Coming Back to Me

by Caroline Leavitt

  “Are you leaving the house the way it is?” Carl asked suddenly.

  “Pretty much—” Gary said.

  “Because the people who moved in across the street gutted a perfectly good house, changed it all around. The fumes were so terrible, Theresa was throwing up, I had headaches.”

  Theresa touched one hand to her head. “It took me months to feel better.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be doing anything with fumes.”

  Bill nodded. “There was construction going on for almost a year. You couldn’t park anyplace. You couldn’t breathe the air. The Dumpsters took up four parking places. Then as soon as the house was done, they sold it.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  “I never liked those people,” Emma interrupted. “They put on airs. And they never had curtains in their windows. And that music. Remember that music?”

  Belle rolled her eyes. “Big deal. Classical music.” She looked at Molly and mock whispered, “They were from New York.”

  “Don’t you be so fresh.” Emma said.

  The talk wound down, the neighbors became silent. “Well, we’d better be going,” Gary said finally. None of the other neighbors made a move to leave. Theresa stretched out her legs and scratched at her knee. Carl lit a fresh cigarette and handed one to Bill. “Nice to meet you!” Belle called. As Gary and Molly were leaving, she fanned her fingers in a good-bye wave, five, four, three, two, one, closed fist.

  They had called Lisa once or twice to invite her to dinner, but each time she had always called back to cancel. “Work. You know how it is.” She hung up without asking for their number and the next time he spotted her, on her way to the train, swinging a black leather briefcase, she waved vigorously with her free hand, but didn’t stop. “I’m late!” she mouthed.

  Gary and Molly painted the inside of the house a soft clear white. They polished the light fixture back to the original brass and took up the carpeting and the paneling. He had spent most of his life living in apartments, and it surprised him how different a house could feel, and how much he loved it. He and Molly sat out on the back porch and had breakfast. She looked so content and lovely that they both began to take their time getting to work, and Molly was late so often that the principal had called her into the office to reprimand her. Evenings, Gary couldn’t wait to get home. She met him at the train station sometimes so they could walk home together, a bouquet of dandelions in her hand for him. And when she didn’t get to the train, she was always waiting on the front porch, sitting alone, sometimes with a pint of ice cream with two spoons crisscrossed in the center.

  They both kept trying to be friendly. Every time they encountered a neighbor, they tried to make small talk, to offer an invitation, and every time it was refused. Gary told himself it didn’t mean anything, it was just a kind of shell they had to penetrate. Gary even brought home some of the kids books he had done, handing them out one evening to Bill and Carl. “For your grandkids,” Gary said. Carl flipped the book over and over in his hands, frowning, as if he didn’t know what to make of it, before grudgingly accepting.

  The neighbors might have seemed disinterested, but Gary couldn’t help noticing that every time he and Molly walked outside, a curtain would move. Every time he came home and grabbed a kiss from Molly or swept her hair from her face, a group of women down the street would go silent, considering them.

  One afternoon, Gary had left the front door open to get something out of the trunk of the car, which was parked out front, and when he came back inside, he found Carl in the living room, looking around, scanning the walls, picking up a glass bowl on an end table and calmly studying it. “Something I can do for you?” Gary said, astonished.

  “Just wanted to see how you changed things.” Carl craned his neck, staring at the ceiling. “You put in new drywall?”

  Gary tried to be polite. He let Carl examine the kitchen and the living room. He didn’t say anything when Carl turned the new kitchen faucet on and off. “Cheaply made,” Carl said. He tapped the cabinets. “You changed the knobs, too, I see.”

  Carl wound his way to the front of the house, rolling his palm thoughtfully on the wooden banister, staring critically at the bookshelves, at the bare wood floors. “Wood floors can be cold. We like to carpet.”

  “I like the wood.”

  “Well, you can always carpet later.” Carl squinted up at the moldings on the ceiling. “You’ve done all you’re going to do with this house?”

  “Well, we might do a little more,” Gary said. “You know, cosmetic stuff.”

