THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010
I grab the Diet Cherry 7UP, dump most of the can into a glass—a giveaway from the breast-feeding conference I attended last March, inscribed with the proclamation, I AM A LACTIVIST!—dig out a half-finished bottle of merlot, pour a healthy jolt in, and hope that the chemical cherry taste and aspartame will be enough to sweeten the vinegar tang of the old wine. Since Dori isn’t around to slug me on the arm, I need at least a modest buzz to disrupt my current cycle of regrets.
I take the drink and settle into my usual spot on the sofa where I’ve sat up more nights than I care to recall listening for the rumble of Tyler’s truck. To take my mind off my fear that this will be one of the nights when Aubrey doesn’t return, I listen to my messages. The first one is from Simone, who reminds me that I saw her late last week in the hospital after her delivery. The message breaks up but sounds frantic enough that I call right back.
“Thank God you called!”
When someone asks why I do the work that I do, that’s what I should tell them. Those four words. “Thank God you called.” How many people ever get to hear that at their jobs? Her problem is engorgement. I walk her through expressing by hand. “That should help soften the breast a little. The nipple won’t be so flat and little Joaquin”—as usual I remember the baby’s name—“will be able to get a good latch.”
“My mother-in-law says I should use cabbage leaves.”
“Great idea if you’re making cabbage rolls, but there’s really no evidence that they work any better than a nice cold compress. An ice pack will help with tissue swelling.” I tell her that it’s safe to use acetaminophen or Advil.
I know Simone will be fine, but she’s still uncertain and pleads, “Could you come over tomorrow?”
“I’d love to, but my daughter’s leaving for college and I’ve had to clear my schedule for a few days to help her tie up some loose ends.” I promise to check back as soon as Aubrey is safely winging her way toward a bright and shiny future.
“College,” the new mom whimpers while Joaquin cries in the background. “Will we ever make it that far?”
“Blink twice, Simone.”
She laughs. Always a good sign. I give her my colleague Janis’s number. “If Joaquin is not drinking like a frat boy by tomorrow, Janis can help you.” I think about Janis, who I split shifts at the hospital with—late thirties, married, two sons, kind eyes, an inexplicable affection for animal prints—and am relieved that there is finally another competent lactation consultant in Parkhaven who can fill in for me.
I hang up and notice that among the many things annoying me are the misbegotten Betty Page bangs I’m trying to grow out. They’ve reached the sheepdog stage and are driving me crazy. I pin them back before I return the rest of the calls.
The calls—each one so absorbingly unique, yet all variations of problems I’ve dealt with hundreds of times before—occupy me so completely that a couple of hours slip by before I finish the last one, switch the light off, and stretch out on the couch to listen in the dark for what I want to hear most: Aubrey coming home.
As I strain to detect the muffled squeak of the front door being quietly opened, I drift into the cozy place that floats on the outskirts of actual sleep. Memory overtakes me with the vividness of a dream, and I am back with Martin in our sweet little duplex in Sycamore Heights. We are eating the dinner we’ve spent a couple of happy hours making together—chiles rellenos with raisins and pecans stuffed into the peppers—on the postage stamp–size deck behind our rented house. We have recently discovered that there are other white wines besides chardonnay and that they are all delicious with chiles rellenos. It is sunset. Swallows dip through the air chasing late-spring insects. The smell of newly cut grass wafts over to us. Someone across the alley is playing Lucinda Williams’s new CD. We are cocooned in the simple opulence of being together.
Most mothers say that the happiest moment of their lives was when their child was born. Aubrey’s birth was the most intense moment of my life. But happiest? My pick for pure, simple happiness would be on that deck with Martin. I will never understand how, if he’d been even a fraction as contented as I was, he could voluntarily have given up that feeling.
I jerk fully awake, force the dream-memory aside, and listen for any sound that might indicate that Aubrey has come home. But the snuffling whistles of Pretzels snoring at my feet are all that disturb the utter silence.
My mother hovered and clung more than any helicopter mom that was ever invented after her. But even she couldn’t control any of the most important events in my life. She couldn’t control that she died young, and she couldn’t control who I fell in love with. My future was decided on that train in Morocco when I fell in love with Martin.
I pray that my daughter’s future has not already been decided. That it wasn’t decided twelve months ago, at the start of her senior year, when my business finally really took off and I was gone all the time and I didn’t intervene when I should have. I pray that Aubrey won’t pay the price for my negligence. That she will come home tonight and have the life she was meant to have.