Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

Charlie comes to the hospital pretty consistently now. Twice Haim has had emergencies, been rushed to the PICU, and twice more Charlie has disappeared. But twice she has come back, each time staying away only a week or so, returning when Haim stabilizes. “At this point, I feel like I’m doing more harm than good if I stay,” she says, and I don’t point out to her how ludicrous this is because I know that she knows it, that she is saying this just to bridge the gap, just to speak, to tell me that these times won’t be like the holiday, that she will no longer disappear into silence. She’s also given me the international cellphone I hold in my hand now, and though she hasn’t today, she usually answers it. The times she has answered, I haven’t asked her to come back. I’ve tried to keep my voice even, tried to dryly just tell her the medical details, what’s going on. I would still probably be too angry to talk to her on the phone when this happens, but honestly, I’m just too tired.

She came back to me that night after the holiday ended. I could hear the key turning, the door to the flat opening in the dark, as I lay in bed and pretended to be asleep. This was the last question I had, the only one seeing the kinderklavier had not answered.

Of course, later we’d argue, my feelings about things swinging wildly, the memories of bitter lines of thought that I’d strung together in the long, lonely hours sitting in Haim’s room surfacing, reanimating me with anger.

“You think I don’t know what this makes me?” she said, on one of the nights the mothers were staying with Haim, in order to give us “some time to talk some things out.” “You think I don’t see how everyone in that hospital looks at me, you think I don’t know what even my own mother thinks of me?”

“And Haim,” I said. “Let’s not forget him. How does he look at you?”

Charlie exhaled, frustrated. I don’t know if she could even hear that I was trying to be cruel.

“He looks at me like I’m his mother, he looks at me like he loves me just as much as I love him; he’s our little boy, I know he is, I know that, but what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to say? That I’m a good mother? That I’m the kind of woman who can stand there and watch this thing, this little thing that is my whole heart, flesh of my flesh, that is years of our life, suffer and seize and bleed and die? I’m not that woman, I can’t do it, and do you think I don’t know that there’s something wrong with me, that there’s something wrong with me that I can’t fix, something so wrong with me that I didn’t even know it was there until the clearest possible situation, until he needed me the most and I couldn’t even look at him? You think you’re the only one that’s suffering because you stayed, because there’s nothing inside you that keeps you from watching that, but here I am: I have a little boy but I can’t be a mother, can’t even deny that there’s something completely lacking in me.”

Here she paused, bit a fingernail, looked out the window.

“And the thing is, the really tortuous thing is, Haim’s the only one who doesn’t look at me like that, he’s the only one who looks at me like that deficiency isn’t all I am. He’s the only one who even looks at me like a human being — the irony being, of course, that I’m not, that I’m the opposite, inhumane by anyone’s standard. But maybe that’s something about children, especially maybe terminal children. Maybe they are the only ones capable of true mercy. Maybe he can look at me and sense that I am fucked up, but still his mother — still want to be his mother. Maybe he can sense that the whole reason I had to leave was because I love him, because more than I couldn’t stand the thought of having to see the worst things happen to him, I couldn’t stand the thought of it happening and him looking up at me at maybe, I don’t know, like his last second of consciousness and seeing my pure horror, this panicked horror instead of love, this thing that I can’t hide.”

And on and on and on. I spoke very little during these conversations, eventually not even curious to see if, like a tunnel through the center of the earth, her endless in-turning, her frantic affected deprecation, her spiraling mental contortions might surface somehow back into the daylight of reason. There is nothing sadder than egotism in a partner you have given your life to, because it speaks mostly to the even greater egotism true of yourself in loving your partner in spite of it. Once the heart is colonized, you can’t ever get it back, not even by killing it.

“I mean, you think I don’t know what I’ve done to you?” she said, on another of these nights. “You think I can live with myself knowing what is probably the truth about all of this? You know what I thought right at the start while I was traveling? I thought, this is what I have to do because of the day after, you know, Haim’s suffering is, you know, over, and the day after that and the day after that. I thought this is what I have to do to still be with you , this is what loving you really is, because I knew you couldn’t be with me if something bad happened, if the final, you know, emergency happened and we were standing there in the PICU and you looked at me and saw that I couldn’t handle it, that I’d checked out, that I was not moved by any of it but horrified — filled with horror at the sight of our own son — I knew that you’d never be able to be with me after that, that even if you loved me you wouldn’t be able to be with me after that. And I didn’t want to start over. And I didn’t want you to have to start over. And I thought that maybe, just maybe, this is what really loving you required: sacrificing myself, my character, taking myself out of it and letting everyone think I’m horrible — in fact, being horrible — so that you and I may live after Haim doesn’t. And this is what I had to think about the whole time I was gone, this is the truth I had to face then and that I have to live with now — that it’s possible — I can barely even say it — that I love my husband more than my son, if only because my son is barely getting to live. There, it’s horrible, unbelievable, but I’ve said it, because it’s more important than anything to be honest.”

That time I stood up and grabbed Charlie’s face with one hand like you would a child who has something that should be spat out. I could feel her teeth through her cheeks.

“How about we try something new,” I said. “How about this: no pity. No pity, not for you, not for me, and not for Haim. No pity. And no forgiveness.”

That was all later, though. That is our recent history. That first night, when I heard her come in, as I listened to her undress in the dark of our room, I didn’t say anything. She slipped into bed, and I could feel her heat — her body always so warm. And she settled in to the position in which she always slept and, as we’d done when we were younger, I felt her leg slide over, barely touching her skin against mine. I let her, felt the warmth enter my body, though later I would feel stupid about it. What can I say? There was only so much room on the mattress with which I could escape her, and I was already as far as I could go.

•

There was a time when we were not yet these people. This is how memory works, resisting your own meaningful organization. For instance, if you asked me to remember now a single day from the heady period when, simultaneously, Haim was a newborn and I was getting the bulk of the rejections for fellowships, teaching jobs, and my novel manuscript, I couldn’t do it. But if you ask me about when Haim was a toddler, when we still lived in Iowa and I thought I might still be a writer, I am immediately back standing in the small canyon of buildings in downtown Iowa City on a brisk September late afternoon, watching the sun alight on Charlie’s reddish-brown hair, which she’d dyed darker because it was cheaper to maintain, as we waited for the homecoming parade to start and Haim ran around, weaving between the families in lawn chairs in front of us and babbling loudly.