A Perfect Life

by Eileen Pollack

  I was already three months pregnant, I said.

  My father jumped up, as if he didn’t know whom to fight. But he wasn’t about to let the fate of a grandchild who didn’t yet exist steal the relief he had bought so dearly. He slapped Willie on the back, sneezed, crushed my shoulders, and didn’t even ask if we intended to get married. Honey sipped water and smiled a stiff smile until her son reminded her that congratulations were in order.

  She choked out a word that might have been “Congratulations,” or it might have been “I can’t.” I could tell she was thinking about the members of the family who hadn’t yet received a clean bill of health. She put her face in her hands and started sobbing. I leaned over and tried to comfort her. She stood. Her chair fell backward. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Janie, I’m very happy for you. And for Laurel, too, of course. I’m very relieved for you both. I’m grateful for all you’ve done. But I can’t . . . You can’t expect me to . . .” Willie came up behind her and wrapped her in his arms, as he had wrapped Flora Drury in his arms. My father went over and did the same. It was hardly the celebration for which I had hoped. But I finally got up and joined them.

  In the three weeks that followed, I received dozens of inquiries from universities offering me my own lab. Reporters kept calling. I was interviewed for Nova and a television program in Japan. (I couldn’t help but wonder if Achiro would watch the show, if news of my success would please him.) What I wanted most was to see Laurel. I longed for her embrace, for the sense that we had overcome the long rivalry between us. I dialed her apartment in Vermont, imagining a day when I would have that number memorized. I tried again the next morning, and the next, until, in frustration, I let the phone keep ringing until someone picked up, revealing herself to be one of Laurel’s neighbors who had stopped by to feed the cat. Laurel, the woman said, had gone to New York to see her boyfriend and wouldn’t be back until the end of that week.

  And so, a few days later, when the phone started ringing in the middle of the night, I had some idea who it might be. I untangled myself from Willie, thinking we would need to buy a double bed, soon, and grabbed the phone before it woke him.

  “I’m downtown,” Laurel said. “I’m in the lobby at South Station.” She had taken the train up from Manhattan and missed the last bus to Vermont. She had only enough money to make this call.

  I told her to take a cab and I would pay the driver.

  “It’s such a beautiful night,” she said. “I would rather walk.”

  “At this hour? Are you nuts?”

  “I shouldn’t be bothering you,” she said. “You need your sleep. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I can’t seem to hold a thought in my head. Don’t worry about me, Jane. I’ll spend the night here.”

  I started to tell her to wait and I would come get her, but she already had hung up. Was she in her right mind? She almost sounded drunk, although she rarely drank anything stronger than tea.

  I told Willie I needed to take the Jeep, but my voice didn’t seem to reach him. He slept heavily, as if such a large body sunk him deeper into sleep. I usually got up every few hours to take antacids or pee, but this didn’t disturb his rest. What would happen when our baby woke crying in the night? Would I need to clobber him to get up, or would it be less bother to change the diaper myself? Would we fight about things like that? How could I get angry at someone who might become ill at any time?

  “I need to go rescue Laurel,” I said. I expected no response. But as I reached across his chest to grab the keys, he asked if he should come. “No,” I said. “There’s no reason both of us need to freeze.” I would have felt easier with his company. And now, of course, I regret more than anything that I didn’t beg him to come. But I suspected then that my sister wouldn’t reveal what was really troubling her unless we were alone.

  I pulled on tights beneath my jeans, although I could barely zip shut the zipper. A scarf pulled high, a hat pulled low. The frigid air stung my sinuses. The Jeep door whined; the seat complained beneath my weight. I was afraid the engine wouldn’t turn over, but it did. The streets were so quiet I hoped Laurel might be safe; even a mugger wouldn’t be out on such a cold night. The moon was so brilliantly full, it looked like a hole in the sky through which white paint was pouring down to glaze the Charles. The scene was even more surreal because a wooden desk was sitting on the ice about twenty yards from the Cambridge shore, with a chair and a pole lamp. I could make out a pile of textbooks on the desk, a typewriter, and a telephone. MIT students were given to playing pranks. Not long before, they had stolen a statue of a cow from a steak house on Route 1 and hoisted it to the dome on the main building. But hauling a desk on thin ice? Someone’s roommates had risked their lives to play this joke.

