The Stuff That Never Happened (33 page)

I look over at Sophie sleeping next to me, her face catching the gray early light coming through the window. She is no more ready to be a mother than I was, and it will take all the courage and strength she has to pull this marriage together and embrace the uncertainty. Did I fail this child somehow, give her the mistaken impression when she was growing up that life is serene and easy? Did everything come too easily for her—friendships and love and success, so that when troubles come, she has no idea how to cope?

Maybe. But lying there, I realize that I know something else now that I didn’t know before: here I’ve been championing Whit and thinking he had to go to Brazil and that it was so important for his career, but now I know he shouldn’t have gone. His place was here, and he’s going to have to work hard to earn her trust again.

And there’s another thing I know now, in the gathering dawn. Sophie has seemed so weak and emotional throughout this time, and I’ve often felt as though she was playing a passive, victim role in her own life. But it’s not really been like that at all. She has never closed off her emotions, the way I would have done or her father would have done. No. The tough times came, and let it be noted that Sophie yelled and shouted, screamed and fought for her marriage.

That’s something that neither her father nor I did.

We just walked away. And that’s what I have to live with.

[twenty]

2005

I
try to call Grant because I badly want to tell him this thing I’ve figured out about walking away, but he doesn’t answer his phone. Not through the whole morning nor in the afternoon. I picture him looking at the caller ID and seeing that it’s me and deciding he doesn’t have the energy.

He is still walking away.

That’s okay. I know now that we’re all in a waiting mode. There is nothing to be done when the time isn’t right yet.

Right now it is enough that Sophie and I lie on her bed together in the evenings, Sophie knitting a blanket and me doing sketches of a baby in a café in Paris.

This is a call to my granddaughter to come and save us. I’ve seen babies do this trick before, so I know it is possible. Maybe it is the only thing that will work.

AND THEN, less than a week later, Sophie gets up predawn to go to the bathroom, and through the cotton batting of sleep, I hear a calm voice saying, “Mom. Mom, can you come in here, please?”

I disentangle myself from the covers and go to her, and then everything starts unfolding just the way it did in the heartbreaking scenario I had been imagining and fearing the most. In the harsh fluorescent light shining down on the white tile, in the white, white bathroom, there is bright red blood, alarming amounts of red, lots more than I would have thought possible. It is flowing and flowing, and Sophie stands in the middle of the bathroom, her face white, but she is not screaming, and she is not falling down, so we have that going for us. She lets me wrap her up in her bathrobe, and then I ease her over to the closed toilet seat, and I get my cell phone and call 911.

“My daughter is thirty-six weeks pregnant, and she has placenta previa, and she is bleeding—a lot,” I say into the phone, and I give the address to the dispatcher, who promises an ambulance will be right there, as though we’ve all rehearsed our parts.

May I just say that it scares me how serene Sophie is? In a way I’d be happier if she were doing her usual yelling and screaming and railing against nature and Whit and even me. If she were screaming about how unfair this is, how she’s scared or hurting or anything, but instead, she’s closed her eyes and is breathing softly and deeply. They start an IV right there in the ambulance, and we ride through the glistening wet streets in a rainstorm, with the headlights falling away to let us through on our path.

This must be really serious
, I think,
if even New York traffic is willing to let us take the street without argument
.

At the hospital, things are a bright, fluorescent blur, as if the whole thing has been filmed with a handheld camera. Nurses and doctors gather around, and they’re all doing things to Sophie, who is still the worst kind of calm, like she might be leaving, is what I think. Maybe she’s not even really here with me, not even now.

No, no, no! Don’t think this way
.

“Sophie,” I say. I squeeze her hand and lean down and brush the little tendrils of hair off her temples. “You’re doing fine. Everything’s okay now. You know that, right?”

She smiles with her grayish lips.

Don’t think this way
. If my eyes even fill up with tears, they will send me out of here. I’m permitted to stay because I sit right there beside Sophie with my hand loosely holding hers, because I’m the person she can count on, the
support person
.

The medical people have apparently come to a decision, and then they scatter, hurrying off to get equipment and more people. I hear some of the words—“bleeding under control … clamped … take her upstairs … get this taken care of!”

“What is happening, please?” I say to a curly-haired nurse who is pulling the chart out of the holder on the door.

“Oh!” she says. “They didn’t tell you? They’re going to do the C-section now.”

“But—is this wise? Is it time?” I say.

“She’s thirty-six and a half weeks,” she says cheerfully. “The baby’s lungs are fine. No sense waiting for another bleeding episode.”

“Can I be there?”

