[2017] What We Lose Page 9

  My father is less and less available. When I call him, he answers the phone in a low voice and hurries me off the line. As he is hanging up the phone, I swear I hear a woman’s voice on the other end. Sometimes I call his number and just cry into his voicemail. I ask if he can visit me in New York, but he says that he is busy, always busy. You never had so many plans before, I tell him. You’re being very emotional, he says, stressing the last word as if it is an uncomfortable sweater he is being forced to wear. I envy the flatness in his voice, the feeling that he has steadily moved uphill away from our tragedy while I have managed to slide myself back down into a pit.

  Why, why, why? Aminah prods me with this word over and over, and I have no answer. I have done only what I could manage. I have had no strength to terminate the baby, or to handle an adoption; I have only persisted, and it has landed me at this point. When I tell her how far along I am, she sighs heavily. She knows what I have been hiding from myself the past few weeks. The baby is a baby now. There’s no way to deal with this easily. I can still give it up for adoption, she tells me hopefully, but this option seems the least likely. I can’t imagine carrying the baby to term only to give it away. The shame of having to admit to the world that I can’t care for the baby seems unbearable.

  I feel like I am walking on land again, like my effort is getting me somewhere.

  I call on a Sunday and he again tries to hurry me off the phone.

  I have no time for formalities. “What’s her name?” I demand of him, and he tells me.

  The woman’s name is Elma. They have been seeing each other for the past three months, he says. It’s nothing serious yet, he is careful to mention. She is a secretary in the admissions office at the college. After he tells me this, I am silent for a while on the phone, letting myself marinate in bitterness.

  “I didn’t know how to tell you, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to do. Thandi, are you there?”

  “I am.”

  “I want to be happy again,” he says, his voice breaking. “Don’t you think I deserve happiness?”

  “Of course,” I say. “You deserve much more than that. I only wish I could be okay with what form of happiness you’ve chosen.”

  “Well, you know, these things choose us.”

  “Hmmph,” I grunt. “Well, I don’t want to meet her. I don’t want to know her. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, honey, that’s fine. I understand.”

  I can’t stop repeating it in my head: Elma. Elma. Elma. I have the sudden urge to stab something.

  “Dad, I’m pregnant.”

  The spare room in Aminah and Frank’s townhouse is outfitted in antique floral prints, medals and trophies from Frank’s high school days, and pictures of Aminah’s father. The effect is a strange mash-up of WASP-Afrocentric style that I am forced to take in every night.

  Aminah has accosted me into staying with her and Frank for a week. On the phone one day, she suggests gently, then more forcefully, that I could use some time to rest.

  “I can rest well enough in my own apartment.”

  “It will be good for you to be around friends.”

  I run out of excuses with Aminah, so I call in at work, lying to my boss that I have the flu. My boss is satisfied with this explanation for my recent erratic behavior. I pack my bag and take a train to Philadelphia.

  For dinner, Aminah cooks me meals composed mostly of vegetables from the farmer’s market—no risky foods like seafood or rare meat. At the dinner table, she and Frank have wine from the wine fridge that glows like a spaceship under their new countertops. She’s bought me nonalcoholic wine, but I refuse that.

  “I can have up to a glass a day. They say it’s even good for you.”

  But Aminah just dips her head. She is doing her standard steel gaze—she pretends she hasn’t heard me.

  “Asparagus?” she holds a gold-rimmed platter out to me.

  Later that night, Aminah buries me under stacks of blankets.

  “I feel like a real pregnant woman,” I say. “You got me all laid up here. I’m not on bed rest, you know.”

  She does her steel gaze again and leaves the room. After she’s gone I try to decide exactly what I’ve done to offend her—is it the pregnancy itself, or the fact that I don’t seem to be taking it as seriously as she thinks I should?

  Frank works from home the third day. In the morning he cooks me scrambled eggs; he peels and sections my orange, slices my apples into eighths with the cores cut out.

  “Peanut butter?” he offers.

  “No,” I say.

  Frank has filled out since high school; I notice white hairs where there was only jet black, pushed perfectly back on his head. I can see in his eyes how his long days have begun to wear on him. I also see what Aminah has always seen in him. He has that same thing that my father has—that only some men do—that extra bit of wiring that makes them stay.

  “Aminah’s being tough on you ’cause she cares,” he says. “That’s her way.”

  “I know,” I say. He gives me the best reply that he can give, which is to not require anything of me at all. For a while, we sit there at the table in silence, slightly older and fatter than our high school selves, only slightly closer to each other. Then he takes my plate, carries it to the sink and cleans it, and lets me wander back to my room, to carry on with my day as I please.

  My mother’s pain was her second disease. It was constant, bracing. At first, she kept it contained with a twenty-milligram OxyContin, taken three times daily. She had a travel alarm clock that she carried with her in her handbag, which she set every morning, then reset for four hours later when it went off. Her purse was a mess of prescription bottles and paraphernalia, including crackers for the medicines she had to take with food, smelling salts for the ones that knocked her out, Pepto-Bismol for the ones that made her nauseated. She managed the routine well, with the duty and spirit befitting someone of her profession.

