The Possibilities

by Kaui Hart Hemmings

  “Did you get him to take a sip?”

  “This glass was even fuller before.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “Cheers.”

  We clink our glasses together and I take a hearty gulp. Billy looks around the room and I do too, feeling a need to comment on something.

  I pick up the apple next to the two plastic bottles of water. “I love it here.” Billy smirks, but I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic. “Everything I say sounds insincere,” I say. “Look at that mountain.” I take another swallow. “It’s so indifferent. What is happening here?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “I can’t stop thinking of him, but I’m thinking of him as a baby and . . . it was so wonderful, but it was all so hard and I want to, I want to do the right thing, but I’ve failed already and what if I can’t do it? If I’m not fit to . . . ”

  He takes my glass, puts it back down on the desk, and gives me a hug that I give in to. “It’s all the right thing,” he says. “And you didn’t fail.”

  As we separate he kisses the top of my head and I look up. We look at one another, bemused, and then we kiss on the mouth as I knew and I suppose he knew we would. His tongue is warm and sweet. He has eaten a piece of my chocolate. His hand on my back makes its way lower. It’s a slow, dizzying kiss. I experience that vertigo I always used to experience while kissing him. It’s a feeling from girlhood when you kissed and kissed and that was all, until it wasn’t.

  But we’re not young and kissing doesn’t last long. I hook one hand onto the buckle of his jeans and pull him back toward the bed, but he takes charge, switching me so that he sits down first and pulls me to him, in between his legs.

  “Wait,” I say, when he leans back and tries to bring me up onto his lap.

  There’s no way I’m going to be on top; I can’t imagine it, straddled naked over him, bouncing, his hands thrusting me forward, it’s somehow too comical, too exposed. My face flushes. I am shy. He hasn’t seen me like this for twenty-two years. My body is good with clothes on, but my skin hangs a little where it hadn’t before. My breasts are in need of a refill. My stomach, my thighs, my ass are loosened. But he wouldn’t remember me as I was before. I don’t remember him. I recall a thin, strong frame like a cage, a natural, musk scent, a rogue patch of hair on his chest. What will he look like now? This emboldens me—instead of imagining your audience naked to bolster confidence, we should imagine their aged bodies. I unbuckle his buckle.

  “You’re pretty,” he says.

  We look at one another up close, my gaze drops down to his mouth.

  “You want to have sex. Of course I’m pretty.” I laugh, but he looks at me as though he knows I’m saying one thing to couch something else, or he just feels sorry for me, like I can’t say and do what I mean.

  He presses his mouth to mine because I suppose this is the easiest, most genuine thing we can do right now. I pull back, sense and caution seeping in, and shame—this is not a proper reaction to this dilemma—but he presses himself to me harder until my mouth softens and opens up and holds his like it’s starved. It’s one of those violent and desperate kisses you see in movies where the characters stand in the rain with their hands in each other’s hair, kissing as though a war’s about to start. I accidentally moan into his mouth and think, Who am I?

  The sound of my voice pulls me out of the spell a bit. “It’s so cold in here,” I say, wanting refuge from the light underneath the covers. The room is so prim and Victorian. I feel like we should copulate while speaking in British accents.

  When we were a couple we’d hook up in his silver Bronco, or on his mattress at his A-frame house in Blue River. He had three other roommates, and if we had had enough to drink I wouldn’t muffle the sounds of my climax—I’d let it tear through the cabin. It was like ringing a bell, announcing we were united. I hadn’t had sex like that in college—and possibly haven’t since. Sometimes we’d have sex in the parking lot of Steak and Rib before his shift. I’d send him off with a smirk, feeling both dirty and wifely, then go home to wait for him to get off his shift. We’d head out at ten thirty to the bars—Pounders or the Gold Pan—sleep until one thirty or two. It was like a brief glitch in my life, like my bus broke down and I was forced to get off and ended up having a really good time. I got back on that bus, initially thinking I’d take what I learned and enjoyed with me.

