After You (26 page)

“A panic attack,” my mother repeats, her voice calm at first, taking it in. “You are telling me he had a God damn panic attack at the altar? That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

And then she starts to laugh and cry, all at once in a rush of release, the two sounds blurring until they sound like, until they are, exactly the same thing.

* * *

Later, we all stand around my dad’s bed, a half circle. He is spending the night at the hospital for observation. He looks embarrassed to have found himself like this today, without his designer gray suit,
him
the one in a gown, papery thin and mint green, his skinny white-haired limbs on display, betraying the truth that none of us can bear to see: He is getting older, and one day he’ll stop doing that.

“So,” he says to my mother, who, as soon as she sees him, kisses his whole face, again and again, forehead, cheeks, eyes, nose, lips, until the rest of us look away.

“So,” she says. “Don’t you ever d—Don’t you dare ever do that on me.”

She can’t finish, she won’t finish, because there are some vows you can make and some you can’t, no matter how hard or how much you want to be able to.

And there are some three-letter words that can’t be said on days like this.

“I’ll try my best,” he says.

My mother shakes her head at him, scoots herself into his bed, so they are body to body and I don’t know where he ends and she begins under the white hospital sheet. “Not yet.”

“Not yet.”

“Honey?”

“Yeah.”

“I told you so.”

“Told me so what?”

“We totally should have gotten the wedding insurance.”

47

P
hillip drives Mikey and Claire and me back to the house. The hospital has given my mother a cot, and she will stay there by my father’s side until he is discharged tomorrow morning. Though she will not sleep—the terror still clings to all of us, just like the antiseptic smell of the waiting room—I know she will not have a single instinct to run. She will ride that fine line between exhilaration and claustrophobia that comes along with finding yourself exactly where you are supposed to be.

From the look of the backyard, it seems the party dispersed itself in an orderly fashion. The tent is gone, the chairs returned to the rental company, the dance floor that was laid out in the far corner of the grass packed up, leaving behind a square of flattened green. Only the chuppah remains outside, my grandfather’s tallis still tied down across the top, the tassels flapping in the wind.

The food is left waiting for us, Saran-Wrapped, half in the freezer and the refrigerator, half laid out on the table. My dad went traditional on the menu, chicken or beef or vegetable, mini hot dogs and crab cakes to start. The flowers, too, have been brought inside and decorate the house. Looking through the back window, it seems someone either recently wed or died.

Phillip and I sit in the living room, just the side-table lamp on, the way it was left this morning. Claire and Mikey have gone upstairs, after a wave good night and Mikey giving Phillip a hug and a “Thanks, man.”

I feel a rush of pride that I married someone like this, even if he no longer wants to belong to me. He was strong and capable and fast, calling 911 at the same time he loosened my father’s tie, cradled his head. Gliding through traffic, fearless, like a car thief, which it turns out he sort of was: When the ambulance came, he grabbed a random set of keys from the valet. We found out later, from an understanding answering-machine message, that the borrowed Prius belonged to one of the flutists.

After Oliver, too, Phillip was the one who paid all the bills and dealt with Blue Cross Blue Shield, and went back to work, and still made sure I was eating and there was dinner on the table that included a vegetable. At the time, what appeared to be superhuman seemed like a slap in the face; it seemed
wrong
, somehow, that he could be okay, when I could barely brush my teeth. Didn’t he notice that our baby—that Oliver—had died? His ability to function only highlighted all that I was incapable of, seemed like evidence that he had managed to bypass the pain. I couldn’t understand how he found a way to lose less.

Now I realize, sitting here in the half dark of the living room, that I left him with no choice. Just like when I found myself making tea for Greg and breakfast for Sophie after Lucy’s funeral, someone has to be the adult. Phillip was keeping his vows,
in sickness and in health
, and he was taking care of me in the only way he knew how. I used it to divide us, because we seemed too far apart, unequal to the task at hand, and somehow, along the way, I forgot how to talk to my husband. And he forgot how to talk to me.

“You were, um, great today. I don’t know what we would have done without you,” I say, hoping my voice tells him how grateful I am. No matter what has happened or what happens between us going forward, my family was lucky to ever count him as one of us.

