Excerpt of He Came in With It by Miriam Feldman

Excerpted with permission from HE CAME IN WITH IT: A Portrait of Motherhood and Madness by Miriam Feldman. © 2020 Miriam Feldman. Turner Publishing Company.

I guess there were signs. There had to have been signs. I missed them all.

So where does this story begin? Damned if I know, exactly. I had me a son. I had a fat little baby boy with a mouth like a rubber band. My husband, Craig, and I surfed the labor waves together like champs. When my son came out of me, the room was oddly hushed. He was my first, so I didn’t know what to expect. But it sure was quiet in there. No slap and cry, no nothing. Nick was blue and cold when he was born. We waited in the delivery room for his inaugural wail and heard only silence.

“Don’t worry, dear,” the nurse said. “We just have to warm him up a bit.”

They placed him in an apparatus that looked like a toaster oven. Everything in the room seemed cold, frozen. My husband and I each held our breath, and finally our son took his first. And we let ours out. I had my boy. Deep dark eyes and a serious composure. All the fingers, all the toes.

We named him Samuel, as we had planned, and then after a day or two, Craig and I renamed him Nicholas. Nick. I’d had a beloved uncle with that name, so that was fine with me. Craig gave him the middle name Dylan, after Bob.

 Nick: a normal, healthy boy. He was strong, he was adorable, and his future was as bright as the goddamned sun. I would loll around and stare at that future of his like a baby myself, entranced with jangling keys. Now Nick sits in a dark room all day, each day, and I wonder, What is he thinking? Who is in there?

I see how people look at him. I can read my family’s faces. I know what has happened to him is a tragedy. But to me he is in there, and his future is still ablaze, alone in his filthy apartment that I try to keep clean.

It was a soft, white afternoon on Ridgewood Place. Saturdays were generally quiet; an occasional dog would bark, but hours could go by without so much as the sound of a slow-moving car. A pleasant melancholy settled in on the weekends.

Walking a few houses up the street to collect Nick from a play- date with his friend Jack, I felt an overall sense of goodness and well- being. We had managed to buy our first house in Larchmont Village, an idyllic neighborhood of Los Angeles. I was a working artist, I had a handsome husband, and we had a darling son and another baby on the way. We seemed to belong perfectly in this venerable neighbor- hood where generations of families had deep roots in old homes. All was going as planned.

It had rained. As I walked, the sun came out, throwing long shadows and a crispness into the air. Everything felt fresh. With each step, wet leaves underfoot, the sidewalk felt comfortable. I was on my block. I was in my life.

My neighbor’s porch was still dripping. Nick was waiting for me on the steps with Jack and his mother, Bridget. We chatted for a minute, then I took his hand and we began down the sidewalk.

“Did you have fun, Nickboy? Was it a good day?” I asked.

“Yeah, we lined up all the toys, the little ones. They stretched all around the living room.”

He loved to do that, make long, domino-like trails of objects winding through the rooms of the house. He also utilized endless quantities of tape to sculpt airplanes and monsters. He made them out of clay sometimes too.

“Well, that sounds good,” I said.

“Ma, what’s the thing about shadows?” he asked, squinting into the sun.

“The thing?”

“I mean, like right now, my shadow is really long. But it changes all the time. Why?”

We stopped for a minute, and I crouched down. “You know how the earth revolves around the sun, so in the morning the sun rises, moves across the sky, and then sets on the other side?”

“Yes.”

“In the morning, our shadows stretch in one direction as the sun moves up and across, so they get longer and longer, like now.” I pointed to our lengthy shapes on the cement, stretching into the rich amber light. I stood up, and we continued walking. “Isn’t it wonderful, Nicky, the way our shadows are always with us? They’re like our best friends. Isn’t that a lovely thing?”

My four-year-old looked up at me with his endless brown eyes and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “And when we die, we will go into our shadows.”

At the time, I marveled at what a profound thought that was. Surely, this was evidence that he was no ordinary child. He was some kind of savant with the soul and vision of an adult. This was a child destined to do important things. And I was a young mother filled with the hubris of inexperience.