The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel (21 page)

“Please get off,” she said, almost formally this time, yet he thought he detected a break in her resolve. He pushed her securely against the frame of the door, pinning her with his hips. Her Botticelli face was raw, pale, and very awake.

“Please, V,” he said. He kissed her chest near her collarbone, then her breast through the fabric of her tank top.

“Don’t,” she said. He kissed her other breast, her clavicle. She had to let him. She stepped on his foot, which he felt was mildly encouraging—footsie—until she stepped again, hard, with the heel of her boot. The door frame held them there as his foot throbbed.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

“You already did.”

He pressed the top of his head into her neck, nuzzling and inhaling her.

18

Sunday

Veronica

What happened next was unexpected. A familiar scent rose up around her, warm and sweet. It was coconut oil, rich and intoxicating. She saw a smear of it on the neck of his T-shirt. She sniffed it. The triangular patch of light behind his head melted and broke open. She leaned closer to him as if into a darkening prism. Winter sunlight poured into the space of the doorway, warming the crown of her head, her hair. She stopped pushing him away. She breathed him in.

Her body loosened in his arms. “Are you okay?” he asked. She couldn’t speak. Last night had been a mistake, an aberration. She nodded and pulled him closer to her. She was overcome quite suddenly by that fleeting, strange lover’s conceit that they were one and, having been unnaturally parted, they would—
had to
—connect. This was what was real.

He pulled her back into the nursery with a proprietary hand on the nape of her neck and shut the door. “The baby!” she said, almost demurely, knowing that she wasn’t going to go to her, that instead she would have sex with her insane husband. His aggressive motions became tender. Down the hall, Clara cried out briefly. John opened Veronica’s jeans fast with one hand and traced a finger on the rim of her underwear, just above the scar. They were the lemon-yellow lacy ones, nicer than any underwear she’d worn for months, which she had put on Saturday morning a million eons ago. She felt him touch the edge of the panties, almost mournfully, before he yanked them down.

She kissed him more deeply and he pressed his hands under her shirt, under her filmy bra onto her nipples, which hardened quickly beneath his fingertips. There was no time—the baby might wake up—but it was as if they were saying hello and goodbye at once, and it had to be
at once
, very fast and immediate.

The sheepskin rug was soft beneath her. His white narrow hips were a delectable blade, a part of a machine, burrowing in, while his stubbly chin knocked at her jawbone and neck. Sorrow consumed her.

“What is it?” He paused above her, sensing her distraction.

“Nothing.” She swam in this warmth. His hair, the oil, his skin. Saturated yellow glowed beneath her eyelids. Yellow turned brighter and deeper into gold. The color seared through her like something electric, a flash of happiness.

*   *   *

The spell ended as quickly as it had begun. The golden hue was eclipsed by darkness. In the back of her throat she could still taste Damon’s licorice toothpaste. What had she done? She heard John say, “I’m sorry. What’s wrong?” Her cheek rested in his warm palm. She hesitated there. Despite all that had happened, the grave flight away from each other, the otherworldly delusions, he was holding her the way she had always wanted to be held.

He caressed the brown curve of her hips. She saw him move back a bit, perhaps to gain perspective. She recognized the question in his face: Was this the last time, or had she forgiven him? He cupped her face in his hands. “You look so sad,” he said.

“You have no idea—” she answered, as tears spilled from her closed lids.

Clara woke up and cried in earnest. Neither one of them moved to get her.

19

Sunday

John

It wasn’t the baby but the telephone that roused them. “Don’t go away,” John told Veronica before rushing to answer the call, to stop the ringing and get rid of it—whoever it was—because he needed to return quickly to that sheepskin rug, while she was still there, while her great distress made her available. He picked up the kitchen phone.

“Ines may be miscarrying again. She’s bleeding,” Art said, trumping them and their own domestic drama. Veronica, half dressed, rushed out of the nursery and over to the stroller, pushing it a few times until Clara settled down.
You have no idea,
she’d said. Now he’d lost his chance for discovery. “We’re at the hospital,” Art said, “and if you could come by—actually, if
Veronica
could come.”

