Wind Across the Breaks

Lisa Norris

Through the sliding glass door, I looked out over the back pasture. Snow made everything bright on the treeless hills. The snow wasn't too deep; I could see the wheat stubble poking up at the back of our fenced pasture on the hill that rose behind the house. Beyond that hill, Mule Deer Mountain's slopes were dark with pines. We'd be cross-country skiing there again, Sarah and I, once this crisis with Nathan was over. We'd seen a moose along the trail last time, about two months before Nathan was born. Sarah wore my ski overalls, too big to fit in her own. We stayed on the flattest trails, but she had trouble keeping her balance and fell right on her nose as we came down a slight incline. I saw it happen, the slow wobble forward, the way she protected her belly by folding in half as best she could, pushing her head forward to take the impact.

Sarah's a strong woman. She runs marathons--or did, before the pregnancy. It didn't surprise me that she thought to protect the baby. She knows what to do with her body instinctively. I skied back to be sure she was all right. She was just getting up, putting one foot back into the ski binding.

"I'll have to be more careful," she said. "I wasn't thinking." She brushed the snow off her front, then rested a hand on her belly. I started to go on, but didn't hear Sarah behind me, so looked back to see if she was following. She stood with her eyes closed, breathing deeply, tears running down her face.

Sarah followed me in her own good time. That seemed to be all right. When we do fight over something, it's usually because one of us got in too close, not because of our distance. We're married, yes; we've lived together for five years, yes; but we're separate, too. When we go camping together, for instance, I'll get up before Sarah does and go fishing and maybe not see her again until dinnertime. Even if I come back for lunch, she's usually off by herself somewhere, collecting rocks. Sarah's a geologist. I teach Shop or, as they call it now, Industrial Arts. With our two careers and our hobbies, it was difficult to decide we would have a baby, and though we are intelligent enough people, and had made a well-informed decision to become parents, Nathan's presence was a shock to us both. His crying filled every room, as relentless and wearing as the wind across the breaks. It reached even the basement, where I tried to escape in my woodshop. I whittle small animals--beavers, moose, elk, bear, whatever is native to these parts. Moving the blade along the soft wood, I imagine the animal insisting its way out of formlessness.

I had not thought of such a thing happening with human beings--formlessness giving way to shape--until Sarah became pregnant. Hearing the heartbeat through the obstetrician's stethoscope before Sarah's belly even began to swell, then seeing the cloudy limbs on the Ultrasound picture, I had the same deep feeling I used to get as a child looking up at the stars, as if I were both as large as the universe and as insignificant as a speck of dust. It's hard for me to express how I felt when Nathan was finally born. When I close my eyes I can still see his little round head protruding from my wife's dark-furred vagina, his limbs springing free of her, then his small, sharp wise-looking face taking in his new surroundings. I couldn't stop touching him, even after they put him on Sarah's bare chest; it was as if I had to convince myself that he was real, that what I'd just seen really had happened. After the nurses cleaned up the baby and Sarah, and we had Nathan in the hospital room, Sarah held him all night, and I sat in the chair beside them, one hand on Sarah's arm. I told her I had never been so much in love with her, and it was true, every word.

Now it was Sarah who sat in the chair next to Nathan. He lay naked and unconscious on a small bed enclosed by plastic. An IV was hooked to his tiny arm. A blindfold protected his eyes from the light that would, eventually we hoped, reduce the bilirubin levels. A tube fixed around his penis led to a bag which, once he was rehydrated, would collect his urine. A monitor on his chest measured his heartbeat. He had dropped from his birth weight of six pounds to five. He looked like a preemie.

The doctor, a heavyset man with small eyes, had shaken our hands after he'd examined Nathan, introduced himself, and said, "He's severely jaundiced. His bilirubin level is sky high. If he wasn't so dehydrated, I'd fly him to Spokane for a transfusion. We've got fluids going into him and the UV light on to reduce the bili levels. We've done all we can do. Now it's in God's hands."

We'd been calling the nurses at the hospital every day for a week since we'd brought Nathan home, telling them our baby was crying. They'd said, "Babies cry." We'd been checking the diapers, but they were the absorbent, disposable kind, and we didn't know what a wet one felt like. Finally, the morning we'd brought Nathan in, he had stopped crying. He lay on the bed without moving. He looked parched, like a very old man; I realized this in hindsight--that he was, in fact, dehydrated, but I didn't know what was wrong then.

Sarah sat in the metal chair next to the incubator and looked at Nathan. She didn't stir when I said I was going home to feed the dog. She said, "All right."

"They asked if I wanted to talk to a minister," she said. "Do you?"

