by Dan Savage
“He's so beautiful,” Terry said again. “He's so beautiful.”
“We know, we know,” said Melissa, rolling her eyes. “You told us that already.”
The nice nurse left the room, and a different nurse came in. She wanted to know long Melissa was thinking about staying.
“By law, you're entitled to stay forty-eight hours,” the nurse explained. “But if you're feeling all right, you can be discharged sooner.” She then pursed her lips and asked Melissa, a little too brightly, how she was feeling. There was a smile on her face, but there was also a tone in her voice. She didn't say so, but she was letting us all know that Melissa, uninsured and having had a relatively easy birth, shouldn't take advantage of Oregon's taxpayers by lying around for two days.
Melissa stared at the nurse, and said nothing.
“You can check out tonight, if you're feeling up to it. Or tomorrow morning.”
“Forty-eight hours is two days, right?” Melissa asked, turning to me. I nodded. Melissa stared straight ahead, the way she did in Laurie's office when we were trying to decide on the number of visits per year. Melissa, the girl who jumped off trains, was probably well enough to leave tonight or tomorrow, but if she went through with the adoption, the time she spent in the hospital with the baby would be her only time as a full-time mom. I wanted to explain that to the nurse, standing by the door with her clipboard, but this decision was Melissa's to make.
There was a long pause. The nurse was no longer smiling. She looked hard at Melissa, and said, “That's right, forty-eight hours is two days, and by law you can stay two days. But you did have a relatively easy—”
“Two days means I can stay until Monday, right?” Melissa asked, looking down at her bed.
“Yes, but—”
“So I'm staying until Monday.”
When they moved Melissa and the baby down one floor to the recovery suites, Terry and I slipped out of the building and down to the van. Terry needed some more film for the camera, and I needed a walk.
When we found Melissa's new room, she was alone. The baby was in the nursery at the end of the hall. The nurses on the floor—all smiles and reassuringly officious—knew Melissa was doing an adoption and were keeping him in the nursery to prevent her from bonding “too much.” Olde-tyme habits die hard. In the nursery, a nurse showed us how to bathe a newborn and clean his umbilical cord. He wasn't ours yet, but all the nurses were deferring to us as if he was. We explained that it was okay with us for Melissa to see the baby, and they let us wheel him in his crib down the hall to her room.
Melissa's recovery room was pretty swank, apparently designed to attract moms who have private health insurance to pay for their two-day stay. Her regulation hospital bed had a maple headboard; there were a matching table and chairs, a cushioned window seat, a TV, a VCR, a private bathroom, and a large picture window with a view of the Willamette River. There were real light fixtures—lamps, wall sconces—with real lightbulbs (instead of fluorescent lights) on dimmer switches. The baby's rolling crib was as tall as Melissa's hospital bed, made of the same maple as the head-board, though the sides of the crib were Plexiglas. When Melissa didn't want to hold the baby, she could set him in his crib and lie right next to him, nose-to-nose, watching him sleep.
Terry and I dashed around the room, getting Melissa and the baby whatever they needed and taking pictures. Melissa gave the baby his second bottle, and I had the honor of changing the first poopy diaper, filled with what looked like Hershey's Syrup. I wiped his butt carefully, then ripped open an alcohol wipe to clean his umbilical cord. As Terry and Melissa watched me fumble, I began to feel . . . something. Not quite a bond yet, but definitely more than I was feeling earlier in the birthing suite.
The nurse who'd showed us how to bathe the baby came into the room with a case of bottled formula and a video. She popped the video into the VCR, and we watched an ethnically diverse crowd of new moms and dads care for their newborn babies, as a soothing male voice explained the importance of regular feedings, cleaning the umbilical cord, and relying on friends and family for support during “those important first weeks.”
Melissa said, “Well, duh,” over and over. “Don't forget to feed it, don't forget not to drop it on its head, don't forget to change its diapers.” She turned off the video. “We know this, right?”