  The pain she experienced from disease is unimaginable. This is not an empty statement, a flaccid grasp at empathy. Chronic pain is one of the most difficult states for humans not suffering from it to imagine. That is because most of us experience pain only for moments, or, maximum, for a few days during an extended stay at the hospital, and even then it is not constant. Few of us will experience the level of pain that does not respond to powerful painkillers. That is a hell reserved for the very unlucky.

  When you have chronic pain, the feeling that most people experience only in peaks becomes your baseline. Its effects are similar to those of the drugs that are often used to treat it. It is mood altering, causing changes in personality and even hallucinations. Pain can be a disease in itself.

  We stopped fighting as much. She stopped screaming. Her touch became lighter. She had more patience, and physically, she actually felt lighter.

  In time, her pain outgrew the medication. It became too much for the one or two pills and polite rituals she was so adept at managing. Her dose grew to forty milligrams, to sixty, eventually to two hundred milligrams of OxyContin three times per day. This was just for maintenance, so that my mother wouldn’t go into withdrawal coming off the medicine. Several times a day the pain came on fast and quick, and she’d be immobilized, crying and begging for me or my father to do something. When this happened, we gave her more oxycodone on top of her regular dose. Sometimes it helped. But help never meant that the pain was gone, only that it was lessened.

  When the pills weren’t enough anymore, her doctor put my mother on a morphine drip. She started sleeping more hours than she was awake, and she couldn’t tell us that she was hurting anymore. All we could do was guess if she was suffering by the depth and frequency of her breaths, by the restlessness of her limbs. And then, all we could do was push a button on a little machine, releasing a tiny burst of medicine, and hope that it helped her.

  She lost weight. She went from
a size 14 to a 12, to a 10, and then to my size, a healthy 6, before she was bedridden and we stopped counting. She was weaker, her skin more prone to bruising, her bones more fragile. She needed support whenever she walked, and I would often offer it in the form of an elbow or a shoulder. Toward the end of her life, I could lift her entire weight into her wheelchair.

  Peter calls me to explain his absence. He was terrified, he says, once he actually started to think about what raising a child would entail. He could only see it failing.

  “That sounds like a lie, I know,” he says, and chuckles a little nervously when I don’t answer right away. I make a mental note never to tell Aminah this.

  We talk for an hour. That night, I sleep better than I have in years. He is the one with whom I share this burden, and when he is back, I feel less alone with it. But when I wake up, I remember my situation. I caress my stomach. Somehow, in these past few weeks, I have become more tender toward it. Barely awake in bed, I look down at it and begin to cry. But then I get out of bed. I wash, I dress, and I leave for work, the weight of my body feeling so hot, so unstable, like it is about to explode.

  Love is also like this. I make one of those infernal lists that every best friend and romantic comedy suggests making during periods of amorous decision-making, where I enter the pros and cons of a relationship with Peter. These are the results:

  Intelligent

  Curious

  He makes me feel deeply at ease

  He takes care of me

  Will make a good father

  Stable

  Cute

  We have good sex (regular, consistent)

  He will never leave me

  I think I’m smarter than he is

  He doesn’t challenge me

  Hasn’t figured out his life yet

  Was hesitant about becoming a father (dad issues??)

  Lacks a certain joie de vivre

  Not conventionally handsome

  We don’t have great sex anymore

  I know he will never leave me

  This always occurs, no matter how reckless the people involved. I fall in love carefully.

  We winnow one person out of all those we meet and deem sexually attractive and worth several hours of our time. We get to know each other. We decide, against all better judgment, to take on the risk and pair with this person. We like someone. They like us; we stay together, we fuck our brains out, like turns to love. We ignore all the little nuisances of their personalities.

  Then trouble intrudes. For some, the relationship flares into violence. Some simply fade out and stop calling; they fall into someone else’s bed. You splinter and you split.

  We want to be together. We want to stay. This is our default setting.

  We love each other. We are having a baby together. The choices are few, and there is a clearly logical one.

  Peter and I marry on a spring day on a Pennsylvania mushroom farm, half an hour west of where I grew up. His mother and father fly in from Portland, along with college friends from California, Hawaii, and Spain.

  I allow my father to bring his girlfriend.

  Aminah is the only one accompanying me to the altar; I won’t bow to the pressures of tradition and be traded between two men. I wear an ochre gown that I find in a consignment maternity store. It was a bridesmaid’s dress, not a bridal gown. Aminah skins up her face the first time she sees it, but over time, she stops objecting.

  I’m so big by this time that I rely on her arm for support. I’m so pregnant I feel dizzy.

  Peter looks giddy as I walk down the aisle. I feel swollen and odd. The sun turns his red hair translucent, his suit slightly too large around his shoulders. But there is nothing about him I would change.

