Crooked Branch (9781101615072) Read online

  “I think . . .”

  She’s a professional waiter. She doesn’t even fidget.

  My voice is so small I can barely hear it myself. “I think I might be going crazy,” I say. “I’m scared that I’m going crazy.”

  Dr. Zimmer frowns at me. She turns her head on a slight angle like dogs sometimes do, when they’re really considering you. There are leafy, green ferns lining the windowsill behind her, and their brightness seems to make light of my confession.

  “Like actual crazy,” I say, for clarification. “Not fun-crazy.”

  “Okay.” She nods. “Okay. Let’s see if we can figure out where that fear is coming from.”

  During my twenty-seventh hour of labor, I realized I would need therapy. I pulled so hard I feared that the bar would snap and splinter, and nurses would be stabbed in the head with the shrapnel and killed instantly, falling to the floor with their mouths and eyes open in horrified Os. Their last act of motion in the world: the release of a ballpoint pen from a lifeless hand, the languorous roll of a Bic across the laminate floor.

  It was shift change again. My third nurse was leaving to go home for the night. She was sporty and olive, with almond eyes and swingy black hair. She could have been anyone. But she was my third nurse and she was going home for the night to eat a Lean Cuisine and stretch out on her couch and pretend to read Borges while she watched The Bachelor. Tonight was the finale: would Sebastian choose Crystal or Shenandoah?

  I passed out. The contractions were ferocious because the doctor had turned off my epidural so I could feel them. As if I was in danger of not feeling the eight-pound child who was attempting to exit my body. He was a male doctor, and he thought the pain would help me push, which is like the philosophy that waterboarding helps people confess to hiding weapons of mass destruction. Between contractions, I lost consciousness. Or maybe I just went to sleep. I was likely very tired, though I couldn’t have said so with any conviction, because all I could really feel was pain. Like fire and knives and every other cliché of pain that’s ever been muttered, all of it patched up together in a big ball, like in that video game where you start off with a little teeny ball that rolls around the room and picks up thumbtacks and paper clips until it gets big enough to start picking up buckets and small dogs, and then eventually cows and then barns and then skyscrapers and then planets. My pain picked up incongruous, unrelated, worldwide pains in the exact same way. So that first I could feel stubbed toes and paper cuts and smacked funny bones. And then I could feel the farmer in Ipswich twisting his back in spasms under the weight of some greasy machinery, the child in New Delhi who had just run her hand under the sewing machine at the factory where she worked, the twenty-two-year-old Hollywood waitress who didn’t get The Part, even after she lap-fucked the paunchy casting director (no easy feat) within easy earshot of his assistant and two other hopefuls. And then finally: facial burns, chemotherapy, suicide.

  My new nurse came in and she wasn’t a new nurse at all. She was an old nurse, my first nurse, who had gone home the evening before, slept all night, gotten up in the morning, measured and eaten her Special K with skim milk, gone to the gym, had a manicure, lingered in a coffee shop with an ex-boyfriend (now married), and finally returned to work, where I was STILL IN LABOR, TWENTY-SEVEN HOURS LATER.

  “Still here?” she said. “My goodness! Going for a record, are we?”

  I hated her. I thought about the violence of this beginning, so different than I had imagined. My birthing ball mocked me from its corner. I pushed. Well, not me—my muscles pushed. I grunted and strained and prayed. The nurse held my knee open on one side, and Leo held the knee on the other. They tried to comfort me. They told me I was brave and I was doing a great job. I didn’t have much choice. I squeezed my eyes shut so that my eyeballs wouldn’t spring free of my head. My baby would be born, and during the big, beautiful moment of arrival, it (he, she) would get hit in the head with my runaway eyeball. An inauspicious greeting.

  “Welcome to the world, baby!” PING! “Oh, don’t mind that, sweetie—no, no, don’t cry. It’s just Mommy’s eyeball.”