  South Station, which was being remodeled, was a mess of scaffolding, plywood tunnels, and plastic tarp. I checked the waiting room, the bathrooms, the luggage room, the platforms, then got back in the Jeep and navigated the tangle of one-way streets that surrounded the station. In a few minutes, I would pull over, find a phone, and call home. Maybe my sister had come to her senses and taken a cab.

  But no, there she was, walking toward the Common. I could just make out her shawl. That couldn’t be all she was wearing, could it? Worse, when I drove up, she shook her head like a little girl refusing a ride from a stranger—although, as a little girl, Laurel had several times accepted rides from people she didn’t know. She didn’t smell of alcohol, but there was a frantic look in her eyes. She left the sidewalk and veered across the Common. I parked the Jeep, then raced across the snow, praying I had been right and it was too cold for criminals.

  “If we have to take a walk,” I said, “can we take it somewhere besides the park?”

  She looked around as if she were only now realizing where we were. “I don’t want to go to your place.”

  I followed her back along the path, across Beacon toward Charles Street. I felt safer there, as if all the fancy shops, deserted at this hour, would somehow protect us. Then she took off across Storrow Drive to the river. Her hands must have been freezing—she worked them into the rear pockets of her jeans.

  “I saw Cruz,” she said. “I knew it would be ugly, but it was worse than ugly. I don’t ever want to go back.”

  Well, I said, no one was forcing her to live in New York.

  She shook her head. “Vermont. Not New York. I bought a round-trip ticket, but there’s no reason for me to go back there.” She pulled a hand from her jeans and brought out a ticket, which she tossed in the snow. I had to remove my own gloves to pick it up.

  What about her dance troupe? I asked. The reviews had been terrific. Or hadn’t she read them? I had memorized the quotes: Explores interesting new ground . . . often compelling . . . original . . . deeply felt.

  “What do my reviews have to do with anything? I couldn’t do that again.”

  “Of course you could!” I had meant to be encouraging, but my voice came out sharp. “Think of all the years—”

  “That’s exactly what I am thinking about. What am I going to do with all those years? I was a good enough dancer—for someone who was going to die soon. But for an ordinary person . . . And without Valentine’s, I am pretty ordinary. Jane, I don’t know how to be ordinary. And even if I were good enough, how much longer could I keep at it? My knees are shot—all that skiing, a bad landing I took skydiving. Do you think I would have taken all those chances with my legs if I had thought any of it mattered?” She tossed her hair; the strands crackled and threw off a spark. “And don’t talk to me about choreography. That was Cruz. Well, no. The idea about the slime mold was mine. But what to do with it, how to turn it into art . . .”

  “So why don’t you marry him?”

  “Because you have to be able to imagine spending your life with someone. Getting old with him. I don’t love him. It didn’t matter before. If he wanted to marry me, fine. We would work together a few years, have some fun, and as soon as I got sick he would run away. But all those ye
ars and years together . . . And kids. He wanted to have kids.”

  “But you can!” I said. “You can have kids. Don’t you see? You won’t get Valentine’s, and any kid you might ever have won’t get it either.”

  She slumped against my chest. “I have no excuse for it now, do I. I have nothing to live for. Or not to live for.”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” I said. She was prettier than anyone else I knew. She was talented and smart. How dare she talk as if she had nothing left to live for?

  “I can’t do it,” she said. “I was never scared of anything before. Because none of it mattered. ‘Creative terror,’ that’s what I used to call it. What am I supposed to do now? Even giving you that blood—it was my chance to be a heroine. I was sure it would show that I had the gene and you didn’t. So what can I do now? You get to work on the cure. You’ll have your kid. You have Willie. Dad, he’s got the foundation. Your lives are still wrapped up in it.” She laughed a laugh that sounded like the ice on the river cracking. “You were smart to get attached to a man who’s still at risk.”