“Of course you can, Grandma. You’re going to sit right up by Mom’s head and keep her company. You’ve got the most important job of all, didn’t you know that? They’re bringing the stretcher for her now.”

“Oh,” I say, and sit back down. “Sophie, open your eyes, honey. Sophie, you’re going to have the baby now. Did you hear?”

“I heard,” she says softly. She looks at me with her wide gray eyes. “It’s okay, right?”

“What?”

“It’s okay? Are you fine?”

This is a joke from way back when she was two years old, scared of going into the swimming pool, scared of the dark, scared of feathers and dust. For weeks she went around muttering to herself, “Are you fine? Are you fine?”

I laugh. “We’re all fine, honey. And Beanie’s coming! This is her birthday, your baby’s birthday,” I say, and squeeze her hand.

And then the stretcher comes, and we take off for the birth room—all us chatty, smiling, emergency-competent people, bearing Sophie along with us, as though she’s a queen and we’re escorting her to the sacred temple.

A C-SECTION doesn’t take long, and you don’t see much, so even if you’re squeamish, it’s okay, I tell Grant. There’s a screen blocking your view, and so I just sat with Sophie telling her how exciting this was, and then there was a cry, and the doctor—not Dr. Levine—said, “She’s here!”

“Wow,” he says.

She is six pounds and four ounces and she has a fringe of brown hair and blue eyes. But I guess they all have blue eyes at first—isn’t that what we’ve heard? So who knows what color they will turn out to be. The important thing is that she’s healthy, and they stopped the bleeding for Sophie, and she’s fine now. Everything went as well as could be expected, no damage to the uterus. All’s well that ends well, et cetera, et cetera.

I tell him about the blood and the ambulance ride, the way the emergency-room people made the decision and somehow didn’t tell us. My words are tumbling all over each other. It’s not the way he likes to hear stories. We haven’t really spoken in detail since the day he left New York, nearly a month ago, and so when the story runs down, there is a moment of awkwardness.

“Well,” he says. “This is all good news. How’s Sophie’s mental state?”

“Good,” I say. “You would have been very proud of her, Grant. She was calm and in control, never once panicked, never cried.”

“Good, good,” he says.

A silence falls hard between us.

“So have you told Nicky?” he asks.

“No! I wanted to tell you first. I knew you’d want to be first—”

“Well,” he says. “Well, thank you for that. Thank you. And I’m glad that things went well and that you got to be there. I’ll get things squared away here and be on my way.”

“You will? You’re coming?” I don’t know why this surprises me.

“Annabelle. Sophie’s my kid. Of course I’m going to be there. What do you think?”

“Okay. Well—I didn’t know, is all. I’ll call Nicky to let him know, too. He may want to get a ride with you.”

“What?” I can hear the impatience in his voice. “No, Nicky can’t come. He’s got his last week of classes before finals. He can visit when his classes are finished and he’s taken his exams.”

“I think he wants—”

“Well, I’ll
explain
to him that he
cannot
. There will be plenty of time for him to see the baby once he’s gotten through freshman year. He can even spend the entire summer being a devoted uncle if he wishes.”

“Grant—”

“What, Annabelle?”

“Please, let’s not make a federal case of Nicky’s schooling, okay? You know, right when things are so happy and all—”

“They’re going to be happy no matter what,” he says. “But he
is
going to stay in school.”

NICKY, OF course, doesn’t see it that way. My phone call wakes him up, but as soon as I tell him about the baby, he starts asking a million questions about “the way the whole thing went down,” as he puts it. It’s sort of the antithesis of Grant, I realize; Nicky loves hearing about the ambulance ride and the huddle of medical people in the emergency room, and the way it felt when we first saw the baby.

“Did they have to spank her like they do in the movies?”

“I don’t think they’ve spanked babies in this country for a hundred years, if they ever did.”

“Good. You’d hate to think the first thing a kid goes through is physical abuse. They didn’t spank me, then?”

“No, no,” I say.

“Okay, great. Whew. So listen. I’ll call Dad and get him to pick me up and bring me down with him.”

“Nicky, you can call him if you want, but he told me that you’ve got your last week of classes and he wants you to wait until final exams are over.”

“What?”

“Yeah. He feels pretty strongly about this. I’ll e-mail you some pictures, and then you can come right after exams—”

“But, Mom, listen to me. I don’t have any exams.”

“What do you mean?”

He lets out a big sigh. “I’m leaving school.”

“What? You dropped out of your classes?”

“Well, I didn’t exactly drop out of them yet. But I haven’t been to them in about three weeks. Since I came back from break.”

“Nicky! What in the world—?”

