I promised I would keep the diagnosis to myself.
“I suppose that was the business part. You want some hot popovers? Sit down and I’ll make us a fresh pot of tea.”
I said no, but she kept insisting. Still wearing my parka, I sat. Eve poured us both tea from the china pot. We ate three popovers apiece. And it came to me that this must have been part of why I’d come, to drink tea with Eve Barter and so be forgiven for the unforgivable message I had brought.
After I left Eve’s kitchen, I wandered back to the dock. Charlie Stacks stood at the prow of his boat, sniffing the air. It was only four thirty, but the sun was going down. I could smell the storm coming, although I couldn’t have told you what it smelled like. I stared across the water. I didn’t look forward to consoling Maureen. And I was even less eager to get back to the lab. Maybe it would be better to let Yosef read the results. Would it be less excruciating to hold the gun myself, or ask someone else to hold it? I had to laugh. If I let Yosef read the blot, would I be playing Russian roulette?
We were halfway across the bay when Stacks clasped a hand to his chest as if he were pledging allegiance. “I’m not feeling so well,” he said. “Town’s that way. Stay this course, but keep an eye out for rocks.”
He waited until I had taken the wheel then staggered out of the cabin. Maybe he was trying to prove that my eyes, though younger than his, were less useful than his ears. I saw nothing but the horizon, the sun resting on the land like a note on a stave. I craned my head out the door. “Mr. Stacks? Are you all right?”
I should have shut the engine and gone to see if he needed first aid. But I didn’t know how to restart the boat. I looked for a way to make the engine go faster, but neither lever produced this result. I twisted the dials on the radio but heard only static. If I headed straight for the setting sun I would be sure to reach the mainland. But what about the rocks? I glanced at the coffee-stained map. Wasn’t that guppyish shape the island? I was afraid to take my eyes from the sea, but every now and then I tried squinting at the map, and I grew more confident I could steer my way in, avoiding the giant sandbar lurking to my left, the shoals off to starboard.
After what seemed forever, a steeple pricked the sky. Lumpy buildings. Faint lights. I steered clear of a rock on which a gull sat flapping its wings and laughing. Then I passed a buoy whose bell clamored in our wake. I was congratulating myself on having navigated my way to the shore when I realized that the map I had been using was upside down.
I approached the dock sideways but cut the motor too late. A knot of fishermen on the wharf watched the boat drift by. “Get a doctor!” I shouted as I ran the boat aground.
“What the hell you doing!” Stacks called.
Two fishermen sauntered toward the ferry. The shorter and less attractive—he reminded me of a hedgehog—reached up and swung me down. I ran to find Miriam. Halfway along Front Street, my body seemed too heavy to move. I gulped air to keep from vomiting, then forced myself to run the rest of the way. The three women in Miriam’s waiting room studied me as if they could guess I was pregnant and expected me to miscarry right there. I brushed past the receptionist, through the frosted door, and choked out an explanation.
“Damn him,” Miriam said. She asked the woman on her examining table to watch Raphael, who was chewing on a rusk. She called the nearest hospital and demanded an ambulance, then gathered a stethoscope, an oxygen tank, and some drugs and stuffed these in her bag. Raphael started crying. “I’ll kill that selfish old coot,” Miriam grumbled.
When we got back to the beach, Stacks was slumped against an oil barrel like something that had washed ashore and nobody cared to salvage. “Ain’t going to that hospital,” he told Miriam.
“Yes you damn well are. And you’re going to let them put that pacemaker in. I won’t have you calling me out at all hours and disturbing my child.”
The ambulance came. The EMTs ignored Stacks’s protests and shoved him in the van. Miriam grumbled good-bye to me and hurried back to her office. The fishermen stared at me as if they expected me to do something with the boat. I backed away, as if this were a conspiracy to lure some unsuspecting passenger into taking Stacks’s place and ferrying the mail back and forth to Spinsters Island forever.
I kept walking out of town. I was nearly to Paul’s house when he rode up behind me.
“Where did you leave her?” I said.
“You sound as if you think I did away with her. I had a board meeting. It wasn’t as if I knew she was coming.”
