The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  When she came, it was different than other times, at once ethereal and violent, accompanied by the movement of the baby in a way that maybe should have shamed her but she was too taken. She pressed her face again into the pillow, this time to muffle her own sounds.

  “How was that?” David asked, continuing to stroke her with his hand. She inhaled raggedly and nodded. His face was slick with her and it embarrassed her for just a fraction of a second because the look in his eyes was unmistakable, his love for his hulking, unsexy, animal wife and the fluid from her body that he now wore unabashedly on his own skin.

  “Come here,” she said, and he crawled up next to her and she kissed him, wiped the wetness from his mouth. “You’re really something, you know that?”

  He tucked her hair behind her ear. “Better than the alternative.”

  “There’s a decent chance I’ll be less encumbered by Father’s Day.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  “I love you madly; you know that too?”

  He kissed her in another line, this time down her throat, over her breasts, her belly, and then back down between her legs. “There she is,” he hummed, like he was soothing a baby. “There’s my girl.” He was back to work and she was letting him, her hands in his hair. This man, with his surprising tenderness, his care for her. There he was.

  He was on his stomach between her tented knees, trying again, when they heard the girls in the hallway, a chorus of giggly whispering. She stiffened, snapping her legs shut as David leapt away. When the door opened she was beet-red and covering herself with a much-too-warm blanket and he was standing ten feet from the bed in an unconvincing display of nonchalance.

  “Is it a good time?” Violet asked, as Liza was shouting, “Happy Mother’s Day.” Her children had not quite mastered the clichéd tray of charmingly shambolic pancakes, but Violet held a plate of toast while Wendy and Liza clutched, respectively, a box of Crispix and a bouquet of tulips pulled from the front yard.

  “Look at all this,” she said, glancing at David, trying not to laugh. “Come here, loves.”

  “I’ll get some coffee,” he said, and he patted her knee under the blankets.

  “Come on up,” she said, wondering where he’d thrown her underwear, hoping to God it wasn’t anywhere visible. Liza mounted their bed first, crawling up and snuggling against her. Violet followed more shyly, coming to kiss her on the cheek. “How sweet are my girls,” she said, scooting over to make room for Violet. Now only Wendy remained in the doorway, pulling out a handful of dry cereal and letting it rain, one piece at a time, back into the box. “Wednesday, humor me today. Let me have all three of you in the same bed.” Wendy fought a smile. “Come on. Come placate your big crazy mother.” Wendy advanced into the room and curled herself demurely at the foot of the bed. “Did your dad help you with this?”

  Violet shook her head. “No, it was our idea.”

  Liza draped herself over Marilyn’s belly, dropping the tulips and their accompanying dirt into David’s spot on the bed. “Oh my gosh,” she squealed. “He kicked me.”

  And suddenly she had three pairs of hands on her stomach, even reluctant Wendy’s, prodding, reacting to the movement from within, laughing, murmuring to one another. She allowed herself to rest back against her pillows again, contented in an entirely different way. Your family could do that to you sometimes, catch you off-guard with their charm and their normalcy. Those rare moments—like this one—were the reason that she was pregnant again. That she and David would soon be celebrating their seventeenth wedding anniversary. That these three girls, wearying as they often were, were currently making her happier than she’d possibly ever been. This was the point of having a family, these fleeting moments of absolute pleasure. Stockholm syndrome. They kept her coming back for more.

  She shifted beneath the weight of the baby and the six small hands. She reached to stroke Wendy’s hair and her heart swelled when Wendy let her. This was the point.

  “God,” David said when he returned. “I leave for ninety seconds and look what happens.”