  And here we are again. I politely disembark and stand up so we can do a brief, sad striptease. The height of the moment seems scaled already, for me at least, but I know we have to do this. We started something and now we have to get it done. Now I feel a need to prove myself, to show myself as I once was. He takes off his shoes, then his pants but leaves on his white socks. One sock has a red line across the toes and one does not. He removes his boxers, then sits down, his strong thighs flayed. His desire is very apparent. Nothing Victorian about it. He is more filled out now, still trim, but no longer a cage. He has muscles, and a welcome sight of a small roll of belly. He’s hairier than he was before.

  I take my jeans off, grateful I’m wearing underwear that isn’t large enough for two of me. I leave it on, as well as my socks and sweater, then try to get into the bed with some dignity. I end up performing a kind of pole-vaulting maneuver, something that started out silly and cute but ended up ungainly because I didn’t commit. It’s like switching hi to hello midsentence and coming out with “hilo.”

  I get under the covers, kicking my legs to loosen the sheets that are forcing me to point my toes. I laugh even though nothing is funny. I could cry.

  Billy lies down on top of me, kisses me, takes off my sweater, my tank top, my bra. I wrap a leg around him and he moves his hand down my body, stopping at my breasts. I think of him fondling one of those squishy stress balls and as soon as I think this I know I can’t reach between his legs without feeling a little ill. What has happened to my sexuality? It’s so strange being beneath this man who used to make me buck and tremble and now I’m forcing myself to arch my back, forcing myself to slurp his tongue, just trying to conjure something back—the Bronco, the A-frame, the proud orgasms like a yodel in the woods.

  He keeps his hand going—down, down, in between. He pokes around with his finger, then stops, licks his hand, and resumes, expertly. How many women has he been with, how many dates, what was Rachel like? I realize I’m tensing my thighs and let them fall open, then I take him and put it in as one puts a cord into a socket. It won’t go all the way, so I pull at my skin around him and eventually we lather up enough moisture for it to work.

  There. It’s working. We are working, and sex does its job of making me forget. It’s all sensation, focused sensation, so so so good—actually good, I’m good! And then I remember again, bits and pieces of my strange new world—Kit, Cully, even Morgan, the way they were as babies—the way red dots would appear on Cully’s forehead when he cried, the way he’d shake his head as he came in toward my breast to nurse.

  I climax anyway, right when I’m remembering all the things I’m supposed to forget, and having an orgasm while thinking of pregnancy, babies, and your dead son feels awful and weird, and at the same time unremarkable and true. This is all life is anyway. Throw in some food and sleep.

  Billy moves out and off, then lies back with his hands cupping his head. He turns his head to me, a big childish grin on his face, then his smile goes away as if he’s just remembered what sparked all this in the first place: desperation, an inability to think or speak, an urgent need to escape.

  We stay still, looking at the ceiling.

  “I read something interesting in my room,” Billy says.

  “Oh yeah?” I say.

  “I guess in the main mezzanine,” Billy says,“on the ceiling mural. There’s a male dancer with two right feet.”

  I turn my head, but he just smiles and keeps looking up.

  “Tell me this is weird for you too,” I say, watching his expression.

  He blinks twice, pulls his earlobe. “This is weird for me t
oo.”

  “Tell me you don’t do this with Rachel.”

  “Do what?”

  “Go back to her after . . . ”

  He doesn’t blink. “No. God, no. Why? Jealous?”

  “No. I just don’t want to be part of a trend.”

  “You are not part of a trend,” he says, turning his head to look at me. He’s just a head with a body of a sheet.

  I look back up at the ceiling. I don’t know why I asked about Rachel, why I care about trends. Maybe I see this happening again. It’s easy. But then I reconsider: there are far easier things we could have done.

  “God damn,” Billy says, and I smile, thinking he’s complimenting my skills, but I look over and he’s crying. “Cully,” he says, and chokes on his name. I curl into Billy, putting my face on his chest, which is heaving now. His hand on my lower back grips me like a ledge. “I’m sorry,” he says, but I don’t say anything. I just let him weep. I cry along with him, just when I think I have no more left. There will always be grief, endless reserves to draw from, which is strangely comforting. It doesn’t last too long—this lament. It’s like a passing shower. After, we don’t say anything for a while and the silence is peaceful.