I had forgotten how attractive he was. Poor Maureen.
“It’s not what you’re thinking. It just came to me, after I proposed, that I would be wrong to leave here. It would sound more admirable to claim the people here need me. But it’s the reverse that’s true. What would I be in Boston? I’m sure I could manufacture a cause. But I wouldn’t be as valuable there as I am here. I’ve told her straight out, if she decides to move up here, we’ll get married anytime. I know the sacrifice she would be making. I’ll understand if she chooses not to make it. But I’m not a coward. I’m not a hypocrite.”
“You’re a bureaucrat,” I said. “She keeps getting screwed by bureaucrats.”
We climbed the steps to Paul’s house. “Thank God,” Maureen said. “If I had to sit here another minute . . .”
He carried her to the van. I clamped the wheelchair behind the steering wheel, settled in the chair, and turned the key. Paul stood beside Maureen’s window, but she wouldn’t look his way, as if her neck had lost its last degree of mobility.
“I’ll write you,” he said. “We can still be friends, can’t we?”
“No,” Maureen said. “I don’t think we can.”
When we reached the main road, she blew her nose. “I can’t believe I have to start over. From scratch. I was tempted to pitch it all and stay. But I would go nuts here, Jane. I would go absolutely nuts, cooped up in that house. I love him. But since when has loving someone ever been enough?”
19
Neither of us was in a rush to get back. After an hour on the road I told Maureen I was too tired to keep driving. We checked into a bed and breakfast. The bathroom was too small for Maureen’s chair; I helped her hobble to the toilet, then turned and waited until she was ready to hobble back. There was only one bed. We stripped to our underwear and settled on opposite sides of the mattress.
Maybe we should stay awhile, I said.
Maureen asked for how long.
I don’t know, I said. An extra day. Maybe two.
Sure, Maureen said.
I told her that I was pregnant.
“Oh, sweetie.” She sighed. She held my hand and sympathized but didn’t offer advice, whether because she was too tired and depressed or because she knew I wouldn’t listen. It came to me again that if we had grown up in a society in which pregnant couples were able to test their fetus to make sure it didn’t carry the genes for any serious disease, Maureen probably wouldn’t have been alive.
We slept hours past breakfast. The day was brilliant but cold, even for December. Huddled inside our jackets we scurried from shop to shop, browsing through shelves of plastic lobsters and picturesque postcards of the islands offshore. I thought of sending one to Willie, but what would I have written? I’m having your child, let’s get married. Or: I’ve decided to abort it. I wondered if I would ever lead a life in which I could drop a postcard to my boyfriend with a simple “I miss you.”
We slept twelve hours that night, ate our breakfast with the other guests, then tried to stroll the boardwalk, but we couldn’t withstand the wind.
“We might as well go home,” Maureen said.
We might as well, I said.
We expected the weather would turn warmer farther south, but the wind grew more bitter. The heater whimpered and squealed, then stopped working. Rather than wait in a grimy service station for some mechanic to repair it, we sat rigid with cold, breath clouding our faces, all the way back to Boston. It was a Thursday afternoon. Most peopl
e were at work. The Charles was filmed with ice.
I parked the van and helped Maureen get out. She poked around in the depths of her overnight bag, then pulled out a tissue. “On top of everything, I’m coming down with a cold.” She blew her nose. “Let me know what you decide. I’ll shake myself out of this.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “You’ve got your own problems.”
I walked home and spooned a jar of peanut butter onto stale rye bread for dinner. Around eight, I wrapped a scarf around my face and biked to the lab. Going up in the elevator, I wiped my nose on my scarf; I was getting Maureen’s cold.
“Homozygous mouse is fine,” Yosef said. “I just came back from checking. As for the test, all you got to do on your own DNA is develop the blot. Other gel is hybridizing, it should be ready tomorrow. You want me to stay? I don’t like to think you’re here all by yourself.”
I thanked him but said I didn’t want anyone around when I read it. He understood, didn’t he?
“No,” he said. “If it’s me, I want friend around to help take bad news. Or help enjoy good news.” He put his lips to my ear. “I’ll be praying,” he whispered.
