Three Good Things Page 5

  All she had managed in that call, between her own tears, was, “Be sure he knows we love him, okay? Tell him.”

  Slowly, other good news began to follow. Benjamin was drinking from a bottle; he was off the feeding tubes. His heart and lungs seemed to be working just fine. Now he only needed to gain some weight and beat the jaundice that had set in. She knew from Rob that Ellen had stayed with their baby every night after work, sleeping by his crib, during those first few days. Rob would arrive early in the morning to release Ellen from her shift, having just slept by Lanie’s side himself. The NICU doctors kept saying their son was a fighter; the nurses dubbed him cutest baby in the NICU. It wasn’t much to go on, but for the moment it was enough. It had to be. Enough to know her little guy was breathing, responding, being watched over.

  Still, the thought of not having once held him, that he lay somewhere where she couldn’t even stroke his arm, his leg, give him a binky to suck on, was almost unbearable. The nurses, Rob, Ellen, all told her that she’d see her baby as soon as she was able. In the meantime, Rob brought her a cloth ragdoll especially designed to absorb her scent, which he took to Benjamin. She’d read that babies recognized a mother’s scent immediately, that they knew it instinctively from being inside the womb. She hoped her sweet boy would take some small comfort from her smell, know that she was nearby even if she couldn’t yet hold him.

  When at last the hospital released her to go greet him for the first time, five days had gone by. Already she’d missed so much. When she arrived, still in a wheelchair because she was too weak to walk, she was breathless; here was her miracle boy. What looked like a million tiny tubes protruded from his miniature body. Blinking monitors flashed and beeped all around him. Two blankets propped him up on either side, and his eyes fluttered open when she stood over him and said, “Hi, baby. It’s momma.” Her voice broke with tears.

  “Here she is, little guy. The lady you’ve been waiting for.”

  Benjamin looked up at her with the most intense eyes she’d ever seen, dark, dark blue, she could barely detect the irises. A blue blanket swaddled him tightly. She reached out to stroke his cheek. His skin was so soft! She peered in more closely and saw that he had little rosebud lips and a slip of an upturned nose, like her mother’s, like his grandmother’s. Even the swirl of his ears was amazingly beautiful. Rob had said it, but it was true. Their little guy was perfect.

  “He’s still working on his hair,” Rob joked. Only a few wisps of brown wove around his head.

  She started sobbing then, loud gut-wrenching sobs that surprised them both. Was it the release of finally being able to see her son, touch him, love him close at hand? Or was it the pain of seeing her child tethered to so many machines that worked furiously to help him get better? She supposed it was a combination of the two. She felt Rob’s arms around her, his breath on her neck.

  “Shhh. It’s okay. It’s all gonna be okay. He’s got his momma now.”

  She nodded, wiped her face with the back of her hand.

  “Hi, my little lovebug.” She stroked Benjamin’s delicate cheek again.

  “Do you want to hold him?” The nurse had come back to check on them.

  “I’d love to.” She paused. “Is it okay?”

  “Oh sure, let me help you get him out and settled in your arms.” Gently she lifted Benjamin from the incubator, a tangle of wires and cords hanging from the bottom of his blanket, and placed him in her arms. She helped Lanie to position him so that his small head, seemingly balanced so precariously on the rest of his body, was cradled in the crook of her arm.

  “You’re just a peanut,” she whispered, then kissed his forehead. At that moment Benjamin gave a big, air-slurping yawn that made them all laugh.

  “Just another typical day in the NICU,” Rob said.

  “Glad to see you’re so excited to meet your momma.” Lanie laughed at her little boy’s nonchalance while he looked up at her with bright, quizzical eyes, as if to ask, “So, what are we doing next?”

  When at last they got the call saying they could bring their son home (Lanie had been home for two days herself, the wait for Benjamin excruciating), she and Rob repacked the bag they’d carefully filled when they’d first been expecting to return home, a happy family of three. Diapers, diaper cream, pacifiers, burp towels, and a chime toy to hang from the car seat. On top Lanie lay the baby’s homecoming outfit, a soft onesie with big yellow ducks parading across it. They looked like happy ducks to her, ones that would quack in a cacophony of joy if they could. Rob locked the car seat into the back, and they held hands for the entire drive, hardly speaking a word.

