Love Stories in This Town

by Amanda Eyre Ward

  Sally finished her whispered calls and approached, looking a little less spry. Again, she made the case for an early lunch.

  “What about the house?” said Greg loudly.

  “Oh, right,” said Sally. “I did talk to Joe. We lost the house. But how about I run get my keys, and … a nice, you know, lunch?”

  I listened vaguely as Greg discussed the situation further, learning that we had been outbid, and it was over, though we could make a backup offer. When the calls were made and what phones worked and where various keys ended up, we were too exhausted to clarify. I would never stand in that beautiful kitchen, eating an ice-cream sandwich in my bathing suit.

  I went upstairs and changed my Maxi Pad and swallowed my pills. I took off my oversize sunglasses and lay down. Reflexively, I put my hands on my stomach, but then remembered, and let them fall open.

  We spent a long afternoon looking at other homes. We tried to convince ourselves that a too-small house with a crazy water feature was even better, all things considered, but as Sally dropped us off at the airport, a sinking feeling was already settling in.

  “Don't forget,” said Sally, as I climbed from the van, “the perfect home is out there.”

  “Okay,” I said. Four days before, a technician had moved her wand on my skin and looked at an image on the screen. The doctor was sure everything was fine. The ultrasound was just a precaution. Greg told me he could see the baby's face—its eyes—but when the doctor explained that the baby had never grown more than a few weeks old, that it had no head, and no heart, Greg said he must have been wrong.

  In two weeks, my baby, the mass of cells, would be analyzed and we would be told it was tetraploidy. The doctor wrote something on her rectangular pad, then handed it to me. The paper read, “Tetraploidy. 92, XX, YY.”

  “Any questions?” asked the doctor.

  I knew that to Greg, these symbols would mean something, bloom into a narrative. To me, they were cruel and unfathomable. “But why?” I said. “What did I do?”

  She sighed, and said, “Nothing, Kimberly. It had absolutely nothing to do with you. It's just … the way things work out sometimes.” She scribbled again, handing me a prescription for Prozac. When I got back to our apartment, I put both sheets of paper in my underwear drawer.

  Outside the Houston airport, Greg waited, holding our bags. He stood, broad shoulders a little slumped, and watched me. I remembered the sweet shock I'd felt when I'd first seen him, in the audience of my graduation fashion show. Most of my classmates, like Greg's sister, presented glamorous gowns, but I designed coats for little girls, swinging cape-style coats made of wool and fastened with vintage toggles. I knitted matching scarves and mittens. I'd worn only plastic parkas growing up—my designs came from my imagination, and a picture I'd seen once of a Parisian schoolgirl, standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe. Though the SCAD store had wanted to buy my whole collection, I saved one red coat, one scarf, one set of mittens.

  “Have a safe trip home,” said Sally.

  “Okay,” I said. I walked to my husband, and he folded me inside his arms. I wanted to say something, to fix something. He looked so young, and so bewildered.

  “I can't believe it,” I said. “It happened so fast.”

  “There will be another,” he said.

  We looked at each other. There would be another, there would. But I wanted the one that was gone.

  On Messalonskee Lake

  ONE

  A woman had drowned in the lake, but that did not make it any less picturesque. We hadn't known her, after all; I had never met her, and my husband, Bill, was a boy when she died. She was Bill's aunt Renee, married to his father's brother, Gerry. She played the violin. This was all I could get out of my husband during our drive up 1-95.

  “So she fell out of the boat?” I said, waddling into the cabin, which smelled of either pine, Pine-Sol, or both.

  “Yeah,” said Bill.

  “When was this?”

  “A while ago,” said Bill. “I told you, I was just a kid.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “We need some air,” said Bill. He was wandering around, opening doors and windows.

  “Who falls out of a boat?” I said. “It's very sad.”

  My husband approached. He tried to take me in his arms, but I barely fit. “Here,” I said, pressing his palm to my stomach. His fingers were warm, and I leaned into him.

  “What?” he said, into my hair. He moved his thumb along my neck softly; I kissed him.

  “I think it's hiccuping,” I said. There was a bubbling sensation inside me, not the kicks I had come to know, but something lighter.

  “Maybe it's laughing,” said my husband.

