The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel (17 page)

“Wait,” Derek said, and pulled a stiff engraved card from his wallet. “Laura had her stationer make this for us.” In black script, the card said their names and the London address they would be moving to after the birth. It was a card Annalena Chase Edelson would have deeply approved of.

“Fancy,” John said, turning it over.

“You never know who’s fancy,” Derek said, and hustled back into his small red car. When Derek left, John felt an unexpected sting of abandonment. He wrapped his arms around the baby to try to quell it. Clara squirmed.

*   *   *

The last thing he remembered Veronica really wanting was her mother. It was after her “bag of waters” was broken, when the labor was still moving very slowly. “Can you call her?” she’d asked. The request caught him off guard. Veronica never admitted wanting Annalena. But when he looked at his wife, he saw that thin, solemn six-year-old trailing behind her mother at Sotheby’s.

He left the room to call Annalena, and he asked her to come. “Oh, I’ll wait at home until the baby’s born,” she said. Her voice was ashy and light as if she hadn’t understood the request. There was a long pause. John sat in the meaty air of the cafeteria and considered what to say.

“She wants you here with her
now
.”

“Well, I don’t know what use I can be at the
actual
hospital. What can I do?” Annalena asked.

“She wants you to come. It’s not that you could do anything.”

When Annalena spoke again, she was halting, as if her reserve was melting. Her voice was breathy, almost shaky. “She’s doing fine, isn’t she?”

“It’s been a long day—or, no, it’s been two days—I don’t even know how long anymore, and she asked for you.” He heard Annalena laugh nervously in response.
“Just come,”
John said, surprised at the force in his voice, how her laughter had infuriated him.

She did arrive about half an hour later, looking small and scared, her mousy face emerging above a white blazer. She wore a red grosgrain headband.
Who wears a headband in 2004?
Ines always wanted to know. It was deliberately out of date, an announcement to the world that Annalena was not present.

“I brought some linen I’m embroidering for the baby. How is she?” Annalena said. They stood at the information desk on the maternity floor.

“She’s hanging in there.”

Inexplicably, Annalena had blushed. What the hell was she embarrassed about? “Should I wait in the lounge?” She gestured with the ridiculous linen sampler toward some seats. She didn’t seem to understand that she was Veronica’s
mother
and should not go anywhere. John resisted an urge to grab her tiny shoulders and shake her.

He took a deep breath. “No. Okay, um, no. You should come
into
the room. Right away. I’m going in. Come when you’re ready.”

When he got back, Veronica was sitting in a chair as two people changed the dressing on her bed. She stood to let them peel the damp gown off her naked body and untangle it from the tubes, then put her and all her tubes into another fresh gown. Ignoring him, she moved back to the freshened bed, as if sleepwalking. He squeezed her hand when she was settled. She opened her eyes. “Where’s my mother?”

“She’s here, honey,” he said.

“Where?”

“She’s in the lounge.”

“Why?”

“She said she’s not sure what she can do in here.”

“Did you tell her I need her?” she asked, tears streaming down her face.

He’d failed her; he had failed to bring her the one thing she had asked for. Why had he not forced Annalena into the room? “I did. She has some, um, sewing she’s doing, but she’s here in the building. She’s—she loves you,” he blurted, desperate to comfort her. Veronica’s eyes lit for a moment; then she hid her face as if ashamed. She turned and faced the wall.

“Your mom is here for you.”

Veronica did her best to curl her ungainly body into a fetal position. She pulled the covers up to her chin.

“I’ll ask her to come in again,” John said, but it was futile. He felt his wife’s disappointment. What could he do about it? Wanting Annalena wasn’t rational. She wasn’t a woman who could be had.

“Don’t you get it?” Veronica said. He’d become the despised messenger. And then the door opened tentatively. Veronica sniffled and looked up with expectation. John felt a wave of relief before Muriel’s face appeared in the doorway.

*   *   *

The two-fifteen flight to JFK had already left. There were no more flights until the next morning, an eternity and a thousand dollars later. He looked around the airport aimlessly, as if there’d actually be anyone to help him.

