Everything Here is Under Control Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Emily Adrian

  E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Alenka Vdovič Linaschke

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-982640-06-4

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-982640-05-7

  Fiction / Women

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  For Kate,

  who tried to warn me

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was a point in Carrie’s labor when she wouldn’t stop asking if I was okay.

  Carrie had declined drugs until she was six centimeters dilated and the contractions left her shaking so hard she couldn’t steady her jaw. When she forfeited her fantasy of a natural birth, she did so completely; she wanted the drugs flowing through her system in an instant. But the anesthesiologist was with another patient, and then he was on his lunch break, and then he was with yet another patient. Moaning and periodically vomiting into the plastic tray her mother held beneath her chin, Carrie endured. In the few seconds between each contraction, she would wipe tears from her eyes and say, “Is Amanda okay?”

  Crouched in the corner of the hospital room, I was too dizzy to stand and too ashamed to answer Carrie’s question.

  “Amanda’s fine,” said Mrs. Hart, her voice clipped. Carrie’s mother hadn’t wanted me in the room to begin with, and now she took no pleasure in having correctly predicted my uselessness. She wanted me gone, but I was not going to leave. My goal was to return to Carrie’s side. In another second.

  “Don’t worry about Amanda,” murmured the nurse, strapping a fetal monitor around the globe of Carrie’s abdomen. “Amanda’s not the one having a baby tonight.”

  Later Carrie would say she had been sincerely worried about me. Driven insane by pain, it seemed possible to her that I had, coincidentally, been struck ill. That I needed medical attention. That the nurse’s indifference toward me would facilitate my swift and untimely death.

  No, I was just freaking out.

  Carrie’s pain shocked me for two reasons. For starters, I believed we were prepared. We had read all the books and attended a six-week childbirth class in a church basement. With our eyes wide open we watched both the vaginal delivery video and the C-section video. Neither of us passed out—which was more than we could say for one husband in the class, a man whose habit was to surreptitiously eat Skittles out of his pocket while the instructor defined mucous plug and episiotomy. Carrie and I both cried at the videos’ conclusions. The blue-faced babies covered in wax and jam, the moms with their naked elation.

  The second reason was that I had once watched Carrie attempt to hurdle a shopping cart in the Walmart parking lot and land on her face. Peeling herself from the pavement, horror movie blood gushing from her nose, she regarded the boy who had issued the dare and said, “My bad.”

  In the delivery room Carrie moaned like she was already half dead, but her pain remained theoretical to me. I couldn’t share it. I couldn’t make it stop. A small and stingy part of me even suspected her of exaggerating. Of writhing and wailing because birth was, among other things, a little bit boring. The child in me—the child even younger than the one I was—wanted to gripe, “C’mon, Carrie, cut it out.”

  But if Carrie could have labored quietly, with a stoic grimace on her face, she would have.

  The anesthesiologist remained MIA. Carrie asked the nurse to check the progress of her cervix.

  “We checked an hour ago,” the nurse argued.

  “I just feel like I need to push,” Carrie said.

  “Can you describe the sensation? Does it feel like you have to poop?”

  Through gnashing teeth, Carrie said, “It feels like I need to push a baby out of my vagina.”

  I laughed in my corner.

  “You!” Carrie shouted. “If you’re dying, then go get some help already. If you’re just being pathetic, then get your ass over here.”

  I got my ass over there. Seeing my friend up close was a revelation. Moments ago her agony had rendered her strange to me, but now I realized she was more herself than ever. Carrie was in charge; she was pissed off; she was unapologetic. She was alone in this, but she wanted me near her. No one would have blamed her for banishing me from the room, either out of girlish embarrassment or an instinct to shield me from my own future suffering, but the two of us knew what no one else would admit: Carrie could handle this.

  The nurse confirmed that Carrie had dilated from six centimeters to ten in under an hour and finally paged the obstetrician. He was a white man with square glasses and an equally square head, who entered the room with a Coke Zero in one hand and took his time assembling his collection of tools. As he removed the lower half of Carrie’s bed, he said, “First baby, I hope?” and Carrie clamped her eyes shut, as if the effort would make the doctor disappear. The wayward anesthesiologist wandered into the room, took one look at Carrie with her knees splayed, and reversed back into the hall.

  I will hate those men forever.

  For two hours I held Carrie’s right leg while she pushed. When her doctor, nurse, and mother began counting in unison from the start of each contraction—urging Carrie to sustain the push—I studied the creases in her forehead and said, “Don’t do that. She hates it.” When her lips became so dry they cracked and bled, I smeared cherry-flavored Chapstick all over her mouth.

  Between each contraction I offered her both a basin for puke and a drink of water. She had time to choose only one.

  When she screamed for someone to please, please help her, I cried into the scaly flesh of her bent knee. I didn’t think about her age (inadequate) or about the boy (same) whom she’d abandoned in the waiting room. I’d forgotten all about the baby. I thought, distinctly, This girl is the love of my life. If Carrie died, I would die too. Her mother had stopped shooting me looks and was standing on the other side of her with a concerned, haunted expression. Like she couldn’t remember what year it was.

