Chapter Thirty-three
TWO DAYS later, on a stifling hot midsummer afternoon, Marlboro Man packed my hospital bags into his pickup, buckled our seven-pounder into her comparatively huge car seat, and helped me into the backseat for our drive back home to the ranch. I should have been so happy—I had the guy and the baby and she was healthy and the sun was shining—but it didn’t feel right to me, the whole leaving-the-hospital thing. I wasn’t ready at all. I’d just gotten used to the beeping of the monitors and the coziness of the warm, secure hospital room. I’d grown accustomed to the nurses checking on me every couple of hours…and candy stripers bringing me warm meals of stew, mashed potatoes, and green beans. At the hospital, I knew what to expect. In two short days, I’d mastered it. I had no idea what would be waiting for me at home.
When Marlboro Man pulled away from the hospital, it hit me: instantly, I felt desperate and alone. Pressing my face against the window, I acted like I was asleep…and quietly sobbed the whole way home. I wanted my mom, but I’d pushed her away to the point where she was keeping her distance out of respect for my wishes. If only she were at the other end of this hour-long drive, everything would be okay.
We got home to find twenty cows in our yard. “Dammit,” Marlboro Man muttered under his breath, as if this was the last thing he needed right then. That made me cry harder, and I could no longer shield Marlboro Man from the sounds of my wailing. As he got out of the car, he looked back at me and said, “What’s wrong?” He moved toward me, more than likely concerned at the unexpected sight of my swollen, red, puffy face. “What happened?”
“I want to go back to the hospital!” I cried. A cow dropped a fresh green load on my daylilies.
“What’s wrong?” Marlboro Man asked again. “Seriously…are you in pain?”
That only served to make me feel foolish, as if I would have no good excuse to lose it unless I was hemorrhaging out of my ears. I sobbed even harder, and the baby began to wriggle. “I just don’t feel right,” I cried again. “I feel…I don’t know how to do anything!”
Marlboro Man wrapped me in his arms, completely clueless as to what to do. “Let’s go inside,” he said, rubbing my back. “It’s hot out here.” He unbuckled the baby’s car seat and pulled her out of the car, and the three of us walked past the cows and toward the house. My echinacea blooms were all missing their petals. Stupid rabbits, I thought. I’ll kill ’em with my bare hands if they go near my flowers again. Then I started crying harder that I’d even had such a thought.
We walked into our house, which was spotless and smelled of Clorox and lemon. A vase of fresh flowers sat on our dining table in the breakfast nook. Not a thing was out of place. I took a deep breath and exhaled…and suddenly everything felt better. The baby was fussing now—she’d been in the car seat since we’d left the hospital over an hour earlier—so I pulled her out, lay down on the bed with her, and started nursing. Almost immediately, the two of us fell into a deep sleep. When I woke up, it was almost dark. I hoped it was early the next morning, which would have meant we’d slept all night long…but, in fact, only an hour had passed since we’d dozed off.
After I woke up, splashed cold water on my face, and drank nearly a gallon of orange juice, our first evening home turned out to be dreamy: Marlboro Man and I ate pieces of a casserole his mom had left in our fridge earlier in the day. For dessert we feasted on a homemade angel food cake his grandmother, Edna Mae, had brought by. Edna Mae’s angel food cakes were light…fluffy…perfect. She’d gone the extra mile with this one and coated it with a creamy white seven-minute frosting, then chilled the iced cake to perfection. I gobbled down three pieces without even knowing I’d taken a bite. It was lifeblood for my postpartum body.
After dinner Marlboro man and I sat on the sofa in our dimly lit house and marveled at the new little life before us. Her sweet little grunts…her impossibly tiny ears…how peacefully she slept, wrinkled and warm, in front of us. We unwrapped her from her tight swaddle, then wrapped her again. Then we unwrapped her and changed her diaper, then wrapped her again. Then we put her in the crib for the night, patted her sweet belly, and went to bed ourselves, where we fell dead asleep in each other’s arms, blissful that the hard part was behind us. A full night’s sleep was all I needed, I reckoned, before I felt like myself again. The sun would come out tomorrow…I was sure of it.
We were sleeping soundly when I heard the baby crying twenty minutes later. I shot out of bed and went to her room. She must be hungry, I thought, and fed her in the glider rocking chair before putting her in her crib and going back to bed myself. Forty-five minutes after my head hit the pillow, I was awakened again to the sound of crying. Looking at the clock, I was sure I was having a bad dream. Bleary-eyed, I stumbled to her room again and repeated the feeding ritual. Hmmm, I thought as I tried to keep from nodding off in the chair. This is strange. She must have some sort of problem, I imagined—maybe that cowlick or colic I’d heard about in a movie somewhere? Goiter or gouter or gout? Strange diagnoses pummeled my sleep-deprived brain. Before the sun came up, I’d gotten up six more times, each time thinking it had to be the last, and if it wasn’t, it might actually kill me.
I woke up the next morning, the blinding sun shining in my eyes. Marlboro Man was walking in our room, holding our baby girl, who was crying hysterically in his arms.
“I tried to let you sleep,” he said. “But she’s not having it.” He looked helpless, like a man completely out of options.
My eyes would hardly open. “Here.” I reached out, motioning Marlboro Man to place the little suckling in the warm spot on the bed beside me. Eyes still closed, I went into autopilot mode, unbuttoning my pajama top and moving my breast toward her face, not caring one bit that Marlboro Man was standing there watching me. The baby found what she wanted and went to town.
Marlboro Man sat on the bed and played with my hair. “You didn’t get much sleep,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, completely unaware that what had happened the night before had been completely normal…and was going to happen again every night for the next month at least. “She must not have been feeling great.”
“I’ve got to go meet a truck,” Marlboro Man said. “But I’ll be back around eleven.”
I waved good-bye without even looking up. I couldn’t take my eyes off my baby. As she lay there and sucked, I began to feel strange. My entire chest felt tight and warm to the touch, and my breasts, I noticed, were larger than I ever remembered them being—even in the last days of my pregnancy. Once the baby fell asleep again, I made my way to the shower. It was the only thing that could possibly pump some life into my sleep-deprived body. I let the warm water fall on my face and sting my eyes, hoping to somehow wash away the utter exhaustion that had taken over. Slowly, three minutes in, I began to feel better…just in time to notice that the tight, uncomfortable feeling in my chest had returned with a vengeance. I glanced down to find, to my horror, that my breasts had become spigots, both shooting milk eight inches in front of my body.
And they showed absolutely no signs of stopping. They sprayed and sprayed.
If I, the daughter of a physician, had been prepared for the medical side of pregnancy and childbirth, I was completely dumbfounded by this development. Nothing could have prepared me for the horror.
That night, Marlboro Man invited Tim over to our house. I hid in my bedroom the entire time, clutching towels to my bosom and trying desperately to get my now-fussy, squirming baby to relieve the building pressure in my breasts…while at the same time avoiding any kind of interaction with Marlboro Man and Tim. I was way too busy trying to assimilate what was happening with my body and my mind—not to mention my life—to hold any kind of coherent conversation.
They were invaders, anyway—those men in my living room. Invaders who didn’t belong in my nest with my new baby bird. They were dodo birds…maybe grackles. I’d peck them if they got too close. Why were they in my nest, anyway?
Later that night, just as I was dozing off, I heard cries and yells from the other room as Marlboro Man and Tim watched Mike Tyson bite off Evander Holyfield’s ear on live TV. The baby, who’d finally, at long last, gone to sleep moments earlier, woke up and began to cry again.
It was official: I was in hell.