Katherine smiled and moved so that the whole length of her body was pressed against Emma’s own.
“Yes,” she whispered into Emma’s ear. “I know.”
A few minutes later, Katherine’s shirt was off, her back pushed up against the narrow strip of wall beside the window. Her breasts were deliciously warm in Emma’s mouth, but she left them to move down the soft slope of her belly, licking at the skin where it disappeared into her jeans. Then she pushed her face between Katherine’s legs, pulling at the button on her fly.
Suddenly, Emma stopped and stood up. “Do you have—”
Katherine nodded. “It’s all still in the back seat.”
“Give me your keys,” Emma said, her voice thick.
The harness was awkward. Emma felt like she was gearing up to go rock climbing, and it broke the mood a little. But when Katherine smiled up at her and parted her legs, all Emma’s desire returned in a rush. And when she entered her slowly, her lips against the taut skin of Katherine’s shoulder and heard Katherine moan . . .
“Is that okay?” she asked quietly, but Katherine said nothing, rocking against her, breathing. When Katherine came, her cries made Emma come, too, and the surprise of that left her gasping.
“Wow,” they both said, afterwards, laughing, clinging to each other. “Wow.”
CHAPTER 42
Emma
Emma’s mother, Sarah, had delicate hands, the skin across her knuckles so smooth they seemed to have been polished. She kept an emery board in the console of her car, and at red lights she filed her nails into perfect ovals, the cuticles always smooth and perfectly intact. For years, Emma had filed hers, too. “It’s the most girly thing you do,” her college boyfriend had said once, and Emma had thought she had heard a note of accusation in his voice. Probably he had wished she shaved her legs.
Unlike her mother’s, Emma’s hands were perpetually desiccated. The backs of them were so wrinkled they seemed the hands of a much older woman, which Emma’s middle school students never failed to tactlessly point out.
“You got old lady hands,” they told her as she handed back their papers. “How old are you anyway?”
Emma was not ashamed of her hands exactly, but she felt them to be a trial, with their endless thirst for lotion and the way her cuticles hardened and split and demanded that Emma constantly police herself lest she tear them into bloody shreds.
So it surprised her when, one Saturday morning, as she and Katherine walked along the eastern shore of Lake Merritt, Katherine raised their clasped hands to her lips and said, “I love your hands, Emma.”
Emma felt her face redden. “What? Why?”
Gently, Katherine opened Emma’s hand and traced her finger along the calloused skin of her palm.
“I don’t know exactly. They’re so rough. Real.”
Emma laughed. “Well, I love yours.”
And she did. Katherine’s hands reminded her of her mother’s: the smooth skin, the slender fingers. Lacing her fingers with Katherine’s, she felt a peculiar sensation of contentment come over her, a contentment laced with nostalgia. As a child, Emma had rarely spent time alone with her mother, without her brother or her sister, but once a year in late summer their mother would take each of them to the mall in turn, to buy them what they needed in back-to-school clothes.
As soon as Emma and her mother entered through the double doors into the singular smell of cosmetics and new clothes, Emma would take her mother’s hand. Even when Emma was in her teens, and knew instinctively that most girls her age did not walk hand-in-hand with their mothers, she did not stop. She loved the feel of her mother’s hand in hers, the oiled skin, the affectionate way she rubbed at the bones of Emma knuckles so that they shifted against each other.
It was not the only time Emma sought out her mother’s affection. She remembered once when she was nine or ten and their family had been invited to spend the afternoon at the pool of one of her mother’s friends. She remembered vividly how she had carefully dried and wrapped herself in a towel before squeezing into the lawn chair next to her mother and taking her hand.
“Aw,” her mother’s friend had gushed. “You’re so lucky. She’s so sweet, isn’t she?”
Her mother had smiled and nodded in reply, but Emma had known instantly that she was not being truthful. It occurred to her for the first time that perhaps Sarah would have preferred it if Emma were not so demonstrative in her affections. Her mother had never done anything to give her that impression. She had never pushed Emma away or wriggled free. She squeezed Emma’s hand when Emma took hers, and she stroked her back or patted her head when Emma snuck her arms around her waist. And yet, in that moment by the pool, Emma felt sure that her mother did not, in fact, count herself “lucky” that Emma was “so sweet.”
