When the Killing's Done (46 page)

“Alma?” She can feel her mother shifting her weight from one foot to the other, the floorboards communicating the movement to her through the tiles of the bathroom floor and up into the soles of her bare feet. And she feels ridiculous suddenly, like a child, a toddler, her mother out there listening for the tinkle of her urine the way she must have all those years ago at the Takesue household or in the cramped little head of the
Black Gold
. Potty training. That’s the term for it.

She’s drawing in her breath to answer, to say “Not yet” or “Give me a minute,” when it comes, hot and sudden. She barely has time to maneuver the cup to catch a portion of it—for a moment there, drifting, she’s forgotten entirely the purpose of the exercise—but here it is, her urine, an inch or more of it, captured in the plastic throwaway container the manufacturer has thoughtfully provided. Immediately, even before getting up to wash her hands, she thrusts the dipstick into it and sets it on the tiles between her slim splayed feet. “Alma?” her mother calls, rattling the doorknob now. “Don’t keep me in suspense out here.”

The seconds tick by. Nothing happens. Heart pounding, feeling feverish and weak, she leans forward to pick up the container and give it a shake—maybe it needs to be stirred, that’s what she’s thinking, maybe there’s not enough contact between strip and solution or she’s been doing something wrong—when suddenly the second line appears below the first, as pink as cotton candy.

Her mother insists on celebrating, just the two of them (“And Ed doesn’t have to know a thing about it till it’s really sunk in because he can just sit in front of the TV and entertain himself with his ball games”), taking her out for the Sunday brunch at the hotel down the street because she’s going to have to eat for two now and yes, she can have one mimosa, only one, and that’s the last alcohol she’ll see for the next nine months. “You won’t miss it, honey, believe me, and I just pray you don’t inherit my—what would you call it?—
propensity
for morning sickness. Or morning, afternoon and evening sickness,” she adds with a laugh. “But everybody’s different, every
pregnancy’s
different, and I’m sure you’re going to be fine.”

Sitting there on the patio of the hotel and looking out across the barbered lawn and the strip of blacktop road to where the sea beats immemorially at the beach, the salt scent strong in her nostrils and the symbolic baggage of all that seething oceanic life as apparent as if she were rocking below the waves with her mask clear and her snorkel jutting high, she begins to doubt herself all over again. Does she really want to go through with this? Is there really room for another hungry mouth on this sore and wounded planet? And Tim. What of Tim?

“What are you thinking?” her mother asks, both her elbows propped on the table, one hand languidly revolving the pale orange liquid round the rim of her glass. Her plate is littered with the translucent husks of shrimp and the glistening black shells of mussels, fruit rinds and olive pits, a picked-over salad bathed in oleaginous dressing. “Because it’s your decision. And Tim’s, of course. But you can make me a very happy woman, honey, because I am ready, let me tell you, loud and clear, to be a grandma. Janis might not have made it or what’s her name from the Mamas and the Papas, but I did. And I’m ready to shout it to the world.” Grinning, swaying in her seat, she happens to catch the eye of the two women seated at the table across from them. She winks. Mouths: “I’m going to be a grandma!”

On any other occasion, this sort of thing might have been mortifying, especially given the fact that the two women stare right through them and then turn back to their conversation, but today, on this late and glorious morning bathed in autumnal sunshine and scintillant with the rinsed-clean smell of the ocean, Alma lets it wash over her. She’s undergoing a process of adjustment, she understands that, hormones percolating up inside her, overwhelming her resistance even as her brain tries to take command, reason, weigh her options, until finally she feels herself giving way. She shrugs. Treats her mother to a smile. Raises her glass. “Yeah,” she says, even as her mother leans forward to clink glasses, “I guess you are.”

Right. Sure. And then there’s Tim.

She’s there waiting for him at the slip when the Park Service boat glides past the breakwater and swings south into Ventura Harbor, the afternoon arching high overhead, the sky a pale feathered blue and the sun a gentle beneficent presence hanging just over the crowns of the palms, so golden and mellow and rich it looks as if it’s been painted in. Everything, including the protestors making their endless circuit around the building behind her, seems to glow with an inner light, colors heightened and shadows softened even as their homemade banners and signs—
Stop the Killing!
—fade away to abstraction. She’s tested herself three times since the initial trial, investing in a second kit just to be certain there were no anomalies with the first, and just before her mother bundled up Ed and headed back to Arizona yesterday morning, she made an appointment with an obstetrician for Monday of next week. For a blood test. To be sure—incontrovertibly, rock-solid sure.

