The Birthdays

by Heidi Pitlor

  “Okay,” Brenda murmured, and closed her eyes.

  He leaned forward and dabbed at her mouth, but she didn’t budge.

  A tall nurse appeared in the doorway. “She up?”

  “She was, but I’m not sure she still is.”

  “She’ll be in and out for a while,” the nurse said, and checked the chart on a clipboard hanging from the end of the bed. Brenda’s head leaned to the side and her mouth fell open. The nurse returned the chart, avoiding his eyes, and rushed out of the room.

  He squeezed the tissue in his hand into a ball. Brenda’s hair had bent into strange angles, and she looked like a child now as she slept, incredibly young and soft and breakable, at the mercy of everything in the world.

  He soon grew fidgety and wheeled back down the hallway, where the only sound was the buzzing of a distant machine. Two nurses ran past him. An old man sat bent in a green chair outside an empty room. Daniel wandered back to the waiting area, where he sat alone for a while and listened to the long honk of a car’s horn outside.

  —

  Ellen and Joe would sleep in a square green room with two single beds. Ellen looked down at the soft beige carpet, at the thin green and beige curtains hanging by the windows, the ornate antique clock on the wall. She wondered if they’d hired an interior designer. “More towels are in the hall closet, as well as more blankets and pillows,” Liz said.

  Joe set Babe’s cage on one of the beds and hefted his suitcase onto the other.

  “Don’t worry, Babe won’t need his own room. He’ll stay with us,” Ellen said, and Joe shot her a look.

  “I’m off to make dinner,” Liz said, and Ellen followed her into the kitchen, where the floors were rich auburn tiles, the countertops marbled granite. Heavy stainless steel pots hung in a circle above an enormous, shiny stove. The refrigerator and sink were sleek and metal too. The airy room and everything in it looked as if they could survive a nuclear bomb.

  Jake came in and took a seat at a round wooden table in the corner that was covered in separated families of food. He had met his female counterpart in Liz. Ellen wondered what made him so deeply organized, and whether she herself had had anything to do with it. Her house had devolved into chaos when he was growing up, as there had never been enough room for the five of them. No matter how hard she tried—and she tried incredibly hard—to keep the place clean and orderly, it was a constant clutter of car manuals, toys, books, clothes, notebooks, shoes, tools, newspapers. Perhaps Jake’s obsession with cleanliness was some sort of reaction to his childhood home. He was certainly in for a challenge with fatherhood.

  “I’m just making a simple roast chicken for dinner,” Liz said. “You want to help with the salad?”

  Ellen nodded. “You know, when I was pregnant with him,” and she gestured to Jake, “I had the strangest cravings for chicken all the time.” Liz handed her a tomato and a knife. “Dad and the butcher became good friends over those nine months.”

  “I haven’t had any real cravings yet,” Liz said, “but I’m sure I’ll get them. I seem to have every other symptom. Jake, you’ll probably get cravings too. What do they call that, sympathetic pregnancy or something?” Ellen wondered if he had been trying to steal the spotlight from her lately. Pregnancy did tend to make some men feel excluded, and he’d be a prime candidate.

  Jake’s only response was a snappish. “So Dad brought Babe.”

  “He did.” The knife pressed against the firm skin of the tomato, pushing it into the cutting board. Ellen set the knife aside and poked the skin with her thumbnail. It parted and a puddle of seeds bled onto her fingers.

  “How’s he doing these days?” he asked, a concerned tone in his voice. It was a loaded question, really, one meant to prompt her to complain.

  “Oh, well enough. He always has to have his pets nearby, you know that.” The tomato was a little green inside.

  “And how’s Daniel doing?”

  “Where is Daniel, that’s the question.” And why wasn’t anyone else asking this? Because no one had an answer, that was why.

  “I’m sure he’ll call again soon,” Jake said. “You know, we haven’t seen him since Brenda got pregnant.”

  “He’s fine, I suppose. Busy with work. We’ve invited him to dinner the past few weekends, but he’s always got a million things going on. Brenda too.”

