by Karen Raney
Enough! I should not be watching this. I should turn it off, refuse to look. But I was hungry for more. In front of me the image was changing again and all I wanted was to see what came next.
Marks appeared and began to circle the blankness in search of a worthwhile form. Slowly, sleepily, then faster and with greater purpose, the marks flew to their places, joining into lines and shadows, while the edges bulged to make way for a new kind of head. I caught my breath. I knew by heart those slits of eyes and that particular toothless laugh. “Was that really me?” Maddy would say, holding the old photograph like a holy relic in her hand. “I know it’s me, but deep down I can’t believe it.”
Clearly she had used her own baby pictures for the drawings. But the more I stared, the less it looked like Maddy at any age. I had never seen a face like it. It was a child given over to a kind of laughter no child should know about, triumphant and without hope and indifferent to anything but its own release. While I had been downstairs loading the dishwasher, taking out the trash, assembling trays of crackers and soup that she would thank me for and leave untouched, she had been making this.
When Robin came home, I told him about my visitors and replayed the segment screened during the march. When the earth-head had been wiped clean of habitation, I pressed stop and closed the file.
“Whoa,” said Robin hoarsely. “I’d kind of forgotten what it was like.”
“Not easy to watch.”
“Great that she made it. That she could make something like that.”
“Should I let them use it?” I asked him.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Well, why would I?”
I didn’t show Robin the new ending. I copied the file to a memory stick and carried it around in my wallet. Whenever I had a private moment at work or at home, I watched the film, pausing the frames, speeding it up or slowing it down, and sometimes, with an image frozen on the screen, I would glance away and whip back to catch it unawares.
The defiant and despairing expressions were painful, the crumbling face filled me with horror, but at least I could understand them. I could not understand the laughing baby’s head. And what kept me awake was this: If Maddy had left the ending for me to find, we were in some kind of bizarre and exhilarating contact. If she had made it for herself and herself only, I was trampling on her private life in a way I’d vowed never to do.
27
Thanksgiving came and went unmarked, as it had the previous year. We postponed our family dinner, until the anniversary of Maddy’s death. That proved to be a mistake. I had not understood the strange power of calendar dates. The twenty-fifth of November rushed toward me like the edge of a cliff, and that morning the events were upon me as vividly as if they had just taken place.
As in those first terrible weeks, bed was a sanctuary and a trap. If I faced the wall, the frames of misery awaited me. If I faced the door, I could see people entering and leaving, in the weird light that precedes a storm, people who weren’t Maddy and never would be Maddy.
“Wouldn’t you feel better if you got up?” said Robin, stroking my forehead with one hand and my wrist with the other. “You don’t have to do anything. Just come downstairs. Watch TV or something?”
Go over there. By that cloud. I’ll swim to you.
“No, thanks.”
“Sure? We miss you.”
Close the curtains. Is it nighttime?
“Thanks, Robin. I’ll be okay.”
My father took my hand and held it, saying nothing.
He doesn’t know, Mom. I wanted him to love me.
My mother’s weight depressed the bed’s edge. “You won’t always feel this way, Eve. Believe me.”
I smiled for her.
Water, please.
My mother stroked my hair. “Beth and her kids stopped by. Everyone’s calling. Everyone’s thinking about you.”
“Tell them thank you. Tell them not today.”
She tiptoed out. I turned to the wall.
“Spare me.”
Spare me belief of any kind. In the unfathomable will, in appalling luck, in random error, in the life everlasting. Spare me belief that the complex universe can’t fit our simple ideas, that bad things happen to good people, that the journey is the destination, the true body awaits, the veil is thrust aside, the person slips into the next room. Spare me belief in the futility of belief.
Spare me the casually alive sons and daughters of my friends. Acquaintances who turn away in banks and aisles with relief in their eyes only I can see, that it happened to her and not me. Spare me the solidification of time. The slackness of the house when I want it to resist me in a way I never asked for and could not foresee. Spare me the tedious sounds I make, and the silence.
Spare me fluorescent glare and aquarial gloom. Plastic tubing, peel-apart packets, fluid-filled sacks, machines that click, hum, suck, or drip; anything pointed, jointed, tapered, or interlocking; anything rubber-soled, rubber-wheeled, padded, or palliative or sterile or collapsible or disposable with extreme caution. Above all, spare me that morning in November, when bearing my tray of dispensables I closed in on the bed, and Maddy rotated her fragile head, and the whites of her eyes said, Spare me.
PART III
Eve
28
During the long wait at Dulles, I asked Alison the standard questions and she answered in a reluctant monotone. She’d grown up in Baltimore, youngest of a family of three, her mother an elementary school teacher like mine. Her father owned a liquor store that went under when she was eleven.
“People in DC all come from somewhere else,” I said. “You and I are natives.”
“I come from Baltimore.”
“Close enough.”
She had been something of a prodigy in high school and won a scholarship to Mount Holyoke. Her interest in art came from “just looking at things.” When Alison was a junior in college, her father left the family for good, her mother moved to Detroit with another man, and Alison did not do as well as she’d hoped on her exams. Besides, there weren’t any jobs out there for art history majors.
