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You wish to know, so I tell you. But if I hear one "I'm sorry," I might have to shang-hi somebody.
“Happy birthday.”
The memories come flooding back. I can remember it all. It’s so clearly ingrained in my mind, not even the years past have scrubbed many details away.
When Mother came home, she gathered the rest of us kids into the living room. I snuggled up to Alan, still drowsy from my nap. Sasha wiggled on Osanna’s lap, impatient from the moment she sat down. Osanna and Alan themselves were old enough to actually pay attention with minimal shows of boredom.
“Kids, your daddy and I went to the hospital today-” Mother began.
“Were you hurt, Mommy?” I interrupted anxiously.
“No, Kennedy, I wasn’t hurt. Do I look hurt?”
“Then why did you go to the hopsicle? Did you need a booster shot?”
“No, Kennedy,” insisted my father. “Just let your mommy finish, okay?”
Alan took the arm he’d wrapped around me and applied his hand firmly over my mouth while Mother continued, “Anyway, we went to the hospital, and we found something out. You see, we’re going to have a baby. You’re going to have a new little brother or sister.”
Alan’s hand dropped from my lips like a stone. Osanna’s grip went limp, allowing the struggling Sasha to scramble down from the couch and crawl back to her toys on the kitchen floor.
I knew, even in my three-year-old mind, what this meant. Another kid like Sasha was going to be running around here. I wish my mind hadn’t been so astute. Or maybe I wish Sasha and I were older, and Sasha could be astute with me. At her age, she hadn’t a clue what Mother was talking about. As for Osanna and Alan, I could tell what their feelings were: new baby equaled big no.
I knew what I had to do. My mother looked so happy. Standing there, smiling so expectantly, I just couldn’t bring myself to break her heart.
“I like babies, Mommy. Except when they do gross stuff, like go poop in their diapers.”
“Well, you did that too when you were a baby, Miss Kenny-Dee,” laughed Mother, swinging my up into her arms, glad to have an ally. “You’ll just have put up with it.”
For weeks after that, I was swept up in the world of newborns. Mother dragged me everywhere to do baby-related activities. Before long, I was going along with Mother out of a real sense of excitement over this new entity in my life, rather then a sense of duty to the woman who raised me.
The only place Mother didn’t take me was the hospital. I was not at all fond of it, despite my overly frequent visits. The day she and my father came home from finding out the baby’s gender, I looked eagerly at them as they revealed the child growing inside her was a boy, and we would have a new little brother. In my childish glee and innocence, I
didn’t notice the hint of worry in my parents’ eyes.
The weeks went on, drawing nearer and nearer to the due date. In the back of my mind my other self –present even at three-almost-four– had an itching feeling that Mother hadn’t gone for this many doctor’s visits when she’d had Sasha. However, the front of my mind, the most obstinate of the four voices, pushed that aside, saying Mother was older now, and what did the back of my mind know about babies and doctors, huh?
When Mother was put on bed rest nearly four months before she was due, the front of my mind brushed it off as exhaustion from dealing with my brother and sisters and I. I read Dr. Suess and Little Critter to her, which made her smile, a rare thing those days. She let me touch where the baby was, something that confused me. I didn’t remember seeing the bulge at that particular spot last time, or on any other pregnant ladies I’d seen before.
Then, one month later, Mother was rushed to the hospital. Adrenaline rushed through me as Alan explained she was going to have the baby taken out, because it wasn’t doing good things to Mother. He began walking back and forth across the kid’s waiting area, until I asked what he was doing.
“It’s called pacing, Kenny. It’s a grown-up thing, you wouldn’t understand,” he explained impatiently.
So, just to show him I could so understand, I began to try this pacing thing. After about ten back-and-forths, I began to get dizzy. Flopping down next to Osanna, I stared at her for a while. Finally she noticed, and glared irately at me.
“What?” she demanded.
“What ‘cha doing?”
“I’m thinking, Kennedy. Is there something wrong with that?”
“No,” I replied, and continued to stare as she turned back towards Sasha, who was sleeping on her leg.
“Kennedy Leanne, cease that unseemly staring right now,” she ordered. As I did not know the meaning of “cease” or “unseemly,” I stopped only because of her tone.
I tried to play in the corner, talking softly to my invisible friend, Milton, but I couldn’t concentrate. He tried to comfort me, but Milton was like me, more comfortable at fake tea parties than hospital waiting rooms.
The tension that comes with a bad feeling hung in the room. Alan knew it, and Osanna knew it, and I thought maybe even Sasha, tossing and turning on the floor, knew it too. I didn’t know what it was, but all four of the sides of my mind –front, back, left, and right– were total agreement.
Something was really wrong.
Hours later, my father came into the room from where he’d been with Mother. He looked so forlorn and defeated at first I thought Mother and the baby were dead. Then he beckoned us through the door, and I knew at least that wasn’t true.
Mother lay still on the bed, her eyes were open, glassy and unseeing, but very much alive.
“Where’s Benjamin?” I asked, impatient to meet my new baby brother, whose name I had helped pick out (or so I thought; in reality, the name had picked ages ago, I just happened to agree).
Alan and Osanna tried to hush me, in their instinctive knowing, but my father picked me up and silently took me from the room down the hall to a large window in the wall. Looking through, I saw rows of plastic boxes, some holding babies, others empty. One along the side of the room held the tiniest baby I had ever seen. Tubes ran from every surface imaginable. I stared at this baby for a while, then asked again, “Where’s Benjamin?”
He just pointed at the tube baby.
“What’s wrong with him, Daddy?” I queried.
“He’s sick, Kenny. Very sick,” he said softly.
“Is he going to die?”
My father paused for a long time, then choked out, “… Maybe, Kenny. We don’t know yet.”
As a three-year-old, death held little meaning for me. “Will he come back to visit us if he does?” I thought it might be something like moving away, as a day care friend of mine had done. She had come back to visit often.
Again he hesitated. “No, honey, he won’t.”
“Oh,” said I. “Well, that stinks.”
Something that might have been a laugh gurgled in my father’s throat. “Yes, dear, it does.”
“Can I go in?”
“I’d prefer you di-” he started, but I had already scrambled out of his arms and pushed through the heavy door.
I stood before Benjamin’s plastic tank, looking at all the tubes. I wondered why he had them all. Gazing into his sweet little face, I felt myself growing older. How could he be happy in a tank? Why was he going to go away and not come back?
Later I would find out that he was one of very very few ectopic babies to live to be born. Later I would find out that during Mother’s c-section, the doctor had cut in the wrong place, mortally hurting Benjamin. Later I would find out that death was a permanent thing.
But later wasn’t now.
My father caught me just as I tried to stick my hand into the box. He dragged me back into the waiting room, where my brother and sisters sat in silence. He drove us home in silence, where we ate in silence and returned to the hospital in silence.
I never knew silence could be so deafening.
We children slept in the waiting room while my father sat with Mother in her room. Sometime in the morning I woke up suddenly, and I just knew. I didn’t burst into tears. I didn’t scream for my mother or cling to Alan or ask Osanna questions. I just stared out a window at the rising sun.
My father came out and told us what I had somehow already known.
A week later, Mother came home from the hospital.
My birthday passed, as did Osanna’s and Sasha’s and Alan’s.
And life went on.
It was easier to look forward than back.
Now, years past, looking down at the tombstone, I wonder. Who would you have been, Benjamin? What would you have become?
Then I say it just again, because it’s all that makes sense.
“Happy birthday.”
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