Kerry Jade

The Would-Be Father

Kerry Jade

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HE TRIED TO PICTURE THE PAIR coming toward him, to deliberately relive those hours, but an image from a National Geographic kept cropping up in his head instead. It was taken somewhere in Africa, but that didn’t matter. His mother was wearing blue, a blue wool coat in June. It was cold for June, but the wind was hot and the women in the photograph were being trailed by younger girls–a swarm of them–and they all had pots, impossibly heavy, clay pots on their heads.

And Selene, she was there too, walking beside his mother. She looked so timid beside Rosemary, even though it was his mother who carried the car seat. Selene didn’t have the same conviction in her steps. He thought she wore orange, though he didn’t recall her owning anything orange. They walked side by side, their long bright dresses blowing against one another’s legs. They all seemed to be moving very slowly but that wasn’t his mother and the wind looked like a hot wind that threw sand at their faces and ankles and hands, anywhere their skin was exposed.

Maybe it was the setting that made Selene seem so meek and shy and young. The visitation room was drab and threatening. The tables had dingy white plastic tops and tubular metal legs and at each one sat a convict. She had been so carefree. That show-him-the-ropes wildness that had been coursing through her when they’d first gotten together–it was rooted out completely now. She was timid, almost girlish. And the expressions on those young girls’ faces–as though the heat and wind and weight of their pots was all a bit much for them.

No. Motherhood had not made a woman of her, as people claim. She was still three years older than him. He remembered reminding himself of that back then, and how surprising the fact had seemed, even though it was one he always knew. The women who walked in front–the three whose pots were the largest–didn’t look agitated. They were calm. Peaceful. Resolute. Something other than beautiful. It was as if, by growing a baby inside her, Selene had receded into her own youth. She giggled when he hugged her, but he could feel the tension in her body and those bodies seemed impossibly lean underneath the weight of their pots. The table he sat at had markings scratched into it and he recognized the symbols from prior visits but they meant nothing to anyone aside from their intended audience, and how they got there… he had so much to learn.

They’d been searched before entering the room. Everyone had been. Even the visitors. He couldn’t so much as send a letter to the outside without it being scrutinized and approved by prison security, and here other people were scratching codes into hard tabletops as if by magic, yes! That was the thread–magic. They had his infant son wrapped up in blankets and one was swirled loosely around his face like his head was a crystal ball.

His son was tiny, so impossibly tiny. He had tiny hands and tiny feet but none of that means anything. They all have. His mother in the blue wool coat. She set the car seat at her feet. There were two chairs aside from his own, all on the same side of the table, and the chairs were facing his, and she set the car seat in front of her chair and sat down. Did she take off her coat? He can’t remember. She must have. He must not have been looking. He was looking at the baby but he couldn’t see the baby because it was in the carrier under so many blankets. Selene’s face, was it like those girls? No. And anyway, it didn’t matter. It was his son he wanted–no. Needed to remember. The son he’d never seen until he did and then it was only his foot, bursting sideways from the carrier. An impossibly small, clothed foot.

His mother lifts the baby and blankets drip from it like water and it sounds like a lamb but all babies do and there’s a yellow blanket dangling from its body and his mother loosens her outer fingers and tells Selene to take that blanket–to lay it on his lap. And Selene touches him for the last time, which he’s never thought about until now, but the blanket is draped over his knees and then there is a bundle in his lap and it is wide as a double loaf of bread and it is wriggling. Such small movements, but they fill him with an impossible sense of fear or pride or maybe this is what responsibility feels like and he doesn’t know what to say. His mouth is dry–drier than the photograph and he swallows, but his throat has gone rigid with a bump in it so he says nothing but puts his pointer fingers into the baby’s palms. White. The knuckles of the impossible fists go impossibly white with the baby’s impossible strength as it latches onto him. It is smiling and is face wrinkles and there is spit on its lips but he cannot wipe the spit without letting go of its hands and he will not let go and neither will his son, whose clutch is so determined that his fingertips have gone white.

He pulls back with his own fingers and his son’s body lifts, its tiny rib cage rising off of his thighs and the boy’s scrawny, inadequate neck bending backwards from the weight of its head and he is careful not to lift the boy too far but still, he raises him and lowers him for most of the hour, watching his head tip back, feeling the weighty crown on his knees, his creased neck opening to the stale air of the room, and he is amazed that his son won’t let go. He thinks of drawing the bundle to him, to his chest, to feel the warm wriggly body against his own heart, but he thinks better of it. Visitation hours are timed. He wants to be able to gaze on the boy for as long as possible. He wants to remember him after the hours have ended

He doesn’t think he says a word to Selene and his mother is smiling, peaceful, because the women are untouchable in their burden and he knows if he were there he’d sooner hide in the shadows of a bush some ways off and watch them carry water, for though he’d like to, he does not believe he could lend a hand. But now, the rapture is his and his son seems truly to like him, to know he is its father and the time is almost up and it will be a week before he is allowed to see the boy again and he must hug the boy to feel its compact body against his before they are apart. He raises the infant up to his chest and it stands on tiptoe on his thighs. It grabs at the collar of his prison uniform and puts its wet mouth on his shoulder and this is when he can smell the boy and he smells like all babies and yet the smell is perfectly his own. And he can smell it now in this chair but there are only two smells he can conjure from memory, his infant son and cigarettes, and it is hard to smell the former without also recalling the latter, but he pushes that other smell from the room and now it’s just him and his son and the impossible rapture.

He can feel the tiny pulse through the baby’s back, as though it pounds straight into his palm, and then the little body tightens and squirms and it is not like its other wriggles. It is uncomfortable. He loosens his already gentle grip but the baby pukes on his shoulder and Selene, who has been still the whole visit, lurches forward and takes her son from him and Rosemary is handing him a rag to wipe with before he knows what has happened and he knows the prison will make him change his shirt and whatever trace of smell will be gone so he wipes the spot well to hide it but his chest feels cold and naked where the baby had been.

He doesn’t worry about the puke until he sees how Selene is comforting their son and that’s when an idea stings him like a horsefly: “So that is what he thinks of me.” He looks at the clock both sad and relieved that visitation hours are over, and he stands to hug them all goodbye and brushes his son’s cheek with his finger, but this time the baby jerks its chicken neck away from him and drops its heavy head on Selene’s shoulder.

So that is it, he thinks, as he is led away, and he tells himself that next week will be different and he is already living for next week with no thought in his mind that that week will never come. That neither Selene nor his son will ever visit him again. And he is alone in a chair at his mother’s house, and there are no wet spots on his shoulder, and he cannot smell the baby but only the faint tinge of cigarettes, so that is life now, and there is no sign that waiting around will make it be anything else. He reminds himself that he is “Pappi” to six kids that aren’t his own, and that somewhere out there is a boy of his own but he doesn’t know him. And he doesn’t know if it is right, but he knows it is the truth.