“I know, Mom. I shoulda told you and Dad. But he just made me so mad, and I was taking these stupid classes that don’t have anything to do with anything. And then I had the flu when the main paper was due in my history class, and the guy wouldn’t take it late, so that’s like half my grade is an F right there. So what’s the point? And then I wanted to snowboard because the end-of-the-season powder has been totally, awesomely perfect, and then my friend Jason needed me to help out with this job he got on the slopes, and so I had to work because I needed the money, and—”

“Oh, Nicky. Why didn’t you tell us?”

“It was just a sucky semester.”

“I know, but still …”

“Anyway, Mom, so I want to come see the baby. I’ve got to be there.”

“Oh, Nick—I don’t know what to tell you.”

He gets quiet.

“Can’t you just try to take your finals? You know how mad your father’s going to be.”

“Is that all you care about? Really? I’m an uncle, Mom. And I want to come and be with you guys—I want to be there when you’re all together, because this is a family event, you know, and I’m part of the family! Stupid Whit can’t be bothered to come, and now you’re trying to keep
me
away, too?”

I can’t think. Then I say, “No. No, of course you should be here. I’ll send you the money to come.”

“No, that’s okay,” he says. “I’ll call Dad, and I’m sure he’d love to Darth Vader me for another six-hour car ride.”

“Nicky, I’m not sure ‘Darth Vader’ is a verb. And I think you might—”

“Might what?”

“Well, I just think you might have some trouble convincing your father that you should be here, is all. Promise me that if he says he’s not going to come and get you that you’ll just ease up and do what he says. Okay? We’ve got enough tension going on in this family right now without all this, and the baby will still be a new baby next week when you get here, you know.”

“I freaking cannot believe you’re saying this, Mom!” he says.

“Nick.”

“I am coming, one way or another. I am not staying away just because of ‘tension in the family.’ I have to be there!” And he hangs up.

[twenty-one]

2005

G
rant gets to the hospital just as evening is falling. He ducks into Sophie’s room as they’re wheeling away her dinner tray. I’m sitting in the armchair by the bed, holding the baby, who is sleeping peacefully. Sophie and I are both so tired we can barely talk. We’ve spent the day cuddling Beanie—she’s still Beanie even now that she’s achieved non-fetal status—and cooing and cheering as she’d nurse and open her eyes and hold on to our index fingers. We’re besotted with love.

All in all, a wonderful, satisfying day, but exhausting. Sophie, in addition, has spent nearly an hour on the telephone with Whit, reliving for him in exact detail every moment, and then trying to arrange an earlier flight home for him.

And now there’s Grant coming in, rumpled and smelling of the outside world and carrying a bouquet of flowers and a giant lollipop.

“Hey, so is this the room where the cutest baby in the world is staying tonight?” he says, and Sophie says, “Oh, Daddy! Hi! I’m so glad to see you—come look at her!” He smiles and goes over and kisses Sophie first, but she says, “No, go see the baby. Mom has her. I think she has your nose!”

He comes over to me then, and I tilt the baby and move her blanket so he can see her face.

“The news reports I heard were correct,” he says. “She is the cutest baby in the world, like they were saying on all three networks. Little Grantina Bartholomew, is that her name? That was the report on NBC, but CBS couldn’t confirm it.”

“Ha-ha,” says Sophie. “Nice try. So far she’s still Beanie.”

He hands her the flowers and the lollipop, and she buries her head in the flowers. “Ooh, roses and lilies. They smell so wonderful. Thank you.”

“So how’d it go?” he says. “I heard you got to ride in the ambulance with the siren going and everything. You really like to do it up in style, don’t you?”

So she tells him the whole story, and he smiles and nods as she’s telling it. At one point he’s looking so longingly at the baby that I get up and motion to him to sit down and take her for himself. He gives me a grateful smile and sits down with her and makes cooing noises. She opens her eyes and stretches a little and then goes right back to sleep. We all watch this amazing performance.

“So no Nicky?” I say.

He doesn’t look at me. “Nope. He’s got work to do.”

“When I talked to him, he didn’t have any work. He was planning to call you and see if you’d bring him along with you.”

“I talked to him,” he says. “I told him no.”

“But why?”

“Annabelle. He is driving me crazy with his irresponsibility—he’s got to get his studying done.”

“He dropped out of school! He doesn’t have any studying.”

“He hasn’t officially dropped out. He’s missed a lot of classes, yes, but I told him that he can talk to the professors and try to make up his work. I’m sorry, but I do not see why he thought he could get away with this—”

“He just wants to be with the family,” I say. “He was concerned about Sophie and the baby, that’s all. He wanted to feel a part of things.”