  They were at the front door when Carl suddenly seemed to notice Gary’s front windows. “Is something wrong?” Gary asked.

  “You’re not putting up any Halloween lights?”

  Gary tried to be tactful. “I suppose if we had nieces or nephews or kids, we would.”

  Carl blinked at him. “What do kids have to do with it? It’s decorations. It’s beautifying. Used to be the whole neighborhood was blazing. Every holiday, too. Prettiest thing you ever saw in your life.” He shook his head angrily, as if Gary had insulted him.

  Gary let Carl out, but after that things seemed to change. Carl never seemed to forgive them. He began to find more and more wrong with everything they were doing. When they sandblasted the blue paint from their brick house, Carl called the police complaining of toxic fumes. “It’s making Theresa ill,” he complained, though Molly had spotted Theresa in the backyard just that morning, hanging up her wet wash, humming something low and deep in her throat. When they put up a six-foot wood fence in the backyard, instead of a short, open wire one the way everyone else did, Carl called the housing inspector to demand a stop, and when that didn’t work, he tried to get a petition going in the neighborhood as a protest, sliding a scribbled list of names under Gary’s door one night. Gary stared at the names. Mrs. John Storelli. Stan Lorenzo. He didn’t recognize any of them. The fence stood, but for weeks afterward, they found tiny surprises on their porch. Cigarette butts when neither one of them smoked, candy wrappers, trash. And once, a small dead sparrow.

  When they passed Carl and Theresa on the street, Molly would always smile. Theresa wavered, looking unhappily from Gary to Molly. “Hi, Theresa,” Molly said, and then Carl began to whistle, something jangly and tuneless, and Theresa’s gaze shot down.

  “Theresa! Carl!” Gary called, but they kept walking, moving past them as if he and Molly were invisible.

  That winter, the neighborhood blazed with Christmas lights. It snowed so heavily, the cars were buried. People put on skis to walk down the street, if they walked at all. The whole neighborhood seemed to be in hibernation, and it was that winter that Molly became pregnant, that spring when she began to show, and the neighbors began to take new notice of her.

  In April, paper Easter bunnies and pastel eggs filled the windows, and the neighbors brought out brightly colored plastic lawn chairs and set them up near the sidewalks. Nights they would sit outside talking, sometimes having cups of lemonade or store-bought cake on paper plates, sometimes a radio playing beside them. A few kids ran around on the sidewalk, playing balls, shooting by on skateboards.

  One day, Molly was sitting with Gary on the small front porch, her belly little more than a speed bump. Four months pregnant with a little boy they wanted to call Otis, when Emma came outside. She stared at Molly, as if she were trying to figure something out. “Hi,” Molly said, the way she usually did, and this time Emma looked at her and then smiled. “It’s a kind of gift I have, or maybe it’s more like radar, but I can always tell. You’re having a baby, aren’t you?”

  Molly grinned happily, put one arm about Gary, and then nodded.

  “So you two are staying then?”

  “Staying? Of course we are,” Gary said.

  “The Riders didn’t stay. They gutted their whole house and redid it, but soon as their kid was old enough for kindergarten, they moved to Montclair. Same with the Morans. Only they went to Short Hills. Take my advice and don’t list
en when people tell you the schools here aren’t good. All of my kids went to these schools and turned out just fine. This is a good place to raise a kid, to build a family.”

  “Well, we want to,” Molly said.

  Emma nodded at Gary. She leaned on their gate and talked to them. She looked down at Molly’s belly. “You’re carrying so high, I bet it’s a girl. I’m almost never wrong.”

  “Boy according to the doctor.” Molly had a sonogram photo of the baby she carried in her wallet, a small white foot pointed upward, a tip of a nose, a presence.

  “Ha. Doctors don’t know everything,” Emma said. “They told me Belle was going to be a boy, too. Maybe it would have been better if she had been.”

  “Well, we have an extra bedroom, all painted pink, so if this one isn’t a girl, maybe the next one will be.” She laughed.