  When we realized we would never be alone again, Bill and I had decided on a romantic week at his family's Maine cabin. He had spent his childhood at Camp Snow Island, and I knew he wanted to move back and run it someday. Unless I was hit by a bus or got trigger toe, I wasn't leaving the Boston Ballet, but I was happy to spend a week in the wilderness.

  I asked for an economy car when I called Thrifty Rental, but when we took our key into the parking lot, there was a PT Cruiser in Slot A-8. “No,” said Bill, when he saw it.

  “I think it's cute,” I said.

  “You cannot drive a PT Cruiser to Belgrade Lakes,” said my husband. “You can't step out of that car and buy bait.”

  “I'll buy the bait,” I said.

  “Lord help us all,” said my husband. I began putting away the groceries we'd bought on the way: jam, bread, milk, eggs. “Was Renee pretty?” I asked, opening the refrigerator.

  “Sure,” said Bill. “I don't know.” He motioned to one of the family photos placed around the cabin in tarnished frames. “There she is,” he said.

  I peered at the photograph. Aunt Renee wore a bemused expression and a bandanna. She had her hand on the shoulder of a little boy. “Who's that?” I said. “I thought you said they didn't have kids.”

  “That's me,” said Bill.

  “Oh,” I said. The boy in the picture—Bill—was smiling timidly. I wondered if our baby would be shy.

  At Day's General Store, we bought steaks and beer. I had gained eighteen pounds, but the doctor told me to eat even more. He wasn't really worried, he said, but he was cautiously concerned. Jocelyn, who was in my company, hadn't gained enough pregnancy weight, and her baby was born six weeks early. Little Allan was fine, but the story was scary enough to make me choke down a bunch of beef.

  As Bill manned the grill, I sat on the deck overlooking Messalonskee Lake. Snow Island, where the camp was located, was faintly visible across the water. A green boat puttered by: a man and his young daughter. “Any luck?” called my husband, and the girl held up a fish.

  “Goddamn,” said Bill. He was in his element here, a fact I tried to forget every morning as he set his jaw and stepped on the T, uncomfortable in a suit and tie. Bill didn't like cities in general and Boston in specific. He loathed his job raising money for the Appalachian Trail Society. I had studied dance in Burlington, Vermont, for the first few years of our marriage. We had planned on a lifetime of dreaming big and working hard. When I actually made it, we were both ecstatic, but also stunned.

  “I can't wait to take the boat out,” said Bill.

  “Is it the same boat?” I asked. “The one Renee fell out of?”

  “What?” said Bill. “Maybe, but I doubt it.”

  I hefted myself out of the chair—my balance was completely off now—and walked across the pine needles to take a peek. It was yellow, with a bucket in the stern.

  Bill finished grilling, and we ate at a wooden picnic table. We made up two beds on the screen porch and lay in one. Bill pressed his ear to my belly, trying—but failing—to hear a heartbeat. I pulled my maternity tank top up, feeling his scratchy cheek against my skin.

  For days, we napped and cooked and swam in the lake. I worked out regularly—I was expected back in the studio six weeks after the baby was born, so there wa
s no time for a break. In my off-time, I constructed elaborate stories about dead Renee: a doomed affair, a clandestine meeting gone disastrously wrong. I pressed Bill for details, but he claimed to know nothing. Had he been there the night she drowned? He was asleep, he said. Was she depressed? How would he know, he said. He told me not to get worked up. Each evening, the man and his daughter floated past us, holding up lines of fish. Bill had some luck, and I even went with him a few times, though I joked I would sink the boat. I loved watching my husband paddle—the movement of his strong muscles.

  On our last night at the cabin, we sat on the deck as the sun set. The baby performed petit allegros in my womb, and Bill held my hand. Suddenly, he stood up and pulled off his shirt, then his pants. “Lovebug, what are you doing?” I said. Naked, Bill stretched and smiled. Then he did a swan dive into the freezing—even in summer—water. He emerged a few feet out, like an otter.

  “Join me?” he said.

  “Oh, hon,” I said, “I don't know.”

  He waited, expectant, and I decided it wasn't too much to ask.

  The water felt thick and cool. It surrounded me, and then I surfaced, sputtering. I could smell algae. Bill watched me as I swam breaststroke. I reached my husband and wrapped myself around him the best I could.

