by Lisa Tucker
They never talked about their mother, not really. Up until Kyra was eleven or so, Amy would occasionally say, “We should save this for Mommy” when they found some treasure in the woods: a shiny rock, a perfect daisy, a snail or a butterfly. It ended one afternoon after Kyra yelled, “She’s never coming back!” and smashed something to the ground, she no longer remembered what. But inside Amy’s heart, it had not ended. This was what Kyra knew that no one else did.
As Kyra held her crying sister in her arms, she felt sad, but stronger, too. Her sister obviously needed her. When Amy had calmed down, Kyra thought how surprising it was that her sister seemed so perfect on the outside, yet on the inside she was as troubled as anyone, maybe even more troubled than most.
That thinking of Amy this way seemed oddly cheering to Kyra is probably forgivable. She was only a teenager. To the grown-up Kyra, that day would always be memorable not because she’d discovered that Amy had problems, but because she’d been there for her sister. She’d held her sister while she wept. And she’d told her sister the truth, though she didn’t know how true it was then—she couldn’t imagine the future without Amy in it.
FOUR
Sandra had put one of the senior nursing assistants in charge and left work only minutes after her son called with the news about Michael. Now she was in the car, stuck in traffic on 95, on the way to her former daughter-in-law’s house. She had time to think, but rather than think about what had happened, she found herself thinking about David, what he was like as a boy. What he was like before Courtney.
He’d always treated women well; in fact, he was the kind of boy who respected women more than men—at least more than the old-style, hide-your-feelings-type men he associated with his father. From the time he’d started dating at sixteen years old, he’d demonstrated an enormous amount of compassion: for the girls who cut themselves because their daddies didn’t love them, for the girls who refused to eat because they were desperate to be prettier, even for the girls whose mood swings included screaming at him for not doing something they were too unstable to know they wanted, much less ask for. Sandra watched as he took in these crazy girls the same way he took in stray kittens when he was little. Naturally, Sandra did not call David’s girlfriends crazy in her son’s presence. If anything, she talked herself out of her worries by finding the good in each of her son’s choices: Isabelle, the cutter, had such a lovely voice; Miranda, the anorexic, was very smart; Jill, the queen of mood swings, was trying so hard to be normal, you just had to admire her for that.
As David went through high school and college, Sandra wished he would meet a woman who would be easier for him, someone who could take care of him for a change. She also wished he would break up with the ones who weren’t easy. Instead, they left him when they tired of his steady reasonableness, his cheerful good nature, his inability to put an end to their fear of being rejected by giving them the criticisms they were always waiting for. He let them break his heart because he found the alternative unbearable.
“You are Prince Charming,” Sandra said, to cheer him up, but also because, in truth, he really was back then. He was sensitive, kind, tall, good-looking, and intelligent—so much better in every way, Sandra thought, than herself or her ex-husband. Admittedly, Sandra had a few issues of her own in the self-esteem department. Though she rarely let herself think about it, deep down, she knew that David’s unusual ability to take care of screwed-up women was, shall we say, at least partially homegrown.
Courtney was the one who stayed long enough for him to marry. It was her idea, to get married right out of college, but David was excited, too. He loved Courtney, and he really loved the idea of having a proper family. He dreamed of having two or three children who would be sheltered by a picket fence and happy parents. No apartment for his kids. No divorced father who could barely be bothered to visit and refused to attend his own son’s wedding because “weddings are meaningless.”
Sandra remembered the first time she was afraid for her son. It was after the wedding, at the reception, when she went outside to sneak a smoke. Courtney was out there, too, talking to one of the guys from the caterers. The guy was decent-looking, but what was Courtney doing laughing and chatting out here? Was it possible that she was flirting with another guy on her wedding day? Sandra stomped out her cigarette and threw the butt in the trash. When she went back in, she saw David dancing with Courtney’s ancient grandmother. He was smiling and guiding her safely around the floor in the gentlest, most unobtrusive way possible. When he glanced at Sandra, she smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.
They didn’t have a honeymoon because David had to settle into New Haven. Graduate school was starting in less than a week. He’d gotten a fellowship to study history; he was planning to get a PhD and become a professor. He was extremely dedicated to his work, while Courtney was . . . not. She was planning to use the next few months discovering what she wanted to do with her life. As if the expensive college paid for by her parents hadn’t already given her four years to do this “discovering.” David, on the other hand, was a scholarship student. He’d gone to college entirely on his own merits because his father wouldn’t pay and Sandra had never made enough to save for college. She’d been lucky to support herself and David on her salary as a geriatric nurse.
Courtney’s discovery process ended only six weeks later, when she turned up pregnant. David admitted that she’d told him she was using the pill. “So she lied to you, honey?” Sandra whispered into the phone, though she instantly regretted saying this. Courtney was not about to get an abortion. David was not about to divorce her. What was done was done. Why add trouble to what was already going to be big trouble for her boy?
“I think she just made a mistake,” David said. “You know she’s not that great at remembering details.”
