If You Lived Here (44 page)

Let us know about the baby. We are waiting to hear.

Most sincerely, Rita P. Hayes

I spend the next hour and a half sitting at the guest computer, typing e-mails in reply, offering my good news, finally, after so many weeks and months and years of bad.

“Hey.”

Martin and Hai Au stand above me, sleepy-eyed, their hair mussed from the bed. Hai Au’s hand rests against Martin’s cheek. His expression is not happy, or sad either, just mildly curious as he observes the room. “Hey,” I say. “We got an e-mail from Rita.” I shuffle through the pages I’ve printed out and hand it to him. I want to see his response.

He holds the paper in one hand, the baby in his other arm. He reads it, then crumples it and tosses it into the trash beside the desk. “Well, good for Bennet,” is all he says.

“Do you want to take a vacation?” I ask. I’m thinking: the three of us, the beach.

“No,” he says, yawning.

The front door opens and Dr. Penzi appears. He’s carrying his medical bag and a bunch of flowers. “Hello!” he calls across the lobby, striding toward us. The Americans turn to look at him. “Hello!” he says, nodding to each of them. “Hello. Hello.”

When he reaches us, he is breathless. The flowers tip out of his arm to the floor and he bends down to collect them. “What a day. Too stressful,” he says, but his face doesn’t show it. “Here.” He offers me the flowers. “For you, the three of you, the new family.”

They are red roses and white mums, a thick and fragrant bunch. I think, He must not know we’re not a family, not really.

Martin grins. “Our doctor at home doesn’t bring us flowers.”

The doctor grins. “Again, our Vietnamese system.” He cocks his head, focuses on Hai Au, and says, as if to the boy, “Have I kept you long?” Hai Au’s expression registers nothing. His finger hooks on Martin’s ear.

We walk upstairs to the room. The unavoidable deserted island draws the doctor’s eye. “Mai,” he asks. “She is here?”

“She’s gone to do some errands.”

“Oh.” He takes another look around. He steps into the bathroom to wash his hands, then, stepping back out, says, “I suppose we should begin.”

We lay Hai Au across the bed and he begins to scream again. Martin and I sit on either side of him, holding his arms, cooing, kissing, singing, but he doesn’t even hear us. Even Martin has betrayed him. Even the guy who plays grass.

“No worries. I’m quick,” the doctor assures us. And he is. He listens to Hai Au’s heart and lungs, checks his reflexes, his throat, his ears, the shape of his head, his scalp. “Strong heart,” he says, speaking loudly, above the screams. “Strong lungs, but you know this already.”

I look up and see Martin gazing at me. For the first time since he’s got-ten here, his eyes are focused just on me. I manage a smile. “It’s scary,” I tell him.

He nods. “It’ll be okay.” The tone in his voice reminds me of how kind he can be.

We hear the door click open and Mai slips into the room. The doctor only pauses for a moment to glance at her, then returns to Hai Au, steady and efficient. I have never spent much time agonizing about Hai Au’s health, but now the anxiety clouds the room like sudden bad weather. Hepatitis C? Each pause, each second touch or gesture that might be different from normal, makes me jump.

“Is he okay?”

The doctor presses his finger into Hai Au’s side. Kidneys, perhaps? “You, Mommy, do not worry.”

Mommy. Mama. Mom. Ma. Mother. Mommy. “I worry,” I tell him.

“We’re funeral directors,” Martin explains. “We worry.”

The doctor keeps his eyes on my boy, pressing a finger into the other side. Hai Au, like a toy with a magic button, ratchets up his screams. The doctor pulls down the pants and unfastens the Velcro tabs of the diaper. Martin, I see, has managed to change it. Hai Au begins to kick. Martin and I each hold a leg.

“At my lab tomorrow,” the doctor says, “we will check his blood and, if you can manage, his stool.”

“What are you looking for?” Martin asks.

“Oh, the usual parasitic infections. Plus, I check thyroid. Hemoglobin. White blood count. More. I’ll give you a list.” The doctor’s hands continue, expertly. Groin. Penis. Testicles. After resecuring the diaper, the reflex of the knees. The calves, the balls of the foot. “Martin and Shelley, I believe you have a healthy son. But did you bring Elimite?”

I cringe. “I forgot.”

Martin looks at the doctor. “What’s Elimite?”

“For scabies.” The doctor points to a couple of red bumps on Hai Au’s groin, and a couple of others between his fingers. They look like mosquito bites.