  I watched Carrie’s perineum tear open and spill blood onto the doctor’s shoes. I watched Nina emerge sunny-side up with her full head of black hair. She was waving her arms, protesting the eviction, the arctic air of the delivery room. The doctor tried to hand the baby to the nurse, but I said, “No. Give her to Carrie,” with such ferocity that no one argued.

  With her daughter in her arms, Carrie laughed. “That was so fucking brutal.” Radiating love, she stroked the pillow of Nina’s cheek. For the first time I understood what it meant to be proud of another person. That I could already feel Carrie retreating from me didn’t seem to matter. We were eighteen years old; one of us would snap at the other within the hour. So what? I was sure of two things I hadn’t previously known: I would become a mother too, someday, and Carrie Hart would be in the room when it happened.

  “I promise, nothing will ever be so bad again,” Carrie told Nina.

  Even now, over a decade later, I count this among the best days of my life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  By the time I untangle the baby from the straps of his car seat, he’s screaming like I’m trying
to murder him. His fire engine song exhausts me without actually winning my sympathy. Every once in a while, his sorrow is slow to build, beginning with wide eyes and a trembling lower lip. That’s the move that melts my heart, but he has no idea.

  Avoiding my own reflection, I slam the car door and carry him up the porch steps. I knock softly, as if—despite our mutual hysteria and the odors clinging to our clothes—Jack and I will be mistaken for polite.

  Down the street, the setting sun makes the white houses glow amber. Cicadas drone, atonal and urgent. I grew up two blocks from here, and this neighborhood still looks the same: cracked slabs of sidewalk, bundles of coupons spilling from every mailbox. It makes me think of ding-dong ditching the neighbors, of lying down in the middle of the road to make a suicidal snow angel on a Tuesday night in January because our mom had kicked us out of the house. She needed to balance her checkbook. She needed, she told us, to hear herself think.

  Jack will never know the pleasure of lying in the middle of the road. We live in Queens.

  Bees emerge from a mess of lavender beneath the living room window and hover way too close to the baby’s bald head. The veins visible at his temples still freak me out. It’s alarming to think of his anatomy, delicate but complete. To realize I’m the one responsible for ensuring he grows into a full-size, weather-resistant human—and though I’ve googled it before, I can’t remember what you’re supposed to do if your baby gets stung by a bee.

  I can’t remember if I locked the car, or if it’s even customary to lock your car in Deerling, Ohio.

  I can’t remember the last time I slept more than two consecutive hours.

  This baby has driven me a little bit crazy. I once believed I was capable of understanding that an infant cries because he is an infant—because he was born, if not literally yesterday, then last week or last month or last spring—and not because he has specific designs on ruining his mother’s life.

  But I was wrong. I’m not capable.

  From inside I hear footsteps, the first confirmation that anyone’s home, and I consider turning on my heel. I should go to my mom’s. No matter what I interrupt, Jaclyn will give the impression of being overjoyed to see me. For a moment I imagine myself trusting her joy, doing nothing to resist it, wrapping it like a blanket around my shoulders. But the baby makes quick getaways unrealistic. Even if I managed to strap Jack into his car seat in record time, Carrie would see the New York plates on the retreating car and know.

  A teenager answers the door. We stare at each other, unblinking. After a while she says, “Greetings.”

  I should compliment her hair, formerly cloudlike but now pulled away from her face and secured in cornrows—definitely her mother’s work. I should exclaim over her height, her upcoming birthday. Because Nina is not yet a teenager; she’s two weeks from turning thirteen. Lately, as far as I’m concerned, people are either babies or not-babies. Nina might as well be college bound. She sleeps through the night—or, if she doesn’t, she’s secretive about her sobbing.

  Nina’s gaze lands on Jack. “What’s all over his shirt?” she asks. It’s her first time meeting him. Her arms hang loosely at her sides.

  “Spit-up.” It’s overwhelming, Nina no longer being three. “Is Carrie here?”

  Nina steps willingly aside as her mother appears in the doorway. The relief I expected to feel at the sight of her eludes me. Carrie’s features are stitched tight with guarded confusion, her toned arms are covered in tattoos I’ve never seen, but she’s fundamentally unchanged. I would recognize this woman with my eyes closed. We’re like dogs born in the same litter, programmed to remember each other’s scent.

  “Why is he crying like that?” she asks.

  I kiss the top of Jack’s head. He’s two and a half months old, but it’s been years since Carrie and I welcomed unplanned visits from each other. “What do you mean? He’s a baby.”

  “He sounds hungry.”

  “He ate an hour, maybe two hours ago. He was asleep on the highway, but he hates getting in and out of the bucket seat. It’s super awkward. I’ll be glad when he has some neck control.” I’m shouting, ostensibly to be heard over Jack, but also because I need to shout.

  I need to shout, to pull my own hair, to sink my teeth into something firm but yielding.

  “If he was sleeping, why didn’t you bring the whole car seat inside?”

