Expectations
Chapter 4
Jim could hear it before he was even close to the door of his apartment. Female voices, laughing and chattering inside. It was happening more often, now that Christie was more than three months along and everyone knew about the babies. More friends stopping by the apartment. More female bonding.
Bracing himself, he removed Hank's harness and put his key in the front door.
"…the morning sickness isn't as bad as it was," Christie was saying, her voice coming from the couch area of the living room. "I'm still dragging at work, though. Hi, Jimmy! You're home early."
"Who else is here?" Jim asked, irritated that she hadn't thought to tell him straight away. She didn't always think of such things.
"It's just me," a familiar voice said.
Shannon? Since when did Christie hang out alone with Jim's sister?
"This is a surprise," Jim said, dropping the harness in its usual spot and heading toward the voices.
"Watch out for the—" Shannon couldn't even complete her sentence before Jim's foot made contact with something on the floor that shouldn't have been there. He knew instantly he had no hope of regaining his balance. Arms flailing, he took a tumble, hitting his knee hard a second before his hands came down and broke the rest of his fall
He heard them rushing toward him at the same time, but Shannon got to him first.
"Here, Christie. Take Bradley. I've got him."
I've got him? For a split second Jim flashed back to that horrible day when he had entered Terry's home and was pulled along by Annie until Terry had said, "I got him, Sweetie. I got him." As if he wasn't even a person. As if every step he took had to be monitored. As if he couldn't enter a familiar living room and find a place to sit on his own. And now he had fallen in front of his sister, who thought he needed help. She was ten years younger. Jim had always protected her, helped her, teased her mercilessly. He wasn't ready for the tables to turn.
As he struggled to disentangle his foot from some kind of strap, he felt his sister's hands in his, trying to help him to his feet.
"Wait," he said irritably. "What is this thing? It's all wrapped around my foot."
"I am so sorry! That's Bradley's diaper bag. I forgot…"
Soon Jim's foot was free and, after touching his knee gently to see if it seemed badly bruised, he stood and brushed himself off, hoping he hadn't done any harm to his suit.
"You can't be forgetting stuff like that around here," he said sharply. "Think about it for two seconds, Shannon. I need everything to be in a certain place. The floor has to be clear."
"I said I was sorry," Shannon said, resting a pacifying hand on Jim's arm.
"Jimmy," Christie said. "It's as much my fault as it is hers. She just got here a few minutes ago and we started talking and—we got distracted. You know how it is when there are babies around. I'm sorry we didn't think about the bag."
He raised his hands in front of him to end the subject—a gesture he knew Christie hated but that he used because it was effective—and then let them drop to his side. "What brings you by?" he asked Shannon.
"I wanted to come over and talk baby stuff with Christie. Everyone is so excited. Mom and Dad are shocked they get to be grandparents again so soon. They thought little Bradley here would be it for a while."
And why had they thought that? Did everyone find it shocking that Jim was capable of impregnating his wife? He frowned, thinking of his parents. He was their only son and his dad had always taken great pride in everything Jim had done from boxing to joining the military to becoming a cop to becoming a detective. Jim and his dad may not have known how to talk to each other, but the more manly Jim seemed on the surface, the more he knew his dad bragged about him down at that same bar where he had spent nearly every evening of Jim's life, drinking with a group of friends. Jim didn't think his dad thought being blind was very manly and he doubted if his name came up much in that group anymore. His mom and sister were supportive and upbeat when they saw Jim, although he could feel their pity and their sorrow from time to time. But his dad…Jim no longer felt like the biggest source of his father's pride. It seemed more likely he was an embarrassment to him now, in spite of how well he had adapted.
"You look really good, Jimmy," Shannon said—a little too brightly. It was the voice she used when she was trying to sound chipper and normal because Jim's blindness was still weird to her. Jim wondered if his family would ever get used to seeing him this way. Thank God Christie wasn't like that, he found himself thinking—not for the first time. Christie had learned to think of it all as normal and had made it easy for blindness to be normal. Why shouldn't it be normal? He still felt the same inside.
"He cleans up well, doesn't he?" Christie said, admiration in her voice.
"Does he always dress like that for work? That's a really nice suit."
