After You (21 page)

“Yup,” she says. “Exactly like me and your father.”

My mother books a flight leaving tomorrow morning, direct to Boston, where she will rendezvous with my dad, beg and receive his forgiveness, and then indulge him in the final wedding planning. She promises that she will be there in eight weeks’ time, walking down the long aisle in my dad’s backyard, the very same one I once walked.

“You know what’s interesting? No matter where you go—an ashram in Peru, to visit your beautiful daughter in London, even New York—you’re still stuck with yourself at the end of the day. I know it’s cliché, but it’s true: The voice in your head doesn’t change with geography,” my mother says as we take a “ramble” on Hampstead Heath—my mother’s idea, since we must use all words and do all deeds British while we’re here. I don’t know how a ramble is any different from a walk. Nonetheless, it feels different today as I link elbows with my mother on the paved path through the green grass.

Next to the pastel houses in Notting Hill—I’ve grown to love how their fairy exteriors refuse to give in to the gloom, whimsical enough that I often feel like I’m on a stage set—the Heath is my second-favorite place in London. Japanese-style trees, fine and pointed, contrast with meadows and hills and glittering ponds. It reminds me of Kent but without the sheep and the cottages; I’m again tempted to put ribbons in my hair and walk with a lace-lined umbrella to shield my fair skin from the nonexistent sun.

Deep thicketed woods bracket the landscape, adding an ominous quality—the green of the rolling hills that much greener, that much brighter, because of the deep forest shading its edges, and because you know the deep thick of the city is breathing its choked breaths less than a mile away.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“And I’m not just talking about place either. I’m talking about circumstances. You know, they did this study of people who became paraplegics later in life and found that just a few years after their accidents they were back to their original selves. If they were happy people before they lost the ability to walk, they eventually became happy people again. If they were depressed before, they went back to the same level of depression. We can’t escape our nature. We are who we are.”

“But you’re going back to Dad. If we are who we are, shouldn’t you be getting on a plane tomorrow to go anywhere but Boston?”

“Nope. I love your father, I’ve always loved him, even when I wanted to kill him, and no matter where I go on this planet, that never seems to change. Might as well accept it already. It’s time you went back to being as happy as you were before, too.”

“Go back to being as happy as I was before what?”

Now she gives me the look reserved for insubordinate patients, not one that is in any way
patient;
her jaw sets rigid, her nostrils flare, her eyes go cold and hard.

“Enough, Eleanor.”

“No, seriously, Jane. As before what?” She looks at me tenderly now, almost as if to say,
You really don’t know, do you?
And then she unlinks my arm from its perch under her elbow. She holds my hand now, the way I used to with Lucy when we were six, both of us in our OshKosh overalls, me shy, her giggling, as we took a tour of her backyard:

“There is the tree where I fell when I was four but got up and didn’t cry. And that’s the slide that my uncle gave my parents when my cousins got too big for it. And here is my armpit. I can make fart noises from it. My dad taught me,” Lucy would say, the master of ceremonies even then.

“Before Oliver, Eleanor. Before Oliver.”

“Who’s Oliver?” Sophie asks. I had almost forgotten she was here, since she has been walking and skipping a few feet in front of us, lost in the scale of the Heath, an outrageous-sized version of her own Secret Garden.

I am about to say,
Nobody
, but I remember my mother is with me, and a therapist, and she’ll look down upon my dodge.

“My son. The baby, who, you know, died.”

“Oh, right. I didn’t know his name was Oliver. I wish I’d got to meet him. I bet he would have been cool and would have played with me.”

“I bet he would have.” This is the most I’ve said out loud about Oliver in two years. I touch my stomach. A reflex.

“You think he’s hanging out with my mom in heaven?” Sophie asks.

“I hope so, sweetheart. She’d take good care of him.” And for an instant I picture it, Lucy and Oliver together, taking a tour of someone’s backyard.

“Just like you’re taking good care of me here.” I feel the guilt multiply and breed in my gut. Can she sense the gravitational force, that something may take me back across the pond? Can she tell I am making pro-con lists in my head as we speak, deciding what it is I am supposed to do? My competing vows amplified and in direct conflict. What I owe to Lucy, and to Sophie.

What I owe to the dividing cells in my stomach, and, by extension, Phillip.

And, yes, what I owe to myself too.

38

I
buy a single pregnancy book. The one everyone tells you not to buy when you are pregnant because it will horrify you with its litany of things that can go wrong in the womb. I eat the forbidden book whole, devour the dismal forecasts, swallow each one, each warning sign, until I feel them nestle in my gut. I am not naive this time. I ignore the happy, optimistic books I used to read; I will leave nothing to chance. Statistics comfort and haunt me. Daily inspection of my skin, my teeth, my urine, the shape of my belly helps me sleep better at night. No one can say I am not watching, not taking the best care I know how.

