Jeff Gabel: SPITFIRE • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Jeff Gabel
SPITFIRE

My mother-in-law believes in signs. She believes in synchronicity and premonition. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for her obsession with death. When Neil and I told her we were naming our girl after a singer we admired, she warned us, “That singer died young, you know. An addict. Choked on her own vomit. There are photos if you don’t believe me.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“Even so,” she replied, looking at me sideways, “she was never her true self.”

“What are you, her medium?”

Neil told me to take it easy. He is endlessly endeared by his mother’s superstitions. “She’s kooky,” he once said. “That’s all.”

For months our girl did somersaults in my womb. Breeched one day, sideways the next, her bottom pressed against my bladder. We went in for an aversion, but when the O.B. pressed the transducer onto my belly, our girl was head-down. That night she flipped again. This went on until finally, a week after my due date, I was in constant pain and we decided to induce labor.

My mother-in-law begged us to wait.

“She’ll come when she’s ready,” she said.

I nearly slapped her. Neil said something diplomatic about how it was my body and my baby. My choice.

After fifteen hours of labor, our girl was head-down but had no intention of dropping. They injected me with Pitocin, stuck a Foley balloon into my cervix, broke my water. None of it worked. The anesthesiologist stabbed me three times at the base of my spine until he got it right, and I was numb, shaking so violently from the hormones and epidural that Neil looked utterly petrified. I couldn’t feel it when they cut me open and pulled her out. But I heard her. I saw her. Wailing, limbs quivering, eyes shut, walnut hair matted against her scalp. She was perfect.

A few hours later, we called my mother-in-law to tell her the good news.

“Patty Wood’s granddaughter drowned in a pool,” she announced suddenly. “Eighteen months old. Can you believe it? It made national news. I’ll send you a link.”

“Please don’t,” I said. Neil held his phone away as if I had tried to snatch it. I grabbed his wrist and pulled him close. “Let me guess,” I spat, “the girl’s name was Natalie.”

My mother-in-law went silent.

What the fuck, Neil mouthed. I shrugged, feeling adrenalized, then childish and cruel. When his mother was a girl, she saw Splendor in the Grass eight times, convinced that if she channeled her energy in just the right way, she might change the ending. Six decades later, four after Natalie Wood drowned, she weeps every time it plays on TCM.

That night, at half past three—the witching hour, I am often reminded—I woke to silence and rolled over to check on our girl. Her eyes were wide, mouth open. Her arms wriggled underneath Neil’s perfectly wrapped swaddle. Her skin was turning bluish-gray. At first, what was happening did not occur to me. Then something clicked. I tried to sit up. A searing pain detonated in my abdomen, blazing through my insides to the tips of my fingers. My body collapsed like a marionette with snapped strings. I shrieked and managed to slap Neil awake. The moment he saw what was happening, he pulled our girl from the bassinet, turned her face-down, and started smacking her on the back. Nothing. I snatched her and did the same, only harder. Still nothing. “My baby is dying!” I shouted. “Neil!”

Neil sprinted out of the room. I lifted our girl upright. She was now violet. Her little expression, moments ago tightening, receded from me. I was sobbing, staring with wretched resolve into her eyes, her irises two brown-speckled galaxies of electric blue. For some reason—it embarrasses me now, to think of it—I tricked myself into believing that if only I held her gaze, I might draw back the life so quick to drain from her. Her pupils quivered. Her mouth agape. I went silent. And in that moment, what image should pop into my head but my mother-in-law, ten years old, plopped in a front row seat at the Esquire, lips pursed, hands folded in her lap, staring ahead with unwavering intent while soft, technicolor light bounced off the silver screen and splashed across her face.

Another flash of pain shot up from my incision. I clenched my daughter. I shouted. I screamed.

Then, just like in Backdraft when Kurt Russell crashes into a nursery ablaze, the door swung open and in came Neil, followed by two nurses, perturbed and disbelieving. The nurse in front took one look at our girl and said, “Oh, shit!” She bolted over, grabbed my baby and smacked her, violently, three times on the back. One two three. A glob of mucus the size of a cherry shot out of her mouth and there it was: the sweet, sweet sound of her wailing. Her color returned. Her face scrunched up and her tiny arms broke free of Neil’s swaddle—my little Spitfire.

For months I avoided telling my mother-in-law. I thought she’d treat us like we cheated death and someday must pay our due.

One day, exhausted, I let slip what happened. Her reaction totally disarmed me.

“You woke up,” she said. “You couldn’t hear her choking, and yet, you woke up.”

“We were lucky,” I replied.

Then, counter to everything I had ever come to understand of her, she did not insist I was wrong, did not cite some weird aspect of the occult I merely refused to see. She just placed her hand on mine and looked at me tenderly. Ever since, she never mentions what happened. And when she looks at Spitfire, her eyes are warm, in awe, as if for her entire life she has been storing every ounce of love just for our little girl.

Jeff Gabel’s fiction has appeared in Valparaiso Fiction Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Litro Magazine, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson. He lives in his hometown, Denver, with his wife and two daughters. You can find more of his stories at jeffgabelwrites.com.