Melissa wanted to nap, so Terry and I left her in bed with the baby. She asked us to turn off the lights as we went; she lay on her side, facing the windows, the baby in her arms. Leaving was hard, and as we walked down to the van, Terry admitted he was afraid that Melissa might change her mind and decide to keep the baby. We'd find out the next day, when Laurie came to the hospital with the papers. We drove down the hill and over to the Mallory, checked in, and took a nap ourselves. Before we headed back up to the hospital, we stopped at a video store and picked up some Simpsons tapes—something else Melissa and I shared.
Back at the hospital that night, the lengths all three of us were going to to avoid calling the baby by name became comic. None of us was using the names Melissa gave him at birth, David Kevin, or the names Terry and I intend to give him, Daryl Jude. Melissa called the baby “little guy,” and Terry and I called him “kid.” Melissa asked the baby over and over, “How you doin', little guy?” When it was time to pass the baby around, Terry or I said, “Gimme the kid.” We had hoped to revisit the name issue in the two weeks before Melissa's due date, but now that the baby had come early, we'd never come to an agreement on one set of names. I couldn't help but think that little David Kevin/Daryl Jude would be discussing this with a shrink someday.
When Melissa's dinner came, she passed the baby off to Terry. She complained about the hospital food—there wasn't enough meat on her plate, and the chocolate cake didn't taste like anything—so I offered to run down to the cafeteria and get her something else.
“Too late,” Melissa said, shrugging. “The food wasn't any good, but I already ate it.”
At about eight o'clock, a nurse came in to check on us and the baby. She listened to the baby's heart, and said, “Hmm . . .” We were all a little troubled by the sound of that “hmm.” The baby had a heart murmur. She told us not to worry—too much: many babies are born with slight heart murmurs, and most disappear in twenty-four hours. But this was a particularly loud murmur, so she thought a pediatric cardiologist should drop by. She didn't want to panic us, she said, she just wanted an infant heart specialist to come and “give this a listen.” The fact that she didn't want to panic us naturally put all of us in a panic.
Three hours, two EKGs, and one chest X ray later—all this work done in Melissa's room—a pediatric cardiologist was standing at the foot of Melissa's bed, explaining that we should be concerned, but not worried. The doc was another young woman, as tall as Melissa's obstetrician was short. Her rap was reassuring— “We have to wait and see; we should know better by morning. Some heart murmurs are louder than others. But right now, we shouldn't worry, not too much”—but the look on her face connected every dot. There was something potentially wrong with this baby's heart. A heart murmur this loud could mean a hole in the heart, and that could mean . . . this infant would need surgery, and that would mean . . . this infant might die.
I was holding the baby while we listened to the pediatric cardiologist. I looked down at his tiny face, his head tucked into his little knit cap, and I watched his eyes open and close. Terry was sitting next to me, and the baby was holding on to one of my fingers. The kid yawned, blinked, and went to sleep. And I thought to myself, Do NOT bond. This baby might die, so let's not waste time and emotional energy bonding with it. This option—the freedom to shift gears like this—was available to me because I was not the baby's biological father. This was not my baby. This was not flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. This was flesh of my paperwork, blood of my checkbook. And since the paperwork wasn't done, we weren't related—not yet.
If this baby died, Terry and I wouldn't have lost a child, not really. We would've lo
st a baby that was almost ours, and this adoption we almost did with Melissa would have been simply— disrupted. We would go back into the pool, and adopt some other baby, and name him D.J., and we would love that baby so much that . . . we couldn't imagine things working out any other way. All this was running through my head as I listened to the doc. I would be upset if this baby died, but I wouldn't be devastated. After all, it wasn't my baby yet, and I wasn't the father. This was David Kevin I was holding, not Daryl Jude—not yet.
But in the eight hours we'd spent at the hospital, Terry had bonded, and he had no distance. As we left the hospital, Melissa and the baby sleeping together in her bed, he was visibly upset. He was in love with that baby, he said, and he was worried. I put an arm around Terry's shoulder in the elevator and swore the baby would be fine, even as I silently wondered whether we could go right back into the pool or whether we'd have to do all the paperwork all over again.
