In 2007, my wife and I took
a trip to the Ohio State University Medical Center to confirm the good
news we thought we already knew, which was that she was pregnant with
our second child. We watched him move around, fishlike, on the sonogram.
He had blue eyes, I was sure, and he was uber-intelligent, and girls
were going to like him. All these things were radically apparent, even
on the sketchy black and white computer screen. The nurse typed a message
from him to me – “Hi, Dad!” – and printed wallet-sized sonogram
images, which I promptly showed to my buddies, my colleagues, the woman
at the Tam Tam Chinese restaurant on High Street, the university library’s
rare books curator, the towel guy at the gym, the checkout guy at Blockbuster
Video.
Things were looking up. I was
almost done with graduate school, and my writing career was starting
to take off – major anthologies, emails from editors at major publishing
houses, a first-rate New York agent, whole nine. Ohio State was in the
national title hunt, in a year in which my wife and me had resolved
to watch football all day every Saturday, and every last bowl game of
an increasingly long bowl season. Our older son was learning to read,
and he was newly interested in the milelong walks that culminated in
half-hour buying binges at Half-Price Books on Lane Avenue, pizza at
the low-rent place across the street from the bookstore, and the long
trek home in the dark, him hanging onto my sore back, a plastic bag
full of books hanging from each hand.
Then one day my wife called
me into the bedroom and said, “Look at this.” The sheets were wet
and bloody. We called the ambulance. They rushed us to the emergency
room. The diagnosis was not good. Placenta previa, a bad case, they
said. Another hour and we would’ve lost the baby. The prescription
– mandatory, they said, and no fudging – was bed rest for the balance
of the pregnancy, which was months.
Now we had a problem. I was
teaching at three colleges, plus online courses for the Gotham Writers
Workshop, and I had a thesis to finish. Our son had preschool to attend,
and we wanted him to attend, because he was thriving there. And someone
had to take care of him while we were gone.
Into this breach, heroically,
stepped my parents, and all the more heroically since my mother was
still recovering from a major surgery. They cooked, cleaned, cared for
my wife, cared for my son, didn’t much complain. But, inevitably,
given the stress, there were tensions, and these tensions came to a
head on December 19th, a night when my fears that my wife
and baby wouldn’t make it, and my resentments, and my parents’ wearinesses,
and my wife’s desire that someone, someone, make her some ice
cream the way she liked it for once, with hot fudge on top and almonds
sprinkled just so, all converged with such force that I feared a psychological
breakdown.
My salvation was that December
19th was also the night of the San Diego County Credit Union
Poinsettia Bowl Party, the first bowl game of the year. Good Lord, was
it welcome, and we celebrated the best way we could, with steamed crab
legs and poinsettias purchased from the Giant Eagle grocery store across
the street, and for the first time in a long time, we all of us found
something to hope for.
The next day I spent a few
hours in the Caribou Coffee down the road and wrote the story pretty
much beat for beat the way it happened, and published it as an essay
in The Southern Review, and not long afterward, emails poured in from
all over the country. We’re worried about you and your family, they
said. How is your wife? How is the baby? Is everyone all right? I answered
everyone with the good news: The baby came early, but the baby is thriving,
he’s beautiful, he’s the strongest of us all.
Last month I received news
that the essay had been named to the 100 Distinguished Sports Stories
of 2008 list in the back of the Best American Sports Writing anthology.
By then, I had already turned it into a short story, making, I’ll
admit, minimum changes, and it is the leadoff story in my collection
In the Devil’s Territory, which releases this week from Dzanc Books.