"Typical for work," Christie assured Shannon. "Jim's got taste."
"I'm going to go change," Jim said, heading for the bedroom. "You guys can keep talking about my wardrobe since you find it so fascinating."
"Let me look at that knee," Christie said, following him. "You hit it pretty hard."
"It's fine. I'll just be a minute."
He felt better when he had changed into Jeans and a t-shirt, even though he had no idea of which t-shirt he was wearing. He never had labeled his casual wear because it was mostly interchangeable anyway.
"There's Uncle Jimmy," Shannon said in a baby voice when Jim emerged. "You want to hold him?"
Soon Jim found himself on the couch with a six-month-old baby in his arms, listening to his wife and sister talking about pregnancy. He tuned them out, figuring the less he thought about his sister's reproductive cycle, the better.
Bradley was a happy baby, seeming perfectly content no matter who was holding him. Jim could tell, as he hefted the sturdy boy up in front of him, holding him firmly by the armpits, that he had grown quite a bit in the weeks since he had last seen him. He held him so they were face to face and Jim couldn't resist giving one of those cheeks a kiss.
Then it happened. Bradley didn't make a sound, but as Jim's lips were pressed against that fat cheek, he felt Bradley smile.
"What's that?" he asked Bradley, smiling back at him. "You a happy boy?"
Bradley laughed this time and Jim ran his hand over the soft fine hairs covering his nephew's head. He knew, from what Christie had told him, that Bradley didn't have much hair of any color but that what he did have was starting to come in golden, just as Jim's had. Jim had held Bradley many times, but never with the privacy he had now, knowing the women were in the kitchen, absorbed in conversation.
It was different with babies, he realized. People were supposed to touch them, kiss them, examine them. No one would find it the slightest bit odd for a blind man to be tracing the features of a baby or allowing his fingers to find a baby's tiny sharp fingernails or to marvel at the silky texture of a baby's skin. Jim wasn't one to find it socially appropriate to go around feeling people's faces in order to get a better visual image of them. The only face he felt from time to time was Christie's, but he always wanted to keep it fresh in his mind and she encouraged that—especially since the face touching was usually leading up to an entirely different kind of exploration. He had never thought about what kind of image of an unknown face could be produced in his mind through touch but now, since he had relative privacy, he gave it a try.
"He looks like a Dunbar," Shannon had told him the first time Jim had held his baby nephew. Jim knew what that meant. Dunbar babies had a distinctive look—blond, sturdy, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked—so he already had a place to start.
Gently, talking quietly to Bradley the whole time, Jim took his first detailed look at the baby, feeling the chubby cheeks, the nub of a nose and even the ears that had that little extra Dunbar curl to them around the lobes. Twice, Bradley smiled at him. He had never experienced anything in his life that made him feel the way he did when he was able to feel a baby smile. He wondered if other people were as affected by seeing the smile as Jim was just by knowing it was there. Maybe Christie was right. Maybe he really would know his babies in a special way.
"You were really good with him," Christie told him later, after Shannon and Bradley had gone home. "I like seeing you with a baby in your arms. It brings out something sweet in you."
Jim put the last dish from dinner in the dishwasher and did his usual check, running his hands carefully over all the countertops in case he had missed anything. Satisfied that they were clear, he wiped them clean.
"How are you feeling?" he asked Christie, who was sitting at the bar making her way through the bowl of ice cream Jim had dished for her before he had started on the dishes.
"Better. This is great ice cream. You should have some yourself."
"Can't. You're finishing it off right now."
"I'm sorry! I didn't know that. Come over here and have a bite."
He wrinkled his nose at her. "That's okay," he said wryly. "You're the one with two people inside you. You've earned it."
"But I feel bad!"
"Don't worry. I don't want any. Hey, Christie. How did Shannon look?"
"Pretty much the same as always," Christie said. "Her hair is still really long and blond and she's just a little bit chubbier than she was before the baby. She's hoping to breastfeed the rest of the baby weight off."
Jim cringed.
"Breastfeeding is a beautiful and natural thing," Christie said, sounding indignant. "I'm going to do it—if I have enough for the two of them."