  I had to crumple Laurel’s shawl in my fist to keep from wrapping it around her neck. “How can you say that?”

  She hid her face. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I know how hard you’ve worked. I know how happy you are for me. And I was, too. At first. Those first few days I was euphoric. How could I not be? Then I got back to Vermont and had time to think. Cruz kept calling and demanding I go down there. And I did. But he wants kids. I don’t love him. I told you that already. But even if I did, I can’t have a kid.”

  “Of course you can have a kid. Laurel, you’re only thirty!”

  “You don’t know the truth. No one knows. It was that summer in Alaska. With that guy Spence? Remember him? The lumberjack?”

  He had hardly been a lumberjack; his father owned half the timber in the state.

  “I got pregnant. For the third time. I told you about the first two times. But there was a third time. It was terrible. I convinced some doctor to tie my tubes. He didn’t want to, at first, because I was only in my twenties. But he was some old guy in the middle of Alaska, I’m not sure he even had a license, and I convinced him I had Valentine’s disease. It wasn’t such a lie. I believed it. Every time I missed a dance step, every time I forgot something, or my moods changed, I knew I had it. I can’t have kids, Jane. I dropped out of school. I aborted three pregnancies. I had my tubes tied. I don’t know how to earn a living. All I can do is to spend other people’s money. Do you know how much I owe? I owe eighty-five thousand dollars. I would get an offer for a credit card, and I would think, sure, why not, run it to the limit. Where do you think Cruz and I got the money to put on that show? I don’t know how to live within a budget. I don’t know how to be a sister, or a lover, or a friend. I don’t know how to be a grown-up. I don’t even know who I am without it. Do you understand? I don’t know.”

  We were in the shadowy nowhere beneath the T. The trains had stopped running. If I climbed the bridge, Laurel might follow me. We would be safer up there. Even at this hour there was an occasional car. But once we reached Cambridge, we would have to walk past the projects, the construction sites, all the bars. We could go up to my lab, but what would we do there? Laurel wouldn’t want to be reminded of the day she had given blood.

  “What’s that?” she asked. She pointed across the ice. From this distance, the desk might have been anything. I told her what it was. And for the first time that night, my sister smiled. She looked beautiful again. “I’m going out there,” she said. “Didn’t you always want me to finish college? I’m going to sit at that desk.”

  I grabbed her shawl—but I was too late, that’s all I was left with. She spun away from me and hurried across the ice. She couldn’t be serious, I thought. The Charles never froze completely, not even during a prolonged cold spell. The ice supported the desk, but that was near the far shore and who knew what lay between. I wanted to run and drag her back, but she was halfway across the ice. Besides, she was stronger than I was. What if we both fell in? What would happen to my baby? Better if I ran for help.

  I glanced back toward the brownstones, not one of which was lit. Oh, what did that matter, disturbing someone’s sleep! Still, it might be quicker if I flagged down a cab. The driver could radio in for help. Storrow Drive was deserted, but there was traffic on the bridge. At the very least, I could keep an eye on Laurel.

  I started running up the steps to the pedestrian overpass. I took the stairs two at a time. It occurred to me that my sister was mentally ill. A scene flashed through my mind—it was from that musical, The King and I. The king’s unhappy concubine, Tuptim, choreographs her version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The slave girl, Eliza, escapes across the ice. When Simon Legree tries to cross the same river, the Buddha calls out the sun so the wicked slavedriver falls through the ice and drowns. Was Laurel thinking about Eliza’s dance across the ice? Did she think she had to make good on her promise to die young? None of this made sense, and the thought that my sister truly had suffered a breakdown frightened me as much as the probability of her plunging through the Charles.

  I reached the bridge and stood there panting. I looked down. Laurel was three-quarters of the way between the Boston side of the river and the desk. The moon had disappeared, but the ice glowed pure white, as if it were lit from underneath, and the mere fact that it seemed possible to walk across something you usually couldn’t walk across made me understand why my sister wanted to try. “Laurel!” I called down, but she was too far away to hear.

