A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

by Peter Ho Davies

Can they go through all that again? Each month’s small bloody despair makes him fear a larger one.

  He wonders: When does trying again become trying again and again and again? Become simply trying?

  And then, finally, she’s late—a day, two, three. She pees on a test stick, sets a timer. While they wait, she reminds him of an early date, one of their first. But what makes her think of it? “I was late then, too! Forty-five minutes or more.” When she arrived she was flustered, anxious, expecting him to be mad, but he was just relieved. “I was fine, I had a book. Except I was worried about you,” he told her simply. Her hair was dark with sweat, he recalls. “That’s when I first loved you,” she says now. “Because I wasn’t angry?” “Because you waited.”

  It’s the best sex of his life, her desire so sharp, so zealous, even if it’s not for him. Perhaps because it’s not for him. He can lose himself, abandon himself. The best sex of his life, yet he’s relieved when she conceives again, and it’s over.

  * * *

  The pregnancy is a vigil. They walk the long hospital corridors as if to the gallows. They brace themselves for test results. They don’t talk about what they’ll do if it happens again. Perhaps it will be a vindication. Perhaps it will be only what they deserve.

  * * *

  Their copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting reappears at her bedside. Whenever he saw her reading it before, he liked to cover his eyes: Spoiler alert!Now, he says nothing, expects nothing.

  * * *

  She never had morning sickness before; now she throws up before every test.

  At nights, she clings to her body pillow; he stares at the ceiling fan. In the gloom its three still blades look like the outstretched wings and tail feathers of a giant hovering bird. Eagle. Vulture. Stork, he thinks. The stork of Damocles . . .

  * * *

  A boy this time. The result of one of the tests. They tell no one. They put the ultrasound in an envelope in a drawer in a desk. They don’t discuss names. At a dinner party when a friend asks why she’s not drinking, his wife says, If I told you, I’d have to kill you.

  We’re taking the Fifth, he explains, making a joke of it. Even the grandparents are on a strictly need-to-know basis. At a stoplight on the way home from a checkup at the start of the third trimester, they look at each other: Are we now, she asks, or have we ever been? Meaning parents.

  * * *

  Clearly visible in the final ultrasound images: a silvery profile, like the head on a coin.

  * * *

  When the day comes—a scheduled C-section—he sits in a waiting room while they prep her in the OR. It’s the summer solstice, the longest day; they’ve only been here for an hour, and already it feels like forever. He wears what the nurses call a “bunny suit,” a clear plastic jumpsuit with a hood. He can see his clothes through the plastic, his bare arms. It reminds him of the Visible Man—that old plastic model kit of the human anatomy, skeleton and organs encased in a transparent shell. His plaid shirt, open over his T-shirt, looks like lungs. As people pass him, he feels exposed, as if his very skin is see-through. As if he’s been flayed. As if he’s about to be born himself out of this clear sac. He rustles as he walks when they call him.

  Inside, his wife is waiting palely, the sheet tented around her waist like a hoop skirt, blocking her view of the doctors and nurses, their bobbing faces masked, their soothing words disembodied. In scrubs and caps they’re indistinguishable from the team at the last procedure, the last time a doctor reached inside her.

  Craning, he can just make out her feet in the distance, socked because of the chill. He’s reminded of the magic act, sawing a lady in half.

  But he’s wrong. It’s a different trick—hey, presto!—a rabbit from a hat.

  The baby—face closed tight as a fist, arms and legs churning—begins to turn blue on the delivery table. Is that right? the father wonders, and then the nurses, so friendly and solicitous a moment earlier—calling him Dad, calling congratulations—elbow him aside, voices stiffening with urgency, and he finds himself pressed up against a cool tile wall, thinking, Yes, this is it, what we’ve been bracing for. Something, almost like relief, seeps through him.

