Trouble Child, by Rachel Mans McKenny
Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
They are recalling my baby. I explain this with a sardonic head wag when my boss asks why I need to leave early. He is faulty.
Since the death of my father, my co-workers have distanced themselves. My sense of humor has skewed sideways and they don't want to hurt their necks looking at it. I can't blame them. Our company’s insurance is horrible.
My husband and I bring our son to the doctor with the following symptoms: Leo is pale and growing slowly. You are pale, the doctor points out. True. Leo is small, though, and we are big. He is almost seven months old but not gaining weight. Leo has natal teeth that didn't fall out to make room for baby teeth. In the front of his mouth, Leo has teeth behind his teeth, like a shark. When he smiles, it looks like a cemetery.
The doctor taps on his little knees and rubs his little foot for that reflex, the first one they're supposed to have, but it takes Leo a minute to kick. He's forgotten his lines. His leg missed a cue.
When I was a kid, my father and I would play a game when I was mad. He would scrunch his nose, stick out his tongue, and say, "Darling, I love you. Would you please smile?" I was supposed to say, straight-faced, "Darling, I love you, but I just can't smile." I always lost. I always lost.
I am so lost.
The doctor rubs Leo's limbs and takes his blood, and I worry that I haven’t asked enough indignant questions. "How will this help him?" I challenge, holding Leo in my arms. He doesn't squirm as a second tiny vial of blood is taken.
I am teaching myself to worry. It is supposed to be instinct, this maternal concern, as sure as sleeping steadily on tree branches is for monkeys. My mother died so early that I hadn't seen this supposedly natural behavior. My father told me, rocking me in his arms, cradling me in his lap while we listened to his old LPs, that Joni Mitchell could be my mother. We hung posters of her around the house and prints of her paintings, too. "She's a painter first," my father told me. He read that in an interview. "Then a musician."
"Then my mother," I said, joking.
"Then your mother," he said.
My father died six months ago, and I addressed a handwritten invitation to his celebration of life to Joni Mitchell. He had never met or even attended a concert, but it only felt right to invite my mother. Sitting on the stiff bench of the crematorium, I held my newborn and my husband's hand and listened to "Case of You."
We leave the hospital without results from Leo's tests, with only the promise of several long, sleepless days ahead. It's funny how the anticipation of something, like insomnia, doesn't dull its impact. It's funny how when we say something is funny, we often mean sad. Terrible. I lay awake in our small bed in our small town and feel very far away from anything alive. Both of us grew up here, my husband and I, though we moved away for ten years for school and travel lust. Before Leo we lived in Vienna. Most nights, the lights shone in the window there from the line of stores that stayed open for the locals, picking up medicines and coffee beans on their way home from late dinner.
The only light through our window now comes from the track at the high school abutting our property. Sometimes, the timer doesn't work and it shines all day and night, a beacon for dumb bugs and wandering teenagers looking for a place to go in a town with nothing, not even gas stations, open past ten. Tonight, the beacon is for me, shining— a reflected bat signal of wakefulness on the ceiling. I sense Henry awake next to me, feel his restless breath. Though we've been married seven years, tonight we hold still under the covers. A détente. A cesura. An imaginary journey elsewhere, two people both wishing themselves gone.
We spend Saturday waiting for news that wouldn't come on a weekend and sorting through things in the house I grew up in. Small-town real estate isn't in demand, and after my dad died, I lost all momentum. The few filled containers are scattered like seeds across the upstairs hallway, where I wish they'd grow into something, anything different from the tin plates and canteens my father had sold in his shop. Tent poles of four lengths and three widths, tied into garbage bags. Boxes of moss-colored rucksacks. Cigar boxes with Boy Scout patches. All these things are piled on Formica tiles, which my father planned to redo his kitchen floor with. The tiling was a failure, a plan he'd had for two years and never executed. He'd had a strike-of-lighting kind of stroke, the ending-it-all kind where he must have toppled to the ground while on the phone with his tarp supplier.
Leo spends most of the day on my hip as I pack boxes, his eyes big. Every so often, his fingers wiggle in the direction of a pile of old sweaters or a Rubbermaid of discarded newspapers, and I let him run his tiny palms over them. "Soft," I say, or "Hard," because somehow I have to define the world for him. We stand near the window for ten minutes during our lunch break to watch the goldfinches come and go from the neighbor's feeder. Leo taps the window with his finger, and I think, feeling an unmovable boulder in my chest, "Oh, I am terrified."
Last Christmas, Henry bought me a biography of Joni Mitchell and discovered she had been a mother, but not mine. Biologically, she had been a mother. The song "Little Green" was about the child she gave birth to and who was adopted by another family. The biography talked about Joni and her daughter reuniting in the mid-nineties. I had texted a screenshot of a paragraph from the chapter to my father. "Guess I missed the invite to the family reunion."
He sent back a kiss face, a music note, and, inexplicably, a beach umbrella.
I would give anything to make fun of his horrible emoji choices, all still saved in a chat thread I won't delete. Hundreds of thousands of pixels of otherwise inexpressible things. He couldn't sing to me, record an album about us, but he could summon an entire beach vacation into a text thread to make me smile. He could define a family in a picture.
