28 Abbott Looks out the Window
Long after the volunteer community search party disbanded, the missing girls have been found at a rest area four states away. They’re alive. They were playing shoeless in the picnic area when an alert motorist called authorities. They’re skinny, but they have always been skinny. The sheriff’s deputy back home wept at the press conference. He said, “Most of us working on this one have kids. The ones with kids are the hardest.” He said, “You just can’t—” but he didn’t finish. Abbott leans back in his chair and tries to recall which missing girls these are. The summer is full of them. Out his window he can see a maple tree, the top of a weathered wooden fence, his neighbor’s roof and chimney. The window is divided into twelve panes, four rows of three. Abbott imagines that each pane is a framed photograph. He studies the composition of each of the twelve panes. He moves along rows, left to right, beginning with the upper left pane. A cloud of leaves and a single red brick. A squirrel on new shingles. Sky with faded contrail. There is not one pane that is not beautiful.
29 Abbott and the Cold Shudder
Abbott’s office is nearly a nursery. The chair and books he has already moved to the basement. Only the desk remains, crowded on one side by a changing table and crib, now assembled, and on the other side by a rocking chair and a chest of drawers filled with tidy stacks of clothing that seem too small to fit anyone. Alphabet letter-cards span the walls, spaced uniformly. A Kite likes wind. A Lamb is soft. The Moon is full. Abbott stands in front of his desk, awaits connection. The room still has the new-paint smell. Today is the anniversary of tragedy, but which day is not? Abbott’s eyesight is not what it used to be, but if he squints and leans down toward the laptop screen he can read, in the archival photographs, the messages handwritten on the signs held aloft by dark-skinned people trapped on rooftops of flooded buildings. One sign says HELP US, one says WE NEED WATER, one says PLEASE HELP. Darwin was troubled by the eye, its “inimitable contrivances.” How could natural selection, working so gradually upon only the modest, incremental variations produced by random mutation, have created something as complex as an eye? What adaptive benefit is one one-thousandth of an optical organ? Or even half of one? “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,” he wrote after the publication of On the Origin of Species. But the mechanism of the eye is the easy part to believe, as any insurance executive can tell you. “One might have thought of sight,” wrote the vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, “but who could think / Of what it sees …?” Abbott’s wife knocks on the open door. Abbott turns, keeps his body in front of the screen so his wife cannot see. “When are you going to move the desk?” she says. “Right this very instant,” he says. Abbott DISCONNECTS NOW and crawls beneath the desk with a screwdriver. He begins to take the desk apart, keeping the screws in a sandwich bag he will affix to the inside of a drawer with masking tape. On the tape he will write DESK SCREWS in black marker. At some point during the disassembly, a juncture of interest to philosophers, the desk ceases to be a desk, the office an office.
30 Abbott on the Roof
The stars are far behind the clouds tonight as Abbott climbs a borrowed ladder to his roof. He does not have wine or a blanket. He sits on the flat roof above his family room and rests his back against the gentle slope of the garage. He presses his palms against the shingles, still warm from the day. He knows the warmth is from the late-summer sun, but it is easy to believe that it comes from inside the house, from all the bodies and breath and motion. The heat of a family, radiating out. He does not have marijuana or an old acoustic guitar. In two minutes he’s self-conscious. In five minutes he’s bored. In eight minutes his lower back hurts. He sees a firefly blink below him, and he counts the seconds until it blinks again. He hears his neighbors through their screens: the bright clatter of silverware on plates, spouses and children calling for one another through the houses. Where are you? Can you come here for a second? Have you seen Matt? Someone is running a power saw. Someone is dragging a can to the curb, though it is not, Abbott thinks, trash night. The wind pushes small sticks and branches across the roof and off the edge. No moon, no constellations, no meteor showers. Abbott climbs back down the ladder. In the family room his wife says, “What were you doing?” Abbott fixes a drink in the kitchen. “Just checking,” he says. His wife says, “Come in here.” She is lying on the bad couch. The family room is still a mess from the day. “Let’s clean this up later,” she says. Abbott lifts her legs and sits beneath them. The veins in her ankles look terrible. You poor thing, the nurses always say. “Are you scared?” Abbott says. “Sure,” she says. “Do you wish we had done the amnio?” he says. “No,” she says, “I don’t think about that.” Abbott sees a bulging garbage bag slumped against the front door. It probably is trash night, then. “Everything is going to be fine,” he says. “Look at this,” she says. “Is that an elbow?” he says. “Either an elbow or a knee.” Abbott tries to kiss it but it’s gone. He keeps his lips on his wife’s stomach for a while, then he says, “Just a second.” He slips out from beneath his wife’s legs and gets off the couch. He leaves the family room and walks the length of the house to the bedroom. From the drawer of his nightstand he takes a wrapped gift and returns to the family room. “This is just something small,” he says. “I got you something too,” his wife says. “Go get it. It’s in my nightstand.” Abbott walks back to the bedroom and pulls a small wrapped gift from his wife’s nightstand. Then he walks back to the family room. “Did you wrap this?” his wife says, holding up the gift. Abbott shakes his head. “It’s nothing big,” he says. Abbott’s wife begins to unwrap the gift. “You know,” she says, “when I first heard you up there, I was angry. But then I realized you are not the kind of man who would ever fall off a roof.”