  Another contraction. I curled, I heaved, I pushed, I pushed, I pushed. It was the twenty-eighth hour now. I passed out again, and the nurse put a damp washcloth over my face to cool me. I tried to breathe in and I was sucking terry cloth. My nose was blocked. I panicked and tried to shake the washcloth loose.

  “YOU’RE NOT HELPING,” I wanted to scream. “I’m claustrophobic! Get that fucking thing off my face!” But I was unconscious again. And then another contraction. I was crying now, the tears just slipping down my face, indistinguishable from all the other fluids.

  “C-section,” the doctor said.

  He was talking to Leo, and I’m pretty sure there were more words in the sentence than that. Their voices were traveling over and back now, in front of me. They were saying more words.

  “You told me you could see the head,” I cried, with my real, out-loud voice. I was sobbing, wasting precious energy on that. “Three hours ago,” I sobbed. “What happened?”

  Leo moved back toward me, toward my face-end. He put his hand on my forehead. I was so fucking hot. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I think this is the only way.”

  It was seventeen more hours before the anesthesiologist came. Or okay, it was seven minutes, but really, that’s only a technicality because my ball of pain was so big now that it was picking up galaxies. I was feeling alien pain. Blind, one-legged, orphaned Martian pain.

  You’d think that after all that crescendo of horror, its release would be spiritually epic, that there would be a heroic, unblemished afterglow, a sepia portrait of love. After twenty-eight hours of labor, three hours of pushing, and finally a C-section, didn’t I deserve some damned afterglow?

  But instead of sepia, there was only the fluorescent, overhead buzzkill. It shone down on my baby’s red face, her red head, her tiny red fists. And then my teeth started to chatter, and my arms started to twitch and flutter, and my whole body was shaking, and one of the nurse-voices told me that it was just the anesthesia wearing off, but that they’d better take the baby, just in case. And then they scooped her little red-wrapped body out of my arms and gave her to someone who was a much better mother than me, or at least to someone who wouldn’t shake her and drop her, splat, on the hospital floor in her first hour of life. I watched her ascend from my arms, and the weight of her absence was like a brand-new grief, a hysteria.

  Leo sat beside me on a spinny chair, holding my greenish shaking hand. He tried to smooth back my ridiculous hair, but it was no use. I hadn’t seen a mirror in days, but I knew what I looked like: that school photograph, the one from the eighth grade, with the hair that managed to be both greasy and fluffy at once. I’d worn a royal blue cable-knit sweater, too, for God’s sake. I shuddered and shivered and clattered.

  “Is she supposed to be shaking like that?” Leo asked the nurse.

  “It’s normal.”

  “But that much?”

  The nurse came around the curtain and moved some wires around.

  “Oooh, blood pressure not great,” she said.

  She was wearing pink scrubs. Leo looked at me and smiled with his lips closed.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he said.

  “I couldn’t do it,” I said.

  “You did do it. She’s perfect.”

  “But I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t push her out.”

  He shook his head at me.

  “You did great, you cooked her for nine whole months.”

  “Ten,” I whispered.

  “She was stuck,” he said. “That wasn’t your fault.”

  “She only weighs eight pounds. Why would she get stuck? My hips are massive.”

  “Shhhh,” he said. “You’re just tired. You’re exhausted. You did great.”

  And then I was shaking again, awfull
y hard, and I was afraid I might actually pull some of the tubes loose from their machines. I hoped they weren’t vital. I waited for it to pass.

  “I heard a horrible story,” I said to Leo when my teeth stopped clattering momentarily. “About a woman who fell asleep with her baby, in the hospital bed.”

  My throat was shaking now, too. I didn’t know your throat could shake, but there it was, and the words were coming out all quivery and distorted. I tried to keep my voice down, but I couldn’t control it. Leo was looking at me strangely.

  “And she dropped the baby,” I said. “He fell right off the edge of the bed. She just fell asleep and she dropped him.”