  After our impromptu swim, the baby was hungry, so I dressed and wandered into the kitchen. I ended up staring at every family photo until I found another of Renee. In this picture, she was standing next to Uncle Gerry, who had attended our wedding, and given us a salad bowl.

  Gerry's hair was white now, but in the picture, it was reddish brown. He looked about nineteen. He and Aunt Renee were sitting side by side, wearing bathing suits. Renee held her hair back from her face; she squinted against a summer sun.

  At our wedding, Uncle Gerry took me for a spin around the dance floor. He was still handsome, like Bill's dad, but the word was that he lived all alone somewhere in Canada. “You have everything in front of you,” he said. His eyes were kind. “I'm jealous,” he said.

  “Can I call you Uncle Gerry?” I had asked.

  He looked more bewildered than touched, but then the band began to play Van Morrison's “Into the Mystic.” Bill came from behind and took me in his arms.

  I brought the photo of Renee and Gerry outside. “Look at them,” I said.

  Bill sighed.

  “They were happy, too,” I said.

  The sun's final rays shot across the lake, and the green boat came into view. I watched my husband as the girl and her father moved past. They waved, and Bill waved back. I knew that soon, I would no longer be the love of his life.

  TWO

  There were tears and lists and bottles of frozen, yellow milk, but finally Bill was alone with his wife. She sat in the passenger seat of the rental car clutching her breast pump. “I just wish the cabin had a phone,” said Lizzy.

  Bill pulled out of his parents' driveway. “The baby,” he said, “is fine.” He felt as if he had been repeating these four words incessantly since Aurora's birth.

  “I know,” said Lizzy. “But do you think the cell will work?”

  “My parents know where to find us,” said Bill. “Can you try to relax?”

  “To be honest,” said Lizzy, “I don't want to go. I'm sorry, Bill, but I just don't. There—I said it.”

  Bill pressed on the accelerator. It was early fall, the trees still holding their auburn leaves. If Lizzy just stopped talking, they'd be at the cabin in an hour.

  “Bill? Seriously. Let's just go another time.”

  “How about a donut?” said Bill, pointing to Kaye's Donuts, on the side of the road.

  “A donut?” said Lizzy. She rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand. She was tired, of course, but so was he. At eighteen months old, Aurora still slept with Lizzy, waking a few times a night.

  “Yes,” he said. “A donut.”

  She gazed out the window. “Well,” she said quietly, “okay.”

  “Just skip it,” said Bill. “Just forget it.”

  “No, I want one,” said Lizzy. “I want a donut, Bill. Maybe raspberry jelly?”

  “It's too late,” said Bill. He drove on.

  It all began with a broken leg. Lizzy had returned to the company six weeks after Aurora's birth, and Bill loved pushing the baby to day care in the expensive stroller her parents had sent from Bennington. His job was a chore, but it paid the bills (as the Boston Ballet didn't) and he could often sneak out early to pick up his daughter.

  Aurora was nine months old when she fell off a climbing gym at the park. Her scream was horrible, and her leg was broken in two places. Lizzy was dancing Odette in a Swan Lake matinee, and could not be reached. What the hell were you doing? she wanted to know, later that night, after she had given Aurora a sponge bath. Well, he had been reading Portland Magazine on a bench, sipping a latte. Bill agreed with his wife: it was his fault.

  Aurora began protesting when Lizzy dropped her at Happy Baby Day Care, holding on to Lizzy and wailing. “I want to be with her,” said Lizzy, calling Bill's cell phone, “and she wants to be with me.” The last “me” was infused with a desperate, high-pitched tone.

  They decided Bill would do the drop-off and the pickup. Lizzy would do the evening bath, the singing, the snuggling, the nighttime feeding. She would settle Aurora between them in bed and then say, “Bill, no. Not in front of the baby.” She would sleep with Aurora held to her breast, and Bill would lie awake, move onto the couch, and do the drop-off and the pickup.

  As they neared the cabin, Lizzy seemed calmer. They drove into the town of Belgrade Lakes, stopped at Day's for supplies. Bill slipped a bottle of wine into the basket, and Lizzy said, “It's for you, not me.”

