The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. Cherise Wolas
pain meds were affecting her sight, for the baby looked so white, as if he were bloodless, when Daniel had been golden and rosy.
You’ve been in and out,” Martin said as he untied her hospital gown, pushed it down past her breasts. She hadn’t said a word yet, her throat still clenched tight, but he understood she wanted the baby’s flesh on hers. She had been right, with Daniel, about the essentialness of that first connection, not wasting it on anyone else’s baby. She was overheating, but the infant was cool and dry, not damp and sticky as Daniel had been, and even though they were skin-to-skin, the way this one looked up at her, she thought she had to be wrong, that it wasn’t an arrogant stare, a smirk on his pale lips. He blinked, then turned his head away, already his own person.
She tried feeding him. He latched on. She felt the suction between his pursed mouth and her nipple, but suckling did not interest him, he was content to lie there, just like that, before tucking back into himself. Four times she tried, before Martin paged their ob-gyn.
Dr. Hinton lifted the baby from Joan’s arms and said that because of the C-section and the meds coursing through her, he hadn’t been allowed to suck after being liberated from her womb. Dr. Hinton actually said, When he was born, and Joan revised his words because liberated from her womb expressed the gravitas she thought this birth deserved. “The suck reflex is strongest then, right after birth. Delayed gratification sometimes makes it more difficult later on. But it’s only the third day.” Joan hadn’t realized she had been out for so long. The doctor stroked the baby’s lips. “To evoke and test the rooting reflex,” he said, and the baby pulled the doctor’s pinky into his mouth. “He’s gone into full reflex, pulling my finger in, wrapping the lateral sides of his tongue around it, creating a medial trough, starting the peristaltic motion from front to back toward the soft palate and pharynx. Nothing’s wrong with the short frenulum, because his tongue’s moving forward easily. His airway is all clear, no mucous. So everything looks fine. He’s got a powerful suck, see how he’s moving his whole head, his face wrinkling and dimpling?” Joan and Martin nodded. “I’ll send in the lactation specialist. She’ll be able to help.”
But the baby had made his decision. He would not partake in such intimate nurturing, was disinterested in receiving nourishment direct from Joan’s body. At her request, his bassinet was moved out of the nursery and into her hospital room. On a frequent schedule, the nurses had her pump, then returned with bottles of her milk wrapped in white cloths, as if mother and son were about to embark together on a fine dining experience. But he did not want Joan as the source of his sustenance, his tongue touched the plastic nipple, held on, sucked once, then he turned away, closing his eyes as if to say, I’ve made it clear, haven’t I, that I don’t want what comes from her? He was fed bottles of formula instead. Her milk was donated to a baby down the hall whose mother could not nurse at all.
At least Joan could keep him tightly grooved to her body, and she held their new child for hours, letting him go only when he was solidly asleep. It had been so different with Daniel, the way love had bubbled up, until the stream was an ocean, too large to ever spring a leak. Every day in the hospital, Joan waited for this new one to grab hold of her heart, to adhere to her beat, but a cool river ran between them that neither seemed capable of fording.
She and Martin had learned its sex ahead of time, no need for mystery with the second. And they had chosen a name. But only sometimes did Joan remember that fact, to use it when she spoke to him quietly. His birth certificate read Eric, Norse for ever or eternal ruler. Neither she nor Martin had any connection to that Nordic world, but it sounded strong, as strong as Daniel Manning. Just days old, and it seemed to Joan that Eric was indeed already ruling over his world. The kisses she gave him often felt premeditated.
Years later, Joan would wonder if she had already known everything, about him, but not just about him, about all that was to come, seeing the future while still in her hospital bed, clutching the baby to her heart, hoping the separation between them would close and heal, looking into his unfathomable eyes.
Perhaps it was the epidural she had been given, with its local anesthetic and narcotics, or the general anesthesia during the C-section, or the painkillers she was swallowing every four hours, but future events tumbled through her mind during those days and nights in the hospital, whipping past her eyes so quickly they could not be called visions, a kaleidoscope of images, mere flashes immediately forgotten. Through the years, certain situations would feel familiar, the feelings too, that sense of recollection, a déjà vu she could not place, not remembering that her mind once overflowed with an abundance of vital information. There would be no sense of that déjà vu, however, when the family she had never wanted twisted down into unknown depths, into a different kind of abyss, from which a roaring animal would race, up through dank tunnels, to tear into tender flesh. None of that was captured in those frenzied images. Did a broken heart reveal itself in X-rays, or was an autopsy required to see the fracture lines running through the four chambers, where ventricles and atria had shattered?
But in those earliest days, when nurses flitted in and out, checking her incision, rubbing her down with lotion to abate the itching, forcing her to cough, and to take short walks, as she tried mothering Eric, what Joan saw clearly were the vast, indecipherable truths written across his eyes, keenly felt the way he demanded and rejected her attention.
Her heart had opened wide for Daniel, with an unexpected and boundless adoration for her firstborn, but she knew instantly that Eric would not hold the same sacrosanct place, that he would never want what she could offer. And although her immediate reflex was to deny the notion of unequal maternal love, she realized that motherhood might also include what falls away.
THE ALTERATION OF PLANS
On a hot windy day that tore the clouds apart, Joan and Martin brought Eric home. The pink roses out front had died while she and the baby were in the hospital, and carrying him up the brick walk, through that dead arbor, seemed like a funeral procession.
Framed by the opened front door, Daniel clutched Fancy’s hand, still dressed in his camp clothes, his face peeking out from behind her wide flowered skirt.
He had a sweet, confused look on his face, a tremulousness about what was happening. He looked at his mother’s belly, no longer as enormous as it had been when he felt a leg, a hand, the kicks, squealing when the skin rippled, like waves on a lake, when the baby somersaulted around. Joan and Martin and Fancy had each explained the concept, that what was inside of Joan would eventually come out, that Daniel would have a brother, and now the baby was here, at the doorstep, about to enter their home, changing the nature of their threesome, their foursome, forever.
Fancy’s face was all lit up, her big front teeth shining, that gap between them like a secret.
Joan settled on the couch, and Fancy said, “A cause for celebration. Mr. Martin bought a nice bottle for a toast, and there’s ale in the fridge for your milk.” Fancy did not know yet that Joan’s milk was of no use.
Daniel clung to Fancy’s hand until she said, “Master Daniel, climb up and take your first look.” When Fancy was nervous, formal appellations preceded their names.
He let Fancy go, kicked off his small tennis shoes, and climbed up on the couch.
“So Daniel, this is Eric,” Martin said, and Daniel stared up at his father, then back to the baby.
“Can I?” he said, and Joan said, “Of course,” and when Daniel gently touched the baby’s face, his confusion fell away.
“He’s so soft.” Joan laughed. “Just like you, my love, when you were his age. The way you still are.”
Daniel looked out the window at his playground. “When can I show him the sandbox and the swings and the jungle gym? When can he hang from his