The Fallback Plan (8 page)

I looked over my shoulder, to see if there were cue cards he was reading from. Nope. He’d memorized his lines.

“So you don’t think it’s AIDS?” It never hurt to be too sure.

He looked up from his prescription pad. “Do you have unprotected sex?”

Only with transsexual prostitutes
.

“No,” I said.

“Are you an intravenous drug user?”

“No.”

“Probably not, then,” he said, “unless you’ve been drinking breast milk lately,” and resumed writing, in even smaller handwriting, shielding the paper from my eyes with his arm like I had to be protected from my own diagnosis. Then he left the room with my chart.

When the technician took my blood, I watched her put the needle in my vein so I would know when to expect the pinch.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “He doesn’t think it’s AIDS.”

• • •

After my appointment, I drove to Walmart to fill my prescription.
Find someone to talk to. Pay someone to listen
. No more Dr. Libman. In the car, a Modest Mouse song came on 93XRT that went,
While we’re on the subject, could we change the subject now?
I brought a book inside to read while I waited, and held it in my lap so the cover wouldn’t show. The book was a gift from my mom called
Calling in “The One”:
7
Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life
. I wasn’t sure what her hurry was. I’d never had a long-term boyfriend, so maybe she was holding the promise of one in front of my nose so I would just get my act together, fix myself.
Calling in “The One”
didn’t have any characters or plot. It just had Katherine Woodward Thomas, M.A., M.F.T., who wanted me to know that I would never find a soul mate until I let go of my past and lived from one fleeting moment to the next, like someone with Alzheimer’s.
Is that what you mean, Katherine? Like someone with Alzheimer’s?
It reminded me of a story by Alice Munro about a woman named Fiona with Alzheimer’s, who falls in love with a man at the home where her husband puts her, the home where she’ll spend the rest of her days.

I wished I were Fiona. I wished Jack and Jocelyn would get married, and then in forty to fifty years when he developed Alzheimer’s we could be institutionalized together, and fall in love, and each and every dawn would be the most beautiful dawn we had ever seen, because we would have no memory of those that came before it.

A wide golden frame, about as deep as a window box, hung on the Browns’ dining room wall. It was a strikingly ornate toy theater Amy had built. Inside, a tableau was already set so that only one play could be performed: Joan of Arc.

A tiny Joan was attached to a tiny metal skewer that slid her back and forth along the frame. If you turned a knob on the side of the box, flames made from red cellophane erupted from the bottom. I pointed out that she was missing some angels.

“May got ahold of the angel puppets and decided to make them bath toys,” Amy told me. “I told her it may look like a toy theater, but it isn’t a
toy
toy theater. I don’t think she got it. So in my version of the story, no angels, Joan just hears voices in her head, and gets burned to death.”

“So your Joan is psychotic.”

Amy sighed and nodded. “I won an award for it, back in college. I used to win all kinds of prizes.” She went up to the frame and turned the knob so the flames moved, and engulfed Joan’s tiny body.

“Ahhhhhhhh,”
I screamed, in a small voice.

“My voices have deceived me,”
Amy answered.

During the first two weeks I watched May, Amy went
up into the attic and stayed there all day, while May and I wove crowns, and went wading in the kiddie pool in the backyard. When it was time for May’s nap, I would tidy up. And by tidy up, I mean snoop.

I felt like a detective in an Agatha Christie novel. I was looking for evidence of what had happened to these people. The before and after. I wasn’t just the babysitter; I was an investigator, a collector, a memory-keeper. I was obsessed. This wasn’t benign curiosity; this was deliberate privacy invasion. My leftover acting habits. It was as if I wanted to know everything so that I could recreate them as characters in a play that would never be performed.

I liked finding pictures of Amy that were taken when she was pregnant, because in them she looked so young and soft, so helpless and aglow. She looked more like the Amy I’d met at the party than the Amy I knew now, whose arms were sinewy, and whose face was sallow and pockmarked without makeup. If you saw the woman in the picture board your bus, you’d give her your seat. If the woman told you she was an artist, you’d imagine watercolors of waterlilies, pastorals, paintings of small children tethered to balloons.

