and shrieked.
The hissing in particular, but especially in combination with the shrieking, has a wild-animal sound—an essential and irreducible beastliness—that chills me. It chills Meredith, too. We’ll sometimes glance at each other, neither of us uttering a word, and in that glance we’ll read each other’s terror. Meredith, I’m almost certain, lies awake wondering if our beloved baby boy has inherited the afflictions of her two disturbed sisters. The hissing and the shrieking reproduce the bedlam of a psychiatric ward in Connecticut in which her older sister has resided since Meredith was in tenth grade.
Inevitably, given what we know of genetics, the blaming has revved up a notch. The guilt has thickened.
I worry not just about Timmy, but equally so about Meredith.
I don’t think she can handle much more.
Though I try not to let on, I’m also concerned about the limits of my own tolerance. As I sing “Row, Row” in the dark, my thoughts seem to rattle around without content, or without objective and realistic content. I fantasize sometimes. I pretend none of this is happening. I pretend I’m teaching history to my son as I sing about John Wilkes Booth going merrily down the stream.
This morning I found Meredith sitting outside Timmy’s bedroom. She was trembling with … I don’t know what. She was trembling with all that has been and all that still is.
I had seen her weep before, but never like this.
Behind the closed bedroom door, Timmy was shrieking.
I didn’t decide anything; I just did it—loaded all three of us into the car and drove to an emergency room.
Seven hours later we departed with three prescriptions: Xanax for Meredith, Xanax for me, and a drug called Prilosec for Timmy. Our son was found to be suffering from acid reflux disease. His case was severe. We were informed that acid reflux can be difficult to diagnose, especially among infants, who are unable to articulate where things hurt or how things hurt or why things hurt or even that things hurt. They can cry. They can shriek and hiss. We learned today, along with a great deal else, that insomnia is a common symptom of acid reflux; we learned that the condition is caused by a relaxation of the lower esophageal sphincter, which in turn permits stomach acids to drain into the esophagus; we learned that those acids can produce intense pain, especially in the sensitive tissues of a baby; we learned that the word “colic” (sometimes called “infantile colic”) is descriptive of a set of symptoms (frequency of crying, duration of crying) but is not a diagnosis of organic cause; we learned that we were not to blame; we learned that Timmy hated only the terrible pain, not the world.
All that was today.
Now it’s 11:17 p.m., and the house is bizarrely silent. The Prilosec did its magic—not instantly, but very nearly so.
The Xanax also worked. Meredith has been sleeping since late afternoon. I’m feeling extremely fine.
Until two hours ago I had been sitting in the dark with Timmy, even though he no longer needs me. He too is feeling fine. He sleeps peacefully. He is in his crib. In a few minutes I’ll get some sleep myself, but for now, as I scribble down these few words, I’m content to sit here listening to the all-is-well hum of our baby monitor, its soothing electric buzz coming from some unpopulated and distant galaxy. I’m riding the jet stream of Xanax, true, but I’m also feeling a kind of nostalgia, the sort of backward-looking, tongue-probing surprise one feels after an aching tooth has been pulled. I don’t miss all the horror, of course. But I do miss surviving the horror. I miss our rocking chair. I miss holding Timmy in the dark. I miss “Row, Row”—enough to feel acutely what is missing. This sensation, whatever it is, reminds me a bit of what I’d once experienced in Vietnam after a firefight ended, when something that was so excruciatingly present became so shockingly absent.
I had been afraid my son would die.
I am still afraid. I will always be afraid.
It occurs to me that one day, when he is a senior in college, or maybe when he receives his doctorate from Stanford, I’ll have to let him take his chances out in the killer world. At that point—or maybe when he is elected to his second term as President—I’ll probably allow him to apply for a driver’s license and (if he’s very careful) use the family car to go out on his first dangerous date, though I’ll be singing “Row, Row” in the back seat.
Timmy is an infant. He is on my lap. My nose is pressed to the top of his head. My eyes are closed. I am smelling his skin. And the smell of skin—a baby’s skin—becomes, in the instant of smelling, the one and only thing in the universe. Nothing else exists. There is no yesterday and no tomorrow, only the smell of skin, no murder, no turpitude, no unhappy endings, only the smell of skin, for everything else is elsewhere, and the smell of an infant’s skin is the smell of light obliterating darkness.
Timmy’s first fifteen months mostly evaporated for me. What I have in my head, when I have anything at all, is a jumble of diapers and bottles and strollers and car seats and two or three near-death experiences. Timmy eats, or at least tries to eat, live electrical cords. He enjoys dirt for dessert. Last month I swatted a cockroach from his lips. I am not kidding.
But then an event occurs which I need to capture here, for Timmy’s sake, as a small record of his early days on our planet. Sometimes I chuckle at what happened; other times I get angry.
In July of this year, not long after Timmy’s first birthday, our family attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference up in the mountains of Tennessee, where I had been tasked with providing advice to people who sought to become better writers. Most often in such circumstances I can think of almost nothing to say: read widely, toughen up your psyche, ration the booze, and don’t forget to write a little. I want to be helpful, of course, but I don’t know how. I feel like an imposter. Occasionally, in my courageous or whimsical moods, I’ll offer to my students the tentative suggestion that fiction writers might do well to trust their own stories. Above all, I’ll mumble, to trust a story means to tell it—not to creep up on it, not to postpone the “good” parts, not to hint at it or cleverly foreshadow it or offer the reader periodic promises that a glorious tale will soon be coming. To trust a story is to conquer the fear of plunging headfirst into the surprises and contradictions of being human.
So
