The Drifter(77)

OUT OF THE GAME


September 9, 2010

Each morning in the Davis household played out in roughly the same way: awake by 6:45, stirred by the soft pounding of Remi’s feet on the hardwood floor, followed by a couple of perfect minutes in bed. It wasn’t the way it used to be, the blank staring at the ceiling and gradual reentry into the land of the living. Now Betsy relished that handful of blissed-out, uncomplicated minutes under the covers with a tiny four-year-old body pressed against her chest. It was taking Betsy an unusually long time to get used to the idea that her daughter was growing, not just growing up, but growing longer and leaner, with expanding hands that were strong and callused from the monkey bars at the park and cheekbones emerging from a once-round face. She’d sprung up like a sunflower that summer, bright, happy, and sturdy in the wind. Betsy could hardly believe that the girl who was sprinting down the beach, the one with the squealing laugh that carried in the breeze for what seemed like miles, belonged to her.

In the beginning, in those first few hours of her daughter’s life, Betsy wasn’t even sure the baby would live to see her first birthday. When the doctor first held up their tiny daughter, in the briefest minute before she was whisked away to the NICU, Betsy was in such shock that she’d had a baby at all, and so much sooner than she’d expected, that all she could do was marvel at her tiny fingernails and perfect, miniature lips in the way that people admire a scale model of a tall ship.

“How did we make you so small?” Betsy whispered, not understanding enough about what lay before her to cry just yet. The scale read four pounds, three ounces.

“She’s going to make it,” said Dr. Kerr, or Sara, as Betsy had come to know her obstetrician during the intense hours she spent in the hospital fighting to keep her daughter safe inside her womb a little longer. Sara was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, where Betsy was propped up, glassy-eyed, trying to grasp what her doctor was saying through the Dilaudid. “But you’ve got a rough patch ahead. Rest if you can. Remi is in good hands now. She’s going to need you to be strong.”

Sara had explained that what had happened was called placental abruption.

“Essentially the baby’s food source detaches from the uterus, which triggers pre-term labor. The baby’s only chance for survival is outside of you,” she said. It was rare, and Sara explained that stress and anxiety weren’t known risk factors, but no one could say for sure. Betsy had been complaining of abdominal pain, which was the reason she was in Sara’s office when the worst of it began, but she avoided any mention of the newspaper article. It wasn’t something she talked about. After the contractions started in earnest, there was nothing they could do to stave off labor. So Betsy and Gavin’s Christmas present became their Halloween surprise, destined for a lifetime of jack-o’-lantern carving costume parties, birthday cake taking a backseat to sacks full of candy.

While Betsy rested and Remi slept in the NICU, Gavin did the only thing he could think to do: He made a playlist. He started with “I Found a Reason,” from the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno’s “I’ll Come Running,” “Little Fat Baby” by Sparklehorse, Radiohead’s “Sail to the Moon,” Calexico and Iron & Wine’s “History of Lovers,” Bright Eyes’s “First Day of My Life.” When they weren’t snatching moments of sleep between limited, sterilized visits with their child, Betsy kept her headphones on to drown out the hospital noises and mask the sound of her racing pulse in her ears. After a week passed, Remi’s lungs were stronger and things looked less dire, Gavin would slip in a song sung by a female badass, but only terrible ones, as a rallying cry. It made Betsy laugh.

“Thanks to you I have ‘Warrior’ by Scandal stuck in my head,” she said one weary morning, when she was leaving the hospital to go home to shower and he was arriving for the day shift. “I’ve been shooting at the walls of heartache all night.”

Gavin navigated through the sea of insurance paperwork. He made sure Betsy ate a few bites of something. He kept things in order at home, called Betsy’s office to inform them of the latest news and asked for their discretion and patience. He did a scathing and dead-on impersonation of the sternest of the NICU nurses, which made Betsy laugh in a deranged, sleep-deprived way. It was hardest in the middle of the night, usually 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., which was when they weighed their tiny girl to see if she managed to eek out a few more ounces. Betsy’s body was just catching on to the idea that it had given birth, and nursing her was all but impossible. Gavin was her rock.

“I’m your three a.m. guy, right?” he said, forcing a smile. “That’s how this all started, sort of, right? We drove away into the unknown in the middle of the night.”

“And lived happily ever after?” she added, delirious from endorphins. “Sort of?”

“Sort of. I promise.” He kissed her forehead. “You’re still cute when you’re crazy.”

NEARLY FOUR YEARS later, that promise was proving difficult to keep, and their new morning routine, with Betsy struggling at preschool drop-off, was the latest of many issues. Her obsessive, oppressive impulses would override any hope they had of peace, and it would subvert even the easiest of parenting tasks, like packing their daughter’s lunch.

“Gav,” Betsy called from the bathroom, “I sliced up some fruit for Remi’s lunchbox. It’s in the fridge.”