There was an entire album of the three of them on vacation, before Annika was born, holding one another on sandy beaches or posed in front of landmarks: the Washington Monument, the steps of the Art Institute, a lighthouse. Nate had the All-American features of a glasses-wearing
J. Crew model, and Amy was usually wearing a garishly patterned dress, a dress to show the world that even though, yes, she was a woman who stayed home with her child all day, she was not one of those women who stayed home with her child all day.

• • •

One afternoon Nate came home early, and instead of sending me home, Amy asked me to make some iced tea.

May followed the three of us onto the back deck, which was covered in damp maple leaves from a recent midnight storm. She picked up a broken branch and carefully descended the stairs—two tiny feet to every step—to the yard, holding the branch ahead of her like a torch to light the way.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To get little bugs,” she said.

“No little bugs in Daddy’s briefcase, though, okay, sweetheart?” Nate looked at me and raised his eyebrows, indicating that, in case I didn’t already know, this was one of the perils of fatherhood.

“I DIDN’T DO THAT! THAT LITTLE BUG MUST HAVE JUST WANTED TO BE IN THERE!”

Nate leaned closer. “I found this cicada,” he explained. “You tell me:
why
would it want to be in there?”

His shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows, but Nate still
wore his tie, and it gave him the appearance of an actor in the wrong costume. Someone’s prom date. A huckster. When the sun moved from behind the clouds I could see a few drops of sweat along his hairline. It was the first time I had seen Nate since the party the previous winter—no, it was the first time I had seen Nate since browsing hundreds of photos of him, and it was like seeing a celebrity in real life and comparing the static image with the flesh; my brain began to improvise scenarios in which it was just the two of us, on a beach, in the south of France.

I felt confused. I drank my tea.

May was crouched in the yard near the protruding roots of a tall tree, poking at the ground with her stick, willing the earth to yield its tiny creatures.

Nate and I watched in silence. There wasn’t really anything to say, since I knew I couldn’t say any of the things I wanted to say:
How are you, no, how are you
really,
why are you home so early, I don’t know if you should wear your shirt like that, what do you and Amy do when I’m not here?

“Good to finally get over that heat wave,” Nate said.

“Yep,” I said. I watched a mosquito land on my arm, and smashed it.

“Auditioned for any plays lately?”

Before I could answer, Amy came out of the house with a hand-painted ceramic plate, covered with sticks of string cheese and baby carrots, and set it on the picnic table without looking at either of us. I watched her watch May,
her eyes squinting against the light of the setting sun, the fingers on one hand twisting and untwisting the charm on her necklace as if trying to unscrew it from the chain. Nate reached for a carrot and then turned to watch, too. May was oblivious to our vigilance. She could have no idea that we were watching her in order to protect her from every unthinkable, unknowable danger, that we watched her because we all thought that we knew what had gone wrong with Annika. If only someone had been there in the room, wide awake while she slept; if only they had always held her, and never put her to sleep in a bed, Annika would have never died, she would have been in someone’s arms right then.

After another minute, May turned around, held her stick in the air, and announced that she had found one that wasn’t moving, and could she please bring it inside the house.

• • •

For a few days, the best clues I found were the photographs, but then I decided to enter the nursery.

May was napping. Before I’d joined them, Amy told me, she didn’t really have a routine for May. They’d play, and eventually May would pass out somewhere—on the living room floor, on the couch, curled up in Nate’s desk chair—and Amy could work for an hour or two until she
heard May wake up and start to cry for her. When I asked my mom about it, she said, “Oh no, kids need routine. Put her down for a nap at the same time every day.” Then she shook her head and said the “whole thing” was “so sad.” So that’s what I told Amy I’d do.

That day, Amy was at the doctor and May hadn’t wanted to take a nap when it was time for one. She had fought and fought me, and it had taken two and a half readings of
Green Eggs and Ham
next to her in bed with her chiming in on the refrain, before she finally closed her eyes.

