The Grown Ups Read online

  Three months into this and Suzie finally was beginning to feel like a mother. She went over and lifted Leo off Michael’s chest, holding him high against her shoulder. “Hey, little man, hey there,” she murmured against his silky cap of hair. She felt him rooting around, his mouth open against her shoulder. He settled for gumming the skin with his sticky jaws.

  She glanced back at Michael. He was awake now but he looked out of it, and no wonder, considering he had just worked a twelve-hour shift. An hour earlier, when he had walked in the door, she had been sitting in bed with Leo resting on the tent of her knees. You would never have known it by their son’s sweet demeanor and spastic movements of joy, but he had been up for most of the night. Suzie calculated she had gotten roughly three hours of sleep in fifteen-minute increments. Her nipples were sore from nursing and she was pretty sure she smelled, since she couldn’t remember the last time she’d showered. Michael had taken one look at her as he reached for Leo and urged her to take a shower. She knew he was exhausted but wanted to spend time with Leo.

  Now Suzie said to Michael, “Go to bed.”

  Michael held out a hand. “I want you to come with me.”

  Suzie smiled. She would love to crawl back into the warm bed with Michael and sleep. Even if the sheets smelled musky and the bed was never made anymore. Last week she had found a dirty diaper under her pillow. Thankfully it was only pee and had been rewrapped securely with the sticky tabs. But still. A diaper in bed? Ugh.

  She shook her head. “Little man is happy and I’m going to put him in that bouncy thing and try to make sense of our lives. Or at least take out the garbage.”

  Michael shook his head in protest and yawned.

  “Go,” Suzie said again, feeling energized by the shower and the smell of shampoo in her clean hair. “Go.”

  She watched as Michael hoisted himself from the couch. He undid the buttons of his shirt as he walked to the bedroom, tugging it from the waistband of his pants. At the corner of the bed he kicked off his shoes, unzipped his fly, let his pants drop to the floor, and then fell facedown onto the mattress. Suzie turned off the lights and shut the bedroom door.

  Suzie looked at Leo. He was watching her, one corner of his mouth turned up in a half grin, his slick little baby-seal head wobbling only slightly on his strong neck. “Come on, buddy boy, let Daddy sleep. I’m going to teach you things in the kitchen that will make all the girls love you one day.” She hoisted him on her hip, picked up the bouncy seat with her free hand, and set Leo up on the floor by her feet near the sink.

  Several hours later the dishwasher was humming, the sink and surfaces were clear, the garbage was gone and with it all of the mysterious and moldy takeout containers from the refrigerator shelves. Suzie had stopped to feed Leo and put him back in the bouncy seat, and then she had dumped some pasta sauce into a saucepan and put water on to boil. It wasn’t much, and she couldn’t help but imagine what Sam would have to say about the choice of meal, but at least she and Michael would have a civilized lunch. She even went so far as to set two places at the table, reasoning that Leo, now dozing in the bouncy seat, would be good for at least another hour.

  She was going through a pile of mail, paying bills, ripping up junk, when the bedroom door opened and Michael appeared in his boxers and a T-shirt. His face still had sleep creases and he stretched as he shuffled toward them. Suzie pointed to sleeping Leo and Michael’s expression softened. He lifted his nose and sniffed the air. “Is this what heaven smells like?”

  “Tomato sauce and disinfectant?”

  Michael nodded and Suzie laughed. She got up to dump the pasta into the boiling water and poured Michael a cup of fresh coffee. He came up behind her, slipped his hands under the giant T-shirt, and cupped her full breasts in his hands. “I love nursing,” he said as he kissed the side of her head.

  Suzie laughed. Her first instinct was to bat his hands away but she missed him, she missed this kind of touching. They had gone back to having sex when her doctor had cleared her at six weeks, but with their schedules it wasn’t remotely a regular occurrence.

  “How fast can you make this happen?” Suzie joked. But as she leaned into him she could feel that Michael’s erection pressing into her lower back was serious.

