Chang-Rae Lee - Aloft

But when I let go of her hand to turn and taxi Donnie back to the terminal it falls limply between us. I look over and her head is thrown back, her eyes closed, the band of her headset scraping at the side window, and for a second it feels just like that one summer when I was taking us home at the end of her failed runaway junket, when after the first couple of hours I truly wasn't angry at all, and was even secretly pleased, in fact, to be driving down the straight-shot highway as I watched her sleep the beautiful sleep of her at-last-exhausted adolescence, the bronzed arid palettes of the Dakotas rushing by at eighty-five.

"Baby?"

And when I look once again, I'm confused, for her face and throat, I think, are surely not cast in such a light-shaded stone, or wan papier-mache; they can't be that null newsprint color.

When I undo the seat belt and pull her over she slumps sideways on me with such a natural drape that I'm almost sure everything will be perfectly fine, my girl's just tired, and as we jounce along the paneled tarmac, it's like both of us are now guiding this little ship in, both of us at the controls.

LIFE S T A Y S T H I C K A N D B U S Y, on the ground.

Rita, my sweet never-at-rest, stands at the stove making today's lunch of grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches (and ones without ham for the kids) while I set the dining room table with plastic utensils and cups and paper napkins and plates.

She's already prepared the cucumber and tomato salad, and a tray of homemade brownies for dessert, and for my contribution to the meal I've emptied a bag of rippled potato chips into a bowl and opened a fresh warm jar of gherkins (the pantry closet, unfortunately, run through with hot-water pipes). Along with the brats' juice boxes and raspberry seltzer for Rita and Eunice, and because it's an unusually mild October Saturday, and because I simply wish to, put out a six-pack of light beer for us guys, which I'll have stowed in the freezer for a short stretch before, so that the first sip feels almost crystalline, like tiny ice pops on the tongue.

Pop, not amazing to report, wasn't wild about this at first, but he's grown into a fan. He puts in cans for himself now, though half the time he forgets and plucks one out of the nonfreezer section of the fridge and instead I have to throw away the burst ones regularly. But I don't mind. You could say we've all had to come around in the last few weeks, dealing with one another's daily (and especially nightly) functions and manners and habits and quirks, which in themselves of course are thoroughly in-consequential, and one hopes not half as telling of our characters as are our capacities for tolerance and change. Perhaps from this perspective we blood, relational, and honorary Battles should be considered a pretty decent lot, for we've been mutually permissive and decorous and even downright nice, if nice means being mostly willing, mostly communicative. This doesn't preclude of course the periodically pointed communication, as Eunice aired earlier today after breakfast while she was cleaning the bathrooms, her self-appointed Saturday chore. As the kids were settling in to a solid four-hour block of Nick Jr. on the tube and Jack was showing Pop the work going on outside, with me heading down to the basement to finish constructing the wings on a balsa-framed model of Donnie (a hobby I haven't taken up since youth), Eunice marched out to the kitchen wielding a wet toilet brush in her yellow rubber-gloved hands and called for a conference on the Problem of Hair. Apparently with just two bathrooms for the seven of us we are steadily shedding enough of it to weave a hallway runner, which, though not as disgusting as dried pee on the toilet seat (a snuck glance by her at Pop), has resulted not just in a furry feeling underfoot but a serious clog in the sink and tub drains. Jack piped in about people not wind-ing up the water hoses, and I added a note on the strange desire to illuminate empty rooms, and it was only when Rita arrived bearing grocery bags of foodstuffs and asking if she'd just missed Paul (Yes, ma'am) did we all clam up and retire to our respective tidier-than-thou corners.

Paul, who despite my protests insists on sleeping in the basement behind a sheet pinned to a clothesline and so tends to stay out of our hair, as it were, would probably not partake in the col-loquium anyway, as he has more serious things on his mind than prickly domesticities. Just before Rita arrived for her Saturday visit to cook and clean a bit and then take me away for a night, he departed as he does each morning for St. Jude's Hospital, where in the preemie unit his son and my grandson, Barthes Tae-jon Battle, all 4 pounds 8 ounces of him, sleeps inside a clear plastic boxed crib. Twice a week I'll make the trip with him, but of course he goes every day, sometimes returning home and going back at night, and from what I can see and hear talking to the nurses, he has the same routine each day. He'll stop by the cafeteria first and get a large tea, and if the baby is sleeping or in a state of "quiet alert" he'll read aloud from the pile of books he brings in his knapsack, hours and hours from volumes of poetry or novels or the literature-studies journals containing critical es-says of Theresa's, these last of which I can hardly understand but like to listen to anyhow in the same way I suspect the baby is not knowing but still listening intently, the purely plucked tones of Paul's calm writerly voice like an incantation, like a spoken dream. He'll read until the baby wakes, and then rock him and play with his unworldly tiny fingers and toes, small and tender enough to appear nearly transparent, hardly seeming to qualify as bone, and then get the boy suckling from an equally diminutive bottle, which the kid has always taken to quite well, vora-ciously in fact (indication enough that he's ready for Battle).

Whenever I'm accompanying, Paul will hand him over to me for a stint, and though without fail I'll play the ham-handed dolt for the cute, hefty nurses there's zero chance that I don't know what I'm doing. When I cradle his body in hardly two hands it seems to me I'm holding a refinement rather than something premature, too young or too small, a perfection of our kind that needs no more special handling than an unwavering attention, which m ght be object lesson enough. Each time I'll examine him closely, and note that his pixie face is distinctively un-Caucasian, not much of a beak to speak of, the eyes almost like stripes in the skin, and the only thing that makes me pause for a half second is not that he doesn't look anything like me, which is how it has to be, but that I can't quite see his mother in him either, not yet, anyway, as he is an exact replica of the infant Paul's parents have shown us in pictures from his baby album. But maybe it's better this way for Paul and the rest of us, and that she's somewhere there, but not there, maybe mercifully good that in this one expression she's presently demurring.

But then the sweet runt will cry out (more like intensely mewl), or loudly crap in his diaper, and know some opinion's afoot. For some weeks now the baby has no longer been aided by any breathing apparatus or fed intravenously, but for another couple weeks will still be monitored round-the-clock for steady vitals and the right mix of blood gases and sugars. Then, if all looks cheery and flush, and he puts on weight with the formula, Paul will finally bring him home.

Naturally, the all-agreed-upon plan is to ensconce Paul and the baby in the master, jack and Eunice to sleep on the pullout in the family room for however long it takes for the second master bedroom addition to be completed, which by then should be close.

Jack has been directing the construction, the final project in the books for the venerable firm of Battle Brothers Inc., est. 1938, and which promises to be a sizable loss. But no mind. I told Jack to build it the way he wants, with the grade of finishes that will make him and Eunice happy and comfortable, and that whatever Richie Coniglio couldn't slush into the larger write-off of the business, I'd absorb. Jack, however, has done the whole job straight off the shelves at Home Depot and Lowe's, Eunice ordering the sale fabrics and furnishings from Calico Corners and Pot-tery Barn, the sort of floor-sample fancy just about anyone should be able to appreciate, and certainly counts as deluxe for me.