Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  It was difficult for Nick to go back on the road. The trailer women made it a little easier for him because of the way they took care of Dore. But still, he’d be all ready to leave, and then he’d find reasons to go back into Susan’s room. He’d lift her up for a moment, and then place her back in her crib, and then he’d be frozen at the door, unable to tear his eyes off her.

  When he traveled, he called in to talk to the baby as well as to Dore. He made Dore hold the phone up against Susan’s ear so he could sing to her. He figured the baby would recognize the sound of his voice, the baby would know she had a father who was alive in the world and thinking of nothing but her.

  When he was home, he told Susan stories. Dore would watch him from outside the darkened room, giving him his time alone with his daughter, and the stories he told made her fall in love with him even more. He made up wild things—places where all the cats were psychic and had the power of speech and could tell you your future in soft, insinuating purrs. He told stories about people in Brazil who changed themselves into dogs and horses at will, who could fly from one end of the globe to another in less time than it took a puppy to sneeze. And, too, he told the stories Tom had told him; and as he told them, he remembered his own wonder, and he thought of himself as reconnecting to his father, as passing him down like a heritage.

  Dore waited until Nick was finished, and then it was her turn to tiptoe into the room and gently take Susan. She would sit in the rocker and tell stories of her own. “Peter Rabbit.” “Little Red Riding Hood.” The stories any mother would tell any daughter.

  Nick would never less than adore Susan, but for Dore it was something else. She could never quite relax into being a mother. She was tired all the time; she wanted to sleep through a lazy afternoon instead of getting up to change her daughter or coax her out of a crying fit. She’d watch Nick doting and feel tight twinges of guilt. She kept telling herself it would pass.

  And then, abruptly, Susan began having bad dreams. She screamed and twisted in her sleep, and Dore, thinking she was just hungry, just wet, would go into her room with a bottle and a dry diaper. Susan wasn’t even damp, and she flinched from the bottle Dore offered; she flailed her arms and pushed away from her mother. Dore, terrified, would watch Susan struggling in her crib, and would finally grab her up and pace, singing bits of songs, trying to hush Susan a little. But the baby wouldn’t be pacified. Her face got so red and contorted, Dore feared she was strangling. She called up Flora, who told Dore she had been on her way anyway, that you could hear the baby halfway across the court.

  Flora took the baby from Dore and set her, still screaming, into her crib. She took Dore firmly by the arm and shut the door. “Let her cry it out,” Flora said. “It’s just bad dreams.”

  “Bad dreams?” Dore said. “What could a baby possibly have a bad dream about?”

  Flora shook her head. “I don’t know. It could be just indigestion. Or then again, it could be a sign of something. You might want to take her to a doctor.

  Dore sat up. “What sign?” she said. She remembered the birthmark on Susan’s shoulder. She had rubbed it with mineral oil until Nick had caught her hands and stopped her, telling her the mark was part of who Susan was, and shouldn’t be tampered with.

  “I don’t know,” Flora said. “That’s something you’ll just have to figure out yourself, because sure as all hell, this little one isn’t going to tell you.” She rubbed Dore’s back. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Listen. You hear that? She’s sleeping now.”

  Dore, in the silence, suddenly wanted to sleep herself. She started to get up, but Flora stopped her. “You might start her up again.”

  Dore worried. She took the baby to a doctor, who looked at Dore as though she had three heads when she started talking about signs and nightmares. He told her it sounded like a virus, and gave her a prescription for drops she was to put in the baby’s milk, three times a day. The prescription cost twenty dollars, and when she gave it to Susan, it just made Susan get sleepy faster, and the nightmares occurred that much sooner.

  Dore got tense waiting for the screams to start. Flora was good about coming over—she’d bring her knitting, the kids’ jeans to mend—but all she could really do was offer Dore support.

