I bent over the opposite side of the case. His fingers wiggled like underwater plants. How would I recognize him if we crossed paths later in life? These seaweed hands would be buried inside normal man hands. I wouldn’t even be able to know him by name, because he didn’t have one.
Almost! I said. There was no good way to be, so I was being cavalier, lancing my own heart. We came pretty close. See you next time!
Kubelko Bondy looked at me with disbelief, speechless.
I turned and walked out of the NICU before Clee looked up. I went down the elevator and into the lobby. I walked out of the lobby into the street. The sun was blinding. People were striding past thinking about sandwiches and feeling wronged. Where was I parked? Parking garage. I searched for my car, floor by floor, row by row. Ambulance. I’d come by ambulance. I’d have to call a cab. I didn’t have my cell phone. It was in the room. Fine. Go back and get it. In and out again. I took the elevator back up to the seventh floor. Everything looked the same, the pig-faced nurse still had that face. How good this world was, with its large and real concerns. There was the couple who blamed each other — they were holding hands and smiling tenderly. I was a ghost, spying on my old life without me. Room 209. Clee would be making her way back from the NICU any second now. My cell phone, grab it and go.
She was sitting on the edge of her bed, crying. Something terrible had happened in the short time I was gone. She glared at me and made a shapeless angry sound.
“I couldn’t find you. I looked all over.”
Nothing terrible had happened.
“I was just trying to make a call.” I patted my phone in my pocket to show her. My phone was actually in my pocket; it had been there all along. I’d come back for something else.
The last of her crying came out in a clotted sigh after the first kiss. We began a series of impatiently off-center ones, as if we were too hurried to land them properly; then our mouths became fingertips, moving blindly over the bumps and hollows of each feature. She stopped, pulled her head back a little and looked at me. Her mouth hung open and her eyes were slow with thought. She was studying my face like she was trying to break it down, find some appeal in it — or maybe figure out how she got here, how this could be happening.
“Come in here,” she said, lifting the starched white sheet.
“There isn’t enough room.” I sat carefully on the edge of her bed.
“Just come in.”
I took off my shoes and she slowly, painfully scooched to one side of the twin bed. The combined width of our bottoms just barely fit inside the guardrails.
We began again, slowly this time. And deep. Her bosom, loose beneath the hospital smock, pressed against mine; she pushed her tongue into me with strong, mature movements and I held her face, that soft, honeyed skin. It was nothing like the things I had once done with her in my head. Phillip and the plumber and all the other men had missed the point completely. The point was kissing. Suddenly she froze, wincing.
“Are you in pain?”
“I am, actually,” she said, a little curtly. It was startling how quickly she changed.
“Maybe you need more fluids?” I looked at her saline bag. “Should I call the nurse?”
She laughed hoarsely. “Let me just think about something else for a minute.” She exhaled a long, controlled breath. “I guess I’m not ready to have these kinds of feelings.”
“Which feelings?” I said.
“Sexual.”
“Oh.”
At eleven I brought us lunch from the cafeteria in the basement; she ate the minestrone soup and the crackers and the yellow cake and the orange juice and then she needed to take a nap. But only after kissing my neck while running one hand through my short hair. It was like a dream, where the most unlikely person can’t get enough of you — a movie star or someone’s husband. How can this be? But the attraction is mutual and undeniable; it is the reason for itself. And like a surprise on the moon or a surprise on the battlefield, astonishment was native to these parts. The climate in 209 was fetid, breeding an exotic flower instead of the natural thing that Carrie Spivack had described. Or maybe she would say that things often became very sensual right before the release of the baby on the third day; maybe this was part of the arc. Tomorrow was day three.
I waited for her to wake up and when she didn’t I went up to the NICU by myself. A couple was taking off their gowns as I was putting on mine. They were talking about used cars.
“You would never buy a car without kicking the tires first,” he said, balling up his gown and throwing it in the recycling by mistake.
“You would if you were taking a leap of faith and trusting that God knew what you could handle.”
“I’m pretty sure God would not want you to buy a falling-apart old junker.”
“Well, it’s too late now,” she said, making a fist around her purse strap. She looked older than her picture on ParentProfiles.com, both of them did. They reeked of their house back in Utah, its old carpets suffused with cigarette smoke. This would be the smell of his life, of him.
“Is it?” Gary said. “Is it too late — legally?” He was scared. He really did not want the car they had bought. “Yes, it is,” she said. Then she gave him a look like Let’s not talk about this in front of that woman. They were terrible people, even slightly worse than most. I stalled, fumbling with the sleeves of my gown. Should I introduce myself or try to kill them? Not violently, just enough that they wouldn’t exist. Amy gave me a polite nod as they exited. I nodded back, watching the door swing shut. It occurred to me that the doctor had said only that the baby would live. Not that he would run, or eat food, or talk. Living just meant not dying, it didn’t necessarily include any bells and whistles.
Kubelko Bondy’s eyes were wide open and waiting.
Every single thing about you is perfect, I told him.
You came back, he said. I bowed my head and tried to come up with a promise that would allow for nothing being in my control.
I love your dear little shoulders, I said. And I always will.
Clee slept until noon and then we went back up together. She put her arm around me in the elevator and kept it there as we walked down the hall. Our hips bumped together in a difficult syncopated rhythm. We passed the couple who used to blame each other and they nodded without flinching. I thought to myself that these would always be the first people I came “out of the closet” to. They seemed very accepting. A few of the nurses looked silently startled by our new intimacy. Maybe because they had thought I was Clee’s mother. Or maybe because they were now dealing with two sets of parents and we weren’t the real ones. Clee gave me a peck on the lips in front of the Isolette. In this quiet way we came out to the baby.
Carrie Spivack had been here too; her Philomena Family Services card was sticking out of the plastic name tag that said Baby Boy Stengl. I palmed it like a magician and moved it into my pocket.
“We can’t keep calling him ‘the baby,’ ” I whispered.
“Okay. Do you have a name?”
This moved me, that she thought I had any right to name him. I pictured trying to explain the name Kubelko Bondy.
“It should come from you, you’re his mom.”
She laughed, or I thought it was a laugh — it ended in a gasping kind of swallow. We noticed a strange red mark on his tiny arm. I waved over a nurse with bleached-blond hair.
“Hi, little dude,” she croaked, checking his monitor. “It’s a big day for you.” She reeked of perfume, perhaps to cover the smell of cigarettes. The mark: a cigarette burn. I felt alive with anger. But I was a manager and knew how to handle this; I could already picture her crying after what I was about to say.