"I'm all for that," Jim said, smiling toward his wife. "I just don't care for that particular image of my sister…"
"It's no big deal."
"So, you have any interesting conversations before I got home?"
"Nothing big. She felt terrible about leaving the bag out, though. She told me when you went in to change."
Jim sighed. "I guess when the babies get here, things are always going to be a mess around here so I better get used to it now. Right?"
"We'll try and keep things neat," Christie said, her spoon making tapping noises on the bottom or her ice cream dish as she tried to get every last bit. "No promises once they get older, but we'll just have to try and teach them good habits."
"You know, I think I noticed something," Jim said, feeling a little shy. "Um—does Bradley have my ears?"
"Your ears?"
"Yeah. They felt a bit…familiar."
Christie's laugh came from deep in her throat. "I really didn't notice. Would you like me to call your sister and ask her?"
"Christie," he said, climbing onto the stool next to hers. "Don't laugh. I thought noticing something like that was…"
As usual, he didn't know how to talk about the feeling that small accomplishment, something most sighted people wouldn't have even found interesting, produced in him. Since finding out he was going to be a father, Jim had assumed he would always be out of the loop when people analyzed the faces of his children, picking apart their features and figuring out where each one landed in the genetic map going back a few generations on either side. But today Jim had noticed a Dunbar ear for himself.
Christie's ice cream dish made contact with the counter and then Jim felt cold fingers grazing the stubble along his jaw. "I'm surprised you noticed his ears," she said, a smile in her voice. "I'm sorry I laughed."
Jim suspected that Christie often knew how to interpret his little clues; those partial sentences he found himself giving her when he couldn't articulate his thoughts. She had an empathy that showed her the part of himself he didn't know how to share.
According to Esther, the therapist Dr. Galloway had recommended, he needed to learn to be open about it. The big "IT." Two sessions in a row had turned into uncomfortable talks about how being blind had affected the marriage and how Jim needed to learn to share his feelings about it, no matter how raw they might be. Jim had left the last session with the sincere hope that next time they could go back to his infidelity and really dig to the bottom of it. That seemed fun in comparison to all the talk about blindness. But maybe even Esther assumed his past lifestyle was no longer an issue now that blindness had so emasculated him, taking him out of the running for that kind of indiscretion. He sighed.
"What is it, Jimmy?" Christie asked. She seemed to ask that question a lot, especially lately.
"I'm just—I don't know. Do we have to go back to Esther?"
"You don't think she's helping?"
He felt half his face scrunch as he thought. "Do you think she's helping?"
"I thought she made some very interesting points."
Jim stood so he could pace the kitchen as he thought. "Yeah, I know what you mean. But…when I spoke with Dr. Galloway, it seemed—"
"We've already talked about this, Jim. Esther isn't Dr. Galloway. She specializes in couples, which is what we are."
"But Galloway specializes in cops, which is what I am. What does Esther know about that? And what does she know about blind people? Telling me the way I'm supposed to be feeling and what I need to be talking about…"
"Maybe we can get her onto a different topic next time," Christie said soothingly. "One you can talk about."
Jim laughed without cracking a smile. "I think we both know what that means."
"Isn't that why we're going to her in the first place?"
Jim faced Christie. "If going to her is helping you, then let's keep doing it. I'm in for whatever is necessary to fix us."
"You know what's weird?" she asked. "I haven't been feeling very broken lately."
Jim shook his head, the corners of his mouth down. "Neither have I. But…do you think I don't talk about the blindness enough?"
She didn't answer right away. Jim could hear her idly scraping her spoon against the bottom of her bowl again. "I don't know," she said. "You live it. I see what you go through and I can imagine what it must do to you but…do I need you to spell it out for me all the time? I guess not. You're a lot better at letting me in then you were at first so however you feel comfortable doing that is fine with me. I just want you to know that you can tell me anything."
"I do know that. If I have something to tell, it'll be to you."
He found her, still on her stool, and placed a hand on her stomach. She said she wasn't showing much yet, but he could feel the difference in her body. The new roundness of her stomach.
"Here's something we can bring up at our next session," Jim said as he felt a smile spread across his face. "How do people raise twins?"