  Gowned figures surround the little body—the tiny face, mottled purple as if in rage (At whom? the father asks)—and carry it off. He wonders, torn, if he should follow or stay with his wife, calling his name now from behind her sheet. And then it’s too late, the baby gone, whisked away. The new video camera in his hand—most expensive of all the new gear—clatters against the wall, and he cradles it instinctively.

  He moves back to his wife’s side. “What is it?” she begins. “Tell me.”

  “A boy,” one of the nurses says when he can’t speak, but that wasn’t the question, he knows.

  Later, the first glimpse his wife will have of the baby is on the lurid little screen of the camcorder.

  * * *

  Four days in the permanently twilit NICU. Rows of hushed babies in boxes, rectangular transparent boxes (at least you can see what’s going on inside them), wrapped in regulation-issue blankets—bet-hedging blue-and-pink striped—the same blankets he’ll see for years after wrapped around other babies in emailed birth announcements, always with a stab of recognition. His wife is too weak to visit, so he sits on a stool hunched over the isolette, talking to the baby, willing him to open his eyes, crooning, “Little guy, it’s Daddy,” whispering it, self-consciously, over the pants and bleats of the monitoring machines.

  The seconds drip through the IV lines.

  He feels about himself for love, the way he might pat his pockets for his wallet and keys. Do I love him yet? Is this love? The nurses say, “You can touch him,” and he strokes the baby’s toes, his fingers. Gingerly. As if a stranger. Someone has placed a plush beanie toy in the crib—a brindled puppy—he’s never seen it before. He wonders if it’s some mistake. He thinks of the piles of baby gifts at home, waiting quietly. There’s something forlorn about the single toy. He thinks of orphanages, charity. When he holds it out to one of the nurses, eager to give it up, as if it were meant for someone else, she puts it back on the baby. “It calms them to feel some weight.” She tells him he can lay his hand on the child, but it seems so heavy, so inert, he thinks he might still the little fluttering chest.

  He only gets over it when another nurse—high ponytail, bosomy floral scrubs—tells him to change the baby’s diaper. His first resentful instinct: Isn’t that your job? She stands over him, calling him Dad, Dad, Dad. It feels like nagging mockery.

  He is starting to get used to it—shuttling between bedsides, his wife’s and the baby’s, absolving himself with hand sanitizer—and then he goes in and the box is empty, and he feels the tears rearing up in his eyes. “It’s okay,” the nurse assures him quickly. “They just took him away to do some tests.”

  He feels suddenly hollow, caved in.

  “What tests?”

  “An ultrasound. Of his brain, I think.”

  He knows what an ultrasound is, of course. How many have they had now? This second time around he’s come to cherish them, the glimpse of the child, its liquid flicker. But an ultrasound of the baby’s brain? For an insane second he pictures a baby in there, a baby inside a baby, like a tumor. He feels panic, the taste of metal rising in his throat.

  “But no one asked us!” he says tightly. “What if we don’t want the results?”

  She looks at him blankly.

  When he tells his wife, she wails, “Why didn’t you stop them?”

  “They’d already taken him!” But he knows he’s failed to protect the boy, the first failure of many, he intuits darkly.

  They pace the halls—him pushing his wife’s wheelchair—until the doctors return, casual and smiling. Oh, the baby is fine. It’s nothing. The test was just precautionary. He looks in their faces—one older, one younger—and glimpses the world outside, a life of deciding on dinner and what to watch, traffic and weather. Incredible to think it still goes on, that anyone can im
agine a single moment ahead.

  His wife can’t stop shaking, doesn’t dare hold the baby in her trembling arms.

  It’s a teaching hospital, he knows. He teaches writing at the same university; he understands the model. Sometimes he looks at the work of his students, work gone only somewhat awry, and uses it nonetheless as a salutary warning of worse trouble. Careful, he writes in the margin. A teaching moment. This is what he tells himself now: The baby is fine; they were just making sure, following procedure, teaching.

