by Kyra Davis
“Hey, don’t knock the Suzuki. I bought it for five hundred dollars and it barely leaks.”
I looked up at the beads of water clinging to the edges of where the convertible roof was loosely attached. “Did it occur to you that a roof shouldn’t leak at all?”
Jeremiah grinned as he put the car into gear. “I was talkin’ about the oil.”
I laughed despite everything. Maybe the universe wasn’t coming to an end. Maybe Allie was right and Tad would be happy. I put my hand flat against the window as if I could somehow draw strength from the wind howling outside.
“Hey, are you all right?”
I jumped slightly, then laughed at myself. For a split second I had forgotten he was there. “I’m going to be. I’m going to be fine.”
Jeremiah gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride. He stalled the car in front of my house and I started to open the door. His arm reached out and stopped me before I could get out. “You sure everything’s cool? You haven’t had any problems with Tad or nothin’, right?”
It was an oddly stated question—grammatical issues aside. If he thought I was upset because of a lovers’ quarrel then shouldn’t he have asked if Tad and I were having problems? “Things with Tad are great.” I looked at his hand and he removed it from my arm.
He nodded slowly. “Okay, I was just checkin’. I know a lot of newlyweds have a tough time with all the transition shit. You know, we still have to go out to dinner, the three of us.”
“Yeah, of course…I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll set it up.”
I bent my head down and ran to my front door. I waved at Jeremiah one more time as I stepped inside and watched him take off. The house was warm, indicating that the heat had been on for at least an hour, and I could hear the sounds of tinkering coming from the kitchen. Shit, he had cooked. The last thing I wanted to do was eat.
“April, is that you?”
“No, it’s an intruder.” I tried to keep my tone light as I hung my coat and purse on the rack. “I’m here to attack you.”
I looked up as Tad bounded into the foyer and swung me up into his arms. “Goddess, I missed you!”
“Wow, it’s only been twelve hours, I’m flattered.”
“That’s all day!” he protested. “Come here, I’ve got to show you something!”
He threw me over his shoulder and took me into the spare bedroom where we had the computer set up. “Tad, are you on crack? Why are you so hyper?”
“Look!” He lowered me to my feet and spun me around so that I was facing a tall stack of papers. “That’s my new business plan! By next year SBM will have tripled its income.”
“That’s great.” And by next year this bedroom is going to be a nursery. “Are Sean and Eric on board with it?”
“Of course they will be, it’s brilliant!” He giggled. “I’m a genius!”
“So they haven’t actually seen the plan yet.”
“I told you they’ll like it,” he snapped. “It’s flawless, and there’s more.” He whirled around before yanking me forward into the living room and pushing me onto the couch. “Tom called. They’re going to be offering an entrepreneurship class this summer at City College and he wants me to teach it!”
“But Tom’s a professor not an administrator. Can he really make that kind of decision?”
“Tom carries a lot of clout there.” I watched nervously as Tad zigzagged around the room. “He’ll get me in. I already know what my curriculum will be. I bet I could convince them to offer the class on a regular basis. Maybe SF State will pick it up, or USF. This could be great! And the pay isn’t bad either, not great but not bad. And I bet when word gets out that I teach business classes at reputable colleges and universities SBM will have more clients than ever!”
His level of excitement was so disproportionate to what was going on that I found myself actually recoiling a little. “Tad—” I tried to find the least inflammatory words possible “—don’t you think that you’re getting a little ahead of yourself? I mean, it’s all great, but none of it has actually happened yet.”
Tad’s feet stopped moving and he pivoted his body in my direction. “You don’t…you don’t believe in me.” The anguish in each of those words made me ache.
“No, no, I do believe in you.”
“The hell you do!” The anguish was being ebbed out by notes of hysteria. I moved closer to the corner of the sofa. “I’ve put everything I have toward getting us here. Look around you! We have a house—”
“We rent a house.”