Sophie says, “Hello? I’m a postpartum person here? And I don’t want to listen to any bad things. Why don’t I call Nicky and talk to him and see if he can come after his exams?”

“All right,” I say quickly before Grant can object to even that. Her cell phone battery is dead, and so I go to my purse and get mine for her, and for a long moment she’s punching his number and then waiting. Then she says, “Hi, Nicky. This is your sister, who happens to be a brand-new mama. Call me when you get this message. I’m sorry you’re not here! Love you! Bye.”

I give Grant a steely look. “You should have gone and picked him up.”

He sighs. “I just don’t want him to drop out of school. Why is that wrong?”

“Oh, Grant. It’s wrong because you can’t stop it. It’s already happened. You should have at least gone and gotten him. We can’t just leave him behind … he obviously wasn’t ready for college, but that doesn’t mean we just leave him out of things.”

The baby jerks awake and starts to cry right then—perhaps realizing the family she’s been born into—and Sophie says, “Will you please bring her over to me so I can nurse her? And maybe … could the two of you, sort of you know, maybe … leave for a bit? Like, maybe until tomorrow?”

“HAVE YOU eaten?” he says when we get down to the lobby.

“No. I had a candy bar last Tuesday, I think. Do you want to get something in the hospital cafeteria?”

“God no,” he says. “There’s a Greek place across the street. Let’s go there.”

It’s pouring rain outside, but he takes off his jacket and puts it over both our heads and we run across the street into a diner that’s way too dimly lit. We find a table in the back and he orders us glasses of red wine and then sits there, staring at the forty-page menu as though it’s a thesis and he’s going to be tested on it. Finally he puts it down and rubs his eyes and says, “I should have gone and gotten him.”

The waiter brings the wine and stands there with his order pad, looking at us.

“Grant. What do you want to eat?”

“I don’t even know. I’m going to try to call him.”

“Two spanakopita,” I tell the waiter. “And salads with oil and vinegar, please.”

“There’s no answer, just voice mail. Do you think I should leave a message?”

“Wait. I think I have his roommate’s number saved in my phone,” I say. “I’ll call Matt and see if he knows where Nicky might be.”

“Okay.” Grant puts his head in his hands.

Matt answers and says he last saw Nicky at about two o’clock, and he told Matt that he was going to hitch a ride to New York. He thought he knew some people who might be going to New Jersey for a basketball game, and if they couldn’t take him, then he said he was just going to use his thumb.

“He’s going to hitchhike? To New York?” I say, and glare at Grant, who moans and rubs his temples.

When I hang up, the salads have arrived, but I’m not even hungry. I push my plate away. “He’s out there in the rain on the turnpike somewhere trying to get to New York,” I say.

“I should have gotten him.”

“Of course you should have gotten him! Why didn’t you?”

“Why couldn’t he just stay in school? What is happening to this family?”

“This
family?
What is happening to you? Why do you have to act like we’re all a bunch of ne’er-do-wells who are constantly falling short of your expectations?”

He looks up at me. “Is that what you see?”

“Yes! God, yes, Grant. You—” I start to say something and then just clamp my mouth shut.

“No, go on,” he says. He pushes his salad plate away, too. “Tell me. Please. For God’s sake, let’s just get it all out in the open.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. We’re in enough of a crisis right now.”

“No, we’re not. This doesn’t even approach crisis level. Not really. Chances are Nicky’ll be popping up here just as soon as one of us has our first heart attack. You’ll see. In the meantime, you have to talk to me.”

“I
can’t
talk about it,” I say, but then of course I talk anyway. I’m furious with him. “You know what makes me the maddest? This is supposed to be a happy day. This is the day our granddaughter was born, Grant! Here it’s a big wonderful day, and instead of celebrating, we’re sitting here in this diner unable to eat even a bite because we’re so upset! And why? Let me count the reasons, Grant. The first is that you are livid with me over something that happened twenty-six years ago and which has utterly no consequence to our current life, but which you have decided is of complete—”

