"Live to Tell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner Lisa)

CHAPTER SIX

A knife is missing. It’s four a.m., and I’ve crept out of bed to take inventory. Evan woke up at eleven, midnight, two a.m., and three. Now he will probably make it until five. At least I hope so.

I haven’t slept, but that’s nothing unusual. The first few weeks of sleep deprivation are the hardest. Now it’s been so long since I’ve had more than three consecutive hours of rest that it’s the nights I do sleep that mess me up. I find myself foggy, barely able to pull it together. It’s as if, having finally gotten sleep, my body realizes what it’s been missing and rebels.

I don’t have time for rebellions, so I’ve given myself middle-of-the-night chores. Several times a week, this includes inventory of the kitchen utensils.

He must have gotten the knife from the drying rack. I try to be diligent, but I’m rarely functioning at one hundred percent. My fine motor skills have eroded to the point that I drop small objects half a dozen times a day. When people speak to me, I have moments when I see their mouths moving, but I can’t process English.

Evan once watched a show describing how Navy SEALs must survive more than ninety-six hours without sleep as part of Hell Week. I wanted to scream at the TV, Ninety-six hours, my ass. Try eight years!

I might have started laughing hysterically. These things happen.

Now I try to marshal my limited coping skills. Assuming Evan got the knife from the drying rack, he had roughly three to five minutes alone with it before I discovered him in the kitchen. He would’ve hidden it; he’s clever that way. But somewhere close; he wouldn’t have time to make it downstairs and back, nor could he go down the hallway because I would hear him. So the knife is close, stashed somewhere in the kitchen, dining room, entryway, or family room. I should be able to find it-I just have to think.

I drag myself off the kitchen floor. The kitchen is cast in shadow, illuminated solely by the undercabinet lights. I’ve come to yearn for the dark solitude of these early-morning hours, when my son finally sleeps and I have thirty, forty, fifty precious minutes to myself.

I find a flashlight, then creep into the foyer, where I pause to listen for sounds from upstairs. I can see the glow in the upstairs hall, from Evan’s room. He demands an overhead light for nighttime, as well as a radio playing at daytime volume. He can’t stand the dark; he’s terrified of the phantom he believes lives in the gloom.

Sometimes the phantom tells him things. For example, sometimes the phantom tells him to kill me.

I love my son. I still remember the first moment I was finally allowed to hold him. I remember the endless days and nights of rocking him, feeling his greedy little lips suckle at my breast, the weight of his impossibly tiny body as he finally grew sated and drifted off. I remember the scent of talcum powder. The silky feel of his fine hair. The way he’d sigh as he nestled against me.

Evan was born ten weeks premature. I’d like to say it was just one of those things, but according to the doctor, it was all my fault.

Back in those days, Michael and I lived a marvelously shallow life. We owned a giant old Colonial in Cambridge, which we’d painstakingly remodeled to fit in with the other historic homes in the neighborhood. Michael worked long hours as a vice president with a major finance company in Boston, while I networked with our upscale neighbors as a much-sought-after interior decorator. I designed kitchens for doctors, window treatments for lawyers, and custom-made sofas for various professional athletes.

Michael and I had both grown up poor. Now we merrily evaluated our days by what designer clothes we’d purchased, or what up-and-coming Boston power player we’d met. I interspersed two-hundred-dollar facials with rare-antiques shopping, just as Michael filled his calendar with strategic lunches and box seats at various sporting events. Weekends meant the Cape in the summer, or our “lodge” in the White Mountains during the winter.

When I became pregnant, it was one more exercise in conspicuous consumption. I ordered cashmere sweaters from Pea in the Pod, layette sets from Burberry, and, of course, an English pram. I overhauled the nursery while taking up yoga and switching from my morning coffee to decaffeinated green tea. Nothing would be too good for our child. Nothing.

Michael gifted me with a diamond necklace, a two-carat eternity circle to brand me as his elegant, knocked-up wife. He also started a tradition of taking me to a fresh Boston hotspot every Saturday night, where we would savor four-course dinners and joke about how, soon, these kinds of evenings would be a thing of the past. He would drink gin and tonics. I would sip cranberry juice. We would stay out until two in the morning just because we could, but also because deep inside, we weren’t that sad life was about to change.

We loved each other. We really did. And like so many young married couples, we believed there was nothing we couldn’t handle, no challenge we couldn’t face, no hurdle we couldn’t jump, as long as we had each other.

Then, unbeknownst to me, a bacterial infection reached my womb. On the outside, I looked healthy, vibrant, glowing. On the inside, I’d started to poison my unborn child.

I don’t remember much of the ambulance ride. I’d started to bleed. A lot. My neighbor Tracey had the good sense to dial 911. She sat with me in the back. Held my hand while EMTs cut off my suede maternity pants and barked out commands that frightened me. Where were the words of reassurance, the assertions that this was a minor mishap, Your baby is fine, nothing to worry about, ma’am.

I lost consciousness at the hospital. Michael arrived moments after the ambulance. According to my neighbor, he had such a tight grip on my hand, the doctors had to pry his fingers from mine to wheel me in for the emergency C-section.

Then, ready or not, Evan Michael Oliver was born into the world.

