worse than just that, George. I’ve got three “hosti
le workplace” grievances filed against me with the union, all because some of the docs that my predecessor hired are unhappy with their evaluations. I think it’s a record. The craziest part is that none of the evaluations are bad; I just didn’t give them the very top score – they don’t deserve it. Which reminds me,’ Barrett said, ‘going through my rendition of “These are a few of my least-favorite things,” I’ve got a bullshit meeting with two commissioners in a few minutes.’

  ‘Is Janice one of them?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Be careful,’ George said.

  ‘I know,’ Barrett said, ‘she’s made it very clear that I was not her first choice for this job.’

  ‘True, she was gunning for Hugh Osborn. She’d brought him over from DFYS, I’m pretty sure she promised him rapid advancement. I thought he was completely unqualified and made that clear to the selection committee; she wasn’t at all happy. The politics of that place can drive you crazy. It’s this constant tension because of the dual reporting structure, where it’s both part of a state agency and attached to the medical school as a training site. Both want control and so whenever it’s time to pick a director there’s this huge pissing match over which candidate gets selected, someone from the university or someone from the state system.’

  ‘OK, but based on that you’d think I’d have been her choice; I’ve always turned down faculty positions, not because I have anything against the medical school, but they pay crap.’

  ‘It’s not that, Barrett. You’re too high profile for someone like Janice, who just wants to keep her agency out of the headlines. You write books, have articles published, and occasionally … how do I put it?’

  ‘Get abducted by sociopaths who want to end civilization as we know it.’

  ‘Pretty much. When you chased down Richard Glash last year,’ he said, referring to an escaped convict who had nearly introduced a lethal plague into the Manhattan water supply, ‘you and the forensic center were front-page. Janice has survived three governors and been commissioner of two agencies. And like all political appointees she lives in constant fear. At any point she can be terminated, which often happens after something bad hits the papers. You make her nervous. And while I don’t want to add to your worries, I’ve heard rumblings.’