Two vehicles, a black Honda Civic and a white company van, have come to a rest in the middle of the two-lane highway, nose to nose. The car’s back bumper is up on the guardrail, the front an open sore—pulverized engine parts, contorted metal. Inside the bent carriage, Mother has not yet come to and Baby is screaming. An emergency caravan in the background, lights pulse blood and blue. It is dark. The street is black except the middle line that glows like a ghost.
***
Mother wakes to seashell waves at the back of her head, Baby crying on top of that. A paramedic knocking on Mother’s window. When Mother finally gets her eyes to stay open, the paramedic gives a thumbs-up and moves away, out of sight. The front window caved, cracked in a spider web design. Little squares of glass on her clothing, hard bits in her molars, at the back of her throat. She isn’t sure if it is okay to swallow the chunks. Glass, she has heard, can poke holes at the inside of a person. Mother tries to talk, to reassure her eighteen-month-old daughter, but she can’t get her voice loud enough. Baby’s wails keep cutting out. The paramedics drum on back door windows.
“Wake up sweetie,” they are saying.
Mother tries to look in the back seat, but can’t move her head, her knee pinned in at the dash, the steering wheel at her sternum. A better mother would be able to move, she thinks. A better mother would rip her knee free, command the unwilling body, reach back and touch Baby’s plump leg. She can feel tingling in her left hand. She tries her arm, bending the elbow, reaching up to touch her own hair. She feels for a wound, glass dislodges and falls down her nose, cheeks, ears.
“Don’t move.” The paramedic is back at Mother’s window, muffled voice. “Stay still.”
Mother smiles, to show that she will cooperate, but knows the mistake when the paramedic doesn’t get back to knocking at Baby’s door. Something in Mother’s expression makes him pause. She must look crazy, and now there is only one person attending to Baby. A female paramedic who continues to rap against the glass. “Honey, honey, come on, wake up,” she says to Baby.
Mother wants the man back there too, so that the knocking will be louder. Silence from the back seat, no crying, not the slobber breathing Baby does after a fit. The man studies Mother, forehead creased, concerned. He has a flashlight in his hand but it is pointed at the dash, turning glass into crystal.
“The baby,” she says. The man doesn’t move; he is blue hued through the tinted window. “Baby,” she says. Her voice is small; her voice is gravel. “Baby,” she uses her fish mouth, exaggerating the word.
“Stay still,” he says, and steps back to resume at Baby’s window.
***
Before the accident, while the car is still sitting cold in the driveway, Mother closes the door to the nursery and pauses, hand on the doorknob. She can hear Baby kick against the crib slats. Morning nap has been working only sometimes lately, but Mother still needs it, so she can take a shower, have coffee, hastily buttered toast. Today, she also needs that time to pack. They are going to the coast for a few days, meeting her parents. Husband can’t come, he has to work.
She walks away on tip toe. The floor creaks even though it is fake wood laminated. In the kitchen, she puts her hand on the cool granite, closes her eyes, and waits. The upstairs tenants are getting ready for work. She bristles when the steps move over the kitchen and towards her daughter’s room. The neighbors have cement feet. Still, Baby is silent. Mother brings the monitor into the bathroom and turns on the shower. She has one foot in the tub, steam rises, the water is translucent grey. At that moment from the baby monitor: a whimper.
When she enters the room, Baby wipes away her tears with balled up hands and smiles. She stands and jogs on her mattress, holding her arms up to be lifted. Mother holds her, breathes in rice cereal and milk, feels Baby nuzzle at the neck, arms tight, little hands gripping the back of her shirt. Mother pats a soothing rhythm, sways in the dim room, thinks that Baby might go off to sleep like this, but then the child uncurls, puts her hands on Mother’s cheeks and squeezes. They rub noses and laugh.
“No nap?” Mother says.
“No, no.” Baby shakes her head.
This is how packing goes: boots and jackets for the coast, Baby needs up, fistful of onesies, Baby needs snack, cooler of pureed vegetables, Baby has found the umbrella, wants to open it, screaming because Mother says no, no, no.