I read the book again and again. My new bible, now that Sophie and I have moved on from
The Secret Garden
.

The doctor—part of the UK National Health Service—tells me not to worry, that what happened before will not necessarily happen again. My second pregnancy is no riskier than any other. She doesn’t tell me what I want to hear, that my bad luck the first time acts as insurance. That I’ve already paid my premium and used up my deductible. That I can’t lose twice.

Greg looks at me strangely when I refuse a glass of wine with dinner, when I ask for chicken teriyaki no MSG when he orders in sushi, when I touch my stomach like it’s something delicate.

He doesn’t ask, and I don’t tell.

Three months. I give myself three months, the first trimester, to keep my secret, to jump through the first hoop of security, before announcing the situation to anyone, and that—
please forgive me
—includes Phillip. Other than my mother and my new NHS ob-gyn—and I guess my brother—no one knows about the cells multiplying and coalescing, somersaulting in my belly. No one knows it is now almost half an inch long, has elbows and toes. Already, the gods have decided the sex—there are miniature testes or ovaries tucked inside the tadpole tucked inside me, organic predictors of a potential future. They will grow and unfold and drop, and one day, in thirty-two weeks, assuming—
don’t assume, don’t jinx it, don’t get your hopes up—
assuming this doesn’t come undone, I will hold a baby in my arms, a tiny boy or a tiny girl, and he, she, will belong to me.

Phillip hasn’t called, and I haven’t called him. When I think of him, I feel pure guilt about my silence. But I’m too scared. Not only will talking to him require me to make necessary continental decisions and own up to my literal Sophie’s Choice, there is the possibility that he could reject us both—me and the baby—wholesale. Even worse, telling him feels like making the same mistake twice—indulging in that toxic presumptuousness. I
should
wait until after the three-month mark. Right now is too soon to start talking about something that may not even be real.

Instead, I will relish my twelve-week reprieve. I’ve never had a huge secret before, never known the pleasure of keeping a part of yourself hidden and unavailable, protected from others’ parasitic impulses. In my hopeful moments, the ones I try to keep tamped down to not let them overwhelm the fear—the fear I’ve become comfortable with—I want to hug my fishbowl belly and scream:
Mine!

I wonder if this is how Lucy felt during her time with René. Did she walk around with this whole new life tucked into her pocket? A reservoir of excitement and love and giddy warmth amplified because it didn’t yet have to be shared? The one part of her not ripe for picking from her husband, from her daughter. Did she enjoy the romance of the undercover world? The fact that she could keep a secret from me if she needed to? That where she ended and I began, and where I ended and she began, was much clearer than we had ever thought?

Do you know I’m having another baby, Luce?
I think to myself, words sent out to a destinationless universe.
Do you now know my secrets, too, the ones I don’t even get to know yet? Boy or girl?

I don’t expect answers, and I laugh at myself, unable to even attempt to hold my news close and locked under my skin. I still try to tell Lucy, even though she can’t hear me.

I’m lousy with secrets. Which may be why, unlike my best friend, I’ve never really had any until now.

We watch the news every night at six over dinner. Greg comes home early most days—early meaning after a full ten-hour workday—to spend time with Sophie. He tucks her in now, after we’ve eaten and put our time in with BBC One and she and I have read together. He’s taken on the responsibility of her nightly glass of water. The nights are routinized and relaxing. A well-choreographed dance that begins with Greg sweeping through the door at five, running straight to Sophie as he loosens his tie:
How was your day, love? Give us a kiss
.

She still has nightmares. Fewer, though. Less painful. The grip on her dreams has softened, her reaction dulled from the nightly repetition. She has them once a week, at the most.

When we last saw Simon, I asked what had caused the change.

“I think she’s grown bored with her own horror. She is a resilient kid,” he said.

I felt a flush of pride then for Sophie. She even gets As in Therapy.

“The last known living American veteran of World War One has died today, at the age of one hundred ten,” the pretty BBC presenter with the posh accent and the Botoxed forehead says now. Behind her on the big screen we see color pictures of the man, with his four kids, six grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. His skin ropes around his tiny frame, the teeth too big for a retreating mouth.

“Is World War One the war where America got free from London?” Sophie asks.

“No, Soph. The American Revolution was a good one hundred fifty years before that. And America fought and won its independence from the British Empire, not
London
. London, as you already know, is a
city
in the
country
of England,” Greg says.

“Right.” Sophie’s attention is drawn back to the television as they show pictures of the funeral. A row of men in uniform point large rifles at the sky, like they are aiming for God.

