Our New Normal (ARC)

by Colleen Faulkner

  But I don’t want to be an auto mechanic. I want to be a doctor in family practice. If I become a doctor, I’ll have more education than Mom or Dad. It might make Dad feel weird if I outranked him. But maybe not. Maybe he’d be proud of me.

  A bang on my bedroom door startles me.

  “Dinner in fifteen!” my brother hollers. His voice fades as he keeps going, toward his room, probably. “And the kitchen trash is full. Your turn to take it out.”

  I want to holler something at him like, “I’m having a little bit of a breakdown here. Couldn’t you take out the trash?” But I don’t want to tell him I’m preggers. He’s going to call me an idiot. And that’s going to be the nicest thing he says to me. Mom and Dad don’t like Tyler but Sean hates him. He calls him stuff like Pea Brain and Little Dick. He calls him Little Dick because Tyler used to have an old GMC Sierra pickup that had a really loud muffler and Sean says only guys with little teeny-tiny dicks make their trucks louder. The engine went out in it so he doesn’t have it anymore. I don’t know if Tyler’s dick is little or not because he’s the only person I’ve ever had sex with.

  “Trash!” Sean yells, banging on my door again as he goes past in the other direction. “Dinner!”

  I sit up. I feel sick, but I don’t know if it’s the baby that’s the size of a lemon in my belly making me sick, or the idea of going down to dinner and having Dad look at me the way I know he’s going to look at me. Because I’m sure Mom already told him. She loves to give people bad news. And she tells Dad everything. Even stuff I’d rather she didn’t, like when I had a crush on his friend’s son in the sixth grade and when I got my first period. Both times Dad felt compelled to say something that embarrassed me so bad I think I’m still emotionally scarred from it.

  I look at my closed door where my green rain slicker is hanging, next to another slicker that belongs to one of my cousins. We share the bedroom. This is my grandparents’ house. Dad’s side. Was before they died. My dad and his brother and sister share it. This is the girls’ room. My aunt gave us our own room when my oldest cousin started growing boobs. She said we were too old to sleep in the “dorm room,” which is where Sean sleeps. I kind of miss the dorm room.

  I look at the door again. I don’t want to go down to dinner. I just want to sit here on my bed for the next twenty-six weeks or so until I have this baby.

  What am I going to do with a baby?

  I get up, fighting tears. If I go downstairs looking like I’ve been crying, Mom will jump to all kinds of conclusions. She’ll think she’s won. She’ll think she can give my baby away, but she can’t. This is one thing she can’t do to me. There are laws against that.

  I tuck my phone into my back pocket and leave my bedroom. I go downstairs and the back way into the kitchen, hoping to avoid everyone. I wonder if that’s possible for the next twenty-six weeks.

  I can’t believe Tyler still hasn’t called me back. I told him I had something really important to tell him. Something bad.

  I go into the kitchen from the laundry room and step on the pedal that opens the lid of the trash can. Mom and Dad are standing at the counter talking about fixing the hinge on the back door. Like this family doesn’t have bigger problems right now.

  I stare into the trash can. Lying right on top is one of those plastic clamshell thingies that berries come in. I yank it out and throw it into the recycling bin. I put it right next to the trash can so it would be easy to sort. I put a recycling bin here and at home and at Gran and Granddad’s. Could I make it any easier for them?

  I dig into the trash, knowing full well that there’s more recycling in there.

  Sure enough, I come up with a cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels. At home, we mostly use cloth wipe thingies I bought on Etsy. When they’re dirty they go into a basket and then into the wash. It’s easy and it’s way better for the environment. Some people argue about the water used in washing the cloth towels, but I’ve done the research. And I don’t use soap; I use household vinegar to wash them. Dad sneaks a roll of paper towels into the house once in a while. I just pretend I don’t see it.

  I throw the paper towel roll into the recycling bin hard and all of a sudden I feel like I’m going to cry. “Recycling in the trash again,” I holler in a general announcement.