I took the cassette—a piece of X-ray film clamped between cardboard sheets—and spun the darkroom door. I flicked on the red light, and, hands moving by rote, slid the film from its sheath. I set the timer for a few seconds longer than required. I wasn’t in any hurry. I shook off the extra drops of fixer from the film. I tried to calm my thoughts, but my heart beat as wildly as a Geiger counter. I turned on the white light and found the lane I wanted. The heavy smudge, here, and the empty space, there, meant I had inherited one good gene from my father and another good gene from my mother.
I went limp. My legs buckled. I sank to the floor. “Thank you,” I kept saying, although I wasn’t sure whom I was thanking. God wouldn’t use a person’s health to punish or reward her, would he? Still, I found myself bargaining: Don’t let Laurel have it. Let both of us be okay.
I plunged my X-ray in the fixer for another five minutes. Later, carrying my film down the hall, I stared at the empty space where the marker should have been but wasn’t. I clipped the film above my bench, then sat and watched it dry. Yosef came in. I looked up at him and smiled.
“Thank God,” he said quietly.
“I already thanked him.”
He laughed. “Two Jewish atheists thanking God, is funny.” He kissed my hair. His lips lingered. “You come over. I’ll get some champagne. We’ll make a very big celebration.”
I almost said yes. But that wasn’t what I wanted, getting drunk with Yosef. We would end up in bed, and everything between us, all this tenderness, would be ruined. I would need to see him in the lab the next day and pretend we hadn’t had sex.
“Not tonight,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
He jabbed a Camel in his mouth. Usually, he obeyed the rule about not smoking in the lab, but he lit the cigarette and inhaled, and when he let out that breath, all his hope and animation seemed to go with it. “Sure,” he said. “You change your mind later, you call me at home, no matter what the time.”
I would do that, I said. He made the thumbs-up sign, hugged me again, and went out. I didn’t want to leave the film hanging where anyone could see it, so I pressed it in Saran Wrap, slipped it inside my parka, and biked home. I hung the film from the Venetian blinds in the kitchen and then paced the living room. “I’m lucky,” I said aloud. “I don’t have it. I won’t die.” But how could I believe that? How could a smudge on a piece of film reveal anything so private and essential about me? How could it make me another Jane Weiss?
I dialed my father’s number, but before anyone could answer I hung up. What about Laurel? he would ask. He would be in Boston that weekend for her concert. If my sister’s test, like mine, turned out to be negative, I could see the happiness on his face when I told him that both his daughters were fine. And if Laurel’s test turned out positive, maybe my own good news would temper his grief.
I phoned Maureen instead.
“That’s wonderful,” she croaked. “I’m so happy for you. That’s terrific.” But nothing she said seemed ecstatic enough. Maybe, deep inside, she envied my good luck. Or maybe nothing anyone could say would satisfy a person who had learned she wouldn’t die.
“We’ll go dancing,” Maureen promised.
“Great,” I said. “We’ll do that.”
I looked for Willie’s number in New Hampshire. It was past ten. I imagined the phone ringing in his shack with no one there to hear. I was trying to figure out what message I would leave when Willie said, “Hey.” For a moment I couldn’t answer. “Anyone there?” he asked.
“It’s me,” I said. “It’s Jane.”
“Jane,” he said. “Hey. How are you? Are you all right? Is something wrong?”
“I thought maybe you could come down here tomorrow instead of Saturday.” Go ahead, you can say it. “I need to talk to you. I need to see you.”
He told me he could come right then, if I wanted.
I looked around at the threadbare couch that had come with the apartment and the empty beakers in which I had arranged Laurel’s bouquets. Yes, I said. I wouldn’t mind if he came. I would be grateful. Please, come.
“I’ll be there in two hours. Is that okay? I could drive faster, if I needed to drive faster.”
“No,” I said. “Two hours. That’s fine.”
