The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  He took a deep breath. “I want to get to know the baby,” he said. “I want to come home.”

  I was going to say, “This isn’t your home anymore.” The words were right in front of me, and the decision was as easy as saying them. I didn’t feel conflicted or troubled. This was just how it was. But in the tiny moment before I could speak, as I was drawing in the breath I needed, a car alarm went off on the street, and Maxie started to cry.

  It was my cue to get moving, so I moved. I was in Maxie’s room in a flash. I always ran to her when she woke up from sleeping. I felt a need to reassure her that I’d always come quickly when called. She was in the crib, on her back, red-faced and pissed, and I gathered her up and said little things like “Hey, Maxie girl. It’s okay. It’s okay now.” I sat in the rocker, and we started to nurse. Only then did Dean show up in the room.

  “That was your car alarm, wasn’t it?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Do they serve any purpose besides waking babies?”

  But he was lost. He was staring at Maxie. She was nursing away, doing her thing. And he was transfixed.

  She was a sight to see. She was seven months now, and she’d turned into a Gerber baby. Her little head was covered in fine yellow hair. She could sit up, and eat handfuls of spaghetti, and she was just starting to work on crawling—all kinds of amazing baby tricks. I was in awe of her. She’d more than doubled in size since she was born. And she was a big flirt. I kept waiting for her to stop nursing to smile at Dean, but she didn’t.

  “She looks just like you,” he said, and came a little closer. “She doesn’t look anything at all like me.” Then he gave me a big smile and said, “Lucky for her.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  After a while, he said, “The whole breast-feeding thing’s pretty cool.”

  If he meant “cool” to mean “Isn’t human biology amazing?” I had grappled with that concept and already moved on. If he meant “cool” to mean that he found the whole thing titillating, I did not want to know.

  “Don’t talk to me about breast-feeding,” I said.

  He had lots of questions about Maxie. Was she healthy? Was she a good eater? Did she take after me or him? How much did she weigh? How tall was she? Did she have any teeth? Did we nurse in public?

  Most of his questions were ones that only a person who knew nothing about babies would ask. He wanted to know if she was walking yet, if she ever ate junk food, if she called me “Mama.” I found it hard not to answer him in an increasingly irritated tone of voice. If he had been here, he would know all this. And about an encyclopedia’s worth more.

  Dean wanted to hold her, but I made him sit on the sofa first. He suddenly seemed like the kind of person who might actually drop her. I put a blanket down on his lap, mostly because his jeans looked like they hadn’t been washed since before he left, and I set her down in his arms. We all waited to see what would happen, Maxie included. I had an impulse to get my camera but decided against it. How would I put a picture like that in an album? “Here is a photo of you just born. This is you eating your first solid food. And this is the first time your daddy ever set eyes on you.” Of all the moments in Maxie’s life to capture on film, this one, I decided, might actually rank dead last. And then the matter was truly settled because she decided to cry. She could always tell when she was in the care of someone who had no skills. I snatched her away from him and started on the bobbling moves I’d perfected over the months.

  “You really know what you’re doing,” Dean said.

  “It’s not hard to know more than you,” I said.

  “Can I skip out on the insults? Can I come back later?”

  “Yes, it appears that you can,” I said.

  “I’m trying to be nice, here,” he said.

  It was almost impossible for me to make even neutral comments sound anything other than acidly sarcastic. I said, “I just don’t see what nice has to do with anything.”

  Dean threw up his hands as if to say, I give up. Then he asked if he could take a shower. I wanted to tell him he didn’t get one until I got one—and make him take Maxie until I had soaked in the tub for an hour, shaved every errant hair on my body, read Country Home, and painted my toenails. If he was going to show up here, he could make himself useful. But there was no way I was leaving Maxie with him unsupervised. She might survive, but she’d sure be miserable. And there was no reason to make her suffer just to punish him.

  He went off to run the water, but turned back at the door.

  “Oh,” he said. “I saw a neighbor of yours when I went out to my car and he said to tell you hello.”

  I froze. “What neighbor?”

  “A guy. I don’t know. He was walking his dog.”

  And then I had to know: “Was it the first time you went out to your car, or the second time?”

  Dean thought about it for a minute. Finally, he decided. “The first time.”

  “So you chatted with him in your boxers?”

  He nodded as if that hadn’t occurred to him before. He watched my face for a second. “Do I know him?”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t know him. But he knows you.”

  It was all I could do not to drop the baby and sprint down the street to explain. But I held still. I didn’t want to do anything that would invite any questions from Dean. I wanted a bit of privacy on that subject.

  Dean went to shower, and I snuck over to Gardner’s, but there was no answer. I stood on the porch for a long time, hoping he might come to the door or possibly drive up in his truck, but I gave up when Maxie started to get antsy. It would have been a great time to call Meredith, but I didn’t have my cell phone with me, and she never answered anymore, anyway. I decided to walk to Claudia’s. I needed somewhere to go that was not my house.

  “He’s not still there, is he?” Claudia said when I told her.

