Signs and Wonders

by Alix Ohlin

  “Tyler,” she said, walking up to him.

  “It’s okay,” he said immediately. He didn’t want to have to hear the apology, which would embarrass him all over again; he wanted to go straight past it, back into normalcy.

  “I’m having a rough time,” she said brusquely. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

  He nodded, looking down at his bike.

  “I’ll see you, okay?”

  He nodded again. As she was walking to her car, he called her name, and she was so rattled that it wasn’t until later, pulling into the driveway, that she realized he’d called her not Ms. Gilson but Lisette. She turned around.

  “Whatever’s, like, bothering you—you deserve better.”

  This made her laugh. “How would you know?” she said.

  That night she couldn’t sleep. Dan snored lightly next to her, a sound as profoundly comforting as any she’d ever known. He was her husband, and almost more than anything else she wanted him to be a father. Her pelvis ached with such emptiness that she couldn’t stop palming it, soothing it, trying to ease its pain. She knew it was psychosomatic but it felt absolutely, unequivocally real. As real as hunger, or thirst, or life and death.

  She’d made up her mind before she even knew what she was contemplating. It was like falling down a flight of stairs—no gap between the moment your foot slips and when you’re lying in a heap on the floor below.

  This is what she did: at the next rehearsal, she smiled at Tyler. And he smiled back. Just like that, in the passage of one second, she knew she had him. Before a single word had been spoken, or a single gesture enacted, or a plan even hatched. And it was so easy. It turned out all the banks in the world were giving away free money, and all you had to do was ask.

  Her body, now, was a cunning machine. It had its hunger and emptiness; it would be taking matters into its own hands. She let it go about its business, not stopping to ask any questions.

  “What’s got you so happy?” Dan said to her that night, over dinner.

  She looked at him in the candlelight, her sweetness, the love of her life. He was craggy and tired-looking, with bags beneath his eyes. She saw his features overlaid not with the young man she’d first met in college but with the old man he would someday become.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just happy to see you.”

  That night, in bed, she ran her hands through his hair, her fingertips tracing his shoulders and back, and coaxed him into sex. She had to believe that, as close as they were, as much as they meant to each other, some part of him had already entered her, was already inside.

  After smiles, a little extra attention. Tyler seemed to be waiting for it, to know and accept what was happening. He stayed after rehearsal, packing up his instrument slowly, dropping his sheet music and studiously, laboriously rearranging the pages. She remembered this kind of unspoken agreement between people conspiring to be alone from the old days, so ancient now, before Dan. It had been ages since she took up a flirtation. But she still knew the deal, remembered how it was done. She, too, was slow, and they walked out together into the fall evening, and she offered him a lift. She realized that he’d purposefully stopped riding his bike to rehearsal just in case this would happen, and she felt a rush of gratitude so warm and intense that it was almost like love. He sat in the passenger seat with his long legs cramped, knees high and awkward, violin case tucked between his feet. Outside his house, he thanked her for the ride. He barely looked at her. And that was all.

  But from there they built a routine together. Perfect collaborators, they brought a relationship into existence, and nursed it into the world. Soon he was the one she looked to when explaining a concept, a beat, what she wanted, and he would nod. He was the first violinist, and she had him leading the strings in rehearsal while she worked separately with the woodwinds or percussionists. She relied on him. And he waited for a ride home and during that ride told her about his classes, his plans for college. He was a bright kid and had gotten into Princeton, so excited to be leaving home, and for all that entailed. What the other kids thought, if anything, she had no idea. If asked, she would have said he was a natural leader. She would have told his parents, He’ll go far.

  At the Christmas concert, the orchestra tackled the Tchaikovsky with shrieking abandon and labored gamely through the Hindemith in front of their families, who smiled dazedly until it was over, then started clapping a little too late. Afterward, she stood for a while chatting with Tyler and his parents. The mother was a bottle blonde, short, well preserved. The father, of whom Tyler was the spitting image, still had all his hair, had stayed trim, and seemed, when he laughed, to have good teeth.

  In the car driving home, Dan wouldn’t look at her. Just before they pulled up to the house he said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  She said, “Going home?”

  “I mean with that father. Staring at him. Laughing your head off. Flirting.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  He parked. He still wouldn’t turn his head. “I’ve never seen you like that,” he said. “You’ve never acted like that before.”

  She was defensive, angry, proud—and how perverse was that? Proud of her husband, who knew her well enough to sense, right away, that something was going on, though he couldn’t have been expected to figure out how low she’d sunk. “I was just being myself,” she said.

  · · ·

  There were no rehearsals over the holidays. On January 15, the first evening they came back, she slept with Tyler in the rehearsal room, on a table. There was no first kiss, only her hungry body and his teenage one, his thin biceps working, his angular hip bones cutting into her thighs, his skunky, hormonal smell mixed with the scent of Doritos and hair gel. It was so different from sex with Dan as to constitute a completely new operation, more like coaxing a squirrel out of your garage, everything jumpy, a little feral and uncontrolled. But she was patient and showed him how she wanted it done, same as conducting. The act itself was over very fast, with most of their clothes still on. To tell him not to say anything to anyone would have insulted his intelligence, so she didn’t.