“Let me get her,” John said, and he motioned for Veronica to pick up the other phone. He recalled Art’s single-word response: WHAT? He was glad that he’d been temporarily forgotten.

Veronica picked up in the bedroom. When she heard, she asked about the blood. “Was it bright red or brown?”

“The second one, I guess,” Art said sheepishly. “She said it was like at the end of your period. I don’t know exactly.”

“Good, that’s a
good
thing,” she said, though her voice wavered.

The fear from the hospital—that long spell of uncertainty—returned to John. From the kitchen he watched Veronica through the open bedroom door as she quickly got dressed. She paused, hands on her hips, the phone in the crook of her neck, before she peeled off the yellow lacy underpants, replacing them with some white cotton ones.

Art said, “They said it was too early for Braxton Hicks, whatever that is.” John didn’t know what it meant either. He didn’t know what any of it meant—how you could thoughtlessly have sex for decades with no repercussions, how the mysteries of biology could mean nothing to you and then, quite suddenly, dominate your life.

“I’ll leave right now. Have you been seen yet?” Veronica asked.

“Not yet. We’ll be here awhile. Ines said she wanted every test under the sun.” Art’s voice was stripped, sad, the way John had rarely heard it.

*   *   *

John hung up and found Veronica already fastening Clara onto her body. “Her fever’s down. Hopefully we’ll be back soon,” she said, rushing to the door.

“Leave Clara here with me.” Ordinarily that’s what they’d do. It was close to her bath time and she’d been sick.

“I just can’t,” she said, her face shrouded by her marvelous hair.

“I’m coming with you, then.” He could not let her go. He followed her out the door. She adjusted the baby’s socks—made to look like Mary Jane shoes—as they rode down in the elevator. He’d been briefly optimistic, but Veronica was as distant, as she’d seemed on her first day back to work months ago, capable and clearheaded when faced with problems that weren’t her own.

On the street, she let him hold her hand briefly as they walked to the corner, but then she removed it to fidget with the carrier. “It seems more serious than it is. They’re only going to the hospital because it’s a Sunday. On a weekday they’d just be sent to her doctor’s office,” she told him, thinking aloud.

They jumped into a cab on Spring Street. As they rode uptown, they must have looked ordinary to anyone—a family of three heading out together on a Sunday afternoon. They had been that family, and all the while—through the unseasonably hot fall, through the darkness of winter, through the virtual weekend and the dream of escape—he had not fully known this.

“Did Art know where you went?” she asked.

“Art? He had no idea,” he said, unsure why he lied.

“He must have,” she said, shaking her head.

“He had nothing to do with it. If you’d let me, I’d tell you everything.”

“Your mother definitely had no idea. She told me that story about you visiting the Sandlemans when you were little—she loves that story.”

“She does,” he said, but Veronica had turned away from him to look out the window at the slush in Union Square. “I’m here,” he said, breathing into her shoulder, “in case you want to keep talking.” Briefly, she turned to him. “I missed you,” he said.

“I missed you too.”

The cab passed the dowdy restaurants on First Avenue where he’d eaten far too many meals, the mediocre pizza places and the bars patronized by hospital staff in dirty white lab coats; passed the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel and the endless rows of doctors’ offices with brass plaques until they were back at the hospital, back where Clara had been born.

He liked feeling Veronica follow him out of the car and around the corner as they walked under the neon
EMERGENCY
sign and into the fluorescent waiting room.

His newly able wife approached the desk.

“Arthur Greene is already with the patient; you can’t go back,” a nurse told her.

“She asked for me,” Veronica said, “specifically.”

John remembered the greyhound running through the lavender, the poster that read
EXCELLENCE
. He had once taken care of her.

“Only one significant other.”

“Can you let her know I’m here?” They waited. Veronica paced with Clara, who was twisting in her sling, on the verge of a meltdown.

Just as she did on the night of Clara’s birth, Veronica had to keep moving. If she paused for a moment or dared to sit down, the baby would be incensed.

