My Coney Island Baby

by Billy O'Callaghan

  Caitlin closes her eyes and wills herself down into that more controlled darkness. She feels for Michael’s hand, and counts the seconds until his fingers close in answer around hers. She makes it to five, then ten, and when after ten there is still no touch a worm of dread stirs within her, awakening all manner of fears, all the things that have been there for a long time but increasingly so in recent times, things she hates even to contemplate. But then, just as she is about to open her eyes again, his hand finds hers. It squeezes, gently, and everything once more begins to settle. His skin against hers lends cool reassurance, and a pulse insinuates from somewhere very deep within.

  They stand there then, holding hands and holding onto one another, fettered together by this single willing touch, each thinking the sort of thoughts that approach the same subject from different sides. His coat’s hem flaps madly, and even though he is keeping her mostly sheltered, the skirt of her dress catches a sudden sweep of wind and billows, and all she can do is wrestle it back against her legs, gather up the loosest flumes of the material and hold the hem snug against one thigh.

  ‘All right,’ she says, finally, acting all worn down. ‘I give in. Time for bed.’

  Michael puts his arm around her waist. She does not look at him and doesn’t react when he kisses her cheek, high up, close to her eye. She wants to imagine that he is smiling, and that he is happy. They turn away from the vista of the ocean and the enormous clotted sky, and walk in a tight huddle once more down the pier, their backs braced against the day’s vicious sweep.

  II

  Limbo

  They’d just started in on their second year of marriage when Barb fell pregnant. Until then everything had been bliss. Michael was working at full tilt, the way you can when life still seems straightforward as typeset. Rabid for sales and all the good things that sales could bring, things like the cramped but lovely rented apartment in New Rochelle, the late-model Chevy Nova, clean and well enough maintained to pass as almost new, and the sort of cash flow, moderate but consistent, that kept bills to a bearable minimum.

  The car was their biggest indulgence, a real financial drag, but because his job begged him frequently out of town it not only let him make the backwaters of Connecticut and Maine hauling the sort of samples that he could never have managed by bus, train or plane, it also offered the occasional option of driving all night to catch breakfast at home instead of bunking down alone in some dank nowhere motel. When he first started at Jefferson’s, he’d tried making do with public transport, had suffered the wrenched neck and the stiff back of long, lonesome hours spent away from the comfort of his own bed. But once married, he and Barb agreed that the car was worth a little extra bust of the hump, the five or ten more hours a week put in at the office, coming in early or staying late, making calls, wading through reams of paperwork, trying to free up that critical fraction more selling time that would make all the difference. Having to bear the added workload was not easy, especially with a beautiful young wife waiting at home, but even after every sundry demand had been met, there was always still fire enough to burn beacons. Because he was twenty-three years old and built to go around.

  They spent their first year of marriage mostly falling in and out of days. Life was difficult and euphoric, cluttered with work, with running, snatching at words, keeping a hard pace and existing each only for the other. And late on, squeezing beneath the sheets only to find that, actually, sleep was not even the second most pressing thought in their heads. So much seemed to exist for them at once, every detail felt heightened, every touch, every sound, smell and taste. The darkness acted like a poultice on the world, drawing flavour. And Barb had this way of smiling as she dozed, a little teasing smirk that had him a balloon simply begging for the quick, brutal jab of a pin. Lovely and sweet and full of the kind of rumbling laughter that works so well in any situation but really comes into its own once the lights have been doused. Year One made a tide of the details, and living was all about finding means and opportunity at every turn. Contacts, strategies, bargaining, deals taken to breaking point, all sorts of asses kissed, promising the moon and stars down out of the sky, numbers cracked and hammered to a decimal or two above absolute death, for goodwill’s sake, for kindness and fair exchange and, more often than not, out of sheer, straightforward desperation. And in between, and all around, the snatched moments of a high; some breakfast game of footsie, lunches taken standing up, finger-licking dinners, and beer sipped from a shared bottle or can while sprawled all the way beat and three-quarters broken in front of some old late-showing movie, something to raise a few peals, Jimmy Stewart, say, or Cary Grant: suave, debonair, all conman’s grins and ever so slightly up to no real good. Either that or else one of the tough guys, Bogart, Lee Marvin, Mitchum. John Wayne. That sort of tough. Not muscle-bound; assured. Men who could take a crowbar to the knees and still keep in step, still keep jiving. What mattered wasn’t who or what they watched but the fact that they had a sofa, and beer – or wine if that was the sort of night they were trying – and one another. With the lights turned low, Barb liked to sit with her usually bare legs tucked up beneath her or else stretched out across his lap. He’d stare at the movie, playing her at her own game by feigning a lack of interest in anything but the story unfurling across the screen, until twenty minutes or half an hour in when, almost of their own accord, his hands would go to work, helpless for her calves, her feet and the bones of her ankles, and finally, unable to hold himself back, the rest of her.

