The Invisibles (10 page)

Mason sipped hot tea from a mug, which announced in cartoon font,
The Early Bird Gets the Worm!
, and depicted a smiling bluebird in a nobleman's blouse uprooting a pale worm from the ground. He wanted another bump from the baggie in his coat, but he thought he'd let it wait until he was off the phone.

His brother answered. There was a pause in the space after Mason spoke his name. Leonard said something to people in the
background, and suddenly he heard his father and his mother speaking to him. A little girl asking a question and being told to hush. That would be Tanya's daughter. They had him on speaker phone and were trying to take turns talking to him. His father went first, in a voice steady and calm, almost subdued. His mother, too, sounded so careful. To hear their caution made him wince, but he answered their questions as best he could. The connection was poor. He listened to their voices, trying to see their faces through their tones. After a long silence on Mason's end, his father remarked that the call had been dropped, and they should hang up and wait for him to call back.

“Wait,” he said, in a voice that sounded desperate to him. He said he was there, though it had already dawned on him that it would be tomorrow before he could prove it to them. He said a few things about the severity of the storm, then promised to tell them his story in the morning. When he hung up, he knew by the sound of their voices that they had not believed him completely. It was not disbelief he had heard, or even skepticism, but an awareness of who he had always been.

He carried the presents up to the guest room as quietly as he could, hoping the groans of the steps beneath him blended into the storm. He was looking forward to another snort, but then he changed his mind, thinking instead to pass out and take the shortcut to the morning. The air in the room smelled like mothballs, and a layer of cold air drifted over the floorboards. He did not bother to turn on the light. The window was dark, crusted with a layer of snow, visible only by the faint violet light outside. He climbed into the bed fully clothed, pulled the quilt to his chin, and gazed at the dark ceiling above. The mattress was narrow and lumpy, and all he could do was lie there and wait for sleep. He thought of Wendy again, and in the painful instant that followed it seemed that it was, this feeling he had run from thirteen years
ago, the fear of the way life unfolded in this place, with slow and unflinching inevitability. He opened his eyes and saw the presents lying in a neat stack beside the bed, their wrappings gleaming faintly. After a moment, he remembered what each contained but could not say why he had chosen them. He let out a sigh and felt his body start to relax. Sleep was closer than he had imagined. Tomorrow he would drive home and see his family. Whatever happened after that, happened.

Six weeks, seven. Perhaps one-third of women experienced light bleeding or spotting during the first trimester. About thirty percent of them miscarried. This last fact should not scare them, Dr. Kornblum elaborated in her California monotone, but give them hope: consider the 70 percent who got their babies. The odds were with them. Who knew where this blood came from? The body was a mystery, an ancient adventurer. Without brazen biology, none of them would be there in the clinic, listening as computer speakers amplified the whisper sound of the baby's heartbeat.

Hazel had read this much on the Internet, and she milked the sound of the words until she realized Kornblum and Riley were waiting for her to speak. She being the pregnant one and all. She looked into their eyes and announced that she was feeling uncharacteristically brave. “I thought all the stuff I read was written by crazy people on the Internet,” she said. “But maybe some of it was by sane people on the Internet.”

Riley nodded energetically and declared that he agreed with the women, and then he rubbed and massaged the knots in Hazel's back for a long, quiet time.

That evening they called their parents and told them to expect to become grandparents in the spring. Hazel's parents opened a bottle of wine and stayed on the line until well after they were drunk and talking seriously about heading out to a bar. Riley's parents, lower-intensity people, conveyed their blessings after a round of happy sniffles. When it was over Hazel and Riley set their cell phones aside to charge and opened the windows to let in
cool night air. On the street, strangers called out to each other in drunken voices. Above the streetlights and the airplanes the moon was dissolving into blackness. The curtains moved with a life all their own.

Eight weeks. She had a big blue folder stuffed with lists of off-limits activities and substances. One page named herbs she had never heard of, black cohosh, blue cohosh, ma huang, thuja. There were known poisons, like wormwood. Had she ever been in the same room as wormwood? Had she ever been within a mile of these things?