  Afterward, he kissed her neck, a dry, close-lipped kiss, like a thank-you note.

  In total there were three times, all of them in the rehearsal room after everybody else had gone, twice on the table, once in a hellacious, back-aching position involving two folding chairs and a French horn case. He seemed to want to experiment, either already tired of their routine or else wanting to make things more exciting, perhaps degraded, in accordance with whatever fantasy he had about adult sex, and she tried to accommodate him. It was the least she could do.

  She hoped three times would be enough. After each one, she took stock of her body, weighed and surveyed it, but she couldn’t tell any difference, and was desperately afraid.

  Dan came into the bathroom as she weighed herself, squeezing her breasts. In the mirror, their eyes met.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said mechanically. “You aren’t fat.”

  She smiled at him. Fat was what she wanted, but he couldn’t know that yet. “Thanks, honey.”

  The way she said it—her ease and placidity—alerted him. He cocked his head. “What’s going on with you, anyway?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You dress differently. Walk differently. You have this vacant smile all the time.”

  “I’m still wearing the same clothes.”

  “You’re wearing dresses instead of pants. In January. You’re putting on makeup every day.”

  “Maybe it cheers me up.”

  “For God’s sake, Lisette, do you think I don’t notice? Are you seeing someone else? Is it that father from the Christmas concert?”

  “Oh, honey,” she said, and turned to him, away from the mirror.

  “Don’t touch me right now,” he said. “Just don’t.”

  He spent the night in the guest room, the one they’d planned on turning into a nurs
ery. The next evening, when she got home from rehearsal, he’d moved his clothes in there too. And he himself wasn’t home: no note, no message saying where he was. At midnight, she heard him come in, run the water in the bathroom, and get into bed.

  She thought she’d give him some space. She was far enough gone, at this point, to think that space was what they both needed.

  Then, strangely enough, they lived for a time as cordial strangers. They ate meals together and inquired politely about each other’s day. The shell of their former life held fast even as its contents were emptied. Dan lost weight, looked exhausted. Once, in the middle of the night, she got up to pee and heard a strange sound from his room, like choking or throwing up. She paused outside the closed door to listen, realizing, gradually, that it was the dry, painful twisting of sobs torn from a man unaccustomed to them. She put her palm on the door, then opened it.

  “Go away,” he said immediately. “Just go away.”

  In the morning, they acted as though this hadn’t happened.

  Three weeks later, she peed on the stick and got a positive result.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said out loud.

  That night, she made steak and mashed potatoes, Dan’s favorite meal. When he came home from work and saw it, he took a wary step back. He had the look of a dog that’s been beaten and can’t help expecting the next blow. And this, she knew, was the next blow. But it was also a gift—eventually, he would recognize it as such himself.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said. From the other end of the table, she could see herself reflected in his eyes—a torturer, a demon—but she stood with her fingers clenching the back of the dining room chairs they’d bought as newlyweds.

  “Whose is it?” he said.

  “It’s ours,” she said.

  “Lisette, are you crazy? What have you done?”

  “It’s a miracle,” she said firmly. “It’s our family.”

  He stood there shaking his head. “We’re not a family anymore, Lisette,” he said.

  To Tyler she said: “My husband knows. It’s over.”

  They were in her car, after rehearsal, their breaths visibly streaming toward the dashboard. She crossed her fingers inside the mitten of her left hand. This was the chance she’d taken: that he could let go as easily as he’d latched on. If he fought, if he cried, if he struck out in anger, he could ruin everything. She’d given him that power over her life in exchange for what she needed. It was the biggest risk she had ever taken.

  For one quiet, dark moment he looked into her eyes, then turned away. He reached his hand up and absently plucked the front of his winter coat. Seeing this nervous gesture again, she felt a great tenderness she could only describe as maternal, twisted as that was. And Tyler: he’d been fumblingly sweet, he’d stroked her hair, but she knew he wasn’t in love with her. She’d given him experience and some passing satisfaction and he already knew how to separate these physical facts from the emotional ones. There was a girl who played the flute, and Lisette had seen how he looked at her, queasy with wanting. The girl didn’t reciprocate, though, so Tyler had taken what he could get. The only question now was whether he could leave it behind.

  He said, “Okay.” He could.

  He was seventeen years old, bound for Princeton in the fall. His skin was clearing, his shoulders getting broad. There would be a lot of other women in his life.

  In the months to come, she found a doctor, alone, took her prenatal vitamins, alone, bought a crib and baby clothes, alone. Dan wasn’t with her for the first ultrasound, didn’t hear the baby’s heart beat, didn’t read What to Expect When You’re Expecting. On the other hand, he didn’t move out, either. So that was something.

