Amanda Bright @ Home (34 page)

“You’d think they’d have at least freshened up the paint a bit,” the buyer said. “Might’ve fetched a higher price.”

“It’s amazing what people learn to live with,” the agent replied.

Amanda would happily have taken a blowtorch to all of it herself. She had a new house of her own to dream about, a brand-new house with no history whatsoever. It was being built right now as she lay here on the mattress: a four-bedroom modern rambler set in an acre of woods, in a development named Sammamish Landing. No, no, no—it was not
that
sort of development. The house they had chosen had won a West Coast architectural award for its creative design and ecosensitivity. Glass-paneled walls generated solar heating; low-voltage lights reflected off steel-beamed, vaulted ceilings. The development was stepped into hills around a common trail; not far away was the town of Bothell, with its main street and riverside park and band shell. Bob’s new office was in the city of Bellevue, a ten-minute drive away—“that’s without traffic,” the agent warned, but Amanda did not care. Bob’s office could be on the moon, she was so happy. As she said to Bob, as they stood by the flagged posts that marked the site of their future house, “We never expected to be like this, did we?”

She was referring to their good fortune, but he replied, “There are a lot of things we never expected to be like.”

Amanda replayed the comment several times through her head to reassure herself that he had said it without bitterness. His eyes were surveying the field of churned-up mud. Did Bob see what she saw: the promise of a new life being raised before them? Or did he see, as he had joked, “the aftermath of the Somme,” a place that would always be tainted with defeat?

Amanda decided to let his remark go, and remained quietly at his side, holding his hand. The mist that had greeted them upon their arrival melted into a cold drizzle. Amanda called Ben and Sophie, who were poking sticks in mud puddles, and they retreated to their rental car, where the baby was strapped into her seat, asleep. Amanda had already pressed Bob on his feelings about his new job, and he had been adamant that it was the right choice—“If it’s good for all of us, then it will be good for me”—but she knew that Bob was anxious not to diminish her own enthusiasm, especially since he had spent so much effort convincing Amanda that the move to Bothell did not constitute a sellout.

“Mike Frith?” Amanda had uttered in amazement, a few days after she had given birth to Samantha. “You’re going to work for
Mike Frith?
”

“Keep your voice down, and let me explain.”

They were in Amanda’s hospital room, which she shared with a heavily medicated new mother and, for as long as visiting hours would permit, the woman’s husband and extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. The other half of the room resembled a florist shop; on Amanda’s side sat the lone bouquet of pink roses Bob had brought after she’d regained consciousness. The hospital did not allow flowers in intensive care, where Amanda had spent the first twenty-four hours of her stay—not even flowers brought by so formidable a person as Sarah Blumstein. Despite a prolonged argument over “the sterility of the environment contributing to the poor health of the patients,” Blumstein’s “life-sustaining” arrangement remained at the nurses’ station, where it withered after a day. Amanda was similarly protected from a bouquet sent by her mother. (“Although why she nearly had to die in childbirth, I can’t imagine,” Ellie Bright complained to Bob. “This is the problem with daughters—they never seek advice from their mothers, even when their mothers are experts. I could have told her she had toxemia, for God’s sake.”) Amanda herself did not remember being in intensive care. Nor did she remember a single detail of Samantha’s traumatic birth. She had lapsed into a coma immediately following her cesarean—a coma that the doctors, in their auto-mechanic way, described to Bob as being “fairly typical” and “nonpermanent.” As Amanda lay unconscious, their baby daughter had been whisked from the operating room to the neonatal intensive care unit, where her bright red body—so unfathomably tiny!—was punctured with tubes and sealed inside a Plexiglas tank.

Later Bob wondered aloud to Amanda if he had not had it the worst of any of them: in one room lay tiny Samantha, fighting for life; in another, his wife, unresponsive to words or touch. He did not leave the hospital to go home. He could not face home or the worried eyes of Ben and Sophie. Better the children should remain undisturbed with their neighbor, Marjorie, as if on a little holiday. Bob slept on a vinyl couch in the waiting room, and spent his days wandering up and down the hospital corridors like a shadow trapped in purgatory.