  “Why are you telling me that?” Leo said. “Don’t even think about that.” He leaned in and kissed my forehead.

  “He died, just from falling off the bed.”

  “Shhhhh,” Leo said again. He stroked my hand.

  “They’re so fragile. That’s all it takes.”

  The nurse pulled back the curtain, I could tell by the metallic sound of the rings scraping along their track. But my eyes were closed against the wicked light, and I was shaking again, and I don’t know where my battered body found the energy to shake like that, like some primal, tribal bone-dance.

  • • •

  The morning after Emma was born, I woke up in my hospital bed and tried to sit, but I couldn’t move. I had to roll over on my side first. Ow. Slowly. First roll, then hoist, roll, hoist. A long series of miniature, agonizing movements until I was half-seated.

  “You all right over there?” A voice behind the curtain. “You were whimpering in your sleep.”

  I tried to pull back the curtain to get a gawk at my roommate, but when I reached, I felt like the incision across my abdomen would open up, and all my insides would strew themselves unattractively across the bed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thank you. I just had a bad dream. A horrible dream.”

  I shuddered. It took me at least four or five minutes to reach and press the nurse-call button on the wall behind my head. Then a loud crackle and another disembodied voice.

  “YES.”

  I looked around.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Yes?” the voice said again.

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

  I couldn’t tell if the voice could hear me, or if I was supposed to be talking into a microphone or something. I hesitated.

  “Yes, hi,” the voice said again. “Just calling to chat?”

  “Oh,” I said. “No. It’s awkward—I didn’t. I didn’t know if you could hear me.”

  My roommate was chuckling behind the curtain. I thought I could hear her rolling her eyes, but I couldn’t, of course, and that was probably just another weird symptom of all the morphine and rampant hormones, thinking I could hear a thing like a rolled eyeball.

  “I can hear you,” the voice said. “What do you need?”

  Was there a volume switch somewhere? The voice was so loud it gave me goose bumps. I jumped in my skin every time it spoke.

  “I need my baby,” I said. My roommate snorted. “I mean I just woke up here. I haven’t seen her. I haven’t seen her since she was born. I wanted to . . . I’d like to feed her.”

  The speaker crackled and there was a metallic switching noise, but no voice.

  “Hello?” I spoke into the air around my head. It was like talking to God, but with less assurance. “I couldn’t hear you.”

  “I said it’s shift change right now.” The voice was back. “Nurses are taking report. But someone will be in to see you within a half an hour or so, and you can request the baby be brought from the nursery then.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  The final crackle indicated the end of the conversation, and I didn’t expect it, but I started to cry, great heaving, shuddering racks of tears. Crying hurt, and now my small intestine would fall out for sure, but I couldn’t stop. I reached for the phone, and I had to sort of collapse onto my elbow in order to punch in the numbers, but then I couldn’t right myself again, so I just stayed like that, half-tipped-over in the bed, clutching the receiver against my ear. Leo answered on the fourth ring.

  “Are you coming?” I said.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  He sounded confused. I looked at the industrial school/hospital/jail clock on the wall.

  “Seven thirty.”

  It was really only seven twenty-three. I could hear rumpling sheets. He stretched.

  “Yeah, I’m coming, for sure, of course,” he said. “I can’t wait to see my girls!”

  I couldn’t answer him because I was crying again.

  “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head. A giant, voluminous sniffle. “Not really,” I said. “I’m all alone here.” Roommate flicked on her television, as if to contradict me. “I haven’t seen the baby. They haven’t brought her to see me, yet. I don’t even know if she’s okay.” Leo was running water.

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” he said. “You only gave birth to her four hours ago. They’re probably just expecting you to get a little rest. Visiting hours don’t start until nine.”

  “I can’t sleep,” I said. “Everything hurts. I can barely move.” God, I was whiny. I knew three-year-olds who weren’t this whiny. I couldn’t help it. “I just want to see her. I want you to be here.”