31 Abbott Chooses a Side
Monitored, amplified, the fetal heartbeat sounds to Abbott like the hoarse bark of a guard dog. “Or like a marching band far away,” his wife says. The nurses take her blood pressure and talk about their distant pregnancies. “Back then they just knocked you out,” says one. Then they roll Abbott’s wife out of the room. She smiles weakly and waves as she disappears. Abbott puts on his scrubs and waits. He knows that eleven thousand babies are born in the United States every day. Nothing else so ordinary is ever called miraculous. He sits, stands, walks to the window. Three stories down, morning commuters drink coffee and talk on their phones. They do not even glance up at the Childbirth Center, this hub of life. They do not seem to notice or care. Abbott surmises that he has driven past dozens of births while opening CD cases or eating crackers. He sits, stands, picks up items and puts them down. Finally someone comes for him, leads him out. His wife is at the center of the operating room with a drape over her chest. Abbott can choose which side of the drape: belly or head. He chooses head, because it is crying and because he does not want to see — ever — his wife’s abdominal wall. Her headache is caused by a rapid drop in blood pressure, and the anesthesiologist is making things better. His voice is soothing and kind through his mask. “Is it still bad?” he says. Abbott’s wife nods. “In just a second you’re going to start feeling better,” he says. There are many people in the room. The nurses and doctors joke about speeding tickets, and Abbott wishes they would be quiet. Then they all grow quiet, and Abbott wishes they would start joking again. He does not know whether the procedure has begun. He is with his wife, though it is true that the doctors on the other side of the drape are with his wife, too. He strokes her hair through the thin fabric of her scrub cap, worried that it might not be the right thing. (Later she will tell him it was the right thing.) Her arms are out to her sides. The doctors use what sounds like a vacuum. Abbott, sitting by his wife’s head, can see, over the drape, the eyes of the doctors above their masks. The birth feels secretive, covert. He can feel the hot air pooling in his own mask. The thing he’d like to tell all of them is Please be careful with this woman and this baby. It’s always possible to be a little bit more careful. He leans down to whisper to his wife. He puts his covered lips lightly on her ear and says nothing. He makes a whispering noise but not words. The doctors tug hard at the hole they have made, and here now there’s a human baby aloft over the drape, looking not at all ready for existence. Her skinny legs, for instance, are curved like parentheses. It has already happened and it is over and it has begun. The doctors begin to repair Abbott’s wife’s body. Her head is smiling, weeping. “Is she OK?” she asks. Someone says, “She looks great.” This time the camera has fresh batteries, but Abbott forgets to take a picture. Fortunately, the anesthesiologist is there to help. Here’s the red-throated howl. Here are the curled toes. Here’s the knit cap too big. Here’s the yellow cord with bright drops of blood. Here’s the pediatrician’s forearm. Here’s the scale. Here’s the wife, so close and so far away. Here’s the terror, the full and expanding heart. Here’s what happened to Abbott.