The Stuff That Never Happened (32 page)

“Thank you,” I say when I can speak again. “But you’re being way too generous. I have hurt so many people. I’ve ended up hurting everybody that I really love.”

“Oh, tell them all to grow a pair,” she says. “You and I both know the truth.” Then she says, “Not that it matters, Annabelle, but … is Jeremiah still hot?”

I try to answer her, to say yes, yes he is, but all that comes out is a tiny noise from my throat.

“Hello?” she says.

“I’m sorry,” I say after a moment. “But I can’t—I think I have to go.”

“Oh, baby,” she says. “Oh, baby. This is so hard. But, you know, it’s okay to always be a little bit in love with Jeremiah, isn’t it? You can have that for yourself. It doesn’t mean you’re going to change anything.”

I AM waiting for something—good sense to set in, most likely—and finally April comes, and the apartment becomes too small and too stuffy to bear. Spring is in full swing now, but the building management doesn’t seem to have gotten the message. The heat blasts through the radiators the same as ever. I have hot flashes and wake in the night feeling baked, and I seem to be moving through life harboring a headache that won’t shake itself loose. I am going through the motions: cooking food for Sophie, cleaning up afterward, eating, trying to sleep, watching television, drawing pictures, and waiting. I try to be available to her, but we decide that it’s best if I start sleeping on the living room couch now that she is so large and I am so restless in the night, needing to kick off the covers and then pull them back on at least a dozen times. Even during the day I try to give her space by staying in the living room reading or painting. My editor has called and told me about a series of picture books involving children traveling around the world, and she’d like to see some sketches.

Sophie and I seem to be tiptoeing around each other. I hear her sometimes talking to Grant on the phone, giving her daily health update.
My legs are aching, and yesterday I had a headache, but the baby isn’t
kicking me so much today
. This is way more information than she gives to me.

On Friday, we go for the weekly ultrasound, and when it’s over, Dr. Levine turns off the machine and turns on the overhead light, and then she says the time has come to put the C-section on the schedule. Sophie is at about thirty-four weeks now, and it should be done in her thirty-seventh week. How about Monday, April 25?

So Beanie Bartholomew will be a little Taurus, just like her mom. Stubborn and opinionated and earthbound, but also good and real and true.

When the nurse writes the date down on the calendar, I look over at Sophie, who lies there on the ultrasound table, twisting a Kleenex in her hand.

“Is this really the only way to get the baby out?” she asks in a surprisingly young, little-girl voice. “I always thought there was a chance I could do this, you know, normally.”

Dr. Levine, who is my favorite of the obstetricians we see, smiles at her. “Well, the placenta has definitely stayed put over the cervix, so this becomes the normal way this time,” she says. “And, Sophie, I know your mother would agree with me here—it’s not going to serve you to think of this as
abnormal
. What’s great about this is that we can deliver you a nice, normal baby, and that’s better than a normal pregnancy or what you would call a normal delivery. I go for a normal baby every time.”

“Do you think everything is really, really going to be all right?” Sophie says, and her lower lip trembles.

Dr. Levine pats her on the shoulder and says, “I think it’s going to be just fine. You’ve done beautifully, Sophie, and you’re almost at the end. You should be very proud,” but then she sends me a quizzical look. At her signal, I follow her into the hallway while Sophie is getting dressed.

“How are things going at home?” she says. “Anything I should know?”

“No,” I say. “Not really.” Do I really have to explain to the obstetrician that I had an affair before Sophie was born?

Dr. Levine smiles at me. “Well,” she says, and pats my arm. “She’s just an emotional person, isn’t she? I’m guessing it can’t be easy for you living with her during this time. It would be great if this husband of hers could get home for the birth, wouldn’t it?”

“Believe me, I’m ready to fly down there and frog-march him back here,” I say, and she laughs.

This is the first person I’ve made laugh in weeks. I almost want to invite Dr. Levine out for drinks.

“SO WHAT exactly happened back then?” Sophie says to me in the cab on the way home. “Did Dad catch you two having sex and break up with you?”

I look out the window and don’t say anything.