  “The next one!” Emma nodded at her, pleased. Emma was so friendly that when Theresa walked by, Emma flagged her over. She put one arm about Molly. “She’s having a little baby! Look at that sweet belly!”

  Theresa exchanged glances with Emma.

  “They’re staying,” Emma said.

  Theresa sat down on the porch, stretching out her legs. “I don’t think we’ve ever had the chance to really talk.”

  The neighborhood women never really became Gary and Molly’s friends. They never invited either one to their bridge games or to sit in the park or over for dinner. No one ever asked Molly or Gary what they did or what book they might be reading or what movie they had just seen. But the whole time Molly was pregnant, they warmed to her as best they could. When they saw her, they called advice. “Stay off your feet,” Emma told her. “Drink peppermint tea,” Theresa advised and came over with a blue pitcher full of it, so sugary sweet Molly felt light-headed. The women stroked her belly, they praised her weight gain, they noticed the slight swelling in her ankles. Theresa wanted to know what names they had picked out, and when Molly said Otis, after Gary’s favorite singer, Otis Redding, Theresa looked blank. “Well, isn’t that nice,” she said doubtfully. They were vociferous in their disapproval that Molly’s doctor was not only a woman, but that Molly called her by her first name, Karen, and worse, that Karen was at Mt. Sinai in Manhattan. “Manhattan, are you insane? Why do you have to go all that far away for?” Emma said.

  “No, no, it isn’t far. And she delivers almost all of her patients’ babies. Most of the other doctors have associates.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Emma said. “You change your mind, I have a good doctor for you, the same one my niece used. Dr. Howard Crabbe. I don’t know why you have to go all the way to New York when we have perfectly good doctors here.”

  The women never tired of talking to Molly about her pregnancy, although they never talked to Gary other than to warn him not to let Molly do too much. “She looks beautiful, your wife,” Theresa told Gary. “Look at that belly on her.” Her hands shaped form. The men wouldn’t let Molly carry a grocery bag if they saw her, but they ignored Gary, especially Carl, whose whistling grew louder and more insistent. Only Belle seemed somewhere in the middle. She began to hesitate when she saw Molly, to stare, but she never said anything at all, and in the end, she kept walking.

  Family, I have family, Gary exulted. He couldn’t stop touching Molly’s belly. At night, in bed, he lifted up her shirt and gave the baby advice.

  “Always expect the best,” he whispered. “Always try to be happy.”

  Molly threaded her hands through Gary’s hair. “You big fool,” she said affectionately.

  He took photo after photo of her, of the house, sending copies to Bob and Rayanna, to Allan. “Now you have to come visit us,” he wrote them. “We’ll be the ones with a backyard barbecue this year, with bottles boiling on the stove.” He kept a changing roster of her pictures up in his office, so all he had to do was look up and see her. His life seemed to shimmer in front of him, to sparkle.

  He kept buying things for the baby. Teddy bears in T-shirts, plastic rattles and trucks and a tiny leather jacket that was so absurdly expensive he had to check the price tag twice before splurging on it anyway. Suddenly it didn’t matter so much that the neighbors were still a little distant, that Carl’s only response to them was still a sullen whistling. He had Molly. He had the baby. Every time he watched her walk down the hallway, swaying a little with her new weight, he felt dizzy in his happiness. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, he couldn’t keep his hands from her belly, from her hair, from the arch of her back.

  But Molly suddenly began to worry.

  She was six months pregnant when he found her at the kitchen table staring at books with titles like Doctor, Is My Baby All Right? and When Things Go Wrong.

  “Molly, is this really necessary?”

  She looked up at him helplessly. “I know the amnio was fine,” she said. “And I know it’s probably just hormones, but I can’t help it.”

  “Molly, come on.” He lifted the books from her hands. He made her come with him and take a walk. She tried to act light about it, but he saw how she began to be more and more careful. At dinner that night, she pushed aside her chocolate cake without tasting it. “Caffeine,” she said wistfully. She rubbed at her temples. “Headache,” she said, and when he reached for the aspirin bottle, she shook her head.

