Bird Call
The phone call with the social worker is brief. “I can’t,” I say. Mrs. Romness responds with a sigh that expels every bit of what she’s been holding in these past three weeks. It’s been that long since she rattled out of my driveway in her Ford Focus and left me, terrified, a howling infant clutched under my right arm.
Circumstances haven’t improved. The crying ceases only for brief periods. The baby screams when she sees my face. Still, long after the phone clunks back into its cradle, my fingers linger on the handle. Can I really not?
“What if she hates me?” I’d said as Mrs. Romness reversed down the drive that day.
I could see her orange lips twisting more than I could hear her words over the crying. “She’s just a baby,” she said, hitting the gas even as her head leaned out over the road. “You asked for this.” She was eager to cross the baby off her lengthy to-do list, even if the placement wouldn’t last.
I looked down at the infant I was suddenly responsible for. Mrs. Romness was correct. I had wanted this child to be mine, a desire that seemed, at the moment, naïve. I was an expert on the treatment protocol for stage four neuroblastoma. I could calculate the likelihood of survival to five years in a newly diagnosed pediatric leukemia patient. But I had never held a miserable child past that first hour when your heart screams to end the suffering of the poor infant, let alone the second hour, when your heart cries only to end its own. I found myself wondering if other parents felt this way at first, like they were holding a cat trying to wriggle free.
For three weeks, we walked. We swung. We sashayed down the hallways in circles, in straight lines, in light, and in dark. For three weeks, I extinguished every strategy offered by science and resorted to advice from all the blogs I could read. She wailed on.
From my desk chair, I listen down the hall to Bella’s intermittent whimpers. I make another bottle, one last attempt at mothering before she goes away. I venture down the hall but as soon as the graceless thud of heel striking floor heralds my approach, her soft cry crescendos into sandpapery shrieks. I reach my arms toward her and her own limbs quiver. I peel the swaddle from her shoulders and the quiver ramps into a shake. She is seizure-like by the time I actually pull her from the mattress. I feel her fingers spread over my forearm, grasping it. Her tiny nails dig into me but, when I search for a sign of comfort, I can’t find any. A whiplash of frustration tautens my muscles. “I can’t help you,” I say to her tiny face.
Bella drinks the bottle without relish. There is still formula left when Bella pulls her lips from the nipple and resumes whimpering. She stares at me and I see, once again, a need I can’t identify. My fingers trace the familiar curve of her belly, pressing gently against her liver to feel its smooth contour sitting just under her ribs, just as it should be, just as I have found it countless times before. I rub tiny circles over her neck, letting the tips of my fingers roll over muscles and vessels, searching for enlarged lymph nodes. I listen with my stethoscope and shine a flashlight in her mouth but my exam reveals nothing amiss. All the while, she wails. Her lips are blue around their edges from the effort and her hair is damp where the tears have rolled.
I crouch on the black and white tile in the foyer, waiting for the rattle of Mrs. Romness in the Focus. A shoe crunches against brick steps outside the front door. Then, a short, aggressive knock. I breathe deeply, waiting for the loosening in my chest that never comes. Something spreads on my tongue, as though I swished milk past its due date.
“Come in,” I say. I put Bella back in her seat but I can’t bring myself to open the door.
“Jaimie,” I hear from outside. “I know you’re here.” It is not the voice I expect. This one is nearly monotone and firm and makes me want to stand up straight. I pull down the brushed metal door handle to find the tightly gathered, slightly salted hair and sharp green eyes of my mother. We stare at each other. “For heaven’s sake,” she says after a moment. “What is wrong with that child?” Her question—or really, the questions she doesn’t ask—demonstrates restraint. She doesn’t want to admit, even between the two of us, that I have kept certain things from her.
I pluck Bella from the carseat and let my gaze linger on the floor. I don’t have to watch her. I can feel her eyes catch on my rumpled outfit and greasy hair. “I didn’t expect you.”
“Your car’s in the garage. On a Tuesday morning.”
