He passed out on the couch and when Lourdes got home, she awakened him and led him bumbling down the dark hall to bed.
In the consecutive nights, he tried not to drink but found he could not sleep. He flipped over a dozen times, disturbing Lourdes aplenty, and he could not be tricked into slumber by his usual insomnia stopper—sandwiching his head between pillows. So he drank and indeed slept.
By the end of the first full week of going into work with a hangover, his editor told him he looked like shit after the morning meeting. Cordo said he had a cold and probably wanted to kick his own ass for falling into this cliché shit. His editor told him to go home but instead he went to the nearby walk-in clinic.
How long had it been since his last checkup? When did Kitchen Nightmares premiere?
He told the doctor about the insomnia, the increased drinking, the cancer, the pregnancy, his mom’s and dad’s death, unwanted intrusive upsetting thoughts, the OCD—the way he couldn’t drive or how Lourdes couldn’t drive without him fearing a tire would blow or the tank would run dry, the teeth brushing, the flossing, the showering two or three times a day, how he couldn’t let the sink be full of dishes, had to clean them on the spot, the hand washing, the vacuuming up any debris whose color contrasted that of the carpet so that he couldn’t focus on anything else, Lourdes was gonna have a seizure in the lab and fall and crack her skull or dump acid all over herself or the baby would come out deformed or retarded or die in its crib the second they took it home and then what—the cancer, the chemo, the radiation, it would be too late and for what, what had they put it off for, for a fucking faulty kid and Lourdes would fucking die and they should have had the goddamn abortion!
He was quiet, hiding his face from the doctor and drying his eyes. He sniveled.
“Every day I wake up and hope she’ll have a miscarriage…That little sonofabitch will wrap the umbilical around its neck.”
He saw the doctor look at him flabbergasted. He wrote Cordo’s prescription and recommended him to a psychiatrist.
He never told Lourdes about the pills, the drinking, or any of that unpleasant stuff.
One night late in the seventh month, Cordo was wakened by Lourdes talking. He turned over and found her sitting up against the headboard. She was pale and sweaty and had a haunted look in her face he had seen before, in delusional fugues. This was her first in a long time.
He sat up beside her.
“What’s wrong, babe?”
Her voice was grave, dry.
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“What?”
She touched her stomach.
“What if I’m wrong about everything?”
She thought about the implications of whatever she was talking about.
“Or just one thing?”
She looked at him and started crying.
“What if there’s only darkness?”
As she shook Cordo held her.
“Or people stuffed into dark holes unable to get out and we’re crawling all over each other in piss and shit and blood and vomit and there’s crying and screaming for all eternity…Jesus Christ, what if I’m wrong?”
Cordo hugged her tightly, hiding her face, until her fugue led her back to sleep. Cordo stayed up all night trying to make sense of it all.
And now just over nine months. Cordo, a widower and single father at 25. He’d been given four years. Four years of morning breath and morning sex. Of plunging each other’s clogged toilets. Of reading in bed at night together. Of Thanksgiving and Christmas meals together. Of popping each other’s blackheads. Of the smell of her hair after a shower.
What did he have in return?
A little human wrapped in a bag of its own waste, who cried all night and all day, a doctor telling him it was just colic and don’t be so alarmed, put her under a ceiling fan or run the vacuum around her or walk around with her but none of these proved effective and Amelia was still crying well into her second month and he was taking heavy doses of fluoxetine every day. He scoured the internet and Amelia cried during drives around the neighborhood in her car seat and she cried during warm baths and Beethoven nocturnes.
He took her to the pediatrician, who ruled out any possibility of Amelia’s crying being anything more than very persistent colic and sent them home.