  The next afternoon, he came home to find the counter was lined with vitamins, with teas with names like Babyease and Calciyummy and Pregnant Protection.

  At night he woke up to find her sitting up straight, her hands on her belly. “PROM,” she whispered to him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The umbilical chord rushing out of you. The baby gets damaged.”

  “Molly.”

  “Cystic fibrosis. It can happen during birth, if there isn’t enough oxygen.”

  “It’s not going to happen.”

  “What if it does?” She had a list of terrors. Failure to thrive. Choking. She had heard two pregnant women in Karen’s waiting room talking about a woman whose doctor had been on vacation and his associate doing the delivery had panicked during delivery and strangled the baby with the cord. “You can’t go on vacation,” Molly warned Karen. “You can’t even go away for a weekend.”

  Karen half smiled. “Does the dry cleaners count?”

  “Wear your beeper at all times.”

  Karen sighed. “Molly, you should just relax.”

  But the fear still lived in Molly, wild and restless, beating against her ribs. She kept a skittery list in her mind of all the things that could go wrong when she delivered. There would be a traffic jam in the tunnel. The car would break down, and she’d have to deliver it in a ditch and there wouldn’t be enough oxygen for the baby to survive. She made Gary take the car for a tune-up even though he had had it checked months back. She made him buy a beeper. She bought books on home delivery that she studied at night as if she were taking a test. She knew three different kinds of breathing and a few exercises for self-hypnosis to help her relax. She quizzed herself, she quizzed Gary. “How many seconds between breaths?” she asked him. She wanted to be prepared.

  “Everything is going to be fine,” he told Molly. He lifted the T-shirt she slept in and kissed her belly. He reminded her how well she ate, how she had given up sweets and fats and salt.

  “You haven’t even had a cold,” he reminded her.

  She loved teaching, but she began to be glad the school year was ending. The school threw her a baby shower, her class made her thirty different cards, most of them with crayon drawings of storks on them Come back, they all said. Come back to us next year.

  She stayed home, busying herself with projects. “The nesting instinct has kicked in big time,” she told Gary. She began fixing up the baby’s room, painting on a tiny border of zoo animals, hanging curtains. And then one day, he found her sitting on the front porch with Belle, and Belle was tying a blue rope bracelet about her wrist. “It’s for luck,” Molly said sheepishly. “Everyone at Belle’s school wears them.” She pulled
at the bracelet, she tightened the knot.

  In September, the week Molly was due, the neighborhood was celebrating the Feast of Saint Ann. “Grandmother of Jesus, patron saint of motherhood,” Emma explained to Gary. “The woman’s saint.” It was already four and growing dusky, and three different blocks were closed off to traffic. People were crowding the streets, sitting on curbs, standing on the sidewalks, filling the porches. Emma had two small TV trays set out on her porch filled with paper plates of zeppoles she kept urging on neighbors. “Saint Ann, Saint Ann, send me a man,” Emma crooned, handing a pastry to Gary. A small parade had already come by, ambling down the center of the road. Two dozen little girls in blue satin costumes were tossing batons and high-kicking their tiny white boots. A marching band was playing a horn-heavy, only slightly out-of-tune serenade. Six men boosted up a life-sized statue of Saint Ann, a pale, dark-haired woman, robed in blue, and pinned all over her robe, like exotic flowers, were dollar bills. Emma nudged Molly. “Go, put one on her. It’s good luck.”

  “I can hardly walk,” Molly said. She was wearing one of Gary’s -shirts over a black stretchy pair of pants. She fiddled with the brace Belle had given her. An old woman in a black coat, a black kerchief about her head, gave Molly a long, hard look, and then abruptly crossed herself, spitting noisily three times into the street. Shocked, Molly recoiled.

  “Oh, no, no, don’t look like that,” Emma said. “She’s keeping the Evil Eye away from you.”

  “Oh.” Molly looked uncomfortable. “The Evil Eye.”

  A woman with a newborn baby in a carrier strode by and waved at Molly. “Don’t worry, they do come out!” she called.