I am trying hard to keep my tears silent, wiping them away as quickly as they come. A period of history over and done with, eventually swept clean with the death of every veteran. Not just an erosion of memory. A complete wipeout. I twist the event into something dramatic and devastating and within reach:
They’re gone. They’re all gone
. As if I am watching a flattening bomb, twin buildings collapsing, an explosion on the tube—events that I can relate to, that twist my gut, that conflate time via burned televised images.

One man has died, a ridiculously old man, no less, a universe away from what we now casually call our “terror threat.”

I see his picture, and his teeth, and his family, and I remember reading about the Battle of the Somme, where almost twenty thousand men died in a single hour, and my heart breaks for the march of history. For the world my baby may one day join, the one that Sophie already lives in, a world unrecognizable, and yet the same as it has always been: people killing one another with the closest tool at hand.

“Auntie Ellie, why are you crying? You’re such a dork. Yesterday you got upset at a nappy commercial,” Sophie says, crushing any illusion I may have had that my frequent tears have been well hidden.

Greg looks at me, more concerned than bemused. I have no idea if he knows I’m pregnant. Certainly, there haven’t been any gentleman callers as of late to indicate I’ve been up to some baby-making. Other than when my parents visited, my pay-as-you-go phone rarely rings, and when it does it’s either my brother or Claire, my brother to gush, Claire to thank me again and again for setting them up. Phillip’s out of the picture—no calls, no packages, no e-mails, no faxes—more radio silence. He makes only late-night appearances. I dream of him, mundane dreams in which we do things normal husbands and wives do, movies and dinner and loading the dishwasher; they fill me with such comfort that I have trouble escaping out of bed in the mornings. I want to stay tucked in my head, warm with my own boring memories that aren’t boring to me at all.

“You all right?” Greg asks me, handing over a paper towel, presumably for me to use as a tissue.

“Yeah, he just looked like a sweet man.”

“He lived to one hundred ten! We should all be so lucky.”

“We should all be so lucky,” Sophie echoes, but softly, as if she’s inputting the expression into her brain.

“I guess. I dunno, it’s still sad. That’s the dream, right? To survive something like a war and do something you love and live that long and have lots of kids and grandkids,” I say, thinking of my stomach, which hasn’t grown all that much. I look like I recently indulged in a bit too much Chinese food.

“My dream is to grow up and marry Inderpal and have lots of kids, at least ten, and be a news anchorman like that lady,” Sophie says, pointing at the screen. “She has a cool job. Or J. K. Rowling. I kind of want to be her too. I want to be lots of things.”

Greg smiles at Sophie, no longer concerned about her burgeoning interest in boys. He’s heard the marrying-Inderpal thing enough times that he doesn’t react. Now that he’s met the kid, heard Inderpal’s adorable adultspeak, listened to him talk about his rock collection and how he now wants to be a doctor
and
an astronomer and why he thinks Gordon Brown is underperforming as prime minister, Greg can’t help but approve. We are just relieved that she has found a real friend.

I take Sophie for playdates at the park, where she and Inderpal sit at the bottom of the slide, she with a Harry Potter on her lap, he listening to an audiobook through his iPod. Occasionally, Inderpal bops his head to make it look like he is listening to rap or Panjabi MC. We all pretend to be fooled.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Ellie?” Greg asks. He gives me a nostalgic look, one that says,
Are we there yet? Are we
actual grown-ups? Because this isn’t what I dreamed about when I wore pajamas with feet: to be a lost widower, a bored lawyer, a confused parent
. Sophie laughs at us, her assumption that we are too old to be fantasizing about our futures. Ours have arrived long ago.

“I have no idea. I used to want to be a CEO. That’s what I would say when I was little. I was rebelling against my mother. Now I don’t know. Definitely not what I was doing before I came here. Maybe an elementary-school teacher? What about you?”

“I want to live on a big farm and throw out my BlackBerry. Have one of those movie moments where I get to chuck the thing in the ocean or something. Maybe burn my ties too.”

“Your ties? But you like to look formal.”

“Not really. I just live in a formal world.”

“So why don’t you? Trade in that Beamer for a tractor. Put on some overalls and call it a day. Wake up and smell the manure. You can afford it.” Greg doesn’t answer me and doesn’t smile. He just looks away. Changing your whole way of life is easier said than done.

“Can we have sheeps? If we live on a farm?” Sophie asks.

“Sheep,” Greg and I both correct her in unison.

“Sheep,” she echoes, happy to have learned something new. I can’t help but think of the baby and know, with a guilty certainty, that he or she will never be this easy to please. “We should all be so lucky to have sheep.”