Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

Ed also did not know this and it prompts Cindy to give him the rough and basically sympathetic outline of Engin’s visa situation during which Honey begins kicking. She squirms off my lap and I give her half of The Very Hungry Caterpillar , the half with the one apple two pears three plums four strawberries five oranges. She sits next to my right foot and turns these pages and sticks her little index finger through the holes that the very hungry caterpillar made. I order a greyhound. It’s nice to be in a bar, it’s nice to talk to people, even these people, it’s nice when your baby is sitting nicely behaved on the floor of the bar.

“So what do you think we should do about ISIS then?” Ed asks me and Jesus, ISIS, ISIS, ISIS, what fear we’re all living with. “I don’t think anyone has a good answer,” I say. “Sometimes I think we should just hammer the shit out of them and Bashar al-Assad too” and Ed laughs and we all cheers and I feel savage and parochial and bad, all this activated so quickly by $4 punch. Why do Americans always go back to the bomb. I feel my face bloom into a glorious Irish sunrise.

Honey is on her feet and halfway out of the bar before I register her absence, mostly from Cindy’s expression, and I turn to see as she trips and falls over the hummock where the linoleum of the bar ends and the patterned floral wall-to-wall of the restaurant begins. She pops up like a top and begins brushing her hands anxiously the way she does now when she falls down, but I sense immediately through the Irish sunrise that something is different. Unlike with most of her falls she starts yelling, one anguished yell followed by a silence that I know portends real screaming. I lunge for her, knocking the table with my ass and sending the greyhound onto the seat where I’d been sitting. I run across the bar and squat down and try to wrap her up in my arms but she is frantically wiping one hand on my chest and screaming like I’ve never heard. A streak of blood appears on the placket of my white shirt and my stomach becomes a lump of plutonium. I cannot get her to hold her hand still. I see the hostess and Cindy hovering in my peripheral vision, the hostess holding out a napkin which I take without looking at her. “Oh my sweet baby my sweet Honey, show Mama your finger,” but I still cannot get her to hold still and finally have to grip her wrist very hard to see that the fat part of her tiny middle finger, her little grape, has torn open. Her sounds are no longer supported by the scaffolding of crying and are just awful rhythmic shouts. I look up and the hostess points to the corner and the bathroom. I bundle up the baby and smash her hand to my chest and run through the dining room where there are about five tables of people. I stumble on the way and hear the clatter of silverware as a man in a cowboy hat swiftly stands to intervene, but I right myself before he can take my arm and I say “Thank you” and keep running. I shut the door behind me and lock it set Honey on the counter and turn on the faucet. “Amee-amee-amee” she says, which I think is Mommy, and she looks at me with an expression that is equal parts puzzlement and pain, and she cries again and continues to wipe her finger on my chest as blood wells up again and again, and my body tenses as I imagine the flap tearing further through her agitation and I know that if I do not get a hold of myself I will throw myself around this bathroom like a terrible screeching missile and I have to settle and suddenly I do, I am calm, and I say “It’s okay.” “It’s okay, baby.” “It’s okay.” It occurs to me that she has never seen blood in quantity before, never had any kind of bleeding injury, and I see that after she wipes a new red gout onto my shirt she uses her other hand to try and wipe it off. I have to angle her body down and forcibly hold her arm straight to get it under the cold faucet and droplets of blood spatter as she flails. Someone I think is Cindy knocks on the door and says “I’ve got a first aid kit here” and I open the door with one hand on writhing Honey on the counter and take the proffered kit. Cindy muscles in and raises an eyebrow. “Think she needs stitches?” she says, looking at my shirt. “I… think with a cut like this you are supposed to do cold water and then see if the bleeding will stop.” The toilet paper mechanism rattles as I snatch a long trail of toilet paper. “I have this toilet paper,” I tell her moronically. I hold Honey’s arm hard enough there will certainly be a bruise and I endeavor to isolate the wounded finger from its mates, and see that blood continues to well out of the flap. Cindy puts a stabilizing hand on Honey’s shoulder and I twist the toilet paper around the finger in a lumpy, inelegant turban.