  Nick was home one afternoon when Susan had a nightmare. He hadn’t really believed Dore’s stories, he had been sure she was exaggerating, but then he heard Susan’s terror for himself and saw what happened to her face. Dore gave him a hopeless look of fear, but he went and picked up Susan and walked her back and forth in the trailer, singing, bouncing her, doing whatever he could think of to soothe, while Dore stood in the hallway, pale and exhausted. Susan didn’t seem to cry as long when Nick was carrying her, and she finally fell asleep right in his arms. He put her back in her crib and she slept through the night.

  Whenever he was home, then, Nick began walking the baby’s terrors away, calming her, taking less and less time to do it. And then the nightmares stopped, as abruptly as they had begun. There was one quiet afternoon, with both Nick and Dore tense, and then another, and then things eased back to normal. “I wonder what that was all about,” Nick said. But Dore, remembering how the baby stiffened in her arms, remembering Nick turning to her with Susan sleeping in his arms, averted her face, taking it all as blame.

  FOUR

  Susan was barely six months old when Dore began to feel guilty. Sometimes she thought it was because of Nick, because of her anger at him. He seemed more in love with his child than with her. He couldn’t go down to the supermarket for a box of Kleenex without taking the baby with him. He had to take her to museums; to drive-ins, where he’d make a soft bed for her in the back seat; to restaurants and shopping malls. He just wouldn’t go anywhere unless the baby went along as well. As soon as he stepped into the trailer, before he even saw Dore waiting for him, waiting for the kisses that should be hers, he was in the baby’s room, teasing her, singing and nuzzling, riling Susan up so she wouldn’t sleep later.

  Dore tried to pull Nick back to her. She put on sheer black nightgowns, she dusted herself with perfumed powder, and then she started seducing him—unbuttoning his shirt, tugging him down on the living-room rug if she had to. She felt it, though, how he somehow wasn’t there, how he kept listening for a voice that wasn’t hers, for sounds she wasn’t making.

  “I’ll just be one minute,” he’d say, bending to kiss her breasts before rising up away from her.

  She’d wait one minute, then two, before storming to her feet. She didn’t have to guess where he was, she knew his face was softened in wonder, that he was leaning over Susan’s crib. But she couldn’t yell at him. How could she? A man had the right to adore his daughter. And it was more than most of the men in the trailer court were capable of. None of them took his kids to the park the way Nick did; not one of them would be willing to spend a whole Sunday just sitting on a blanket with a baby. The children here all belonged to the women who bore them.

  The trailer women saw how Nick doted on Susan, but even so, they gave their advice to Dore. They didn’t discuss children with men. Dore saw the pictures Ruby’s girls drew, taped up on the kitchen cabinets. Ruby was always drawn big and bright, taking up the page with her outstretched hands, her mass of hair, and her smile. But her husband, Danny, who was even larger than she was in real life, was dwarfed on the paper. He had no arms, and in some of the pictures it looked like he was wearing a skirt.

  The first time Dore saw those drawings, she had to sneeze to keep from laughing. She waltzed home and curled about Nick in gratitude. She used to think she knew what Susan’s drawings would look like, but lately she feared that she would be the person dwarfed and disappearing in a drawing. She thought the baby preferred Nick. Susan quieted right down when it was Nick who picked her up. She didn’t stiffen in feeding the way she sometimes did with Dore. Susan would let Nick change her without a fight, and when Nick was away on the road, the baby seemed to know. She’d get cranky, spit up in her crib, and refuse her bot
tle. She perked up only when she saw Nick again, when he asked how his girl was. “Oh, we’re both dandy,” Dore said.

  The whole thing vaguely shamed her so that she couldn’t talk about it, not even with Flora. She told herself she wasn’t a bad mother, there wasn’t one thing defective about her. If there had been, the other women would have picked up on it, they would have noticed it and scolded her. She watched the way they were with their babies. She didn’t think they showed any more love than she showed Susan.