As a child, he’d been lost once at Wolman Rink around Christmas. Bravely he’d circled the ice, then went around again. Couples zoomed past. Bits of ice sprayed into the air. Next he tried staying in one place, to see if his parents would appear. Eventually it was too cold to remain outside. He found his parents in the café, cooing over Irish coffee. When he appeared, they asked casually if he wanted to taste it.
But I was gone
, he wanted to say. He’d sipped the fiery drink and it scalded his throat. He was then offered a hot chocolate. Perhaps only a few minutes had passed, but in the time he’d been missing, unnoticed, a desert had expanded in his chest. He’d stood alone on the ice, the crowd of skaters zooming past. The loss was his alone.

He wanted to call Derek and looked at the engraved card; it listed Derek’s London number only. In the cacophonous airport, he was homeless. Clara was hot and cranky.

“Dadooooo!” she babbled loudly, with anguish and tears in her eyes. Little red huts sold refreshments and souvenirs in the impossibly bright sunlight. Even in the late afternoon the sun was unrelenting. It was an amazing thing to have a home. To be able to go there and take off your shoes and put your keys down on the counter.

John went to one of the huts and ordered a Banks beer and sat at the bar, holding the cold bottle against his hot forehead while Clara wiggled. She arched her tiny back and grunted stiffly, wanting to be set free, then leaned down as far as she could toward the ground. How he needed to keep her from that ground, where she might eat the cigarette butts and
lick
the floor.

He bought two of the squat Caribbean bananas from a pruned woman selling them off her head. He fed Clara some from his fingers, which helped somewhat, but then she flapped her arms and feet frantically, wanting more. He bought fried chicken at one of the little huts, eating it himself and giving Clara a bottle of goat milk. When she was calmer, he set out again—he had to, for he was
her
home—over the hot tarmac to a white stucco airport motel.

12

Saturday

Veronica

Veronica was back at Grand Central for the second time in one day; it made her feel homeless. Her bra dug into her back in the way it did when she was overtired, as if her body were melting. The train ticket was in her hand. She stood eagerly on the platform. Soon. Soon she could hold Clara, the baby’s body draped warmly over her chest and shoulder. She and John had joked in the early weeks after Clara’s birth that they wanted to take turns being put into slings, rolled into flannel blankets, and carried in each other’s arms. It was one of the tragedies of adulthood: that one was simply too large to be lifted by another person.

John
had
supported her full weight once during early labor. She would have to remind him: Pain was something they could get through together. She’d been so alone, but she needn’t be anymore. They needn’t be alone.

Nearby, a teenage couple, underdressed in matching blue fleece, waited near the track, kissing. The boy held the girl’s face with both hands as if it were breakable.

On board, Veronica unwrapped and ate a very useful egg sandwich—it had been so long since she’d last eaten from a diner—and had a coffee. No, it was not a farm-raised duck egg; no, it was not a fair-trade macchiato. The cheese on the sandwich was a bright yellow American square. The bread was not whole grain but white and fluffy as a cloud. Mendelsohn’s wife, Jamie, would be appalled. But the sandwich was so good. It was
greasy
. Had anything ever felt cozier than the egg sandwich and her own window seat on this train? She had a good view across the aisle, where the young couple in fleece had planted themselves to make out. And she enjoyed it—yes, she liked seeing the happiness of others, as if in John’s absence she had suddenly become, or was perhaps
once again
, magnanimous. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt wiser, seasoned, and even a little taller.

The teenage girl caught Veronica’s eye and blushed. Veronica actually winked. There she was, an entirely new incarnation, an older woman capable of dispensing affirmation and comfort.

The train rumbled through the Bronx. She watched a man across the aisle from her as he dozed off—he was a boy, really, stuck inside a pin-striped suit. John, too, was simply a boy. It seemed perfectly understandable that John had had no answer for her about the reasons for her hysterectomy. Was there truly a dangerously low level of amniotic fluid? Was it really necessary to induce labor? In the intervening months he’d failed to come up with an answer. But how could he have? And how could he or she
ever
know if things might have happened differently? Life after the birth had been
a lot
; it had all been a lot for John too.