By month five Amelia’s siege against him had not weakened. She slept only long enough to rebuild her strength spent in the last barren stretch of crying, so he never slept more than two hours in a row. He started looking around for nannies, who took care of Amelia for a few hours while Cordo went to a park or bench along a pier or a cheap movie theater with soda-sticky floors and the smell of butter and mold in the padded cushioned walls from the ‘70s and he slept a few stolen hours and was wakened by a theater employee come in to clean up after the movie was over and Cordo left but snuck down the hall to look in through another door’s window slot and saw the previews were just starting and so he snuck in and took the first seat after coming up the ramp and went promptly back to sleep.
None of the nannies stayed on for longer than a week, most quit after three or four days. Sure, some of them were recent grads in early childhood education or family sciences and perhaps had not anticipated a live baby would be so different from the sack of flour they took care of for a month back in high school or from the premies at the hospital they had often gone to hold and interact with as part of their internship. But some were also experienced, very Mrs. Doubtfire, who knew all the secrets, like as not frowned upon by the modern medical community but just good enough for the Tratham children back in 1971.
When none of their homespun remedies—which, as far as Cordo could tell, never entailed alcohol—worked, they realized their futility and quit. By near the end of the sixth month, Cordo had gone through 17 nannies.
One day he was sitting on the couch and softly rocking Amelia in her cradle as she cried and when it had no effect after several minutes, he stopped and told her to shut up but she couldn’t have heard him over her crying, so he said it again and again and again and he stood up and bent over her and yelled at her to shut up and she only cried more and he screamed at her and he must have realized he could not win, for he ran out to the foggy backyard and the day was gray and drizzling and he slammed shut the door behind him and grabbed the glass porch table and hurled it over the railing and it shattered in the grass, aluminum frame bending pleasingly, and he snapped his head to the chiming of the tin wind bells hanging from the gutters and he tore these off and whipped them into the forest far beyond his back wall and he did the same to the hypnotizing bronze mobile and the birdfeeders and squirrel feeders and after this was done, he was rasping and sweating and he saw the flowerbed down beside the deck, under the kitchen window—Lourdes’ garden. It was fully packed with roses and orchids and sunflowers and lilies and poppies all flowered for the summer and he jumped over the railing and knelt at the flower bed and nearly dove in to start tearing out the plants but he stopped himself.
His red eyes watched the dew stream down the perfect petals and bulbs and stems and drip off in little droplets and he started to cry.
He went back to work without a stable nanny but rather a slew of intermittent ones. Some quit right when he got home, others while he was still at work—having the decency to text or more infrequently call to tell him I’ve left your baby in its crib, I quit—and he blew through interviews or halted in the middle of transcribing a recording to rush home to be with Amelia.
He learned to work outside on the porch (after buying a new table) and he went in on the stroke of every hour for more coffee and he checked in on her—fine but still crying—before going back out, taking naps out in the grass in order to stay up all night.
These methods sustained him for another month, then he ravaged the internet again for causes of prolonged colic, which proved unhelpful and sent him flying into the emergency room demanding every test and examination be conducted.
At the end of eight hours, the doc
tors found no signs of infection, acid reflux, or any other digestive malady—common culprits of infant distress—her nervous system was as developed as it should be, her heart rhythm was good, do you burp her after feeding? Take her for walks in her stroller? Give her a pacifier?
“Yes.”
The doctor recommended some over-the-counter simethicone and reducing her feeding portions.
Of course these didn’t help. Neither did lactase drops.
One Saturday eight months after Amelia had been born, Tom came over and he and Cordo drank beer on the back porch with the baby monitor between them. Cordo turned it up and let Tom listen to Amelia’s wailing for a few seconds, then turned it low again.
“Every day, every night. Doctors can’t find anything wrong with her. Maybe I’m talking to the wrong people—I should consult a fuckin’ priest.”
Tom smiled but there was no humor in Cordo’s face as he glared at the baby monitor.
“I know it’s tempting to think something’s wrong but there’s really not,” Tom said. “All babies get colic, some longer than others. And when Amelia grows up to be rich and famous with a voice like Nina Simone, you’ll be thankful.”
Cordo took a sip of beer.
“I don’t deserve this.”
Tom watched him.
“What? What is this?”