There are only five people disembarking—two of the college girls working with the captive foxes, an archaeologist studying the Chumash remains, the botanist who’s set up a nursery to propagate native plants with the idea of re-introducing them once the star thistle and fennel have been removed or at least reduced, and Tim. He gives her a wave as he comes up the ramp looking thinner than usual, looking tired, wasted, his hair snaking out to obscure the long thin sliver of his face and his shoulders hunched under the weight of his overcrammed backpack. He’s wearing a pair of sunglasses she’s never seen before—big bug-eyed seventies shades with gilded frames—and how long has it been? Ten days, that’s all. It seems like years. She watches the grin lift his jaw and light his face and then he’s there, letting loose the backpack and spreading his arms wide to take her in. And when she hugs him to her, feeling the heat of him, the familiar contours of his body, the touch of his lips on hers, she can’t let go—or not yet. Not till she communicates her joy in the language that precedes language, flesh to flesh.

“Wow,” he says, breaking away from her to bend for the backpack, “I guess you missed me.”

Smiling up at him, her eyes roving from the stiffened mud at the cuffs and knees of his jeans to the smooth silken growth of a fledging beard he didn’t have the last time she saw him, she just says, “You have no idea.”

He’s got the backpack slung over one shoulder now and they’re heading up the walk, his hand in hers. “So from your body language, I presume you just want to rush home and get it on—or were we going to have a beer first?”

“Beer first.”

And it’s just as she pictured it: the booth by the window, the fried calamari, the pale pilsner sizzling in the glass, his eyes on hers, the music falling away to a background murmur. “Good news,” he’s saying, dipping a strand of calamari in a little silver cruet of aioli as if he’s trying to thread a needle. “I think we’re down to no more than maybe three or four birds.”

For the past four days she’s been rehearsing what to say to him, running through one imaginary conversation after another. Right now, though, now that the moment has come, she can’t do much more than nod and smile and say “Great” in a weak retreating voice.

“By early next year, summer at the latest, because they’re pulling us off this for now, till spring anyway when we can see who’s nesting and who’s not, the goldens’ll be gone and you can let the foxes loose.” He’s gulping beer and putting away calamari as if he’s been a castaway all this time instead of bellying up to the big communal pot of whatever’s cooking at the field station. “But I tell you,” he goes on, waving a chunk of the calamari with the tentacles bunched at the end of his fork, “it’s a bitch out there. They’re getting wise to us. Hey, but more good news: as of this moment there are three happy and healthy goldens on their way to the Sierras for release, and one, a juvenile whose wing got unfortunately screwed up in the net who’s going to find a new home at the Santa Barbara Zoo.”

And what does she say? “Great.”

“But what about you? Your mother still here?”

“She left yesterday—Ed had some sort of golf tournament or something he had to be back for.”

“That was all right, though? I mean, them being there, the concert? How was it?”

“Great.”

He takes a moment, craning his neck to flag the waitress for another beer, two hopeful-looking gulls watching him intently from the rail beyond the big table-to-ceiling windows, then turns back to her as if only in that moment discovering that she’s there. “But what’s the deal—you’re not drinking? I thought”—and here he lowers his voice to carry the sexual innuendo, ten days apart and a broad bouncing bed awaiting them at home—“you’d at least have a glass of wine to welcome me home. Aren’t you happy to see me?”

It’s out before she can stop it: “I can’t drink.”

Before he can even begin to puzzle that out—she watches the wondering frown spread across his face—the waitress is there to ask if they’re ready for another round. “You’re having the Firestone, right?” she says, addressing Tim. Tim nods assent. And then to Alma: “Another Diet Coke?”

“No,” she breathes, “I’m okay.”

“You ready to order, or—?”

“Sure,” Tim says, grinning up at the waitress, “as long as you’ve got any food left back there. You didn’t run out, did you?”