"I want a tent," I tell Henry after spending the day ripping off lengths of packing tape.
We bring home the tent, and I set it up in the backyard. Somehow, the lights from the high school track aren't as bright so low to the ground. Exhausted from sorting and worrying, I sleep all night in the tent, with Leo in the house like a distant territory.
On Sunday, I pack Leo in the carrier. He likes to rest his cheek on my breasts while we grocery shop. I think, at first, he is sleeping, but his habitual stillness makes it hard to tell. By some strange happenstance, there is no one else in the store, not anyone. I don't even see a staff member for ten minutes. I walk the dreamlike aisles and notice the pears are very ripe. I bag three. Manicotti noodles. Cans of peas and baked beans. One cylinder of off-brand oatmeal. I push my cart through the store and think of times when my father used to let me ride on the bottom rack of the cart, fingers trailing the floor. I used to pretend to be in an army ambush. I won't let Leo ride in the cart like that. Once, I got my fingers stuck in the wheel as it reeled sideways on a turn. My right index finger jammed inside and bled from the nail for two days. It is still tilted.
Signs of life appear at the two staffed checkout lines. One mustached man and one thin older woman, three stalls from each other, silently glance at me like I activated their sensors. I approach the man and place my things on the belt. They roll obediently forward like tin can soldiers, stopping at attention by the till. I hand over my credit card, and he packs our items into sacks.
"How old's your baby?" the thin woman asks from two lanes over.
"Seven months," I say, "Seven months in a week."
"Great," she says. "That's great," as though his current age is large in size or wonderful, not simply a fact or a prerequisite to becoming eight months old. It is, though. Great. I grew this entire person. Do farmers ever think this, staring at the produce trucks taking away a thousand acres of grain?
"Great," I echo, patting Leo's head. He isn't asleep.
"You take care now," she says.
We leave, taking as much care as we can.
I make an authentic Sunday dinner: roast beef, mashed potatoes, peas, and a frozen pie baked too long. I lose track of time without doing anything, really. Staring into space and thinking, the timer goes off, and I think, "Just a minute." And a minute becomes ten and we have burned peaches. One morning, on the way to work, I listened to a report on NPR explaining that it wasn't an illusion, that time truly sped up as you aged. The brain's alarm clock, which signifies the turning of every year, winds down, and so when the holidays, your dead father's birthday, spring comes around, it's a surprise. How much slower time went as a kid. I remember the hour I spent crying after my fight with my neighbor. I'd told her she was ugly and cried so hard that I threw up. It felt like a week.
I call into work on Monday, unable to face the phone call or, worse, the online medical chart notification, which is surely on its way. I go to my father's house, intent on destruction. Leo watches from a bouncy chair while I throw entire boxes of things away. Bank deposit receipts and old cash register tapes coil together in a box like paper snakes. I call a man from our town’s Facebook page to bring a dumpster. Standing in the driveway, waiting for the truck, I notice my father's mailbox. I had, surely, turned off his mail. Right? Or, in the dizzy passage of time, the unending blur of motherhood and grief and work and life and burning dinners, did I forget?
I notice the mailbox is mostly empty. Mostly, but for a few town shoppers to "Resident" and a thin envelope addressed to me, which is probably how it escaped the hold I now definitely remember placing.
My heart stops at the sender's name, and I push my finger, the bent one, under the envelope's shoulder to nudge it open.
Joni was so sorry to hear about the death of your father, the letter begins in a sweet, gentle cursive. She could not attend the services in his honor, but she hopes you feel her earnest wishes for a continuation of his memory in your life. The ones we love are never lost. With greatest sympathy,
And it was signed by a person I had never heard of and a parenthetical remark (Joni's assistant).
I want to burn it, hug it to my chest, yell at it. Is this what it is like to have a mother? Is this what it’s like to be a mother, or a daughter? To disappoint and disappoint and disappoint?
Leo watches me from my hip, large eyes round and solemn. My phone begins to ring as the dumpster comes down the street. My hands are full of a disappointing letter from my mother and a baby who should be crying, surely, at the loud noise. Or laughing, surely, at the rapturous sight of a dump truck. Instead, he is grim. You are grim, the doctor, probably, would point out. Leo is simply a product of us—Henry and me-- isn't he? Anything wrong with him is from inside one of us or back a generation. My fault.
The ringing goes on, but I can't pick up.
My father came to the hospital to visit me after I gave birth, and he gave Leo a check for three thousand dollars and a Boy Scout patch for me to sew onto his baby blanket.
My phone goes quiet.
"His first patch. The rest he's got to earn himself," my father said. The patch was for First Aid, a discontinued style of a heart with sutures and a needle.
Did he know, better than anyone, that this was the patch I needed? I'd earned? A suture to my heart when I pushed out my son, my trouble child, child of a trouble child, grandson and true inheritor of Joni Mitchell.
"Darling, I love you," I say to my son as we watch the dumpster park in the driveway. "Darling, I love you, would you please, please smile?"
Rachel Mans McKenny is an author and book reviewer from the Midwest. Her short stories have appeared in HAD, Split Lip, Electric Literature, and other places. You can find her at rachelmansmckenny.com or @rachelmansmckenny on Threads or Bluesky. Her favorite Joni Mitchel album is For the Roses.