Evan weighed three pounds four ounces. When I first met him, he was the size of a kitten, lying in the middle of the isolette with half a dozen wires and tubes dangling from his tiny, wrinkled body. He was covered with fine hair, and so translucent he appeared blue, but that was really the color of his veins, spun out like fine lace beneath the surface of his skin.

He needed the incubator for warmth, a ventilator attached to a blender to help him breathe, and a feeding tube to deliver essential nutrients. He required a blood pressure monitor and a cardiorespiratory monitor. Then there was the drainage pump, the IV, and various other lines that came and went as Evan struggled to fight off infection while still developing properly working internal organs.

He lived in the enclosed isolette like a china doll in a display case. We could look, but not touch. So we stood for brief moments, shoulder to shoulder, filled with that terrible sensation you get when things aren’t just wrong, they are WRONG, and you keep waiting for the situation to end, even as specialists yap at you.

The grief counselor kindly offered to call our parents. “You don’t have to go through this alone. Reach out to your community, lean on your families and friends.”

Michael, stone-faced, never replied. Finally, the counselor took the hint and disappeared. It wasn’t her fault we didn’t have families and friends-at least, not in the sense she meant. My mother had never forgiven me for becoming more beautiful than her, while Michael’s siblings spent more time in than out of jail. We’d given up on everyone years ago. We had each other, and that, we constantly reminded ourselves, was enough.

I wanted to scream that first day. I was only allowed to visit Evan for minutes at a time in the NICU, then it was back to my own hospital room, where I would lie on my side, my traitorous stomach pooled beside me. Nurses brought me medications. The lactation consultant taught me how to operate the breast pump. I was supposed to sleep, focus on recuperating. Mostly I lay in the dark and reviewed the past thirty weeks in my mind over and over again. Was it the sip of champagne I’d had at New Year’s? Maybe the fumes from the paint I’d selected for the nursery? Where had I failed? If I could just identify the moment, then go back in time…

Michael journeyed between the NICU and my room, an ashen-faced man uncertain of who needed him most, his fresh-out-of-surgery wife or his barely breathing son. He didn’t speak. He didn’t weep. He just moved, ten minutes in this room, ten minutes in that room, as if movement would keep the situation under control. His dark hair started to gray overnight. His strong shoulders seemed to stoop. But he kept walking, room to room, ward to ward, a man on a mission.

I thought Evan would sleep round the clock. All energy conserved for growing, but inevitably, as nurses adjusted his IV or feeding tube, Evan would wake up, staring at us wide-eyed, as if trying to absorb everything about this strange new world.

“He’s a fighter,” the nurses would say, chuckling over his waving fists even as he blocked their movements. “That’s a good sign, honey. He’s a tough one.”

And he would kick his thin little legs, as if in agreement.

Eventually, I was allowed to touch his cheek. Then one day I finally got to cradle him against my chest, Michael standing beside me, his hand gripping my shoulder so tight it hurt.

Evan opened his eyes again. He stared at both of us, eyes so round in his tiny, wizened head.

And we did what parents do in the NICU.

We promised everything-our grand house, our designer clothes, our self-absorbed careers. We promised it all. Our very lives. We would give up every single piece of ourselves. We would do whatever had to be done, we would lose whatever had to be lost.

If only our son would live.

I can’t find the knife. I’ve searched around the ficus tree, along the floorboards, between the folds of the shredded curtains. I take up sofa cushions, peer into every nook and cranny of the entertainment system. I beam my flashlight under furniture and over cabinets. I know Evan’s favorite places. The knife’s not in any of them.

He has it. I know he has it.

He’s outsmarted me.

The sun will be up soon. I can see the edge of the night sky beginning to lighten, and for a moment, I’m so tired, I want to cry.

“Mommy.”

I whirl around. Evan’s standing behind me. He wears his favorite Star Wars pajamas, his hands clasped behind his back.

I’m breathing too hard. I have the flashlight in my hands, so I beam it into his pale face. I don’t want him to see how badly he’s scared me.

“Evan. Show me your hands.”

“I want to see Chelsea.”

“Not right now.”

“Is it morning, Mommy?”

“No, honey, it’s still nighttime. What’s behind your back, darling?”

“Can we see Chelsea?” he asks again.

“Not right now,” I repeat steadily, still eyeing his hands, still waiting to see what he’ll do next.

“I want to go to the park,” he says.

“In the morning, honey.”

“I want to make a new friend today.”

“Evan, turn around now. It’s time for bed.”

Evan abruptly sticks out his hands. He turns them palm up, so I can see that they’re empty, that he hasn’t been holding anything. The expression on his face is guileless, but then, as I watch, I can see it. A shadow moving in the back of his eyes. A faint smile curving one corner of his mouth.

He knows what I am looking for.

He knows he has it, and that I don’t know what to do.

The shadow in his eyes moves again, and I fight the chill creeping up my spine. Evan isn’t the only one in this house who’s afraid of the phantom.

I take a deep breath, snapping off the flashlight and putting my hand on my son’s shoulder. His body is relaxed beneath my touch. He lets me lead him to the foyer, up the stairs. We follow the bright glow to his bedroom, where I tuck him back into bed. He’s already half-asleep, his eyes heavy-lidded as I brush a few blonde wisps from his forehead.

“I love you to the moon and the stars and back again,” he murmurs, a line from our favorite book. I caress his cheek.

“I love you, too.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says dreamily, already drifting off. His blue eyes open. “But I do.”