Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  Dore eventually cried herself into a restless sleep, but Nick stayed up, one hand on her belly where it rose and fell with her breath, the other hand moving on his own knee, the way a stranger’s hand would in comforting. Don’t think, he told himself. Don’t think.

  They stayed at the hotel until after the funeral, and when they drove home, they drove with people from the trailer court and Dore’s parents. No one knew what to say to Nick. The men patted his arm, stiff, uncomfortable; a few muttered vague sorrow. But all the women concentrated their energies on their own kind, on Dore. Flora wouldn’t let Dore alone for one moment. She even offered to move the two of them into her trailer for a while; she said she wasn’t so sure that being alone right now was such a hot idea. “She’s not alone,” said Nick, but Flora paid him no mind.

  Nick sealed up the baby’s room, but Dore kept walking by, jerking the door open, straining to hear anything, a cry, a breath. She couldn’t believe she wouldn’t open the door Nick kept shutting and find Susan laughing in her crib. It wasn’t true.

  Dore’s parents left, and the women from the court began coming over with plates of cold cuts. They all let Dore be. No one thought of blaming her for hiring a sitter outside the court, for going out so often; no one even mentioned the mother’s intuition they all depended on. The only person doing any blaming was Dore herself.

  She told them what a terrible mother she had been. She’d get so wrought up she’d have to go into the bathroom. They’d all hear the water rushing into the sink, masking her crying, and when she came back out, no one said anything about her red eyes, no one looked at anything but the tangle of needlework in their hands, the plates on the table. Dore told them she was responsible, that she was an unnatural mother, that she had ignored her own baby.

  “Oh, hush, you did not,” said Ruby.

  “The baby had nightmares,” Dore said suddenly. “She wouldn’t stop crying.” She looked at Flora. “You knew. Everyone knew. You said you could hear it halfway down the court. I don’t know, maybe she knew what was going to happen. Babies are so close to their beginnings, maybe they can see their own ends, too. And—and—she was marked.” She touched Flora. “You said so.”

  “Dore,” said Flora. “That was just a birthmark, nothing more than a daub of extra color. And I never in my whole life saw one single baby who didn’t wail his lungs out once in a while. You’re just tormenting yourself, and for no good reason at all.”

  “Listen,” Dore said. “I did nothing. I could have wheeled her in the park more. I could have taken her to the baby pool. I went out by myself, leaving her with the sitter. I could have taken her, I could have.”

  “You could have been the first man on the moon, too,” Flora said. She took Dore’s hand. “There’s no one to blame,” she said.

  Dore said nothing, but she kept looking. She went to the library and got medical texts and turned to the pages on crib death, writing down statistics, details, on small scraps of paper that she’d jam back into her purse. She bought medical paperbacks in the drugstores and read them in the trailer. She hid the books from Nick; she never discussed what she read with him, and when she came home one day to find him reading one of the books, his face steel, she averted her eyes. Neither of them said anything about anything. Dore sprawled across the bed, watching the ceiling, listening to the steady turn of the pages Nick was reading, waiting for him to come across the one sentence in the book that would, once and for all, irrevocably blame her.

  Dore needed Flora more and more. She needed the women in ways she didn’t need Nick. She almost couldn’t bear to be with Nick. Every time she saw his face, she remembered just who had prodded and prodded for a sitter, just who had insisted on making those nights under the stars last and last because she couldn’t let go of any of the sweetness. When he tried to touch her, she flinched. She kept going over to Flora’s, walking into the other woman’s kitchen as if it were her own. She’d start washing Flora’s dishes in the sink, she’d shell the peas for Flora’s dinner, keeping her back straight, her eyes unfocused, and Flora, knowing mindless work was just what Dore needed, said nothing.

  Nick couldn’t believe it. He felt that he was precariously floating through life, unattached to anyone or anything. Dore talked only to the women, and the women ignored him. He walked toward the men, but they were embarrassed by his grief. They’d pat his back and avert their eyes; they’d mutter what a tough break it was and then excuse themselves, leaving Nick standing in the middle of the street, alone.

