The Newlyweds (21 page)

“No! Your father is not to blame. He’s given up all of his projects—he’s exhausting himself trying to find the birth and marriage certificates. It’s very difficult to get these things here,” her mother reminded her, as if Amina were an inexperienced foreigner rather than a person who’d scrambled to collect all of her own visa paperwork only three years earlier.

“I don’t want you to worry,” her mother continued, before she could say anything. “Especially now.”

“Why now?”

“You need to stay calm. Drink plenty of water and don’t make the food too spicy. Try not to stand in the doorways—that can cause a difficult labor. And check eggs before you eat them—never eat an egg with a double yolk. That’s why your India Aunt had the twins.”

Her mother kept talking about the imminent pregnancy and their arrival in America, and Amina let the phone drift slightly below her ear, so she could hear her mother’s voice without understanding the words. She turned off the water, and for a moment she was a newcomer again, alone in the house after George had gone to work. The stillness had been so complete that some days she’d wondered whether she could make a noise if she wanted. She’d felt not only invisible but incorporeal and doubted as she made her way from room to room that her feet impressed upon the carpets. She had glanced at herself in mirrors as she passed and was sometimes startled by the familiar image—a skinny girl in a homemade blouse—as if she’d expected the house itself to be blind to her.

She heard her mother pause for an answer. “What?”

“Which way does your bed face?” her mother repeated. “You know your head shouldn’t be pointing toward the door.”

“I’m not pregnant,” Amina said quietly.

“Just in case,” her mother said. “You never know!”

That night Amina had thanked God more fervently than usual for her job, which had allowed her to end this conversation on the grounds that she had to shower and dress. If someone had told her in those first lonely days that there would come a time when she wouldn’t look forward to phone calls from home, and would even sometimes dread them, she wouldn’t have been able to believe it.

11
Just after Thanksgiving, George told her that Annie Snyder was pregnant for the third time. Dan left for work later than George did; she often saw him from the kitchen window on those cold mornings, moving quickly from his house to his car, looking no different now that a pig’s heart was beating in his chest. (
Valve
, George
corrected her—it’s only the valve.) Sometimes she would see Annie waiting on the edge of the lawn with her older boy for the school bus, balancing the younger one on the lump of belly that was already protruding underneath her long down coat.

Amina rode to work with George every day but Thursday, when she took the bus because her shift didn’t start until noon. It was on one of those December Thursdays, going for the mail in her own parka and boots, that Amina noticed Annie waving to her. She waved back, and when the school bus pulled away, her neighbor crossed the street to speak to her. The temperature was near freezing under a sharp blue sky, and the old snow was encased in a treacherous layer of ice. Over the last year, Amina had developed superstitions about both cold and physical activity, and in the second half of each month she tried to expend as little energy as possible, staying indoors and letting some of the housework slide. It was ridiculous to think that standing in the cold could prevent a person from becoming pregnant, but she longed for the couch and the warm house, a cup of the FertiliTea Kim had bought her from Lori’s Natural Foods Center, which out of embarrassment she’d hidden from George under the sink behind the detergent.

“This is awful, isn’t it?” Annie said. “And we still have practically the whole winter to go.”

“It was winter when I came,” Amina said. “I remember I’d never seen trees without their leaves.”

Annie smiled uncertainly. “That’s funny—I guess you wouldn’t have. Listen—I just wanted to say thank you for what you did when Dan was sick last year. Last night I was lying awake, and I realized we never did. Looking in on the house and everything.”

“It was nothing.”

“And the flowers and the muffins. George took care of the house, but I know those came from you.”

“George took care of it afterward. But the first day it was Kim.”

Annie gave her a quizzical look. “Kim Neeland?”

“The flowers were also from her. George thought she would understand the alarm better, so she was the one who went to your house. I didn’t do anything except muffins—that was no trouble.”

“But the card said from you and George,” Annie insisted.

“Did it?” Amina said. “It was so long ago.”

She thought the child must be getting cold. Her face was bright pink in the opening of a pink hood, but she looked otherwise unperturbed, already accustomed to weather that Amina would continue to find unnatural for the rest of her life. If she and George ever managed to conceive, would her own child develop the same defenses, or would she shiver and suffer, longing for a climate she had never experienced?

“You’re working with Kim at that yoga place, aren’t you?”

“Only administration,” Amina said quickly. “I don’t do any yoga myself.”

“Oh, I love yoga. I did it when I was pregnant with the first two, but I’m getting lazy this time around.” Annie hesitated for just a second. “But Kim always looks great.”

“She’s very healthy.”

“But she’s still not dating anyone?” The child began to fuss, and Annie talked to it in a silly way, kissing its face and shifting it to the other hip. “Do she and George still get along?”

“Yes,” Amina said, and because the question seemed to demand some further response: “She’s his cousin.”

“Well, but she was adopted,” Annie said. “Right? I didn’t know her well in school, and then she was living here only a couple of months before she moved downtown.”

“Here in Rochester?”

Annie looked at her curiously. “I mean when she was living here”—she indicated the house—“with George, before she moved downtown. I remember her trying to plant something one day—delphinium, I think. But she didn’t bother to clear the beds the way you did, and you saw they didn’t come back. Of course he’d only just bought it in March, so she didn’t have time to do much.”

“In May,” Amina corrected automatically. George had bought the house in May of 2004, four months after they’d met. Kim had once taken refuge with George—long ago, after her breakup with Ashok, when she’d returned from New York City “a mess”—but that was at his old apartment in Brighton. She had never lived in this house, and she certainly couldn’t have been living there in the winter and early spring of 2004, when Amina and George had been exchanging their first messages.

