“See,” Cary said. “She misses you.”
“She’s happy wherever she is,” I said.
If Cary was ovulating, we’d come home; we never wanted to miss a month. I’d fly home from Seattle even though I was speaking at a conference in Los Angeles the next night; Cary would drive home from Boston—she didn’t fly—even though her next show was two hours away, in Northampton, where she grew up.
Every morning, after waking, and every evening, before sleep, I closed my eyes and meditated on the children we’d have. Lucy and Vincent.
I believed in miracles and had hundreds of letters as evidence: people who had read my first book then cured themselves—with only their thoughts—of diabetes, hypertension, multiple sclerosis, liver cancer. A man who was told he’d never walk again, a devout Pentecostal for whom even the laying on of hands hadn’t worked, read my book, believed that he’d walk again, visualized it, acted as if it would happen. He removed the wheelchair ramp leading to his front door. Two weeks later, when he hadn’t walked, he still believed, and as evidence of his faith he gave away his wheelchair. The next day, he walked. “I wasn’t surprised,” he wrote. “Everyone else was, even my wife, but not me.” A seventh-grade girl wrote that her hair had fallen out—she, like her father, had alopecia—and that her mother read my book and taught her some of my techniques. The girl made a creation box, and inside the box she put photographs of herself before she lost her hair, and she believed that her hair would grow back, she even gave away all the hats her friends had given her, and after only a few months of sending out her intention, of believing, her hair began to grow back.
These people, whom I had inspired, now inspired me: if I had helped them believe, then their letters could strengthen my own beliefs.
I worked on the nursery; I bought a box of diapers; I bought two pairs of baby socks, two tiny winter caps. Three months passed, five, eight, ten, more time than a baby would have lived inside Cary. The answer, whether from a pregnancy test or Cary’s body, was always no.
No, to me, meant not yet.
To Cary no meant no; it meant maybe never.
And that was fine with her, she told me. If you accept whatever happens, she said, if you embrace what life gives you, there are gifts.
After a year of trying, the home pregnancy test said yes.
“That’s what it says,” she told me.
“I knew it!” I said. “I knew it would happen!”
“You never know,” she said. “It could be a false positive.”
“Jesus,” I said. “It’s like you want it to be no.”
“No,” she said. “It’s just that I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”
“My hopes are up,” I said. “My hopes have been up.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “You like to be sure, but how can you ever be sure?”
“You’re holding sure in your hand.”
“I don’t mean this.” She laid the pregnancy test on the bed. I didn’t want to touch it; I was afraid I might make the pink strip disappear. “What I mean,” she said, “is that you can’t be sure you’re supposed to be doing something until you’re doing it. Maybe we’re not supposed to have kids.”
“Will you please stop saying that.”
“I’m not trying to upset you,” she said. “It’s just that I don’t feel pregnant.”
“But you are.”
“Maybe,” she said.
I was in Denver a few days later when she called. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew. I told her I couldn’t talk, I was just about to leave for an interview, I’d call her when I got back to the hotel. There was no interview. I lay in bed, closed my eyes, and tried to will it untrue, what she hadn’t said but what I’d heard in her tone, the way she said hi, her first word, a little too happy, but beneath her happiness, fear.
The phone kept ringing that night, but I didn’t answer. I like to think this was an act of kindness, a desire to protect her from me, from the unkind words I wanted to say, but there was meanness, too: I wanted to make her wait; I wanted her to spend those extra hours worrying about what I’d say.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her first words when I answered the phone, a few minutes before midnight.
“Me, too,” I said.
“I really am disappointed.”
“Me, too.”
“I wish you were home.”
“I’ll be there in the morning.”
“Are you angry?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m not angry.”
“You are.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“I can tell,” she said.
“I’m not angry!”
“Tell me again,” she said. “Say it like you mean it.”
THE YEAR HE felt the pebble in his shoe.
Smaller than a pebble—let’s call it a grain of sand. The one fear he couldn’t meditate or positive-think away. He could take off his shoes and socks, shake them out, wash his feet, but the next morning, after he dressed, it was still there, he could feel it, a little bigger than the day before: the grain of sand, his greatest fear.
It’s easy for me—the man writing this—to look back and say that was the moment, but even he knew it then.
Valentine’s Day, the dog’s third birthday. Seventy pounds, fully grown, but the hyper tail of a puppy, slaps the floor if you look at her. Ready to jump on you, even though she knows not to. She sits at the window, crying. Sniffs at a thin crack in the glass.
The girl—as he calls his wife—wants to stay in bed, too cold to get up. She wants the boy—as she calls him—to make pancakes. She doesn’t like to exchange gifts that can be kept, and so pancakes can be his to her. She likes best things that can be used only once. She likes one-night-only performances. She likes art made to change or die, art you can experience only once, Andy Goldsworthy’s snowballs that melt to reveal leaves, pinecones, twigs, thorns. When she hears a song she likes, she turns up the volume, closes her eyes, shuts out everything else, but has no interest in buying the album. Her best songs, what she considers her best, she doesn’t record; she plays them only at her shows.