“Never mind. I don’t really want to know anyway.”

NICKY HAS a completely different take on things, one that doesn’t automatically conclude that I’m a horrible person. He calls me to say that he thinks Grant is having some kind of midlife crisis or perhaps a psychotic break with reality.

“Mom, I swear, the drive up with him was like something out of a horror movie,” he says. “He was like Darth Vader, just breathing and seething. Meanwhile he’s driving like thirty-five miles an hour
on the highway
, and all these trucks are passing us and honking, but he doesn’t care. He just
breathes.”

“I know, Nick. He was upset.”

“So wait. What’s going on? He found out about some guy you had a thing for in the past? Is that it?”

I hesitate. “It’s complicated, Nicky. There was a man I loved, and—well, your father didn’t ever want me to see the man again, and then I ran into him in New York and had coffee with him.”

“You had coffee with him, and Dad freaked out?”

“Yes, basically.”

“Okay, Mom. You gotta tell me. I can take it. Is my father insane?”

I laugh.

“So when is Sophie going to have this kid?” he says.

I tell him the C-section is scheduled for the twenty-fifth.

“I’ll be there,” he says.

“But you can’t. It’s the end of your semester—”

“Mom, I have to be. It’s so cool. I still can’t believe how that thing kicked and tried to get me to move my hand off, like I was trespassing on her house or something. It was so amazing. Do you just sit in there all the time and stare at Sophie’s belly and watch the knees and elbows go by?”

“Not so much,” I say.

“Well, you should,” he tells me. “That’s what I’d be doing.”

“Nicky, are you studying?”

“Uh, Mom, you’re breaking up! I can’t hear you anymore! Hello? Hello?”

“Nicholas David McKay, you are not fooling anybody. I hope you know that.”

He makes the sound of a dial tone and then bursts into laughter.

I GET back from the store one day and before I can even turn my key in the lock, I hear Sophie on the cell phone in her room. She’s shouting at Whit.

“But she’s in four of the pictures you just sent!” she’s saying. There’s a silence. Then she says, “Well, what it
means
is that she’s always around you. And that you obviously like the way she looks if you’re going to keep taking her picture.… No! I am
not
crazy! I
know
that. I know you don’t think—
no!
No, I don’t think I can trust you!”

Her voice drops, and I put away the groceries in the kitchen, wishing that I didn’t have that free-fall feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Then she says, “How can I know for sure? Everybody wants to sleep with you, and I’m here all alone and I’m as big as a house, and I don’t know if I can keep this baby inside me for as long as it takes! No, no, no! You
shouldn’t
have left me here! And—”

Then I hear her crying and she says, “I just found out that my mom cheated on my dad right after they got married. And now I don’t know who I can trust anymore.
Nobody’s
really faithful. And now my father isn’t speaking to her.” Silence. “No, he didn’t just find out, Whit. She
saw the guy again!
At least twice. She’s awful.”

I don’t hear anything more for a while and then she says, “Well, you can try to convince me all you want, but I just want to tell you one thing: this baby is going to be born on April twenty-fifth, and I want you to be there! … All right, then. Promise me! You promise? Okay.”

I fix us vegetable burritos for dinner and take hers into her bedroom an hour later. She’s lying on her side on the bed, staring out the window.

“Sophie,” I say. “Sophie, you have simply got to let this go. You’re making yourself miserable over something that has nothing to do with you. Really. Did you know that when I was twenty, my mother left my father so that she could go and sleep with another man, a scruffy artist who drove around in a van with drawings on it? My mother was the most conventional, straight person ever in the world, and she just went and had this affair, and went to feminist meetings and did all this wacky stuff, and do you think I stopped loving her or trusting her? I didn’t. I just tried to make room for it somehow, and then it all passed. Sophie, people aren’t put on this earth to meet every one of our expectations. That’s what makes life so
interesting
, honey. Can’t you see that?”

She turns and stares at me. “Is this supposed to make me feel better? Now you’re telling me that my
grandmother
cheated, too? How is that supposed to help?”

I have to admit, she has a point. What was I thinking?

