Knockout (10 page)

THE INDOOR BABY

F
rom his bed, my husband Mitch yells for fresh air and sunlight for our son. He argues that this is child abuse; that Swayze needs to be an indoor/outdoor baby, not just an indoor one.

“For the love of God, Mona,” he tells me, “stop this now.”

I empty out Mitch's catheter bag. I bring him his protein shakes. I flip his body to keep the bedsores at bay. While I care for him, Mitch never fails to remind me that he used to charge enemy bunkers and root around in mountain caves, always ready to meet his maker.

“Of all the crazy shit I've seen,” he says, “what you're doing to Swayze is the shithouse craziest.”

We live in an isolated area, in a rambler surrounded by a thick stand of Norway pine. Our winding driveway is washed out, treacherous even in daylight. Mitch's parents died years ago and the only visitors we get now are my mom and James, the delivery boy from the grocery store. I've tried to convince Mitch that Swayze's safer living like this, but Mitch won't be convinced.

“This isn't about his safety,” he yells, “it's about your irrational fear.”

Mitch was a ranter even before that landmine took his legs, but since then he's gotten much worse. I usually play the role of the good wife and let him scream and gnash his teeth all he wants, but sometimes when his rant gets especially lengthy or loud I open up the Bible of indoor baby rearing,
Nurture Against Nature
, by the noted Swiss pediatrician and agoraphobe, Dr. Gustav Halder, and I drown Mitch out.

“The sun does not keep your baby safe,” I yell at him this morning after he won't stop grousing. “The night sky does not help raise your child. Clean, crisp air does nothing for your baby's well-being. Wide-open spaces do not thrust your kid on a path to become a productive member of society. You do not plant a seed in the ground and a little baby sprouts up. Your baby came from the womb—and as you know from previous chapters—the womb is the most indoorsy organ of all.”

T
onight I feed Swayze in the rocking chair by his crib. He's a good eater. I put him up to my nipple and he goes to town. The doctor called him a miracle baby and I couldn't agree more. He shouldn't be here, but here he is.

It certainly wasn't easy. Mitch and I tried forever to have him. We emptied out our savings accounts to see the best specialists. I took Clomid after Clomid. Our sex life turned perfunctory, timed by tiny shifts in my body temperature and punctuated by me hurriedly pressing my thighs tight into my chest.

One day I had enough. I tossed the pills into the trash and shoved my basal thermometer into the junk drawer. I crumpled up the cocktail napkin on my nightstand where I'd charted when my eggs were going to drop. On my to-do list under “Clean window blinds!” I wrote the words “Adopt a cute child!” Mitch
and I never actually got around to discussing adoption because shortly after I wrote this phrase down, his reserve unit was called up into action.

“You knew this could happen,” he told me as he pulled his duffel bag from the crawl space and shook out the sand.

I touched the gray patch of hair on the side of Mitch's head that was shaped like a maple leaf. He pressed his lips against my neck. He slowly ground himself into my hips and I dug my fingernails into his shoulder blades and pulled him down onto our bed. For the first time in a long time I didn't care what my body temperature was or if my cervix was going to be receptive. For the first time in a long time it was unplanned and desperate. When we were finished we were lying on the floor of Mitch's closet near his clothes hamper. Somehow one of my hoop earrings had fallen out of my ear and clamped itself around his ankle.

“You've done your part for God and country,” I told him as I untwisted my legs from his ass. “Can't it be someone else's turn?”

Mitch stood up and grabbed all of his underwear from his underwear drawer and dumped them into his suitcase. I'd fallen in love with Mitch because he had thoughtful eyes and a strong chin and because I fit into his chest when we danced, but I'd also fallen in love with him because he was a man who never shirked his duty. Now I realized that I was willing to love him a little less in one way to love him a little more in another.

“Honey,” he told me. “It's everyone's turn. It's everybody's turn always.”

W
hen Mitch left, I missed hearing his gentle snoring fill our bedroom. I missed how his long fingers could always fix that crick in my neck. I missed the good chicken chili he made on Sunday nights.

A few weeks after he was gone, I went to the doctor to get a mole on my leg checked out. The mole had looked like a skinny
Ohio for my entire life but had suddenly morphed into a fatter Tennessee.

“That mole is nothing to worry about,” the doctor told me, “but you're pregnant.”

I was shocked. I called Mitch from the parking lot of the clinic, heard the clicking of phone interchanges from country to country as my call snaked its way to him over land and sea.

“You need to come home now,” I told him. “There's no way in hell I can do this alone.”

“You know I can't come home yet,” he said.

“Maybe you could shoot off something nonessential from your body, like your pinkie, and they'd fly you back home for a few months to recuperate?” I asked. “Or maybe they would they send you home if you accidentally lopped off a decent-sized part of your ear?”

For my first trimester, there was no one to hold my long hair when I puked from morning sickness. There was no one to scare away the deer that kept traipsing through our backyard and eating our flowers and shrubs. There was no one to talk me out of going on the Internet and reading all the things that could go wrong with a baby inside the womb and everything that could go wrong with a baby when it was out in the real world.

A
few months later I drove to the clinic and my ultrasound tech pressed a paddle against my belly. She said there was a boy swimming around in the sluice. Instead of giving my husband a hug, I had to give her one. Yes, Mitch continued to call me and yes, he reassured me things would be fine, but his phone calls were usually full of static or full of background explosions.

“Put the phone up to your stomach,” he told me. “So I can talk to my boy.”