“Use real syrup,” she tells him. “And don’t skimp on butter.”
While he’s putting on a sweatshirt she adds, “Anything but round. Some other shape we can say we’re eating for the first and last time.”
She used to live on the second floor, but now they live on the first and second. They bought the brownstone; they rent the third floor to a med student and a pianist, lovers or friends or friends who want to be lovers, they can’t tell. They have heard fights, and so they wonder. The med student, a woman, crying. After, silence. Then the piano. Then more silence.
The dog follows him down to the kitchen, takes a drink of water. He finds her chew toy, makes her lie down for it, throws it for her to chase.
Snow flurries overnight, white dust on the street. Not so much that he can’t run later. His feet are cold on the kitchen floor. He doesn’t own slippers, even though his wife assures him he’d look cute; he doesn’t like dog hair on the bottoms of his socks. He stands in front of the stove, one foot warming on top of the other, then the other on top, as a circle of batter forms a pancake.
He remembers: not round. He reshapes the circle into a rectangle. Too easy, he thinks, so he thins the rectangle until it’s a line. Boring, he decides, and divides the line near the bottom: a line on top of a dot. An exclamation point. Too enthusiastic, so he uses a spoon to curve the top of the line. A question mark. Perfect. She’ll see it and tell him another knock-knock. She likes the dumbest ones best.
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Boo.
Boo who?
Don’t cry! It’s not as bad as you think!
He hears the dog run upstairs. A game with the girl. She eggs on the dog to chase her room to room, through hallw
ays, up and down the stairs. Ralph is faster than the girl and smarter than most dogs, so she wins. Catches the girl out of breath from laughing so much. He has played with them before, knows that involuntary laughter, that feeling, something chasing, closing in, right behind you. That rush of adrenaline even if what’s chasing has no intention of harming you. Fear-laughter. Ralph doesn’t know what to do when she catches them. All that effort, finally she has them, now what. She touches with her nose, circles, slaps her tail against their shins, looks for a tennis ball, needs something in her mouth. If she finds nothing, they’ll bend down so she can lick their faces.
He can hear this game from where he stands, watching batter bubble in a pan. He moves his face closer to smell, then flips the question mark. He decides to make toast and scrambled eggs; he pours two small glasses of orange juice and starts a pot of coffee even though he doesn’t drink coffee and messed it up the last time he tried to make it for his wife. She’ll be happy with the gesture.
And then it happens. It began as a thought, a fear, a grain of sand, and then it happens.
He thinks to call up to her, as a parent might to a child, Be careful up there, you don’t want to get hurt.
Immediately following this thought is an image of his wife on the floor, not moving, and immediately following this image comes the feeling in his body, a chill that has nothing to do with the cold floor or the cold outside, the snow falling more steadily now, maybe he won’t be able to run, after all, and immediately following this feeling in his body he hears her fall down the stairs.
He finds her at the bottom. The dog is halfway down the flight, unsure what to do; even her tail, between her legs, knows that the game’s over. His wife lies on her side, unmoving, against the wall. He imagines she’s broken her neck. He rushes to her, touches her back, says her name. She moves her hand. The silence that comes before crying. It terrifies him when the sound comes. A child crying. He thinks, I would rather she be unconscious. A stupid, selfish thought. I can say that now because I’m no longer him. The man who shares my name, ten years younger, no gray in his hair or beard, puts his hands on her back, tells her not to move.
He remembers—perhaps I’m remembering now, for him—the first time he heard his mother cry. It scared him then, too—the knowledge that adults could cry. It was the year after his father died. An unexpected thunderstorm. His mother hurried out to the yard to take in the laundry from the line—sheets and pillowcases and his school pants and one of his father’s old shirts she sometimes wore to bed—and in her hurry she banged her knee on the open screen door. She fell to the ground and cried the way children cry: high-pitched and breathless, her face red and shaking. The boy who shares my name ran to his mother, tried to touch her knee, where she was holding. She kept swatting his hand away. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Please leave me alone.”
This is that fear, but worse. His mother, he secretly knew, was a child. His wife, too—a child. But different from the child his mother was. His wife was a child who skipped and sang and pouted and played games with the dog and was unafraid to get dirty, to ruin her clothes and shoes. If she cried, she would cry quietly. Not this. This was the sound she should have made, but most likely did not, when she heard the news that her father had crashed a plane into the side of a mountain and her family was gone.
My only hope, as I tell this now, is that she doesn’t hear him. My hope is that she’s in too much pain to hear when he says, “No more running through the house with the dog! No more! I knew this was going to happen!” My hope is that she doesn’t hear, that she feels him rubbing her back.
He smells batter burning, sees smoke drifting in from the kitchen, the question mark has turned black, but he won’t leave her, not until she stops crying.
“Stop crying,” he says.
THEY ARRIVED, AFTER all, Lucy and Vincent, but not in the manner I had intended. Red-haired twins, four years old, the girl too shy to look at us, the boy unblinking, studying our faces.