“I know you think I’m mad at you. But I’m not mad.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m really not. I was. I was so shocked that you’d seen Jeremiah, and everything came out badly. I’m mostly mad at myself, if you want to know the truth. I haven’t gotten anything done on my book, Annabelle. I’m no good by myself, but I’m no good with all the rest of you either.” He sits there for a moment, leaning on his elbow and holding the bridge of his nose. Then he looks at me again. “You know what? I realized that I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to figure out what could potentially go wrong for this family in every potential situation, and I’ve run around like a wild man, trying to come up with a game plan for protecting all of you in every single situation. I feel like a basketball guard that has to guard every person on my team on the court. And
then
it turns out that that was a screwy plan in the first place because bad stuff
still
happened to all of you! Just look at what’s happened.
You’re
flailing around. You go running to a man who broke your heart before. Sophie gets married to a guy who somehow thinks it’s not his job to be there when his daughter is born. And meanwhile my own son has decided he’d rather smoke dope and work at a ski lift like a bum than keep going to school to make something of himself.” He holds out his hands. “And you know what? So what, right? Big deal. The main thing I’ve figured out is that I can’t do it anymore. I can’t. I can’t keep you safe, Annabelle. None of you.”

“I’m safe,” I say. “We are safe.”

He sighs. “I know that. I guess I know it. But whether you are or not, I can’t protect you from everything anymore. And”—he takes a deep breath—“apparently I can’t live without you. I’m just going to have to accept that, too, I guess. You’re telling me now that you want a life where you spend part of the time in New York helping with the baby and doing illustrations …”

“I think that will be good for us. I need to have my own things to do.”

“And what about … Jeremiah? God, it’s still hard for me to say his name.”

“This isn’t about Jeremiah,” I say. “I’m not going to see him. But it was wrong to make a deal where we wouldn’t ever mention even his name or that it ever even happened.”

“No kidding.”

“It gave it too much … well, power. That I had once made that mistake. You can’t just claim that stuff just didn’t ever happen. It did happen! And just so you know, I never talked to him again after that day he left me. All those years, and I never talked to him.”

“Yeah, well, I did,” he says.

“Did what?”

“Talked to him. He didn’t tell you about that, did he?”

“You talked to him?”

“I punched him out.”

I put my hands over my mouth. “You did
not
punch him out.”

“Oh, I did. When he left you at the train station—”

“But you didn’t know about that. How did you know?”

“Annabelle. Think about it. We both still worked at Columbia. So one day I just went into his office and I asked him what the fuck had happened between you and him, and he told me.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he couldn’t do it. He gave some mealymouthed excuse about how he had to stay with his family, and how he’d never meant it to get to that point with you, and oh, he was so full of himself, so egotistical—I’m sorry, but he did not deserve you, Annabelle. He did not deserve even one minute of your love, and I just went over and punched him in the face. As hard as I could. And I told him he had hurt a person who had loved him enough to be willing to leave somebody who loved her
for real.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?”

“I didn’t want to. I wasn’t proud of it. I’m still not proud of it.”

“You fought for me,” I say. “When I thought you didn’t care.”

“Oh, stop it. If there was anything you knew, it was that I was an idiot for you. I was almost a quivering little puppy dog around you.”

“No, you weren’t. Now don’t take this the wrong way, Grant, but you never really showed any true passion for me.” He looks shocked, so I go on: “I mean, in bed, sure, but that’s just sex. When it came to—”

“Just sex?
Just sex?
I have been madly in love with you for decades! And you took my heart and stomped on it and I took you back, and I have made love to you thousands of times, in every circumstance known to humankind—and you’re saying I was never passionate about you?”

“You—you were always so mild-mannered.”

“Well, woman, now that you know that I punched a man out in your honor, I hope you’ll see my ardor differently.”

“Wow,” I say. “I wish I’d known. Also, Grant, you were gone so much of the time. I didn’t even know you, and when you were home, you were just bound up with work.”

“Well, yeah, that part
was
unfortunate. It was an unlucky way to start a marriage, when I had more work than I’d ever had in my whole life. Whether you know it or not, the university system demands that, which is why I figured we’d better leave Columbia and go back to New Hampshire. I figured if I gave all that up and taught at the community college, then at least I’d be able to be home. I wouldn’t ever get famous, or do the research I wanted, but at least I’d have you and I’d be a halfway decent husband who could maybe keep you happy.”

I study his face, the tired look in his eyes. Carefully, I say, “And … well, are you sorry?”

“Am I
sorry?”
He lets out a laugh. “I’ve been sorry as hell, Annabelle! Where have you been? This whole past year has been about me being sorry! It was one thing when the kids were little, not to mind everything I was missing out on. I
loved
what we were doing, I loved raising the kids—but there were times when I’d wake up and see you sleeping and I’d wonder if you were dreaming of
him
. And days when I’d be at work and I’d wonder if you were home calling him up. Or you’d get that dreamy, tragic look on your face sometimes and I’d want to know if you still wished he’d picked you over his wife and kids. Because a person never gets over thinking that sort of thing, you know, whether it gets talked about or not.”