  “You should invite us to dinner sometime. We haven’t been down there since Thanksgiving.”

  “You can come anytime you like, you know that.”

  “Invite us sometime,” he said.

  She scooped up a fistful of tomato and dropped it onto the bowl of lettuce beside her. It seemed Jake had always thought she preferred Daniel to him—which, if she were to be perfectly honest, she did once in a while. Any parent who claimed to like all his or her kids equally was lying. Love, that was a different matter. She loved them all deeply and instinctively. She truly wanted the best for them all. But like? Jake did overreact to the smallest things. He did try too hard to impress people, especially now that he’d made his money (he’d even offered to buy them a new roof for their house a few months ago—a touching but ultimately showy gesture. They would never take money from their kids). He was her son, though, and he was a good soul, an inherently kind person who only wanted others to think well of him in the end. “I’ll look at my calendar when we get home and we’ll make a plan for you to come down,” she said.

  She finished the salad and made her way back to the green bedroom. She almost tripped over Babe, who stood in the doorway looking up at her. “One day I’ll kill myself falling over him,” she said. Joe glanced up from a book and frowned. His glasses had inched to the end of his nose and looked as if they would slip off at any moment. Ellen moved toward him and pushed them back.

  “I need to lie down,” she said. The beds were tiny, really, and her feet hung off the end of her mattress. Their bed at home was luxurious, a king-sized on which they could lie entirely separate from each other. They’d splurged after Hilary moved out. Those days, the house echoed with emptiness, and they (especially Ellen) were feeling the need to be indulgent. The new bed occupied the entire room, and they even had to move their dressers into the kids’ old bedrooms. When Joe said something from his side of the bed, she often didn’t hear him. But if they wanted to, they could make their way toward each other, and once in a long while, after a trying day, they did find themselves in the center of this enormous bed. Now, in the green room, she noted the wide gulf between the beds. It had, after all, been a day filled with little stresses. And bigger ones—Daniel still hadn’t arrived. Hilary was pregnant with a married man’s child.

  “Joe?”

  “Yes?”

  “You there?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good,” she said, and closed her eyes. In her mind, she lifted off the bed and floated to the ceiling, out of the room, down the hallway—her arms soft, like wings—and into the living room toward the front door. Down to the water where the waves tumbled in the night, the moon watched her like an eye, the stars gathered in mythic shapes above. It was a lovely thought at first, though certainly a strange one. She looked down and saw Babe now beside her bed. She thought she detected a bit of a smile on his face. And maybe it was so, maybe he was all-knowing and could read minds and was amused by hers right then. Admittedly there were times she almost liked having the turtle nearby. When Joe was engrossed in the paper or a book, Ellen didn’t mind it so much because she wasn’t entirely alone. Here was this creature, this witness. Before Babe there was Napoleon, the parakeet. Joe preferred mostly quiet, unobtrusive animals—and anyway, Jake had been allergic to everything else. Before Napoleon there was Ramone, the goldfish, who darted around his tank, looking wide-eyed at them. They could have been worse. The pets could have been mangy dogs or cats that scratched the furniture and left their hair in woolly clumps on the rug.

  She thought again of her conversation with MacNeil in his garden—his question about whether Joe had chos
en her or she him—and she tried to more fully remember the day they’d met. She did recall a few key things: the hospital, Joe’s shiny black wingtips, his trying to sell her parents a car. What had drawn him to her, this random girl? She certainly didn’t look her best and he was a handsome boy, with short, dark hair and olive skin, brown eyes. Tall, lanky, broad in the shoulders. She’d been impressed by the kindness of his asking a complete stranger whether she was all right. Really it was Joe who’d chosen her, who’d sealed her fate—she was sure. It was he who’d singled her out in that coffee shop—or was it just outside the coffee shop, by her parents’ car? She glanced over at him on the other bed, a world away.

  The house was quiet, and Ellen listened to her breath. She wondered where Jake and Hilary were right now. In their separate bedrooms? “Joe, where do you suppose Daniel is?”