  At night he reached for Dore. He wanted to make love to her, to be inside of her, as deep as he could, so that he’d know he was a part of someone, but she stiffened, she pushed him aside. “I can’t,” she said.

  He knew she blamed herself, but as far as he was concerned, he was the one at fault. How could he have agreed to a sitter? How could he have allowed himself all those times away from his daughter, away from his life?

  He saw the baby everywhere. At first, just glimpses. Under the bed, a gurgle by the back door. Sometimes, too, he simply smelled her. Milk scent heavy in the sheets, so elusive, so strange, he’d tear the covers from the bed trying to find her. Only once did he see her whole. He was stepping from the shower, and there she was, just under the steam by the door, crawling toward him.

  He quickly crouched, reaching out his hands, his heart slamming against his chest. He shut his eyes, grabbing for her. All he had to do was just touch her, fingertip on skin, and she’d be real, she’d be alive. He knew it, and then his hand trembled, and he grasped for her, and instead of her downy dark hair, her peachy skin, he felt the sudden rough terry towel on the floor, the smooth side of the shampoo bottle, and he opened his eyes and she was gone. His baby, his girl. He slumped to the damp tiled floor and put his hands up to his face and wept into them. He wished he were holding his daughter—and, oh, God, he wished he were holding Dore.

  He began working. At first, to forget. Later, because it became such a simple pleasure, walking into a room, finding a face that seemed glad to see him. He would never have left Dore for a moment if she had seemed to need him, even a little, if she weren’t so wrapped up in her cocoon of women. He was nervous about seeing his clients at first. He was used to treating them all like friends, telling them all about Dore, all about his daughter. Before he even started pulling out the new crop of book jackets, pitching his books, he’d be pulling out snapshots of Susan, showing her off. But now he didn’t want to talk about anything; he didn’t want to have to say the words, to remind himself all over again what had happened, freshening his pain until it was all he could do to breathe. He didn’t want anything more than the warmth of a welcome.

  He had nothing to worry about. He didn’t have to tell his clients anything, because somehow they already seemed to know. No one said anything, but clients had hot coffee ready for him as soon as he stepped in the door. There were crullers and chocolates set on a plate. He was taken to lunch, to dinner, made to have a cocktail or two. And clients bought more books from him than he knew they could sell, and when he pointed that out, he was waved aside. He couldn’t bring himself to ask any of the old questions about how their families were doing, and no one volunteered information; they seemed to be waiting, poised on his words.

  Nick finally broke down at the Stonewall Bookshop in Philadelphia. The book buyer there, a friendly young woman named Felice, led him to the back room and made him sit on a box of books and talk to her. She listened while he spilled out his grief; she kept her hand lightly on his shoulder and she never once took her eyes from him. When he was finished talking, she didn’t say anything. She didn’t tell him it would get better with time, she didn’t say she understood, but she kept her hand right where it was so he could feel her pulse moving through her fingers, and she sat so close, he could hear her breathing.

  She made him go with her to a movie, right that moment, and she kept talking to him through the film, ignoring the angry hushings of the people around them, not letting him brood, an
d it wasn’t until afterward, over coffee, that she told him she had heard the news a week ago, from another salesman. “News like that spreads,” she said, and then she waved at the waitress, tilting up her coffee cup to show it was empty.

  Nick worked long hours. He liked being busy, out on the road, his mind filled with schedules and billing sheets. His hours were so crowded, he could fall into bed and sleep from exhaustion, deep and dreamless; he could wake up and the million things he had to do that day would push into his mind, leaving no room for Susan, for Dore.

  When there were lulls, when he did call Dore, she usually wasn’t even home. He’d have to call over at Flora’s. “She’s sleeping,” Flora told him. “She’s out back in the sun.” The times he could persuade Flora to get Dore to come on the line, Dore sounded distracted and very far away from him.

  “I hate to leave you alone,” he said.

  “I’m not alone,” Dore said. “I sleep at Flora’s.”

  She didn’t want to talk. There were long silences that he kept trying to fill, and as soon as he hung up the phone, he wanted to dial her again right away.

