One Small Thing (19 page)

“What do you want, Aves?”

Before she could stop herself, she blurted, “My baby.”

“Oh, hon. I know.”

“No you don’t,” said Avery, looking at Valerie. “There’s no way you can. You have your baby. You got him right away. I was strapped down on tables like Frankenstein, and even then my body wouldn’t work. You don’t know what that’s like at all.”

“Oh.” Valerie pulled her hands away from Avery’s.

“It’s true. I don’t begrudge you Tomás. I love Tomás. He is the baby I’d love to have myself. But it was getting so hard to be with you and him all the time. I didn’t want to be, but I was jealous. I could feel it under my skin, growing every day like fungus. It was eating me alive.”

“But Avery, you gave up. You called Dr. Browne and stopped everything. That’s not going to help you get pregnant. That’s not going to give you your baby.”

Avery stood up and unzipped her skirt. “Yeah, well now it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to get what I want, am I? I’ve got a strange, damaged kid coming my way. I’ve got a husband I don’t know. I’m going to focus on work. I’ll take that instead.” She slipped off her skirt and hung it up. “It’s all I have left.”

“Oh, please!” Valerie stood up and shook her head. “Look around you! Come on. Can’t you see what Dan is trying to do? He’s trying so hard to make it work. He loves you.”

“Right,” said Avery, jerking a pair of pants out of her suitcase and flicking them straight. “If that was true, he’d have told me about Randi from the very beginning. He would have trusted me.”

“Have you said that? Have you told him how you feel? Have you told him anything?” Valerie looked at her, more softly than Avery could have looked at her, especially if Valerie had told her she’d resented her pregnancy and baby.

“Sort of. Not really. Anyway, it’s done, isn’t it? There you all are fixing his room. What can I do?” Avery turned to the closet and hung up her pants, grabbing onto the hanging clothes to steady her. She could see her life was spinning away from her. She was like a faraway satellite or comet that came close to the earth only every few years, passing overhead once only every five years. The next time she orbited, Daniel would be a teenager, his friends in her house, Dan barbequing them steaks; Tomás would be a five-year-old with a three-year-old sister, both playing on the lawn, while Valerie rubbed her pregnant-again stomach. It was like the view she had of her family life before her father died. Every year, it grew farther and farther away, her dad’s face a blur under his dark hair, her own teenaged body barely a memory.

“It doesn’t have to be like that. You can come back. You can make decisions about the room and everything.” Valerie moved closer to her, and Avery could smell her friend, the slight, sweet scent of breast milk, baby lotion, soap. She wanted to lean against Val, pull her close, believe her as she had about the infertility treatments, the crib, the paint, the clothes in the catalogues. Val had been her truest friend since Jonnie Frankel in high school. How Avery had loved to run over there and sink into the Delgado’s red couch, sipping (pre-Tomás) Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay and eating cheese and crackers. She loved her friend, but all that had happened had changed the pattern of their friendship, starting really from the day Valerie found out she was pregnant. It was their shared desire and exact circumstances that had brought them together. And nothing Valerie had envisioned for Avery had come true, and now Avery was on her own because Luis did not have a secret son or a drugged-out, dead, ex-girlfriend. There was nothing for them to talk about any more.

Sighing and standing straight, Avery turned to Valerie. “It’s hard, that’s all. I’m sorry. I’ll get better. Listen, I’m going to go to the bathroom and clean up. I’m pretty tired. I’ll be right out, okay?”

Valerie moved forward a step and then stopped, something in Avery’s eyes telling her what her words had not. “Oh, all right.”

Avery turned back to the closet and listened as Valerie walked out, closing the door behind her, leaving Avery alone, the noises of laughter and planning and building as far away as a distant planet.



In the kitchen, she put on the kettle, leaning against the counter as the gas burned blue under the steel. Isabel came into the kitchen, her face slightly red and moist.

“I haven’t put something like that together since . . . .” She trailed off and opened the refrigerator, taking out a plastic bottle of Crystal Geyser water.