  I know Sean isn’t listening. I’m sure he’s got his umbilical cord connected to the TV. I think my brother is on the autism spectrum. He’s so weird. And awkward. And his obsession with video games is beyond normal even for guys his age. I used to say I think we should have him tested. His mature response was usually to stick his tongue out at me. At least then he responded to me, even if just as a taunt. This last year, his senior year in high school, I don’t think he knew I was alive. Which makes me sad because when we were little, he was my best friend.

  When we were little, we played together all the time. Sure, we played DUPLOs because that was his thing, but he played chef with me, too, and vet’s office. When we got into elementary school, we raced our bicycles in the driveway, did homework together, and sometimes he and his friends even sat next to me in the school cafeteria. It wasn’t until I started growing boobs in middle school that things got weird. Or maybe it was when he started growing man balls. There was no big fight between Sean and me, he just . . . drifted away. Mom says that happens sometimes with siblings, especially when they’re male and female. She says he’ll drift back. I hope so. Because I miss him.

  I sigh and dig into the bag again. Hit a pocket of something gross. Food. Food is supposed to go in the compost container on the counter. My fingers hit the ridge of something hard and I pull out an empty salsa jar. “Who cares about the planet?” I practically scream. “We’re all going to die someday, right?”

  Suddenly I realize the house has gotten really quiet. Mom and Dad have stopped talking. I don’t even hear the dog walking around, his nails scraping the hardwood floor. I look up to see my parents staring at me. Sean, too. He’s standing at the counter with a bag of hamburger rolls in his hand. They’re all looking at me.

  I wonder if Sean knows.

  “Recycling goes in the blue bin,” I say, feeling like I could stomp my foot or do something else equally childish. “If you don’t know by now what goes in recycling, flip it over and check out the symbol. Or just ask,” I say, speaking slowly, as if they can’t understand my words. Only with a nasty tone. Really nasty.

  Sean looks at my parents as if I’ve just appeared, an extraterrestrial from a faraway galaxy. So maybe he doesn’t know he’s going to be an uncle.

  Dad picks up a serving plate of corn on the cob. “Burgers are ready,” he announces, avoiding eye contact with me. “Let’s eat before everything gets cold.”

  And I want to die. Right here beside my recycling project from the seventh grade.

  3

  Liv

  I stand at the bathroom sink staring at myself in the mirror. Unlike most women my age, I still wear my brown hair long—well, just past my shoulders. I just haven’t been able to get into the sensible haircut prevalent here in the Northeast. What Oscar and I jokingly refer to as the L.L.Bean haircut. I do wear my share of L.L.Bean clothing, but not the hair. Never the hair.

  I tip my head back, smoothing my not-as-shiny-as-they-used-to-be locks over the crown. My roots need touching up. My hair used to be a darker brown, but with the graying and the constant upkeep, I’ve let it go a little lighter. I think the new color is a little gentler on my aging skin.

  I let go of my hair and reach for a headband to push it all back so I can wash my face. I can’t believe I’m thinking about my hair. I’ve got bigger problems than that. We’ve got bigger problems. Oscar and I.

  I stare at my reflection while I pump face soap into my palm, then I rub it all over. It’s not a bad face for a forty-four-year-old woman. I’m developing laugh lines around my mouth and there’s some discoloration under my eyes, but nothing drugstore concealer won’t fix. I wonder if I need to talk to my dermatologist about Retin-A. T
he laugh lines are definitely worse. And what’s with my droopy eyes? I can barely see my lids anymore.

  I meet my gaze again, still rubbing the soap on my face. My best feature is still my eyes. Brown, with flecks that look green sometimes. I always wonder where they came from—if it was my mother or my father. Birth mother or father. I sometimes wonder if they’re still alive, if there’s someone out there with my eyes.