“I drive a BMW. We were married at the Ritz. We just got back from Spain, for Christ’s sake! And now you don’t think I can do this?”
“I didn’t say that, Tad.”
“Yes, you did!” In a flash of anger, he took the ceramic bunny that we had been displaying on the end table and hurled it across the room.
There was a crash and then silence. We both just stared at the fragments of our first wedding gift. Then without a word Tad turned around and walked out the front door.
I tried to breathe, but doing so was a struggle. I sat paralyzed for several minutes while I tried to come up with some explanation for what had just happened. I jumped at the sound of the doorbell but was still too stunned to immediately get up and answer it.
“April, are you there?” I heard Caleb’s muffled voice filter through the door. I closed my eyes; I had totally forgotten that I had invited Caleb to come over and claim some of my unwanted wedding gifts. It didn’t seem possible that he could be here for something so normal on a day in which everything had been turned upside down and backward. I used the little strength I had left to push myself off the couch and let him in.
Caleb stood in a military-like stance and held his nose in the air. “I’ve come for your cheese plates.”
“Packed up in the kitchen,” I said quietly as I stepped aside to allow him admittance.
Caleb strode toward the kitchen but stopped when he was halfway through the living room. He knelt down by the shards of ceramic and carefully lifted what remained of a long white ear. “My, my,” he murmured. “This is one dead bunny.” He replaced the piece on the floor and turned to me. “Did you slip and drop it?” He used his fingers to make imaginary quotation marks around the word drop.
“Caleb…”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. While I never saw him in life, from the looks of his remains I’d say it was a mercy killing.”
“Tad and I got in a fight.”
The amusement in Caleb’s face disappeared and he stood up. “Who threw it?”
“Tad,” I whispered. “I mean, he didn’t throw it at me or anything. He just got frustrated, and well…” I gestured toward the broken pieces and then fell back down onto the couch.
Caleb sat down beside me and rested his forearms on his legs. “What was the fight about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, you must have some idea. People don’t go around hurling ceramic rabbits through the air for no reason.” He paused and looked back at the bunny remains. “Well, maybe they do if the rabbit looks like that.”
“It wasn’t about the rabbit, Caleb,” I said between gritted teeth. “I came home and he was all excited about some stuff that he’s trying to do with his business, and when I suggested that it might be a little early to be popping the champagne, he lost it on me…He killed the Easter Bunny.” I put my head in my hands and started crying for the second time that day. What was going on? Why would Tad have done that?
Caleb clearly didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. He shifted awkwardly in his seat and put his arm around me. “April, you do know that wasn’t the real Easter—”
“You don’t get it! I loved that hideous creature! He stood for something! And now something is going on with my husband and I have no idea what it is, and if that wasn’t enough, I’m pregnant!”
Caleb gasped and pulled away so he could bette
r see my expression. “Are you serious?”
“I found out just a few hours ago. I took the test over at Allie’s and I was going to tell Tad but then he freaked out on me before I even had a chance! Caleb, I can’t deal with this…I just…” I started sobbing again and this time Caleb took me into a full embrace.
“Hey, hey, it’s going to be okay, honey.” He gently rocked me back and forth until my sobs turned into quiet sniffles. “All right, one thing at a time. Let’s start by thinking through this little argument you two had. You said he was excited about some work deal?”
I nodded weakly, having no energy or desire to go into the specifics.
“You know I’m always on your side, but let’s try to put ourselves in Tad’s shoes. He had some news that he was anxious to share with you, but instead of being excited for him you rained on his parade.”
I pulled away. “It wasn’t like that, Caleb.”
“Of course it wasn’t. You had news of your own that was one hell of a lot bigger, but Tad didn’t know that.”
“But he was just so intense, Caleb—both intensely happy and then, out of the blue, intensely angry.”
“But he didn’t in any way hurt or threaten you, right?” Caleb asked.
“No, no, he was just…angry.”