  * * *

  —

  He couldn’t recall ever seeing so much blood. Things with Marilyn went very wrong very quickly and he was taken to the far corner of the room with the baby; still nameless, she received a rough bath and a perfect 10 on her Apgar all while he considered the knowledge he had accrued in med school of placenta accreta, which he had heard Gillian say, not to him but to someone else in the room. Gillian was suddenly shouting out orders that he could not bring himself to process. The baby was swaddled and placed in his arms and he stood dumbly, staring at a ravaged, bloodied version of his wife, until Gillian noticed him and stopped, red hands poised above the glossy gushing of Marilyn’s uterus, and said, “She’ll be fine, Dad. Go introduce yourself to your daughter.”

  Another girl, he thought dimly, but he had no one to tell. One of the nurses—Kathleen, who was both no-nonsense and mystically intuitive—laid a hand on his back and led him out.

  “Come on, Dr. Sorenson.”

  Marilyn had been admitted at 3:00 a.m. and he was wearing jeans and a Cubs T-shirt, unshaven and wide-eyed. He knew some of the nurses who had tended to Marilyn over the twelve-odd hours and they looked at him knowingly, fondly, not as Dr. Sorenson but as a soon-to-be new dad; as a man who, when prompted, made up a story to entertain his suffering wife, something Arthurian that he remembered from an undergrad lit class; as a man who took it stoically when his wife shot down the story, hissing, No knights. Nothing medieval. Don’t talk to me about the fucking patriarchy right now, and don’t ever touch me again. He’d suddenly felt ridiculous, schooled, completely foolish about the fact that these nurses—far more capable than he, conversant in the baffling language of women—had ever deigned to call him “doctor.”

  “David,” he corrected her hoarsely, and Kathleen patted at his shoulder.

  “Chin up, David. She’s in good hands. Look who you’ve got there.”

  It was then that he finally looked down at the baby.

  “Do you have a name picked out?” Kathleen asked, leading him back to Marilyn’s hospital room, from which she had been whisked at such speed that he had barely been able to hang on to her hand—a room where he didn’t want to go; a room whose walls held the memories of his wife vocally and animally in agony. Kathleen led him gently to the chair next to the bed, where he had spent the better part of the last twelve hours. The bed was gone, wheeled away with his wife still attached.

  “Christopher,” he said wryly, feeling the ironic weight of the name.

  Kathleen smiled, handed him a cup of water. “Sounds like you’ve had a few shockers today, hmm?” He looked up at her again and felt the muscles of his face lighten a bit; he wasn’t sure if he was about to smile or cry. “You didn’t have a girl’s name picked out?”

  “Grace,” he said, studying his new daughter’s face, rumpled and reddened and damp. He touched a wisp of hair on her forehead—dark like Violet’s, dark like his own—and she flinched, but she still wasn’t crying, had quieted almost immediately after they cut the cord.

  Let’s give it a go. This was what he got for being impulsive: his wife slit open and bleeding without getting to see their beautiful new baby; facing single fatherhood of four daughters. The last word he’d heard Marilyn utter—on all fours, writhing—was motherfucker. He felt himself starting to cry and he felt Kathleen’s warm hand again on his shoulder.

  “It’s a beautiful name,” she said, and she turned to leave him alone. “I’m praying for Marilyn,” she added quickly before she slipped from the room. And he looked down at the baby and she looked back up at him, met his eyes, it seemed, though he knew she wasn’t yet capable. He started praying then too—first halfheartedly to the ominous Catholic God of his childhood and then to something larger. Just please don’t let her die, he thought. Please, anyone, whoever, I
don’t mean anything without her; I can’t do this without her.

  “Please please please,” he said aloud to anyone, everyone, to his daughter, who didn’t deserve to be burdened with this kind of responsibility but who deserved more than anything to meet her mother, the woman who’d been joking, hours earlier, between contractions, about how mole rats were known to give birth to two dozen babies at once, about how lucky she was to have it so easy. “Please,” he whispered to the baby, but she had fallen back asleep.