It’s not just Baby that causes Mother to feel the uneasy panic that has marked early parenthood for her. Every item she handles, chooses to pack or not pack, is a mark of her ability as a caregiver. Mother can’t help but measure herself in the negative. The freeze-dried fruit packs go in because Baby will consume them quickly and, after all, they are a part of the recommended fruit and vegetable regime. She laments that they are non-organic and imagines pesticides traveling every inch of Baby’s body: sponged from the bloodstream by the organs, permeating the young, pulsating brain and biting off too many synapses. One negative demerit to join the millions. One day, someone will notice all these marks against her, and they will declare her unfit as a parent, and give Baby to a more deserving woman, one who would never consider non-organic freeze-dried fruit packets, despite their affordability.
They are just in the car when Husband calls.
“Bank account is low.”
She sighs, turns on the engine, and puts the shift in reverse. “Those button-up shirts I bought you yesterday,” she says.
“No money till Friday, even then, paycheck won’t clear till who knows.”
“So?” She pulls up the emergency brake and puts her forehead on the steering wheel. She can hear him move around, the wheels on his office chair swiveling, the typing.
“Bank account is low.”
“Want me to return the shirts, that it?”
“Might be best,” he says.
She is silent. He coughs loudly into the phone and she clenches her jaw. She used to think, about his little idiosyncrasies—isn’t it funny how they aren’t annoying. The sound of his teeth scraping against the fork. His inability to be quiet on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, marching from the bedroom into the hall, causing the floor to shake. Doing the dishes but not bothering to clean the counter.
After Baby, every flaw feels like the symptom of something bigger. Now, it is worse than his inability to move his mouth away from the phone before coughing. It’s a general lack of consideration, the inability to intuit her stress, leave this financial lesson for another time—it’s a lack of recognition for all the small things she does to make the house run smoothly. She hears the click of computer keys and feels like his employee, an assistant who doesn’t merit full attention from the boss.
“Love you,” he says. He stops typing for this, and she imagines his fingers hovering above the keys, waiting for the response.
“Go,” Baby says, kicking the back seat.
Mother hangs up without saying goodbye. She turns off the engine.
“Go, go, go.” Baby is about to cry.
“One second sweetie, just one more thing,” she says.
She gets out of the car and Baby looks through the window at her, forehead pinched. Mother holds up her finger. “One second, hold on sweetie. Quick, quick.” She crosses behind and hesitates. What if the neighbors see the Baby in the car by herself, howling? She hits lock on the key and hears a beep. At least no one can steal Baby. She’ll run in, grab the shirts.
***
In the department store, at the exchange desk, Baby breaks free and runs to a circular clothing rack. Her head is between two blouses. She pulls on one and it slips off the hanger. She falls on her bottom, the nylon fabric crumpled in her lap. When Mother comes near, Baby squeals and scrambles to the center.
“Ma’am?”
“Sorry,” calls Mother, on her hands and knees, struggling to grab hold of Baby. When she gets back to the desk, a small line has formed. Baby arches her back and bends over Mother’s arm, upside down, laughing.
“Ma’am?” The sales lady gestures at the credit machine, wanting her to swipe. “Let’s get that refund on your card.”
As they walk towards the exit, Mother continues to hold Baby. Her biceps ache, but she can’t handle chasing Baby through the remainder of the store, the shoe display a looming disaster.
“That, that?” Baby says, pointing to the red heels.
“Unrealistic footwear,” Mother says. This does not satisfy Baby, who wrenches her body around as they pass.
“That?” Baby says, reaching over Mother’s shoulder.
Mother, who is usually quick to reply, wanting to encourage language development, doesn’t answer. She is still harboring some anger towards Husband. Early in her pregnancy, she had read that bringing a child into the mix was the most toxic thing one could do when it came to relationship satisfaction. Was it happening? A slow deterioration? No, she decides. It’s just exhaustion.