Avery turned toward her, her arms folded across her chest. “Since when, Mom? I don’t remember you putting together anything. Most stuff was just delivered, and then, you know, not delivered at all.” She felt heat under skin and moved away from the stove.

Her mother looked at her and nodded. “You’re right. So I’ll say it differently. I’m glad to feel like this now. I’m glad to be of use. That’s all I’ve wanted recently. That’s all I want now.”

“Oh. Oh. Oh, that’s great.” Avery’s lips trembled, and she took the tea kettle off the flame, watching the blue tips of fire lick the air. “Wonderful. Just flipping wonderful.”

“Avery, can’t you see this might be what you’ve wanted all along.”

“Are you crazy, Mom? Do you really think—“ She stopped, hearing Dan’s voice travel down the hall. She began again, whispering. “So you think that finding this out about Dan is what I’ve always wanted?”

Isabel shook her head and then sipped from the water bottle. “No. That’s not what I mean. It’s the child. The boy. Daniel. He’s yours. He’s what you’ve wanted in a strange way. He’s not a baby, of course.”

“And not mine, Mom.”

“But he’s Dan’s. And Dan is your husband. Things don’t always work out as planned, you know.”

“Yeah, Mom. I know that. Look at us. Our life. Look—look at Dad!”

Putting down her drink, Isabel turned toward her and then moved closer. Avery closed her eyes and imagined her first-class seat in the jet, her body hurtling through the air somewhere over Tulsa, Boise, Reno. Anywhere but here, with her mother suddenly wanting to talk, in this house, where everyone was working away from and against her.

“Listen, Sweetie, it was so hard. I should have talked more to you, let you know how I was feeling, when your father got sick. And later.” Isabel paused, the hum of the fridge like an annoying bug Avery wanted to swat. “We just never talked about it.”

Avery looked up quickly and waved her mother’s words away. “And now isn’t the time Mom. God, I’m so glad I came home. Everyone is all over me.” Again, she thought of Mischa, the night he knocked on her hotel door, holding a bottle of Dom Perignon and two ounces of Beluga caviar. She’d opened her door, staring, thinking,
What? You keep jars of caviar around? Spares for going to women’s hotel rooms? Your cultural calling card?
She half expected him to whip out bottles of Stoli and a couple of Russian nesting dolls, an ambassador of seduction. But then he’d smiled, brushed his thick blond hair up over his forehead, his blue eyes on her, on her, on her.

She could call Brody and concoct an excuse to get back to St. Louis, a plane trip only days away. Mischa would still be there, working on the office system, his next stop Dallas. She could end up there soon enough, organizing a system for Sherman Wilson Insurance or Home Spot. Avery blinked, breathing out, breathing in. Her kitchen, her mother. How she should be acting. What she should do. Avery shook her head. “What is this, the month of revelation? I’ve gone all these years without knowing about Dan. Without you talking about Dad. Why now? Whenever I’ve said something before, you’ve ignored me.”

“I was talking with Dan—“

“Dan? About what?”

“About that time.” Isabel stared at her softly, her eyes so full of lines. Avery blinked and swallowed, clutching her stomach that still felt hard and full and weighty.

“Mom. Please. I’m so tired. I’m sorry. I can’t talk about this.”

“That’s exactly what I told Dan. Every time I try to talk to you about your father, you leave the room.”

Avery ran a hand back and forth on the kitchen tile, running a finger down a line of grout, her tongue circling in her mouth for the least angry words. “
I
leave the room? Me? I don’t think so. You never keep the discussion going. I want to. So does Loren. God knows what Mara wants. But from the very beginning, you were too zonked out, and then it was like forbidden territory. No one could enter without the map no one could find.”

They stared at each other. Avery felt like she was seeing her mother from another perspective, the same way she felt while leaning against the bedroom door, Loren next to her, the mound of their mother’s still body. She clenched the bridge of her nose with a thumb and index finger, squeezing the skin as if pressure could push away this conversation. And then, as if in answer, Luis walked into the kitchen. “Okay! Come see, it. It’s all done.”