Her neighbor was nodding slowly, her arms clasped around the child at her hip. “Well, you know best. But I could’ve sworn it was March because I was just pregnant with Kyla and I felt awful. Lawson was a terrible two, and I was stuck inside with him, bored out of my mind. I remember when they took the sign down—all of that snow.” Now Annie was looking at her with barely concealed eagerness, trying to divine what she knew. “Kim was sweet with Lawson, always spoiling him with toys and stuff. We were worried George would be lonely when she moved out—but then of course he found you.”

Some old instinct kicked in, and Amina adjusted her expression. She was grateful suddenly for her skin, which didn’t flush in an obvious way. “George is so generous,” Amina began, and she was startled to hear her accent returning, as strong as it had been a year ago. Suddenly she sounded like a well-to-do Deshi lady, imperious and blunt—in fact more like her aunt than her mother. “And Kim has such troubles.”

“I think you’re both very generous,” Annie said, glancing again at the house. “I should take this one inside before she freezes.” She turned to the child. “Is da little nosy frozen?” The little girl laughed, revealing a set of miniature teeth.

“Please say hello to Dan for us,” Amina said, and because she needed Annie to believe that nothing she’d revealed was a surprise, that Amina had been perfectly aware that Kim had been living in this house—
their
house, that George had bought “too soon” in their courtship—she added: “George and I would like to invite you for dinner.”

“Oh—we’d love that. It’s just a question of sitting. If you know anyone?” Annie added, but Amina shook her head.

“I’m afraid I don’t know any babysitters.”

12
She took the bus to East Avenue, and then walked to Edgerton Street. She entered the apartment building and climbed the four flights to the door, waiting a moment before she tried the key in the lock. Kim wasn’t home. Amina was struck as usual by the blithe disarray of the apartment: the futon bed unmade, strewn with clothes; a dirty mug and plate on the floor; a towel hanging over the
back of a wooden chair. Amina instinctively reached to pick it up, and then stopped. She had often wondered that Kim wasn’t more embarrassed about the state of her apartment, given that Amina was a guest: she apologized for it (her “reaction” to years with Ashok) but in an effusive, theatrically self-deprecating way that had never convinced Amina, even when she had found it charming. Now this disregard for propriety struck her as characteristic in a more threatening way.

She knew Kim didn’t teach until the afternoon, and so she was probably out shopping. Amina had already decided that she wasn’t going in to work—at some point Kim would come back and find her here—if necessary, she could wait all day. Apart from tidying or watering the plants, she had always been careful not to disturb the things in Kim’s apartment more than necessary. She was pretty sure Kim wouldn’t have noticed, but she had certainly never opened a closet or a drawer. She’d been conscious that Americans protected their privacy more closely than anyone she’d known at home, and that fact had kept her from exploring the apartment as thoroughly as she would have liked.

Now she began with the desk. The picture in the drawer was still there: when she glanced at it, Ashok’s expression seemed to have changed. Now there was a slight smirk at the corner of his mouth, as if in wonder at her ignorance. Amina moved into the bathroom, where even the medicine chest became interesting when she pictured its contents scrambled with George’s things at home. Apart from a great number of all-natural creams, scrubs and exfoliants, and a sleep aid made from valerian root, there was nothing much to discover, and so Amina moved into the main room. She leafed through a book called
The Yoga of the Yogi
that was sitting out on Kim’s desk, and then a date book: either Kim didn’t have many engagements, or she was the kind of person who bought a calendar but couldn’t remember to write things down. The closet door was open and Amina stepped inside. It wasn’t any of the hanging things that caught her attention but a pair of flip-flops—real plastic Bata chappals, the pattern on the sole worn smooth. The shoes were sitting on the highest shelf; if she hadn’t noticed them, she might also have missed the brown paper envelope, wedged underneath a pile of sweaters. She had to stretch to reach the envelope, but she didn’t hesitate. She felt as if she’d
been absolved of any trespass by everything she’d learned in the last twenty-four hours.

Letters were what she’d expected, and so at first she was disappointed. The photographs were printed as a horizontal strip—there were four of them—each inside a black-and-white arc, like the space opened up by the single wiper on the rear window of a car. Each image was dark and grainy, indecipherable, a black oval with a milky center, and it took several moments for Amina to understand that she was looking at a human fetus. The quality of the paper, and of the envelope itself, was much finer than you would find at home; Amina thought the clinic where Kim’s mother-in-law had sent her must have been a place exclusively for rich people. She was replacing the pictures carefully in the envelope—calculating that they must now be eight years old—when she noticed the information printed in a minuscule font along the margin:

Amina stared at the date, wondering if she were making some kind of obvious mistake. But the facts were printed clearly on the page. If these numbers were correct, Kim had gotten pregnant in February of 2004—right here in Rochester. A month later, George had decided to buy a three-bedroom house in a genteel suburb known for its excellent school district. He had moved in immediately, bringing along his pretty, eccentric cousin, who had planted delphinium in the overgrown beds around the house, and then perplexed the neighbors by leaving before summer had even started.

If Kim had been eight weeks pregnant in April, she might have discovered the pregnancy at the beginning of March—right around the time that George stopped writing to Amina. It crossed her mind that Kim might have gotten pregnant with someone else’s child, and even that George might have taken her in under those circumstances. But the fact of the house made that easy explanation impossible to believe. She remembered the way Annie had looked at her in the driveway, and the way she’d spoken of George and Kim as if they’d been a couple. During that ten-week break, when Amina was working
up the courage to go back on AsianEuro, they had been setting up a life together.