“We can’t do that, honey,” Nurse Nancy said.
Howie realized his mistake; he didn’t say the magic word. Gulping for air between sobs, he said desperately: “Take him out, please.”
“We can’t do that.”
“PLEASE!” Howie bellowed, unable to keep his voice down any longer. “PLEASE!”
Alarmed, Nurse Nancy turned to look for assistance, and was relieved to see the Fells hurrying toward her.
“Is everything all right?” Ernest asked, taking his sobbing son from the nurse’s arms.
“I think seeing the baby in the incubator upset him,” Nurse Nancy said apologetically. She conveyed concern, but also seemed a little bit irritated.
Not-so-nice Nurse Nancy.
Howie nodded, then buried his face in his father’s chest. He wanted to forget seeing Baby Nathan like that, tiny and purple and in that incubator-thing. He wanted him to just be a baby. Just a regular, normal, healthy baby. His brother shouldn’t be kept in a box like that. It was wrong. (Incorrect, unnatural.)
It scared Howie in a way he had no words to describe. He didn’t like that feeling at all.
4
Chapter 3: LILA
Lila Golden Fell wasn’t the kind of woman who was good at making cakes. Nor was she good at baking, generally. Or crafting. Or décor. Homemaking: not her area of expertise.
This domestic deficiency made it difficult to socialize with the other women in the neighborhood. Like most young Ann Arbor wives, Lila was married to a professor. But her husband taught at the community college, not the university, which was one strike against her. Being a former career woman herself was another.
Lila used to be a reporter. When she found out she was pregnant with Howie, she stopped working. Four years later and now with two children, she began to fear she was not “taking a break,” as she kept telling everyone. She was afraid she might have gotten stuck on the Mommy track. Lila loved Howie, and Nathan, too. But damn, she missed deadlines, cranking out stories and pinning down sources. She missed the cigarettes, the cranky editors, the clacking typewriters and ink-stained fingertips. She was good at writing articles and punching up headlines.
She was not good at writing out flowery words on the pale buttercream landscape of a box-made vanilla cake. The violently blue icing looked jarring, jagged; the sugary letters were barely legible in their weak declaration—“Happy 1st Birthday, Baby Nathan!”
“Mama,” Howie said, tugging on her apron strings. “Daddy isn’t awake yet.”
“It’s early,” Lila said, wiping a strand of hair from her forehead. The gesture left a bright blue streak of frosting she would not notice for another hour, at which point she would not care.
“Baby Nathan is sleeping, too.”
“Yes, well, that’s good. That’s why Mommy is able to make this cake for his party later.”
“Can I see?”
“Give me a minute, sweetheart.”
“I’ll be patient.”
“Good.” Lila gave her son a wobbly smile, embarrassed at the idea of him seeing her cruddy handwriting. Maybe she could fix it, adjust the “B,” make that “y” a little loopier…
“Will there be a lot of people at the party?” Howie was a constant conversationalist. He was always talking, to anyone and everyone—his parents, neighbors, strangers, sometimes rocks or sticks if no one else was nearby. “Will it be a real soiree, like Grandma says?”
“Well, a pseudo-soiree, anyway,” Lila says.
“What’s ‘pseudo’?”
“Your word of the day, Howie.” Lila never believed in baby talk, despite her neighbors assuring her it was better to talk to babies at a level they understood. Technically, Lila did talk to her baby at a level he could understand; it was just a much higher level than most other babies.
She never used made-up words, or even searched for simpler words. She enjoyed finding clear definitions for words when she explained them to her son. It was like introducing him to a new friend. “Pseudo means… something artificial. A sham. An… imitation, trying to pass as the real thing. Usually a poor imitation, or something mimicked.”
“Sue-dough,” Howie said, sampling the word. “Pseudo. Good one. I like it. Pseudo. Why will it only be a pseudo-soiree?”
“Oh, ah, I was only kidding,” Lila assured him, looking at the cake and realizing that repeated touch-ups of the letters had only rendered them more illegible. “It won’t be a pseudo-soiree, it will be a real party. The Millers are coming, and the Helmanns, and the D’onofrios. And your dad’s parents should be getting in town in time for the party, too.”
“But your parents won’t be here, because they’re dead.”
“Right. They won’t be there because they’re dead. If they showed up, it’d be creepy.”
Lila was always cavalier about referencing her long-dead parents. She should have mourned them more; and she did, occasionally, fantasize about how wonderful they must have been. But she never knew them. They had the foresight to hand her off to some cousins who were fleeing Lithuania to start a new life in America; they put their baby daughter in the hands of those cousins, promising to come for her as soon as they could afford fare to the new world. Then they died in concentration camps before they could make good on that promise.
The cousins who brought Lila to America with them, David and Sarah Golden, were perfectly nice. But they hadn’t really planned on the life sentence of a child. They provided her with what she needed, but not with much else. Maybe that’s why Lila never did well with the other mothers in her neighborhood; she never had a relationship with her own.
“Are you done now? Can I see the cake?”
“Sure,” Lila said, putting on a cheerful voice, lifting Howie to see her handiwork.
“That’s a sad cake,” Howard said.
“No, it’s happy. It says ‘Happy first birthday, Baby Nathan.’”
“I can read the words,” her toddler reminded her. “I mean, mostly. That ‘y’ is basically just a blob, and that ‘H’ looks like a guillotine. It’s a sad cake.”
“Yeah, you’re not wrong,” she sighed. “Tell you what. Instead of sad, let’s call it pseudo-happy. Now. I’m going to start setting the chairs up in the backyard. Why don’t you read until your Daddy and brother wake up? If Baby Nathan is up first and starts crying, just come get me.”
“Okay,” Howie said agreeably, and trotted off to find his book.
Lila didn’t want to know what book he was reading. The last one he finished was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A toddler choosing Mark Twain over Dick and Jane was disconcerting, especially since he was raising some pretty astute questions about slavery. She was in trouble, having a kid that smart. One more thing she couldn’t talk about with the other mothers.
Not that their children were unintelligent; Anita D’onofrio was a piano prodigy, and Jack Miller was “a math whiz” (according to Howie). But brainy babies didn’t seem to be the other mothers’ goal. For them, as long as their children were clean and well-dressed, quiet at all times, and said please-and-thank-you-ma’am,