Pictures of You

by Caroline Leavitt

  “Want to keep walking?”

  Several blocks later, they were winding their way toward SoHo, when she stopped in front of a hotel, hesitating. The Mercer. She didn’t say anything to him, but she didn’t have to. He followed her inside and he paid for the room, using their real names.

  AS SOON AS they were in the room, she leaned toward Charlie and kissed him. Isabelle slipped her shirt down and he saw the soft swell of her belly and he leaned down and kissed it. You be good to her, he wanted to whisper to the baby.

  She slid out of her clothes. Every time he had touched her before, he had felt that he was cheating on April. Now there was nothing but this room, this bed with the squeaky springs. There was nothing but Isabelle’s pale skin and the way she sighed when he touched her. He reached for the lights, but Isabelle pulled at his hand. “No, I want to see you,” she said, and the whole time they were making love, she kept her eyes wide open. When Charlie shut his, she whispered, “Look at me,” and he did. He wrapped her hair around his hand and pulled her closer to him. He studied Isabelle and she touched his mouth. “I love you,” he said.

  Her mouth moved. “You never said that to me before.”

  “Yes, I did. All the time. Just not out loud.” He kissed her shoulder. “I love you,” he said again. “I always will.”

  Afterward, they sat naked in bed and ordered room service. A salad plate, crusty bread, and sparkling water, because she was being careful not to eat a single thing that was bad for her. They littered the sheets with their crumbs. Isabelle looked up. “Hear that?” she said. “All that traffic noise. It’s getting late.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Charlie said, reaching for her, but Isabelle got out of the bed. She began putting her clothes on. “We should get going,” she said.

  “Stay,” he said, trying to pull her back onto the bed. She smiled and kept dressing. He got up and started dressing, too. He helped her smooth the sheets, as if no one had been in the bed at all.

  Outside was still bright and hot and Charlie’s mouth was dry. He rested his hand along the side of a building for a moment. Isabelle walked him all the way back to his car. He saw her mouth wobble, just for a moment, before she smiled at him.

  “Come with me,” he said. “Come back to the Cape with me. Come see Sam. I love you. I know you love me.” He grabbed her arm and held it and there was that fierce heat again and he felt like crying. “You can call Frank from Massachusetts. We can work all this out.” He thought of their whole life, like this big stretching picture. Every cell in his body was pulling toward her, like magnets. “I made a mistake,” he said, cupping her face in his hands. “Let me fix it. We can be a family. I’ll love your baby like my own. Like you love Sam.”

  And then she pulled her hand away and folded it on her belly. Her lower lip trembled. “I can’t,” Isabelle said. She stepped back from him. “Please, Charlie. Please don’t make this harder.”

  “You don’t love me?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He felt a pull of desperation. “Maybe I could stay a few more days.”

  “Please. Just go,” she said. “You have to go.”

  Charlie got in the car. You could think you understood things, but the truth was that you could never see the full picture of someone else’s life. Not April’s, not Isabelle’s. He wasn’t even sure about his own life now. He looked back at her. Her hair was lush and full and shimmering. He wanted to jump out again and grab her and tell her she had to come with him. He wanted to kiss her mouth, her neck, the slope of her shoulders. He drove slowly, and even though he knew it was crazy, he half expected her to run after the car, waving her beautiful hands, calling to him to stop, stop, because she had changed her mind, she couldn’t live without him, either. He knew she loved him. He thought of April, always holding something back, and then he thought of Isabelle, in the hotel room with him, her luminous skin, the smell of her hair. The way she kept her eyes open while they made love, the way every time he turned away, she would whisper to him, “Look at me.”

  And he had. He had really seen who she was.

  Charlie let himself look in the rearview mirror. The street was teeming with people, but Isabelle was gone. It was then that he started to cry.

  AFTER CHARLIE LEFT, when she was sure he wouldn’t see her, Isabelle started crying right there on the street. She leaned against a building and sobbed into her hands and when she finally stopped, she dug out her sunglasses and then walked to the curb and hailed a cab. As soon as she was seated in the back, she blew her nose and then carefully put on a little makeup, assuring herself that by the time she got to her building, she’d look as if nothing had ever happened to her.