  No, she took good care of her baby. She rocked her and told her stories. She took Susan into the bathtub with her and filled it with bubbles. She’d look at her baby and feel half-dizzy with love. She didn’t know. It was just that whole nightmare period, the way Susan was somehow different with Nick. Dore thought maybe she just needed to get out alone with Nick, without the baby. Maybe when Susan got used to that, Dore could even think about going back to work again. Nick, after all, still had his job. They could hire a girl, just for half the day, just until she got home. Dore remembered Ronnie Dazen’s eyes suddenly, how they had followed her, had seen no one else but her—and despite herself, she blushed with pleasure.

  Nick was uneasy about getting a sitter, but he agreed to it when he saw how unhappy Dore was, how much she wanted to get out alone with him. He wouldn’t hire anyone from the trailer court, though there was certainly a wealth of baby-sitting material there. The girls scribbled advertisements for themselves on colored index cards they tacked up on the bulletin board by the pool. The names blurred from the splash of the water, the slogans (“Leave the baby with someone you know, then what a treat to get up and go”; “Hire me, I’m great, you see!”) grew smeared and inky. Nick didn’t trust any of them. They were too young, too silly. They whispered every time he walked by them.

  So Nick called up one of those services, and there were a few interviews, and finally they hired a high-school girl named Monique Lelac, who came with two references. Monique was tall and pale and thin, studying to be a painter. She was from France, finishing her basic schooling before returning. Nick thought she was great. The first time she came over, he saw how she moved right toward the baby, how she pulled two soft cotton blocks out of her bag and handed them to Susan.

  Nick insisted on giving Monique a detailed lesson on how to use the fire extinguisher. He showed her the numbers of the police and fire departments tacked up right by the phone, and he showed her how to light the stove, making her do it while he watched. Dore told him he was being silly; that if they wanted to make the movie, they should go now.

  Their first few times out alone, Nick called Monique from the theater, from the restaurant. He didn’t relax until they were back in the trailer and he saw for himself how Susan was sleeping. “You see?” Monique said. “Everything is fine.”

  They hired Monique every week. Nick began trusting her enough not to call her at all, and Dore finally relaxed. She found she liked her daughter much better when she didn’t have to spend every minute of the day with her, when she could have Nick to herself for a whole evening. It felt like they were courting again. They held hands in the dark of the movies. At restaurants, she would lean over and nip him on the neck. One evening he surprised her by driving out to one of the lakes and parking with her. There were other cars scattered about, just teenagers, fumbling in the back seats, passing Thunderbird wine back and forth. But Nick had brought champagne and he spread out a soft plaid blanket across the back seat, and when the two of them came home, they were both flushed, their eyes glittering like mica. “Have a nice time?” Monique asked.

  No one in the trailer court went out as often as they did. No one could afford to, or maybe no one wanted to. Sometimes, when Nick was away for a week, Dore would call Monique just so she could get out and go to a movie by herself or go shopping. It was too hard being without Nick and having to stay in the trailer all day. “A baby needs attention,” Flora said. “She gets it,” Dore said, balancing Susan in her lap.

  Her guilt made her try harder. She’d put Susan into the backpack Nick had bought and take her to the park. “What a good girl,” she crooned. “My little plum.” She’d turn and look at Susan with rare delight. She’d start to feel wonderful. And then her back would begin to hurt so she’d have to unbuckle the backpack and carry Susan in her arms. By the time she got home, exhausted, hot, Susan burbling and happy, she’d need to curl up around the heating pad to uncramp her muscles. She tried to talk to Susan, saying, “Listen, I’m your mother and I love you, I do.” She told her stories about mothers who loved their babies so much they created whole magic kingdoms for them. And then she’d lie back in bed and remember how complete she had felt carrying Susan, how content and whole, and she’d try to figure out just why that feeling had left her, just where it had gone, and why love wasn’t enough.

  Dore felt the women watching her when she went out nights with Nick. She sensed eyes behind the curtains studying Nick when he walked Monique out to the car to drive her home, her long white legs flashing in the moonlight. The trailer girls who baby-sat resented this usurper. They snubbed Monique every chance they got, deliberately gathering in front of Dore’s to talk, becoming sulky and silent when Monique walked past. Girls who had once come out of now here to help Dore carry groceries from her car, to help with the stroller, seemed suddenly to evaporate.