But even after that moment of insight in the lawn chair, Emma did not change her behavior toward her mother. At first, she had tried, but it did not come naturally to her to rein in her affections, nor was she able to curb her longing for her mother’s embrace. Once, when she was thirteen and swimming in adolescent angst, she had vowed to herself that she would stop. She would not hug her mother, or say that she loved her. She would wait. She would see how long it took before her mother reached out to her, or told her that she loved her without Emma saying it first.
Emma had not been able to complete the experiment. One afternoon three days later, as her mother was leaving her room having just delivered a neat stack of folded clothes, Emma had blurted out accusingly, “You never say you love me.”
Her mother had paused in the doorway, her arms still full of her brother’s laundry. She had looked at Emma for a long moment.
“And you never hug me,” Emma had quickly added, since why not? Emma knew that she would never have the courage to say anything like this again, and so the need to say it—to say all of it—was too strong in her for her to hold her tongue.
Her mother had taken a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if to gather the patience to deal with this new ridiculousness. And this summoning of patience had made Emma feel both ashamed and irate. Ashamed, because she knew that to her mother she must seem petulant and nit-picking. And yet it infuriated her, nonetheless, that her mother could, with her sigh of exasperation, so belittle something which was, to Emma, of such monumental importance.
Emma could not remember her mother’s exact words that afternoon, but the message was this: that she, Emma’s mother, did not show her love in the same way that Emma did, but that that did not mean that she did not feel it. Emma’s mother had nodded at the pile of folded clothes she had left on Emma’s chair. “I do your laundry. I cook your meals. I take you wherever it is you need to go. I am constantly showing you that I love you.”
Emma had nodded, contrite. She had not muttered, “But you have to do those things. You’re my mother,” as she had wanted to. She had sensed her mother’s exasperation with her; she knew that she could easily push her over the thin line into anger.
“I know,” she had murmured instead, although inwardly she had railed against her mother’s cool logic. A pile of clean clothes was not the same as a hug. A meal was not “I love you.”
The strange thing was that even while Emma longed for more from her mother—some effusion of affection that would match Emma’s own—Emma did not ever doubt her mother’s love. It was the scaffold on which their family was built, the underpinning of the narrative that bound them. Laurel, her birth mother, had not loved Emma. If she had, how could she have given her up? In her father’s telling, he had offered Laurel all he had if he could keep his girls, and Laurel had not hesitated.
But if her father had been the early hero, it was Sarah who had made them a family. Emma had been only a baby then. She had needed a mother, and Sarah had stepped up. Laurel had not loved her, but Sarah had. She had proved it.
Growing up in the eighties, families fractured by divorce were a dime a dozen; rare were the kids at school who could claim their family as intact. Strangely,
Emma had always counted herself among them. She did not bounce biweekly between houses, nor did she feel any affinity with the girls who whined about their stepmothers. She had a mother, not a stepmother. She had a brother, not a half-brother. The unequivocalness of her mother’s love had saved them. They were a family—intact, inviolable.
Now, holding hands with Katherine by the lake, Emma’s chest tightened with emotion. Was this how it felt to be in love? When Katherine took Emma’s hand and raised it to her lips, or slipped her arm around her waist, or moved in bed so that she lay pressed against Emma’s side, Emma felt an immense joy billow up in her. It was an elated feeling—a feeling of hunger sated, of belonging beyond measure. She squeezed Katherine’s slender fingers between her own; she felt that she could never let her go.
Emma stopped suddenly on the path and pulled Katherine around to face her. Katherine smiled at her indulgently.
“Katherine,” she said desperately. “I . . . I love you.”
Katherine’s mouth formed a little pout of sympathy, and Emma’s heart missed a beat. She didn’t want Katherine’s compassion, she wanted—
But then Katherine’s arms were around her, her mouth against her hair.