I shook my head. I'd been annoyed when the doctor said, "It's in God's hands now," as if he were giving up his responsibility.

"Let's go home," I said.

"And leave him?" she said, gesturing toward Nathan's room.

"We can't do anything for him here."

Sarah went into Nathan's room. I followed. There was nothing in the room but Nathan, his incubator, the machines and the chair in which Sarah'd been sitting. It was a small hospital with only two rooms for Intensive Care. Tonight Nathan was the only patient. I looked at the baby. He was my son, but he seemed older than I was with that tiny, wrinkled, serious face.

"It doesn't seem fair," I said. "I should've been able to protect him at least this long."

I wanted Sarah to touch me, to say it was all right, I didn't really fail our son, but she stood apart, her shoulders hunched tightly, bent over her crossed arms as if someone had just punched her in the stomach.

She'd shown me the little white drops coming out of her nipples a few days after Nathan came home. Sarah was a small-breasted woman, and I think she'd been nervous about whether the milk would come. When it did, or anyway when she thought it had, she went around the house with her shirt unbuttoned, her breasts fuller than either of us had ever seen them. I was proud of her patience--up through the nights, hour after hour, with our son at her breasts in the rocking chair. Nathan wouldn't really suck the way I guess babies are supposed to, the way I thought came naturally. He'd try to, but then he'd turn his head and cry. It seemed he never stopped crying. When we put him in his bassinet to sleep, if his eyes were closed when we laid him down, they'd open as soon as his body felt the mattress.

Sarah drank the glasses of water, made sure to eat enough calories--the only thing she didn't get was any rest, since Nathan didn't sleep. Maybe that's why, as we found out in the hospital when they hooked Sarah up to the electric milking machine, she had no milk. They said she might have had milk earlier; the shock of hearing the baby was in critical condition might have dried up her supply. It was impossible to know. When Sarah heard this explanation she said nothing, but I know Sarah. In a race once she fell and sprained her ankle but got up and tried to make it to the finish. When she couldn't, the injury was the least of her pain. She went over the fall again and again during the weeks she was on crutches, trying to locate her mistake. In our bed late at night, her foot propped on a pillow, she went deep into her own character. "Walt," she'd said, "maybe I was just too greedy. If I hadn't been in such a hurry to push past the others into the inside lane, I wouldn't have got so tangled up."

During those weeks of Sarah's self-recriminations, I tried to talk to her with my hands, to tell her again and again that I loved her, that no mistake was too bad, that her ankle would heal and she'd win the next race. When she didn't respond, I either went into my woodshop or, on the nicer days, drove down the grade to the Clearwater River. Standing in the water with my dry fly bouncing in the riffles, I thought of the way the light worked on the water and the hills; took in the smell of water and sagebrush. I imagined myself a heron standing in the shallows, sharp beak ready to stab his prey. I'd feel the tug on the line, set the hook and let the fish fight. The invisible force would race out, taking the line, then back, sometimes letting me catch a glimpse of itself as it flipped in the air, trying to shake loose; but finally I'd bring it in, its gills heaving, and surround it with my net. I'd stroke it with my fingers under the water, admiring its colors, then put the fish up on the bank and stick my knife blade through its head.

After we lay down together, I reached for Sarah's hand. She let me squeeze it, then pulled it away.

"He's going to be all right," I said.

"I hope so," Sarah said.

"It's not your fault."

"I should've realized it sooner." Sarah sounded like she was going to cry again, so I was glad for the darkness between us. "It was because I didn't want to seem like a hysterical mother. That's why I didn't bring him in. I didn't want the doctor to think of me like that. So Nathan might die because I didn't want some doctor to think I was a wimp."

"We're both to blame," I said. But I didn't know if I believed it. What could I do to help with breast-feeding? I thought how naturally such things came to animals and wondered--as I often did--what was the problem with human beings. I had thought Sarah was different, tougher. She could outhike most of my buddies. But I guess that had nothing to do with being a mother. "I'll call the hospital," I said. "I'll see how he is."

"No." Sarah put a hand on my arm as I reached for the phone. "I just need to think he's okay. If he's worse, I don't want to know yet." She got out of bed and unplugged the phone.

"Okay," I said. I imagined finding out in the morning that my son was dead, that he'd died by himself in an incubator. If he died we'd probably never forgive ourselves for being home while he was there by himself. Yet I lay stiffly next to my wife and listened to her breathing; neither of us moved.

