Nantucket Nights (16 page)

“One day when I was pretty far along, seven months or so, I found myself down at Penn Station, and I decided to surprise him. I got on the Metroliner and walked from the train station to his hotel. The front desk clerk knew I was his pregnant wife. He gave me a key to his room; he was happy to do it.”

Theo felt like he was standing on a cliff where he was drawn to the edge, yet afraid of falling. “And?” he said.

“And I walked in on him having sex with two women. Monica, who was his consulting partner and another woman, their client. The three of them were so ... involved with each other, they didn’t even notice me standing there until finally I thought to scream. They all noticed that.”

Antoinette was openly weeping, wandering the room like she was looking for something. A tissue, maybe. She disappeared into the bathroom and emerged with a hand towel.

“His name was Darren.” Antoinette blew her nose into the towel. “I haven’t spoken that name in over twenty years. Darren Riley.”

“You still use his last name,” Theo said.

“I loved my husband. I loved him desperately. He was one of those special people who everybody loves—men, women, dogs, babies. He was charming, dynamic, funny. And that was his downfall. Women fell over themselves for him, they allowed themselves to be degraded. Monica later told me that there had been other threesomes, in other cities, in California, and before that, even.”

Theo thought he might vomit. He grabbed a pillow and pressed it to his crotch. “What did you do?” he asked.

“I went back to New York, alone. Darren didn’t bother trying to get me back. I guess he knew he blew it. He gave me a quick divorce and lots of money. But it was like he didn’t even try. He didn’t apologize, and suddenly it seemed he didn’t want the baby after all. When she was born, I couldn’t make myself feel anything but anger. I couldn’t feel any love for her; I couldn’t even give her a name.”

“So what happened?”

“I tried to kill myself. I took pills. My neighbor found me unconscious, the baby screaming in her crib. I hadn’t fed her in, like, twelve hours. Social services took the baby away and by the time I was released from the hospital I realized I couldn’t raise her. I didn’t want to raise her.” Antoinette pressed her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose and threw the towel into the corner of the room. “What has stayed with me after so many years is how Darren made me love that child and then he stole that love away. It is the cruelest thing I’ve ever known anyone to do.” After a few seconds, Antoinette straightened into perfect posture. “After the baby was gone, I moved away and started over.”

“You came here?” Theo said.

“I constructed a life that allowed me to survive day to day. Minimal interaction, no one to care about but myself. Here in the woods on this island thirty miles out to sea. This is it, Theo. This is my life.”

She retreated into the bathroom. Theo dressed quietly; it was past time for him to go, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave. No information for months, and now a deluge.

“So now you think you’re pregnant again?”

She stood with her hands on either side of the sink, staring into the mirror. She nodded.

Here was the one thing that Theo had been afraid of ever since he knew enough to be afraid of it, and now he wasn’t afraid at all, he was excited. Thrilled. Antoinette, pregnant.

“It’s okay,” he said. “If you’re pregnant, it’s okay.”

“It’s anything but okay,” Antoinette said. “God is punishing me.”

“For what?”

“For you,” Antoinette said. “For sleeping with an eighteen-year-old.”

 “I want to have a baby with you,” Theo said.

 “No, you don’t. We’ll do what’s easiest for both of us. If I’m pregnant, I’ll have an abortion.”

“But I love you! I’ve been trying to tell you I love you for weeks, but it’s like you don’t hear me.”

 “I hear you,” she said.

 “But you don’t believe me.”

“I believe you,” she said.

 “But you don’t love me back.”

 “There’s no way to make you understand. You’re too young. And so you’re just going to have to trust me, Theo.” She walked toward him and took hold of his face, her hand resting exactly on the spot where she had slapped him, only now she was gentle, as gentle as if he were a baby himself, and he saw that her eyes were filled with something, and he let himself believe that it might be love.

There was a day or two of reflection. Theo marveled at the power of his own body; he’d created another human being. He ran through scheme after scheme, one more unlikely than the next. He and Antoinette marrying, raising the child. Theo would graduate from high school in a year. He would forgo college and work for his father. Or, if his parents disowned him, he and Antoinette and the baby would move off-island. To California. France. South Africa.

