The August before Olive was born, rough waves I used to jump into when I wasn’t pregnant taunted me. You can not come in. But I went in anyway. I walked out into the ocean, Will, a few feet ahead of me because he wouldn’t let me swim alone, and almost immediately I was pulled under the water and tossed in circles. My stomach did not hit the ground, but every time I flipped under the moving ocean, I was conscious that it could. I was all hair and sand and bubbles and swallowing salt, until finally able to stand up, I took a breath.
Will rushed towards me. He watched it happen. My bathing suit was on, but in the wrong spots. He pulled it down, picked me up, carried me out of the Nantucket water. I cried because I thought I killed her. I killed her so I could cool off. I killed her because I was hot. And then she got the hiccups. They felt like tiny fish blowing bubbles under my skin, and I cried because I could feel them. She is alive, I thought. Inside my body she is protected. Once she is born, it becomes trickier.
Olive is an itchy baby. Goes to sleep with smooth, perfect baby skin and wakes up with blood all over the collar of her white pajamas that have purple llamas on them. Blood under her fingernails. Paper cuts in the folds of her neck. Her skin breaks. She digs a hole in the back of her head. The hole is deep and she carves it out in one night with her very small fingernails. She is always scratching, always bleeding. I file her nails every day, put mittens on her when she goes to sleep. She wakes up with the tiny cotton gloves balled up in her mouth, compact, soaking wet. They fit so tightly in the space that holds her tongue that I think she swallows them sometimes when I look at the monitor, run downstairs and put my fingers in her mouth to check. She grabs my skin and pinches. Grabs my fingers and bites. She has two teeth. They appeared one night while we were all supposed to be sleeping, and she cried for five hours while they pushed through her gums. I covered my head with a pillow, buried my face in Will’s back while we let her scream. We didn’t know it happened until Will pulled a book out of her mouth two days later and saw the tiny teeth impressions pressed into the thick cover.
Her teeth are sharp and jagged and new. Her grip is intense when she gets some of my skin between her fingers. She is powerful and small and she doesn’t know her own strength. When she is out of my body, when she is a person, I can’t always keep her safe, but I will try, forever, to make sure her nails are smooth and short, that the scratches are cleaned up, and that her father, who used to do heroin in the bathroom while we watched movies, doesn’t ever do it again.
Looking down at him the night he overdosed, brown fluid leaking out of his mouth onto our bathroom floor, realizing that a human being in front of me was dying, actually dying, and I was the only person who could try to save him, I remember thinking, What if I don’t do anything. What if I don’t help him. It was a second or two, for this thought to turn away, to not go down the long road that I knew would be ahead of us if he woke up. And then there was a quick negotiation, fight or flight, and I dialed 911, screamed into the phone, My husband is dying. I think he might have overdosed. I pushed myself under his body to turn him on his side until the paramedics came through the door. It was an unremarkable Friday night. It could have been forgetful, even. We cooked dinner, we watched movies, then I watched him almost die.
Four years later, months spent in therapy, and we live with what happened. Every year, on September 9th, I give him a card that congratulates him on quitting heroin. I tell him how happy I am that he is still alive. This year I tell him we never would have met our daughter if he died. He reads it while he is sitting on the ground playing the guitar for her. Olive is holding two pairs of footy pajamas, three white undershirts, and a pair of tie-dyed pink pants—a surprising amount of clothes for a person with very tiny hands. She grabs anything she can get into her fingers when Will is changing her diaper in the morning now and carries the items around, dropping them slowly as she wakes up, creating a trail of blankets and sheets and diapers and clothes. I am watching the two of them while I pump milk into plastic containers wearing a nightgown that is threadbare linen and needs to be thrown away. It is part of the collection of clothes I’ve relegated to wear while I am nursing my daughter.
We got into a fight last night and neither of us slept well. His face changes when he reads the card, and I start to cry. I can see his feelings. It’s in the way his chin goes down. The way he makes a small sound, looks at me, looks at her. This is where we are now. Four years later and we take care of Olive, we get in fights, we try to take care of each other. Watching them is peaceful. I mean it when I say I am glad he didn’t die.