  * * *

  —

  “I thought you said it was a boy,” Wendy said with some amount of distaste, peering skeptically at the bundle in her father’s arms. Liza was worriedly examining the dry-erase board on the wall. Mom: Marilyn, it read in loopy cursive, a heart over the i in her mother’s name. Goal: healthy baby! Her dad’s dad had driven them to the hospital after staying with them overnight, and though he’d been extra jokey in the car, she could tell something was wrong, was deeply suspicious of the fact that her mother was absent from their introduction to their new sister and of the fact that her father wouldn’t quite meet any of their eyes.

  “What’s dilation?” Liza asked.

  “We did say she’d be a boy,” her father said. “We were wrong.” Then, to Liza: “Ask Mom about that some other time.”

  Wendy relaxed slightly. Their mother must not be dead if Liza was being encouraged to ask her irritating questions.

  Her mom had come in to say goodbye in the middle of the night; Wendy had awakened to find her sitting on the edge of her bed.

  “Sweetheart, wake up for just a minute,” she’d said, her voice gentler than usual but also weirdly awake-sounding, given that it was still dark outside. “Wendy. Hey.”

  “Mom,” she said, trying to sound exasperated, but in actuality her heart was pounding. She didn’t want her parents to leave. She couldn’t admit this, because she was fifteen, but she wanted their family to stay exactly as it was.

  “Darling, I’m turning on your lamp for just a second, okay?”

  Wendy heard the click and suddenly the blackness of her pillow was edged with eye-watering yellow light. “Oh my God,” she said.

  “Honey. It seems like this baby might be trying to join the ranks. Daddy and I are going to go to the hospital.”

  She didn’t react.

  “Grandpa’s downstairs,” her mom said. “He’ll get you guys off to school, all right?”

  “Fine. Can I go back to sleep?”

  “Want to wish me luck first?” Her mother’s voice had changed. Wendy chanced to look at her, just for a second, and saw, beyond her anxious smile and the exhausted puffiness around her eyes, something almost frightened on her mom’s face.

  “Good luck,” she said. “Can you turn off the light?”

  Her mother seemed to deflate. “I— Sure. We’ll call soon. I love you.”

  She hadn’t said it back, had yanked her blankets up and rolled away and buried her face in the mattress. She hadn’t said it back, and now her mother had disappeared and her father looked epic levels of weird, his hair sticking up in the back and his eyes big and hollowed-out like Beetlejuice, gazing down at the baby.

  “It kind of looks like a boy,” she said disdainfully.

  “No she doesn’t.” Violet crept closer. “She looks like Mom.”

  “I think,” he said, “that she looks a bit like all of us.”

  Liza took a step toward them. “Like how?”

  “Well.” Their father settled back in his chair, tucked in a corner of blanket around the baby’s neck. “Mom’s nose. The same little hands that you had, Viol. Wendy’s mouth. And Lize’s long legs, which you’ll see when she’s not swaddled.”

  He’d told them their mother was resting and that they couldn’t see her because of germs.

  “She’s going to have her feelings pretty hurt if no one volunteers to hold her,” he said. “She may begin to develop some kind of a complex.”

  “I will,” Liza said.

  “Remember to support her head,” Violet said, her voice lowered to baby volume in a way that made Wendy want to punch her in the face. Their mother had been giving them lessons in infant care in the last few weeks but Wendy hadn’t really paid attention.

  “Remember to support her head,” Wendy mimicked.

  “Dad,” Violet said, “can you tell her to stop being such a—”

  “Girls,” their father said flatly. “Please.”

  “Don’t drop her,” Wendy said. She brushed Violet with a sharp elbow as she went to sit on the windowsill. Her dad rose and rested the baby in Liza’s arms.

  “What about you, Dad?” Violet asked. “What part of her looks like you?”

  He suddenly looked like he might be sick. She’d never seen her father throw up before.

  “Dad?” Violet asked. “Are you okay?”

  He smiled weakly. “I’m great. Of course. Just have to take a leak.”

  Wendy wrinkled her nose. “Dad, gross.”

  He laughed too forcefully, making his way toward the bathroom. “I want three pairs of eyes on that baby, okay? Mom’ll kill us all if we let someone kidnap her.” He closed the door behind him and turned the water on, but beneath it Wendy could hear a strange noise, not a throwing-up noise but a shuddering sound that she did not recognize immediately as crying.