“Scabies?” Martin looks concerned.

“Like lice,” I say. My elbows suddenly feel itchy.

The doctor sees me scratching and smiles. “If you have gotten them

also, you won’t have symptoms for several weeks. But I’ll give you some cream for all three of you to use tonight. You spread it on before bed, then wash it off in the morning. Wash all your sheets and clothing very carefully, too, or you’ll make a great big circle of infection. You came here to adopt a boy, only. Leave the bugs in Vietnam, eh?” He leans over and gently brushes a lock of hair off Hai Au’s forehead. “It’s okay now, little one. All finished.” Hai Au’s screams have turned to whimpers, like a child who has abandoned hope.

I pick him up and, for the first time today, he doesn’t reach for Martin. He holds me, tight, wiping his nose on my shoulder. Mai, laughing, gets a tissue and wipes his face. “There’s an e-mail for you on the table,” I tell her, then I look at the doctor. “I was planning on giving him a bath tonight. Should we still do it?”

“No problem. It might calm him. But you’ll have to wash him again in the morning.”

Martin is already squatting beside the changing area, pulling out the soap and a towel. We have slid so easily, he and I, into the tasks of caring for this child together. But I never doubted his ability, only his will. He stands up, pulls his room key out of his pocket, and holds it out to Mai. “Do you mind sleeping upstairs tonight? It might be easier, with Hai Au and all. I had them change the sheets.”

She looks up from her e-mail, glances at me. It doesn’t mean anything, I want to tell her. She lets the key drop into her hand—“No problem”— then goes back to the paper. A moment later, she reports with a laugh, “Marcy ask, do I mind she sells cakes now? She say that she make a caramel cake and the owner Port Land Grille buy them to sell at her restaurant. And she say Gladys been making tortes. You believe that? Tortes! She wants to know can she buy a Cuisinart.”

I’m holding Hai Au, patting him on the back. His fingers lace through my hair and I’m trying not to think of scabies. “What will Marcy do when you get back?”

The doctor looks over at Mai. “When do you go back?”

Mai looks up at him over the top of the e-mail. “Next week.” And

then, as if she’s answering some question he hasn’t even asked, she adds, “Well, we got the baby now,” as if that’s the only reason she’s here.

It takes Hai Au a while to realize the bathtub’s function and, until then, he likes it. Holding himself up on the edge, he cruises along the side, leaning over to peer into the water like someone checking for goldfish. But when I start to pull off his clothes, he screams. It’s not like I can reason with him or anything. He lies sprawled across a towel on the floor, twisting and kicking to get away.

As I struggle to untie Hai Au’s shoes, Martin sits on the toilet seat, the tube of Elimite in his hands, reading the instructions on the package. “We rub his whole body with the cream, from the neck down. We concentrate on the areas between his fingers and toes, all the cracks and crevices, too. His genitals and anus. And then we do ourselves.”

“How pleasant.” One shoe off. I grip the other kicking foot. “It’ll be one of our lovely memories of Vietnam.”

I glance over and see the slightest smile on Martin’s face. Maybe he remembers that I can, in a pinch, be funny. But then Hai Au kicks me in the nose. “Ouch!” The force takes the breath out of me, but it’s only the foot with the sock on it. Martin continues to grin, not so kindly. I rub my nose with one hand, catch the wayward foot with the other. “I’m going to get in, too,” I announce to Hai Au. The sight of me, pulling off my own clothes, surprises him enough to make him pause. I let my clothes drop to the floor, then rip off his diaper, sweep him up, and climb into the water. Martin keeps his eyes on the box of cream. A vision of my naked body will not drive him wild. I can remember the years, of course, when it did. It hasn’t been so long since a certain pair of flowered panties would utterly distract him. But I don’t expect that he and I will experience moments like those again. I ease down into the water, holding Hai Au against my chest. His body is smooth and slippery, a baby seal. As soon as he feels the warm water, he begins to giggle, then squeals with delight, leaning

forward and slapping his hands against the surface.

Martin looks up and watches both of us. “You like it!” he tells Hai

Au. He pulls himself down off the toilet seat and kneels on the towel on the floor, filling his cupped hands with water and letting it spill over Hai Au’s head. I can’t see Hai Au’s face, but his shoulders jump with pleasure. His skin ripples at the folds of his neck. I take some soap and rub his back, which makes him wiggle more. His laugh is loud and ecstatic, the laugh of a human being who has discovered something great and totally unexpected: air-conditioning, whipped cream, cats. Yes, it’s his cat laugh. When I look up, Martin is smiling at me.