In the evenings, Theo tried to get Antoinette to talk about her past some more, but she wouldn’t. Sometimes she was upbeat, and when he arrived she’d be sitting on the built-in benches of her deck with a glass of chardonnay and a book. Other days he found her in the bedroom with the shades drawn, and when he knocked on the door or tousled her hair, she opened one eye and murmured, “Go away, Theo. Go home to your mother.”

Then, on the first of August, a day when his job at the airport had been particularly hellish—all the July people leaving, the August people arriving— she showed him the pregnancy test. It was one of the evenings when she was out on the deck. She poured him a glass of wine, and they sat quietly listening to the birds in the surrounding trees, and then she went into the bedroom and came back with a white plastic stick with two purple stripes. Antoinette held it out to him, turning it in the fading light as though he might want to inspect its authenticity.

“Well,” he said. “Now what?”

“I’ve made an appointment off-island for the Tuesday after Labor Day,” she said. “An appointment for an abortion. That gives me four weeks to think it over.”

“Don’t have an abortion,” Theo said. “Please.”

“I don’t see any options,” Antoinette said. “You, my dear, are in no position to think about being a father. Not at eighteen.”

He no longer felt eighteen, and he said so.

“Well, then, what about Kayla?” Antoinette said. “This will devastate her. Your mother’s one of my few friends in this world, and I’m not prepared to destroy her, or the rest of your family, for that matter.”

“What my mother thought didn’t seem to bother you before,” Theo said.

“It bothers me now. I’ve crossed a line.” She looked at him with genuine sadness. “I’m sorry, Theo. I’m sorry for starting all this.”

“Why did you, then?” he said. “If you don’t love me, I mean?”

“Oh, Theo.”

“No, really, I’m curious. Was this all about the sex? You came to my baseball game and you liked my body? You figured because I’m only eighteen that I’d be okay with sex, no strings attached?”

“It wasn’t that.”

“What was it, then?”

“Look at my life, Theo.” She gestured to the surrounding woods, which were growing dark. “It’s pretty damn solitary. I don’t believe in other people. Not after what happened to me.”

“Why did you let me into your life, then?” Theo asked.

“Because you’re young, you haven’t acquired a lot of the crap that older men carry around with them. You’re clean, you’re honest. You’re good. You’re Kayla’s son, and Kayla is one of the people I feel safe with.”

Theo set down his wineglass and leaned over the railing of the deck. Fireflies lit up the woods. “First you tell me you want to abort our child because of my mother and then you tell me the reason you slept with me in the first place is because I’m my mother’s son and therefore a safe harbor for you? What I would really like is for you to forget about my mother. Our relationship, our
baby,
is about you and me.”

“I wish that were true, Theo.” She finished her wine and disappeared into the house. Maybe she wanted Theo to follow her, but he wouldn’t do it. He hopped the railing and strode across her soft, green lawn. When Theo got into his Jeep, he saw it was nine o’clock.

“Where were you?” his mother asked when he got home. She was alone in the kitchen, drying the dinner dishes. “This exploring of yours is getting a little suspect.” She got in his face and sniffed his breath. “Have you been drinking, Theo?”

He stared at his mother. She had a tan and her hair was lighter now that it was summer. When he was a little boy, he always told her how pretty she was. Now, he wanted to slap her.

“Fuck you,” he said. He breezed past her and went up to his room.

Hating his mother gave him focus; he funneled all his anger, his hurt, his frustration into dealing with her. She had been a good person to him his whole life, and he had tried to return the favor. But now he couldn’t look into her face without thinking of the abortion. His child, the only thing he had ever created, ripped from Antoinette’s body and discarded. It was his mother’s fault.

Hating his mother transformed him. His anger swirled around him like a wind, blowing his mother—and father and brother and sisters—away. His mother was afraid of him now, he could see it in her eyes, and that made him hate her more.
“Fuck you,”
he said.
“Please just shut the fuck up, and lose some fucking weight while you’re at it.”
He left the house without explanation. He shunned his chores. And on one night when Antoinette had refused to sleep with him, saying it would be best if they
cooled things off,
he drove his Jeep through his mother’s garden. He threw the Jeep into four-wheel-drive and ran over the puny wire fence she put up to keep rabbits out. He drove back and forth over her herbs and vegetables, breaking zucchini and cucumbers, squashing tomatoes, until every plant was mangled and the garden was marred by deep tire ruts.
Fuck you,
he thought.
Fuck you and your stupid garden.

