The ambulance hit its siren once as it pulled into the emergency bay. Robert parked his car nearby. He was shutting his door when they wheeled Althea through the doors, her profile small and anemic. He hurried inside, his head pulsing with no sleep and the leftover Maker’s Mark. But there was only an emergency waiting area, a woman at a desk typing something into a computer, her glasses pushed to the tip of her nose. He approached her and was conscious of his bloody white shirt. He wanted to tuck it in, at least, but the thought felt ludicrous.
“Where did they take my wife? I think she’s having the baby. Where would they take her?”
The woman glanced up at his shirt, then up at his face as if she weren’t sure she heard him correctly.
“Have you preregistered?”
“Excuse me?”
“For the delivery, sir. Are you in our computer?”
He told her no, they were going to do that later. His wife wasn’t due to deliver for two more months. “She’s bleeding. Where would they take her?”
The woman looked at him over the rim of her glasses.
“I need to see my wife.” Robert’s voice cracked. His eyes began to fill.
“Of course you do, dear. But first you need to sit down so I can enter her into the system.”
Robert sat in the chair facing her desk. His legs felt momentarily useless and he was grateful someone had told him what to do. The woman pressed a few buttons to clear away old work, then sat forward and, looking only at the computer screen to her left, asked him questions about Althea: her full name, her date and place of birth, her next of kin—“Me, her husband.” And as he spelled out his name, he began to feel the strength return to his legs and feet. He sat up straighter and perched himself on the edge of the chair. He answered that they had no medical insurance, she could bill him directly. And he gave her the address of The Whaler Hotel—they would either be there or they wouldn’t, but at the thought that he and Althea and their son or daughter might not be living in The Whaler cabins, Robert forced himself to imagine it was only because they would move, and not because there would be only one returning there instead of three.
Soon enough she let him go, directing him to the maternity ward where a man in a turquoise smock told him his wife was being prepped for surgery. Why? What’s wrong? But the man just told him to have a seat, then disappeared behind a swinging door. The small waiting area was six cushioned chairs, a table spread out with magazines, and a watercooler and Coke machine. His mouth and throat were dry. There was an evil taste in his mouth. In his right pocket was the cash from last night’s tips, and in his left were a few stray coins, enough for a Coke. As the can came clacketing down through the machine, two women in those same turquoise smocks walked quickly and quietly down the hall. Their shoes and hair were covered with blue-green netting. Their white breathing masks were hanging loosely beneath their chins. They pushed through the swinging door, and Robert did not know if they were going in to help with Althea, but their silent and urgent rushing left him feeling queasy and lost, like he was falling backwards away from all this, his mouth dry, his stomach a terrible mistake, his knees liquid. He sat with his unopened Coke, rested his elbows on his thighs, and breathed deeply through his nose. He saw his shoes were still untied and left them that way. He remembered Jackie’s heels on his shoulders; he remembered the sound Althea made as she wrenched Jackie off the bunk, a deep sustained cry that could only come from a well of quiet.
He sat there a long while. He felt he should call someone. There had been a friend in college, before he quit over a decade ago: his roommate, a thin, sad-eyed existentialist with whom Robert would often go drinking.
Robert thought of him now and suspected that even if he knew his phone number, he wouldn’t want him here; at a local bar or at a dorm party, the existentialist would get morose and sneer at the young men and women dancing or huddling together over a joint in their loose jeans. “We’re all going over the falls, man. Drink up, Doucette! God drowned in the first boat!” And Robert would drink up, then leave his friend and join the others—women mainly, those with delicate throats and wispy hair which, when they danced too close, would catch on his face if he hadn’t shaved—women who smiled at him because he was almost handsome, which meant cute; and when he told them over the music and through the smoke that he was an English major and wanted to be a poet, their interest would deepen and some of them wanted to drink alone in a corner with him, talk about life and beauty. And so he adopted the sentences of his poetry teacher and he’d tell them that life was a song that had to be sung and forget iambic pentameter—too cold. “Life’s a burning building; life’s a ride through the rapids before we all go over the edge, and we only have so much time to get things down. Like your delicate throat,” he’d say to one. “Like your eyes,” he’d tell another. “The way they make me think of minks in Russia, a family of minks in the snow.” He’d leave with one of them and later, after he’d ejaculated into her, after he’d slept in her room, the dawn’s hopeful light piercing the windows, he’d know he was a poet; he just hadn’t put it all down on paper yet. He’d slip out of her warm bed, sometimes taking one last look at her naked buttocks as she slept, or at that sweet triangle of pubic hair between flaring hipbones, and he’d dress and leave the dorm that smelled of cigarettes and cold pizza boxes and beer soaked into the carpet. He was Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Wilde; he was all the rascal poets he’d been reading. And as Robert left the smells of the dormitory and stepped into the cold New Hampshire air, he was grateful he no longer smelled hay and silage, warm udders and oak-handled shovels and hoes, cow manure and diesel fuel, the smells of a life he thought he’d never escape: in the winter, the twice-daily mud-and-ice trek to the barn to lead six dozen holsteins eight at a time to the milking room; to clean the valves and tubes after; to rake manure and haul corn silage from the silo to the feed bunk; to keep the calves dry and fed in their stalls; to inseminate heifers, then calve them months later, changing the hay they slept in, hauling bales as if he hadn’t hauled enough in August, the baler shooting them out at him when he only had a few seconds to hook his fingers into the twine, heaving and tossing the bale into place onto the trailer behind him, the sweat in his eyes, his back a tight cord about to snap. And in the fall they’d have to pack the silo with load after pickup load of the corn they’d planted in the spring, and the vacuum chute was always getting clogged or breaking down, so while his father climbed the ladder with a tool apron, Robert would build a huge mound of corncobs he’d have to load into the silo once it was fixed. There were always things breaking down: the tractor, the picker, the baler, the milkers. One summer the freezer went and hundreds of dollars of bull semen thawed and died. And if all the machinery was running smoothly, a storm would come in and there’d be a roof leak, soaking some of the stock who were too stupid to move, and then they’d get sick or just more dopey than usual, and one might trip on her way to feed and cut a foreleg, and Robert would have to nurse that, clean it and wrap it with gauze. But sometimes an infection would come anyway and the cow would get a fever, and even if she could make it to the milking room the milk itself might be tainted, and Robert’s father would have to sell her off for scrap beef: cat and dog food, hotdog filler.