“This. This is hell.”
“You drama queen.”
Cordo shut his eyes, held his head.
“I wanna kill myself.”
Tom set down his beer.
“Don’t even joke about that.”
“Well I’m not fucking joking. My fucking wife did it, why can’t I?”
Cordo ground his teeth at Tom.
“Because she needs you.”
“Then why’s she trying to drive me fucking insane?”
Tom said nothing. Cordo read the beer label.
“God, why’d she fucking do this to me?”
Tom watched him.
“So you have a heavier load than most parents. So fucking what? She’s your daughter, you just gonna pussyfoot out of it?”
Cordo sneered, sat back.
“Fuck you, Tom.”
“Fuck me? Well that’s fine, Cordo, fuck you too. In fact let’s just lay it all out, I don’t fucking like you.”
“Then why are you fucking here?”
“Because you fucking need me.”
“I don’t fucking need you.”
“Oh yeah, buddy, you fucking do.”
“You think you have to stay my friend out of some sort of allegiance to Lourdes? Well fuck her too, I don’t need your goddamn pity.”
“You don’t have my pity, you have my sympathy. Which is why I won’t pat your arm and say, ‘Hang in there, pal.’ You’re talking heavy-fucking-shit reality, so I’m gonna hit you with some: You kill yourself, Amelia’ll be a fucking orphan.”
“Just like Lourdes and I were.”
“And didn’t you two turn out so fucking perfect.”
“Fuck you, Tom.”
“Fuck you, Cordo. Let me hit you with this: If Lourdes hadn’t wanted her, she would have had the abortion. But she didn’t.”
Cordo glared at him.
“Then why’d she fuckin’ kill—”
“I don’t know, I don’t know why she did what she did. But Amelia would not be here if she had not wanted her.”
Cordo was silent. After a moment Tom stood with the baby monitor and he put a hand on Cordo’s shoulder and squeezed a little.
“You finish your little pity party out here,” he chuckled, “then go to sleep. I’ll take care of her tonight.”
For the next few days after he got home from work, Cordo went into the attic crawlspace above his walk-in closet. He had the baby monitor in his back pocket as he tossed through deteriorating cardboard boxes marked varyingly BOOKS, CLOTHES, DISHES, MOM’S STUFF, DAD’S STUFF. He spent the equivalent of several hours, interrupted by going down to check on Amelia, up here searching through a box marked PHOTOS. These were arranged in leather books, frames, as well as loose—old white-framed Polaroids that give the ‘80s a perpetual hazy orange filter. Finally he found a framed picture of a tall skinny woman remarkably like Lourdes. She was standing in a black one-piece in front of a lake and held a little girl in an orange one-piece on her hip. The little girl was maybe five but looked much like Amelia.
Cordo sat against the cobwebby wall of the attic and stared at this picture.
He hung it over Amelia’s crib in the nursery and looked at it often while walking with her around the room during the sleepless nights.
In the ninth month, Amelia started walking. He was out with her in the sunny backyard and she had stopped crying for the time as he held up her arms and she took tentative steps and then he released her, perhaps on a whim, and she continued through the grass, walking as though she had poop in her diaper (which she didn’t—Cordo had just changed her) to Lourdes’ garden, which was in hibernation for the winter, and she fell onto her butt in the soil.
In the 10th month, he took her to the pediatrician, who referred him to a sleep clinic with a specialist in infant sleep disorders. Cordo slept in the lobby for the overnight study, during which Amelia fell asleep and reawakened every hour or two to resume her crying, wires all over her head and torso, the doctor watching data forming on her computer behind the one-way mirror.
At eight a.m. the doctor wakened Cordo and showed him the results and gave him her diagnosis: She’d run an electroencephalography or EEG, which had recorded a tremendous amount of beta brain waves, meaning a higher level of intense brain activity than in other babies, possibly a precursor to obsessive-compulsive disorder but hey, I’m no psychiatrist.