After awhile, I heard Amber moan in her sleep and got up to check on her. Moonlight shone through the sliding glass doors, illuminating the piano, the coffee table with its scattered magazines, the leather chairs and couch. I'd arranged wood and newspapers in the fireplace so I could light it in the morning, but I opened the damper and lit it now. Amber opened her eyes and thumped her tail against the wood floor, then yawned and stretched and got up to lean against me. The fire crackled. I stroked Amber's head, moved away from the heat, felt the runner of the rocking chair in my back and thought of Nathan sucking on that dry breast and getting nothing, his mother giving him all she had, not realizing how little she offered.

I went into Nathan's room and got his blanket and brought it into the living room with me. I held it to my face and breathed in my son's smell--baby powder and urine and some indefinable scent of newness. To me, I'll have to admit, Nathan had not seemed quite human. He was a miracle, I thought, in the sense that he had come alive from my sperm and Sarah's egg after the long incubation. I had my fantasies about the time he'd be old enough to go hunting and fishing with me--though at this point, it was hard to believe such growth was possible. But also I kept imagining--even when I thought he was healthy--that Nathan would never change, that even at 21 he'd have the same solemn faraway look, and we'd have to strap him into a wheelchair to get him to sit up. It had frightened me so much that I had to wonder if, in a way, what had happened was something I had wished on him. Now, according to the doctor, if Nathan survived, brain damage really was possible.

Once, when Sarah and I stayed in a cabin on the Lochsa River, a foaming tributary in the Selway-Bitterroots, we heard a car skid on Highway 12, the road that follows the river from Missoula to Lewiston. We ran out the door to see what had happened. Three people stood in the road looking at the deer they'd hit. When we got closer, we could see that she lay stunned but alive, her head up, eyes glazed with shock, one leg turned at an angle. I thought of my hunting knife in the cabin and sprinted back. In my hand the leather of the sheath felt solid and important; something about that texture and all it implied carried me through as I slit the doe's throat.

Amber lay her head on my lap, on the blue-and-white squares of the blanket Sarah had crocheted for the baby. The bacteria Amber might carry, might leave on Nathan's blanket, seemed unimportant now. I didn't scold her. What got you was never the thing you guarded against; it was what you didn't see--for the doe, that truck hurtling through darkness; for Nathan, our ignorance. I rubbed an end of Nathan's blanket back and forth between my hands. I closed my eyes and thought of my son just as I'd seen him last. I imagined my own life as if it were in my chest, housed there like light, and I pictured my chest opening, freeing the light that moved out our front door, down our lane, left on Third, right on Main and into the front entrance of the hospital. It moved in a beam from my chest to Nathan's. If I could hold him in that light, I thought he might live. I might sustain him even from here by the fire at home with the dog's head in my lap; even here, with my fears and doubts about what life with Nathan would be like if he recovered. I beamed the light into him until I was dizzy, until I could hear nothing but the beating of my own heart, the pulsing of my breath, the crackling of the fire faraway, forgotten, and Sarah's approach unheard, unimagined, until she laid a hand on my arm and I pushed her away, leaping up so fast that Amber yelped with fright and I spun to face my wife, making a sound I had never before heard myself make--a kind of roar.

Sarah pressed herself against the wall and said, "Walt." She held her own hands up as if to ward me off, but my arm moved as if by reflex, like the leg that kicks at the doctor when he strikes the knee; the momentum carried my closed fist between her upraised hands and struck her jaw, so that her head snapped to one side, knees buckling as her hands moved up to her face and she cried out.

I pulled my fist back and stepped away, putting my hand out to my sides, palms up, like a teenager in the police car's headlights saying, "I don't have a thing. I'm clean." Then I knelt beside my wife, but she said, "Get away," and flailed her arms in my direction.

I moved back. I went into the kitchen. I paused at the window above the sink. The moon had sunk and a harsh gray light shone at the edges of the horizon. The dog whined. I noticed the car keys hanging on a hook beside the sink. I put them in my pocket, closed my eyes briefly, then turned back to my wife. She still sat on the floor with her back against the wall She looked monstrous, her face splotchy and red, cheekbones and jawbone lost in the purpling flesh, but she had picked up Nathan's blanket and now held it against her face, as I had.

I moved toward her, but she said, "Don't touch me."

I said, "I'm sorry about your face. I didn't mean to hit you. It was just some weird kind of reflex."

She rubbed the fabric of Nathan's blanket against her jaw. Then she got up and carried the blanket out to the car. Through the window I watched her get into the passenger seat. I looked at Amber. I said, "You can stay here."

I followed Sarah. We didn't look at each other. We didn't speak. We put on our seatbelts. I don't think either of us cared right then whether we lived or died; it was just a habit, each of us pulling the buckles across to lock ourselves in place.

© 1996, The Blue Penny Quarterly. All rights reserved.