He kept expecting to be punished. He expected his father, at the very least, to say something. But his parents steered clear; they let him go, his anger trailing behind him like a stench.

As Labor Day approached, Antoinette grew more distant. When he stopped by, she no longer offered him wine, and making love was out of the question. Seeing her still aroused Theo—and once he excused himself to her bathroom, where he masturbated into one of her hand towels. He didn’t care if she knew what he was doing.

When they had a week left, he asked her, “You’re going through with it?”

“Of course, Theo,” she said. Again, on the deck drinking chardonnay but not offering him any. She looked at him as though he were the paper boy. “Don’t you think you should be heading home?”

Then the Friday of Labor Day weekend arrived and Theo knew Antoinette would be going for her annual pilgrimage to Great Point with his mother. Before she left, Theo drove to her house to confront her, because he was sure that spending time with his mother would only convince her further that an abortion was the right thing. He walked into her house without knocking, to show her that he wasn’t timid anymore. He wasn’t the boy that she’d led inside in April. But he checked all the rooms—no Antoinette. Then he heard a car door and peeked out the window. Antoinette climbed out of a taxi. He met her at the door, even though he could see the girl driving the taxi was Sara Poncheau, from school. Antoinette was carrying a plastic tub of lobsters; he took the tub from her and brought it into the kitchen.

“What are you doing here?” Antoinette asked.

“I don’t think you should go tonight,” he said.

She laughed. “That’s not your decision.”

“Still.”

Antoinette poured herself a glass of wine. “Well, I’m going.”

“I’ll have a glass of wine,” Theo said.

She stared at him a second, then took out a goblet and poured him some wine. It was a small, small victory. “You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”

“Do I need a reason to come by? A man should be able to come by and see his own child when he pleases.”

“There’s no child to see,” Antoinette said. It was true: No sign of pregnancy had manifested itself yet on her body. She was wearing another black outfit: leotard, leggings, Chuck Taylors; and her stomach was pancake flat. “But speaking of one’s child, it just so happens that my daughter is coming tomorrow.”

“Your
daughter?”
he said. “The one you gave away?”

“That’s the one.”

“How did she find you?” he asked.

Antoinette drank her wine, and Theo felt a surge of protectiveness for his own unborn child inside her, whom he was helpless to protect. Just a cluster of cells,, really—still, with a beating heart, probably, and a sex—and here was Antoinette
drinking wine
because she didn’t give a shit. Theo took a deep breath.

“The Internet,” Antoinette said. “She hooked up with some group on the Internet that connects children with their birth parents. A representative called me and said Lindsey had been making inquiries and asked if I would let them give her my phone number. With the understanding that she might not use it. But then she did call and we talked. She sounds amazingly normal.”

“I’m surprised you let her call you,” Theo said.

“I surprised myself.”

“But you’re still going to kill our baby?” he said. He grabbed her wrist and her wine sloshed.

“Don’t, Theo.”

He clenched her wrist so tightly that she dropped her glass and it shattered against the kitchen floor. “I’m not going to let you do it,” he said. “I’ll follow you off-island if I have to. I’ll follow you right into the clinic.”

“This isn’t your decision, Theo,” Antoinette said. “God, why don’t you just let me be, boy? Let it go? You’re young, you’ll have plenty of children once you’re older, once you’re married. This isn’t something you want, Theo.”

“You’re not going to kill our child, Antoinette,” he said. “I won’t let you.”

Her voice was icy. “It’s time for you to leave.”

He kissed her hard on the lips, leaving behind a fleck of dill from the cucumber salad he’d eaten at home. He tried to wipe it away, but she swung at him. “Get out!” she said. She bent down to pick up the shards of glass but did so with her eyes trained warily on him, as though she were afraid he might attack her. This made him feel powerful—finally, she noticed him, respected him—but it made him feel sad, too.