  · · ·

  At the spring concert, she and Tyler shook hands. She was showing now, wearing sack dresses most of the time, but it didn’t seem to register on him. She led youth orchestra sessions in the summer too, but he was going to hike the Appalachian trail with his dad. This, then, was good-bye. He said, “I’ll miss you.”

  She smiled. She couldn’t wait for him to leave. “Enjoy college,” she said.

  Just then a woman whose son played clarinet came by and put her arm on Lisette’s shoulder. She was warm and friendly, a busybody, Dana. She taught biology at the high school and let the girls leave the room when they claimed to be too freaked out by dissections.

  “Oh, Lisette!” she said. “I can tell just by looking. Are you? You are, aren’t you?”

  Lisette nodded, blushing despite herself.

  “Congratulations! When are you due?”

  “September.”

  “How wonderful. Congratulations again.”

  Lisette turned back to Tyler, expecting to have to explain—but he’d already gone off to the refreshments table, where Kim, the flautist, was eating a brownie.

  That night, though, the doorbell rang at eleven. Dan was upstairs, sequestered in his room. When she opened the door, Tyler was standing on the porch, his brown eyes anxious. Her heart pumping, she stepped outside, closing the door quietly behind her. The last thing she wanted was for Dan to come down now.

  “It took me a while to process what that conversation was about,” Tyler said. “Is it what I think?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said. “Dan and I are thrilled.”

  He stepped closer. In the vague glow of the porch light his eyes glinted, the fear in them naked. “It’s not—”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not.”

  He breathed a theatrical sigh of relief, his shoulders rising and falling. For a moment she saw doubt clouding his mind, and then she saw him dismiss it. His eyes cleared and he began to walk away, his palm raised in a gesture of salute, separation, good-bye. He wanted nothing more than to put distance between himself and a pregnant middle-aged woman. He would never ask her another question, she was sure, because he had his whole future in front of him, luxurious, unspoiled; because she’d told him what he wanted to hear; because she was an adult and he was, after all, a child.

  The summer passed slowly, the weather sticky and hot. She worked in the garden and took birthing classes. The doctor asked her if she wanted to know the sex of the baby, and she said no, figuring that Dan wouldn’t want to know either. Dan spent most of the summer away, first visiting his parents, then on a long fishing trip with his college friends. While he was gone, she moved his things back into the master bedroom, his socks and underwear back into the empty drawers, his shirts back into the empty half of the closet. In the spare bedroom she assembled the crib, the Diaper Genie, a little white bookshelf, a mobile. She had been collecting these things for months. Above the bookshelf she hung a framed copy of their wedding picture, she in her white dress, Dan grinning down at her, on the day they said their vows and bound themselves to each other forever.

  When Dan came back, he stood in the hallway outside this room, his hands on his hips. “You are something else,” he said, his tone almost admiring.

  She stood a few feet away from him, keeping a respectful distance.

  “Honey, I love you,” she said. “This is going to happen. There will be a baby.”

  “Lisette,” he said. “Do you understand how close I am to completely hating you? Does it even matter to you anymore?”

  For the first time, a cold shiver swept all over her, cooling her blood, and she felt faint to her fingertips, even her toes. In all this time she’d never thought that she would lose him. So intent, so focused on the goal, she’d set everything else aside. She had the urge to beg him, to cry, to make him pity her, or to yell at him, but none of that would work with Dan; he’d see it as manipulative and hysterical at once. His personality was rigorous and pure; his strictness undercut her own tendencies toward obsession and intensity, kept her moored. No, melodrama would make the situation worse and then she might lose him forever. Staying calm was the only way to manage him, hoping that he would come back to her in his own time, willing him to forget the price she’d paid and remember instead what she had p
urchased with it, that golden, shining good, their future.

  So she said nothing, and he left her.

  When the school year started, he was living in a shabby efficiency next to the hospital. Dan was seen, of course, as a villain—who leaves his wife while she’s pregnant?—and he had to endure this gossiping disapproval on top of everything else. She didn’t speak about him to the people they knew, a silence that was interpreted as high-minded. If she had thought too much about any of this, it would have crushed her. Therefore she thought only about the baby. Her body had to be nurtured; there could be no stress, only good food, sleep, rest. It wasn’t the life she’d dreamed of, but it was in motion. She’d done her body’s bidding and now would do its caretaking, too.

  She gave the hospital Dan’s cell phone number, in case of emergency, but she didn’t call him when the contractions started, or when she took a cab to the hospital. By the time the complications started, the doctors talking about breech birth and emergency Cesarians, she was too out of her mind with pain to call him, so it was the nurse who did, telling him to get there as soon as he could.

  Lisette, in a horror of sweat and pain, barely recognized his voice. It was so much worse than she’d ever imagined it could be, the worst thing that had ever happened to her, and she sobbed and screamed. It felt like punishment for all the bad things she’d ever done. She didn’t think, Baby, or Help, or Be strong, or Breathe. She just thought, Make it stop. Eventually, she lost consciousness or was sedated, she didn’t know and didn’t care; she only wanted to escape the grasping, evil hands of the pain.