  “You could have a glass. …”

  “I don't want one.”

  “Then it's for me,” said Bill. He tossed in a six-pack of Shipyard Ale. Lizzy added an apple. Bill picked out two steaks, and Lizzy found green beans. Bill got eggs and butter, and Lizzy brought the basket to the counter and placed a People magazine and a pack of gum on top. Bill paid.

  When they reached the cabin, Bill found the key under an empty flowerpot, unlocking the door and breathing in the familiar smell of the musty kitchen. He felt a rush of well-being, a sense that anything was possible. He walked to the back porch, where he could see the lake. He could also see Lizzy, who was standing amidst the trees, trying to find cell phone reception. A leaf fell from a sugar maple, landing in her hair.

  One morning, when Aurora was a year old, Lizzy had stopped packing her dance bag and sat down heavily at the kitchen counter. “Hon, coffee?” said Bill, pouring into a plastic travel mug.

  Lizzy was in tights and a leotard, her hair uncombed. Aurora wandered around the kitchen, trying out her new purple shoes. She held up one foot and then the other, delighted. “I don't want to do this anymore,” said Lizzy.

  Bill sighed. “Hon, coffee?” he repeated.

  “I won't take her to that filthy day care.”

  “We can't afford for me to leave my job,” said Bill.

  “I know,” said Lizzy, her expression sad and sure. “I'm quitting the company.”

  “That's insane!” cried Bill.

  Insane or not, she did it, returning home that afternoon with the contents of her locker and a pizza.

  In Uncle Gerry's cabin, Bill opened the bottle of wine and poured a glass. Lizzy came inside and said, “Well! Your parents say Aurora's okay, but she hasn't even had her nap yet.” She looked at Bill and his glass of wine, then went into the bedroom. “I'm going to lie down,” she called.

  “Great,” said Bill.

  It was early afternoon. Bill refilled his glass and walked down to the lake. He had hoped, without the baby and the city, that things could be different. Bill remembered bringing Lizzy to camp for the first time, expertly piloting their Whaler to Snow Island. He'd idled next to the old dock and jumped off with the rope, securing the boat and then holding out his hand for Lizzy, radiant in a blue sundress and w
hite sneakers, her hair loosed from her usual bun.

  “Oh, I get it,” Lizzy had said, taking his hand and stepping elegantly across the narrow ribbon of water separating the boat from the dock. “This is who you are, Bill Ferris.”

  It began to rain softly as Bill finished the second glass of wine and climbed into the yellow boat. He had always loved the paddle to Ashworth Island, located at the far end of Messalonskee Lake. As a teenager, Bill had supervised all the camp trips to Ashworth, from the Minnows' first campout to the Sturgeons' Maine Woodsman Certification Exams, during which the eldest boys had to construct their own shelters, forage for and cook their food, and take exams on axmanship and fire construction.

  Thunder cracked, but Bill was undeterred. He slid the boat into the water and began to row, chanting the list of local fish: Black crappie, brook trout, brown trout, eel—he switched sides, ignoring the rain—bullhead, pickerel, chub, ale wife. Three-spine stickleback four-spine stickleback-Largemouth bass, smallmouth bass. Shiner, splake, pike, sucker. Pumpkinseed sunfish, redbreast sunfish. Smelt, salmon, white and yellow perch. Slimy sculpin, slimy sculpin!

  His father had taught him the roll long ago, though Bill wasn't even sure it was correct. He was no marine biologist. He hadn't even finished his English degree at UVM. He met Lizzy, she auditioned with the Boston Ballet, she was granted a spot in the company, and they moved.

  Lizzy was an anxious mother; she could talk for twenty minutes about baby-proofing. (Sometimes, after a long day, Bill was too tired to deal with the KidCo toilet seat lock and just peed into the tub.) She seemed to have no regrets about leaving her life's work, no interest in movies or current events, no desire to put on makeup. Sometimes Bill looked at his wife and couldn't figure out what the fuck had happened.

  But Aurora: at naptime, she slept on her stomach with her diaper in the air, her feet crossed underneath her. She was curious, earnest, her teeth tiny pearls. When she ran to Bill and settled herself perfectly against him, her head smelled like sunscreen and caramel.