by Ann Hood
Still, she said to Brooke, “He won’t. When he sees your baby, everything will change.”
“I want this more than anything,” Brooke said. “I want a baby.” She did not hide her crying. She cried hard and openly.
“There is a red thread connecting you to the child you were meant to have,” Maya said.
“Do you believe that?” Brooke said. “Really?”
Maya wanted to tell her that she believed it so strongly she sometimes thought she saw them, those thin red threads zigzagging the sky, tethering babies to their mothers.
But she said, simply, “I do.”
Brooke wiped at her cheeks with the backs of her hands, and nodded. “Thank you.”
When Brooke left, Maya turned on her computer and typed in: University of California, Santa Barbara. She clicked until Adam’s name and office phone number appeared on the screen. Without pausing—because if she paused she would not do it—she dialed the number.
The phone rang three times. Maya counted each ring like it was a heartbeat. Then an answering machine picked up.
“Hello, you have reached Dr. Adam Xavier. Please leave a message at the sound of the beep.”
Adam’s voice. It sounded so strong, so unlike the broken one that had called her name as she drove away from him.
The beep ended.
Maya swallowed hard, then said, “Adam. It’s Maya. I was hoping we could talk?”
She started to hang up, but then realized she hadn’t left her phone number.
Quickly, she said it. “Thanks,” she added.
Her computer showed she had twenty-seven new messages. But Maya stood, put on her jacket, and walked out of the office. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. Eight-thirty in California. Of course Adam wasn’t at work yet. Maya could not sit in her office and wait for a call that might never come.
The sun was bright, but there was fall in the air. Maya buttoned her jacket as if she were going somewhere. But she stayed still, digging her toes into the bottoms of her shoes, trying to root herself. She tilted her face upward, waiting.
8
The Families
SUSANNAH
Susannah held up the pink baby blanket for Carter to see.
“Feel how soft it is,” she said. “And washable.” The blanket made her almost giddy. “I might add little rosettes,” she said. “Scatter them around. White ones, I think.”
Carter was looking at her, not the blanket.
“What?” she said.
But he just shook his head. He was in the living room, on the sofa that faced the window that looked out at the ocean. When they’d first bought this house, it had been full of small square windows. The first thing they’d done was to put in large ones, so that when they entered a room, the view assaulted them.
Susannah didn’t like to think of back then, when they’d moved here and she was newly pregnant and hopeful. She had imagined many children, filling the house with them. She had imagined walking across the street, pails and shovels swinging, the air thick with salt, sticky hands in her smooth ones.
She laid the blanket beside Carter, hoping he would touch it. Of course he wouldn’t marvel at the evenness of her gauge, the neat regularity of her stitches. But couldn’t he see that she had knit this for a new baby? That Susannah finally, after six years, felt something like joy creeping into their lives?
“Carter?” she said.
He pointed toward the ocean. “I think a storm’s coming,” he said.
Gray clouds huddled in the distance. She studied them briefly, then studied her husband’s face. She used to think it was the kindest face she’d known. But now Susannah couldn’t even recall the last time she had really looked at him. His hair was thinning, she realized. And he had a sunburn on his nose and cheeks. Cautiously, she traced a line from his temple to his chin. He looked at her, surprised.
“Is she asleep?” Susannah whispered.
Carter nodded.
Years ago, before Clara was born, they would stop the car on long drives just to make love. They would huddle in the backseat, his long legs stretched out and Susannah sitting on top of him. They would even slip into restaurant bathrooms, as if they could not wait to finish their dinner, their need for each other was that great.
But now, as Susannah unbuttoned her white shirt, she could not even remember the last time. It had been so long ago that it had disappeared from her memory. Usually, Carter was late from work, or trying unsuccessfully to get Clara to sleep. Usually, Susannah wanted instead to be alone, to knit, to pretend that she was living the life she’d imagined.
Tonight, though, her body trembled with wanting him. She didn’t even care that he sat, watching her but not reaching for her. She slipped off her shirt and unhooked her bra and heard his small gasp at the sight of her breasts. Then it was almost like before, how he grabbed her. How he yanked her zipper down and pulled off her jeans. How he brought her onto his lap, frantic.
Outside, the storm arrived. It was a magnificent one, with sharp, bright lightning and rolling thunder. When the rain started, it hit the windows like bullets. Somehow the storm added to Susannah’s excitement, and when she came it was as if she was swept away in all that wind and rain.
“Whoa,” Carter said when it was over. “What got into you?” He grinned at her and held her shoulders so that she wouldn’t leave his lap.
But Susannah didn’t answer him. Her desire had turned into something else, a dark, creeping sense of dread.
“Not that I’m complaining,” he said, and Susannah remembered now how chatty he always got after sex. “It’s been too long,” he said. “Since what? Christmas?”
Susannah wanted to say something, but if she said it out loud it might make it true, so she just sat, feeling him growing softer inside her.
“Or maybe even longer,” Carter was saying.