  I don’t have any memory of what happened next. I only know that I saw my sister vanish. I remember waving the shawl—I must have flagged down a cab. But by the time the driver had managed to call the police, by the time the divers got there, by the time they fished my sister’s body from the Charles, it was far too late for any of us to save her.

  21

  I slept to avoid grieving for my sister. I slept to keep from thinking I was responsible for her death. If I had never developed a test for Valentine’s, she wouldn’t have learned she didn’t have it. She might have kept living her reckless life forever, assuming she would come down with Valentine’s but never developing the disease or dying. I allowed Willie to rouse me from my bed and nearly carry me to her funeral, then I crawled back in that same bed to avoid the memory of watching Willie and Ted and Karl Prince and Cruz lower Laurel’s casket into its yawning grave, then watching my own hands as they helped the rabbi shovel some dirt on top.

  I slept to avoid answering my father’s calls and listening to him cry and rant and take the blame on himself when it should have remained mine alone. I slept as a reward for all the sleep I had given up working in the lab, and to forestall the overwhelming task of zeroing in on the gene, figuring out which protein it coded for, and trying to undo whatever damage that protein wreaked. Most of all, I slept to keep from fretting about the child inside my womb and what I would do if I found out it was carrying the gene for Valentine’s. The blessings of ordinary life seemed as fragile as the bones of that fetus inside me. Maybe, like Laurel, I had found the stamina and courage to work so hard for so long because I assumed I would die young and rest forever in the grave.

  I went into the lab only when I could no longer force myself to sleep. I used the sun’s glare as an excuse to shut the shade and block my view of the Charles. The river terrified me now. I kept imagining Laurel plunging through the ice, myself leaping in, some unnameable force dragging both of us down. I crossed the river only when Willie persuaded me to keep my appointment with the obstetrician Honey had picked out in Boston. As the Jeep neared the bridge—not the Longfellow, which I no longer could bear to cross, but the bridge near BU—I shut my eyes and counted. My throat tightened. I shook. Of all the rotten luck, traffic slowed to a stop and we sat on that bridge for so long I finally felt compelled to open my eyes and look down.

  The water was no longer frozen, but I could somehow tell how very cold it still must be. A l
ong-necked black bird I took to be a cormorant dove underwater. I tried to predict when and where it might surface, but the bird seemed to stay submerged too long for any creature to survive. I imagined Laurel’s body among the weeds. I saw my mother’s skeleton in a rotted dress from Weiss’s. Why had they died and I hadn’t? And my mother’s brothers. And my grandfather. And those sufferers up in Maine. Why was I healthy and they were not? And what about the children who had tested positive for the gene, and for whom, as Vic said, nothing could be done?

  “I don’t want to be here,” I said. “I don’t want to be here!”

  Willie thought I didn’t want to stay on the bridge, so he honked his horn and swerved among all the stalled cars. I made it through the checkup. Then we returned to Cambridge by way of a third bridge, near Newton. He gunned the Jeep; I closed my eyes and hummed until we reached the other side. For the next several months, whenever I was scheduled for a checkup, this was the bridge we crossed and the method we used to cross it.

  Willie worried about me, of course. But he had the sense not to say much. The night Laurel went through the ice, I called him from the police station and he hurried down to drive me back to my apartment, where I registered that he had stayed up for us, waiting, with a pan of cinnamon buns he had baked from scratch. When he understood what had happened, he wrapped the comforter around my shoulders and led me to bed. Then he moved in and took care of me. When I berated myself for not calling Laurel more often, not truly understanding what she was going through, he reminded me that my sister had been responsible for her own life. It wasn’t my test that killed her. It was the way she had chosen to respond to the same genetic hand that fate had dealt me. He kept our refrigerator stocked with nutritious foods, cooked me breakfast and dinner, and used the blender to mix me frappés. When I cried, he rubbed my back. He made sure I took my iron pills. Only once did he lose his patience, when the doctor put his stethoscope to my belly and I didn’t seem to care.