***
Mother tries to keep Baby happy in the backseat. Two hours of road already, handing back book after book and the last one Baby threw down, her face beet red, mouth a rectangle that means she is about to cry, legs kicking. Then Baby lets out a beginning warble, sucks in and gives it all she’s got. Mother cringes, adjusts her fingers on the steering wheel, moves the rearview mirror so that she can see the angry creature, willing it to sleep. Even though Baby never naps in the car, there is the hope that she will this time, especially if Mother ignores her and lets her cry for a while, something that she doesn’t usually do for fear of leaving the child with trauma, black hole anxiety that can’t be filled in later. But enough is enough. The road doesn’t have space to pull off anyway, except the shoulder alongside the wet, dripping forest.
They pass a forty-five-speed limit and Mother realizes she is driving too fast, takes her foot off the gas. The digital speedometer counts down. Coming in the other direction: a white van with sallow headlights, ladder on the roof. Mother tries to soothe the baby, sleep, sleep, she says. They are just about to pass the white van when it crosses the middle line, grille like a mouth, coming at them, horizontal teeth. Mother lifts her foot to brake, opens her mouth to say I love you—which is meant for Baby and to fill in for what she didn’t say to Husband over the phone—takes one hand off the steering wheel intending to hold Baby’s kicking foot, doesn’t have time for any of that.
***
In the ambulance, Mother is shivering on a stretcher. She has a white collar around her neck. They have Baby up on a shelf of some sort, still in her car seat. She is not crying. Mother can only see the side of the car seat and Baby’s legs. Her shoes have come off but the little white socks remain. She can see that the socks are different, one is crimped at the top, the other not. A stray string hangs from the big toe of the left, and she wants to get to Baby, pull up and adjust the socks, find her shoes.
The paramedics are standing in front of Baby and arguing.
“We should keep her awake,” says the woman. She has a thick ponytail, a reflective jacket, her arms are crossed.
“I’m not worried, it was nap time.” The man turns to face Mother. “It was nap time, right?”
“Past her nap time.” There’s a tremor in Mother’s voice. “She missed her first nap.”
“See?” says the man.
“But she doesn’t usually nap in the car,” says Mother.
Nobody responds to this. They move around the vehicle, pulling at straps, setting things up. The man lifts the thin blanket uncovering Mother’s leg, and low whistles.
“She doesn’t usually nap in the car seat,” says Mother.
The man’s forehead is wrinkled. He makes eye contact for a moment and drops the blanket.
“She’s breathing, right?” asks Mother.
The man kneels by Mother like a frog. “We’re waiting for life flight. She’ll be taken by helicopter. Alright?”
“But she’s breathing?”
“Yes.”
“She’s okay?”
He stands and walks over to the Baby. The floor gives a metallic pop with each step. He reaches in and adjusts something. Moves her bangs to the side? Brushes glass off her cheek?
“She okay?”
“Can’t say,” he says. “Looks good.”
“We shouldn’t keep her awake?” Mother hopes that the woman will chime in again, she can see her in her periphery, messing with a clipboard on the wall.
“I’m not worried,” he says.
When life flight arrives, the ambulance shakes.
Regrets: she doesn’t ask to see Baby before they take her, she doesn’t ask to be taken in the air too.
Baby is outside the double doors of the ambulance, on the way to the helicopter, and Mother can hear her now. She is screaming.
***
In the Emergency Room, Mother asks the nurse if he’s heard anything about Baby. He shakes his head. He has a short patchy beard and mustache, visible naked skin between the hairs. Large nostrils, purple scrubs.
“Phone?”
“I’ll do my best,” he says.
Mother is still shivering, glass sheds with each move. She can still feel the hard crystals in her teeth but keeps forgetting to ask if it’s okay to swallow. There is a nurse on either side of her. They cut her clothing. Underneath she is wearing a Spanx corset thing.
“What’s this?” Nostrils says.
“Like, to hold everything in,” says the other nurse.