“I must be hallucinating again.” Amanda rearranged the pillow behind her head, and, with difficulty, rolled her body slightly to have a better view of Bob, who had pulled an armchair closer to her bed.
“Mike Frith?”

The laughter and baby-passing on the other side of the room went quiet. Apparently, her roommate’s relatives were also curious to hear Bob’s news. Bob yanked closed the curtain that divided the beds.

“I’m serious,” he whispered. “About a month ago I got this call from his people, feeling me out—you know, a would-you-consider-it sort of thing. It seems they’re interested in having someone like me come aboard as a corporate counsel, to help them comply with the consent decree—”

“You told them you wouldn’t consider it—didn’t you?”

Bob was fidgeting with the control pad of Amanda’s hospital bed. “No, I didn’t,” he said slowly. “I thought it might be worthwhile to hear what they had to offer.”

“But why?”

“Because it’s potentially a big offer, Amanda.”

She took the control pad from him so he would look at her and pushed the button that raised her head.

“I always thought that if you were to leave government, you’d go to work for someone like Chasen—or one of the smaller companies out in Silicon Valley. You know, one of the good guys.”

“I’m not sure any of them would fall within your definition of good guy. In any case, Chasen hasn’t returned my calls in weeks—you know that. Neither has Pressman, and he’s connected to pretty much everyone in California.”

“But Bob—really! Mike Frith? He’s like Dr. Evil. He’s the Dark Side. He’s—”

“—like every other entrepreneur with problems with the government. And this could be a real opportunity for me to do some good. Seriously—” he said as she wrinkled her nose—“don’t you think it would be something to try to help a company like Megabyte reform itself, if that’s its intention?”

“If that’s its intention,” Amanda replied skeptically.

“I’ll find out next week. That is, if you’re well enough by then for me to fly out overnight to meet Mike Frith himself.”

Amanda was well enough. She was discharged from the hospital ten days after she had entered it, leaving behind, with great anguish, her baby daughter, who needed another few weeks of care. Bob and Amanda took turns doing shifts in the hospital nursery, holding Samantha with sterile gloves, helping her delicate mouth latch on to the ungainly rubber nipple of a bottle, until, miraculously, one day she was able to come home, too. By then, Bob had flown out to Megabyte’s headquarters in Bellevue, and the matter had been decided.

“He’s an interesting guy, what can I say?” he told Amanda upon his return. His plane had landed late and when he arrived home he’d found himself confronted with the familiar plate of Thai noodles from Fresh Farms. “Very compelling, very persuasive, as all these big guys are.”

“They say Satan is charming, too.” Amanda was bustling about the kitchen in her bathrobe, putting things away.

“Come on. He’s hardly Satan. Look, I had my doubts going in. But he’s not what you expect, not entirely,” Bob said, chewing thoughtfully. “He’s eccentric, sure. I showed up in a suit, and he was dressed basically like a lumberjack, sitting behind this huge, ridiculous antique desk that looked like it came from the First Stagecoach Bank of Kalamazoo, or something. Anyway, he was frank. Said he could understand why I might not want to work for him, and then he made the case why I should. He’s planning on retiring from Megabyte in a couple of years, and he’s very keen to get the company on the right footing with the government. He said I had integrity—that no one would doubt my commitment to making sure Megabyte complied with the DOJ’s orders—”

“He meant you’re a good beard.”

“Maybe,” Bob said, a little irritably, “but you know me, Amanda, and I’m not going to serve as anyone’s ‘beard.’ I told him outright—if I were to come aboard, I would have to have the power to make the necessary changes.”

“And?”

“He agreed.”

“So what did you say?”

“I said I’d think about it—talk it over with you, et cetera.” Bob added, as if an afterthought, “The money he offered wasn’t bad, either.”

Amanda stopped what she was doing. “How much?”

“Think of the biggest sum of money you can imagine anyone wanting to pay me—”

“Two hundred thousand dollars?”

“—and then double it.”

Amanda covered her mouth with her hand.

“Yup. Oh—and did I mention this? We get a car upon signing. Frith recommended the new Volvo station wagon—he drives it himself—but I said I’d have to consult you about that.”