  “How was your day, beautiful girl?” Frank was home, standing in the kitchen, in jeans and a denim shirt, stirring a red sauce in the pot. “I gave Nelson scallops,” he laughed. “Sautéed them, too.” Then he glanced at her, and his face filled with alarm. “Allergies again?” he said, and Isabelle nodded. The house smelled of basil and garlic. “I made something special,” he said. He turned, looking at her. “God, you are beautiful. I am so lucky,” he said.

  “I’m starving,” Isabelle lied, and when she went to kiss him, she closed her eyes.

  That night, Isabelle bolted awake. She’d been dreaming that she had said yes to Charlie, that she had driven away with him to the Cape, flushed with happiness, and Sam was there and she had hugged Sam so hard, she had thought she might never let him go. She sat up, disoriented, seeing the contours of the oak dresser Frank had found for her, the framed photo of his restaurant. For a moment, staring at Frank, she didn’t know who he was. “Szzth,” Frank muttered. She glanced at the clock. Three in the morning. She got up to make some peppermint tea, one hand on her belly. She was terrified because the baby hadn’t kicked yet, and though her obstetrician told her it was nothing to worry about, that the baby had a heartbeat like a firecracker, she couldn’t help but be unnerved. She walked past the den, hearing Nelson rustling in his tank. She went into the kitchen and switched on the light. Outside, an alley cat was yowling, a strange, fierce cry in the night. She poured the tea and sat down. She thought of how Frank had made her a special dinner, how he sang sweet, silly songs to her when she called him on the phone, how surely he deserved someone better and kinder than she was, someone who loved him the way he loved her. “You should see the way he looks at you!” one of her friends had told her. Every night he rested his head against her belly and spoke Italian to the baby. Ciao. Linguini. Food words that made her laugh.

  Charlie. Her heart raced and she suddenly felt sick. She was pregnant and she had slept with Charlie. She thought she heard Frank moving around, getting up. Any moment he’d come in and give her that worried look. He’d make her broth from scratch, he’d rub her back. If she said to him, I’m in love with someone else, he would tell her to go and be with that person, and he would be kind about it. She would ruin his life. And maybe she would ruin her own in the process. She touched the phone. She’d call just to hear Charlie’s voice and hang up. She’d call just because she could. She started to dial and then just as she punched in the last digit, she felt a tiny flutter in her belly, like someone was tickling her from inside. Her hands froze and she let the receiver clatter onto the table. She felt it again.

  “Frank!” she shouted. “Frank!” Her voice was like a kite, rushing the sky. She heard his footsteps and when he tumbled into the kitchen, his face tight with fear, she was laughing out loud. She was standing in the middle of the floor in her nightgown, her hand on her belly. She reached for his hand and put it there, there on the side, where life was kicking. He kept his hand there, staring at her in wonder.

  THE FOLLOWING SPRING, after the baby was born, a beautiful sunny girl named Elaine, Isabelle began taking driving lessons. She hadn’t been anxious about being a passenger in a car for a long time, but driving had been a hurdle she hadn’t mastered yet. “Are you sure?” Frank said. “We have plenty of money for cabs, and most ever
ything’s walkable, anyway.” Isabelle kept thinking of her baby, of what might happen if she needed to be the one driving Elaine to something. To a doctor or a playdate. You couldn’t spend your life being afraid. “I’ll teach you,” Frank offered, but Isabelle wanted someone neutral.

  Every Tuesday and Thursday, a man named Ramon drove up and took her out. She was sick to her stomach for hours before he showed up, alarming Frank so much he begged her to reconsider. As soon as she sat in the driver’s seat, she broke out into a cold sweat. She gripped the wheel so tightly, her knuckles turned pale. “Relax,” said Ramon. He was wearing dark glasses and there was music in the car. “I haven’t lost a driver yet.”

  He had a lot of crazy ideas. “Hit the break like a sponge,” he told her. He also told her to think of a spot ahead of her that was drawing her forward. She felt as if the world had narrowed, as if there wasn’t enough space for her to drive through. Hunching her shoulders, she struggled to breathe, and then panicking, she stopped and rested her head on the wheel. “Maybe some people aren’t meant to drive,” she said.