  She’s a genius. “I didn’t think of that. I’m not used to driving. In the city, we—”

  Carrie reaches for Jack. I hand him over, and the relief is immediate. It’s like climbing to the fifth floor of our apartment building and letting the grocery bags slide from my wrists.

  “I gave birth,” I announce. Nina has vanished into the recesses of the house, and I’m glad. Carrie may resent my arrival, but she’s still the only person on earth whom I want to see right now.

  “You did,” she concedes.

  We’re Facebook friends, the connection forged in memory of our actual friendship, long dormant. Carrie has left congratulatory comments on the pictures I can’t stop posting.

  “I need help,” I say. And the admission is cathartic.

  Carrie Hart’s body is familiar to me, from the shape of her eyebrows to her small and permanently arched toes, but her expression in this moment is impossible to read, overcompensating for all the years in which we intuited each other’s every thought.

  “Amanda,” Carrie says, “how am I supposed to help you?”

  Jack is curled against Carrie’s chest, his screams reduced to hiccups. His pose, fetal, induces a surge of grief. Part of me wants to snatch him back, and part of me wants to abandon him with Carrie. I’ve been fantasizing about waiting rooms, long lines at the supermarket, gridlock traffic. Everything that used to make me miserable.

  “You already are,” I say.

  * * *

  “Take a shower,” Carrie tells me, still holding my baby. “You smell like spoiled milk and . . . something else.” When she wrinkles her nose I see the sixteen-year-old she used to be. I flash upon climbing into the passenger seat of her pickup truck, early morning, before school, her obvious disdain of the Victoria’s Secret “Endless Love” body mist my mother gave me for Christmas in 2001.

  Whatever happened to that truck? I want to ask her, but it’s the wrong time.

  “Jalapeño chips,” is all I say.

  Before turning down the hallway, I steal a look at the two of them. With one hand Carrie opens the refrigerator, removes a carton of orange juice, and pours herself a glass. Whenever I try to multitask with Jack in my arms, he protests, demanding 100 percent of my attention at all times. When Carrie does it, he’s none the wiser.

  I’ve realized that the handling of newborns is a language your body either retains or forgets forever. Gabe’s mother trembled the first time we gave her Jack to hold. She cupped his head in her palm like he was made of ash.

  Gabe’s parents came to New York two weeks into Jack’s life, when I was still so raw and weepy I could hardly look at anyone. They marveled at what they called Gabe’s involvement. Imagine, Hank and Diane Feldman’s own son changing diapers! Their own son with his special trick of bouncing the baby through the air, simulating the soothing sensation of riding an old elevator.

  “You’ve got it made,” Diane told me. “Hank was always at the office. Day or night, didn’t matter, I was on my own.”

  She meant to shame me as I sat on the couch in my sweatpants, scrolling hungrily through the internet while Gabe tended to our infant. I was unmoved. I did pity Diane though. Gabe plus his two older brothers amounted to nine years of diaper changes, nine years of teething and temper tantrums. Hadn’t Diane deserved a break?

  Carrie’s bathroom is stocked with hand soap and hand towels, the accoutrements of a level of adulthood to which Gabe and I still aspire. Ten times a day a single bar of Ivory travels between our sink and the edge of our
tub. Occasionally one of us will cloak our annoyance in vague intention: “Whoever goes to the store next should buy some hand soap.” But whoever goes to the store next will be daunted by the aisle of toiletries and cleaning supplies. Beneath the buzzing fluorescent lights, all of it will seem frivolous, exorbitantly priced. Three ninety-nine? For what—the plastic pump?

  In Carrie’s shower I’m happy, almost drunk on autonomy. I try to ignore the phantom baby who always cries behind the clamor of the water hitting the tiles. Even harder is ignoring the real baby—mine—who has woken up. Who is screaming now.

  As we drove across the interminable state of Pennsylvania—Clinton signage gradually conceding to red barns branded, in white paint, trump—I tried to desensitize myself to the sound of crying. I remembered that Jack had been fed, burped, and changed. That he was, by definition, okay. My zen would last for a minute or two, tops, before a switch would flip. With my heart racing, nerves fraying, I had to pull over. In the back seat I would hug him close to me, furious but unable to bear his fury.

  Carrie has four different kinds of conditioner—the packaging sleek and sexy, splashed with niche terms like keratin—and about two squirts left in a bottle of generic shampoo. I skip the shampoo and massage something oily into my scalp. Since the birth my hair has been brittle, as dry as September grass. Rushing to rinse it, I’m not anxious so much as excited. To have gained entry into Carrie’s house thrills me. So she didn’t wrap me in her arms, and maybe never will again, but she did reach for Jack. Automatically and without fear.

  Doesn’t that count for something?

  After putting back on my stale clothes, I go to the kitchen, where Carrie calmly hands me my enraged baby. He shakes his head from side to side, clenched fist waving in front of his mouth. Sinking into a chair, I lift up my shirt and latch him onto my breast. There’s a twinge of pain, a wave of shame, a sudden awareness of my own hunger—and then nothing. I’m at ease, feeding my kid in Carrie’s kitchen. Like it’s nothing new.