“Somebody help me,” I said. My pleas sounded inside my head like child’s play, as if real cries can echo something pretend. “Somebody, find my husband.” He’d gone into another nearby restaurant ahead of me.
I bent against the grainy slab of pavement. The rough texture matched a small bruise forming on the back of Leo’s head. I pulled him into the apron of my skirt, my thighs now bare, the seams of my underpants the only stitches holding me together. An old man with goggles for glasses stood up from a table and limped toward me. “God takes care of the little ones,” he said. He cupped Leo’s head with his palms, leathery and wide like baseball mitts. Another stranger called an ambulance. I pulled down my shirt and released my breast from the buoy of my bra, an offering to the baby I thought might die. His wet lips parted, and his gums palpated my knot of flesh, his crying muffled by the warm linen of my bosom. By the time paramedics arrived, Leo had breastfed himself back to life. Later at the Brewers game, the sound of bat-to-ball contact reverberated throughout the stadium as I held my baby swaddled in the miraculousness of resurrection.
Later when Leo was two years old, he disappeared at a local school playground. Irelyn was under the supervision of employees from the Oshkosh Recreation Department, and Fern was asleep in my arms. She was the new baby now. A ten-year-old boy led Leo up through the tunnel slides and safely down ladders. He rolled a ball to Leo, and Leo kicked the ball back, his green LITTLE HOOLIGANS T-shirt to his knees. Under and over the balance beams, and through the open gaps between logs—smoothed, stained, and bolted to the earth—the boys scampered.
I began chatting with a fellow mother about nothing—sixty seconds of banter—and when I looked back, Leo was gone. I retraced the boys’ scurrying, then called “Leo” on repeat, growing louder and more panicked, a crescendo toward real fright. “Leo!” I ran toward the school to scream at Irelyn. Fern, the youngest, was a nine-pound bundle of warmth and indifference against the slack of my midsection.
“Help me,” I said to the mother I had just met, begging and reprimanding, a tone reserved for immediate family. I broke in every direction like a bird whose clipped wings prevent it from taking flight. A knife split my body wide as I searched, and already I could see the scar forming, vitality ripped from inside me, though I’d be expected to keep living.
My spirit was a coin in his left shoe, tucked away for good luck, its fortune turned against him, like the time he picked up a penny on the driveway and slipped it into the back of his mouth, where it lodged for a minute before he coughed up strings of mucous followed by the money, which shot like a copper stone from the sling of his throat against greater evil.
This time he would be ushered back by a custodian mowing the school lawn with a tractor the size of a harvesting combine.
“This guy yours?” he asked.
Leo’s semisweet eyes and whipped-cream skin made me want to eat him with the kind of voraciousness reserved for true relief. He was somehow cut from dual advertisements for fancy cakes, and snakes, snails, and puppy-dog tails.
“You could have been kidnapped,” I cried. My heart rate would not recalibrate until Leo was safely in bed hours later. Studying a child as he sleeps can be tranquil but ominous. My childhood friend’s mother forbade her from sleeping on her back, hands clasped across her chest. “It looks like you’re dead!” she’d admonish. Indeed, beds are shallow graves, and certainly every mother has studied her baby’s chest in the night: Is it rising, and is it falling?
When Francis was born two years later, my friend Angie referred to him as “Leo’s backup,” funny for its various meanings. We could imagine Franco as a backup singer or dancer. Irie was given the gift of voice and Franco the gift of rhythm. Franco was Leo’s understudy, and true to definition, he learned to play many roles by watching Leo—brother, son, and wiseacre. Frank was and still is a performer, his big brother’s stunt double and mimic, his thespian’s eyebrow peaked in the shape of constant, enthusiastic expression.
But of course, when Angie referred to Frank as Leo’s backup, she really meant that he could replace Leo if anything bad happened. When Leo was afraid of being ejected from the Zippin Pippin roller coaster at Bay Beach, she said, “Don’t worry. Mom’s got backup.” She said the same thing if Leo hit his head or took a spill. Frank could take his place as the firstborn son; no big deal. Deep down, I would actually think in these provocatively old-fashioned terms, as if I were matriarch of a family farm and relied on child labor to sustain our existence.
As I listened over the years to fellow mothers in academia, I realized I was potentially less evolved than they were. If I wasn’t a throwback to midcentury rural America, then I operated like lesser mammals, maybe a fox, but more likely a rabbit or mole. To legitimize my investment, so as not to waste a full breeding season, I craved a cumulatively large litter of human babies. A larger brood increased the chances of their partial survival. This explains why birds and fish lay so many eggs; they are optimizing their chances that a portion of their eggs will hatch, even if the remaining portion is slurped up by some carnivorous beast.
Even lower in the animal kingdom are