“Half the waiters in the country are art history majors,” she informed me.
“I thought waiters were all actors.”
“Whatever.” She bit her nails and avoided my eyes. Maybe she felt exposed for having cut her hair and dressed up for the trip; her black jacket and white top looked brand-new. Maybe it was dawning on her that she was going to be stuck with me for a week in another time zone.
Once we were airborne, I said casually, “Alison, there’s another reason I’m going to London.”
“What.”
“To see Maddy’s father.”
“Oh?”
“She never met him. He left when I was pregnant.” I told her about finding their correspondence. I had been going through the letters again.
“Well, she had a stepfather, didn’t she?”
This was not the point, I felt.
Her next question was: “Why do you want to see him?”
“Curiosity?” It was a ridiculous word.
“I mean, if he didn’t stick around, he’s just some poor guy who plunged when he should have jerked—”
“Alison . . . !”
“Just saying. I have a dad. He doesn’t give two hoots about me.” She undid her seat belt and peeled a stick of gum, offering me one she knew I’d refuse. “I thought Robin was nice.”
“Do you have a boyfriend, Alison?”
“Hundreds.”
“Robin is nice,” I said, pleased for some reason that my partner passed muster.
Alison pulled the flight magazine from the seat pocket and lowered her head. “What does he think about you going to London?”
“Oh, he’s fine with it. Robin is very understanding.”
She looked up. “Doesn’t he mind you’re going to see your ex?”
“No, Alison,” I said patiently. “You’ve got the wrong idea. I’m not going to London to get together with An
tonio.”
“Well, what are you going for?”
I thought for a moment. “To punish him.” Saying it felt daring and a little glamorous.
She gave me a long narrow look. “Wow,” she said, flipping her pages rapidly. “You’ve got yourself one tolerant guy.”
I flagged down the flight attendant. Tipping the miniature bottle of wine into the flimsy cup, I had to admit that the sense of purpose I’d been enjoying, landing this study trip and taking Alison with me, was starting to drain away. I put my head back and concentrated on the deep vibration of the plane and the sense that all accountability was, for a short while, suspended. I did not want to land. The further away, the more bearable the world became. Things acquired a pattern from the air that they did not have on the ground. I hardly thought of Antonio. He was in cold suspension somewhere, to be taken out and thawed at the last minute.
When we descended to Heathrow, fires were blazing just beyond the curvature of the earth. What lay underneath was blurred in places by hanging nets of cloud. Eventually the dotted lines of London pierced the cloud for good. My heart quickened at the thought of arriving. Life, after all, cannot be lived at forty thousand feet. If I could not get off the planet, at least I was moving toward Maddy rather than away from her. Alison was silent, her forehead pressed to the window, absorbed in the sight. The city turned below, as if on a slowly spinning plate, and I saw that the lines of light were more crooked than the ones I had left behind, and uneven shapes of darkness lay between them.
29
I love having a boyfriend, but it’s kind of strange. Boys are different from girls that’s for sure! Sometimes I’m not sure what he wants or even what I want. Is it that way with everyone, the first time? Jack is always good to me! He is an incredibly nice person and a loyal person. I can’t imagine him doing anything unkind. Ever. That is maybe almost a character fault! Just kidding. He thinks about things a lot and then decides what he’s going to do. Some people just do what they want in the moment. My friend Vicky is like that, so I know. But she’s very popular, everyone wants to be around her. Jack is more of a loner. Well, maybe we both are in a funny way. Maybe that’s why we’re together. What about you? Are you a loner?
As a meeting place I proposed the PizzaExpress on a quiet corner behind the British Museum. I’d stumbled across it on my first day of interviews. I did not want to be on Antonio’s territory when we met. Nor did I want to aim too high in terms of venue. The arched windows and white and green tiles gave it the air of an upmarket restaurant in which decent wine would be served; nevertheless, it was still a pizza place.
I arrived early and found a table in the far corner with a view of the door. Walls were reassuring; corners were better. I shared mine with a metal plaque and a small stained glass window that had no light behind it. Above me hung a cluster of milk bottles made into a lamp. A waiter in a striped shirt and paper hat brought me a glass of wine. I studied the plaque. The building had once been the Dairy Supply Company, bringing high-quality milk from the countryside to London.
At five-thirty on a Thursday, only three tables were occupied. I was thankful that it was not the kind of place frequented by teenage girls. There was a family with a baby and two men in suits, arguing. At the window sat a pair of retired compatriots of mine, judging from their large-framed glasses and sensible shoes, and the self-conscious way they glanced around. I had already observed two kinds of Americans in London. One believed they had a right to be there by virtue of their ability to pay for things; the other knew they didn’t belong, which gave them an endearing timidity. This couple and I were in the second category, although I was not merely a tourist. I had business in London; I was staying not in a hotel but in the home of a colleague. The father of my child lived here. The phrase had an antiquated ring to it: the father of my child.
