The Way Things Work Out

When Bix was young and newly married, before he had a child of his own, when he knew all he needed to know about pretty much everything; most everything that mattered; most everything that mattered to him; he knew a couple who had a young child, an infant. Brown-eyed like her father. Soft black hair. A pinched chin like her mother. He was sure that with a pencil, a piece of paper, a Punnett square, and a few minutes he could suss out all the probabilities of that combination happening. It was just dominants and recessives. Like heads and tails. That was what he knew, what most people knew then; dominants, recessives, and probabilities. Probabilities ruled.

He’d been in college with Vincent, the father of the young child. A philosophy major. The mother had been a teacher where Bix taught high school Bio. So, they were all friends. Not close, but friends. People he knew. Not that well. But none of that really matters. They were just two people he knew who had a child. A girl. Maybe two or three weeks old, maybe six months. He didn’t pay too much attention to other people’s children then.

What he knew then about children was that, if things worked out, most of the time, probably, when you had one, there’d be a few months of listening to their soft breathing in the dark room next door, lifting your head to the sound of a call or a cough, holding your breath until another cough came, or a swallow, a cry, or the rustling of a shoulder finding a new resting place by the side of the crib. And you’d turn your head back to the hollow of your pillow and fall back to sleep while someone else fed it or changed its diaper.

That’s if things worked out.

He and his wife had visited them, the couple, once, on an unusually warm November evening. The child was named Clair. Clair de lune. He could see her rounded face from across the room, resting in the angle of her mother’s arm, partially hidden by a thin flannel cover.

After the child had been put to bed and quieted, they all sat in the living room.

The couple kept the door to the child’s room ajar and would take turns getting up to bring drinks, clear plates or whatever, and stopping to listen at the child’s door in the lighted hallway. They’d then come back and sit on the couch for a few minutes.

After a while, Bix’s wife said, “We should go now and let you two get some sleep while you can.”

“No, no,” said Vincent, his friend, the philosophy major.

“Oh, my goodness, are you sure? I wish you could stay longer,” said the child’s mother, Lindy, or Lorraine, he couldn’t recall which, and she went into their bedroom coming back with their coats.

On the drive home he thought, they fuss so much. Worry too much. He’d said so to his wife. She turned from looking out the window to look at him.

And then he and Mara had children. Twins.

He found himself thinking of Vincent and Lindy. And of himself back then, when he knew so much about so little and so little about so much. How little he knew then of wakeful nights when every sound in the dark comes freighted with ancient, existential, fear, alerted to every nuance of sound, nerves as taut as a mousetrap in a kitchen cupboard, and of gratefulness in the morning after a peaceful, uneventful, night believing, hoping, that things would work out as they had done last night. The way probability says it should work out, the way it should work out in a well-ordered, teleological, universe. The right way.

For Vincent and Lindy, and their little girl, Clair, it did not work out so well.

A few short weeks after Bix and Mara had put on their coats and said good night, and after they drove home thinking about what they would or would not do when they had children, and then about work and other things and other people, they heard the sad news about the child. About how the child had died in bed during the night; one night, not that night, but a different night. Another night of listening to the silence through the child’s open door.

And, somehow, even then, he shoved that into the recycling bin of his thoughts … because things usually work out well, don’t they? But deep down knowing that the improbable is not the impossible. Else, why read horror stories or watch Stephen King films to attest to your own invulnerability?

And then, for Bix, the years of parental basal-metabolic worry came and went; listening to soft breathing and mashing bananas to silky sweet smoothness evolved into cutting grapes in half, and blowing across hot bowls of vegetarian vegetable soup, sitting on edge on the edge of a sandbox in the park, and figuring out how to remove a square piece of cut carrot from deep in a squirming nostril. Saving growth charts and Crayola drawings of Mommy, a calendar of milestones, and progress reports and SAT scores.  He  heard his own voice say, “Did you do your homework?” “Who’s driving tonight?” “No matter what you have done or what time it is, call me and I’ll be there in five minutes to pick you up,” and “Because I said so.”

And so, having traveled that far, like Bix, you figure things will all work out okay.

Then your kids get married and move away, or just move away, just as you had hoped would happen, knew would happen, feared would happen, and you wait for texts or phone calls. Track them on Find My Friends. And maybe they come back after a rough breakup or needing space to figure out what they really want to do or who they really are. And when they go again you say our door is always open. And even when they call you with biopsy results, you say, because you believe it, as he had come to believe it, that things will work out okay though you know that only sometimes they do. And sometimes they don’t. And you suffer when they don’t and fret when they do.

And so, if it all works out, as it did for Bix, one day they do come back, and tell their own kids to sit quietly, and they stand by the door to your bedroom with a tissue in one hand and a glass in the other. And they listen to your breathing, and read to you, and kiss your forehead at midnight, and ask, “Are you warm enough?” “Can I get you water or anything?” And then they will all go to sit in the living room and talk quietly among themselves and wait for you to fall asleep.