Back at the Mallory, we ordered dinner from room service: pork chops, baked potatoes, and tomato salad. We like heavy, old-fashioned hotel food, but we couldn't bring ourselves to eat. Terry was distraught about the baby, and I was distraught about having a lump of rock and ice where my heart should be. We wound up back at the Eagle, watching porn and playing pinball, and pulling for that kid up at OHSU. In Pioneer Square, we saw a pack of gutter punks sitting on the ground, passing around a space bag. I looked at the boys, wondering if one could be Bacchus. Probably not. If Bacchus had been in Portland, he would've heard about Melissa's pregnancy from the other street kids, and probably have turned up at the hospital. But if that baby at OHSU lived and we adopted him, neither of us would be able to walk past a boy gutter punk again without wondering, “Is that him? Is that Bacchus? Is that our baby's birth father?”
Daryl Jude
Early the next morning, we were up, out of the hotel, and back at the hospital. Any rational couple would have dashed up to the maternity ward, anxious for news: Were we going to be parents or were we going back into the pool? But no couple adopting or birthing is entirely rational, so instead of heading upstairs, we headed for the cafeteria. Terry needed coffee, I required tea, and we both needed something to settle our stomachs before we got the news. We'd been uncharacteristically quiet as we dressed that morning, and we drove the hospital in relative silence. We were pretty quiet on our way down to the cafeteria, too. Neither of us had much to say—to each other or anyone else—until I walked over to the bagels.
Bagels are ring-shaped rolls with a tough, chewy texture, made from plain yeast dough that is dropped briefly into nearly boiling water and then baked. After hanging out in a hospital for the last twenty-four hours, worrying about little David Kevin/Daryl Jude's heart, I was naturally in a health-conscious frame of mind when we strolled into the cafeteria. So I ignored the doughnuts and Danish and baked eggs, and bellied up to the bagel bins instead. I was saddened to note that such things as butter-pecan and cinnamon-sugar bagels existed.
While I was trying to decide between a chocolate-chip bagel or a blueberry bagel, one of the cafeteria workers came out and filled an empty bin with . . . bacon bagels. Butter-pecan bagels saddened me, but bacon bagels gave me fits. First, while bacon is delicious, this was a hospital cafeteria. One would think hospitals would take a hard line on bacon, similar to the line they take on cigarettes. All hospitals are smoke-free, because smoking is bad for you—really, really bad for you. Well, bacon is really, really bad for you too: more people die of heart disease than of lung cancer. Why the double standard? If you're gonna serve bacon in the cafeteria, why not let people chain-smoke in the maternity ward?
When you're worried about one thing—say, a dead baby— sometimes an unrelated and comparatively unimportant thing sets you off. Perhaps I was more bonded to that baby upstairs than I'd realized. Shrinks call it transference or projecting or something, and at OHSU's hospital, I was suddenly transferring in a very big way. All the anxiety I was feeling about David Kevin/Daryl Jude flipped onto that bin of bacon bagels. I was suddenly very, very angry. It's not that the bagels were crap; they were, but living in Goyland, a.k.a. the Pacific Northwest, means getting used to crap bagels. No, my problem was the adding-insult-to-injury-ness of it all. In transforming this basically good-for-you food product into yet another grease ’n’ gristle delivery system, a line had been crossed. Was this how we intended to thank the Jews for the bagel? By filling it with food products that—however delicious— God specifically instructed his Chosen People to refrain from eating? I'm not Jewish, and like most of my Jewish friends, I wouldn't keep kosher if I were, but there was a principle at stake. American mass culture co-opts and regurgitates just about anything—I'm old enough to remember when we stole croissants from the French—but bagels observant Jews can't eat?
I asked the cashier if I could see the manager. It was Sunday morning, she told me, and the manager didn't come in on Sundays. I pointed out to the woman at the cash register that bacon bagels were an insult to Jews, and that it didn't make much sense for a hospital to be serving bacon regardless. The cashier looked at me as if I were nuts, which I was, and invited me to fill out a comment card. Before I could fill out the comment card, Terry dragged me out of the cafeteria and into the hall. But! But! But! The bagels! The Jews! The bagels!
“Fuck the bagels!” Terry barked at me, pulling me toward the elevator. “That baby might be dying upstairs and you're down here screaming about bagels! Who cares!”