I survey the blood on the counter and in the sink and the drops on the floor and point out to myself with the impeccable logic of the drunk and frazzled that there is more blood because I have been drinking and drinking thins the blood, before I remember that it is in fact Honey’s blood, and Honey hasn’t been drinking, only me. “If… if you could just bring me my bag I have some hand sanitizer and some wipes I can use to clean up.” Cindy looks at Honey, who has, thank sweet God above, restored some of her natural composure and is pointing at the little puddles of blood on the counter and saying “Dah! Dah! Dah!” and backs out of the bathroom. The sound of Honey’s cheery normal voice leaves me rubbery, the adrenaline flowing out like blood down the drain of a slaughterhouse. I perch Honey on my hip and hug her and say “What a good, brave girl, what a scary thing, so good and so brave.” She begins crying again but in a more controlled way when I try to look at the toilet paper to see if the blood has soaked through. A bird’s-eye inspection shows a bloom of blood on the inner layers, but none have breached the integrity of the outer layers.

I say “shhhhhhhh” to her and I smooth the damp hair down at the back of her head and across her forehead and she puts her head against my neck and then rears it back to smile into my face and say “Eeeeeh,” pointing at my chest and the blood all over my shirt and the skin of my neck with a tiny adult kind of concern, as though she’s saying “Oh dear, Mommy, you’ve soiled your shirt.” I look in the mirror and I see a murder victim, a mugshot, my hair a nest and blood everywhere. I wish Engin could see. I want to take a picture but it would be too cruel to send him. But just for me to remember, I fish my phone out of my pocket and take a gruesome portrait of mother with daughter.

Cindy is back at the door with the bag in one hand and the half of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in the other. I take the book first and set it on the counter away from the blood. I have been working to compose my face and as I reach for the bag I look at her and say “I’m so sorry—we crashed your and Ed’s date and then made this big fuss.” I smile with the corners of my mouth turned down ruefully and hope for an answering smile but she just says “Kids are hard” and I realize I don’t know whether she has any. I set Honey down on her feet and she holds on to my legs and puts her face between my knees. I get out the wipes from the bag and the hand sanitizer and I wipe away the blood and then squirt little plops of sanitizer down onto the counter. “You oughta think about a tetanus shot for her,” Cindy says, which unaccountably annoys me, of course she has had her damn shots, I even know the exact date because that’s the kind of thing I remember. “She had her second TDAP shot on the sixteenth of last month,” trying to sound authoritative. Honey raises her little arms to me and begins making her “heh heh heh” want-want-want sound and I pat her head and swiftly wipe away the last smear of blood from the bowl of the sink and run the faucet and pack away the wipes and the sanitizer and the half of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and pick up Honey and put her on my hip and kiss her hand and put her backpack over my shoulder and brush past Cindy who holds the door open. “Thank you,” I say. “I’ll just settle up.” When I exit the corridor into the restaurant the tables of patrons and the hostess look in my direction and I remember that I am covered in blood. The martyred Honey smiles a big smile and waves her wrapped-up mitt in the air and there is scattered applause for the baby. I want to disappear from the surface of the earth, I want soft merciful darkness to envelop Honey and me both. “Sorry about that,” I say to everyone, “We’re okay!” and walk in measured steps to the hostess stand where I give her my debit card and ask if I can pay for one Picon punch one greyhound and Ed and Cindy’s drinks plus tip, approximately thirty dollars down the slaughterhouse drain too. “Better stay out here, ha ha,” I tell her, because I am not setting foot back in the bar. Ed waves kindly from his seat. “They got a carpenter’s nail sticking out of that carpeting,” he says. “Must have snagged the finger on that.” “Did we get a little booboo,” says the hostess, who is a majestic figure of a woman nearly six feet tall with broad shoulders blond hair and weathered pink skin. Honey is now in full lover mode, smiling and then ducking her face toward my neck and peeking up through lashes. Thank God. “That’s what I get for bringing her into the bar, haha,” I say, and scuttle out after signing my slip and putting my card into my pocket. “We’ll get Emilio to hammer that down, anyone could just trip over it, imagine me and my sandals!” says the hostess to my retreating figure. “You okay to drive, hon?” Cindy calls from the table. “We walked here—it takes five minutes. Thanks for your help!” Big smile, big smile and wave to Cindy and Ed, big wave to the folks.