There is an incident with a cashew when we are home, in Brooklyn, packing up our apartment, trying to make everything we have gathered for the past ten years of living here disappear so someone will want to buy it. Four cups of cashews, actually, I find out when I call the restaurant and ask for a list of the ingredients in the veggie burger I gave her after the hives start popping up on her skin in patches. They move all over her like a swarm of bugs. I didn’t know she was allergic to nuts. One ear and one eyelid have blown up to unnatural proportions. She is my baby, but I see someone else’s face when I look at her and I am filled with fear that she will never look the way she did for the first ten months of her life. We send the doctor pictures before the teleappointment begins.
Take her to the emergency room immediately. She could be losing oxygen, she tells us.
Do you want to look at her though?, Will asks the doctor. There is hope in his voice that maybe on this Saturday night where we are supposed to be in our apartment, having cocktails, watching a show and packing boxes, the baby sleeping soundly in her room, maybe we can skip the visit to an Emergency Room. Maybe if she just takes another look.
I saw the pictures, the doctor says. Take her now.
The entire car ride I imagine her brain slowly leaking, seeping out of her head into her tiny body, as the oxygen levels get lower and lower, and I repeat over and over, silently, I did this to her. If I kill our baby my life will never be the same. Will, driving in the front seat, is singing Led Zeppelin. If she dies and he is singing Led Zeppelin it will be worse than if she dies and he is just being quiet, so I ask him to stop singing. He tells me he needs to sing or else he will get in a car accident. We cope with danger and death in different ways. Neither of them make any of it better.
In the end she is fine. The doctor in the ER repeats it is always worse for the adults than for the babies, as we stare at her swollen, patchy red smiling face, pulling on the cord they keep attaching to her toe. They give us a prescription for an Epipen. A needle I can use to stop the reaction next time. It is not lost on me that the shot is similar to the Narcan I was supposed to get to keep Will alive if he ever overdosed again. It is not lost on me that everyone I love most in the world, everyone who lives in our house, will possibly require that I push a needle into their body to revive them at some point in the future. It is not lost on me that I am responsible for saving them both if they are going to die.
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There are spiders everywhere in the Nantucket house where we live now. It is Will’s family summer home. We came here at the beginning of May to wait out Coronavirus in a place with more space than we have in New York City and now it is almost Fall.
Spiders are good, Will tells me, when I see one and yell to him to kill it, please. They eat other insects.
In the garage they have taken up residence during the winter, built their elaborate webs, things stuck in them, hanging dark pieces of dirt or dust, spider-ey bits suspended in the fishing wire strings in the corners, under window sills, along the walls. We find a nest the first day we go down to the beach for the summer when I open up my beach chair. They are growing families in the garage. I worry there are too many of them, that they bite Olive at night. She drops her pacifier on the floor and I reach my hand under the dresser, pull it out through a web, everything covered in their home. There is a spider that lives in a crack under the window in the kitchen. It hides when I do the dishes, smart enough to disappear when I turn the water on.
There are tasks that have to be done to get the house ready for summer. Will’s parents hand the chores out to us like gifts we want to return. Bring the deck furniture up, put the screens in, break down the paper bags in the garage to put with the recycling. The bags have been there all winter. I can hear tiny earthy things being crushed and broken as I smooth the paper with my hand, and then a spider crawls out over the edge, close to my fingers. It has a giant uneven growth, the size of a marble on its back, a hard stone painted with yellow and grey spider-y veins. I have never seen a spider with something like this growing out of its body.
I can’t do this, I tell Will, throw the bag, distance myself so far that I am inside the house, no longer helping. I am scared of the spiders.
It’s ok, he says. He finishes the job.