“I’m working from home today.” In truth, I’ve been pacing around the house for weeks, stacking sick leave and personal days onto the abbreviated maternity leave allowed to mothers of children who are not born by them.
She looks at me. Lines I could sketch from memory wrinkle her forehead. “You look like a housewife.”
“You’re a housewife,” I say, barely above a whisper.
My mother runs her hands down her front, smoothing her tightly belted floral dress. Onions and garlic waft my way with her motion, lurking under cover of her perfume. I know she must have spent the morning preparing some awful stew that my father will eat for dinner, but only because there will be no alternative. Growing up, I could taste my mother’s disdain for her work.
Bella wails in my arms. “Thanks for checking on me.” I gesture to the front door.
My mother bends her knees and sets her handbag on the tile. “You’re not going to invite me in?”
“There’s a new chemotherapy protocol I have to map.”
“With this racket?” She studies Bella and me. “Let me help.” She holds her arms out.
“No,” I say. “She’s leaving in a minute.” I stoop down and wrangle Bella back into her carseat to give my words muscle. I squeeze the handle release button with all my might but it sticks. I strike it with the heel of my hand over and over until the car seat rocks back and forth and Bella is hysterical.
Finally, my mother pushes me aside and pops the carseat handle into place. “Great then. It’s settled. I’ll watch her until she leaves. Your career is important.” She picks up the carseat and swings it through the air. Bell stops quivering. “You just settle down,” Mom tells her. She runs a thick finger along Bella’s cheek. I feel the tingle of her touch on my own face and am reminded of the days in elementary school that I spent home, sick. Those were the softest days, when my mother would tuck blankets around my body and read me books about magical places and never mention my potential.
Finally, Bella is quiet. “Back to work,” says my mother.
I stand and watch as my mother crouches down to undo the carseat straps I just fastened. She glances at me again, dismissing me, and waits until I take a step in retreat before she turns back to Bella. When I head for my office, a whimper sounds and I turn again. A swath of light beams into Bella’s eyes from the foyer’s second story windows. They are wild and fixed on me.
“Why are you so unhappy, little one?” My mother’s voice is slippery, so different than the way she speaks to me. Did words meant for me ever slide through the air without any barbs of expectation? The answer, I realize, is yes. There were moments of laughter and tenderness, of drinking hot chocolate underneath the summer stars past my bedtime, of reading stories with flashlights under the covers.
Bella’s gaze shifts to my mother as she holds her up. I watch the angles around her eyes disappear. My mother brings Bella to her chest and they vanish into the family room.
I trudge back to my office and nudge the door until it is half closed. This is my favorite room in the house but today I find no comfort in the walls of journals nestled floor to ceiling with built-in bookcases. There is no buzz of ideas about to burst forth from my mind, no consuming questions.
I sit in my chair and stare at a drawing hanging on the wall in front of my computer. My fingers naturally travel to the paper, feeling the same fibers he once touched. It was made by Tyler, an 8-year-old T-cell leukemia patient, stratified high risk due to his initial white blood cell count of 120,000 and hypodiploidy on his flow cytometry. He came to me from several hours away for treatment of his complicated disease.
I miss the times when it was just the two of us, me sitting by his bedside after a spinal infusion. Brave and reserved in those moments, he would open his eyes and grip my fingers when he woke enough to recognize Darth Vador’s tune humming from my larynx. It was an honor for my presence to bridge his journey from wakefulness to sleep and back, to watch over him at his most vulnerable. That is, until his mother would sweep into the recovery room and the air would change. Tyler cried at the sight of her, his pitch weaving a tunnel through the umbilicus. I lifted my arms to gather him in for comfort but he reached for her. His cry was always for her. Hearing his call, like that of a fresh hatchling, his mother rushed to him and I backed away. I watched and felt, in my own arms, the way she wrapped around him, encompassing him, the way I had never held another human being.