  “Probably waiting for the next ferry.”

  “The rain’s got to be driving him crazy.”

  “Mm, I’m sure it is.”

  “I hope he’s got his raincoat. Do you think they’re waiting in their car in the parking lot for a ferry? Or out in the rain?” She pictured her son sitting in his chair in the middle of an empty parking lot, his legs swung lifelessly to one side, rain pelting down on him. “I wish more than anything he were here with us.”

  He closed the book. “He’ll come,” he said, then set his book on the floor and stood slowly, shaking his left foot awake. He sat on the edge of her bed and nudged her toward the wall. She shuffled to make room for him as he lay down beside her, just able to fit.

  Hilary trudged past their doorway. “Can you believe her?” Ellen said. “I almost collapsed when I saw her in the bookstore. Can you believe they’re all pregnant?”

  “Barely. We’ll go from seven to ten in less than a year. What’ll it be like the next time we’re all together?”

  “I worry about her,” Ellen said. “She’s going to have a hard time as a single mother. She’s not exactly organized. What if she leaves the baby at some tattoo parlor? Just forgets about it one day?”

  “Ell, come on.”

  Hilary had no idea how trying motherhood would be. “Everything she does seems motivated by some need to rebel, don’t you think? Even getting pregnant—and who is this man anyway? I have to say it just feels like a sort of spiteful act. Something to do just because she could.”

  “I doubt it was spite. You know how impulsive she can be.” He pressed his fingers through the spaces between hers.

  “Do you think he’s married, this man?”

  Joe smiled. “No.”

  “Well then, why won’t she tell us who he is? Do you think there’s something wrong with him?” She thought a moment. “Maybe he’s some kind of criminal.”

  He looked at her as if she had four heads, and she yanked her hand away. She wanted badly to reach some sort of answer about her daughter just once—what was wrong with that? All this weekend they would tiptoe around Hilary, asking her only the vaguest, most inconsequential questions in order to avoid eliciting any melodramatic reactions.

  “Jake’s on edge,” Joe said.

  “He always is.”

  “This time seems a little different to me. Something’s going on with him.”

  Joe never noticed such things, and Ellen shuddered to think what other secrets might be hiding beneath the surface of her family. “What do you think it might be?”

  “I’m not sure. He just seems off.”

  She considered her son. “Well, if nothing else, he is a person defined by his rules. I don’t think we need to worry so much about him.” She turned to Joe. “I don’t think he’d go sleep with some criminal and get himself pregnant.”

  “No, he probably wouldn’t,” he said, smiling, and kissed her hand.

  —

  “When do you want to tell them about these two?” Liz asked, rubbing her stomach. She lay on the bed beside Jake, gazing up at the ceiling. Everyone had gone to their rooms to unpack and settle in.

  “Let’s wait until Dan and Brenda get here.”

  “He said he’d call before they took the next ferry, but I’m sure they’ve left by now.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?” He hadn’t meant to sound annoyed.

  “I don’t know, but you don’t have to snap.” She moved closer to him and ran a finger down his face. “Hey, where’d you put the Kama Sutra?”

  “You’re hilarious.” He turned from her and adjusted his pillow, only now remembering that the magazine lay underneath it. He considered quickly grabbing it and tossing it under the bed, but she’d see this.

  She twirled a strand of hair around her thumb. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  “As I said before, it was meant to be a joke,” he said.

  “On some level. But maybe on another level, it wasn’t.”

  He looked at her. “I don’t know. Would that be so wrong?”

  “Not exactly wrong, but maybe a little misguided, at least now?” She patted her stomach.

  “A lot of women like to have sex when they’re pregnant,” he tried again. “A lot of women like to have sex in the first place.”

  “Shh—you want them to hear you?” she hissed.

  “No.” He pushed his fists into the bed as he sat up. A corner of the magazine—one of the cheerleaders’ thighs—peeked out. He lunged for it and stuffed it back underneath the pillow.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” He moved backward, sat on top of the pillow, but she leaned all her weight against him and tried to push him off. “You’re pregnant,” he said. “You shouldn’t be straining yourself like that.”