  “I want to see Mom,” Liza said, holding the baby with a prim, infuriating exactitude.

  “Shut up,” Wendy said. Through the door she now heard the distinct heaving sound of a sob, and it made the hair on her arms stand up.

  “I don’t have that many germs,” Liza said thoughtfully.

  “Shut up,” she said again. She couldn’t stand her mother, but she didn’t want her to die, didn’t want their last exchange to be the one they’d had last night. She started cataloging all of the mean things she’d said to her mom in the last year, in the last three years. All the times her mom looked at her like she’d just floated down from Pluto. The way she hadn’t said I love you back.

  Her father emerged a moment later, patting at his face with a wad of paper towels. “Girls.” His expression was grim. “We’ve gotta talk about Mom.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Violet was on her way out the door, headed to Wine Night at Jennifer Goldstein-Mayer’s, when she was waylaid by—pulled to, magnetically—the dishwasher. The nature of domestic life, she mused, a suburban inevitability: at some point, you were going to find yourself having a heated argument over which end up the forks should be in the silverware basket. The subjects of her fights with Matt had become progressively pedestrian, achingly trite. She remembered laughable debates from their early days together—heated, vitriolic shouting matches about politics (oh, the Romney days!) and propriety (Matt still didn’t understand why it was iffy that he used Jew as a conversational noun) that usually ended in fantastic sex.

  Things had become more complicated, of course; their alone time was virtually nonexistent, especially since Matt had made partner. They had two young children and a mortgage; they had wealth to be managed and a house to be maintained; and, now, they had the insertion of a controversial teenage person who threw a wrench into the well-heeled maintenance of all of those things. It bore revisiting, the Jonah subject, but instead it had become their unvisitable thing, the taboo topic that they edged their way around and pretended they weren’t bumping into.

  So there she was, fuming instead over the fact that when her husband had loaded the dishwasher he’d put all of the silverware blades and tines up, making the emptier prone to minor stabbings, even though she’d told him last night for the seventeenth time to always put the blades down.

  “I thought you were leaving,” he said, appearing in the doorway. She watched him register what she was doing—carefully, pettily, unloading one piece of cutlery at a time, to make a point. He squared his jaw.
“You really want to do this, Violet?”

  She bristled. “I didn’t even—”

  “Can’t you just go drink wine with your friends? Is it not possible for us to have a single night where you don’t freak out about something completely inconsequential?”

  “I’m not freaking out,” she said. “It’s just that we talked about it yesterday.” If she really listened to herself she would be appalled by how she sounded, but she sort of wanted to kill him at the moment, and perhaps this was one of the problems with constantly talking about things other than the thing you actually needed to talk about, because she was reaching a level of anger about the silverware that was appropriate only for something much more apocalyptic.

  “I was distracted,” he said. “I won’t forget again.”

  “What’s going to stop you from forgetting again?”

  “I can’t give you a scientific analysis, babe,” he said, his final syllable bordering on hostility. “But I’ll give it my all to remember, okay?”

  The smartest girl in the room, Matt had said of her once. How false it was. How sick she made herself. She’d opted for all of the decisions exactly opposite from her mom’s; she had done all of the things that her mother had chosen not to do. And she was no better off. She was, arguably, worse off. Her mother, at least, had a sense of herself, despite being a college dropout who’d followed a man to the middle of nowhere, let him pursue his passion while she exercised her gravidity. Her mother’s story, for all she’d judged it, resisted it, was far more poetic than her own. Look at where they’d arrived: the mundane started out being ironically exciting and suddenly you were sexlessly fighting about silverware while your children watched Wonder Pets! in the next room. Something was shifting; something had blown in through the front door and they were both breathing it in, losing ions of love by the second. Never mind the unacknowledgeable fact of Jonah. She shuddered involuntarily.