  And then, some fourteen months along, without thinking a thought in such a direction, big news came banging. What had previously seemed like the height of happiness turned suddenly anaemic. This new state was one of pure exaltation, like feasting after a fast, like the first break of light after a lifetime spent suppressed. Pregnant. Even the word made them gasp. Michael and Barb passed joyous at a hard gallop and felt themselves bordering on ecstasy, neither one of them less so than the other. Everything bloomed. Everything.

  The child was born in late November, the twenty-seventh, minutes after the thinnest of watery dawns had seeped into a heavyweight sky. A boy, James Matthew, five pounds, six ounces. The twenty-seventh was nineteen days short of full term, but that trifling prematurity felt like nothing more than a bookish aside and no one seemed unduly concerned. A boy, a son, a fraction shy in the bounce department perhaps but that, everyone said, was fully to be expected. And the time could easily be made up.

  A light had gone on somewhere, a subtle burn that revealed whole previously unnoticed edges, that readjusted colours and let them impact anew. Michael could not stop smiling. After a while his face began to ache from it, and yet his expression didn’t change, didn’t want to change. He smiled, and shook his head a lot, purely at the wonder of it all. And shattered with relief, Barb smiled too. Perfect as coins in a well, she said, every heavy breath marinated in the kind of laughter that fulfils much the same duty as tears. Perfect, too, as rainbows and neck nibbles and the good sort of country music, before the fungus of plastic and big hats set in, and perfect as that cosy position that can sometimes be found when an embrace closes just right and truly fuses, stopping time.

  Later, when all still seemed okay, absolutely normal, when Barb was released and allowed home to recuperate, they lay nights together in bed, the two of them counting away the minutes and hours until the time when they could reasonably return to the hospital and be again where they most needed to be. Life for them had simplified itself down to pacing the hallways or sitting beside the incubator, admiring and praying for and watching with wonder their little miracle made real, studying how his tiny fingers moved, how his lips twitched, the slow steady swell and plunge of his stomach, the curves and putty-coloured planes of his small, almost-still body encased in glass beneath the jaundiced light. In bed, attempting to compensate for their missing piece, they lay pressed to one another, but not moving, too comfortable to move, and too exhausted, and so instead of moving they sighed and smiled and whispered thing
s, taking turns at swapping long lists of perfections that sounded good but which still fell light-aeons shy of the crystalline perfection they had, by fluke or alchemy, somehow forged.

  Over the years, a regular day for Michael meant coercing contacts into parting with that dollar more than they ideally wanted to spend, but only that dollar, not the entire bank vault, resisting fast gold in favour of the steadier yields accumulated through a slow-bleed method. Such sweet-talked deals accounted for some decent business, and the closing of them brought their own thrills, their own satisfactions, yet he understood, even so, that this was still just work, not life, and that the truly precious aspects of the day lay in the quiet moments, while out driving, say, or taking on board a cup of strong morning coffee or lying awake in bed and drinking in the myriad beauties of his sleeping wife. When he had time to weigh the world and his place in it, and to contemplate and reflect. In those moments, he’d indulge more profound notions, such as whether or not existence had meaning, design, even destiny, or whether the universe amounted to merely the random chance of a turned card. It was all less about answers than about the simple flexing of his mind’s muscles and his heart’s yearning. Some people are born to practicality; others, the dreamers of this world, need that sense of awe the way plants need the nourishment of the sun. He’d roll these questions around, knock them back and forth, wallow in them and be happy.