  It was funny, too, that now, for the first time in his life, when he climbed back into his car for the drive back to Dore, he felt a sudden unwillingness, a raging yearning to stay where he was, moving from bookstore to bookstore, collecting smiles like medals.

  He began thinking they should move. It was too hard to drive into the court, to have every single trailer remind him of what he wanted to forget, to see his past in every face. And, too, he had this strange feeling that the trailer court was gradually taking Dore away from him, transforming her, and that the longer they stayed, the more he would lose. He wasn’t quite sure where they should go or how to approach it, until he saw a notice on the company bulletin board. They needed a salesman in the Boston area. He started to think. He remembered a brochure Tom had about Boston; he could almost see the picture of the skyline. He remembered Helen saying a city like that didn’t interest her, because a place that got so cold in the winter wouldn’t allow a proper summer to get anywhere near it.

  He talked to his boss, and then he went to Dore. He told her it was a great career move, and he told her that they needed to get away from their past, needed to be in a place where every single thing they encountered wasn’t a memory.

  “I don’t want to leave here,” Dore said.

  “Yes, you do,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything, and when he prodded, she sighed. She said she would think about it, and then she went back into the kitchen and he heard the slap of the door, her slow, careful steps on their way to Flora’s.

  She wasn’t lying. She did give it some thought. She thought about how much easier it was for Nick, how his loss was less total than hers because, after all, he could still sense the baby around him; he sometimes even saw her, she was sure of that. Oh, she knew, she knew. She had seen him sniffing at his shirts, she had seen him turn toward Susan’s room, startled, listening, and when she asked him what was he listening to, he had become flustered. He had told her it was nothing, but he hadn’t been able to meet her eyes. She never once managed to feel Susan around her, no matter how she strained with her eyes clamped shut, no matter how she sniffed and sniffed until people started asking her if she was catching cold. She thought it all must be part of her punishment for not having loved Susan enough, for not having been a good enough mother.

  Sometimes she thought Nick was right about leaving. It wasn’t always enough to spend the afternoon at Ruby’s, the slow, steady evenings with Flora. Ruby suddenly didn’t like it when Dore did her dishes; Flora told her to leave the meat loaf alone because she had her own secret recipe she liked. The women let Dore stay as long as she wanted. No one ever told her to leave, but they were reclaiming their old lives, leaving her with nothing more to do than sit with her hands in her lap. She had time to think then, time to know that all she had to do was get up and look outside and she would see Nick crouched down among the flowers she had planted, parting the petals in his search. She knew what he was looking for. She knew, too, what she would never find.

  She woke up one night and Nick wasn’t there and she suddenly started remembering how it was with them when they were first courting, how just the sight of him had made her heart helpless. She missed him, she suddenly wanted him there beside her. She got up and went to the window and saw him, standing out in the middle of the street, fully dressed. He was rocking on his heels, his hands in his pockets, and she went outside in her white T-shirt and panties, and when she got close enough to him, she saw he was crying. She rested her head against his back, felt how warm his body was, and then, without turning, he looped his arms about her, he rocked her in his rhythm, and then she said it was all right, they would leave.

  They moved to Sommerville, to a large, sunny, one-bedroom apartment right on the trolley line, just fifteen minutes from Boston. At first Dore didn’t even bother to leave the apartment. She spent a lot of time on the phone talking to Flora or Ruby, trying to keep up the connection. She missed the trailer, she missed the whole layout of the court. The week they had left, the place had thrown them a going-away party at the community center. Someone made fried chicken, someone else brought cole slaw and hot dogs. The trailer kids ran around and threw chips at one another, the babies got cranky, and the men idly flirted with their buddies’ wives. Nick had brought the young couple he’d sold the trailer to, and he moved them through the crowd for introductions, becoming more a part of the trailer court in his departure than he had ever been while he lived there.

  Now, though, Dore felt that part of her life receding, telescoping away. After a while, Flora on the phone didn’t feel as familiar as she used to. Ruby, on the phone, was rushed. She had kids pulling at her skirts; she had the woman who had moved into Dore’s old trailer coming by for coffee. Dore, no longer part of the community, felt pushed out on her own.