  I splash warm water on my face to rinse and reach for the hand towel to blot, not rub. My girlfriend Amelia tells me I’m being too rough with my skin. She watches YouTube videos on skin care and makeup for forty-plus-year-old women. She insists I should be watching them, too, but I don’t see any need when she relates the information to me.

  I glance out the bathroom door. Oscar is stretched out on the bed on his back in nothing but a pair of boxer briefs. He’s reading. His briefs look faded and baggy; he needs new ones.

  “Are we going to talk about this?” I reach for my moisturizer. When he doesn’t respond, I look at him again.

  My husband of two decades continues to stare at the book. I can’t tell if he heard me or not. Or if he’s really reading or just holding the book up to avoid me.

  “Hon?”

  He doesn’t even try to hide his sigh of impatience. He keeps his eyes on the book.

  “I thought we were going to let this season.”

  Let this season.

  I used to like this phrase he brought to our marriage from his Quaker upbringing. It means to think about it, but also to just let it sit and . . . season like a marinade. But over the years, I feel as if it’s come to mean that Oscar is just going to ignore the subject. Which is not going to work this time. By my calculations, our daughter will give birth the first week of March.

  “Oscar?”

  Again, the sigh, which is now bordering on a groan. He lowers his book to his bare chest and there’s a silence that stretches between us that happens more often than it used to. And it makes me sad. We were best friends for so long. We could talk about anything. Everything. I stand there rubbing moisturizer into my face, wondering how this happened. How we drifted apart. Only drift isn’t quite the right word. It’s been sort of a lurching process. Sometimes we lurch away from each other, then lurch back, but each time it seems as if it’s farther to return to the place we once were. Amelia says it’s an inevitable stage of the institution of marriage, but is it? Does it have to be?

  He closes his eyes. “She wants to keep her baby,” he says softly. “It’s the natural thing, Liv. For a woman to want to keep her baby.” He still won’t look at me.

  I grab my glasses and slip them on; I can’t see a damned thing without my contacts. I flip off the light and walk into the bedroom in a baggy T-shirt and panties. I can’t remember the last time I got into bed in something cute or even bordering on sexy. My oversized shirt has a loon on it. It came from the communal bottom drawer of the dresser here in the master bedroom. Next week Oscar’s sister will probably be wearing it to bed.

  “Right, but . . .” I sit down on the edge of the bed, rubbing the leftover moisturizer into the backs of my hands. “That doesn’t mean that’s what’s best for the baby. Or Hazel.” I wait for his response. And wait. I watch him stare at the ceiling as if he’s a seventeen-year-old boy and his mother has asked him a question. And I hate feeling this way. As if I’m his mother.

  His gaze shifts and he finally meets mine. “I think what we said . . . about letting it go for a couple of days is a good idea. It’s still so fresh. She still hasn’t even talked to Tyler yet.”

  “So you did talk to her?” I get up and walk around to my side of the bed. There are two prints of loons above the old maple bed that was once his parents’ bed. They’re black-and-white aquatic birds that have the most beautiful, haunting song. One print is of a male, the other a female. Loons mate for life. In the evening, we hear our loons in our little cove calling to each other. It’s how they communicate, how they let each other know where they are on the bay. I wonder if as they get older they call less often to each other.

  I sit down on my side of the bed and swing my feet over to sit beside him on top of the cotton quilt. He’s staring at the ceiling again, and even though we’re right beside each other, close enough to touch, he doesn’t reach out to me. I don’t reach out to him. Sitting so close and not touching makes me feel alone. Like the female loon drifting alone on the water, far from her mate.

  “Oscar—”

  “Yes, I spoke with her, Liv. Before I came to bed.” He’s looking at me now. “I just stuck my head in her bedroom door to say good night. Didn’t you?”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I told her that I loved her.” He takes his time with each word. As if it’s painful to talk with me. “And that . . . we’d figure this out.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said she loved me, too.”