  The balance of work, love and dreaming had been easy to cultivate, but then, in the heave of a heart’s single slamming, the capsize came. Words were made flesh and the whole game found new and intensified focus. All that counted was James Matthew. From the twenty-seventh onwards, the universe and everything in it tightened like a fist around Michael, from the instant of first cry distilling down to a central population of three as well as a few peripheral attendants. The world became a second-hand double bed in a cramped but decently positioned city apartment and a hospital’s machine-cluttered, permanently twilit maternity ward incubation unit. The in-between – whatever might have existed between one place and the other: the miles of street, the crowded subway, the weather – was nothing more than empty space, a vacuum to be traversed at warp speed. In bed, in the darkness, he and Barbara whispered of their dreams, and by day they sat in terminal wait, hoping for the best and praying away the end.

  And then, finally and probably inevitably, a moment came when their prayers skipped a beat, and that proved enough to tip asunder the delicate balance. Blame fatigue, blame complacency, blame some sentient wickedness getting kicks from doling out hope and then viciously snatching it away again. Toying with them, taking their prayers, spinning out the plot line of a joke that could only ever end badly, but leading them on and on and still on until there was not another step to take. By mid-March it was all over. Fourteen heady, upside-down weeks. Worse, in some ways, was the fact that they arrived into the hospital to the news. An hour or so later than usual, too, exhaustion having made them tardy, the tiny delicious comfort of an accidental lie-in, a blind slamming of the alarm for five minutes more, just five minutes that somehow became thirty, forty-five. They woke in panic, bypassed breakfast, dressed on the run and opted for the folly of the car instead of going the usual rush-hour subway route. Thinking that they could somehow reclaim the time lost, not understanding at all how these things actually worked. They came out the other end quivering with anger and fear but still utterly unprepared. An hour had made all the difference.

  Suddenly, they were tumbling. And it was such a helpless, pathetic kind of fall.

  ‘Move on,’ people told them, once the immediate afterglow of grief began to bruise. People are conditioned to tolerate a certain amount, because they want, and try, to be understanding, to at least be seen to feel compassion and empathy. But this tolerance is not perpetual. A few days were fine, a week’s worth, perhaps a little more, but anything too much longer than that began to press against a fairly uncompromising statute of limitation. The kindness offered was genuine but, as patience inevitably thinned, began to show strains of torpor. And everyone had a take on what had happened. Doctors, nurses, even relatives. All were careful to keep their tones demure and their expressions serious. But all, in their chosen way, pushed a pragmatic agenda. It happened, and yes, it was tragic, the very worst kind of sad, but it had not succeeded in stopping time. The world was still the world. The inference was clear: leave it as it lies and step away. Move on.

  What they all said was what, in their minds, seemed like the best thing to say, but they could speak in such terms only because James Matthew was nothing to them, not really. A fleeting moment of grief, perhaps, but less for the actual living, breathing, flesh-and-blood, body-and-soul person than for the potential hinted at and then left so cruelly unfulfilled. They felt the loss, felt broken-hearted for it, but they didn’t truly understand it because it did not impinge too directly on their own lives. They could still go home at night and close their eyes without having to take on the waiting torment of remembering the little boy inside that perspex glass-domed incubator, trapped tiny and yellow beneath a grilling light, yellow from a liver responding only to jump-starts, with a tube buried in his nose and more tubes running from the veins in both wrists and from strategic incision points in his stomach, chest and groin.

  ‘Move on,’ became the inferred mantra, repeated in a multitude of different words that all amounted to the same stock two-plus-two-equals solution, addressing Michael and Barbara not just while they were together and had one another to hold onto but also when they could be caught in separate states. Playing them each back and forth against the other and taking full advantage of their vulnerability and helplessness to ram the instruction home. And what the grieving couple were supposed to do, what was expected of them, was to nod and try to smile, even though they were both bleeding fountains inside. With the world on fire around them, their duty was to brace themselves against the pain and to whisper understanding. They were to lie, to themselves and to everyone else, and to keep at it until the lies became fact.