In college, Robert tried putting all of this and more into a poem. And when he finished he felt it was the most honest thing he could possibly have written, the most passionate. How could anyone read it and not know how life at Doucette Dairy was for him? How could they not know all of its tedium? He stayed up till almost dawn typing it and retyping it into the shape he wanted, the right stanza length, the right verse. After a few tries, he found the title too: “Dairy.” He slept in his clothes on his bed but woke before his alarm went off, then went to poetry class, handing his professor, a resident poet and Pulitzer Prize nominee, his manuscript. His professor said he would read it that morning and to stop by before lunch.
“It has the authority of lived experience, Robert, but I don’t believe there was
no joy in any of that work. You’ve written in the voice of the suffering hero and I don’t buy it. Try writing a poem without you in it. Show me the cow’s fever without your bitching about having to change the bandage. The farm life’s the subject, not your whining about it.”
Robert had just stood there, his mouth a dry web. The Pulitzer Prize nominee sat down at his desk and began to read a hardcover book. “Write it again, if you like.”
Robert had spent the day in his room lying in bed. He had an afternoon class but didn’t go. He read the poem over and over, but kept hearing the poet’s last three words, if you like. They were completely apathetic. Would he say those same words to someone he thought had talent? The following week he skipped all three poetry classes. At a dorm party he got drunk and next morning at dawn he woke up at the base of a red maple tree planted by the Class of 1945. He was hungover and cold and could see he’d covered himself with leaves the color of bright blood. There was a stone engraving on the ground: Dedicated to the valiant young men of this university who gave their lives for freedom—1945. And Robert wished there was a war he could go fight, but it wasn’t fighting he craved, or danger even. More, it was something to be honored and known for—an ability, an act, anything. The night before he’d told a girl that the poet had praised one of his poems, saying it had the authority of lived experience. She’d had a sweet milky face and thick red hair and she’d looked at him askance, as if he were a real blowhard for repeating praise like that.
He didn’t know her name and never saw her again, but in the last ten years her skeptical face would sometimes come back to him, the way it came to him now, along with the question to which she seemed to have the answer: Was he? Was he a blowhard?
“Mr. Doucette?”
Robert raised his head. It was the same man from before, his curly hair matted from the surgical cap he now held in his hand.
“It was a placental abruption, but we’ve stopped the bleeding and your wife will be in recovery soon. Your daughter appears to be healthy as well, though we’ll have to monitor her pretty closely.”
“Daughter?”
The doctor told Robert he could see his child in the neonatal unit, and his wife would be going to ICU after the recovery room. He said congratulations and offered his hand. Robert, still sitting, reached out to shake it, then stood quickly and squeezed; the man’s hand was small and soft, and Robert was acutely aware that it had just performed two miracles: saved his wife, and delivered their baby. “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you.” Robert did not want to let go, but the doctor stopped squeezing and glanced down at Robert’s shirt. He said it would be a little while before his family was ready for a visit, and he should feel free to go home and change if he’d like. The doctor let his hand slide out of Robert’s, offered his congratulations once more, then disappeared back behind the swinging door.
Robert did not want to leave. He wanted to find the neonatal unit and see his child. His daughter. Be with her. Let her hear his voice. Smell his skin. But what would she smell? Jackie’s scent? Coconut oil? Old bourbon and her mother’s blood? And later, when he visited Althea, would he want to show up in the same clothes he wore when everything went wrong? No. He would drive home, shower, shave, change his clothes, and buy flowers on the way back.
JACKIE WAS SITTING on the porch step of her cabin when Robert drove over the shell lot and parked alongside the marsh. She was smoking a lighted cigarette this time, and she still wore the baggy Patriots T-shirt she’d slept in—that, and a pair of shorts, Robert noticed, her hair pulled back. She was barefoot, and when Robert turned off the engine she sat up straight, blew smoke, and waited; she was a beautiful woman, her thick red ponytail hanging straight down her back, her thighs and calves hard- and supple-looking, covered with tanned freckles. Robert’s cheeks became warm, his throat dry, and he took a long drink off his Coke before he got out of the Subaru and walked over to her.