* * *
When we got to the maternity ward, the EKG, the pediatric cardiologist, the heart murmur, and the gloom were gone. We had just stepped through the big swinging doors when one of the nurses brightly informed us that our baby—little David Kevin/ Daryl Jude—was perfectly healthy: “It was just one of those murmurs that goes away.” Terry and I just stood there, almost unable to speak.
She asked if we had a nice night; we lied and said we did, and then she commented on the wonderful weather. We smiled, and observed that, yes, it was unseasonably warm. Awfully warm for early March, the nurse agreed, and told us the baby was with Melissa in her room.
This reads like something of an anticlimax—something of an enormous anticlimax, considering the buildup. Well, it was an anticlimax. We hadn't been able to sleep; we'd stayed up all night playing pinball and watching shaved-buttcrack porn stars get fisted; I went Golem in the cafeteria, blowing up about bacon bagels; Terry was near tears in the elevator on the way up, and then . . . nothing. Baby fine, drama over, nice weather we're having. I had imagined we'd get the news, good or bad, gathered around Melissa's bed, one of us holding the kid, all of us crying tears of grief or relief. Instead, the news—hey, your baby is gonna live!—was just dropped into how-was-your-day chitchat.
Melissa was sitting up, her picked-over breakfast tray next to her bed. She was holding the baby, feeding him, and she smiled. We exchange heys.
“He's healthy,” Melissa said flatly, just the way she said it the day before.
We told her we'd heard, and she passed the baby to Terry. I sat on the window seat, and watched Terry hold the baby, and thought to myself, Okay, bond.
Laurie was coming to the hospital in a few hours, Melissa told us, bringing papers for everyone to sign. The hospital food sucked, and Melissa was upset that none of her friends—including David, the guy she named the baby after, the guy who was staying in her apartment—had come to visit. She was sure they'd be around today—they probably thought she couldn't have visitors yesterday, you know, the day the baby was born. We told her about our sleepless night, and going to the Eagle to blow off steam. She told us that the sidewalk in front of the Eagle was a good place to spare-change. We took more pictures: me with the baby; Melissa with the baby; Terry with the baby. No one talked about the future—about tomorrow, when Melissa would check out; about the papers we'd all be signing today—and no one called the baby by name. Any name.
Changing a diaper, I got nailed. I tried to dodge, but ducked the wrong way and got hit again, this time in the opposi
te direction. The baby pissed a big X onto my chest. Melissa laughed, and Terry took a picture.
“So, it's going to be like this, is it?” I asked the baby, passing him to Terry. Melissa told me to get used to it, and as I stepped into the bathroom to change my T-shirt, I looked back at her and said, “Usually guys who want to do that buy you a drink first.”
When he was awake, the baby looked around, blinking slowly. He had long eyebrows, and a round face, like Melissa. Unlike Melissa's, his eyes were blue, and his hair was blondish. Bacchus was lighter than Melissa, with blue eyes, so maybe he'd keep the eye and hair color. Terry and I, a couple who didn't care about the baby being white or male or perfect, were on the verge of adopting a blond-haired, blue-eyed, white male infant, the adoption industry's holy grail.
The baby didn't cry at all. The only time we'd heard him cry was while a nurse bathed him in the sink. Last night, we'd speculated that maybe he wasn't crying because his heart was weak. Maybe he was too ill for healthy, robust yowling.
Nurses came in and out, bringing us little cases of bottles, more diapers, wipes, hats, and T-shirts, and checking on Melissa and the baby. We asked why he wasn't crying—was something else wrong?
“Some babies just don't cry that much. It doesn't mean anything, except that his parents are going to get more sleep then other parents,” the nurse replied. “If it keeps up like this, count yourselves lucky!”
Laurie arrived, beaming her empath beam. She listened as we described last night's drama; she held the baby and pronounced him “beautiful.” Her presence was comforting, but it brought us down to earth. She'd been at Melissa's side every step of the way, and she'd brought the three of us together. I'd expected her to be at the hospital yesterday, when Melissa was in labor, but yesterday was about this baby and his parents, she explained, birthparent and adoptive parents. Laurie was about paperwork and placement, and we didn't need to think about any of that yesterday. We needed to bond with the baby and one another. But with the baby a day old, and Melissa checking out of the hospital the next day, it was paperwork time.