She licked ketchup off her thumb, aware not only of the high-fructose corn syrup that was its main ingredient but that John had felt helpless. The man in the suit awoke with a start and pulled a slim cellphone from his pocket. He stared at it with apprehension, then hope.

She would never have another child.

But as she sat on the train, the reality of Clara finally
eclipsed
that fact. Clara was a baby and would be a girl and might someday make out with a boy on a train. She would sneak out of the house at night and have a life Veronica wouldn’t know about.

The young couple kissed, but the girl kept looking at her watch and giggling as the boy lunged for her. The faint odor of skunk slipped through the doors at one station: The city was receding, growing distant. Crosby Street seemed like another continent; the loft, a mere stage. The skunk odor grew stronger. There were animals in the woods, doing their animal things; there were trees and crackling branches and warm houses, perfuming the air with wood smoke. There was no parallel reality, no other way things could be. This was it; a single cold night in January. She had betrayed John. She would not tell him, but the fact was there, for her to know and to live with. Soon she’d see his house, the small Tudor one he’d grown up in, with the modest boxwoods and the amazing climbing tree. She had the comforting but also unsettling sensation of moving backward through time. She was almost there.

13

Saturday

John

The inside of the new hotel room was stucco like the outside, a white cave of rough walls, and Clara wailed within it. John held her and paced, and this quieted her somewhat, but if he dared to stop she screamed. He longed to be free from her, to be alone. There had been that moment of morning glee as he dressed her for the beach, that sense of his own ability. He’d considered himself pretty capable as a father, but he was realizing now that he hadn’t spent very many consecutive hours alone with her. He had scoffed at Veronica’s fatigue. He had not fully believed it. She had been recovering from surgery, been post-partum, and had begun working full time. She spent almost all of her free time caring for the baby. His smudged reflection in the dirty mirror above the dresser showed that he was now experiencing a small fraction of her fatigue.

Clara screamed directly into his ear. The sound of a baby crying was considered torture; tonight he understood why. Tisbury’s drugs were wearing away. His head was beginning to pound. He hugged Clara, saying, “Daddy’s here,” and feeling totally preposterous. To wish your child asleep, to yearn for her to sleep more than anything else in the world, was the plight of parenthood.

The sleep-training book they’d consulted when Clara was four months old had called letting the baby cry it out
extinction,
with no irony at all, with no admission that crying it out
was
a little death. Veronica and John hadn’t been willing when Clara was four months old, but they were planning to try it soon. In that stucco room, in a guilty reversal, John held Clara and rocked her, all the while wishing for
extinction.
Time thickened and stretched. A spiderweb dulled the plastic leaves of a fake plant on the dresser. Clara’s body grew heavier as he paced. He paused to examine the bruise on his forehead in the dresser mirror. A swollen purple lump muddied his hairline where he’d been hit by the ball. Clara began to scream, so he resumed pacing, his biceps aching. The bedspread was white chenille, the pillow mustard foam beneath a thin pilled cover. Finally Clara’s eyes almost rolled back in her head with exhaustion and closed. They snapped open once more—no!—and then shut.

He waited a full fifteen minutes and then carefully, in a ridiculous mime of slow motion, placed Clara on the center of the bed. When he was sure she was down, he picked up the hotel phone and dialed his home number. Two hours had passed since Derek had left him at the airport. He had a tic in one knee that was trembling. He had to reach Veronica; it was a relief to get the machine.

“Hi, it’s me?” he said, his intonation like a question. “Um … I’m on my way home. I should be there by … tomorrow, Sunday, by one, maybe more like two. I—I’m sorry I missed you. I mean, I keep missing you. Okay, see you soon. I’d put Clara on, but she’s sleeping. Okay—bye.” Despite his relief, he wondered where she’d gone. They never went out two nights in a row.

He worried that it was too late: Ines must have told Veronica about Barbados. Or, and maybe this was worse, she had gone to Irvington. He stood up, paced the darkening room, and then dialed Irvington. His old number, the one he’d memorized in middle school, made him nostalgic. Muriel and Evan announced themselves on the machine. Why had his mother not changed the message? It had been nearly a year. The recording stopped and he breathed into the space after it, unsure what to say. Exhaustion pivoted to confusion. He hung up.