  Ruby, whose girls baby-sat more than anyone, came to visit Dore less and less, and when she did come, she was critical. She noticed the baby’s wet diaper before Dore did; she commented on the brand of baby food Dore used, telling her stories about glass being found in the jars. She judged everything, but she never once came out and asked why Dore hadn’t hired one of Ruby’s own girls to tend her baby. Monique even made the mistake of putting her own index card up on the bulletin board for baby-sitting. It was ripped down every time she tacked it up, and of course no one ever called her.

  The thing about Monique was that she didn’t even like kids. She needed occasional work that paid decently, and baby-sitting was the one thing she knew she could get. People were morons. All she had to do was say two words with her French accent and suddenly she was in hot demand. It was all such baloney. No one ever bothered to check her references, which were coaxed from old beaux, written in false hands.

  She didn’t do much with Susan. She set her into her playpen and then studied for an hour or so before she got on the phone. She would have invited her American boyfriend over if it weren’t so far out of the way, and if the people in the court didn’t watch her so. Instead, she phoned him. She knew how to time things, how to gauge when Nick would call, irritating her with a million stupid questions, reminding her over and over about the damned fire extinguisher. He didn’t even keep ashtrays around, at least not that she could find. He had babyproofed the place so well it once took her a half-hour just to find a sharp knife to cut some cheese. But at least after he had called, she knew she was free for the night. An hour before they were to return, she’d tend Susan, changing her, giving her a bottle. She put Susan to bed briskly, with no stories, with only a snap of a kiss. She was a good enough baby. She didn’t cry that much, and despite herself, Monique was actually beginning to like her.

  They were dancing, moving among the kids and the bright lights, when Nick decided to call Monique again. He was gone for only a moment, and when he came back he was vaguely irritated. “She’s been on that damned phone for hours,” he said.

  “Well, she’s a kid,” Dore said. “What do you want?”

  They left early, though, and when they walked into the trailer, Monique was curled on the couch, reading a botany textbook. The place was so quiet, you could hear the ticking of the clock. “You’re home early,” she said.

  Dore brushed by the baby’s room and peeked inside. Susan was under a light yellow blanket, her soft white toy lamb beside her. When Dore walked back to Nick, she said, “She’s perfectly fine,” and then she went into the kitchen for some water.

  “And no more phone calls that take
two days,” Nick said to Monique, handing her her money.

  “What two days?” Monique said. She stretched, waiting to be driven home.

  Probably no one would have noticed anything for a while if Nick hadn’t decided to go and check on his daughter himself, if he hadn’t taken Dore’s peek one step farther, bending down to kiss Susan, to stroke back a soft wisp of hair, the same inky black as his own.

  The name for it was crib death. A simple catch in the breath, a death so soundless you could stand right over a baby and never even notice that one moment there was an intake of breath, and the next, nothing. It was a mystery unprotected by fire extinguishers and phone calls, by rope-tied drawers and covered wall sockets.

  Monique had insisted on coming to the hospital, terrified that she had done something she shouldn’t have. Even after she knew it was crib death, she still couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes, and when she left, she left alone, hailing a cab in the darkness.

  Nick and Dore were sleepwalkers. They rode home not speaking, not touching. It wasn’t until they reached the entrance of the court that Dore got hysterical, that Nick remembered, almost as if waking from a dream, that Susan wasn’t going to be there. His hands started shaking; he violently swerved the car around, careening, driving like a crazy person to the Holiday Inn at the next exit.

  He felt safer in the hotel. He kept telling himself it was somehow a mistake, that none of it was really happening. He’d wake up in the morning and realize his error and then he’d owe Monique all this money for spending a whole night watching over his daughter, his girl. He tried to breathe normally. He sat on one of the beds in the room, beside Dore, but her eyes were glassy with pain, and when he touched her, she flinched.