  I want to cover his hand, resting on the bed between us, with mine, but I don’t do it. “You said she hadn’t talked to Tyler. How do you know that if—”

  He interrupts. “I just asked her if she’d heard from him. We didn’t talk about the pregnancy. I could tell she’d been crying and I just asked . . . you know, if they’d talked.”

  “And they still haven’t?” I ask.

  “She thinks maybe his phone died and he doesn’t have his charger. Or he broke his screen again.”

  I roll onto my side, propping myself up on my elbow so I’m facing him. He’s still handsome, even with his slightly receding hairline and gray temples. It was his blue eyes I fell in love with the day I first spotted him in the UMaine student center. It took another two weeks of us semi-stalking each other for me to finally get up the nerve to ask him to hand me a napkin. I was so madly in love with him at that point, even before he’d spoken to me, that I probably would have married him on the spot if he’d asked. Or at least gone back to his apartment for a quickie before my world history class. In those days, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Now we’re lying here half naked with nothing to stop us from having sex and the spark isn’t there. It just isn’t and I don’t know where the hell it went. What’s maybe even worse is that the desire to comfort each other isn’t there, either.

  “Oscar,” I sigh. “I think we need to—”

  My cell on my nightstand rings. It seems as if my life is full of interruptions. It’s the sound of a loon, signaling it’s a call from my parents’ house. Our son’s idea of a joke because he insists my parents are both crazy. At least loony. Eighteen-year-old-boy humor.

  I roll over and grab the phone because it’s never a good thing when my parents call after nine p.m. They’re usually in bed by seven thirty, eight at the latest, because that way they can be up and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when they wake me at five thirty a.m. to tell me there’s a purple finch in their bird feeder.

  I lift my phone to my ear. “Hello?”

  “I told her to leave it until you came over. She wouldn’t listen,” my father says. “She never listens to a thing I say. I think she needs her head examined.”

  “Dad, what happened?”

  “Your mother fell off the zucchini.”

  “Zucchini?” I say. I know he doesn’t mean zucchini. Occasionally he says the wrong word. Early-stage dementia. And I know it’s not helpful to repeat the incorrect words he says, but sometimes I can’t help myself. It’s a little unsettling when your father tells you someone fell off a zucchini.

  “Not zucchini,” my dad mutters. “I didn’t say zucchini. How the hell would she fall off a squash?”

  I don’t make any comment on either subject. If I do, it will only take me longer to get to the bottom of what’s going on.

  “She fell off the ladder.” Now my dad gets snippy with me. “Your mother fell off the tarnal stepladder.”

  I ignore his creative curse; he has a whole basket of them. He can’t remember the word ladder, but he can come up with the word tarnal. “Mom was on a ladder?
” I get out of bed. “Dad. What was she doing on a ladder?” I want to shout, “How did she manage to get out of her wheelchair onto a ladder?” but I control myself.

  “Lightbulb. I got the bleeding stopped.”

  “She was bleeding? ” I say. “What do you mean? Where was she bleeding?”

  “I’m a doctor, Liv. You think I don’t know how to stop a head wound from bleeding?”

  Technically he was a doctor, but he’s long retired. And he was an ophthalmologist. He didn’t deal with a lot of bleeding head wounds. “How much blood was there?” I ask calmly. Because I’m always the calm one. I’ve always had to be. My sister, Beth, gets to be the hysterical one, Oscar the emotional one.

  “A good bit. I used those napkin things on the roll,” he says, struggling for the word and gets angrier by the second because he can’t think of it. “The . . . the . . .”

  “Paper towels,” I say softly, my heart breaking for him.

  “Those. It’s just above her eyebrow, but I wonder if she needs to go to the hospital. To have her head examined!” He shouts these last words, apparently for my mother’s benefit.

  “Dad, is she okay? Is she fully conscious?” As I speak, I pick my shorts up off the chair, then decide against them. If I’m going to spend the night in the emergency department, I don’t want to do it in a pair of old khaki shorts that I spilled mustard on. I dig into the bag on the floor beside the dresser to look for the jeans I’m sure I packed.