Since Maddy died, I had become more timid in certain ways and more intrepid in others. There were times when I could not enter a room if more than two people were in it. There were times when the idea of answering the phone defeated me. And yet in my former life I would not have dared to make a trip like this, to take with me an eccentric stranger, and to wait by myself in a restaurant for the lover I had not seen in eighteen years.
Was it because nothing on earth mattered now, least of all what people thought of me? That was not strictly true. I had spent a long time at the mirror, preparing for Antonio. I’d arranged our meeting on a day when Alison was visiting her aunt in Norwich.
Against the Art Nouveau swirls painted on the windows, it was hard to spot the entrance of a particular individual while appearing not to be looking. People changed a lot in eighteen years. I had never been the kind of woman to dye my hair. I’d earned my threads of silver. I hoped Antonio had not married someone who went out of her way to hide her age.
The door opened. Two women deep in conversation made their way to a table by the window. My pulse slowly returned to normal. I had thought about this encounter for weeks. Dreamed it, planned it, refused to plan it, formulated sentences and facial expressions, mentally erased them, begun again.
To start: a dignified greeting between adults for whom bygones were bygones. Followed by: quiet appraisal. “I’m curious, Antonio . . . What was it about for you? What were you thinking?” My natural reticence, my skills in withholding and listening, would give him the chance to account for entering into a correspondence with Maddy behind my back, before I had to divulge anything myself. I would listen graciously as he spoke of his wife and children. Then I would tell him. My rehearsals never got past that point. Obviously it was better to inform him in person than any other way. That’s what I had decided, and there was no going back on it now.
“Never?” I said. “You never, ever want to have a child?”
He paused long enough to tell me what I needed to know.
“What you mean is, you don’t want to have one with me.”
My triumph had been raising her on my own. After turning us down in favor of his own plans and interests, or what he took them to be, Antonio had burrowed back into our lives just when we were at our most defenseless. He was lucky I wanted to see him at all.
To keep my eyes from the door, I read the plaque again, concentrating on details I’d missed the first time. The squalid conditions in which urban cattle were kept. The unhealthy character of London milk. The cow with the iron tail—
He was beside me. He had slipped in. There he stood, blocking the light and taking up all the air, his face a compelling variant of the one I had known so well. His hair was shorter and more barbered, the reddish brown sparked now with gray. His eyes sat more deeply in his head and were ringed with fine tucks and creases. I could not speak. The presence of this living, latter-day Antonio was wondrous and unreal, like seeing photographs of my parents in their youth, only in reverse. The table was between us. I forced myself to stand. As I stood, dread rushed in and I felt like I was in one of those dreams where I had committed an appalling act that could not be undone.
You can’t give someone news like this in a pizza place!
Antonio moved toward me, extending his hands to take both of mine, a courtly gesture I remembered well. He lowered his gaze and raised it suddenly, a habit of Maddy’s, and smiled at me with her shy, generous smile. The shame of it flooded through me: that Maddy had not made it, that I had brought her into the world and failed to save her, that her father was here and I could not show her to him.
When he saw I was crying in earnest, Antonio waved away the approaching waiter and stopped short of touching my arm, smiling no longer, bewildered at this turn of events and uncertain if he had a right to comfort me when we had not even said hello.
“She’s gone.” I fumbled in my bag so I would not have to look at him. “Maddy died.”
• • •
I had never seen Antonio cry before, even in the stifled way he was doing now, clearing his throat and blinking it back, ashamed to let me see. The contortions rendered his face older and mor
e haggard, and at the same time as innocent as a boy’s.
“When, Eve?” he asked finally, fastening his eyes to mine. “What happened?”
He listened in silence while I told him about the year of Maddy’s illness. I hated to hear myself state the facts so coolly, one event leading to another, fixed irreversibly in place. When his eyes watered, he looked away.
“She never told me. She said you had a friend who had cancer. Why didn’t she tell me?”
I shrugged. “Why didn’t she tell me she had found you?”
“She stopped writing suddenly.”
“Was that in September? Over the summer things looked a little more hopeful. By September it had come back. They did the final scan and sent her home. She was very weak. We set up her bed in the dining room so she could be in the center of things.”
“I’m so sorry, Eve. I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it.”
By the door, the American man was holding his wife’s coat with home-on-the-range gallantry. I feared I would never see Antonio again, that this was all we would ever have. “This is strange!” I cried. “Isn’t this strange?”
Antonio hailed the waiter, who did not react to our swollen faces. We sat in silence until the bottle appeared along with a bowl of stuffed olives. Antonio poured out the glasses, released his long legs, and sat sideways, one hand on the chair back, the other doing finger exercises on the table.
“You’re thinner, Eve.”
“You’re the same, Antonio. Almost.”
“Am I?”
“I shaved my head when Maddy started chemo.”
“Your long hair . . .” he began, and did not finish.
“She made me grow mine back.”
“Oh, E-vie . . .” He separated the syllables of my name in the old way. That’s when I knew that intimacy cannot be undone.
“I wanted to tell you in person.”
“Yes.”