  And what has he learned? Why, that he loves his son. The thought of losing him, that alarm bell of adrenaline and then the shudder of relief, that’s love, he thinks. His heart feels clotted with it, knotted with love, clenched and choking. The abiding fear they’ve lived with for months, that he’d thought was stalling love, was the thing itself all along. And now it stretches out before him, forever, like a sentence.

  * * *

  Small signs of progress. One visit the cannula is gone. Another the IV removed. The baby’s eyes open, tiny and fathomless as two dark distant galaxies. The father wheels his wife in, looks from the baby in the crib to her, pale and lank, in the chair. It’s as if they’ve been in an accident, a crash. But survived.

  Only four days after all. Other families, other babies, spend months there. Other babies around him go unvisited. Other babies have a hush about them, a reverence. He looks down the rows of little boxes. He wants his son out of there.

  The nurses are like saints. He’ll find himself falling, meltingly, in love with every doctor and nurse who cares for the child, but these NICU nurses are special. He can’t tell them how grateful he is, promises himself he’ll send armfuls of flowers, lavish boxes of candy, though afterward when they’re out of there—the baby asleep in his car seat, sitting on the coffee table in their living room—he’ll vow never, ever to go back.

  He drives home at twenty miles an hour, solemn speed of a funeral cortege.

  In their living room, so familiar and yet so strange, as if it’s an old photo, faded and curled: their life before. He’d come home once while they were at the hospital, to shower and change, and it had felt as though he’d been gone decades, impossible that the streets were not in ruins, the furniture flocked with dust.

  “What have we done?” his wife whispers.

  * * *

  Another thing he’ll learn about love: He prides himself on being a good teacher, but he’ll never be quite so good again. Some essential love for his students withdrawn, given now where it’s due, to his own child. “I guess I really was in loco parentis,” he’ll joke, bouncing the baby, making faces. “Now I’m just a loco parent! Yes, I am!”

  And another: He’ll keep falling in love—achingly, tenderly—with anybody and everybody who cares for his child. A series of intense crushes. Daycare staff, preschool teachers, babysitters. Is that how they start, he’ll wonder idly, all those dalliances with sitters? As a displacement of this parental love, a spilling over?

  And one more: He’ll love, almost as fiercely, even the pets—the hamster, the goldfish—those beloveds of the child, simply for staying alive.

  The baby has trouble nursing. They feed him formula through a tiny tube taped to the mother’s breast and a nipple shield, a ludicrous rubbery contraption that feels like something you’d buy at a joke shop. (Talk about a letdown, the mother says wanly.)

  The baby has trouble sleeping. They swaddle him as if he were a maniac in a straitjacket and strap him into a swinging chair. The “electric chair,” they call it. Give him the chair!They play heavy rhythmic sounds at top volume so that THE. WHOLE. HOUSE. SOUNDS. LIKE A. GIANT. THROB. BING. HEART.

  At night in the ringing silence, the baby finally, fleetingly asleep, the father lies awake listening, holding his own breath to listen, as if for an intruder, or a mouse in the wall. Even when he can’t hear anything, the presence of the new soul in the next room is palpable. He feels himself readied, tensed, even though it’s the mother who gets up every time the baby cries. Coming back to bed, in the watery dawn light, she glares at the father, hollow-eyed, furious that he’s awake.

  * * *

  Now the baby is nursing.

  But now he falls asleep on the breast.

  During the days the father straps the baby to his chest and takes him for long walks. It’s the only way the baby will nap; the only way the mother will sleep. The father straps on the baby carrier as if it were a pair of bandoleers, mutters hoarse little nonsense ditties over and over under his breath to the rhythm of the forced march. You are the bay-bee; we are your mom and dad. He holds the baby’s bare legs in his hands as they walk; he kisses the baby’s head when it slumps, the drool cooling on his chest, worries his stubble will scratch the tender skin. At crossings, he stands and sways from the hips; sometimes he finds himself—in line at the store, at the whiteboard in class—making the same motion even when he doesn’t have the baby. People smile at him on these walks, complete strangers in their gardens, and he nods back. Can’t talk, sleeping baby. The complicity of parenthood. Except in the student neighborhoods, where the kids avert their eyes as if in disgust.