“Silly,” she said, her voice low. “I know you do.”
Emma tried to pull away without looking at her, but Katherine held her so that at last she met her eye.
“Do you need me to spell it out, Em?” Katherine said, her mouth a half-smile that Emma couldn’t read.
Emma shrugged. “Maybe.” She tried to smile a little, too. “Okay, yes. I think I do.”
Katherine moved so that her lips were by Emma’s ear. “I love you, silly,” she whispered. Then she drew Emma’s hand to her mouth and kissed her fingers. “Are you happy now?”
Emma grinned sheepishly. “Yes. Very. Thank you.”
CHAPTER 43
Jessie
The way it all happened shook Jessie’s faith a little. Or rather, it shook her lack of faith, her certainty in happenstance. Unconnected events were just that: unconnected. Jessie had always believed that. It was only our human need for meaning that put a celestial shine on them, that colored them as something other than coincidence.
Jessie believed this. And yet she couldn’t shake the words that created their own rhythm in her brain: “Give, and you shall receive.” For she had given, and how! The scale of her gift had not been obvious to her at first. She had returned home from the fertility clinic minus several cells, and with a strange sensation in her abdomen—not pain, exactly, but as if pain had come and gone and left a shadow. Laurel had driven her home from the clinic. Jessie remembered little of what they had said; her sleepiness was overwhelming. As soon as they got home she lay down on her futon and was asleep immediately. She woke to find the sky already darkening and a note from Laurel on the table. She had gone back to the hotel to be with Jim and Sue.
Jessie felt as if she had slept for days. She wandered the house restlessly before returning to the bedroom. The alcohol pads and needles she had used to give herself injections over the past few weeks were still arranged on the stack of magazines beside her bed. She brought the trash can and swept them in.
“Well, that’s done then,” she said aloud. Jessie was not squeamish; needles did not faze her. But she was glad her body was her own again, with no added hormones, no crop of eggs crowding her ovaries.
Still, she was restless. She wanted to go for a run, but when she had asked at the clinic if that would be okay, the doctor had said, “Can’t you take it easy for at least one day?”
He had been laughing; he didn’t understand what it cost her.
But if harm could be done—which she doubted—she didn’t intend to do it. She slipped her laptop into her backpack, filled her water bottle, and found her wallet. She rode the few miles into town slowly, taking it easy as the doctor had said. She meant to go to her favorite coffee shop, but found it closed. She glanced at her watch; she hadn’t realized how late it was. The ride into town had eased her restlessness, but still she wasn’t ready to go home. She doubted that she would be able to sleep again for ages, and she did not feel like being alone.
Jessie locked her bike to a light post and walked down Main Street. The stores were all dark, and as she passed by a donut shop, a street light cast her reflection in the window. She turned to look and immediately wished she hadn’t. Her face looked gaunt, and her hair hung heavily in tangled strands around it. A line of poetry she had read once came to mind:
Sometimes I could be Narcissus.
Sometimes I turn my own self to stone.
She understood that; today was not a day she wanted to face herself.
There were tables on the sidewalk a block ahead, but as Jessie neared, she saw that it was a bar and her heart fell. The outside seats were all taken, and Jessie knew she would not venture inside. She had never liked bars; they seemed to exist for a different sort of person entirely.
She turned to go, thinking she would head home after all, take a shower and wash her hair. But just as she did so, she saw a couple stand up from a table at the edge of the sidewalk, and after a second’s hesitation, Jessie sat down in one of the seats they’d left.
She pulled out her laptop and set her water bottle on the table. She knew she should order something, but no server came and she didn’t want to go inside. She found a hair tie in the bottom of her backpack and pulled her hair into a low ponytail.
She opened the computer and created a new document in Word. When she got home and could connect to the internet, she would copy and paste it into an email to her sister.
