Ascending

Chapter 2

2

On April 4, 1968, years before fathers were allowed to attend the delivery of their own child, Scarlett Kane remembered the pain first and the nurses around her, then the doctor standing at her feet guiding the birth. She regretted that her handsome blond husband, Michael, was not present in the room. The baby gushed out of her womb, releasing the pressure. The baby cried.

The doctor smiled and held him up. “It’s a boy!”

The mother’s azure eyes danced. Her husband would be overjoyed. Michael wanted a boy so much. She had to have a boy. She had validated herself and him by giving birth to a son. Her chest swelled and she took large, deep, savoring breaths. A nurse allowed Scarlett to hold her son before the doctor whisked him off to see Michael in the waiting room.

They called the baby Troy Michael Kane. Michael agreed to calling their child after the old tales of the Trojan war, and the alleged discovery of Troy by the German adventurer and archeologist Heinrich Schliemann. “Let’s not call him Heinrich Schliemann,” Michael laughed. “Kane is too Irish for that and Schliemann too shady. Troy Michael it is. He’ll be a hero.”

His wife murmured from her hospital bed, “The name also means ‘foot soldier’ in Irish Gaelic.”

“Fitting,” Michael commented and flexed his biceps. “My son the warrior.”

Scarlett’s mother had been a fan of Gone with the Wind and Scarlett loved being named after the strong female character in the book and epic movie. She hoped her son would also love his historic nomenclature.

At birth the boy weighed eight pounds fifteen ounces and was twenty-one inches long. His mother kept a shock of his pale hair in a blue baby book, which was a gift; later recorded his height, weight, first adventures, and vaccinations at various times of his childhood.

Troy had eczema shortly after birth, on the left side of his face, unsightly at first, and their close friends said, “Aww, so cute,” when they first saw him, then stopped when he turned his little face to the other side and they were shocked at the red mottle. Scarlett’s stomach fell at their reaction but she and Michael were so proud and delighted with their new baby boy.

She applied ointments, wheeled him in his baby carriage to expose him to filtered sunlight and fresh air every morning, down the long tree-lined streets of their neighborhood, past the gossiping neighbors on their front stoops, and the eczema eventually healed.

Michael washed the baby’s clothes in a laundromat because they lived in a cheap rented house with no laundry facilities. The husband used a lot of bleach on the baby’s clothes and washed out all the vibrant colors. Scarlett thought the bleach contributed to the eczema.

Her husband used lots of very hot water and bleach because he was a clean freak, which helped when his wife needed assistance with chores. He vacuumed all the carpets weekly and tidied their belongings in drawers and closets, which were always neat and well organized thanks to him. Michael was very active and useful.

His son remembered him forever although Troy was barely three when Michael Joseph Kane died in a horrific fiery motorcycle crash over the side of a bridge and shattered his helmet on a light standard below. His son remembered fondly and with some puzzlement the circus and the swimming pools that his father took him to when he was small, before his father didn’t ever come back again into his life. Barely three years old at the time, he remembered his mother crying when she left him with Scott’s mother one morning and his father did not come back as he usually eventually did.

After death. What is that? Troy didn’t understand, such a little boy he was, and waited at the window many days for his father to come home again.

Scarlett really didn’t understand, either, and the guilt overwhelmed her. Her last memory of Michael was the senseless fight, the door slamming, and the sound of the Honda bike as it roared away, down the street and to eternity.