Read Online The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos - Free Book Online Page B

those looks. I’d like to ask them how they think it must have felt for a new mother, a first-time mother, lying there on the bed, not able to see her newborn son, wondering what those looks were all about. When we took him home, my mother told me that I could always have another child, that I could try again. Try again at what? I wanted to say, though of course I never said those words aloud.
    When they finally handed him to me, I saw. I don’t remember whether Jeff stood by my side or leaned over to me to look at the baby—his baby, just as much as mine—or whether he touched my hand or arm or kissed my forehead. I’d had all sorts of images of the birth in my mind before it happened. Yes, I anticipated the pain, but then I imagined the tears, the happy tears of witnessing the coming of a new life. There was none of that. When I held myson in my arms, I immediately saw that his head was large, his eyes close together, his face and hands a purplish blue.
    He came down the canal so quickly , the doctor said, that his color isn’t quite right yet. He’ll redden soon, not to worry .
    And his head? I said.
    Jeff said nothing. Jeff did not look.
    Possible encephalitis , he said. We’ll watch him. There will be a few tests . And, It could be nothing .
    The doctor reached out to shake Jeff’s hand, and I remember that Jeff did not take it.
    Now here we are in this town with a girl who almost drowned and then came to life again, living in a permanent state of blue. We didn’t know what was wrong with her—we still don’t—and yet I can’t help but feel relief, knowing there is someone stranger than my son living out there in the world. Finally, there is something worse than a son with a mutated gene—fragile x syndrome, they call it—who bangs himself against the door at night, and speaks in a cartoon-like voice he has made up for himself. There is something worse than knowing you have killed off your own son’s chances of normality without even knowing you could. And you can’t undo it, you and your mutated gene on your x chromosome. Your daughter has been spared, but your broken son in this small town, he is a spectacle. Yet now, now there is someone else to wonderabout at night across the black water, through the trees. Even the people who still think she’s a dream, a game, a rumor to keep us all from being too bored, even they now wonder about her, instead of my son.
    When I wake up this morning after our visit last night, the house still smells of the pies. I’m late getting the kids ready, and Jeff is already gone, as he always is, the only trace of him a splash of water on the counter and the stubble on his razor. And as usual, his side of the bed is made up, the covers tucked in. For years he has been trying not to leave even a trace of himself behind. In the early years he traveled as a salesman for a computer company, but the technology changed faster than he could, and now he sells electronics for a chain store in a town not far from here. It is my fault we stay in this town, even though we both grew up here, the fault has always been mine. He slips out of the house in the morning and into the bed at night without a coffee ground in the sink or a crease in the bedspread. Sometimes at night when he’s lying there in his silent sleep, I lean over and whisper, I know you’re in there. I know you’re really there .
    But now he’s gone and Rebecca has made Ethan a bowl of cereal and turned on the little television in the breakfast nook so that he can watch cartoons and imitate the voices. Sometimes I look at them sitting there, my daughter withher perfect skin and hair like glass and my son with his finger motions—stimming, they call it—and strange sounds coming out of his throat, and I want to cry, right then and there, to put my head down on the counter and not raise it again until someone pulls me up and out of the