Impossible, these names. The beach we loved, where we threw sticks into the ocean for Ralph to fetch. Names we’d chosen for the children we couldn’t conceive, the children I’d tried to will into existence. Names given to these twins by someone else. And now they had been matched with us.
Lucy and Vincent, dropped off at our door, ours for the time being.
Becoming foster parents had been Cary’s idea. Everything, she said, was for the time being; everything was temporary; everything, eventually, had to be let go; so why not embrace this truth, why not welcome it into our lives. That everything changed, she said, that everything ended, made life worth living. “I mean, could you imagine,” she said, “if everything lasted forever.”
“I want you to last forever.”
“No thank you,” she said.
“So you actually want to die?”
“Eventually,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t want you to die.”
“That’s sweet,” she said, “but I have news for you.”
She must have noticed the look on my face; she grabbed my face and kissed me.
They walked into our home, Lucy hiding behind Vincent, each carrying a bag of books and toys. Their caseworker, a burly man with a deep but gentle voice, introduced us to the children. I crouched in front of Vincent and held out my hand for him to slap me five; he stared at it, so I put my hand on his head and told him how happy we were that he and his sister were there.
I leaned around him to look at Lucy, but she pressed her face into her brother’s back.
“She’s afraid of beards,” Vincent said.
“Well,” I said, “at least Cary doesn’t have one.”
Vincent smiled. From behind him, a muffled voice: “Girls don’t have beards.”
“Are you sure?”
“You’re silly,” she said.
We showed them their rooms, their beds, the dresser they’d share. They fought over beds, even though they were identical, and over the bottom drawer. “Stop being a dope,” Vincent said. Lucy started to cry, but before we could say anything—our first parenting moment—Vincent hugged his sister and said he was sorry, she could have the bottom drawer as long as he could have the bed by the light switch, and she said fine, as long as he stopped calling her a dope, and he said fine, as long as she let him be in charge of the light, and she said fine, as long as he stopped calling the doll she slept with Barker instead of Parker, and stopped making the doll make dog sounds, and stopped holding the doll above his head and dropping her and pretending she was falling from the sky, and he said fine, but I could see that behind his back he’d crossed his fingers.
Their mother, a heroin addict, came to see them every other week unless she wasn’t doing well, code for: wasn’t clean, wasn’t going to meetings, wasn’t going for counseling. She was thin and had long, dark hair; she wore the same black leather jacket whether January or June. Her name was Eleanor but people called her Rigby, she said, because of the Beatles song. We called her Mom to the twins, but rarely did she look comfortable in that role, not even when Lucy clung to her legs or Vincent sat in her lap. She read to them too quickly, the book shaking in her hands.
The first time she visited, after she was out of rehab and had been clean two months, she kept stepping outside for air. She had asthma, she told us, but when we looked out the window she was smoking. She saw me by the window once; she turned away and dropped her cigarette. When she came inside, she said, “You can’t give up everything at once. I mean, they expect you to give up everything.”
She was an artist, she told us. “But now I have to get a schmuck job like everyone else.”
During her visits, in bits and pieces, she told us the bare bones of her story, at least its most recent chapter. The father of her children, also an artist (“a much better artist than me, I mean he was a real artist, he lived it”), OD’d when she was six months pregnant; the kids never knew him. “Probably for the best,” she said, but during her next visit she said
, “I wish they could have known him. Not as their father, just as an artist.” The next visit, before she said hello, as if continuing a conversation she’d been having with herself on the subway, she said, “He’s going to be famous. You should see what he left behind. People in the art scene—they worship him. They won’t let his work die.” We talked about the kids for a while—Vincent liked the peanuts guy at Shea Stadium; Lucy liked giraffes at the zoo; both were afraid of planes, of heights; Vincent was wetting the bed—but as soon as there was an opening, and sometimes even if there wasn’t, she’d say, “His name was Maynard Day, but everyone called him May Day,” or “I guess it could be worse, I could have OD’d with him,” or “They have his genes, so.”
I wasn’t sure whether this last statement was consolation or concern.
Whenever we found Vincent sleeping beside Lucy, we knew that he’d wet his bed. The first time, when we changed the sheets in front of him and told him it was okay, he grew angry: he balled his hands into fists, shut his eyes tightly, and his body went rigid; his face turned almost as red as his hair.
“He didn’t do it on purpose,” Lucy said.
“We know,” I said, and Cary said, “It happens to boys all the time, even Eric when he was your age.”
“Nothing happened!” Vincent said, punching the air with each word. “Leave me alone!”
So we didn’t change the sheets in front of him, didn’t acknowledge his bedwetting in any way. Sometimes Lucy brought it up in indirect ways; she’d tell Vincent, for us to hear, that when he got into her bed the night before he scared her, and would he please not touch her with his feet, which were cold.
“Fine,” Vincent said. Then: “My father was famous.” Anything to change the subject. He was the more dominant of the twins, without question, and perhaps Lucy knew that his bedwetting was her only leverage.
The Book of Why Page 9