“Please, stop. I’m just glad he’s going to be okay.” Phillip puts his head against the back of the couch and closes his eyes. The anxiety still hasn’t left us, despite the doctor’s reassurance and seeing my dad look almost the same as he did this morning, though decidedly less dapper. That sort of emotion doesn’t just go; it sits on you, has aftershocks. All of us, except Phillip, cried at least once during the car ride home. “I am so tired. I feel like I’m a hundred years old.”

“I know what you mean.” I stare into the dark corners of the room, where the built-in bookcase lines the wall. I can’t see the books, but I know they are there, as they always have been, installed and filled by my dad right after he bought the house. As if keeping all that knowledge around could protect us from real life. Maybe that’s why my father has never seemed to fear his own mortality. He thought his books protected him. Who knows? Maybe they do.

“Phillip?”

“Yeah?”

“We need to talk.”

“I know. Please not tonight. I’m just … I’m out of strength for the day. I’m all tapped out.” This is the closest Phillip has ever come to expressing weakness, humanness, and it makes me want to crumble. I want to take him in my arms, kiss his face like I saw my mother do to my father not too long ago. Kisses that say,
You are mine, and you are loved
.

“Fair enough. You’re welcome to stay here tonight. You shouldn’t drive home. I won’t, you know, try anything,” I say. He smiles at me, a tired smile, somewhat charmed despite himself by our regression to high school terms.

“Okay.”

Phillip follows me upstairs to my bedroom, the same one my mother used to get ready this morning. Her makeup is scattered on my desk, her veil, which at the last minute she opted out of as too traditional, sits on my chair, the scene disorienting and disarming at the same time. What was supposed to happen and what actually did, so far apart it seems impossible. It was years ago—two different people talking—when my mother promised me that she’d show up.

Phillip and I crawl into my bed, and we each lie on our back, eyes open to the blackness. “Good night,” I say.

“Good night,” he says.

And then, in my head, one word, an introduction for our baby:
Dad
.

We sleep that way straight through the night, Phillip and I, like two gingerbread men, overcooked and flattened by the weight of the day. Our fingertips almost, almost touching.

The next morning we decide to do this walking. Actually, it is Phillip’s idea to stroll around the neighborhood, which is always at its most beautiful in autumn, when the air has just the starting edge of cold, a promise that there will be a winter, and then a spring after that, nature keeping its time, even when you don’t want it to. The Harvard students are back from summer break, backpacked and earnest and, at least for the undergrads, experiencing what it’s like to be away from home for the first time. They scamper by us in groups on Mass Ave. and punctuate the air with their nervous chatter and occasional outbursts of overblown hilarity.

“Any word from the hospital?” Phillip asks, just to be polite. He must know that if there had been bad news I would have told him already.

“Yup. Dad’s coming home today. Everything looks fine.”

“Thank God. So what happens now? You think they’ll try to get married again?”

“Who knows? My mom said she thinks this whole thing is a sign that they should get hitched. My dad has taken it as a sign that they shouldn’t.”

“Typical.” His voice is imbued with fondness. He’s always enjoyed the quirkiness of my parents. So different from his own, who have been quietly and unhappily married for forty years.

At Harvard Square, the punks are out, as always, wearing the uniforms of their rebellion, tattoos and piercings and Mohawks, a uniform that has never changed for as long as I can remember. I wonder if it would break their hearts to learn that they are just like everyone else, and one another, and probably their parents before them.

When we lived in the Back Bay we used to walk here, first across the bridge and then down Memorial Drive along the river, finally turning toward the Square to reward ourselves with cheap beers at the happy hour at John Harvard’s. The place had enough of a yuppified air and plenty of B-school students at the bar to make sure we didn’t stick out as the lifestyle tourists that we were. My father would sometimes come to meet us, sometimes not, depending on whether he had devoted his weekend to Widener, Harvard’s library, which is more beautiful but not nearly as much fun as my new favorite British one at St. Pancras. At the time, Phillip and I were only a handful of years out of college ourselves, and returning to the life of a student felt like a relaxing regression. Sometimes even a necessity.

We wind our way down to the Charles River, where the groups thin out into couples with books but no intention of reading, and families on blankets eating out of Tupperware, and solo bicyclists stopping for a break against a tree. The rowers are out, gliding by, keeping an easy rhythm. I didn’t realize how much I missed this particular scene, one I’ve been a part of since I was a little kid, until I am back here again, listening to the melodic splash of the water, the hissing of the feverish wind. We are not far from the spot where Phillip proposed.

