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All this to say: there are things in my life I haven’t processed fully.
The baby monitor crackled. And I could feel it in her fingers — that it’s like her bones lit up.
“C’mon, he’s fine,” I said.
“You didn’t even look.”
“It’s sitting behind me across the room. No, I didn’t look at it. But I happen to be really, really, really enjoying your back rub.”
She lifted her hands off me, and I heard her cross the room and take it off the TV.
“Bring it to here,” I said, still not turning.
She set it down — too hard — on my desk.
There he was on the little black-and-white screen, sleeping on his side, blankets pulled to his chin.
She went upstairs.
“Babe,” I called after her. “I’m right, right? He’s fine?”
I heard her open the door and go into the bedroom. I watched on-screen my son’s sleeping form, but my wife wasn’t where I could see her. She was in the room with Charlie, sure, but back where the camera couldn’t see.
Here’s the thing that gets her — gets us — so stressed sometimes. It’s what the pediatricians say. That on top of everything else, he’s got this condition where when it gets aggravated, he can start to cough — real bad. And if he’s coughing and stuff comes up while he’s on his back, he can even die if you don’t clear the windpipe. Keep him on his side all the time, no problem. But there’s multiple disabilities, and it’s not comfortable for him to be on his side twenty-four hours a day. He’ll go nuts, in fact. Who wouldn’t? And he can’t be on his stomach, because of the gastric bypass button. So you have to keep an eye on him, and sometimes put your arm under his body and turn him until the coughing stops.
He used to be light as a bird. Not anymore. Me and Charlie, we’re both getting a little fat, I guess. But sometimes when he’s coughing he turns really easy, like the coughing’s started to lift him right off the bed — like it’s little wings all over him, lifting him up. I’m pretty good at working with his energy — at taking whatever’s going on in his body and helping him get comfortable.
Can you blame Shawna for going a little crazy sometimes? Me with my leg, Charlie with his multiple disabilities and button. Me wheeling Charlie into our bedroom every night because the wife says the monitor’s not enough when we’re asleep — we’ve got to have him right there in case he starts coughing.
I fixed myself another drink, a more serious one. I left enough for her to have another, though, holding the monitor as O0AP O.70 QRHZY 2Q0EOCWN WSRUCW
I empathize 100 percent with Shawna’s point of view. She works full-time at a shitty little dentist’s office, then comes home to this freak show. And as charming and wonderful as I’m sure I am, there are, to add yet another wrinkle, cultural issues — I can’t be there for her, support her, all the time, in every way she’d like. I see her talk to certain coworkers, her sister, and it’s different. It’s a whole different side of her.
My wife is black, I’m white. And sometimes she acts closed off around me and other white people. Not judging, just observing. People of all races have all kinds of reactions to all kinds of things. I do! But here’s what I don’t do. I don’t get a whole different voice and way of talking and even of holding my body and, my god, laughing when I’m around my people — which is not saying I’m better or more authentic than Shawna, it’s just kind of fascinating to see how these things play out. When the laughter is genuine and when it’s choked off, sarcastic, halfhearted. Maybe in some weird small way that’s her disability. Again, no big deal. Compared to what she puts up with from me and Charlie, it’s a piece of cake.
No, it’s something else that bothers me. It’s how she acts around our son these days — how she doesn’t touch him unless she has to. Diapers, or hooking up the bag with his nourishment — sure, then she touches him. But otherwise — at least when I’m watching — she stays back out of the frame. Doesn’t stroke his forehead, doesn’t hold his hand and read him stories like how she used to. At first I thought it was that her love for him had … that it had just died. Maybe when I was in Iraq. I even found myself thinking I was part of it. This interracial kid. That he’s broken, somehow — genetically — not because of the racial component, but not not because of it. And Dad’s off being some sort of hero in Iraq, and here she is, with a kid who’s become a series of chores, all these frankly disgusting little tasks and obligations she can see stretching out for the rest of her life. I thought: maybe she had loved the baby — this malfunctioning, mixed-race baby — for as long as she could love him, but then she couldn’t anymore. Couldn’t bear it — loving a child like that. I thought maybe that was it. But then one night the camera was knocked a little off its usual angle, and I saw her at the foot of the bed, holding his ankle with one hand, kneeling and watching him and her lips were moving, I guess in prayer.
And I saw so much love, it almost stopped my heart.
I felt my blood — could feel it pounding in my stump. Hell, I could feel it pounding past the stump — into the leg that was gone. And right there on the couch, watching the monitor sitting up on top, and the TV still churning with sex and murder and commercial breaks in the room I knew so well, with its carpet that’s prematurely old and stained and almost somehow zipped open in places, and the windows reflecting my face and the play of the overhead and TV lights, I could feel the blood pounding through my stump — I could feel it pounding through the whole room!
Poor Shawna! On the one hand: love. And on the other: a lifetime sentence of disgusting chores. An existence you never wanted or expected — never made room for in all the pretty visions of the future you might have had as a child, or young woman.
That’s why I try to wrap my own leg. Today, when I told her I’d done it myself, that was a lie. But I would do it. Because I don’t want Shawna spending one more second on me and my problems than she absolutely has to.
I heard the shower stop. I hadn’t heard it go on, I hadn’t heard it going, but I heard it stop, and I heard her drying herself, and I realized she wasn’t in with Charlie anymore. Then she stepped into the bedroom and approached the closet. I heard all of this, and I heard her open the closet door. Then — what else? — she pulled out several dresses and laid them on the bed — the red dress and the white dress and the black dress, let’s say. I knew she’d end up with the black dress, that was her favorite. Mine too. A year earlier on the phone I’d asked if she’d wear that on our next anniversary. And since getting back, whenever I told her to put it on she always said, No way, Mister, she was waiting for our anniversary, it was her anniversary dress.
My leg started to insist a little — started to throb. But there was no time.
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“The Gallant Arms,” she said, when she was back down. “OK,” she said. “I like the sound of that.”
So, here’s where we were: I was seated at the computer, she was bent at the waist behind me, and our son was upstairs, resting comfortably. My wife and I, we were cheek-to-cheek — cheek-to-cheek on our anniversary.