Neighborly(63)

But I don’t have a clue which one, and trying to parse a night that’s only half-remembered is exhausting. Not to mention that Doug and I are pretending things are normal. The charade wears on both of us. And, give me strength, we’ve got a barbecue to plan for next weekend. I want to cancel for myriad unspeakable reasons, but when I mentioned that possibility to Doug, he just stared at me, then rolled over and went to sleep without a word. It wasn’t even eight o’clock.

Now he’s at work, and I’m on my own with Sadie. She’s whining so consistently in my ear that it’s like tinnitus. I have to remind myself that love is sometimes a gauntlet to be run. Plastering a smile on my face, I elevate my voice an octave and declare, “It’s bath time!” I hold her against my shoulder as I fill the blue plastic tub. She usually likes that part, watching the water that will soon submerge her, but not today. She stares at me, eyes wide with recrimination. Is she doubting my credibility, too?

As I remove her onesie and then her diaper, she screws up her face and begins to scream. “See,” I tell her as she writhes on the bathroom floor, “there’s the water. You’re about to have your bath. You love your bath.”

But she knows better. She does not love her bath. She has never loved her bath. I am a fool to believe otherwise.

Shut up, shut up, shut up, I implore her. No, I order her. You will appreciate that I spend my entire life catering to your needs, real and imagined. You will recognize that I have placed my life on hold for you, that I have given up all vestiges of the woman I have known myself to be in order to invest in your present and future happiness. But she is enraged with me. It’s bewildering and galling. I’m trying to both wash her hair and keep her head from banging into the tub through her spasms of anger. I swear, I hear her telling me that she hates the bath; in fact, she hates me. “You’re a phony,” she tells me. “You try and try, but you never get it right. You’ll never be right. You’ll always be tainted.”

I find myself actually screaming, “Shut up!” She’s yelling too loud herself to hear me. It’s taking on operatic proportions, both of us unglued, each infuriated by the other, inflamed by our private injustices. I snatch her out of the tub, half-sudsed, half-washed, soaking the front of my T-shirt. I stomp down the hall and lay her on the changing table, dripping. She stopped crying somewhere along the way, and her eyes are full of something unfamiliar. Fear. She’s afraid of me. I wish I could say that stops me, that my own anger whooshes out like the air from a popped balloon, but no.

I put a diaper on Sadie’s wet ass and lay her in her crib. Then I go to my own room and close the door. I need a time-out.

Her protests start immediately. She wants me back. She says, “I don’t care how you treat me, just don’t leave me,” and that’s when all my anger dissipates. I start shaking and crying. We’re twins, Sadie and me. No, we’re two molecules who act on each other. Sometimes we make a beautiful compound; today, we’re spontaneously combusting.

I’m so sorry, so mortified. I know that my movements were brusque, but they couldn’t have hurt her. The damage is occurring now, making her think she was bad and that she’ll be left. These seconds are hours to her. They might not be memories, but somewhere inside her, they’re imprints.

Sadie’s cries are desperately plaintive. She needs her mommy, pathetically so. I needed my mommy just that way, and she let me down. I remember my mother’s emotional absence, the vacuum where a person should have been, the shell; I don’t recall an angry presence. I didn’t even register that much. I had no molecular influence on my mother.

I rush to Sadie’s room and lift her from the crib. I’ll have to change her sheet. There’s a damp, Sadie-shaped spot in the middle, which makes me cry harder. I’m a terrible mother, despite all my efforts, or maybe because of them. Because I stretch myself like a rubber band until I snap, just like that note said.

I keep apologizing, but it doesn’t matter. Sadie’s body feels boneless as she falls against me. She covers me, from my shoulder to my pelvis. I rub her back. Why does her skin feel so hot when she’s in just a diaper?

I put my lips to her forehead, and I’m filled with terror. I’m the worst mother in the world, tragically stupid. All the time she’s been fussing, somehow it never occurred to me that she could be sick. I ran through the list of possibilities (hungry, tired, bored . . .) and never once thought “sick.” She’s been remarkably, staggeringly healthy since the day she was born. I’ve never heard a real cough, even, only the occasional sneeze.

Now her body is an inferno, and I never even suspected. Where was my maternal instinct? Melody’s right about me.

I go to the bathroom to grab the never-before-used rectal thermometer. Shit, I realize we don’t have Vaseline. I look around frantically, and my eyes fall on Doug’s nightstand, on the optimistically placed Astroglide.

I undo the tape on the sides of Sadie’s diaper and lay her across my knee, as illustrated in the diagram. “It’s OK, pretty girl,” I tell her. She doesn’t make a sound, not even when I slide the thermometer in. I can’t believe how much I want to hear her cry. She’s turned lumpish so quickly.

I reattach her diaper and place her on my shoulder, patting her as I call the pediatrician. She’s barely conscious. “Her temperature is 104.7, but I don’t know how long she’s had a fever,” I say. I field all the doctor’s questions, and at the end, he says to take her to the ER at the children’s hospital. “I’ll call ahead,” he adds. “They’ll be ready for you.”