She recommended a prescription for promethazine, which Amelia’s pediatrician, after reading the specialist’s report, uneasily wrote out.
Right after getting home from the pharmacy, Cordo gave Amelia an eighth of a milliliter of the syrup by a metered plastic eyedropper. She scowled at the taste as she cried and Cordo sat beside her crib and waited. In 30 minutes she was sound asleep.
When Cordo awakened her to feed her, she did not resume crying, so drowsy was she, and went back to sleep after being burped.
Now he was able to hire a nanny who stayed on. Her name was Margaret, a 62-year-old gray-haired woman from the Midwest. She followed Cordo’s instructions for administering the syrup and never did Amelia cry except for Margaret to change her diaper.
Amelia’s first birthday was not a festive event. She cried for most of it until Cordo gave her promethazine and then she slept while he and Tom and Margaret ate chocolate ice cream and a cake large enough to feed a pool party.
On Lourdes’ birthday Amelia slept while Cordo drank whiskey out on the back porch and listened to “I’ll Shoot the Moon” on his phone—the first he’d listened to Waits since she’d died and which he then only listened to on her birthday. Tom came over later in the evening when Cordo was drunk and he and Cordo watched a few episodes of The Sopranos.
At 13 months old, Amelia said her first word: Drummond. It was during a fit of crying and had been spoken mewlingly but somehow Cordo had heard it and looked it up: an NBA player, a blogger, and a town in Michigan, none of which he’d ever spoken of his in his life, so who the hell knew how Amelia had gotten that word into her mind. But he quickly let it go as she started picking up more words and he started speaking to her in French.
At 16 months old, Lourdes’ life insurance policy finally came through, giving Cordo a much-needed influx of cash to make up for all the debt incurred by the nanny search. The insurance company’s own investigation had yielded no new information apparently and Cordo probably imagined some executive in the 100th floor of a skyscraper weeping as he signed off on the approval forms to give Cordo the payout.
Amelia picked up on both English and French quickly, even the past and future tenses. She was growing black hair, Lourdes’ hair, which Cordo likely could not look upon without being reminded of
her.
At 18 months she easily picked up potty-training, understanding from the first demonstration she had to wipe from front to back.
At two years old, the pediatrician took her off promethazine and advised a one-week trial period to see how Amelia slept off of it. She developed night terrors, from which Cordo struggled to wake her in the night as she screamed and thrashed in her little bed in her room, upgraded from a nursery with flowery wallpaper, stuffed animals, popup books, a pink dresser, pink window curtains, flowery bed sheets.
The first episode, on the first night of her being off promethazine, started roughly an hour after she’d fallen asleep and lasted a couple of minutes, after which she went quiet, never having awakened.
Cordo sat in a pink rocking chair beside her bed and recomposed himself. Her screaming had been terrible, worse than when she’d been a baby, and had frightened him out of work mode in the kitchen to bolt in here.
Now she lay as though nothing unusual had happened. Cordo took a deep breath and shook as he stood and left. An hour later, after he’d finished six more paragraphs of an article, Amelia started screaming again and she continued to do so every hour on the hour.
The next day Amelia remembered nothing from the night. Cordo immediately took her to the doctor, who urged patience and did not prescribe any more medication, give it a full week.
But by the next night, Cordo resorted to giving Amelia an antihistamine hidden in some gelatin at dinner. The pill only served to put her to sleep sooner, she still awakened in fright.
The next morning he asked her if she had dreams. She said no. He asked if she ever felt afraid at night. She said no—hesitantly.
That night he slept with her and when she awakened, he bolted upright and hugged her and said her name soothingly but it did not lessen her terror.
He went back to the doctor the next day and broke down in tears while explaining to him everything that was going on, Amelia sitting obliviously on the examination table, rocking slightly, crinkling the table’s paper sheet, as she hummed a tune that Cordo would have recognized as “Ol’ 55” if her vocal chords had been more mature and had his mind not been otherwise occupied.
Most Unnatural Page 4