  “What? Are you crazy? Who told you such a ridiculous thing? You drive like a pro. When you want to get your license?”

  When she told him why she had stopped driving, he didn’t say anything. He studied her for a minute, tapping one hand against the wheel. “I taught a man to drive who had run over his baby daughter in the driveway,” he said quietly. “He hadn’t been looking. I taught a woman to drive again after she had been in an accident with her fiancé and he had died and she had survived. Drunken driver.” He looked at her. “People who are frightened, who don’t know where they’re going,” he said. “They’re my best students.”

  Isabelle put her hands on the wheel and sat up straighter. “I don’t want to be frightened anymore,” she told him, “and I want to know where I’m going,” and then she stepped gently on the gas.

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWO WEEKS BEFORE his thirtieth birthday, Sam Nash was getting ready to make the four-hour drive from Boston to upstate New York to see Isabelle for the first time in nearly twenty years. Everything was set. Another obstetrician was going to be on call for his patients, though if any of them had been due for delivery, he wouldn’t have even thought of going.

  “I’ll be back in a few days,” he told Lisa, the woman he loved. Lisa was already dressed in the extra pair of hospital scrubs she kept at his place, on her way to do a morning gall bladder surgery, but she lingered at the door with him. “I’ll leave the cell on all the time,” he said. She nodded.

  “It’s good you’re doing this,” she said.

  “Are you still mad at me?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “A little.” She lifted up a brown paper sack. “Lunch,” she said, and when he stepped toward her, she pushed him away. “This doesn’t mean I’m not still mad,” she said. “I’m just giving you lunch out of your own refrigerator.” He took it, grateful, and she gave him a quick kiss that tasted like strawberry jam.

  He watched her through the rearview mirror. She stood on the front porch, waving at him, while he drove away. He knew her. She wouldn’t go inside until his car disappeared from her sight.

  The whole first half hour of his drive, Sam’s head swam and he felt as if he had swallowed stones, which were now a sour lump in his stomach. He wasn’t even gone, and already he missed Lisa. He pulled down the sun visor. There, clipped inside, was his favorite photograph of her. She was drowsy, smiling, totally herself. He touched it, tracing her face, and then put the visor back up.

  They had argued the night before. Lisa was on call and had to rush to the hospital to look at a patient with bleeding ulcers, but she couldn’t find a clean shirt in the closet. “God, if all my clothes were here, I wouldn’t have to go through this circus every time,” she said, and then she grew silent again. She finally pulled on a blue T-shirt of Sam’s and then pulled the V-neck top of her scrubs over it. “There, you look pretty,” Sam said, but Lisa, frowning, wouldn’t look at him.

  She buttoned her coat and tied her shoes, snapping the laces. She finally turned back to him. “What are we doing?” she said quietly. “What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Really?” She lifted the newspapers from the couch. “Real estate section’s right here. You want to look? Here’s a three bedroom. Here’s a whole house. Belmont. Newton. Waltham. Back Bay. Anywhere we want.” She waited one beat, and then two, and when Sam didn’t move, when he stayed there, paralyzed, she flung the paper back down on the floor. “I rest my case,” she said.

  Lisa turned away from him, shaking her head, refusing to meet his eyes. “I have to be at the hospital,” she said curtly, reaching for the front door. She turned to look at him, her gaze hard. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t love you,” she said. After she left, he sat on the porch with his head in his hands; and when she finally came back, two hours later, she just shook her head at him.

  Sam turned onto the highway, merging into the left lane. What was he doing? He’d been with Lisa for five years. “Imagine us together for that long!” he exulted to her once.

  “Imagine us married,” she said wistfully, and then she stroked his arm. “I know this is hard for you,” she said.

  He brought Lisa flowers every week, jonquils, her favorites. He brought her funny little presents that he thought she might love, tucking them into places where he knew she’d find them. A wedge of smoked Gouda cheese. A piece of imported chocolate with orange cream inside. He called her four times a day, and every time she opened a present from him and he saw her face, bright and expectant with hope, he felt a line of guilt. “Are you happy?” he asked, and when she paused before answering, he shivered. “Of course I am,” she said. They were still good together, he told himself. He just wanted more time. He wanted her to be sure she wasn’t making a mistake with him.