  “I guess we should get up,” he says. “A lot to talk about.”

  “Okay,” I say, though I’m far from being ready. I don’t know what to do, what I’m supposed to do, what I want. I imagine the dancer with his two right feet, waltzing in circles, the most memorable dancer, the painter’s mistake.

  • • •

  BILLY AND I sit out on my room’s balcony. We wear the provided terrycloth robes.

  “Look at us,” I say. “In dresses made out of towel.”

  “Like newlyweds.”

  I tilt my face to the late afternoon, imitating Billy’s angle. We do look like newlyweds, or people in a hotel brochure acting as them.

  When I told him I was pregnant, he drove to Denver, found my dorm, and said, “We can do this. We can marry.” That’s how he said it: “We can marry,” which amuses me still. He was five years older than me, and yet right then he seemed like he could be my son. He was this young child, trying to do the right thing. I knew he was living with another girl then.

  “I’m not going to get married,” I said then, and he looked so relieved.

  His parents had come up from Durango when I moved back to my dad’s at seven months. His dad was tall, but then I realized he and Billy were the same height, his father was just more filled out. He looked like he could chop down trees for a living. His mother was short, fit yet round, with cropped brown hair and big earrings. I liked them immediately. They walked into our home, didn’t glance around, didn’t watch their step; they just looked at me as if I had accomplished something. They brought me flowers, then later, dinner plates and sets of silverware and wineglasses that I still own. They bought me a crib and a stroller, baby clothes and blankets. His mother’s voice and vocabulary harkened back to actresses in fifties films, a ring of wealth and sophistication. She called the brown crib sheets “russet ginger.” I think my dad felt bad. He hadn’t thought of doing any of these things.

  “Do your parents have money?” I asked Billy after they had whirled in, then basically out of my life. I hadn’t really seen them much after that first year, which made me feel inexplicably (or explicably) discarded.

  “Enough, sure,” Billy answered. We were at my house, my dad’s house. He kept looking at his watch and I imagined the fights he and his girlfriend (was her name Wanda?) must be having over me. He looked around at the house. “The same. My mom though, she gives things a newer touch.” I eyed the dark wood walls, the antique furniture, the countertops, brown and grainy like a bran muffin, knowing exactly what he was talking about. The homes with wives in them, with mothers—those were the ones with the nice countertops, with the painted walls and harmonious decor. I wanted a home like that one day.

  I looked at the set of silver, the deep bands on the handle. “They’re usually not so generous,” Billy said. He picked up a fork. “Nice. No monograms. I swear my mom monograms everything.”

  Of course it’s not monogrammed, I later realized. I was in a daze of new gifts, greedy and excited over things that I had never cared about before—onesies! blankets!—and I never thought at that moment how odd it was that they’d give me silver and wineglasses, wedding-like gifts. It was like they were arming me with everything I could need so that their son could be on his way. I thought he was the wild one, but in their eyes, it was me. Billy had gotten off the bus in the wilderness, but now he was back, ready to begin.

  The sun has begun to sink a bit, giving Pikes Peak a cold blue tint. I look through the information catalog with images of the hotel, feigning interest in its histories and anecdotes, timelines, facts, and ghost stories. Feigned interest turns genuine. I learn that Julie and Spencer Penrose bought the hotel in 1916. Before that it was a casino and a school for girls. I look at Spencer Penrose in the book. Hey there, Spence. He loved a place. He built on it—little odes and anchors. I think of my ancestors, those hearty pioneers. My namesake, Sarah Rose Mather, dropping her anchor to run a dance hall. In her diaries it says, “Gambling, prostitution, and drinking are rampant in this town. I should think these people could use a place to dance.”

  Cully was my anchor to a place. Now, I suppose, it’s my father. I imagine Kit’s parents flying in from the East Coast, loading me with stemware and baby gear, then waving goodbye. How would that all work out? What if they want the baby? Shouldn’t they be the first ones to choose?

  “I don’t know how I’m going to do this,” I say. “I mean, if I do.”

  I look over at Billy and he’s digging deep into his nose with his eyes closed.