I did this for Mitch during the second trimester, rested the receiver on my belly for Mitch to talk directly to our son. At the beginning of my third trimester, the baby began to kick the crap out of me whenever he heard Mitch's voice and instead of placing the phone on my stomach, I started to set it against my palm.

“Can you just come home for a couple of days when he's born?” I asked.

“I just told him I'd do my best to make that happen,” Mitch said.

I wiped the phone sweat from my palm onto my pants.

“Of course you did,” I told him.

M
y mother came to stay with me a few weeks before my due date. She'd just turned sixty-five, was fresh off her third divorce. Her latest marriage ended when she walked in on her husband, Dan, sucking on the back of her dog walker's knee. She thought her Pomeranian, Snowball, was partially responsible for Dan's infidelity and so she'd given Snowball to me.

“He could've alerted me to what was going on,” my mother said. “It's as much that fluffy bastard's fault as anyone's.”

I quickly tired of my mom's constant chatter about Dan and the dog walker and I certainly got sick of seeing her standing in her panties in front of my bedroom mirror, wondering if her knee joints still looked hot.

“Even if Mitch comes home in one piece,” she told me, “he'll probably leave you in a few months because your hamstrings have gone all saggy.”

My mother drove me to the hospital when my water broke. She held my hand and fed me ice chips during labor. We tried to update Mitch on my dilation, centimeter by centimeter, but his staff sergeant could not reach him. My mother called every half hour, but everyone told us he was unreachable.

“What does ‘unreachable' mean?” she asked.

“It means that he's out on a mission,” they said.

We called and called after Swayze was born, but Mitch was still on that mission. I knew there was something horribly wrong, but I tried to stay positive because I knew that staying positive would keep my breast milk positive and positive breast milk would give my baby a wonderful outlook on life instead of a dire one. Still, I couldn't help thinking that my milk was betraying me subconsciously, that it knew it was sad and worried milk coming from sad and worried tits and that it was probably poisoning my baby against the entire damn world.

After the second day without any word from Mitch, my mother and I began to escalate things, calling our senators and representatives, wading through governmental phone trees and their patriotic hold music and being stiff-armed by their secretaries and schedulers. Finally Mitch's colonel called back.

“I'm truly sorry,” he told us, “but there's been an accident.”

E
ach morning when I wake up, I like to read a random passage from
Nurture Against Nature
. Today I open to page forty-three and read this:

There will be some of your friends and family who will not understand your decision to rear your child exclusively indoors. They will not understand the logic. They will look at the light box you use to keep your baby from being seasonally depressed and they will shake their heads. It's unnatural, they will say, inhumane. They can certainly have their own opinions, but perhaps you should ask them why they do the things they do? Why are they submitting their children to the ills of carcinogenic sunlight or super viruses, why are they letting them get anywhere near unfamiliar pubes in public restrooms? How, in our crazy Amber Alert–colored world, can they let their children
out of their sight for even one second? Listen to their answers and then ask yourself, are their explanations about how they raise their children any better than yours? Do their children seem any happier or smarter than yours do?

W
hen I'm finished reading, Swayze starts to fuss. Swayze and I sleep in the master bedroom and Mitch's hospital bed is in the guest room. This is how it has been since the VA dropped Mitch off, gave me a live-in nurse for three days to train me on how to care for a man who couldn't use his arms and was missing his legs.

I set Swayze in his high chair and chew up some Cheerios for him. I put my mouth up to his mouth and spit the mush onto his tongue. I chew most of Swayze's solids for him because I want to make sure he will get the antibodies from my saliva and because it helps us to bond. Dr. Halder says that chewing up my baby's food will make him able to digest more easily and also make him less prone to dairy and nut allergies.

When I'm done feeding Swayze, Snowball runs inside through his dog door. I fill his dish with kibble. Next, I blend Mitch a protein shake and set it on his drinking tray. I prop a pillow under his head so he can watch television. I take care of everyone here, but there is no one to take care of me.

“Honey,” Mitch says, “I wish I hadn't stepped on that landmine. I wish I'd stepped six inches to the left or six inches to the right. You shouldn't take out my bad luck on Swayze.”

I position Mitch's straw on his lips and he takes a long swallow. I give him a sponge bath every day, but no matter how well I wash him or how many scented candles I burn there's always a tinge of urine underneath the vanilla or elderberry.

“Being at the wrong place at the wrong time isn't bad luck,”
I say, paraphrasing a line from Dr. Halder. “It's something you can help.”

L
ater that day I call the grocery store for a delivery. James answers. He's the owner's son, home from college for the summer. He's got long brown hair that's always in his eyes. He's tall and lanky like Mitch used to be.

“How about two packages of diapers, a gallon of ice cream, a bag of pralines, and some chocolate sauce,” I tell James.

“You making sundaes, Mrs. Roberts?” he asks.

“Uh-huh,” I tell him, “I need a treat.”

“We all need a treat every now and then, don't we?” James says.

“I need a treat more than most,” I tell him.

“I hear you, Mrs. Roberts,” he says.

While I wait for James to arrive, I bring Swayze to Mitch's bedside and set him in his Johnny Jump Up. Swayze hops up and down wildly, like he's trying to bust through the roof. I wipe away a thin line of drool that is extending from Mitch's mouth to his shoulder. I remember how I used to be hot for his mouth and it used to be hot for me. Even when we were in public, I used to feel myself curling my chest slightly toward it when he spoke, wanting its warmth and wetness. Now Mitch's lips are swollen, split in thirds like an ant's body, his teeth are always gnashing, snarling.

“How can you think this is a good way to raise a child?” he asks.