“Didn’t think I’d be in an accident,” Mother says.
Nostrils shakes his head like this is the craziest undergarment he has ever seen, starts at the top and cuts between her breasts.
“So cold in here.” Mother is shivering, her teeth knock together.
“Shock, honey,” says the nurse.
After she is covered up, a cop comes in. Everybody leaves the room so that he can take her statement.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she says.
The cop rocks on his feet, pen poised.
“Start with what you remember,” he says.
“White utility van, with the turn signal on, crossed into our lane.”
“Good memory.”
“It wasn’t my fault?”
“How fast were you going?”
“Forty-five. Or I don’t know, I saw a sign that said forty-five.”
The cop shakes his head. “Several witnesses, it wasn’t your fault. I’d recommend taking the voluntary drug and alcohol test. Looks bad otherwise.”
“Have you heard about my daughter?”
He shakes his head. “Sorry.”
After the cop leaves, Nostrils comes into the room holding his cellphone. On the other end is Husband. He is at the hospital with Baby. He tells her that Baby has bleeding on the brain and a broken clavicle, that she is sedated, but still pushes the doctors away, tries to pull out the IV.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she says.
“I’ve already decided it doesn’t matter,” he says.
The generosity astounds her. Mother is reminded of that day when she stopped trying to breast feed Baby. She gave her formula for the first time and in their dark bedroom, Baby’s face was in pixels of blue. This might be enough, she thought—it was almost like nursing, Baby was cradled tight, her soft hair close enough to kiss. But then she stopped sucking and began shaking her head, trying to escape the nipple. Milk pooled on the inside of her cheek, and dripped from her slack mouth. Mother moved the bottle away and Baby began rooting against her breast.
When Mother came out of the room, Husband looked at the bottle in her hand, still full, and Baby sucking wetly on her neck, hungry. He stood up from the couch and hugged them. Mother swallowed a sob. He knew about the lactation consultations, fenugreek supplements, the Mother’s Milk tea, hours with the breast pump, all of it to get her milk production up. He knew that her body wasn’t working properly, and for some reason, she expected him to feel resentment. She felt like a piece of furniture on discount. Discontinued mother, faulty wife. But after the hug, he took Baby and the bottle silently, and looked at Mother with fierce loyalty, as if she had been unjustly accused of some wrongdoing. Now, she hears the same kind of compassion over the phone.
“Thank you,” she says.
***
Mother in the recovery room, second day. On her leg is a blue vinyl brace with white Velcro buckles. The surgeon tells her that she’s cleaned fluid from under the kneecap, cut off some of the mauled flesh, and closed it up. That Mother also fractured her tibia, but her leg is weight bearing, and she should begin trying to walk on it.
Her hospital bed adjusts when she moves, deflating and filling with air. She can’t move her neck to look out the window.
“You have a view of the park,” the nurse says. She brushes glass out of Mother’s hair with a terry cloth towel. “I’m getting a lot out, but you need a shower.”
The physical therapist comes by. “Let’s get you walking.”
After Mother rolls over and swings her stiff leg of the bed, she feels faint.
“Still with me?” The therapist touches her arm.
“Dizzy,” she says.
Mother’s back hurts: three fractured bones along the spine.
When she breathes, it’s like a large piece of glass slicing her chest in two: fractured sternum.
She shuffles to the door of the hospital room with a walker, nurse and the physical therapist on either side.
***
Every four hours Mother buzzes the nurse and asks for more medication. She doesn’t want it for the pain. She wants it because earlier in the day, Baby and Husband were on video chat. Baby had tubes in her nose, circles attached to her chest, cords traveling to a blinking machine, cotton ball taped at her inside elbow, gauze around her forehead. She looked yellow, blue half-moons under her eyes. But the worst: when Mother talked to her, Baby gave an angry yell and turned into Husband, hiding her face at his shoulder. Mother could see her diaper, the material on the outside pilling. The curve of her spine, brown hair tangled, and the cords running underneath her. She could see Husband trying to negotiate this, parenting a sick child without her. He looked uncomfortable, panicked.