  When he comes home clammy, chafed, shoulders aching, and lays the baby down, it wakes in moments bawling, back spasming, limbs beating.

  * * *

  The baby was born on the longest day. Now every night feels shorter than the last.

  His crying sets off an instinctual panic. Their hands shake; they break out in sweats.

  “Perfectly natural,” their pediatrician explains. “Like hitting a tuning fork.”

  Which only reminds him of all the examples of catastrophic resonance in physics books. Shattering wineglasses. Buckling bridges. How are they supposed to help the baby if they’re shaking themselves apart?

  To the mother the cries feel like blame. A phrase recurs to her—one of her mother’s, old-fashioned, but somehow ringingly apt: a crying shame. A shame that weeps and shrieks and wails and sobs for all to hear.

  And yet a few days later, a stifling summer night, they startle awake to distant crying, only to realize the sound is coming not from inside, but through the open window. They look at each other wide-eyed with confusion—the baby is out!?!—and then it dawns on them: It’s someone else’s baby! Sweet, gleeful relief. It wafts them back to sleep. Ever after, on planes, in hotels, the sounds of other people’s babies crying floods him with profane peace.

  * * *

  Things that wake the baby:

  A ringing phone.

  The doorbell.

  The hollow, echoey bap of a basketball in the street.

  A neighbor’s dog.

  The shuddery smack of the screen door.

  A delivery truck reversing.

  The slap of mail through the slot.

  A squeaking doorknob.

  A groaning floorboard.

  An unbalanced load of laundry, thud-thud-thudding.

  The pitter-pat of typing.

  His grandfather slicing cheese on a plate. Ting!

  The smell of skunk.

  A sneeze.

  His parents looking at him.

  * * *

  It’s their latest version of the uncertainty principle:

  The baby in his room with the door closed, the parents outside listening intently in the dark.

  Quiet. Or too quiet?

  Even asleep in their arms, the long pause between his breaths is enough to set their hearts racing, as if there might never be another.

  Dead asleep. Or just dead?

  There’s only one way to know for sure. But observing the system will change the system.

  If he’s dead, the mother argues wearily, I’d just as soon find out in the morning.

  The father knows, of course, that the uncertainty principle only applies at the quantum level. But how do you weigh an infinitesimal chance against an astronomical outcome. What if there’s a catastrophe in the box?

  He opens the door anyway, and for once, for a moment, welcomes the baby’s cr
ies.

  Later in bed he tries to explain Schrödinger, the cat, the box to his wife. Sounds like object permanence, she says. Put a cat in a box and to a baby it’s neither dead nor alive, just ceases to be. Poof! Isn’t that the same? Not really. How isn’t it? Go to sleep. I’m trying!

  Lying there, he knows he’s muddling the science somehow, mixing up his physicists (Schrödinger, Heisenberg?), conflating one theory with another.

  Maybe the baby will be a scientist, he reminds himself. But that was another baby.

  * * *

  They unplug the phones. They oil the hinges. They blow graphite into the doorknobs.

  They see the grandparents off at the airport. (The grandfather has not held the baby once, has gardened the whole visit, expects them to be grateful.)

  The cow says, Moo, the sheep says, Baa. (“The cheese says, Ting!” the wife adds under her breath.)

  They buy a white noise machine. Now when the father lies awake listening, he imagines he hears voices in the white noise, though he can’t quite make out what they’re saying. A warning? A threat? He used to joke that he could hear the breast pump talking: “Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes.”

  At three months, floaty with exhaustion, they sleep train the baby. Set him down and let him cry for one minute—watching the seconds tick away as if they’re breaking off something—before comforting him. Set him down and let him cry for two minutes before comforting him. Set him down and let him cry for five minutes before comforting him. They sit on the sofa listening to him cry, fists clenched, ready to strike each other if they dare move before the time is up.