Caleb sighed and squeezed my hand. “Maybe there was more going on than you realized. Maybe something happened at work and you said something that reminded him of that. After all, you had more going on than he realized, and my guess is that while he may have been extra intense, you were probably just a tad extra sensitive.”
It was a good theory. It didn’t hold up but I’d give him an A for effort. The problem was, I didn’t know how to make Caleb really understand what I had just seen. I didn’t know how to translate it into words.
“April?”
“Maybe you’re right…” I bit my lip and tried to make myself believe it. “Maybe I didn’t realize what he needed from me right then and I set him off.”
“Now wait, it’s not your responsibility to read his mind but if you can both put your egos aside long enough to admit that there were two people dancing this tango, you and Tad will probably be able to work all of it out tonight.” He looked around the empty house. “Where is he anyway?”
“He stormed out.”
“That seems a little…extreme.”
I didn’t say anything. Everything that had happened was extreme. I needed to talk to my husband. He was the only one who could give me an explanation capable of putting my mind at ease. “Caleb, I don’t think you should be here when he gets back. We’re going to need some alone time.”
Caleb stayed seated. “You swear he didn’t try to hurt you.”
“No, the only things in danger here are our objets d’art.”
“Honey, if that’s art, I’m da Vinci.” He put his hand on my belly and grinned. “So Miss April’s gonna be a mommy. Remember, when the time comes, I get to give the child the ever-important first makeover. Unless of course it’s a girl, in which case I’ll teach her how to play baseball.”
I managed a smile and pointed to the door. “Take your cheese plates and skedaddle. Tad will be back any minute now.”
He gave me a quick kiss on the forehead before collecting his bag of goodies and leaving me alone to organize my thoughts.
I spent the next half hour formulating the words I would say to Tad when he walked in the door. An hour after that I had mentally thrown out that conversation and come up with a much more heated one that included topics such as how inappropriate it was to walk out on your wife for over an hour without telling her where you were going. Three hours later I was worried.
I stood in the living room in my nightgown and used my foot to trace a circle over the newly cleaned floor. Had he been mugged? Been in a car accident? Or was he really so angry that he had actually walked out on me?
But the last didn’t make sense. It had been such a stupid argument. It hadn’t even been an argument since I never had a chance to say anything. In my heart I knew he was coming back, but I also knew that the fact that it was taking him so long spelled trouble, and I had had enough of that for one evening.
At half past midnight I finally resolved to go to sleep. I had contemplated calling the hospitals but couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. I lay awake in bed and stared at the wall in much the same way Tad had in Barcelona. I had long since given up planning our impending conversation. Now all I could do was replay the conversation we had already had in hopes of making sense out of it.
Eventually I drifted into an uneasy sleep, only to be awakened by the creak of the front door opening. I checked the time and then closed my eyes again. Now I was just pissed off, and if I allowed myself to lay into him, at one forty-five in the morning, I would never get any sleep. I listened to the sound of his footsteps as he worked his way through the house. They were heavier than normal, more clumsy. He finally got to the bedroom and, without opening my eyes, I could feel him standing over me. I also knew he had been drinking. It wasn’t the smell, although I thought I picked up the scent of red wine, but it was the way he was breathing, and just something about his overall presence. He stood there for what must have been a full three minutes and with each minute I felt more of my annoyance being chipped away by a more powerful sense of trepidation. Eventually he did move away from the bed and I opened my eyes long enough to see his back retreat through the door. I looked down at my hand and noticed that I had the corner of my blanket clutched inside my fist. I lay there silently in the darkness and listened to the sound of scratching coming from the living room.