He took an hour and forty-five minutes to drive down from New Hampshire. In the meantime, I unpacked my mother’s books and found a photo of a fetus at twelve weeks’ gestation, the face featureless except for those darkly lidded eyes. The gelatinous arms and fingers hung poised like those of a pianist preparing to play. In the center of the chest, a crimson blob beat 150 times a minute—even faster than my own heart had chattered in the darkroom a few hours earlier, when I was being reborn. It wasn’t a question of when life started, I thought. It wasn’t a question of whether I would care for a child who had been born with an illness that couldn’t be foreseen. Like any mother, I would do everything possible to save my child’s life. But wasn’t it wrong to knowingly give birth to a child who would suffer? And what if the child had a one-in-two chance? Or less, a one-in-four chance. Was that half a sin? One quarter?
I heard someone on the stairs. Willie’s hair was a mess. He stepped into the living room and stood awaiting my instructions.
“I don’t have it,” I said.
“You don’t have what?” he said. “The baby?”
“The test . . . I don’t have Valentine’s.”
I watched the news travel from his brain to his heart. He kissed me on the mouth, then crushed me to his parka and swung me around the living room, whooping so loudly I was afraid he would wake the landlord. “This is great!” he said. “Don’t shush me!” He whooped again. “Jesus, if you can’t make noise at a time like this!” He whooped a third time, spinning me until we sprawled awkwardly across the couch. I wanted to say: If my result makes you so happy, why don’t you take the test? But I knew this made sense only if I could promise that he, too, would have a negative result. How could all three of us be so lucky? All four.
We talked about the baby. Again I brought up the possibility that Willie let himself be tested. When he repeated his refusal, I had to sit on my hands to keep from hitting him. “I’m kind of thirsty,” he said.
I didn’t have any chocolate milk, but I offered to make him some hot cocoa. I spooned powder in two cups and boiled water in a pan. Bringing the cups to the living room, I stumbled. Chocolate sloshed to the rug. The old fear surged back. Then I thought: I’m just clumsy. Most people were. Not those few graceful human beings like Cruz and my sister, but everyone else. “Should I go?” Willie asked. “I could find a room at a hotel.”
I panicked. “No. Stay.”
He thumped the cushion he was sitting on; dust rose about our heads. “On this ratty thing?”
We put down our cocoa and I led him to my room, to the single bed covere
d with the daisy-print comforter my mother had picked out from Weiss’s linen department the week I left for college.
“You sure about this?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “But I want to do it anyway.”
“What guy could refuse an invitation like that?” He unbuttoned his shirt, unlaced his red sneakers, and lay down in his jeans. I stretched out beside him. The bed was barely wide enough for him, let alone for both of us. I put my head on his chest, which was hairy and soft and smelled like the woods on a rainy day. I had missed this the most without knowing it, lying with my cheek against a man’s chest, hearing his heart. He rubbed my back. He lifted off my shirt and kissed my neck, then kissed each swollen breast and tender nipple. I wrapped my arms around his back and squeezed until his spine cracked. We made love, long, slow love, every second stretching out longer than a normal second. Exhausted, we slept. A car alarm went off. I leaped up, looked around the room, took a breath, and relaxed. We made love a second time. In the morning, when we awoke, he reached for me again, but this time I pulled back. In a little while I would be developing Laurel’s blot. If her test turned out badly, I would never forgive myself for making love with him that day.
We ate, washed, and dressed, then walked to the lab holding gloved hands. When Yosef saw me, he grinned and presented me with a rose. Then he noticed Willie. I could hear Yosef think: Sure, Russkie can’t compete with American cowboy looks like John Wayne. Well, I thought, he would need to get used to Willie’s presence. Everyone would.
I went into Vic’s office. He was talking on the phone. I waited until he set down the receiver. “My blot turned out negative. I don’t have the gene.”
He bowed his head and twined his fingers. When he looked up again, his face was wet. “This is what it was all about, wasn’t it. Jane, I think that half the reason I wanted this moratorium was because I was so sure you had it. I thought I could prevent you from finding out. Wasn’t that crazy? But there’s this side of it, this blessing. People finding out they’ve got their whole lives ahead of them.” He stared up at the ceiling. “And your sister? Here I’ve been acting as if . . . Have you done her test yet? Does she . . . Well, does she?”
A Perfect Life Page 26