He chooses a patch of grass, and then we sit next to each other, our arms resting on our bent knees.

“I’ll start.” There is no more room for stalling. We are here, and we need to talk, and no amount of fear is going to keep this conversation from happening. “First of all, I’m sorry.”

“For what?” He says it like he’s genuinely curious about which of my many sins I’ve decided to apologize for.

“It wasn’t fair how I stayed in London, and I barely even let you know what was going on in my head and why I felt I had to be there. I can’t say I’m sorry for being there—I don’t know if you’ll ever understand that I had to be—but I’m sorry for the way I handled it.”

Phillip picks up a twig from the ground and starts to peel off the bark with his fingernail. He looks like he’s getting ready to prepare bark soup.

“You know us separating wasn’t just about you leaving,” he says, his words slow and methodical.

“I know. But I’m sorry anyway.”

“None of it matters, does it? We can say all the things we never said and go around and around and point fingers—God knows I’ve done it enough times in my head—but it’s not going to get us anywhere. You know what it comes down to?”

I don’t answer, because I don’t know what it comes down to. I wish it were simple enough to come down to one thing.

“We were put to the biggest test a marriage can be put to. I mean, I never, ever thought, I couldn’t imagine, we’d have to go through what we went through, but the saddest part, almost as sad as losing Oliver, is that we failed.”

“I know.”

“We failed the test, Ellie. The shit hit the fan and we did the opposite of what we were supposed to. We went ahead and lost each other.” His voice catches, and he throws his stick as far as it will go. It lands in the water, barely rippling the surface.

The tears begin to build behind my eyes, because for the first time since that horrible day almost two years ago now, Phillip says the exact right thing. We lost Oliver, and then we turned a dead baby into a bat and used him as a weapon to destroy ourselves. I don’t know how to respond, so I say what comes into my mind next, a non sequitur, and yet not really. Not a non sequitur at all.

“I’m pregnant. I mean, we’re having a baby.”

Phillip freezes, and in that moment all the air is sucked out of the universe, and it feels like we are inside, somewhere without oxygen, not by the Charles, not in an old favorite spot where we used to be able to say anything. I feel the baby in there, in a physical way, not a kick or a stirring but just in there, deep inside and attached to me, still growing its cells, increasing its molecular mass, nonetheless.

“That one night? In London?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t ask what I expected him to ask next, the worst question imaginable:
Are you sure it’s mine?
There’s relief, at the very least, in that. After all this, I’ve still kept a part of my former self intact. I’ve always been honest.

“Oh. I. I. Are you serious?”

“I’m serious.”

“Have you been to a doctor? A good doctor? And what did they say about, you know, last time? Will she be okay?” His voice has risen an octave in panic; he is as scared as I was when, not so long ago, I was breathing in and out of a paper bag.

“She?” Despite myself, despite the weight of the moment, I’m touched that he’s already making grand gender leaps.

“Is it a he?”

“I don’t know yet. And the doctor said that there is no more or less chance than last time. It’s unlikely.”

“But what if? I mean, it was unlikely last time too. One in two hundred is still one in two hundred.” He puts his head between his knees to catch his breath, and just like that, we have a role reversal. I’m calming him down. I’m the one who will be strong for us.

“She or he is going to be fine. I don’t know how, but I just know. We will be fine.”

“You almost died the last time.”

“I didn’t. Not really.”

“You lost a lot of blood, and you could have—” His voice breaks, and I see the panic he must have felt on that day, the possibility that he could have walked out of the hospital having lost everything all at once. He had everything to lose too. He always has.

“I didn’t and I won’t. And this baby won’t.”

“How many weeks?”

“Thirteen.”

“This big,” he says, demonstrating the baby’s length, as I did for Sophie. Thumb to pointer finger. Phillip read all the books last time; he loved the books, used to read me random facts out loud.

We sit without talking for a while. I feel relief having said the words; Phillip knows, and now it’s real. My tadpole is not a tadpole anymore. My tadpole has graduated to baby. I let Phillip think whatever he’s thinking, let him sort through the land mine I have set off in his life. I’ll let him wade his way through until he comes out the other end.