She was looking up at him, her eyes empty of mischief. Instead, Robert saw fear in them, and something he could not begin to name. But he must have been smiling because Jackie said, “Everything’s okay? The baby? Everything?”
“A girl. We have a little girl.” He was conscious of the word we, the exclusion of her in that, and, as if to make up for it, he sat on the step next to her, their hips touching.
“You’re smoking.”
Jackie nodded, took a final drag off the cigarette, and flicked it out into the broken shells of the lot. “How’d she find out?” She was looking at him, her eyes full of sorrow, as if she had been betrayed, and he knew then Jackie would never have told anyone.
He shrugged. “She saw me come out of your place. I snuck in to see you, but you were asleep, so I let myself back out again.”
The screen door opened behind them and Kimberly said excuse me and didn’t wait for Robert to finish scooting over before she stepped between them and off the porch. She was dressed for work, the early lunch crowd, her white blouse and black skirt freshly ironed, her bare legs lean, disciplined, and moral. She walked straight to the Whaler’s service door and didn’t turn around once.
“She hasn’t talked to me all morning.” Jackie looked halfway over at Robert, her eyes fixing on his shirt, his bloody shirt. “I feel really bad.” Her voice broke and Robert put his arm around her. She seemed to be crying, her shoulders bobbing slightly, though he couldn’t be sure because he didn’t hear anything. He could smell her hair, the natural oil in it, the linen of her pillowcase. He began to get hard, and he pulled away.
“I should get my vest.”
She looked at him, her green eyes shiny and dull. She blinked twice, as if she were trying to focus on what he’d really just said. She sniffled, wiped under each eye with one finger, then stood and led him inside. His vest lay on a towel on her bunk, the top sheet balled in a heap at the foot of the bed.
“I rinsed it in cold water.”
“Thank you.”
“Why weren’t you wearing it?”
Robert picked up the vest, damp and dark. “I was carrying it. Just forgot about it.” He didn’t like lying to Jackie; he should not lie to at least somebody. He could hear the beach traffic out on the boulevard, the clown horn of a motorcycle or truck. The air in the cabin was still and hot, and he smelled the sewage, all of theirs, his and Jackie’s and Kimberly’s, all the other barbacks and waiters and waitresses, the ones who waited. And Jackie seemed to be waiting too, her face sad but open to spontaneity, her nipples erect beneath her shirt.
“I’m sorry about what happened, Jackie.”
“Me too.”
Robert moved toward her to give her a hug, he told himself, that’s all, but she stepped back and held up her hand. “Don’t.”
Disappointment and relief twisted inside him. He nodded, thanked her for the vest, then left the cabin and walked back to his own where he showered and changed into khaki pants and an oxford shirt Althea had ironed and hung in their tiny closet under the loft. He was sweating a foul sweat: bourbon and desire and a profound weakness; he was almost certain he would have done it with Jackie one more time, a final time. All the windows were open, but there was no sea breeze at all, just the smell of sewage and salt water from the marsh, the faint scent of garbage from the dumpster on the other side of the lot, rancid fried fish and clams, hot metal and dried soda, and he could not imagine bringing his wife and baby back to this. If she would come—there was the way she’d turned her head away from him as she bled on Jackie’s floor, her placenta “abrupted.”
He wiped his forehead, slipped on his loafers, combed his hair back, then crossed the shell lot. It seemed an entire night and day had passed since he’d closed up, but it was still early, the lunch staff pulling chairs off tables, running the vacuum over the sea green carpet, setting each plate with silverware, cloth napkins, and a Whaler’s placemat menu. Kimberly was drinking coffee at the window table with three other waitresses who were taking a cigarette break, and Robert didn’t have to guess at the topic of conversation
. Still, he waved to them on his way to the manager’s office. One of them, Dotty, a small-hipped woman who owned her own video store a few miles west, asked if his wife was doing all right. Robert nodded and smiled, though he felt as if he were lying again.
His manager, Danny Sullivan, was sitting at his cluttered desk with a clear glass of creamy coffee, smoking a cigarette and studying last night’s receipts. He had a thick red mustache and a wide double chin. He wore reading glasses. A small paper clip holder was turned over on the blotter at the edge of the desk, and Robert remembered Jackie’s hand bracing herself there. He’d forgotten this was the last place they’d done it. He felt like a house burglar walking by one of his victims in the grocery store. Dan Sullivan glanced up at him, then back at the receipts, the smoke from the cigarette wafting in front of him.
“We’re switching over to Sprite on the guns, Bobby. When you lock up tonight, have the barback put all the 7UP canisters outside, all right?”
Sullivan flicked on his adding machine. Robert scanned the desk for any more evidence of last night, but there was none, just the general paper clutter of beer and liquor orders, the only hint a clear semicircle of space at the front edge of the desk where Jackie had rested her ass.