The Crib

The Crib

I drove seventy miles per hour, ran stoplights, slid around corners, and cursed the seconds which sped on ahead of me—impossible to catch. We didn’t have a lawn. The front yard was dirt and gravel with large cottonwood trees. The little house was white and sat by itself a mile from town, with acres of green alfalfa fields and distant red cliffs surrounding it. The screen door was locked. I knew it would be locked. It was logical she would have locked the screen door. I ripped the door open, leaving the hook dangling from the eyelet screwed into the door frame. I burst into the living room and saw her sitting calmly at the kitchen table. It was silent, except for the tingling of a tiny bell from the bedroom as Kristin pulled the red satin ribbon that moved the tiny hammer and struck the bell which hung from the railing of her bright red-and-white baby crib.

Carol was still talking on the telephone to John. I had stopped at John’s apartment for a beer and had called her and realized that she was probably tryng to kill herself. John had known, too, and kept talking to her as I had rushed home. I was in time, but somehow, it seemed so hopeless that I just stood there for a moment staring at the pieces of broken glass lying on the table and the dried, dark trickles of blood staining her pretty arm as she joked with John and avoided looking at me.

We hadn’t brought Kristin directly from the hospital. It is wise not to be embittered by the unintentioned malice of the ignorant, but it is difficult to arrive at an objective viewpoint concerning a human life and love. The doctor had said to think about having other children. The doctor had said this child was imperfect and should be institutionalized as soon as it was old enough. The doctor used words like “severely,” and “institution,” and “it.” I think a nurse was the first who used the word “vegetable.” The doctor talked to Carol and said the words that haunted years of her pretty being and whispered death-wishes and insanity throughout

her conscious and subconscious existence. He said, “This of it as being dead.” He said to Carol, and with only the best of misguided intentions, “Think of it as being dead . . . a non-human . . . put it in the State Home and have another baby as soon as possible.” (Visions of monsters; nightmares of hideous inhuman creatures; a non-human baby borne of her flesh.)

There were friends with awkward good intentions and acquaintances with careful greetings. And from unexpected corners of our world came the closeted parents of children who were institutionalized or had been taken in by grandparents. Their eyes told us that their hearts were torn when they spoke to us, and, yet, they knew it was right for them to speak. Some of them were near strangers; some were longtime friends—people at work, people who barely knew us. Many spoke to us and they all said the same thing: Put her into the State Home.

If we had only been watching. If only we had not been quite so willing to accept their words. If only my mind had not been so ready to run—I would have seen in their faces that they were lying to us and, of course, to themselves.

In Grand Junction, Colorado, there is the State Home and Training School where people like Kristin spend their entire lives under the supervision of underpaid personnel and the watchful eye of closely budgeted care. The doctor had said Kristin should go there. I talked to the people at the Home on the afternoon of Kristin’s second day and they told me she would have to be at least two years old before they could take her. The man to whom I spoke recommended that we contact the Department of Social Services to arrange for foster parents until she was old enough to be placed in the institution for the rest of her life.

“Sure,” I said.

“Carol, they say we probably out to give Kristin up,” I said.

She knew. She had heard the whispers of nurses, seen the eyes of those who avoided her. When she asked her doctor what was wrong

with Kristin he had, with all of his well-meaning medicine, turned in silence and left the hospital room.

Already they had given her a shot which prevented her breasts from producing milk.

Carol stayed up all night making curtains for our old Dodge station wagon. I went to Grand Mattress the next day and bought a large piece of scrap foam. It was July. Kristin was a month old and living with foster parents across the valley from the white house and us. We were getting out of town so everything would feel better. We would stay at campgrounds and sleep in the car. It would be just as it had been for the previous four and a half years of our marriage. We rafted on the Green River in Utah; we canoed on the Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming; we camped by Bear Lake in Idaho; we wandered through the International Food Bazaar in Seattle and rode to the top of the Space Needle; we rented a one-room cabin on the Olympic Peninsula where the Pacific Ocean ceaselessly explodes upon the rocky shoreline, and where eerie inland valleys are ever grey and pale-green in rain forest mist.

“I can’t sleep with the light on,” I had said as we lay in the back of the station wagon on the foam mattress with the curtains pulled shut. It was the first night of the trip and she had our six-volt lantern burning.
“I don’t want to be in the dark,” she said.

And by the ocean in the seven-dollar cabin with the one light hanging from a wire in the middle of the room burning all night, we continued a week-long rummy game into the tens of thousands of points. Of course we knew that something was wrong. We never spoke of Kristin. I seldom consciously thought of her; Carol seldom thought of anything else.

A few weeks were expended and we returned home. I was a teacher and still had another month before I had to go back to work. My parents came from Virginia to visit us. We sat out under the huge cottonwood trees in the front yard at night watching for falling stars and drinking beer. One afternoon, Carol and I went to the foster home

and picked up Kristin so her grandparents could see and hold her for a while. We still have pictures of that afternoon and our faces are tight with sorrow and loss. My father’s gentle, honest eyes speaking from within the stoic exterior of his strong being. My mother’s magical, loving hands; the glow of her glad face; the inference of her life-long heart upon the moment of the visiting granddaughter.

I took Carol to a dentist the last week of August. She went into the office while I stretched out on the foam pad which we had left in the back of the car and drifted off to sleep. Sometime later, I was startled by frantic tapping on the window. A lady from the dentist’s office told me that something was wrong with my wife. I found her in a semi-conscious state, lying in the reclined dental chair muttering the name of our child.

We still laugh about how ridiculous it was for an intelligent, well-educated participant in the Twentieth Century to hyperventilate while having a tooth filled. The unfortunate dentist had been in practice for only a few weeks at the time and seemed to be on the verge of taking in a little extra oxygen himself.

It’s strange what things can become the catalysts of truth. If Carol hadn’t had a toothache, it’s hard to speculate about how long we would have continued the farce of separation from Kristin. Sometimes I think about myself and what an empty life I could have had if it were not for Carol’s toothache, Carol’s heartache, Carol’s honesty. If it weren’t for her obsession that kept us up nights with lights burning and cards shuffling, and that finally put her into dental-hysteria; I could have spent my whole life apart from my child—and also apart from my own truth.

There are so many mistakes to be made in a lifetime. Fortunately, some can be rectified.

The next day we began repurchasing baby equipment and made arrangements for bringing Kristin home. We stayed up all night painting the used crib I had found at Goodwill—neither of us could sleep.