Across the East River, the Pepsi-Cola sign was still beating like a heart. The hysterectomy had brought him this same view and the odd refreshment of the air outside the building. Now they were together, looking at the same sign from the same vantage point; they were together in a place where he could have lost them both.

“Listen. I can get the medical records from Berlin’s office.” It came to him suddenly, the way she might return, the way she might forgive him. She’d been calling Berlin’s office for months, asking for the birth record; she had sent and signed all the required forms, but they would not release it.

“That’s nice of you.” She smiled faintly, which was encouraging. “But it doesn’t matter anymore,” she added.

“It doesn’t matter anymore?” What had happened during the birth had mattered to her for months. He had just caught up to that fact; he’d finally understood.

“They wouldn’t give them to you, anyway.” She spoke without bitterness. “You’re not the patient.”

“I’m going to go there in person and demand the damn thing.”

She looked at him as he kept pace beside her. “It has to be me.”

“I’ll go with you, then. We’ll go together one day at lunch.”

She stopped walking. “At lunch?” she said with a note of confusion. They never had lunch together. Above her, a TV hung from the ceiling in the corner; there, a weatherman was pointing at a dark-gray cloud flecked with flurries.

“Well, we should,” he said. She was right. All they did was work.

He approached Veronica as she turned to stare at the television. He spoke into her hair. “I love you,” he said. Clara started to fuss. She whipped around, standing back to assess him. Her pale eyes roamed over his face as she bit her lower lip. “Can I hold the baby now?” he asked.

“No way,” she said. “Can you get me a coffee, though?”

At the moment, nothing could have made him happier than this mundane request.

20

Sunday

Veronica

The rage that had begun, sweeping her up in its grasp, had been tiring; it was like wrestling with a tangled kite in the wind. White noise and motion and no release. If you held on, the rope would burn your hand. But if you let go of it, the kite would just fly away. She couldn’t let go of it yet.

When he left for the coffee, there was reprieve in the form of the weatherman on TV pulling down a cumulous cloud, delivering the predictable report on barometric pressure and snow. Ines’s fate was unpredictable: There she was beyond those double doors in one of those insufficient hospital gowns that kept opening in the back, imagining a future she did not yet, might not ever, possess. Veronica was now holding her child, cool and calm on her chest.

Theirs was a different sort of emergency from Ines’s. For months John had moped around the loft on weekends in the same thin red flannel shirt, playing Scrabble on the computer. He also played solitaire, and a few times she’d caught him inside virtual realities, fighting demons and vanquishing enemies with unusual cyber monikers. All those nights she had spared telling him that she’d noticed what he “worked on,” and she—well, she’d gone to bed early to read the side effects and warning labels on her various prescriptions. She’d keep the light on for him, trying to wait up but never could.
He
had betrayed her too. They had not gone anywhere for months.

Then on Friday he’d left her, his work, his rut. He had taken the baby away from her. It was unconscionable. He had gone away; he had in fact
done
something. And John had returned with a new energy. She couldn’t deny that she felt it. How would he conceive of it? He was a bold explorer, a brave knight who had conquered an unknown land. She had needed him to stay, to be with her regardless of her mood.

The weatherman’s snow disappeared from the TV screen; in its place, a fleet of Humvees drove across a desert. Clara finally succumbed to sleep and Veronica sat down to rest. A nurse in aqua scrubs scribbled on a clipboard while a gold locket dangled in her cleavage. Inside the locket, no doubt, there was a picture of
her
beloved. All experience was subjective. Veronica—as she had been in Ines’s kitchen on Friday night—was a speck in a vast universe. She was nothing more than a mass of cells floating in darkness. She hovered there, unmoored, wondering how long the feeling could last.

When she saw John returning with the coffee, everything mattered again; his face warmed at the sight of her. She could not have gotten through the birth without his unseasoned and terrified care. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

“I’m worried about that bruise on your forehead.” She touched it gently. Iodine and blood caked his hairline. She had let go.

“Are you?”

“I’m worried about Ines too,” she said.