“He drives a
Volvo station wagon?
”

“He’s got four kids, and he thinks it’s the safest vehicle on the road. He’s also philosophically opposed to SUVs, which he believes are bad for the environment.”

“Don’t tell me he’s an environmentalist,” Amanda said weakly.

“Okay, I won’t.”

He stared at the remainder of his noodles. “I wonder if there’s a Fresh Farms in Bellevue?”

Now Bob was gone. He’d left a week ago to start his new job. Amanda and the children would follow him at the beginning of next month. They’d rented a furnished apartment in Bellevue, which they’d occupy until their new house was finished. Most of their boxes would be sent into storage, a prospect Amanda looked forward to: it would feel as if she were putting most of their old life away, and when it came time to unpack, she would save only those pieces that still seemed desirable.

Amanda shifted herself gently on the mattress so that her face was closer to Samantha’s. She closed her eyes and inhaled the sweet soapy scent of her baby’s skin. Samantha paddled her little limbs. Amanda began to drift off again, thoughts of moving and packing and new lives washing in and out of her mind, until the baby’s cooing gradually increased to fussing, and she was drawn sharply back into wakefulness.

“Here, darling.” Amanda reached for a bottle and arranged her arm so Samantha could feed while lying next to her. She watched, spellbound, as the baby’s mouth seized fiercely on the nipple. Samantha’s gray-blue eyes were as bright as stars and seemed every bit as far away, as if the baby dwelt in some heavenly realm of her own and had not yet joined them in their earthly life. Amanda could gaze at her for hours like this. She had been heartbroken that she was not able to nurse her baby—the Plexiglas tank put an end to that—but she was also amused at herself for being heartbroken. It had always felt like a chore to nurse Ben and Sophie: every two hours, no matter what she was doing, the babies’ cries would reel her in. Their demands at night felt vampirelike and left her drained and exhausted.

This time Amanda treasured her baby’s every new gesture, every new sound. She mourned the passing of each phase of infancy, as if with this child, Amanda could finally appreciate the brevity of childhood. The cords that connected mother to child were not, as Amanda had once thought, as thick and constraining as ropes, but as thin and light as gossamer. Every day a strand broke and fell away.

Already Ben had lost the dimples on his hands. His skin was taking on the tarnish of an active boy. When he came into the house he always brought a bit of the outside world with him. And Sophie—since the baby had come, she had begun asserting her own superior maturity, demonstrating all the things she could do that Samantha could not, and assuming the role of mommy whenever Amanda left the room. One day—a day not too far from now, Amanda realized—the baby she would cradle in her arms would not be hers but would belong to Ben or Sophie or even Samantha, and she would be its grandmother. Amanda would tell herself that this was not possible because time could not move that quickly. But it does, it does, as her own grandmother once warned her, and what’s worse, it only speeds up.

Samantha’s eyelids, translucent as onion skin, were closed, and her lips were still moving up and down but lazily now, barely taking in milk. Amanda gently disengaged Samantha’s mouth from the nipple, and lifted the baby onto her chest, ostensibly to burp her but more to relish these last weeks when her daughter was small enough to sleep upon her heart.

As Amanda rubbed Samantha’s back, it occurred to her that each one of her children had taught her something new. Her first child had taught her how to be a mother. Her second child had taught her how to be a family. And her third—what would this third baby teach her? Maybe, she hoped, how to be a mother and still be herself.

She did not know how she was going to do it. She did not know any woman her age who
had
done it. Amanda admired Liz and took comfort in her friendship, but she could not join her friend’s crusade. “This is not my cause,” Amanda had found herself saying to Liz one day, after the birth of Samantha, “it’s just my life.” And what she wanted, dearly, was for that life to feel normal. Had other generations of women doubted themselves like this? Maybe. Maybe every generation has felt that it had to reinvent the wheel. After all, the road keeps changing. Her grandmother’s World War II generation had embraced motherhood and rejected careers; her mother’s post-war generation rejected motherhood and embraced careers. And Amanda’s?

Well, that she did not know. But she did know this: she, Amanda Bright, was a frontierswoman, who, like so many clever, ambitious women of her generation, had one day found herself in the wilderness with a baby on her hip, only to discover that nothing she had learned growing up had prepared her for her new world.