  The doctors, not known for their bedside manner, were anything but reassuring at Benjamin’s prerelease meeting. Lanie and Rob were elated that their son was finally well enough to come home, to sleep in his very own bassinet. But she felt that elation come crashing down as she listened to the doctors tick off possible signs of concern to look for, to worry over. They had to make sure Benjamin continued to gain weight, that the yellow hue didn’t return to his skin, that he was responding “normally” to them.

  How could the doctors be so heartless? she wondered. She didn’t want to think about those things. She simply wanted someone to tell her that her little boy would soon be clapping his hands, eating goldfish crackers, that he’d be running in the open stretch of their yard one day, that she’d note in his baby book the first day he said “mama.” Couldn’t they see she was trying to imagine a life for the child she had just given birth to?

  When they got home, Ellen opened their blue door wide, welcoming them as “the Taylor family,” shooting pictures all the while. Their little guy was home at last. For a moment, as Rob carried Benjamin across the threshold, saying, “Welcome home, buddy,” Lanie was seized with panic. How on earth would she take care of this child? Was she even capable in her current state? She turned to Rob who, expecting to see delight on her face, discerned worry in her eyes instead.

  “What? What is it? Did we forget something at the hospital?”

  “What if I’m no good at this? At being a mom?”

  He smiled, put his arm around her, and walked with her to the living room.

  “Oh, honey,” Rob said.

  He set the baby’s car seat down on the living room rug and beamed at her.

  “How can you not be good at it? You’re wonderful. I love you. You’re going to be an amazing mom.”

  She felt her lungs expand. He was right. They were going to be all right. And while her own mother had been taken from her much too soon, she knew how to love fiercely, change a diaper, cradle a child who needed as much touch as possible right now. That was what was needed from her at this moment. She could do all those things.

  The memory stuck with her as she wheeled Benjamin around the neighborhood, still bundled up in his sweatshirt and wool hat. Yes, she could do all those things. She was doing all those things, she reminded herself now. How she wished her mother were here to see it, to meet her grandson. How she would love this child!

  If only her mom could swoop in, like a fairy godmother, and guide her through the next seventeen years. Lanie was filled with both practical questions and questions only her mother could know: When had Lanie’s first tooth popped through? How would she make sure that Benjamin started talking and walking at the right age? How did her mother quiet her during her colicky periods? Had she been a napper? (Benjamin decidedly was not.) What were her favorite books? She could remember her mom reading Bedtime for Frances and Corduroy. But what came before that? What had been her favorite lullaby? These were the questions she would ask her mother now but that had never occurred to her in the six short years she’d had with her.

  Harriet McClarety often told her girls, on nights when they’d try to imagine their lives’ paths, that motherhood was the greatest joy in life. She said it, Lanie always felt, not to discourage them from careers—for her mother was an elementary school teacher herself—but to remind them that they were and always would be
her life’s purpose.

  As she reached down to get Benjamin now, she thought back to that first day, seemingly so long ago, when Rob had bent down to release the baby from his car seat, then handed him to her. He was so impossibly small, so incredibly beautiful, this baby of theirs. Benjamin looked up at her, tightly swaddled, wide awake with bright eyes, much as they were on this crisp spring afternoon, as if to say, once again, “Well, what’s next?”

  She carried him back into the house, checked the machine for messages. There were three. One from her friend Audrey, mother of three, asking when they could get together again. “Save me!” she shouted from the machine. “I need to get out of the house, and I don’t know if I’m ever coming back!” Lanie smiled. Audrey was the queen of melodrama, which made Lanie love her all the more. The second was from Naomi Griffin, calling about “a few early details for the Big Brother benefit” held every fall. Lanie’s firm helped the foundation with odds and ends as part of its pro bono work. She sighed. Autumn seemed so far away, but she knew that there were things they had to get started on—donors, volunteers, venue, a theme to bring it all together. She’d call Naomi later when she had the energy.