  Lisa sometimes chided him for being at the hospital too much, for getting up out of bed too many times to tend to other women, even if it was just to talk to one of his patients over the phone and soothe her because she hadn’t gone into labor yet. “But that’s what you yourself would want in a doctor!” he insisted.

  “From my doctor, not from my boyfriend,” said Lisa, rolling over. “I want you to tend to me, too,” she said, and then she pulled the covers over her head so all that showed were the points on her dark hair.

  Sam turned onto an exit ramp and was trapped in traffic. Summer was probably the worst time to travel anywhere, but there was no right time if you were a doctor. Sam had checked all his patients before he left. He knew their due dates as well as his own birthday, and he told himself that if he needed to, he could get back here in time for a delivery.

  It was the end of June, and Sam rolled the windows down, resting his arm on the top of the door. There it was. After all these years, it still surprised him. His scar, a jagged line of silver all the way up his arm. For years he had worn long sleeves even in the hottest weather because he didn’t want people asking him why his arm was so chewed up. He didn’t like feeling that people were staring at him.

  A car honked and Sam merged into another lane. He and Lisa would go together to the Cape in another month, at the height of the season. They’d slather on sun block and swim in the ocean and eat enough fresh seafood to grow gills. They’d stay with his father and his girlfriend, Lucy, who would be insulted if they even thought of a hotel.

  Sam opened up the thermos and took a swig of the coffee. It was sweet and black, the way he loved it. He opened the lunch Lisa had packed and took a bite. Spicy chicken, arugula, and peppers, on a seeded roll. A wake-up sandwich, Lisa would call it.

  Lisa. The night he met her, it was three in the morning.

  He’d just lost a patient, one of his favorites, a bright, cheerful forty-year-old woman named Eleanor who had gone into cardiac arrest just as she delivered her first baby, and though he had tried his best to save her, she hadn’t lived long enough to hold her own child.

  Sam had
sat with the stunned father until relatives appeared, and then he had gone to the cafeteria, sitting in the bright, florid lights. He felt like hell. He kept thinking he’d go back upstairs, make sure the father was okay. He’d make sure the baby was all right. Eleanor probably would have said, Well, at least I got to be pregnant. At least I got a chance to give birth. At least I got a chance to be this happy.

  She was probably in the morgue by now.

  He was draining his cup, the hospital coffee dark and sludgy from being in the pot too long, when a young doctor stumbled in. She wore a white coat over a turquoise dress, her short, dark hair matted. She looked as terrible as he knew he did. To his surprise, she sat right at his table and took some of his carton of milk for her coffee. “Don’t mind me, I’m having a nervous breakdown and can’t be trusted to sit by myself,” she said, swirling her spoon in her cup, making parabolas of milk.

  “My milk carton is your milk carton,” he said. It felt funny to hear his own voice after being silent for so long.

  “Okay if I stay?” she asked.

  He shrugged, because really, what did it matter? He could use the company, himself, especially from someone who wouldn’t take it personally if he didn’t want to talk.

  He glanced at the ID pinned to her lab coat. Lisa Jean Miller. He couldn’t remember seeing her around the hospital. She stirred more milk into her coffee and then told him that she was a gastroenterologist and she had just lost a patient. “Inoperable cancer. Stage four,” she said quietly.

  Sam stopped drinking his coffee. “Me, too,” he said and she started. “I lost a patient, I mean,” he told her.

  Sam had loved women in his life, but it had always been a cautious thing, like at the beach when he would splash water on his chest before he would dare to dunk in. But with Lisa, he fell in love instantly.

  They talked quietly in the cafeteria, about work and then about life. All around them, people kept coming and going like a tide. Lisa told Sam how she had been at Mass General only two years now, but she liked it fine. She loved the city and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. She was one of eight kids from a big Nebraskan family, the only girl, and her parents had been saving since she was a baby so she could go to college; she became the only one in the family who didn’t stay to farm. “My brothers all feel sorry for me,” she laughed. “They don’t understand how I could be happy living in a city.”