Avery stared at her mother, who was almost old now. For so long, she’d seen her mother as she’d been throughout her childhood: short, clipped brown hair, smooth, pale face, dark, full eyes. But the mother she saw now wasn’t that same woman. Her hair was almost totally grey in front, a patch of dark in the back, her eyes tired, a story of a dead husband and children who grew up and moved away.

Pushing a strand of hair behind her ear, Avery sighed. “Okay, Luis. We’re coming.” Avery grabbed Isabel’s hand and they walked together into the hall, the bright kitchen swallowing up their words. How many more times would she be able to hold her mother’s hand? Even if were while they were walking toward something she didn’t want to see, couldn’t look at, hoped she could forget as soon as she turned away?

After her father died, she thought of all the times she’d turned away from him, said, “No way! Like, I’m not going to the store with you,” “I don’t want to play cards,” or “I don’t want to see where you work!” At night for years, she replayed those moments, and said yes to them all. Yes to his hand, his offer, his smile. Yes to everything she’d passed by.

Dan and Valerie sat on the brand new bed, which was made up in blue and yellow sheets and comforter. Dan saw them and stood up, holding out his arms. “What do you think?”

“Oh, my,” Isabel said. “You got that last drawer together! I am impressed.”

Avery looked around the room, all traces of her imaginary baby gone. The walls were a vibrant yellow, the molding painted white. She could smell the wood furniture they’d all put together, the dresser and desk and bed gleaming oak in the light of the new red lamp. This wasn’t a room she knew.
“Nice,” she said, pulling her cheek between her molars, pressing, pressing. “I have water on? Anyone want tea?”

Not waiting for a reply, she turned and walked back into the florescent light of the kitchen, glad she didn’t hear one single footstep behind her.



They didn’t talk until Modesto. Avery sat with her legs crossed, knees pressed against the dash, and leaned against the passenger’s side door. Closing her eyes, she leaned her cheek pressed against the window. For the rest of the evening and night on Friday and all day yesterday, they’d said very little to each other except for the basics. “Yes, the visit’s on Sunday. . . . They’re expecting you . . . I can only take an hour or so . . . . That’s fine . . . . Turn up the air conditioner . . . . I’m going to bed.”

Dan spent most of the weekend shopping for Daniel’s clothes and toys, buying a Playstation and the brand-new Spiderman video game. “Luis tells me all the kids at his school love this, “ he’d said, avoiding her gaze as he hooked it into the television in the family room. Avery had peeked in to the spare room once and saw that the desk was full of paper and pencils and thick pink erasers, the kind she’d always bought before school started and never used; the nightstand was lined with books Isabel had bought; and the bed was dotted with a couple of sleek, boy-looking stuffed animals. He’s doing what I did for our baby, she thought, tears in her throat. She couldn’t hate him for that, but she closed the door and promised herself she wouldn’t look in the room again.

At one point on Saturday afternoon, she’d checked her cell phone for messages, and there was Mischa’s voice. “I am imagining your phone in your pocket, my voice next to your skin. I am thinking of standing in your doorway, and your eyes asking me a hundred questions. Call me.”

Ugh
, she thought as she erased his words,
how cheesy
.
Who on earth talks like that?
But then she imagined his hands on her thighs, as close to her as her cell phone, rubbing back and forth. Her body argued with her voice, sucked back all her words. Something warm grew in her throat and spread into her chest and stomach.
Um
, her body said.
Yes
.

But she hadn’t called him back—she hadn’t called Brody even to check in about the St. Louis trip. She didn’t call Loren or Valerie back; she didn’t listen to her mother’s messages. She cleaned her house, did laundry, stared out the kitchen window, watching red winged blackbirds drink water from the drain around the pool and chickadees land on and then fly away from the empty birdfeeder.

“We’re almost there,” Dan said, nodding toward the Modesto sign, population 194,390. “It won’t be more than fifteen minutes.”