  Michael drew out her nipples with his fingers. Suzie gasped and felt them tingle, not unlike when Leo’s mouth latched on and her breasts flooded with milk. Abruptly Michael dropped his hands and tugged on the corner of her shirt. Suzie reached to lower the flame under the pasta and followed Michael to the couch. He slid her sweatpants over her hips and down around her ankles as Suzie guided Michael inside of her. The sense of urgency was overwhelming and exciting. She closed her eyes and lifted her hips, meeting his thrusts with her own. She felt warmth spread in her lower belly, a delightful pressure that built quickly as they moved.

  Within minutes Michael came hard, moaning deeply into the crook of her neck. Suzie laughed, shushing him, making him laugh as well, his shoulders and chest trembling against her. It felt like they were teenagers, rushing through sex for fear they’d be caught. Only now the person catching them was all of three months old.

  Suzie held on to Michael tightly, her hands clasped against his lower back, enjoying the weight of him pressed against the length of her. “I’m sorry,” he murmured into her hair. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  Suzie ran a hand through his hair. He was still half inside her. The space between her thighs felt wet and warm and she didn’t want to get up, would have liked him to reach down and touch her until she came, but she smelled the sauce bubbling away and was sure the pasta was turning into a starchy mess and she didn’t want to wake Leo. “I love you,” she whispered into Michael’s ear.

  “I love you more, Suzie,” Michael echoed as he slid a hand down her body, over her still puffy belly, and down between her legs until it was her turn to moan. “I love you more.”

  Later, Michael held Leo on his lap while they ate the pasta in front of the TV. A baseball game was on and Michael was explaining the rules to Leo, who was heavy-lidded. Suzie took advantage of the quiet and cleared the plates, cleaned the kitchen, and turned off the lights even though Michael protested her getting up to clean. There was a secret part of her that liked the fact that she was able to tackle so much in a day, conquer the Mount Everest of domesticity.

  Michael got up and carried Leo to the crib in the corner of their bedroom. He looked over at Suzie and she nodded. It was time Leo got used to falling asleep there instead of in his parents’ arms. Suzie held her breath as she watched Michael lean over the lowered bar and place Leo on his back in the center of the mattress. He draped a light cotton blanket around Leo’s lower body.

  Suzie glanced at their bed. Michael had made it up with fresh sheets and she couldn’t wait to put her head on the pillow. He must have done it after he took a shower, while she was finishing up their meal. Her heart squeezed and her eyes filled with tears. Her hormones were still out of whack, but she was also crazy in love with her husband and her son. If someone had told her years ago that one day all this would be possible, she would have laughed in his face. She hadn’t come from this; she had never known this as normal. She had imagined it was for other people, certainly not people like her.

  The travesty of this all was that her mother, still sober and perfectly able, had seen Leo only once, while Hunt, who had been with Leo multiple times in his three months on earth, only sometimes knew who Leo was. It broke Suzie’s heart to watch Hunt’s slow degeneration. The moments she had seen the panic in Hunt’s eyes haunted her.

  Of all the kindnesses Hunt had shown her, the one Suzie would always remember was after the last miscarriage. They had been at Paradox Lake and he had asked her to go out in the canoe. Everyone had been tiptoeing around her, afraid to upset her even more, and while she understood why, she hated being pitied. The canoe ride was the last thing she had wanted to do, but she had gone because the alternative was being stuck in the cabin on one of the twin beds i
n the stifling attic, berating the state of her body and all that it rejected.

  Hunt had offered to let her sit and not paddle; he said he would do all the work. But Suzie had refused to be idle. She took a paddle and fell in sync with Hunt as they traversed the length of the lake. When they reached a grove where papery river birch clustered in feathery clumps along the banks, Hunt guided them into the shallow water and presented Suzie with an old red plaid thermos that had been rolling around by his feet. Suzie took a large gulp and winced: the thermos was filled with Hunt’s special summer mix of bourbon and sweet tea, and the liquor burned her throat.

  They had sat in silence, watching the great blue heron on an island nest built for one. Suzie was aware of the ripples of fish beneath the surface of the water and the thick, velvety push of the waves as they rocked back and forth in the canoe, passing the thermos to each other. Eventually Hunt screwed the lid back on the thermos and lifted his paddle and they left the sanctuary of trees and headed back to the camp. Suzie had let something go that afternoon, and Hunt had given her the space to do it.