ONE NIGHT I wake up with a start and find Sophie sitting on the edge of my bed picking at a loose thread of my quilt. I have no idea how long she’s been there, or how long I’ve known she was there. Her breathing seems to fill the room, so loud it had finally entered my dreams.

I sit up quickly and rub my eyes. “Are you okay? Is everything all right? Did anything happen?”

“I’m fine,” she says. “I guess.”

The clock says 2:34. When Sophie was a kid, she used to say we could make wishes when the time on the clock was consecutive numbers like that. She’d come running in to find me from wherever she happened to be just so we could make our wishes. At first I think that’s what she wants to do now.

“Wait. Are you crying?” I say.

“No. I was, but I’m not anymore,” she says.

“Well, what is it? Do you want to talk?”

“I just want to know one thing. Was it worth it?”

I let a beat of silence go by. “Seeing Jeremiah again, you mean?” I say.

“No. The
affair
. What you got out of it. Was it worth it, really?”

“Sometimes,” I say, “sometimes you don’t do things because of whether they’re going to turn out to be worth it. You—you’re just compelled by something that feels almost
other
. It’s hard to explain to somebody else, but … well, do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Well, I guess I would have to say that one thing that was happening was that the times were so different then. I almost can’t explain how back then it didn’t seem exactly like cheating. It almost seemed right, in those days, to reach out and grab what you needed for your life. You almost owed it to yourself. And, Sophie, I don’t know if you can understand this, but I was barely married. I didn’t even know myself as a married person. You’re ten times more married than I was then. I’d met your father at school, and he did this kind thing of letting me stay at his apartment when my father stopped paying my rent, and then I went back to take care of my family and never expected that anything would come of your father and me—and then one day he just showed up and asked me to marry him because he was moving to New York. And I said yes.”

She narrows her eyes. “You said yes? But why? Did you love him?”

“I did,” I say slowly. “I really did. But now I know that there were pieces missing in myself, pieces I didn’t even know I was supposed to have.”

She’s looking at me calmly. “I’m not going to be falling in love with somebody else.”

“No,” I say. “No, I don’t think you will. The times aren’t the same, for one thing. And you’re way more grounded than I ever was. But, sweetie, other things will happen. You and Whit are going to face pressure, and you’ll fight about money and sex and who does the dishes and who should change Beanie’s diaper and a whole bunch of stupid things that you can’t even imagine right now. But when that happens to you, don’t let it freak you out and get you blaming yourself or Whit or boredom or the government or God or whatever. It’s just life. And you’ll get over it.”

She’s picking at the blankets again. “Mom, do you think Whit is cheating on me in Brazil? Because I really, really don’t know if he can be away for—”

“Sophie, this is going to sound weird, but I think you’re just going to have to get comfortable with the idea of living with some uncertainty in your relationship with your husband. You can’t ever completely know or completely control another person. And when you make your whole life about trying to figure out what he’s doing at any given point—well, then I think you’re going to rob yourself of some of the joy of simply being together. Because ultimately that’s all that matters.”

“But what if love, as you say, ‘just comes’ for him?” she asks. “What if he ends up loving somebody else and wanting to leave me?”

“And what if he does? Anything can happen, darling. That’s what life is—uncertain and crazy,” I say to her. “You’ll survive it if it happens. But remember that you have a shot of
keeping
it from happening if you let yourself truly love him instead of just trying to control him. Let him know how valued he is instead of how suspicious you are of his every waking moment.”

She’s quiet for a moment and then she says, “Whit is coming home on the twenty-third. And he says there’s nothing between him and Juliana, except that he now loves to play double solitaire all the time.”

“Well, that’ll give you something to do while you nurse the baby,” I say lightly.

We both laugh, and then we lie there in the darkness. After a while, her breathing becomes deep and even, and I know she’s asleep. I lie there until the sun comes up, thinking about Jeremiah and how I can’t summon anymore that lighter-than-air feeling I used to get when I’d think of him. The fantasy Jeremiah who wanted me so much and who was somewhere in the world missing me and pining for what he had thrown away doesn’t exist for me anymore. Maybe I don’t need that.