  The third message was from Rob. Things at work were even crazier than expected, and he doubted he’d be home before suppertime. On a Saturday! Lanie felt a pinch of anger; as happy as she was to have her time with Benjamin, she wanted them all together on the weekends. Was that so greedy of her? It hurt sometimes when Rob didn’t seem to share her desire to spend time together as a family. Wasn’t that what the whole marriage thing had been about?

  “Looks like it’s just you and me, baby,” she said to Benjamin as she pulled off his cap and jacket. She walked over to his high chair and strapped him in. “We’ll have our picnic another day. It’s too cold out anyway.”

  She went to the fridge to get cheese and fruit for his lunch. At the back of the refrigerator, she spied some old beers. Would it hurt to have just one? She pushed it aside, just like the thought of Rob’s working another Saturday. Benjamin was banging on his high-chair tray with a spoon, “singing for his supper,” as they’d begun to call it.

  “I’m coming, baby,” she called, as she gathered up the food in her arms and turned to give him all her love.

  “All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.”

  —Frank Lloyd Wright

  Rob checked his watch, then his cell again. No messages. The last call from Lanie had been to say that she’d meet him at the restaurant. Ellen had agreed to pinch-hit as a babysitter, but Lanie wanted to go home first, get changed, get Benjamin settled into his pajamas. Rob had lucked out with last-minute reservations at La Lumière, one of the nicest restaurants in Madison, and ideal for an anniversary dinner. The waitress had already refilled his scotch, and he’d managed to shred the cocktail napkin into tiny bits now sitting at his glass’s edge.

  He looked out the windows onto the cold, glassy face of Lake Mendota. The restaurant sat on the other side of the lake from the office, and the view just one hundred and eighty degrees east was surprisingly different. The evening light played off the lake, little pools of shimmering gold and rose, as the sun sunk in the west. The place was nestled back among tall maples and pines, and a person could walk twenty paces from the restaurant’s windows and be standing at the water’s edge. A small bench waited at the end of the path, and Rob watched as a bird landed at the nearby feeder, in plain sight for customers while they sipped wine and nibbled on escargot.

  It was a beautiful spot, as Gill had promised when he handed over the reservations to Rob this morning, saying “You’re going to be a happy man if you take Lanie here tonight.” He’d winked in a conspiratorial way, as if Rob were one of the guys, though Rob didn’t think of himself that way. He was in a bit of a no-man’s-land at work, the way he saw it. Not old enough to be partner, not young enough to hang out with the swinging bachelors. He was certainly smart and experienced enough to make partner, and it had become a thorn in his side the past year, wanting to get recognized for his contribution to and long hours at the firm. Lanie liked to tease him that work was his mistress, but he failed to see the humor in it. Work was taking time away from his family, from Benjamin. If it were up to Greenough himself, he was sure he would have made partner a year ago. But with Hobbs running most of the day-to-day show, it didn’t look as if anything was going to change soon.

  His dad, a shoe salesman, would chuckle at Rob’s unrest. The man had possessed a coal miner’s work ethic, every day in, every day out of the shop without complaint. Vanity, reward for hard work weren’t things Midwesterners spoke of. You were expected to provide for your family. Of course, his old man, just like his grandfather, had been his own boss, doing everything from ordering the shoes to writing out the customers’ sales receipt on the carbon copy. Rob’s dad had loved everything about the business and seemed to get true pleasure out of fitting a customer with the right style, the appropriate arch. He prided himself on knowing the architecture of a foot, the way the bones connected, of providing the necessary support and cushion in a shoe’s sole. “The soul lies in the sole,” he was fond of saying.