  Those weeks immediately after the infant’s passing could have represented a kind of beginning as well as an end, some transitory period between stages of life, natural progressions and all that bullshit. But instead of facing front and waging some sort of healing war, Barb and Michael, in abject fashion and with hardly a whimper, simply surrendered. They’d lost their fight, and were spent. And what followed was, in effect, dead time, just as much as the time that had immediately preceded it. Even more so, in fact, because that previous period, those months spent hunched on seat edges in a cramped and sterile hospital room, penned in from every angle by a necessary slew of flickering monitors and chirping machines, had at least indulged their delusions and let them believe in the notion if not the actuality of hope. And even later, after all such hope had faded, it still let them continue with the ruse and presented them with way after way of trying to comfort themselves and one another on lies that, yes, were sheer and unadulterated but which were also undeniably honourable. But this new emptiness offered nothing so supportive, not even the succour of an obvious falsehood. In the weeks immediately after their child’s death, they found themselves cut loose to drift until they either happened their way to shore or else slipped under and were lost in the deluge.

  One of the most difficult things to accept was just how literal the end had proven. A murmured apology, following on from the pulling of an actual physical plug. Christ. It was like switching off a light. That definitive. If pressed, Michael might have had to admit that, yes, it was final and at least to a certain extent clean, but there was still something too contrived about it, as if the hospital were acting on his decision, or his and Barb’s, as if they, as distraught parents, had any kind of choice or input in the matter. What had happened was that, somewhere along the way, at some godforsaken hour during the smudge of weeks and months, he’d been taken aside and told that he needed to sign this form, this among all the others. It was nothing to get worked up about; a waiver, but a mere f
ormality in cases such as this, because while the current numbers suggested with a ninety-nine per cent assurance that all would be fine, the very fact alone that there was even the most minuscule possibility of a slip meant the doctors had to keep themselves prepared and in a position to act, and act fast. Signing this form covered everyone and would allow them a free hand if something were to change between now and whenever. And, if such-and-such did happen, to do whatever was deemed medically necessary, to make the judgement call based on their combined decades of experience and expertise. They were talking about off-chances, of course, but were such a situation to occur then every second would have a numbered worth. A quick response was critical, and might prove the difference between miracle and tragedy. Michael had stared at the form and let the persuasions of the two doctors wash over him, but he could not bring himself to even think about understanding. All he could do, in the end, was sign. He sat in a leather-cushioned chair still warm from some recent occupancy, nodded his head and mumbled sounds from somewhere deep beneath his trance, and finally he took the offered pen and scrawled his name beside a tiny looped x. The doctors watched, leaning in on either side, one of them – the older of the two – pointing out with a long thin index finger where a set of initials was also required and where a box needed ticking. Neither had cared to inform him that what he was doing, essentially, was signing the death warrant on his only son.

  Nobody wants a child to suffer, just as nobody wants a child to die. But how far can the limits be pushed before the definitions of ethics and morality turn reprehensible? The answer presented to Michael and Barbara, in a voice without edges, felt like a clawing interpretation. When nothing works except by machine, when even the most outlandish medical possibilities of recovery have been explored and exhausted, when finality offers the only definitive way of alleviating unbearable pain and the only humane option left available is to let the body run itself down. Floating in low sound just above a whisper, tenuous around the certainty of its facts, it was an answer, but one that failed to address how a person was expected to deal with the actual instant of end. How long would it take to realise that the heart was done, and how were you supposed to make sense of that? Because, even within the roll of the final beat, the nothingness of death must have felt impossible. For such a thing as life to exist and then, within a finger-snap, to see it snatched away, seemed not only bad magic but something infinitely worse because where even the darkest sorcery was concerned nothing had to be permanent. Everyone had words to say, advice to offer, assurances to make, but how could they even begin to know what it was like unless they’d been cornea-close, until they’d felt the stone-and-dirt stench of another’s last few breaths against their lips and tongue? There are no words for something like that, and surely nothing for a soul to do, in the moment and even in the aftermath moments, but to stand there and try not to wince, try not to fucking scream.