Later I am up at 3am, a dream about this spider woke me. I keep thinking about the huge mass attached to her delicate legs. In the dream the growth was filled with spider babies, pregnant with all their tiny spider parts jumbled inside, sharp and new and pointy. I realize forty-five minutes into the insomnia that I don’t know if spiders even carry their babies. I remember the nest in the beach chair. I am trying to reason myself back to sleep, but I feel sick at the idea of crushing the tiny unborn spiders. I think I saw her scurrying off somewhere, carrying the giant burden proudly on her back, as I was running out the garage door. I wonder if Will killed her after I left. Spiders are good, he always says.
He didn’t. I am sure of this. Eventually I go back to sleep.
The same day, a few hours later, Olive and I go on a boat ride with my sister in law and two nieces. Children are pulling crabs up from the ocean in metal crates. They hold the hard shells and spastic moving legs in their hands, put the crabs in a plastic bin and we look down at them crawling around, bumping into clear walls, confused about their new location. I am wearing Olive on my body. She is strapped to me, and I rub sunblock into her legs and arms constantly. She is too young for this Critter Cruise, but we came because finding things to do with an infant is a game that I will be playing for a long time, it seems.
Towards the end of the boat ride two things happen. One is that a little boy catches a baby sand shark with a fishing rod that he has been dangling into the water. Everyone is excited. It’s a newborn shark, the Captain tells us. She was born yesterday or today. He knows this because his job is to know things about the ocean and the animals that live there and he has information about the moon and when sharks are born. There are hundreds of babies inside the mother shark, he says. They eat each other, the siblings. Once they survive this their mother leaves them because otherwise she will eat them. I let Olive touch its strong, slippery newborn baby back before it is thrown into the ocean where it can get back to surviving everything, except the fishing line of a nine year old who barely knew what he was doing.
The second thing that happens is that during the Freedom Party, when the kids throw the crabs back into the water, one of the small creatures drops onto the boat’s deck. Glassy orange balls splatter everywhere. I know what they are, but I want someone to tell me a story like the one about the sand shark and the moon.
What is that, I ask.
She was pregnant. Those are her eggs, they tell me.
What are they, my sister in law then asks me.
Her eggs. I guess she just had an abortion, I say, and we laugh.
The crab babies that will never be born remain on the boat’s deck for the rest of the trip. When I look at them a distinct brand of nausea comes up, the same that came with the spider dream earlier that morning. As we pull into the docks in Nantucket harbor, I am aware that the amount of dead animal babies I am seeing, while asleep, while awake, is more than enough.
Before we left Brooklyn to live in Nantucket we talked about staying with Will’s family and what that would be like. For me the issues with this center around not having our own space, deciding what we make for dinner, and lying about writing down the story of how my husband was a heroin addict. I lie to protect him. I lie to protect her. I lie to protect us all.
When Olive is asleep, I write. What do I say when your Mom wants me to come over and do something with her, or go somewhere with your sister, and I want to write? What do I say when they ask me what I do with my time?
Tell them you are working on a book, he said.
What do I say when they ask what it’s about?
Tell them you don’t want to talk about it.
I do want to talk about it.
And then there is honesty from him: I can’t have this be the time I tell them the truth. We are going up there and it’s Coronavirus and there is going to be so much crying and I can’t deal with it right now when we are stuck living there with them. It is going to break their hearts. He doesn’t want to watch it after it’s all said and done. He wants to break their hearts and move away from it, give them space, do anything but look at the damage he caused.
Maybe his mom had dreams about spider babies too at some point. Maybe she knows about the nausea. I agree, it does not seem like we have to do this right now, in this moment, during this pandemic. I can lie about writing. I can keep the secret of who he is, to protect him, to protect her, and now to protect them, too.
We have a new tradition in Nantucket, because it is Summer and nice out, and Olive goes to sleep before 7, every Friday night we take her to the restaurant where we had our rehearsal dinner and sit outside in the garden, dinner at 5pm. There are Cheerios all over the ground by the time we leave, a crying baby as we quickly pay the bill. It is not relaxing, but it’s nice to have a routine.
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On the way home from one of these dinners, Will’s sister turns her head from the
front seat to ask me a question.
What’s this I hear about a book you’re writing?
What do you mean?
Your mom told my mom you are writing a book. What is it about?