  “Being a mom of a baby today would be so different,” I say. “Actually, I’d be the same age as a lot of moms.”

  “Yeah, they’re having them late now,” he says.

  “I can’t imagine starting all over again.”

  Billy strokes his chest. He does this unconsciously, pets his chest. I imagine him as a father again, a father with a baby in one of those things—the slings everyone wears now with their little infant strapped to their torsos, the baby looking at the world as if on a slow-moving zip line. I had a wire-framed backpack, the seat made out of a thin canvas. I look back and am proud of the way I got around with Cully—we’d hike in Blue River, we’d cross-country ski, go to the skating rink, the library on Mondays, get ice cream at the Crown. Little routines. I’m sure everything I owned has been recalled or discontinued. I think of strollers, diapers, BPA-free snack containers. Bottles, changing tables, pediatricians, high chairs. All the accoutrements of new life. Most mothers would be in their twenties and thirties—I’d have the exact opposite problem this time around.

  “Could you?” I ask. “Do it again?”

  “No, Sarah. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.”

  He looks at me to make it clear.

  I know this shouldn’t disappoint me, but it does. I feel cheated, used. It infuriates me as well, the lack of consequence, the easiness. Babies and children don’t necessarily change the course of men’s lives, and somehow his not wanting Kit’s baby doesn’t look bad, but for me, it would. Yet I can’t make a choice based on how it would look, how it would seem. I want to be done with those kinds of choices.

  “It’s like another chance,” I say. “Our son never got the chance to be somebody else. Now he can.” I think of the adventure park in Frisco, the rec center, the toy store, Spring Fling concerts. Things are better now for children. People like them now. They’re allowed to be around.

  I think of all the pictures Cully drew, his self-portrait from the back of his head, the school assembly where he played a folk song, “Four Strong Winds,” on the guitar and everyone watched, stunned.

  “I didn’t know he could do that,” Suzanne had whispered next to me.

  “Neither did I,” I said, taking picture after picture.

  I also think of watching t
he clock, longing for his nap time, for his bedtime, for peace. I remember redirecting, scolding, putting in time-out, screaming, pushing him down sometimes. “No! Can’t you just be good?” Is it five yet? Can I have a glass yet? Can I put him to bed yet? Dad, could you watch Cully for a sec while I . . .

  Home videos, photographs—at times those were the only things that made me stop and love absolutely all of it. I smile now, at how crazed he could make me.

  “You know?” Billy says. “I think Kit may have got caught up for a moment.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, still basking in something.

  “I mean, this whole offer. It was obviously a spontaneous idea. We’ve all gotten along pretty well, she got caught up, it’s like getting buzzed and planning trips.”

  “She wasn’t buzzed and she wasn’t planning a trip,” I say.

  “I think this is her way of not making a choice,” Billy says. “Or to feel good about herself, like she’s giving us something.”

  “Giving me something,” I say. “Which she is. Which she would be.”

  “What made you so angry then?” he asks.

  I lift a leg out of the robe and sit up a bit. I was very angry.

  “I wasn’t angry,” I say.

  “You were pissed,” he says.

  “I was overwhelmed.” I scratch my chest. “Fine, and a little angry.”

  “Because?” Billy asks.

  “Because it puts the responsibility on me,” I say. “Now it’s me saying what to do. And her gift, or what have you—it’s hard not to accept something like that.”

  “What are you saying?” Billy says.

  “I’m saying, how could I not?” I sit up fully, put my feet on the ground, and hold my robe together. “It’s Cully’s. It’s mine. How could I not? Maybe that’s why I’m mad, because I don’t have a choice at all. You have Sophie—you have . . . backup! It’s not the same.”

  This is it, of course. I don’t have a choice, and while reminiscing about babyhood is wonderful, a little bile creeps up my throat when I think of changing diapers and being up all night and strolling, and talking to other moms. It would be different, of course. It would be my grandchild! But there’d be no one to return the baby to. It wouldn’t be different. It wouldn’t be a grandchild. I hear my voice shushing, singing, cooing, but also saying, No! That’s not a good choice, can you find another option, can you share? Can’t you just be good? Dad, can you help for a sec while I . . . ?