  She moved tentatively. She walked two blocks to the supermarket. She took the trolley to Boston and wandered through Fil-ene’s basement, but everything she picked up was pulled from her hands by another, more ambitious shopper, and in the end she just gave up and came home with nothing.

  Nick watched her. A simple thing like buying herself a new belt would make him smile at her, treat her like everything was going to be just fine. She’d wake nights burning, wanting him, but then she’d turn and see him already awake, leaning on one elbow staring at her, and it made her so angry that she’d get up and go to sleep on the living-room couch.

  She found a teaching job at a private high school to keep herself busy, but she couldn’t get excited about it, or care even slightly about what might happen. Her teaching was subdued, reflective. Her students imagined there was something dangerously aloof and mysterious about her, and they adored her for it. They smiled. They treated her as if she were alive and worth knowing. Dore began finding love notes slid into the pages of her grade book. She got essay after essay from young girls about their stormy love affairs. She got comically inaccurate descriptions of abortions. She got suicide tales told by someone who was burning away in hell, looking sorrowfully back on a damaged life. She graded every paper without comment. She wouldn’t meet the disappointed stares of her students when she passed their papers back into their hands.

  She came home evenings and made dinner. She graded papers. She saw Nick watching the corners of the rooms, cocking his head at the sounds she never heard, and then, in the stillness of the night, she, too, tried to feel her daughter. She listened for her. Come home, she thought, come home.

  Nick had thought the move would change Dore, and it had, but not in any of the ways he had hoped. Sometimes she slept pressed tightly against him, sometimes she slept on the couch. When she made love, she was so soundless, so removed, he sometimes yearned to bite noise from her skin, to pull a sigh from her hair. Instead, he was gentle. He acted as though a false move would shatter her.

  The move didn’t make things much better for him, either.
He escaped to the road. He kept telling himself that his life was new now, that he wasn’t going to think about what had happened. He’d start to get pleasure from driving on the highway; he’d glance over at the other cars, and then, halfway to some new city, he’d have to pull the car over to the shoulder because he was so upset, because he had seen a baby in the car ahead of him, and his own car had suddenly filled with the scent of milk. He sat slumped over the wheel until the milky smell started to disappear, and then he bolted upright. “No,” he pleaded. “Don’t go. Don’t.”

  When the car finally smelled like nothing more than a car, he drove to the nearest pay phone and called Dore. He couldn’t make his mouth work very well. He made up some story about having forgotten some papers at home, just to keep her on the phone talking with him. He told her he missed her, he told her he loved her. Sometimes he asked her if she wanted to catch a plane and meet him at the hotel, but she always said no.

  “You miss me?” he said. “You love me?”

  “Don’t I act like I do?” Dore said, and then she told him she had to go, there was someone at the door.

  Nick was cheerful and friendly to his clients. He lied to his old contacts, telling them how well things were going, that he and Dore both loved Boston. To his new clients, he presented a picture of great activity. He detailed dinners that never happened because Dore didn’t feel well, plays they didn’t see because he couldn’t focus his attention. He made it seem that he was happy, and sometimes, when he almost could believe what he was saying, he tried to stretch out the conversation just to make the feeling linger.

  Away, without constant reminders, he could fool himself into thinking he had a very different life. He wasn’t living with a woman who was more of a ghost than a partner; he hadn’t lost a baby. He was just a salesman, a visitor in a city, with time to enjoy it. He tried to stretch the time out the way he stretched out conversations. He’d walk around trying to find the longest lines at restaurants, and once seated he’d read every item on the menu, then call the waitress over and make her explain even the simplest meals to him. Even then, he wouldn’t order until she had come back three separate times, asking him with a steely gaze if he was ready yet. He never enjoyed the food. He took slow, careful bites, watching the other men in the place and wondering if they were happy, if they had wives who loved them, who let themselves be somehow indelibly marked by lovemak-ing, if they had daughters who were still alive, still safe.