  “Show me what that was,” she said, and continued shoving him.

  “Quit it,” he said, and tried to nudge her away, but as he did, she managed to reach beneath him, slip a hand under the pillow and yank out the magazine.

  “Bounce magazine?” She laughed as she read. “‘Fifty Ways to Lick Your Lover’?”

  He tried to grab it from her but she twisted away and read, “‘The Juicy Secrets of Twin Cheerleaders’? Twins, Jake? Jesus.”

  Her words took a moment to sink in.

  How had this never occurred to him? Just this afternoon he’d gotten himself off just thinking of these twins. He hadn’t even considered the fact that these girls were someone’s daughters, and could one day be his daughters. Not that his kids would ever pose for such a magazine. He and Liz would surely be better parents than that, or would they? He was a sick man, stashing porn in his underwear drawer like a horny teenager, and he would make a terrible father. He was a terrible husband.

  “What am I going to do with you?” she said, half smirking, and set the magazine on the floor.

  He stood and paced quickly beside the bed, trying to think of something to say to redeem himself, but nothing at all occurred to him. His body hummed. And there Liz sat, calmly, evenly, virtuous as a lily. In every way a superior person, and right now as smug as could be.

  “Don’t you ever make mistakes?” he finally said.

  “Well, I’m not exactly curling up with copies of Playgirl these days, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “That’s right—you’re a more evolved human being than I am,” he said, as he was unable to think of a more intelligent or, yes, evolved reply, and stormed off to the kitchen. He almost bumped into his mother, who stood by the table, a concerned look on her face. Had she heard them? His heart banged inside his chest. “Y-you hungry?” he stammered. He wasn’t about to offer her the opportunity to opine on what she may or may not have heard.

  “A little.”

  “How about some salad?” He considered what else they had to eat, glad for the distraction. The potatoes weren’t done yet; the chicken was still cooking. But he’d brought the wheat bread Liz had baked the day before, and he found the loaf on the counter.

  Ellen took a seat at the table and made a spire with her arms. She rested her lips against the tips of her fin
gers. Then she said, “Still no word from Dan?”

  “I wish there was something we could do to track him down. I don’t know why they don’t have cell phone towers here yet.” Jake found a small bowl for the salad (even Liz’s salads were morally superior. The little mandarin oranges looked like self-satisfied smiles, the spinach and arugula a fluffy bed of bitter-tasting health). “I know you’re worried, Mom. I’m starting to get concerned about him too, to be honest.”

  “Should we call the police?”

  “Let’s give him a couple more hours. Maybe he just forgot to call before he got on the ferry,” he said. “Can I get you something to drink? It might help you unwind. Maybe a glass of wine? We’ve got some nice vintages here, some pretty rare ones, actually.”

  She smiled. “No, no, I’m fine. You know, you really will make a good father,” she said. “You stay incredibly attuned to other people. You just want them to be happy with you, don’t you?” She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself of something.

  “I don’t know. I’m a little terrified of fatherhood, to be honest,” he said, though this wasn’t exactly it. Clearly she hadn’t heard his argument with Liz. “I’m just not sure I’m up to the task or that I’m a good enough person, you know?”

  “Oh, you’ll be fine, and Dad and I will come up and help if you need us to. You really shouldn’t be terrified. As for good enough, well, you’re one of the most good people I know.” She reached for his hand. “I don’t think you could be a bad person if you tried.”

  Jake smiled sadly at her.

  “And anyway, at least there will be two of you for one baby. Think of how hard it’ll be on your sister.”

  “Mom, can you keep something quiet for a little while?” He couldn’t help himself.

  Her eyes lit and she nodded.

  “We wanted to wait to tell you all at once, but God knows when that opportunity will come.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re having two.”

  “Two what?” she asked.

  “Two babies, Mom.”

  She blinked several times and held her fork before her mouth. “Twins?”