Then Hai Au dives. My hands, slick with soap, can’t catch him, and he ends up headfirst underwater before my mind even registers what he’s done. Martin grabs him, pulls him upright, holds him while he gasps for air, spits, turns red. At first, he doesn’t scream. He looks too shocked, and shattered, and mad. The silence only lasts a second, then he wails again.

After the bath, after we uneventfully administer the Elimite, after Martin and I acknowledge, without words, that each of us, in private, will spread the cream on our own lonely bodies, we sit on the bed, snapping the baby into his pajamas. Hai Au watches Martin slide the feet of the PJs over his toes. He doesn’t fight it now. He just gazes at these feet of his, all pink and strange smelling and greasy.

“Martin?” I ask. I smooth a last bit of cream into Hai Au’s shoulder, then pull the sleeves up around his arms.

Martin has miscalculated the snaps on the legs and has to pull them apart to try again. “You need a doctorate for this,” he mutters.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” I tell him.

He keeps his eyes on the snaps, lining them up in pairs before squeezing the pairs together. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “We both made mistakes.” Though the words are gentle enough, the tone is willfully dis-interested. I’d rather he felt any emotion than nothing at all.

It takes everything I can muster to plow forward. I don’t do it for myself, because I have to assume that my marriage is over. I do it for my little boy. “I’m just wondering. Hai Au seems to love you. I’m wondering.” I find it hard to continue.

He finishes the snaps and looks up. “What?”

We gaze at each other over the sleepy baby. Martin looks curious,

and slightly vulnerable, too, as if he wants to trust me but can’t. I want to make this request as simple as possible, without begging or crying or any other kind of manipulation. “When we get home, do you think that maybe you could let him be in your life, a little?”

He looks down at the floor, pushes a stray baby sock across the rug with his toe. Hai Au, noticing our distraction perhaps, begins to whimper and squirm. Martin picks him up and walks to the window. Hai Au’s ear rests against Martin’s shoulder, his arm dangles like a pendulum. He stares at the wall, at the palm trees, the surf trailing in fine little fingers down the beach. He blinks, then blinks again, not fighting sleep so much as observing its arrival.

“What would you like if you could have anything?” Martin asks. “You and Hai Au,” I tell him. He doesn’t respond, just continues

swaying, staring out the window toward the street. I’d like to ask the same thing, but the thing he ultimately wanted—no child—is no longer mine to give. I have two things to offer—Hai Au and myself—and, though he seems surprisingly fond of Hai Au, I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t want either one.

After a while, he asks, “Do you remember that woman, a couple of years back, her ex-husband died of lung cancer—I think he owned Cape Fear Plumbing or something?”

“Sort of,” I tell him. We see some ex-wives and ex-husbands, but they seldom announce their relationship to the deceased. At funerals, they stand in the shadows, alone and unconsoled.

“Well, she came by one afternoon before the funeral and sat by herself near his casket. We talked a little. She said that they’d been divorced for years—he’d had an affair when they were still pretty young and she left him. Then, after his diagnosis, he contacted her and asked her, straight out, to marry him again. He said he was dying and he wanted to be her husband when he died.”

“What did she do?”

“She refused. Of course. She’d gone on with her life by then, and she had never forgiven him. Why should she marry him again? But then, after

he died, the loss hit her in some really weird way. She was devastated. And she was so angry with herself for not marrying him.”

“She still loved him?”

“I don’t even know if she still loved him. Maybe. Mostly, she felt like she’d failed because she’d never managed to forgive him. That’s what I remember most. She said it’s a big burden, not to forgive somebody.”

Martin lays Hai Au in the crib, pulls the blanket over him, then turns off the top light, leaving only the lamp. He sits down on Mai’s old bed, facing me, and leans forward, his palms on his knees. He looks deeply tired. “Which do you think is harder, forgiving or not forgiving?” he asks, staring at me across the gulf of these two beds.

“I have a different set of problems,” I say. “But I’d like to believe that not forgiving is harder.”

“You’re biased.”

“Of course,” I say. “When I die, I want to be your wife.”

He lies down, his head against the pillow, and closes his eyes. After a while, he says, “I guess I like to hear that.”