Riley said the absinthe they drank in Amsterdam derived from wormwood. “You remember, the green liquor we drank on our honeymoon,” he said, his grin indicating arousal. Sex was forbidden while she was bleeding, and these past weeks he was constantly grinning at her, hoping for good news. He pressed his thighs together. “It was on fire? The stuff that made us fuck like monkeys?”

“I thought that stuff was called booze,” she said. “I thought it was called love. Or lust. And what do you mean, derived? I didn't ask for the etymology.”

There were herbs on the list that surprised her, things she liked and would miss, aloe vera, ginger, parsley. “I feel like I can't even have parsley on the plate,” she said, “or I might pick it up and chew on it. Just while I'm talking. You know how I am.”

Riley knew how she was. He put his arm around her and offered her a drink of the lemonade from a tall glass promoting a science-fiction film with the image of a famous imaginary robot pointing a laser gun at her. “We'll have to tell all the waitresses,” he said. “No parsley.”

She said that wasn't enough. They were forgetful, daydreamy types. They would have to avoid diners for the next seven months.
It was a painful decision for people whose favorite meal was breakfast. “We'll never eat in a diner again, just yogurt at home,” she said, starting to cry, wondering if the guilt was hormonal. “And we'll never have sex ever again. No more breakfast, no more sex.”

She wanted Riley to say it was worth the wait, but he was tired of her indirect apologies and sighed to indicate this. It was the end of the second annual quarter, and he was beset by deadlines for the earnings projections it was his job to calculate. All day he sat rigidly in a cubicle, staring into a tiny laptop screen, using calculations and computer models to predict the future of the companies that paid him to pretend he knew the future so they could make decisions and then blame him if it went poorly. The last thing he wanted when he came home was a pouty wife, especially one who was imperceptibly expanding and bleeding on and off. Hazel gloomily pictured herself growing fatter in the coming months, eventually spilling out of her sweatsuit, hiding from the daylight. She thought a good wife would use this time to go down on her husband or something, but she feared that might be bad for the baby. Her nose pressed his arm, and her tears dampened his sleeve. He patted her shoulder and refused to complain. He was a good husband. His armpit smelled like roadkill, but she decided against mentioning it.

Nine weeks. Three more and the first trimester would end. This did not mean they would be out of the woods, said Dr. Kornblum. It meant they would be out of the first trimester, the statistically grim woods where eighty percent of miscarriages occurred. Dr. Kornblum said she was confident that at that point, the odds would favor them even more.

“Even more than they do now,” she hastened to add. She smiled calmly. She was about the same age, early thirties, with long brown hair and with her first name, Natalie, sewn in cursive on the breast
of her white coat. She spoke in the steady, measured tones of a surfer who long ago abandoned her board for a doctor's coat and a stethoscope but still remembered how to be cool. She was unflappable. “The heartbeat is steady. It could be stronger, but we see growth, which is promising. In a few weeks maybe things will be better. Why don't you come back in two or three weeks? Don't be afraid to call me at home.”

Outside the clinic, women pushed strollers with heavy-duty rotating double wheels. These reminded Hazel of off-road vehicles. The stroller makers had thought of everything. In the strollers, the babies lay protected from sun and public by visors and layers of soft pastel-colored blankets. The mothers wore sunglasses and yoga pants, and Hazel wondered if they would acknowledge her existence and even smile at her, once her pregnancy showed. She speculated that the women might all be going to the same place.

“To do baby yoga,” she explained, jealous because all forms of exercise increased her bleeding, and she sometimes thought she might have to sit very, very still for the next seven months. “They have that, you know.”

“I'm hungry,” said Riley.