  “He is. He’s there, and he’s probably smoking on my porch by now.”

  “Well, you have to get rid of him.”

  “I was going to.”

  “But?”

  “But then he said this thing about wanting to spend time with his daughter. And I started to worry. Is it wrong of me to deprive Maxie of time with her own father just because I am mad at him?”

  “Maxie doesn’t care.”

  “She doesn’t care now, but she’ll care when she’s older.”

  “So he can visit when she’s older.”

  “What I mean is, if he’s in the mood to bond, shouldn’t I let him bond?”

  That one stumped her. Usually, Claudia was a great source for unequivocal opinions. But this time, I made a good case for confusion. On the one hand, he was her father. But it appeared that he was going to be a substandard father. And the standard wasn’t even that great.

  “Does he seem apologetic?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not really. He seems to be acting like nothing happened. Like yesterday I was pregnant, and today I have a seven-month-old baby. It makes me want to light him on fire.”

  “Don’t let him stay at your house,” Claudia advised.

  “I’ll try not to,” I said.

  But I did let him stay. He played the “daughter” card. He wanted to see her. He couldn’t afford a hotel. He would sleep on the couch and do all the dishes. He missed me. He wanted to help out. I meant to say no, but I said, “Fine. Don’t get comfortable.”

  The truth is, once people have been in your heart, it’s hard to keep them out. It was like he had a key. Even though I hated him, I couldn’t seem to treat him like other people. It made me worry for my mother, who had her date with my father tonight.

  I had stopped by Gardner’s house on the way home from Claudia’s, but still no answer. I thought I might try again later, but once I’d agreed to let Dean stay, I wasn’t quite sure how I’d explain that to Gardner. Later came and went, and I didn’t wind up going over.

  And that’s how it happened. That’s how Dean and I started living toge
ther again. I had pictured him coming home at least a thousand times. I had pictured it with me angry and him sorry, with me crying and him crying, with me pouting and him begging, with me silent and him hysterical. But in every scenario, there was always a great release—a dramatic fight that climaxed in some kind of understanding about what we were all about.

  What we were doing now was the opposite of every scene I’d come up with. There was no great fight. I was angrier than I’d ever imagined. And that anger never seemed to go away. It just buzzed around me, through every conversation. In my fantasies of his return, I always imagined he would find something to say to me that would really work—that would explain the whole thing so well that it would put everything to rest. But he not only didn’t have a perfect explanation, he had no explanation. Even one night, after he’d been back for three days, when I asked him point-blank, all he could come up with was a shrug.

  “I panicked,” he said.

  When I used to want him to come home, I had thought it would be a relief to have things back to “normal.” I had thought our little family would feel finally complete, but instead, now, three days in, it felt like Maxie and I had a houseguest. I had thought Dean would help me with the baby, as a partner, and that I’d get some relief. Instead, my mother stopped visiting, because, first, she thought I should put him to work, and, second, she couldn’t stand to see him. He wasn’t working. He had quit his job when he left town, and now he was back with his band, so he just lounged around all day, strumming his guitar. He did do some dishes a couple of times, so that was something. But none of his cleaning outweighed the mess he made.

  And I would never, even for a second, leave him with Maxie. He didn’t trust himself, and I trusted him even less. My mother could do babies. She had raised three, and even if her skills were a little rusty, they came back pretty quickly.

  “Just like riding a bicycle,” she’d said proudly after she got her first newborn diaper on Maxie.

  “Without the wheels or the bell,” I’d added.

  And I, who had never even done any babysitting, had just finished seven months of a total-immersion baby course. Like a language class, but with screaming.

  But then here was Dean, showing up, thinking he could pass the test without having studied. Without having read the books or even having come to class. It was like he skipped an entire semester, showed up for the final, and expected an A.

  Well, he wasn’t getting an A from me. He’d be lucky to pass. I watched him. He’d hold Maxie out in front of him and stare at her blankly while she cried. Or he’d set her down on the sofa with some pillows around her, as if there were anything safe about doing that. All of it made me even angrier. He had no skills and, worse than that, he had no intuition.

  Was this how he’d been parented? Had he never been held? Even if his mother had been the type to leave a baby crying in a crib, surely his gaggle of nannies had found some way to compensate. I couldn’t believe that he really had no instinct to pick Maxie up. I could only come to the conclusion that he wasn’t trying. That he was communicating to me, in some important way, that he not only wasn’t trained for the job but didn’t want it, either.

  Maybe Maxie was picking up on my feelings. They say babies are very intuitive. She didn’t seem to like him much. When I’d hand her to him, most often she’d cry. Sometimes she’d stay quiet for a few minutes. But then she’d make a decision: Nope. Not working. It was as if Dean had missed a crucial window. If we’d both been bumbling idiots together, she’d have been patient with us. What choice would she have had? But now she had a choice. And she chose me. Or my mother. Or even our mail lady, who stopped to chat occasionally while we were out on the porch swing. Anybody but Dean.