TWELVE
I got to work at 6:00 a.m. the next morning. I had dressed in the dark and crept past Tad’s sleeping body on the couch on my way out. I told myself that slipping out was necessary because I couldn’t very well get into a heated debate at a time when we both needed to be getting ready for work. But that was only part of my real reasoning. I didn’t know what to say and I wanted to avoid saying or not saying it for as long as possible. So I threw myself into my work. I did a complete floor change, reorganized the stockroom, worked on “my” Academy Awards promotion—anything to keep myself from thinking about Tad or my newly occupied womb. But that was stupid—who could find out they were pregnant and not think about it the next day? I stood in the middle of the sales floor and put my hand on my relatively flat stomach. There was no way there was room for anything in there aside from the Philly cheese steak sandwich I’d eaten for lunch. Certainly a baby couldn’t have crammed his way in. A baby. A good woman would be excited right now.
“I am excited,” I whispered to myself. Why wouldn’t I be? I got myself knocked up accidentally at a time when a pregnancy was pretty much guaranteed to fuck with my career, when the job I did have virtually guaranteed I would be cursed with varicose veins and when my husband was on a murderous, bunny-killing rampage. How could I be anything less than ecstatic?
At 7:15 p.m. I gave up the chore of inventing urgent tasks for myself and went home. I could deal with whatever was waiting for me there. God only gives you what you can handle. Oh, yeah? said my little voice. Then how come there are so many suicides?
My little voice seriously needed to shut up.
I had done the unthinkable and shelled out money for parking downtown, so getting home took a lot less time than normal, and to make things worse, our new home had a one-car garage and a mini driveway suitable for second-car parking, so I didn’t even have the luxury of driving around the block for twenty minutes while I figured out what I was supposed to say. I literally felt sick as I pushed the door open. The sounds of “When a Man Loves a Woman” floated from the stereo. It was the song that played for our first dance at our wedding. I slowly unbuttoned my coat and went forward to investigate. Tad was sitting on the sofa pouring red wine into two pristine glasses.
“I heard your car pull in,” he said. “I think you may need a new muffler.”
“Oh?” I looked at the label on the bott
le. Bonnie Doon’s Cigare Volant, my absolute favorite wine, and I couldn’t drink it. A new horrible realization took hold of me—I was going to have to stay sober for nine months.
He stood up and handed me a glass. “I thought you might want this.”
“Mmm.” I tortured myself by allowing a few drops to make contact with my tongue.
“I was pretty wound up last night. I just needed to take a long drive.”
“Four hours long?” I asked, not bothering to keep the disgust out of my voice. “Where did you go—Nevada?”
Tad let out an exasperated sigh. “Let’s not do this.” His eyes traveled to my jaw, which was tightening by the second. He sighed again. “I drove around and at one point I stopped to get a glass of Merlot at that new wine bar in the Inner Sunset.” He paused and then moved to my side and pushed a lock of hair behind my ear. “How did I ever get so lucky to have you? Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?”
Normally that pacified me for a while, but not tonight. We had things to talk about. Sweeping it under the rug would just give me an ulcer, and pregnant women weren’t allowed to have those. “Tad…”
“I know the timing on this isn’t perfect, but I got you a gift a while ago and I picked it up today.” He swirled the red liquid in his glass. “I should probably wait until Valentine’s Day, but I just can’t.” He jerked his head in the direction of the fireplace and I saw the flat two-by-one-and-a-half-foot rectangular gift propped against the wall. It was wrapped in that expensive wrapping paper that’s made to look like some kind of nondecorative natural fiber.
“What is it?” There was no way I would let him just buy his way out.
He shrugged and walked to the opposite end of the room. I hesitated before putting down my glass and carefully removing the paper. I gasped. I was holding a portrait of me and my grandmother. It was derived from a favorite photograph of mine, taken when I was four years old. I was curled up on her lap and she was holding a book in a way that allowed me to see the pictures while she told the story. The photo had so perfectly captured the love and tenderness we shared, that although I don’t actually remember the picture being taken, I will always feel that I remember the moment. In the painting the sentiment had become even more acute. The artist had made Van Gogh-like swirls in the background, and the illusion of the two of us somehow melting into one another was at once heartrending and breathtaking. “How did you…”
