I was still fat from pregnancy. Though I felt slim, my pants reflected the truth. And the sweating, my God. However relieved I was to be unpregnant at the nadir of summer, the constant dampness under my breasts—even rivulets down my stomach—was irritating. This was a Paxil thing, as well as hormones and damn August. The drug had allowed me to survive terrors like morning sickness, giving birth, and sitting with my clients at work, but it had some unfortunate side effects. Right now the epic perspiration was a headline. I longed for the times when I could take off my shirt altogether and simply unhook my nursing bra for the baby.
Side-effects notwithstanding, I was grateful for the drug. Nothing got too sharp for me: I glided along. I had needed something to quell the anxiety I felt at work, and especially to numb the panic triggered by facing another pregnancy. In 2001, doctors weren’t so concerned about prescribing it during pregnancy, and I was consumed with dread about the ravages of morning sickness, the violence of childbirth. I began the medication just before 9/11. The TV blared reports all that day. Just barely two, Helen caught footage of the jet approaching a tower in slow-motion, and she pointed and proudly announced, “airplane!” Though I knew the whole country was on high alert and this was Real Danger, I calmly went about my routine. Paxil, my savior.
Now, on an August morning exactly four weeks after Lucy’s birth, I sat folding laundry, one foot extended to bounce the baby’s seat. She hadn’t settled in yet, hadn’t decided to relax into the nest of the world. The bouncy seat didn’t comfort her the way it had her sister. She wanted to be held, but often I had to set her down to scurry after Helen (help her with a puzzle, search piles of video tapes, open a yogurt). Lucy protested in grunts and squirms, red-faced, winding herself up for a full-on wail.
Helen was changing her doll’s diaper. The doll, a cheap bald floppy thing from Helen’s first birthday, was named “Mmpsy.” As soon as the diaper was on, Helen would hold the doll up high to show me.
“Oh, she looks nice and fresh,” I’d say.
Then Helen would frown again and say, “Mmpsy has a poop.” And she’d kneel back down to the rug.
I bounced the seat. Toppling piles of infant clothes dotted the couch. The phone rang, and I knew that as soon as I stopped working my foot Lucy would release the yowl that had been gathering force inside her.
It was Mom. “Honey,” she started, then hesitated.
This exact type of pause portended information that I didn’t want. I was instantly irritated; she was always the one who called with bad news, and the way she shared it was always halting, conspiratorial, like a teenager trying not to smile as she confesses that she saw your boyfriend kissing someone else in the cafeteria. I suppose it wasn’t actually Mom’s fault—why wouldn’t one’s mother be the messenger—but too many instances like this had occurred, and now all I needed was to know that it was her on the phone and I’d get pissed off and terrified.
“What.”
“Um… Daddy’s gone missing.”
It was surreal to hear her refer to “Daddy,” this man who had divorced her fifteen years ago. She hadn’t called him that since we all lived together.
“What do you mean?”
She explained that last night my brother, Chris, went to meet my father at the airport in Vermont—he was coming East from his home in California. He planned to come my way, too, and see Lucy. But Dad hadn’t gotten off the plane. Now my family in Vermont, all my siblings and my mother, were making phone calls to track him down.
“Chris called the police in Santa Barbara,” she told me. “So soon they’ll be at his apartment and can let us know.”
“You mean, if they find him dead?”
“Yeah.”
Then she had to hang up. I was cut loose into the grotesquely sunny day, left to wait. My husband was at his office. Lucy was mewling — I didn’t feel any pull toward her now. Helen was standing at a safe distance from me, clutching her doll and watching my face.
My sister blessedly called then, sharing my need to make speculations. Dad must have had an accident and was lying by the road. He was in a hospital. He’d had a cognitive misfire and forgot, went to a conference and was unreachable.
This, of course, was all bargaining against my instinct: he’d been murdered.
It was my way to expect the worst.
My father, too, had been a hypochondriac and a general worrier. He liked to list his symptoms whenever he didn’t feel tip-top. And intermittently in his life, he submitted to phases of paralyzing anxiety. When he was a young man, I’m told that he used to take to his bed for stretches between his teaching engagements. He’d call to my mother, who was always busy with the kids and house chores, and ask her to bring him cinnamon toast and hot chocolate. He believed these to be curative.
As he moved into his fifties and became a single man, he amassed a store of medications. Besides those for his heart disease and diabetes and high blood pressure, he took something for anxiety. He must have wished that one were available to him years and years back.
At some point in the day, between nursing sessions, still calm, I noticed that I was hungry. It seemed unnatural to eat but I allowed myself fortification against the approaching devastation. I decided on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I also made one for Helen. It was beautifully simple, just eating, just enjoying and being filled.
When my mother’s definitive phone call came, my husband was home and holding the baby. I answered, knowing it would be her.
“Honey,” she said again, smally.
“Is he dead?”
“Yes.” Her voice crumpled.
“Was he murdered?”
I had interrupted her quiet weeping with this question. “That’s weird,” she sniffed.
“Chris wondered the same thing. But I don’t think so. The police didn’t say anything like that.”
Again, she couldn’t talk long; there were many more phone calls to make. Before hanging up, we urgently told each other I love you. Helen, having been held at bay for a while by her father, arrived at my side where I sat on the stairs. I let the phone clatter on the wooden step, then leaned my head down onto my lap. Helen put a tentative hand on my back.
“You sad, Mommy?”
I had never cried this openly in front of her.
“Yes,” I said, head still down.
“You want your Daddy?” she asked.
This triggered a burst of sobbing. Helen, not yet three, was cool. She seemed to know that she couldn’t need me right now. She turned and carefully navigated back down the few steps to the floor, then ran over to her toy box. I forgot her for several seconds, returned to thoughts of my father, the trip to Vermont we’d have to take.
Helen reappeared at my knees and bumped something hard against them. “Here, Mommy.”
I picked up my head, knowing it might scare her to see how red and puffy my face was.
“Mmpsy wants to snuggle you,” she said, and lay the grimy doll on my lap.
“Oh, thank you, Mmpsy.” I gathered the doll against my chest; my chemical armor cracked, briefly. I truly felt love coming from that toy.
A few days after his death, we learned that my father had had a heart attack. We heard details like what the police officers found in his toilet, and about the splotch of vomit that was under his face where he lay on the carpet. It wasn’t murder. No evil force had stolen my dad; it was just that his body’s timer tripped while he packed to come and see his family.
In my mind I observed him as his death approached: first there was concern, then nausea and alarm, then his fall — a great tree of a man. No time to tell anyone his symptoms.
I spent several days lying on the futon in my “sick room” (the room we’d set up for me when I was miserable with morning sickness). I did not feel like grieving. I was too tired and fat, and still sore from the c-section. My husband brought Lucy to me frequently to nurse. The baby and I were still wrangling about a feeding schedule. I said every three hours was appropriate, like the first baby. She wailed that she needed milk after two. Now that my father was dead I supposed she could have her way. I could just latch her and gaze out the window. And it felt lovely to be milked, after all. Draining what was full, drawing out the pressure. Then, when I looked down at her face, she had that particular set of her eyebrows, angled with relaxation and relief. When I finally rolled her away she was passed out, her chin glistening and slack. Her eyes fluttered and squinted with newborn spasms.
It’s okay that he’s dead, I thought. Between nursings I put Lucy in her car seat on the floor. Outside the window the maple and oak were in full crazy green, happy with summer. I pretended I was sitting in the branches. A great wind had swept into the region. It sifted through the leaves and through my head, which was empty, because none of it mattered.