The baby blanket had fallen into a pink heap on the floor. Susannah wanted to pick it up, but Carter held her in place. She began doing the math. She counted backwards and, afraid of where she landed, counted again. Carter kept talking about things that didn’t matter and Susannah kept counting backwards until finally she knew that no matter how many times she did it she would land in the same place. Her last period was exactly two weeks ago. Unlike all the other women at that brunch, the one who couldn’t carry a baby and the one who couldn’t get pregnant for some mysterious reason and the one who had scarred fallopian tubes, Susannah could get pregnant. She just didn’t want to.
“Mama?” Clara’s voice cut through the air.
Susannah saw her daughter standing in the doorway, her hair tangled, the front of her nightgown caught in her pull-up, the shadows of headlights passing on the beach road crossing her face.
“Why are you on Daddy’s lap?” Clara said.
Carter chuckled. “Why are you on Daddy’s lap?” he whispered.
Susannah’s stomach churned. “What are you doing out of bed?” she asked.
“The thunder,” Clara said. “It scared me. Is it angels bowling, Mama?”
“Yes,” Susannah said, sighing. “It’s angels.”
Susannah moved, but Carter whispered, “Stay. It has been so long since I have had you like this.”
She didn’t stay. Instead, she stood and wiggled back into her jeans. In the rain-soaked light, Clara’s face seemed almost serene as she watched her mother move toward her.
“I’ll do it,” Carter said.
“No,” Susannah told him.
She remembered how the night she got pregnant with Clara she had actually felt the moment of conception. A strange fluttering like the way her stomach felt just before a roller-coaster took a plunge. Carter had laughed at her when she’d told him. But Susannah had been certain. She’d placed her hand on her stomach as if to let her baby know she was there. “You wait,” she’d told him. “We are pregnant.”
Now, as she moved toward that child, her stomach did that same flutter. Tears sprang to her eyes. She could not have another Clara.
If this made her a bad person, a terrible mother, then that was what she was. The faded memory of her own mother gripped her. Before her mother got sick, she had been Susannah’s constant companion, knitting clothes for her dolls and teaching her to sail and ice-skate. All these years later, Susannah could easily picture her mother spinning on the ice, her white skates and pale blue coat a blur. Or at the tiller of their Catalina, the wind blowing her straw-colored hair in her face, the tip of her nose pink from sun.
Susannah took Clara’s hand and held on tight.
“Ouch!” Clara said, yanking free.
Clara stamped her foot and howled, all remnants of serenity gone. When Susannah told her to stop, Clara stamped her foot again, hard enough to make the floor shake, then ran down the hall.
Susannah watched her go. She knew she should run after her. She knew all of the steps it would take to get her daughter back to bed. But she stood, her hand on her stomach, this time trying to stop the fluttering there. Thousands of miles away, she thought, there was a baby for her. Maybe that baby was already born. Maybe she was right now sleeping peacefully in a crib, her whole bright future waiting for her.
“Susannah?” Carter was saying. “Get her. You know she could hurt herself. Susannah!”
She heard him zipping his pants, getting to his feet.
“Jesus,” he muttered. As he passed her, he glared.
“Carter,” Susannah said softly.
He was already halfway down the hall, but he spun around to face her.
“We didn’t use anything,” she said.
He frowned.
Behind him, in Clara’s room, drawers slammed to the floor and trinkets and toys smashed.
“What if I’m pregnant?” she said, the words large and unwieldy in her mouth.
Hadn’t the doctor told them the chances of another child with Fragile X were high?
“I don’t have time for your histrionics,” he said, waving her off.
Quickly, he padded down the hall. “I’m coming, Clara!” he called.
At the sound of his voice, the noises grew louder.
Carter’s voice, calm and certain, filled the air.
Eventually, Susannah knew, Clara’s screaming would turn to whimpering and she would fall asleep with her head in her father’s lap.
Perhaps that flutter was only fear. Perhaps it was something like desire, like yearning. Susannah tried to picture China. But she only had some old movie images of pointed straw hats, bamboo baskets, streets crowded with bicycles. She would go to the library tomorrow and take out books. History and sociology. Cookbooks and economics. She would begin her preparations for that baby.
NELL
She was supposed to be reciting the conversation with the class.
“Hello. My name is Nell. How are you this morning? Bangkok is a beautiful city. I am honored to be here.”
Nell said the strange Thai words fluidly. But she could not stop thinking about kissing Theo. Years ago, when she was in high school, all of her friends had a crush on the lifeguard at the country club pool. He was a star swimmer at the public school, a rangy boy with a mop of golden curls and an upper lip set in a perpetual sneer. The boys they dated all went to the private boys’ school. At night, while their parents ate in the dining room, the boys stole gin from the country club bar and made too-strong gin and tonics on the beach. Nell and her friends met them there, drinking with them, and smoking pot, and sneaking behind dunes to kiss and fondle.
But one night—this was at the end of August—Nell took one of those pitchers of gin and tonics and brought it to that lifeguard who worked Friday nights in the kitchen. She stood by the screen door until he finally looked up from the stack of dirty dishes he was washing. Then she held up the pitcher and cocked her head. She wore her bikini top, a white macramé thing, and red shorts. He hesitated, but then he grinned at her, put the wet towel down, and slipped out the door.