The waitress grins back at him and then there’s the delay of ordering, “Did you want fries with that or extra coleslaw, the house salad comes with ranch and the soup is clam chowder,” and then, finally, the waitress is gone and Tim’s staring deep into her, saying, “But seriously, you’re on the wagon or what?”

“I’m pregnant.”

His grin falters, then comes up again, full-on, as if he can’t control his facial muscles. “What? What are you saying?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“I just found out like four days ago. When my mother was here. I missed my period, I guess, but I didn’t—I mean, I didn’t think anything about it till I started getting up and puking in the mornings—”

“Puking? What do you mean puking?”

His face has changed, hardening till the pores stand out, the skin dull and worn beneath his sunburn. She doesn’t like the look in his eyes, doesn’t like the way his mouth draws down around his pursed lips. When she first met him, the first few weeks till he began to relax with her, he used to get that look because no matter how funny he might have been or sweet and caring and genuine, he always held something in reserve. It was because of his ex-wife. Crystal. Crystal had a career of her own—she managed a dress shop in which she owned a half-interest—and couldn’t begin to appreciate the sacrifices he had to make in order to pursue fieldwork, which was the only kind of work he was going to do because sitting behind a desk would just kill him, that’s the way he felt.
I’m no desk jockey
, he’d said when the subject came up on their third or fourth date. And then he’d backtracked, flushing suddenly, embarrassed, because at that moment he realized what he was saying and he fumbled out an apology, hoping she hadn’t taken offense.
I know somebody’s got to do it, I’m not saying that, but I’m sorry—and it’s what I told Crystal—it’s just not going to be me. Not yet anyway. Not till I’m old and decrepit.

“It’s called morning sickness.”

“Are you sure? I mean, is there any chance you’re wrong about it?”

What’s left of the calamari looks sodden and greasy and her stomach flutters at the sight of it. She takes a sip of Diet Coke, reaches across the table for his hand, but he pulls away. She feels a flash of irritation. He’s being a child about this. He’s being an idiot. “I ran the home test three times,” she says in a quiet voice. “And I have an appointment with this obstetrician Paula Meyers recommended—”

“Obstetrician?” The word drops from his lips like a curse.

“—to have her take blood so we can know for sure. But I’m ninety-nine percent positive.” And here she is, soaring again, her glands open wide, the blood beating through her veins on a million tiny wings. “Or no: a hundred percent.”

He sits absolutely rigid, his hands clasped in his lap, the second beer sitting untouched on the polished wooden surface of the table before him. Freshly poured and set there by the vanishing waitress, the beer gives up its carbonation in a mad delirious rush of ascending bubbles, working its way flat. All around them, people are eating, chatting, laughing. Their voices meld and rise in a muted roar that nullifies the thin throb of the music bleeding through hidden speakers. They’re in a restaurant. It’s noisy. He’s been away for ten days, she’s just presented him with the biggest news of her entire clear-eyed life and he’s not looking at her. He’s looking at the table. Out the window. At his beer. “Well?” she says.

“
Well
what?”

“Don’t you have anything to say? Aren’t you”—and here she feels herself sinking, as if the legs of the chair were melting and the floor sucking out from under her—“at least, I don’t know,
interested
? Engaged? Or, God forbid,
happy
?”

His eyes jump to hers. “Happy? No, I’m not happy—I’m just stunned.”

She sees his face as if he’s very far away—across the room or out on the boat still—as if she’s trying to focus it in with a pair of binoculars. His mouth is clamped shut. His eyes are dull, sheenless, squinted like the eyes of a prisoner in an interrogation cell. Maybe this isn’t the time, she’s thinking, maybe she should have waited till they got home at least . . . but no, this is their life they’re talking about here, the rest of their life, and he’s got to understand that, got to wake up and give ground, talk to her, dial it up, lock it in, take her hand and tell her he loves her. “We’re going to need to get married,” she says, pushing it, and she can’t help herself.

“Is that a proposal? Because if it is, isn’t it supposed to be me that does the proposing? Isn’t that the way it works?” He reaches for the beer, but then stops himself. “What’s wrong with the way things are now?”