  Michael turned to her now, a triumphant look on his face. He pointed to the bed and Suzie crawled gratefully up the length of the mattress until her head hit the pillow. Those three broken hours of sleep she’d had the night before had finally caught up to her and she knew her eyelids would not remain open for much longer. Michael settled in behind her, his familiar weight fitting against her curves, his arm tossed possessively over her hip, for a late-afternoon nap. Suzie drifted off to sleep listening to the sounds of her husband and son snuffling every so often in their sleep, and realized that if she could freeze a moment in time this would be it.

  Suzie finally agreed to meet her father. Ignoring him was taking too much effort. The calls and the gifts that went unanswered and returned, the silence from her mother. She had told herself she was past caring, but then she looked at Leo. She wanted to be able to tell him one day that she allowed him to give her father a chance. That she didn’t make that choice for him. She wasn’t sure how far she would be able to take it, but, as she had told Michael, she was just going to commit to this one time. Michael had hugged her for a long time after she had told him that, and she knew without his saying anything that he was thinking of his own father.

  She pushed Leo in his stroller, expertly navigating the lunch crowd perched on benches, swan necks bent over their cell phones, around to the boathouse in Central Park. At first she couldn’t find him. It had been years; the last time in her mother’s hospital room, and that time, like most times, anger and exhaustion had colored her impression of him. When she saw him standing by the water in a dark jacket he looked shorter and older, his full head of bushy hair now almost entirely silver. From the hunch of his shoulders he gave off an air of defeat. At one time that would have given Suzie a great deal of satisfaction, but now she just felt sad and tired.

  Her father smiled as he walked toward them. When Suzie stopped he knelt down in front of the stroller and stared for a long time. Suzie pulled back the hood and fumbled with the blankets around Leo’s sleeping face.

  Her father stood slowly. “What a man. What a fine little man, Suzie. Mazel tov.”

  Suzie nodded, unable to say anything. Her father sounded like his father, a man who had died when Suzie was nine. Her grandfather’s speech had been liberally sprinkled with Yiddish phrases, and to him she had always been his little bird, his faigelah, as he called her. From the few times she had visited his apartment in Brooklyn she recalled the peculiar odor of boiled eggs and fish—that and her father’s disdain for her grandfather’s refusal to give up his old world ways, which Suzie assumed now meant his religious traditions.

  “Was there a bris?”

  Suzie shook her head. “Circumcision in the hospital.”

  “Of course,” her father said quickly as he shoved his hands in his pockets. Leo, waking up, made a little squawking noise, and Suzie’s father said, “Would it be easier to walk?”

  Grateful for something to do, Suzie pushed ahead without answering. Her father caught up to her left elbow. “How is Michael? His job must be challenging, especially with a new son at home.”

  “He’s a wonderful father,” Suzie snapped.

  “I wouldn’t expect any less, Suzie Q.”

  Suzie flinched at his use of her nickname. Her heart was racing. She needed to take a breath and calm down. “It’s, you know, hard right now. We always feel tired and never feel like there’s enough time. But we both know this will pass soon enough. I return to work next week.”

  “I see.”

  “Did you think I was going to give up being a doctor?”

  “Not at all. I know how hard you worked.”

  “You do?”

  “Your mother talks about you. And I know you, Suzie. You are my child. You have my work ethic.”

  “I do?”

  Her father laughed. “Yes, you do.” He paused. “Was that a serious question?”

  Suzie shrugged. Her entire life he had always been at work, but she had never actually imagined him working, given everything else he was doing.

  “I appreciate you seeing me, Suzie. I know you could have chosen not to.”

  “Well, with Leo,” Suzie started. “I never wanted him to think I kept him from his grandfather.”

  “That sounds like you might be willing to try this again? Another meeting?”

  Suzie stopped pushing the carriage and looked at her father. “I don’t trust you. We don’t have a relationship. But I don’t want my child to grow up without a grandfather, so I’m here. Can that be enough for today?”

  Her father stared at her and she stared back. There was a shadow of salt-and-pepper stubble on his jawline. “Absolutely, that can be enough. I’ll do whatever you wish, Suzie.”