They had been flirting all summer, of course. Everyone had flirted with him. But Nell wanted him. Bored with those same boys, their endless boasting, their cold, slippery tongues in her mouth and their hands grabbing at her, Nell wanted this boy. The one no one knew. The star swimmer from the public school. All of the girls whispered about him, things that made him seem even more mysterious and exotic. He had no father. Or his father was an electrician or a plumber or in jail. His mother was a waitress, or worse. That summer night, Nell could think of nothing more exciting.
“Waiter, I do not like my food too spicy,” Nell recited with the class. “Driver, please take me to the Peninsula Hotel.”
They drank that pitcher of gin and tonics that night, and she listened to him talk about swimming. Nell never could have imagined that there was that much to say about swimming, but he talked about speed and depth, the butterfly and the backstroke. She grew dizzy from his words and the gin and then finally, finally, his lips on hers. And then his hands untying her top and his mouth on her breasts. This was the summer before her senior year and she was still, technically, a virgin. That night, as soon as he untied that white bikini, she knew she would make love with the lifeguard, mostly because he was so different from all those other boys doing these very same things with her friends behind the dunes.
“Please make up my room now,” Nell recited. “Please bring me fresh towels.”
She heard that he made the Olympic swim team. She heard he went to Brown on a full scholarship. Even now, she felt a thrill remembering that night, how he tasted like chlorine, how he looked right at her when he entered her that first time.
Nell watched Theo slouched in front of the class. He was bored, she could see that. His hair needed cutting, he needed a shave. There was nothing desirable about him, and for that very reason she could only think about kissing him again.
“I am lost,” Nell recited, her voice clear and loud. “Could you please help me?”
The class tittered. The exercise had ended and she was the only one still reciting.
Theo grinned at her. “I would be happy to help you,” he said in rapid Thai. “Perhaps after class I could buy you a drink.”
Nell snuck a glance at the class. No one had understood him except her.
“I accept,” she said, happy to have studied so hard.
“I HAVE THE strangest feeling,” Nell told Theo that night in the bar. “I think my husband doesn’t want to adopt. I think he suggested it because he thought I wouldn’t actually do it. I’m not even sure he wants a baby at all.”
“How come?”
Nell rolled her eyes. “He wants to sail around the world.”
“Maybe he’ll take me with him,” Theo muttered.
“When this last round of drugs didn’t work, he almost seemed relieved. Our fertility specialist said it was time for in vitro and Benjamin said, ‘The buck stops here.’”
Theo laughed. “He actually said, ‘The buck stops here’?”
“Harry Truman said it—”
“I know Harry Truman said it. I’m not a total philistine.”
“Sorry,” Nell said. She patted his hand, then let hers rest on it. “I just didn’t think actual people said things like that,” Theo said.
“Is it just me,” Nell said, “or are you sitting there thinking about kissing me?”
“Oh, I’ve been thinking about that pretty much since last time,” he said.
“So?”
He laughed again. “So, you have a husband who wants to sail around the world, I have a wife who wants to save the world, you want to get in vitro, and I—”
“And you?”
He shook his head. “Sophie is always wanting to know what I’m thinking. Always. It’s like she wants a portal into my brain. But there are things I can’t tell her.”
Nell smiled. “Like how much you want to kiss me.”
Theo paused. “Yeah. Like that.”
Even later, when they were half drunk and making out in the rain on the sidewalk, Nell couldn’t help but think she had disappointed him somehow.
“How romantic is this?” she whispered to him.
The rain was light and warm, like movie set rain. His hands slipped into her shirt, unbuttoning just enough for him to move them over her breasts, dip inside her bra. Somehow, she wanted to shake that feeling that she’d let him down.
“Let’s get a hotel,” she whispered. “On me.”
His hands paused.
“What day can you do it?” she asked him.
Now his hands slid up and down her ribs, across her flat stomach.
“You remind me so much of someone,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“My big love. The one who got away.”
Was that his secret? That he still loved someone else? Nell thought of his wife. Chubby and bland and kind-faced.
“What day?” she whispered. She slid her own hand down until she found him, hard.
“Friday.”
“Friday,” Nell said.
Later, in her king-size bed with the Frette sheets and her husband asleep beside her, Nell tasted, ever so slightly, chlorine.
EMILY
Emily tried. She took Chloe for ice cream sundaes and long walks around the pond. She remembered her friends’ names, that Courtney played tennis and Cate rode horses. She even remembered the names of her teachers and the quirks they had. “Does Mrs. Jellison still have those creepy fingernails?” she’d ask Chloe. “Did Mr. Frank get in trouble for swearing so much?”
She tried. But still Chloe stood mostly with her skinny arms wrapped around her chest like she was freezing. Still she slunk into corners to call her mother and report on everything Emily doesn’t do or doesn’t remember. Emily would hear the girl whispering and she would look out the window onto her beautiful garden and think of Providence.
In her apartment, all of the windows had looked out onto other houses. Except the bedroom window that faced the street. Her cat slept on the windowsill. Joni Mitchell sang all day from the stereo. And Emily was happy. No skinny kid whispered about how tight Emily’s pants were or how late she slept or any of it.