Courtney fancied herself a creative person, and really, she did have some ability as a writer. At least Sandra liked her poems well enough. One of them was read at the wedding, and it had a lot of comparisons: marriage is like two vines growing together, marriage is like the passenger seat joining with the driver’s seat of a car, marriage is like the financial merger of the moon with the sun. Some of it didn’t make sense to Sandra, but she figured it was her own fault. She’d finished her BS in nursing, but she’d never taken poetry. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d read a poem that wasn’t a haiku written on the side of a bus.
“Child care is full of details,” Sandra said to her son, tapping a pencil against her old kitchen table. “You have to remember to change their diapers, feed them, take them in for their vaccinations.”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” David said, in that tone that made it obvious he didn’t want to hear any more. He would never let Sandra criticize any of his girlfriends, and certainly not his wife. Though it sometimes frustrated her, Sandra admired this about him. She also liked that it went both ways. No one was allowed to criticize his mother, either.
But Courtney wasn’t fine, unfortunately. She got very sick in her first trimester, a relatively uncommon condition known as hyperemesis gravidarum. Sandra had seen women with hyperemesis: basically, they couldn’t stop throwing up, and it often meant going to the hospital for IV fluids. Now when David called his mother, he often sounded exhausted from taking Courtney to the hospital late at night and waking up at seven for his classes the next morning. He was taking three difficult seminars and he’d signed on to be a teaching assistant, to supplement his fellowship. He was also tutoring undergraduates. Whatever he could do to bring in the money they’d need when the baby came.
David was always extremely responsible. It was another difference between them. Courtney thought the world owed her an easy time of things. She railed against everything during her sickness: against their apartment, against their new town, even against David for getting her pregnant (no, the irony didn’t stop her).
Sandra went to visit them as often as she cou
ld. She wanted to help, even though it meant driving five hours to New Haven and sleeping on their uncomfortable IKEA couch. They had only one bedroom, but she told Courtney that if she moved her writing desk out of the bedroom and into the living room, there would be space for a little nursery. “You can put a crib right here,” Sandra said, standing between the two windows. “And a changing table under one window, and a little chest for the baby’s things under the other.”
“And just how am I supposed to write in there?” Courtney said. She’d already thrown up a dozen or more times that day. Sandra was trying to remember to feel sorry for her.
The truth was that she most likely wouldn’t be writing, at least not for the rest of her pregnancy and the first few months of child care. But Sandra said, “As long as the TV isn’t on, what’s the difference? Neither one of you ever turns it on, do you?”
When Courtney frowned, Sandra thought she looked a little like that other Courtney, the one who was on the new TV show Friends. Like the TV girl, her daughter-in-law had an oval face, bright blue eyes, great skin, and near perfect features, but she also had thick red hair, which Sandra thought made her even prettier than the other Courtney. Sandra might have mentioned the resemblance if she wasn’t sure her daughter-in-law had never watched that show. She knew they never turned on the TV, because she kept wishing they would. It might be something she and Courtney could do together. David was in his carrel at the library, working on a paper that was due on Monday.
“Writing requires inspiration,” Courtney said. “You can’t just do it anywhere like other jobs.”
Sandra gave up, but four or five visits later (she lost count, she was up there so often), she found the desk had been moved into the living room. That weekend, she took Courtney to Toys “R” Us to help her pick out a crib. They also got a changing table with pullout wire shelves, because it was on sale. David was working again, tutoring a rich boy whose father paid him a hundred dollars an hour to help his kid write papers for history and English. Courtney complained about being alone so much, but really, David had no choice in the matter.
Sandra hoped all her visits would help Courtney feel less lonely. She and her daughter-in-law were definitely getting closer; at least Courtney seemed to be opening up more. It was a few visits later; they were sitting at a vegetarian restaurant, when out of the blue, Courtney said, “Did you ever feel like you didn’t want your baby?”
Sandra was tired; she wished she could have a good steak. David was off running a review session for the class he was a TA for: “American History after World War II.” He was excited because they were covering the sixties, one of his favorite decades, historically speaking. Sandra was a teenager in the sixties, but she didn’t find that time exciting. If anything, she thought of it as one death after another: from JFK to Martin and Bobby. She’d kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the assassinations and the riots and the war and the kids who were killed at Kent State. Her mother used to call her morbid, but her son thought she’d been a budding historian herself. Maybe so, but she’d never considered being anything but a nurse. She chose geriatric nursing because she loved taking care of old people. Even when she was very young, just getting started, she saw no real difference between the oldest patients—the ones stuck in wheelchairs, the ones who couldn’t leave their beds—and herself. They were all just human beings with dreams and desires and pains and embarrassments. Plus, she didn’t mind the bedpans and “old smells” that turned off many nursing students. Sure, it wasn’t always pleasant, but it was a good day’s work. It made her feel needed, which Sandra thought she couldn’t live without. For her, it was the same feeling she had taking care of her baby.