  Peter’s cousin officiates, and he says only a few words, and then we kiss; we rush out of there, for it’s time to eat. We hurry back down the aisle the way we came, except this time our hands are joined in the air like we’ve just won a game. It’s all joy and celebration, and fast, without hitches—barely time for a pause, just as I designed. There’s no time to cry for who isn’t there.

  We name our son Mahpee, after the sky. Our friends and family chide us for the name, and we are embarrassed for how odd and romantic it is, but we don’t take it back. We do shorten it to M. His real name is a keepsake between the two of us.

  M has my button nose and Peter’s freckles. His hair starts off smooth and amber colored when he is born, and then falls out, grows back in rough, kinky, and mahogany colored, with flecks of gold sprinkled throughout. If we created a scale between me and Peter, M would be halfway between. There is no way I can look at him without seeing Peter.

  Peter and I are happy, and M is too. He is always smiling, even when he is sleeping, and even when he’s fussy, he just kicks his fat little legs, that permanent smile still etched on his pink lips. We can’t stay mad at him. When we’re tired, we grow angry at each other. You made him cry. You made him angry. You fed him too much and made his poop green!

  My father learns quickly to be a grandfather. Aminah and Frank threaten to put off their baby-making indefinitely, they are so preoccupied as aunt and uncle. Peter had a hard time leaving Portland, but he likes New York enough. I drain the rest of the money out of my mother’s inheritance and buy us a small, plastic-sided house with a small yard way out in the farther reaches of Queens. The house is musty and the walls are thin, but there’s enough space for all of us without feeling cramped—extremely rare in New York City. Some days, we’re even able to forget how far we are from friends and amusements (what we formerly conceived of as “civilization”), how draining our commutes are. On hard days, we want to leave, but on good days, we feel like we have everything we need.

  M sits between us. His favorite move is to link Peter’s fingers in mine, and then, giggling mischievously, crawl behind one of our legs and hide. He does this especially when Peter and I are fighting or distant. There is something about him—he has a sense for knowing which spaces to fill in people. Even if it never helps him on a test or in a game, I will always be proud of him for this.

  Every time I touch him I think, how can something be this soft? It is impossible, this feeling of his newness against my coarse fingers. His every bone and skin cell is in a state of formation. He is coming into being before my eyes.

  I have also felt sublime terror since he was born. It is impossible to think of him without thinking of his death—when he falls from the couch, when I struggle to hold him after a long day. I imagine him falling from a great height, the terrible sound, the way his body will become foreign with the life gone. I have never wanted someone as much as him and simultaneously been so afraid of that person being taken away.

  Aminah’s father has a heart attack. It is his second; the first was three years ago, and he recovered fairly quickly then. This time, though, he is older, weaker. His doctors order him to walk slower, and he has to hook up to an oxygen machine when he is at home.

  He starts to recover, to walk around the neighborhood without help, and eventually he drives into the city to visit my father. They go back to watching football again at their favorite bar on Sundays, though he stops short of the Eagles parking lot, which would mean disaster.

  Aminah tells me he confided in her that he was shocked by my mother’s death, brought down, and I realize that I’ve noticed a certain light gone from his eyes. He isn’t funny in the wild way that he used to be, telling rude jokes in all manner of company. He is a softer, more quiet man since he saw her go—as we all are—sobered, constitutionally, by the experience.

  Then one day, he has another heart attack. It isn’t a large one, but it is enough to push him over the edge. He dies quickly, before he is able to feel much pain, in a manner totally opposite from my mother’s death. Aminah calls me cr
ying from the hospital and I take the bus down to Philadelphia a few hours later to be with her. We are part of the same grim club.

  I begin to feel a mortal disadvantage. Aminah and I are well-off. We both come from the same neighborhood. Our loved ones aren’t likely to die unexpectedly from gun violence, or to perish from diabetes or obesity, those side effects of poverty with which we are familiar. We never became accustomed to worrying that, because of where we lived, like that postal worker on the television, one of our loved ones would go out one day and not come home.

  But the numbers are what they are: Out of all the people my age whom I know, one white friend has lost a parent. Out of Aminah’s friends, who are mostly black, four. Aminah is my closest black friend, and each of us has lost a parent. After the death of Aminah’s father, I begin to awaken to those statistics, knowing them to be more real than they have ever been in the past.

  Figure 1. Life expectancy at birth, by race and sex and Hispanic origin: United States, 1980–2008

  The gap in life expectancy at birth between white persons and black persons persists but has narrowed since 1990.

  Life expectancy is a measure often used to gauge the overall health of a population. From 1980 to 2008, life expectancy at birth in the United States increased from 70 years to 76 years for males and from 77 years to 81 years for females. Racial disparities in life expectancy at birth persisted for both males and females in 2008 but had narrowed since 1990. In 2008, Hispanic males and females had longer life expectancy at birth than non-Hispanic white or non-Hispanic black males and females.