“I miss you,” he said.
And she missed him too. All day she’d been lonely for the two of them. But she didn’t feel like she could tell Husband that, couldn’t contribute to his misery.
“Do you have a blanket for her?”
“Yes.” He looked around the room for a moment and then focused on the screen again. “I wish I could be there,” he said.
Baby bucked Husband’s chest with her head, pushing into him, whining.
***
Third day after the accident, Mother is discharged. Her parents collect her from the hospital. She rides in the front seat and feels like every bump opens up internal wounds, broken bones jostled and misaligned. Bile in her throat the entire way.
When she opens the door to the apartment, she can hear Baby in the living room, chattering, busy with toys. Mother knows that baby was discharged an hour ago, that the bleeding in her brain has ceased. During an early morning phone call, she learned Baby was talking again, naming the things in the hospital, playing on the floor instead of clinging to her father.
The leg with the surgery knee has to stay straight. Mother swings it to walk, one hand on the wall as she proceeds. In the living room is Baby. Her cheeks are healthy red, she is holding a toy out to Husband who says, “Look who’s here.”
“My love,” Mother says.
But Baby looks at her angry. Turns away, arms crossed.
“My love,” Mother says.
“No,” says Baby.
“It’s mama.” Husband gets up, stands in front of her. That same look—me and you against the opposition. In this case, Baby on the front lines. He traces gently above the wound on her forehead. “Normal for her to be angry,” he says. “Don’t worry. She still loves you.”
Mother feels blurry, she needs to sit down. An ache spreads from the roof of her mouth to back of her throat and behind her eyes. It has nothing to do with physical injury. Why can’t she figure out the right thing to say to Baby? She can’t take being comforted when she should be the one comforting. She moves away from the two of them and into the bedroom. She slides her bad leg forward and sits on the edge of the bed, covers her face. Husband comes in, his weight creaks the box spring and brings the mattress lower. She cries, can’t stop thinking about all the articles she’s read, how important attachment is, how the unattached child gets angry when the mother returns from an absence. Does Baby blame her? Has Baby’s trust been broken? For one moment, she thinks about telling Husband that it is his fault. If he hadn’t sent her to the department store—if she hadn’t had to make her way to customer service, miles down the waxed floors and gauze shirts that make Baby a maniac, the money would have just come out of their bank account.
Instead, she leans into him and he lifts his arm to accommodate her. Her ear is at his ribcage. She can hear his heartbeat. She knows that he could have blamed her for the crash, that he could have required evidence of innocence before acquitting blame. And she remembers lying on that gurney on the way to the hospital, without either of them. She thought that if Baby died, the marriage probably wouldn’t survive. And this spurned a feeling like falling through darkness, so she compiled a mental letter to both, to make them real again. To Husband, something like—I will no longer cringe when you push your dinner knife through your food and scrape it loudly across the plate. Or at the very least, I will say the thing that is really making me angry instead of the thing that isn’t.
After a few minutes Baby comes running in. She is saying “Mama, mama,” and wants up. Mother picks her up slowly, and they are cheek to cheek. Baby smells like the hospital, iodine and cheap flowers.
They are both still wearing hospital wristbands. Baby matches them up. “Look,” she says. Mother knows the next step. Baby will want to locate her scissors with the purple handles and dull square blades. She will want to cut them off, because she loves cutting—tags off clothes, sticker packages, those slender drinkable tubes of yogurt. But Mother wants this connection to last. She turns Baby’s band around and rubs her thumb over the writing—Baby’s identification. She gives a few extra passes over the last name.
“Yes,” says Mother. “Same.”
Megan Goss lives in Portland, Oregon. She doesn’t own chickens and hasn’t participated in the naked bike ride— but as a firm believer in both the upcoming apocalypse and body positivity, she is likely to embrace and write about those clichés in the future. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Proximity and Bat City Review.
Photo on Foter.com