The Undoing

Ben seemed ok but the EMT insisted on calling a second ambulance just to make sure. You don’t take chances with head trauma, he obliged, especially with an infant. The woman, the driver, on the other hand, was so hysterical, that he had to give her a sedative and send her to the hospital right away.

Several witnesses to the accident described the car gunning toward the bus stop. Fortunately, no one was waiting for the bus. Normally Ben would have stopped the stroller right there to show his daughter the painting of ducks and palm trees on the back of the bus stop, but today he was aggravated and they kept on walking. When the car rammed up over the curb the street mailbox popped loose, cutting Ben down from behind and knocking him and the stroller over. It happened so quickly and to their blind side that he still wasn’t sure how they weren’t hurt, or worse.

The irony of the situation was not lost on Ben. His ex Jeanne had painted the bus stop on commission from the city when they were still together and now he and Benjamina stopped to look at it almost every day on their way to the park. That is, until the other day when he got a letter from her demanding back rent for some tools and an antique motorcycle he stored in one of her garages. He wasn’t feeling the love anymore. She had changed the lock on the door and she was making threats of small claims court and worse. As the letter explained, she blamed him for everything, even her inability to get pregnant with her latest lover who, after the thousands they spent on fertility treatments, still had the sperm of an eighty year old man. At least you weren’t afraid of the pussy, she concluded.

Ben realized that what she really wanted was back rent on their ten years together. After all, what did she get from it she asked? Nothing, a big fat zero, not even a lousy miscarriage, she said.

Jeanne was right. He never committed to her. Because of an early misunderstanding, (in which she quietly went off the pill) he saw everything in terms of her nesting instinct. Particularly the house, which he worked into a story about how it was her inheritance and her nest egg, and he didn’t feel right coming to the table with nothing but his bare hands (and of course, underlying, his seed). She had every right to complain but there was nothing he could do about it no matter how much she pushed. And now, because of her threats and demands, she had quite probably saved Ben and Benjamina’s lives.
*******

The driver of the car woke up in restraints. The room was painted four shades of institutional green and was divided by a pale curtain. Her wig, inexplicably at first, was beside her, brushing her right shoulder and then she remembered putting it on and running out of the house after her neighbor James had left her there, lying in the bed, all warmed up and ready to go.

It was the first time anyone had ever gotten cold feet on her. Of course, it was also the first time that she used her sex as a bargaining tool but she was desperate.

Finally, after months of fertility treatments and surgery, her womb was ready. She was ovulating and she couldn’t take any chances with the hillbilly sperm in the freezer because of a recent power outage. She needed a live donor and Forty-watt, her nickname for Kentucky Joe, was still in the motherland for another week. He would never put it together anyway and even if he did, she didn’t care as long as she got her baby.

She had two days the doctor said, and she would’ve taken on a procession if she had to, but there was James at her door with some nonsense about her lemon trees. She played along and even went outside and bent over a few times while they were picking. Next thing she knew they were in the shower soaping each other up. And then he pulled a number. Got up off the bed and walked away. She thought he might need a minute to himself so she reached into her party drawer and pulled out one of her friends. She had read somewhere that the vibration would get his little guys swimming up hill in a hurry. She thought it was worth a try. Only he never came back and when she heard the front door bang shut she got up in a fit and threw on her leather mini and a wig and went out.

She drove around the neighborhood, hoping to run into James, but she would’ve settled for some random guy off the street, some loser walking his dog. But after a few loops her heart wasn’t in it. She thought about setting up at a café and putting out the vibe but she didn’t want to have to sit there and listen to the next Tarantino agonize about the movie he wanted to make or the script he was shopping around. She needed a toad, not a daytime prince, some guy who’d been sitting under a rock and was just angry enough at himself or the world to still do her a favor. That vague hope was the last thing she remembered.
*******

Ben and Benjamina checked out ok and were waiting to be released when the shift nurse from the ER stopped by their room to say hello.
Ben asked her about the driver.

"A slight concussion," Nurse Juanita said. "She’s under observation while the investigators determine whether charges should be brought."

"But it was an accident."

"It’s not my place to say. I’m sure you’ll talk to them again before the days over."

"Anyway," she continued, "the EMT who brought her in said she came on to him in the ambulance. Something about how she was ovulating and would he do her a favor. We get kooks all the time. This one was wearing a wig and was dressed for a night out. They say she was asking about you, too, and your daughter. Wanted to know if she looked like you."

"What kind of question is that?"

"I dunno, you tell me."

"Look I told the cop already. I heard the tires and then the next thing I know I’m on my ass and the stroller is knocked over on its side and I can’t see Benjamina and I’m thinking ‘Oh my God, she’s dead’. So when something like that happens you feel grateful. You don’t ask questions. You don’t push your luck – you just get up and move on, happy to have your life back in one piece before whomever or whatever decides to change their mind."

"If you say so, but I’ve seen too much violence to be looking the other way. Anyway, you two get in," she said, motioning toward the wheelchair, "I don’t have all day."

Nurse Juanita pushed her charge down the hallway, past the waiting room. Benjamina rode on her father’s lap and waved as though she were on a parade float. Ben was glad to be going finally and he waved too, joining her game. She pointed to a scrape on her father’s knuckle and searched for the word by moving her mouth and making a series of small sounds. When she hit on one that pleased her she repeated it a few times. Even though it was wrong Ben applauded her.

"That’s right," he said, "Papa’s hand is sad."

Juanita had her key out before they even reached the door. She pushed Ben and Benjamina into a dark room and backed away, letting the door close. Ben struggled up out of the chair with his daughter in his arms. His knee had stiffened considerably but it didn’t compare to the tightening in his gut. Immediately his eyes were drawn to a one-way mirror on the far wall, a faint source of illumination in an otherwise dark space. As they approached the window his daughter pointed to the scene within and said, 'Bird.'

Jeanne was asleep or perhaps sedated. Ben hadn’t seen her in almost two years even though they talked. He thought she looked smaller, slighter somehow and he agreed with his daughter. She did look like a bird, he thought, splayed out like that with her arms and feet in restraints, a broken bird.

He watched her chest heave under the sheet that was more or less draped over her. Her exposed legs were trim. She had not let herself go in that sense but he could see the tension that gripped her to the bed. She lay there clenched and rigid, all the softness of youth gone out of her. It was Ben’s fault and he understood finally the terrible and lasting thing he had done to her. All the bickering, the constant put-downs, the slurred violence of their nights, the philandering, the not-so-absent separations, on again, off again, a full ten years of wearing down. And still, all of it would be laid aside and forgiven but for one drop because the thing that killed her, the thing that ate her insides, was the thing missing. The thing that Ben held in his arms and that after ten years of brow-beating him on the matter, she believed she was not good enough to carry and hold herself. This did not stop her from trying of course, but her efforts took place in a context of failure.

Ben looked at the dead-bolted door between them. For a moment he thought he had the power to undo her with his pity, that his remorse would un-cuff her, but as he hesitated, he regained the soft breathing of the child he carried now asleep on his chest and he turned around, feeling his way back to the hallway through the darkness.

The time for undoing had passed.