It was breakfast time, but they felt safe eating in this part of town, where there were no diners, only expensive restaurants more likely to serve kale than parsley if they used garnishes at all. They went into a narrow café with a painting of a naked East Asian woman on the wall. Her breasts, areolas, and nipples were twin trios of concentric circles, and the woman peered over them, at anyone who happened to look, with neutral eyes, as if to dare the looker to question whether she was art. Their granite table was so narrow that Hazel was careful putting her elbows on it, which was the impolite but comfortable thing to do. The menu offered many kinds of hamburgers and salads served with various forms of protein chopped up on top.

Riley grimaced and sighed through his nostrils over this misfortune. He disliked hamburgers almost as much as he disliked salads. Yet time was limited. He had to get to work and start looking at his computer so that he could invent the future. He chose a sandwich with enough dressings to totally conceal the beef patty from his taste buds. When the food came, everything looked too small. “Why isn't this easier?” he said. “Growing up was supposed to be the hard part.”

“I think the only easy part is college,” Hazel said. “And maybe your twenties. You're not already tired of the baby, are you?”

“I'm tired of many things, but I've yet to meet a baby.”

“Maybe I should stuff some gauze up there,” Hazel said.

“I'm tired of the clinic. All those pictures on the wall. Babies in baths, babies superimposed on fake movie posters, and I have yet to meet one of them,” he said. “How much do you want to bet that most of those kids don't even look like that anymore?”

“They do seem crazy about babies,” Hazel conceded. “Some people just want to work with that stage of life, I guess. Just like you only deal with a certain type of grown-up.”

“I deal with reality,” Riley said. “Okay, pretend reality that gets taken seriously.” He dropped his half-eaten hamburger on his plate and scowled down at it. “I bet many of those children are much older now.”

Ten weeks. The living room had become a museum of congratulations cards. Who knew this many people still considered them friends? Not Hazel. There were handwritten notes here from people she'd last seen near the end of college. And some of the cards from Riley's historical cohort came from the wives of men he casually referred to as shitheads. She opened the cards and set them on the floor like dominoes and knocked them over in designs, hearts and arabesques and a four-point star. She built a house.
She photographed these things and posted the images online at a social networking website. Right away, unemployed acquaintances sent little notes informing her how creative and talented she was, and she began to think she was dealing with crazy people on the Internet. When they began to congratulate her on her pregnancy and ask her personal questions about her development, she deleted the pictures and closed her account. She sat in the living room feeling vaguely soiled. She feared she had been very close to turning into a crazy person on the Internet.

Riley came home, and she made him talk about names.

“How can we?” he said. “We don't even know the sex.”

“How many contingencies does your software allow for when modeling industry futures?” she said. “There are only two possibilities here.”

“I should never have told you what I do.”

She began to name the names she liked, and Riley rejected them one after another. Samantha, Fred, Claire, Donald, Tabitha, Lawrence, Heidi, Benjamin, Wilma, George, Genevieve, Brad.

“How many vetoes do I get?” he said.

“Unlimited,” she said. “You're an executive power. How do you like David?”

Riley liked being an executive power. “David's all right. Let's put it on the Maybe list.”

“There's a Maybe list?”

“Shouldn't there be? Have you thought this through?”

Hazel had a confession to make. “I have a confession to make,” she said. “I already have a name for him.”

“Him?” Riley looked cross for a moment. “Did Kornblum call while I was at work?”

“No, I just have a feeling.”

“Oh.” Riley was happy again. He was confident that he knew all about her feelings. “What's your name for him?”

“Henrik,” she said.

“That sounds to me like a Viking name.”

“Yes,” she said. “I think of him as a little seafarer, setting out from a distant country.”

“You're very strange,” Riley told her. “If I had known how strange you really are, I would have knocked you up much earlier.”

“Henrik's the Viking,” Hazel said, “which makes us the peasants watching for him on the sea.”

Eleven weeks. Something was wrong. The ultrasound technician's jaw had clamped tight, and her eyes studied the screen intently. She mumbled something about looking at Hazel's ovaries, then turned the probe. Images shifted to dark on the screen beside Hazel. A large pale torpedo shape moved across the screen, and then another did. Riley's forehead bunched with frown lines. Did he know an ovary to see one?