I carefully untangled myself from the covers and the stuffed animal mountain range atop May’s narrow bed, and shut the door to her room, but not completely, because the doorknob stuck, and if she couldn’t turn it when she woke up she felt trapped.

Then I went and stood in front of the door, the closed door I passed every day, the door that I assumed led to a nursery. I imagined the room would be preserved exactly as it had been six months earlier: pink wallpaper, a pretty white crib from Pottery Barn, a mobile that played Brahms’ Lullaby. Or, if not that perfect room, then an empty room. A territory without a history. A space in limbo.

I could not have imagined the wreck that I found.

Yellow wallpaper patterned with baby ducks covered most of the walls, but in places it had been savagely ripped and removed. There was a pretty white dresser in the corner, but most of the drawers were pulled open haphazardly,
or missing. Tiny socks and romper suits were strewn about the floor, the detritus of baby showers. The room smelled like baby wipes, like a nursing home, like sweet-scented chemicals meant to mask the older smells beneath. There was a curtain rod, but no curtain, and the amount of sunlight made me uneasy. The window ledge was covered in dust. I could see the indentations in the carpeting where the crib had once been, but now it was missing, like a tooth from a gum.

I felt a rash of anxiety start to break out, but reminded myself it was my own fault for opening the door, for looking for concrete proof of their loss. If this were a movie, I would have backed out of the room and found Amy standing in the hallway when I turned around. She’d have caught me. She’d be holding a knife, a crazed look in her eye.

But this wasn’t a movie. I backed out of the room, into the empty hall, closed the door, and went downstairs. The only sound in the house was the soft whir of the central air.

My hands shook, and I gripped the staircase railing. Wasn’t this what I wanted? Evidence of madness? A little mystery? A clue? I was like Harriet the Spy. No, I was like Claudia Kincaid, living in the museum.

May would be asleep for another half hour, so I browsed the living room bookshelves. There was a shelf of art theory and criticism, a shelf of literary fiction, a shelf of travel guides to South America and Eastern Europe. I pulled out Romania. The chapter on Brasov, a storybook medieval
village near the Carpathian Mountains, was bookmarked with a Polaroid.

It was a picture of hands on a piano. White keys and white hands and the rest a black void. They were Nate’s hands. As soon as I saw the photo I knew that I would steal it.

I put the photo in my purse. Then I popped an Ativan like a breath mint. When I got home, I hid Nate’s hands in the back of my sock drawer.

• • •

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“Like a guy?” I said. “Or a therapist.”

Amy laughed. “Or both?”

“Or neither.” We were together at the kitchen table while May was eating her Cheerios, spooning them into her mouth one at a time, an endless parade.

“You’re young,” she said. “You have time. The world is your oyster.” She said all this with the bitter edge of someone whose time is up.

“No, please, the world is
your
oyster.” I presented her an imaginary shell in my palm.

“Please, I couldn’t.”

“Madam,” I said. “You must.”

I noticed that Amy was developing the habit of prolonging breakfast, of avoiding the work that awaited her,
of spending more time with me and May than seemed reasonable. Each of them demanded my full attention and the immediacy of my presence, which only made me feel tugged and divided and anxious. I wanted to please Amy, to comfort her, and to mother May in her absence, but what was I supposed to do when we were all together?

She took the oyster and looked at it in her palms like a mirror and then let it go. It was never really there, but still I felt a pinch of irritation, like I was in acting class, watching someone drop their pantomimed prop.

“I was still nursing when she died,” Amy said.

I looked at May, but she was concentrating on her next O.

In a low voice, I asked if it hurt.

She nodded. “The doctor told me to put ice packs on my breasts. I expressed milk in the toilet.” Amy stirred the last of her coffee. “But I wanted the soreness to last.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought that if it lasted, I would know she’d been real, she’d been mine. At the funeral, I leaked through my bra. I didn’t tell Nate. It would have upset him,” she said.

Amy so rarely spoke of Nate. It was as if he didn’t exist in her mind while he was at work.

But besides that single afternoon on the deck, when he came home in the evenings it was always my cue to leave, so we rarely said more than hello and goodbye.