The People We Keep(107)

“I was going to call you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to—”

“You don’t get to disappear anymore. You can’t go running off into the woods like a wounded deer. You lean on me when it hurts. That’s what we’re here for—to lean on each other.” Margo nods like we’ve made a pact.

I nod too.

It is so warm, the three of us, huddled on the bed. The room smells like summer. There are flowers. Lots of them. On the nightstand, on the windowsill.

“Did you go crazy in the gift shop?” I ask.

“Carly and I called all your friends in your notebook to tell them you had the baby. I thought they’d want to know. And then these started showing up.”

There are daisies from Arnie and roses from Cole. All the girls on staff at Ollie’s in Florida sent lilies. Slim sent a basket of violets. And there’s a big vase of sunflowers. I wonder where anyone gets sunflowers like that in November. Margo tells me they’re from Irene and David and July. She says July wants to meet her nephew and they’re all coming to visit me tomorrow. For once, the idea of seeing Irene doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.





— Chapter 71 —


Margo is out getting us lunch because she says no one ever enjoyed a hospital meal before and she doesn’t expect it to happen now. She left me her slippers and wore my boots. She looked hysterical.

Carly is still asleep, and I don’t know how she’s comfortable all wound around the arms of the chair, her hand hanging over the side and I know her fingers will have pins and needles.

The sound of Max’s breath and then Carly’s then Max’s makes me feel like all the air I’m breathing is coming from their lungs. I imagine it making me strong, healing the ache in my guts. It seems like some kind of miracle that a doctor could excavate Max from the depths of me and introduce him to the world—that I am still here to see him after being taken apart and stitched back together.

Max was stuck, Margo said, turned upside down. They were worried about the cord, and my head was bleeding pretty bad and the doctors couldn’t wait on any of it.

I don’t know what I remember and what I’m imagining, but there’s so much in my mind that feels new, like a movie I watched when I was fighting to stay awake. One scene jumps into the middle of the next.

There’s Carly driving us up to the hospital doors, screaming for help, and so many hands on my body. There’s the way it hurt to be lifted, how everything inside me was shifting, and I could feel Max, all elbows and feet, fighting to free himself like a raccoon in a pillowcase. Someone cut away my clothes and there were too many people touching too many parts of me.

He’s breech! someone said.

Get scrubs for her partner! someone said.

Count backwards. Count backwards. No, backwards, someone said, so I started at Z and Carly laughed even though she was crying.

A woman with a baby blue mask on her face stretched my arms out on a big white cross and the room was cold like the walk-in fridge at Ollie’s, but Carly’s fingers were sweaty between mine. Just as clearly, I remember the surgeon was a grizzly bear in a white coat and the room we were in was full of laughing salmon hanging from the ceiling on meat hooks. So how am I supposed to know if any of my memories are real?

I stare at Max through the clear plastic sides of his bassinette and hope with all my heart that I’m not stuck in some kind of dream. He’s already my favorite thing that ever happened to me. He reminds me of Justin in the shape of his nose, and his dark eyelashes, and I think that’s okay because Justin was someone I used to love to see. He was smart and sometimes he could be very sweet and maybe I can teach Max to be sweet even more of the time. I’ll always look at Max and think about shouting into the waves at night and how the sand was still warm from soaking up the heat from the day and it felt like the world was a wild beast who allowed us to walk on her back. That was a good moment, and it’s where Max came from, so it’s even better as a memory than what I knew at the time. I wonder if maybe when Max meets the sea, he will understand how it’s his oldest friend. He’ll think, Oh, I know you, and he’ll feel like he belongs. I’m going to take him soon, I think. As soon as I can. Maybe Margo will come with us, maybe even Carly, and I’ll sing songs for my own baby on the beach.

Max fusses and I don’t know what to do. My stomach is full of stitches. It hurts to move. I’m scared I’ll drop him.

I catch Carly stirring out of the corner of my eye. “Oh,” she says, sitting up and looking around the room like she’s trying to figure out where she is. “April.”

“I can’t pick him up,” I say, in a panic. His cries make me sure we’re not in a dream, but they also make me want to cry.

“Can I?” Carly asks.

“Please.”

She nestles Max in her arms like she knows what she’s doing. “Hey, hey, little man,” she says. “It is all okay. Everything is okay.” She jiggles him and he starts to settle.

“You’re a natural,” I tell her. I wonder what she thinks of me. I can’t believe she’s here.

“I was the first one to hold him,” she says, tears spilling down her cheeks like they belong to those words.

“You were there?”

Carly nods. “One of your nurses demanded they let me in. I didn’t want to leave you. They said they had to put you under. I didn’t want him to be alone. Max, right? You said in your letters.”