Her question shocks me. I have spent so much energy hiding this project. I am intrigued about the possibility of being free from this secret. But I am not ready, too, it seems. I am not ready to explain the truth, to watch it take his sister by surprise, and then ultimately his parents. I am not ready to face it, right now, in this car, as we drive home from dinner.
The secret still wants to be a secret. I still want it to be a secret. I am not ready for everything to change, so I do not tell the truth. Instead I work around the answer without much thought, words just start coming out of my mouth. I am taking a writing class. I’m not, but I am learning things so maybe it is a half-truth. I talk about the book “my teacher” wrote. I used to love to write and it is the only thing that makes me feel like I am not just a Mom, that maybe I can be something else, too. That sentence is the only whole truth I include in my answer. I lie and I lie and I lie, and then the conversation shifts and we move on surprisingly seamlessly from this thing that I carry around heavily hidden under all the layers of everything I am. It’s out there, quickly, without ceremony or warning, and now it’s in the past and we are talking about a dead rabbit we just saw in the road.
Will doesn’t say anything about this exchange later when we are home and alone. We watch a TV show about people who hunt Nazis. We get into bed at different times because I hate falling asleep on the couch, a direct result of the time I fell asleep on the couch and woke up to find him nearly dead of a heroin overdose. For Will, this is a problem that doesn’t exist. The next morning we go on a run, another new routine every other day at seven in the morning Will’s mother watches Olive and we leave for a little bit, try to get in shape, try to find the perfect route that will make us want to go farther.
I want you to thank me for lying to your sister, I say. He does. Doesn’t it bother you?
What?
Not telling the truth… or when your family talks about your cousin having an Opioid problem and makes jokes about it, doesn’t that bother you? That is who you are.
Sometimes it does, he said.
You have to tell the truth some day.
We keep running side by side down the sand road. There was supposed to be a storm last night and the waves are louder than usual from the ocean on the other side of the dunes to our right, hedges and fences to our left. The sun is coming up, the yellow electricity of it moves in a sharp line, almost to say zap in the moments when it crosses our eyes, a little eclipse. It is for all intents and purposes incredibly beautiful and we are lucky to be in this place where we can run outside without masks on because there is no one else around.
A mile later the conversation is still bothering me. I have to get rid of it if I am going to keep lifting my legs and moving forward.
I wish I didn’t have to tell you to thank me. I wish you knew that it is really hard for me to not be honest and I am doing it for you and you recognized that without me telling you to recognize it. It would make this easier for me.
I’m sorry, he says.
It seems that he means it, the apology is sincere, and that is enough for me for this moment because the conversation about telling his family that he is/was/always will be a heroin addict is never over. It is a living, growing thing, this conversation. It is something that will not escape us. It is not menacing for the most part, it simply exists. We look at it together, and we hide it from the people we love. Five minutes later I tell him I need to stop and walk a little. All of it, the whole thing, made me so tired.
I suppose the animals that I see die, in my dreams, in real life, they are the same as when he overdosed, when I found him in the bathroom and called 911 and they came and moved his lifeless body over the ground, dragged him to a spot where they could save him. Standing over him, looking down at death, my husband, dying, then alive, on our kitchen floor—it’s the same thing as the spiders, the crab eggs on the deck, the animal babies, the people babies, I want them all to survive.
I sing Olive songs and make her laugh and try to get things done when she is distracted. I let her scream for an hour before I pick her up in the middle of the night. I try to teach her how to sleep. I try to keep her alive. Will takes her in the ocean. It is so big, she is so small when he is holding her out there. I fear she will float away and die, he won’t be able to grab her quickly enough. But he holds her tight. So much of being a mother is thinking about your baby being dead, the pull of this fear— imagining her falling down the stairs, cracking her head, choking on small pieces of food, drowning in the bathtub, in the ocean. Watching her endure mistakes. It’s terrible really, but I have to stay. Even though it makes me want to swim away like the mother shark, I stay and I face the ocean while she’s out there in her father’s arms, imagining her drifting off. I cannot look away.