  28

  Somehow, on the fourth day after he’d come home, which was coincidentally Halloween night, Dean climbed into bed with me. He must have used every ounce of stealth he possessed, because I slept as lightly as a hummingbird, and I didn’t even know he was there. When I woke, he said, “Boo,” and started kissing my neck, in the darkness, in our bed, the very bed where Maxie had been conceived, the very bed where he’d done the very same thing a hundred times before. He kissed me until, against my better judgment, I started kissing him back. It was like listening to an old song that I’d heard over and over. It took me back. It was dark, and Dean was here, and Maxie was asleep. With the exception of his new whiskers, it was like my old life again, before everything changed.

  Then he was pressing up against me, and then he was taking off my shirt, and his shirt, and then we were there all tangled up. And even though I was convinced for weeks and weeks after Maxie was born that I would never, ever have sex with anyone again, and even though my poor nipples had been to hell and back, and even though I wasn’t sure that there was anything at all I even liked about Dean, and even though it seemed clear that I was neglecting the possibility of a much better man just a few houses down, we slept together.

  And it was good. I was so reluctant, and it took him so long to change my mind, that by the time he did, I was melted. It also had the added allure of being something slightly against the rules. I was barely speaking to him, so getting naked and rolling around was definitely a little naughty. But what can I say? He talked me into it.

  My poor body had been so neglected. My whole existence, in fact, had been so devoid of any kind of pleasure—even the basic ones like a good meal or a long hot shower or a good night’s sleep, not to mention something as fancy as an orgasm—that I was an easy mark. My brain said no, but my body said yes, please, and the next thing I knew, it was five in the morning, Maxie was up, and I was throwing him out of the bed.

  “Out,” I said, pushing him, still asleep, toward the edge with my feet.

  I went in to nurse Maxie back down, and as I sat in the rocker, I decided many things: One, I felt like I was cheating on Gardner. Two, it was crazy that I felt that way, given that Dean had been The One up until not so long ago. And, three, sex with Dean was not going to happen again.

  But it did happen again. Even though I told him not to, he climbed into my bed the next night and the next. And I was too wounded and too lonesome and too hungry for any kind of tenderness to say no. Every morning, I told Dean it wasn’t going to happen again, and every night, it did. He’d barely been back a week, and we’d already established the pattern of the nighttime booty call.

  But I stayed mad. Those quiet moments in the darkness of our old bed had almost nothing to do with what happened in the house during the day. I stayed furious, and he stayed stupidly nonchalant, and that was our new life.

  I wondered if this was what it meant to have sex like a man—or like a bad man. My emotions and my actions were not running parallel. I was also too mad to worry about whether or not he was having a good time. It felt strangely powerful, though somehow I figured it probably wasn’t.

  I never did talk to Gardner about Dean coming back. Once I’d slept with Dean, I didn’t even know what I would say to Gardner. And that night of dancing faded from my memory very quickly. In a matter of days, it became almost like something I’d seen on TV. So I started checking for him out the window before I set out with Maxie, making sure the coast was clear. I never walked in the direction of his house. I went a little bit into hiding.

  I even lied about it to my mother, who had not been by my house since the night Dean showed up. She claimed she’d been very busy.

  “Do not let him near your bedroom,” she told me on a call from her cell phone.

  “Mother!” I said.

  “You know that saying ‘Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?’”

  “You don’t want him to buy me!” I said. “Even I don’t want him to buy me!”

  “I just don’t want him using you for sex.”

  “What if I use him for sex?”

  “Women never use men for sex, sweetheart,” she said, as if she were having to explain to me, at this late date, that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

/>   “The point is,” she continued, “that you should keep your milk for yourself.”

  “Let’s not talk about this,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said.

  She not only didn’t want Dean in my bed, she didn’t want him in my house. She said he had shown his true colors. “Don’t try to pretend like nothing happened,” she told me. “Because it did.”

  “I’m not sure that you’re one to lecture about getting back involved with exes,” I said. It was too mean, but it was true.

  “Your father and I had one meal. He is not living in my house.”

  She had a point, but he’d also told me on the phone the day after that she’d stuck out her hand at the end of the night, but he’d taken it and kissed it instead. “She liked it,” he said. “I can always tell when she likes things.”

  My mother was pulling up to the St. Regis, so she had to go. I was left wondering if she had been so absent because she didn’t like what I was doing with Dean or because she didn’t want to have to talk about what she was doing with my father.

  It begged the question of what, in fact, I was doing with Dean. And the answer was pretty simple: Playing house. Giving myself all the things I’d wanted and then had taken away. We had the baby, and the house, and the sex. I wasn’t sure I still wanted those things, but it just felt good to have them. And feeling good was hard to resist.

  And then one day, when he’d been back in my life barely over a week, he told me he had some news. His mother was coming to visit. And he was picking her up at the airport in two hours.

  “She’s coming here?” I said.

  “She wants to meet Maxie,” he said.

  “She’s coming today?” I said.

  “I meant to tell you earlier,” he said.

  “But?”

  “But I forgot.”

  “Your terrifying mother is coming here, and you forgot to tell me?”