  At the back of the store, customers could place a foot inside an old fluoroscope machine to measure size precisely. It was touted as the most scientific way to get the “right fit,” and as a child, Rob loved to see the X-rays illuminate the white lines of his bones. His dad would name them for him: “That’s your big toe. It’s known as a phalange in the medical world. The longer bones are your metatarsals, and that there is your calcaneus, also known as your heel. Did you know your heel is the largest bone in the foot, Robbie? Isn’t it a thing of art?” And Rob would nod in agreement, in amazement. That was, until the seventies, when the machines were banned for their high radiation dosage. Rob had placed his small foot in the device countless times, so many that he was probably a prime candidate for cancer. But the machine had been incredible to his young eyes. Funny how his dad had focused on the architecture of the foot, and Rob on something slightly bigger, faintly grander. He’d never thought of it that way before.

  He twirled the ice in his glass, took another sip. The scotch was smooth and strong. Thank God Gill had handed over his reservation. People typically booked reservations here months in advance, and it had become a running joke between Lanie and Rob over the years. “If you really loved me, you’d take me to La Lumière,” she’d tease every now and then. Rob would counter, “When you’ve earned it, babe.” And she’d rightly smack him.

  Except lately he’d been missing his wife. Not the first blush of romance, the excitement over a new e-mail, a new voice mail; he had figured those early butterflies would fade eventually. But he missed the silly things, stuff that no one else in his right mind would find funny but that had thrown them into laughing spasms. He thought back to one night early in their marriage when Lanie had confessed to slight OCD tendencies and said she couldn’t sleep with their sliding closet doors open. Rob had left his side slightly ajar, and she asked him to close it before crawling into bed. When he jokingly refused, Lanie wouldn’t let him into bed. She made snow angels in the sheets, stretching out her arms and legs, giggling as Rob tried to push his way over. “No way!” she’d screamed. “Not until you close that door!” They were both in hysterics by then, though why it had been so funny at the time, he couldn’t really say.

  Lanie had won, of course; she had a way of getting what she wanted. Rob just wished she wanted him more these days. Was that selfish? Probably. But how he craved that balance—being a respected colleague at work, a devoted dad, a loving and loved husband. When would it all come?

  He took another sip and surveyed the other couples in the dining room. On the rare occasion that they went out these days, Lanie liked to imagine the backstories of the people around them. Rob loved that about her—that she would wonder in the first place—when it never occurred to him to consider what type of day the person in the seat next to him had had. But that was his wife
, always wanting to know—and fix—people’s problems.

  To his right sat a young couple probably on their third or fourth date, the young man working hard to impress the blonde across from him. Every so often he would lean forward to say something too soft to be heard, and his date would giggle, as if on cue. Kitty-corner to Rob’s left sat an elderly couple who said little, though what they did say, he could hear clearly since they talked in a tone ten decibels higher than everybody else. At the moment, they were arguing about whether the guy had ordered carrots or potatoes as his side and if he should send back the carrots, as he was certain he’d asked for potatoes. His wife kept shushing him, telling him not to make a scene. Rob exchanged amused glances with a few other diners when the waitress finally brought over a plate of steaming potatoes au gratin, placing it in front of the old man and saying, “Our compliments, Monsieur.”

  And somewhat disconcertingly, at the table directly to his left sat another man, around his age, sipping a whiskey. When Rob glanced up, the stranger apparently took it as an invitation to conversation.

  “Let me guess? Stood up?” Rob laughed and shook his head. He supposed that’s what it looked like. “Nah. Waiting for my wife.”

  “Oh?” The man raised an eyebrow. He was handsome in a traditional kind of way, Rob supposed. Dark hair, thick eyebrows, unusually tan skin for April. “Been there, done that,” he added with a wave of his hand.

  Rob nodded, uncertain how to respond.

  “No thanks. It’s the single guy’s life for me. No hassle, no needing to be home by a certain time, you know what I’m saying?”

  Rob started to commiserate, but the guy cut him off. “Divorced seven years. Much better that way . . .” He paused. “For me, anyway.” He took another drink. Then, as if Rob’s words had just sunk in, he offered, “Sorry, man. I’m sure you’re happily married, taking your wife to a swank place like this. Didn’t mean to rain on your parade.”