“Dear Emma,” she typed, then hesitated. Even now that it was too late for Emma to try to talk her out of it, she knew she didn’t want to tell her sister what she had done. Like her abortion so many years ago, this was a matter for her own private reckoning, a decision that concerned no one but herself. Still, Jessie knew that this was a choice that would not be so easy to put behind her. Already the egg she had given up was no longer an egg. It was a zygote now, and soon would be a blastocyst, an embryo, a fetus . . . If it were to be a secret, it would only get bigger and harder to keep. Jessie began to type with new resolve.
“It is almost ten-thirty, and I am sitting at a little table on the sidewalk downtown, at a bar of all places, after sleeping most of the afternoon. Doesn’t sound like me, does it?” She paused again. She had to tell Emma, but how to begin?
“Today—” she wrote, then deleted the word. “Laurel is here,” she began again.
“Excuse me? Do you know if they serve food here? Excuse me? Miss? Ma’am?”
Jessie looked up at last, finally understanding that she was the miss, the ma’am. A tall man stood at the curb, trying to get her attention. He was dirty and disheveled, an enormous backpack cinched around his waist.
“I’m just coming off the trail, and I’m out of food. Do they serve food here, do you think?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“Do you mind if I leave this here while I go see?”
Strands of brown hair hung in greasy clumps around his face, which was rugged and unshaven. He had clearly been on the trail for a while. Jessie flushed with envy and discomfort. What if he took her for someone who didn’t know? Someone who didn’t know the gritty simplicity of the backcountry, the containment and completeness, with everything you needed muscled into a dead weight on your back? Jessie guessed what he must be feeling, although she had never owned up to it before: that gloss of superiority, coming in from the woods, that no one in town could even begin to fathom how glorious it was.
She nodded, putting a hand to her hair. “Which trail did you do? Nine Mile Ridge? Or the North Fork?”
She watched him take her in, surprised, and she blushed; he’d caught her showing off.
“North Fork.” His brown eyes met hers and he smiled. Then he unclipped the hip belt of his pack and swung it to the ground. Gray rings of salt stained his T-shirt where his shoulder straps had b
een.
“I’ll come right back for this,” he said, leaning his backpack against the empty chair. “Thanks.”
When he had gone, Jessie quickly saved the letter to her sister and closed her laptop. She was watching for him when he reappeared at the entrance to the bar.
She caught his eye and nodded at the other chair at her table. “You can sit here, if you want.”
“You sure? I’m, um, pretty grungy. And I probably stink.”
He was right. When he moved by her, she caught his scent. Wood smoke and sweat and unwashed skin. She breathed him in.
“I don’t mind,” she said.
When his food came, she watched him while he ate. Then she bought them both root beers, because the bar didn’t serve dessert, and they talked about the North Fork trail and his job as an archeologist on the Umatilla reservation outside of town. When they were done, he stood up to go, and she wondered where he was headed; the nearest campground was miles away. At this time of night—and looking like he did—hitching a ride would be nearly impossible.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, when she pointed this out. “I can sleep any old where.” He gestured to the sidewalk where they stood.
She grinned. “I can do better than that,” she said. “Just wait here, okay? I’ll be twenty minutes, max.”
Jessie biked back home, quickly this time, and got her car. Together, she and Heath squeezed his pack into the tiny hatch, and then she took him home with her, where he showered for fifteen minutes and then passed out on the couch. When he was asleep, she tiptoed into the bathroom. The mirror was still steamy, and he had left his sawed-off toothbrush on the sink. She noticed how worn the bristles were.
She showered, then, too, and although the hot water ran out almost immediately, she washed and conditioned her hair and scrubbed beneath her arms. In the morning, she made him an omelet with tomatoes from her garden.
Several blissful, heady days passed in which Jessie did not think about the truncated letter to her sister, saved on the hard drive on her laptop. Then, on Tuesday evening, Laurel called with an update: of the two embryos the doctor had implanted in Sue’s womb, one had survived. Sue was pregnant. As soon as Jessie hung up the phone with her mother, she called Emma, sensing that already she had waited too long. But when Emma finally answered, she rushed through telling her about the eggs she had donated; Heath now seemed like much bigger news.
Give, a novel Page 34