But had she ever felt like she didn’t want her son? Courtney’s question unnerved her. The girl was six and a half months pregnant; it was far too late to get an abortion. Why was she asking this, when Sandra had just spent the day cheering her up? She’d taken Courtney for a manicure and a haircut, and helped her pick out three new maternity dresses. She was still too thin, still vomiting too often to really gain much, but the baby bulge had grown to the point that her jeans wouldn’t fit even if she left them unzipped. Now, wearing her green-flowered dress, with that red hair neatly falling at her shoulders, she looked even prettier than usual. But she was frowning and her eyes looked so sad.
“I don’t know,” Sandra tried. “I wanted to get pregnant, so it was different for me. I’d also been married for a few years.” What she didn’t say was that she’d wanted a baby because her husband was a salesman and never home. It was a stupid solution, when you got right down to it, but she was still young enough to think that all her marriage needed was a baby for her to play with. Then she wouldn’t be so desperate to see her husband that she was turning him off with her pleas and tears.
Courtney stood up and rushed in the direction of the bathroom. She’d only had a few sips of water and one bite of her quiche. Sandra thought about following her, holding her hair, but she was worried the waiter would think they’d left. And Courtney didn’t really want that from Sandra. She didn’t like to be mothered; she’d made it clear that she associated mothering with being controlled. Courtney’s own mother had bossed her around at the wedding. That was all Sandra knew about the woman, but it probably explained Courtney’s attitude.
Sandra spent five minutes or more looking around the restaurant. It was one of those places with stuff on every wall. Next to her was a dented oil can from the forties, and a large glass box with a dusty hat and chipped cane that looked like they were from another century. The place was packed with people. Her daughter-in-law had told her it was considered hip—or did she say cool? Whatever they called it now.
“Sometimes I hate this baby,” Courtney said, slumping back into her side of the booth. Her face was pale. Her hands were trembling.
“I think that’s normal with your condition,” Sandra said. She’d looked it up, and it was, actually. “Once the baby is born, you’ll feel—”
“Like I’m trapped with a screaming baby, in a town where I know no one, with a husband who doesn’t care.”
“David cares about you,” she said, maybe a bit too firmly. She wanted Courtney to feel she could talk to her, but there were limits. And David had been killing himself to provide for her and the baby. He also told her she was beautiful all the time; he brought her flowers he’d picked by the side of the road; he cooked dinner whenever he was home. What more could she want?
When Courtney grew silent, Sandra said, “I know you’re in a tough spot right now. What can I do to help?”
Courtney was twirling her straw in her water. She looked up and laughed, but it was a little bitter. “Let me go back in time to seven months ago?”
“I wish I could,” Sandra said. Truer words had never been spoken. She would have given pretty much anything to get these kids out of this situation. Maybe David was ready to be a father—Sandra wasn’t sure about that—but Courtney was so obviously not ready to be a mother. She worried about her son, but she’d also started to worry about the baby, her grandchild. It kept surprising Sandra: she was only forty-six and about to be a grandmother.
A song came on that Courtney liked and she cheered up, or at least, she changed the subject to something cheerier: David was taking her out to some fancy restaurant next week, for the anniversary of their first date. One of her new maternity dresses had been chosen specifically for the occasion. She also talked about something she was writing, a story about a woman who gives her uterus to a gay man, so that he can have a child. Sandra thought she meant the woman agreed to give birth to a child for the gay man, but no. “She hands the uterus to him,” Courtney said. “Just like handing over a loaf of bread.”
“But what does he do with it?”
“He puts it inside of himself, so he can get pregnant.” Courtney’s voice sounded a little annoyed, as if she were thinking: what else would he do with
it?
Sandra was stuck on the basic facts of anatomy. There was no place inside a man where a uterus could go. And what would it be attached to? But all she said was “That’s different,” and Courtney took it as a compliment. She always wanted to be original. In fact, she gave up on this story a few months later, when, as she told Sandra, she discovered that someone had beaten her to it and written an entire novel about a woman who loses a uterus. “That one is lost, and mine is given away, but it’s close enough,” Courtney said, sighing. “It’s like somebody else always gets my ideas first.”
When they left the restaurant, Courtney was still in a good mood. Sandra drove carefully, hoping to avoid any bumps that might make her daughter-in-law nauseous. They got back to the apartment and David was there and happy to go on and on about how beautiful Courtney looked, from hair to eyes, from face to dress. He even mentioned her shoes, which, as Courtney pointed out, were the same brown Mary Janes she’d been wearing for months. David laughed and kissed Courtney’s hand. “Well,” he said, “apparently I’ve always loved those shoes.”
The couple ended up on the couch together: Courtney resting her head on Sandra’s bed pillow, David slouching on the other end, rubbing her feet. Sandra was sitting on a hard kitchen chair that she’d pulled into the living room. But she was feeling pretty good, seeing her son and his wife relaxing together and, best of all, watching TV. It was Courtney’s idea to turn it on, and even though they didn’t have cable, they got Murphy Brown, which was one of Sandra’s weekly shows.