  Suzie nodded. “Can I tell you something? I hate tennis. I never played tennis. All those times I told you about matches I’d won? All those times I took your money for a new racket?” Suzie swallowed hard. Her ears felt hot. “I never set foot on a court. I wanted to see if you ever showed up at a match. I wanted you to catch me in the lie. I wanted you to care enough. But you never did.”

  Her father exhaled. He didn’t seem to have anything to say in response. Suzie leaned on the bar and pushed the stroller hard so he had to work hard to catch up to her. By the time he did, she could hear his labored breathing. But he didn’t complain and he didn’t ask her to slow down. He matched her pace and they continued the loop out of the park in silence.

  Bella’s bright red coat was visible as soon as Suzie exited the hospital. She was already in line at the falafel stand across the street, holding a place for their dinner date. Whenever Bella was teaching late they tried to connect at least once a week. When Suzie had been on maternity leave that often meant Bella’s keeping her company while she nursed. Slowly they’d progressed to coffee and walks with Leo in the stroller, and now that Suzie was back at work, a quick dinner. Suzie had been back at the hospital for a month now and she missed Leo and Michael even though they were both there at the hospital with her. At least Leo in the hospital day care and Michael on staff made it easier for her to steal moments with each of them during the day, something she wouldn’t have if they had left Leo with a sitter at home.

  She waved to Bella and crossed the street, breaking away from the chaos of the hospital entrance. Bella gave her an up-and-down appraisal as she handed her a falafel sandwich. “You are going to freeze, Suzie.” Bella’s cheeks were as red as her coat from the cold and most of her pale hair was stuffed under a bulky knitted cap.

  Suzie glanced down at her lightweight cotton doctor’s coat; underneath she wore black wool pants and a black turtleneck sweater. She had run from the hospital as soon as she could get away for dinner, afraid to go to the break-room for her coat in case anyone else stopped her to consult or chat. Michael and Leo had already left for the day. Suzie was on call that night and anticipated a long, restless night on the break-room couch. “I don’t ev
en feel it,” she said, unwrapping the sandwich and taking a big bite. It was true that the stifling air in the hospital was overwhelming. Her sinuses were constantly clogged, her head stuffed with cotton. She worried that she was setting Leo up for a lifetime of colds by sticking him in the day care. She took a deep breath. The cold felt refreshing. She had to stop beating herself up.

  Bella shook her head and said jokingly, “Doctors.”

  Suzie shrugged. They walked the half block down to a little park and took the only empty bench. To Suzie it looked like an outpost of the hospital: a mix of workers, maybe some families, everyone united in escaping the hospital air for a little while.

  “How’s my favorite baby?” Bella asked, licking hummus from her fingertips.

  “Delicious,” Suzie sighed. “He’s the best little man ever. He smiles all the time and talks—well, you know, I think he’s talking. We totally understand each other. He rolls over back to front, tries to get up on all fours and move.”

  Bella giggled. “How’s the other man in your life? And you can leave out all the cute things he does like talking and rolling over.”

  Suzie laughed. “He’s the best dad. He gets up with Leo if I’ve been on call, he changes diapers, he gives baths, he feeds him a bottle now that I don’t nurse all the time. He does this cute thing where he gets very serious and has what he calls ‘man talks’ with Leo. Last one I overheard was about the importance of saying you’re sorry.” She frowned. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t do enough for him. I wish I could take away the stress and the pressure of work, Hunt . . .”

  Bella chewed and swallowed a bite of pita. “I don’t know how much longer Marguerite is going to be able to keep this up. Keeping tabs on him is getting to be difficult. And I know we all try to pitch in, but he really prefers her. But the tricky thing is that Hunt’s good days still outnumber the bad, so it’s easy to get fooled into thinking everything is okay and then bam, it turns.”

  “That’s typical,” Suzie said slowly. “While the patient is cognizant he learns to compensate for the times he is less so.” Suzie took the last bite of falafel and reached for the coffee on the bench to wash it down. “There’s a drug trial. Michael asked Hunt’s doctor and he thinks Hunt is too symptomatic to see any results, but he’s willing to give it a shot, probably more for Michael than Hunt.” She paused. “I know this is so irrational but when I think that my own father is perfectly fine when someone like Hunt . . .”