  “Well, I’m coming, okay?” he said. “I’m getting showered, and I’ll stop and get you some breakfast on my way so you don’t have to eat hospital food. I’ll be there waiting when they open that door at nine o’clock, I promise. Will you be okay until I get there?”

  “Sure.” I nodded.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s just not what I expected,” I tried to explain. “To wake up alone here, in this room. It doesn’t seem right that we’re finally a family, our first morning as a family. And none of us are together. And everything hurts. My body . . .”

  I sniffed again, and there were more tears. Ugh—more tears!

  “I know,” Leo said. “But it’s going to be okay, right? I’ll be there before you know it. And they’ll bring that baby in any minute, you’ll see.”

  “Okay,” I whispered.

  I guess that’s when I started to hate myself a little bit—that was the beginning of it, when I hung up that phone and sat there all trembling and helpless in that hospital bed. And I don’t mean hate hate, like the way I feel about control-top panty hose or anything. But more like a Condoleezza Rice kind of hate, like where you know she’s culpable and a little bit shady, but damn, she’s just so smart and full of promise. And anyway, she has plenty of time to redeem herself, doesn’t she? That’s how it was with me. Because I knew I was stronger than this. I was a black belt in jujutsu, for God’s sake.

  • • •

  “Do you have any history of mental illness?” Dr. Zimmer asks.

  “Not personally, but my family grows crazy like they can sell it for profit,” I say.

  “That’s funny,” she says without laughing. “You’re very witty.” She says it like it’s a diagnosis: witty. “What kind of mental illness have you encountered in your family?”

  “Oh, mostly your garden-variety types,” I say. “Depression, manic depression, alcoholism. Nothing too unusual. Just ordinary crazy.”

  “It’s interesting that someone with your substantial vocabulary would choose to use the word crazy,” she says. “Rather than mental illness.”

  I wonder what I’ve said in the twelve minutes she’s known me to make her think I have such a substantial vocabulary.

  “Maybe that word just makes it feel more like fun,” I say. “Less terrifying.”

  She watches my face while I talk, looking for symptoms, probably. A tic or a tremor.

  “Like a carnival,” I offer. “Crazy!” With jazz-hands.

 
“Hmm.” She nods.

  I try watching her face, too, but I’m distracted by her puffy, frizzy halo of gray brown hair.

  “So what does that word mean to you?” she asks. “Crazy?”

  She scribbles something down on her notepad without ever taking her eyes off my face. It’s unnerving, like being dissected without anesthesia.

  “What, like a definition?” I say.

  “Well, just your impressions.”

  I wipe my hand across my mouth, and then take it down again, in case that gesture has some kind of latent crazy in it.

  “I guess, my strongest impressions of crazy are my memories of my grandmother,” I say. It feels like a powerful admission and/or betrayal, but Dr. Zimmer only nods.

  “What was her diagnosis?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not sure she was ever diagnosed—it was the 1950s. But she was in and out of institutions most of her adult life. She had all kinds of electroshock therapy and stuff. But mostly, I think she was just mean. She didn’t know how to love her kids.”

  “How many children?”

  “Four. My dad was the oldest.”

  Dr. Zimmer writes the number 4 in her notebook.

  “Do you have any children, Majella?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Just one.”

  “How old?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Aha.” She stops writing, and closes her notebook, as if she’s just cracked the case, and there’s no need for any further investigation. She leans back in her chair and folds her hands in her lap. “You have a tiny baby at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re suddenly worried about your crazy grandmother who didn’t love her kids?”

  I nod. Why does this make me feel guilty, like I’ve duped her? “But it’s really not that simple,” I insist.

  Dr. Zimmer has twisted in her red leather chair to open a low drawer in her built-in filing cabinets. She flips through the files and pulls out a single sheet. It’s a checklist, and she hands it to me. I don’t want to take it from her, but it would be rude not to. I take it, but don’t look at it.