Tyler’s drawing shows a ninja, dressed in loose, black pants and a black shirt tied at the waist. The ninja has my wavy hair and a stethoscope around her neck. She fights an amorphous blob, Luke Kemia. Tyler drew it crouched on the worn linoleum of the exam room floor, his freshly regrown curls bouncing with the effort of guiding his crayon back and forth against the paper. He drew while I gave his parents the news: he was cancer free. He was released from our weekly visits filled with infusions and needles and vomit. His parents were all smiles and happy tears and Praise God’s, and I was all self-loathing for feeling melancholy at such a time. I couldn’t help feeling that it was all another ending, of sorts. Mourning the loss of a patient to death is expected and prepared for. No one trains for losing a patient to life.
I could expect a Christmas without new popsicle stick reindeer ornaments for my tree. No more photographs of Tyler in the school play. No more watching him grow a personality bigger than his feet.
I met Bella the day Tyler drew Luke Kemia, the day he drifted from my life. I found her in the newborn nursery, where I sometimes held babies in a rocking chair the morning after losing a patient. I was feeling wretched: sad and guilt-ridden for feeling so. Holding a newborn can be a palate-cleanser. Whatever rottenness had occurred in the past was before their time and didn’t matter in their presence.
The nursery was nearly empty that time of day but there were always a few infants camped along the back wall, the chairs beside them cold and unworn. Most of these babies were claimed by Child Protective Services. I stood by their beds to study these newborns before choosing, watching as their pacifiers fell out or their bottles emptied. I hurried past my kindred, the ones that glanced around placidly, accepting of their circumstances. I lingered over the ones who weren’t content with a tightly swaddled blanket and a warm hat. I admired their puckered, determined faces and wondered what made them so perseverant, so convinced it was in their power to achieve something better.
Bella was wedged into a vibrating seat, not at all pacified by the mobile dancing above her head. “Drug baby,” the RN nodded at Bella as she measured the oxygen saturation of a quiet one in the corner. “The Mom split as soon as the kid fell out.” She shook her head. “Another one without a chance.”
I gathered Bella in my arms and stared into her face as we rocked. She was all lines and right angles. Her jaw was square, her cheeks sunken, her nose a harsh line bisecting her face. The only roundness came from her mouth, which she held in a perfect O as she wailed. She looked like a frail old woman until I searched deeper. Her eyes tunneled into my own and dug around. There was an intensity, a focus, that made me doubt the RN’s judgement. Despite her dramatic beginning, the girl was anything but hopeless.
The air in my office feels tingly, as though the first winter storm is coming months before it should. I head back to check on them and find the door to my family room closed. The brass knob on this side is tarnished. Dark smudges flow over its curves. My mother would never allow her own doorknob to exist in such a state. I realize with fury that she would likely be pleased to find that mine has been neglected, that my attention is spent on other pursuits. I have the sudden urge to tear the knob from the door, to slice it off with some sort of machinery. I stare with loathing at the four Phillips screws that hold the knob in place, an echo from childhood pounding in my skull.
I still see the slice of light that shines under the locked door and feel the way the darkness falls steeply behind me down in the basement. I smell the dank air and feel the spindly fingers of the shadow monsters about to grab me. I scream to be let out. No one comes.
But I am grown now, above childish fears. My lungs fill with clean air. I lean all my weight against the wood in front of me and jiggle the knob. It pops immediately and I burst through to the other side to find my mother relaxed on the couch, with her eyebrows swept high. Bella is asleep in her arms.
“I never close this,” I say.
“Darling, you’re flushed. Can I get you something?” Even in my house, she is in charge, always the hostess, always fresh and put-together.
“It was quiet. I came to make sure you were fine.”
“This baby is sound asleep. Perhaps we should have come to check on you,” she says.
I feel the heat rise in my face. Where my mother is feminine and composed, I am messy and emotional. She could not possibly have raised progeny more different than herself.
“Are you shaking?” she says.
Bella’s head rests against my mother’s armpit. Her eyelids are swollen but she is still and quiet. “Bella doesn’t sleep during the day,” I say. With my right arm I feel my own left armpit, tense and unwelcoming.
I want to go to Bella. I want to pick her up and feel her toothless gums slip against my shoulder as her lips part, to watch the tips of her fingers curl slightly into my flesh like hooks holding onto just me. I want to sniff the fuzz on her head, fresh and meaty, like a puppy, and feel her muscles give way as she slowly drifts to sleep. But she is happier in someone else’s arms.
“She’s fine. You’re free to get back to your protocol.”
I reach for Bella but my mother stops me with her palm. I stare at the creases on her hand, the way they could fold over me any minute. “She’s sensitive. She needs nurturing.” My words come out blubbering and wet. Even I can hear how ridiculous I sound, frantic about a sleeping baby.
My mother watches me a moment, waiting for me to calm down in her infuriating, rational way. “I know what she needs. And I know—I have always known—what you need. I didn’t teach you to smile pretty and find a good husband. I raised a strong woman,” she says. She gestures up and down my sweaty frame. “Not that you can tell right now.”
“You locked me in the basement!”
She sighs without remorse. “You locked yourself in the basement. But what happened next? That’s the important part. That is the part you should be thinking of.”
I am there again, feeling my way down the stairs, through the army of shadows to the toolbox. I grasp the screwdriver—several screwdrivers—because they are all different. Ascending again, frantic to reach the top, I stumble. I slip, then fall. Pain. “I screamed for you.”
“I know,” she says. “Like this child, only louder. After that.”
I pull myself back up the stairs, limping on a swollen ankle. My hands shake as I raise each screwdriver to the tiny screws until I find a match to the size and shape. I torque the screws out of their holes. The door swings open to freedom. The light hits my pupils in slices and I squint, feeling it cut deep behind my eyes. I find my mother sitting on the floor beside the door. Her back rests against the wall. She nods her head and holds her arms out to me. I am confused by the pride shining in her eyes even as I have tears flowing from mine. I hear an awful noise and realize it comes from my own throat. My screams muffle as my mother presses my face to her chest.
“I was not going to let you grow up thinking you needed someone else to save you.” Her face is rosy from Bella’s heat.
I turn from my mother, a bit nauseated from the thumping in my chest.
“No one ever taught me I could be anything other than what I am,” she says
It takes a minute to realize the drumbeat I hear comes from the front door. Someone knocks. Bella is still asleep.
I see the orange lipstick first. “Mrs. Romness, you’re here,” I say, pulling open the door.
The social worker says nothing but steps through the entryway and retrieves her phone from her pocket. She glances at the time. I am grateful she doesn’t ask me why. I suppose she is used to this, the constant shuffling of unclaimed children.
“Where will you take her?” I ask.
“There’s one crib open at the shelter.” She looks at her phone again. “If I can get her there before it closes.”
My mother walks into the foyer behind me. I reach out for Bella but she hands her directly to Mrs. Romness, who stuffs Bella into her carseat and clicks the handle into place. The noise wakes Bella and she opens her eyes to see the woman with orange lipstick pick her up in the seat. Without another word, Mrs. Romness carries Bella to the door. She is quiet, swinging from the social worker’s arm, surrendered. I have seen the look before but, until the last hour, never from her. “Good-bye, Bella,” I say. Only now, as her presence recedes, do I notice that Bella’s appearance has changed over the past three weeks. Her cheeks have a new, slight roundness.
At my voice, Bella’s eyes widen and search for me. When our gaze connects, she sets her mouth into a circle and resumes screaming. The social worker steps onto the front porch, leaving the door open. I stand in the threshold, watching them leave, listening to Bella’s cry.
A draft of fall air darts inside. A chill slaps at the wetness on my cheeks. I turn to my mother. At first, she is busy brushing at the flowers on her dress but then she looks up and nods her head at me. I see the same pride I remember from childhood and I fight the urge to bury my face in her breast. My mother swings the door shut.
I stare at the knob. She is the one who taught me to open it for myself, after all. I shove my mother aside and thrust the front door open again. Bella’s scream travels to me, familiar now. I feel it reverberate through the marrow in my bones. It wraps around me, tunnels into me. A mother knows her young will call out for her until she, a mother, answers. My own voice rises now and the social worker turns. I call to Bella until she finds my pitch. I sing her into my arms.