Where Love Goes (35 page)

“And then Ursula could be right there, too, to bond,” he says. “And Sally and Pete, naturally.”

Is it just the pregnancy, or why is Claire feeling queasy?

“You know what I was thinking?” he said. “I know you’ll want to breast-feed, but it would be so great if we got a breast pump to pump your milk, so I could feed the baby right from the beginning.”

Back when she was pregnant with Pete and Sally, Claire was always trying to interest Sam in feeling their kicks, but now when Tim puts his hand on her belly, she lifts it like a wet fish and sets it back in his own lap
.

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t touch me there at the moment,” she says.
What a bitch. And the worst part is, he apologizes
.

Now he’s talking about demand feedings versus a schedule. What does she think about having the baby in the bed with them for the first six months or so? Just until she’s old enough to go in with Ursula?

Or
he
. “Imagine,” he says. “It never even occurred to me we could have a son.”

“I want to take him camping,” Tim says. “We’ll start out just sleeping in the yard under the stars. I’ll take him down to the pond and show him all the different kinds of peepers. We’ll collect frogs’ eggs and mushroom spores and animal scat.”

“What would you think about the idea of disconnecting the television?” he asks her. “I hate what it’s doing to Ursula.” Now, there’s an idea that would do wonders for his relationship with Pete.

He’s talking about Waldorf education and Suzuki violin. He doesn’t want to be one of those Little League fathers who are always screaming out instructions to their kids on the field. “Stop me if you ever hear me doing that, promise?” he says. “I want to build you the most beautiful rocking chair in the world. I want to knit you a shawl to cover yourself while you feed our child. You will be a madonna to me.”

T
here’s a call on Claire’s answering machine from Sergeant Wallace of the Blue Hills Police. Jenny has been hit by a car. Because nobody was home when it happened, the Animal Protection Society has taken care of it. She was so badly injured the only humane thing to do was have her put to sleep.

Tim will be picking up Ursula right about now at the neighbors’. Sally is out somewhere, with Travis no doubt. Mickey has also called to say could you believe Carter’s home run? What was Williams thinking of, giving him that pitch?

She is just standing there taking this in when the phone rings again. Tim. “I just had to tell you again,” he says, “that was the best day of my life.”

She gives him the news about Jenny.

U
rsula knows how it happened. Jenny missed them so badly—Ursula and her dad, her real family. She had gone looking for them. She was crossing Elm Street, one block down from their apartment, when the car hit her. She was on her way home. She probably had her tongue hanging out the way she does when she’s excited. Her ears were flopped back from running. I’m free at last, she was probably thinking. I finally got out of there.

Pete was the worst, the way he kept playing that horrible loud music all the time. How was Jenny supposed to sleep? They never did tricks with her. They didn’t talk to her. One time when Ursula was over she had heard Sally say, “That dog is on my bed again. Will somebody please come take it away?”

Now she should be happy. Jenny’s body was taken to the Animal Protection Society, where Ursula and her dad picked her up Sunday night after they got the news. If she and her dad had been just a few hours later, Jenny would already have been cremated. They got there just in time. But not really.

Ursula didn’t go into the room with her dad, but she was waiting when he came out. He had Jenny in his arms, wrapped in her special blanket, which he and Ursula had brought. Her face was covered, but one of her paws was drooped down from underneath the blanket. Pete and Sally evidently never clipped her nails.

Her eyes were closed, and it looked like there was actually a tear in the corner of one of them, although Ursula knew it was really just that goo she got sometimes. Somewhere inside there must be blood oozing out of her, but on the outside she looked fine. Ursula herself knows how that can be. To look at Ursula at that particular moment, for instance, you would never have guessed all the things that were oozing out inside her.

They drive to a place her dad knew from his research work, way out in the woods. There’s moss in this place and ferns and a nice smell Jenny would like. If Jenny was here—not just this dog body, but the real Jenny—she would want to dig. Also chew sticks.

They have brought her chew bone. Also her collar. Her dad has also brought a shovel. After he sets Jenny on the moss, still wrapped in her blanket, he begins to dig.

There should be a song, Ursula thinks. She thinks about the songs they’ve been learning at school. “Buffalo Gals.” “Eating Goober Peas.” The theme song from “Gilligan’s Island” that Mrs. Kennedy taught them during recess one time when it was too rainy to go out. None of them is right.

She sings that song “I Will Always Love You.” “If I should stay, I would only be in your way,” she sings. “But I will always love you.”

“Remember how she used to chew on your Pound Puppy?” her dad says. “Remember that time we left a box of eggs on the counter and she ate all twelve of them? Shells and all.”

“Remember how she liked to run into swamps and eat frogs?” Ursula says. “And sometimes when she came out of the water there would still be a frog’s leg hanging out of her mouth. And then she’d burp and it would be frog breath?”

“When you were born,” her dad says, “we worried she might be jealous. But she just lay there next to your little sleeper bed guarding you. Sometimes she’d lick your face.”

“Her farts were the worst, weren’t they, Dad?” Ursula says. They are laughing now. Also crying.

“Especially that time we gave her the garbanzos.”

“How old was she, Dad? In dog years?”

“She was ninety-eight, Urs. She had a good life.”

“All except the end.”

“You were always so good to her.”

“But in the end she must have wondered where I went. She must have wondered why we’d leave her like that.”

“I don’t believe dogs think like that,” he says. “She knew you would always love her.”

“She was my sister,” Ursula says. “The only sister I had. I’m an only child now.”

C
laire and Sally are parallel parking. “One-half car length beyond your space, sharp turn in the direction you want your rear end to go, angle back, right your front end, pull up straight,” Claire recites. This is Sally’s fourth attempt at this particular parking space.

“Shit,” says Sally. “I give up. They hardly ever put parallel parking on the test, anyway.”

“Let’s just drive around the rotary again a couple more times,” Claire says. Sally turns sixteen and takes her test in a few weeks.

“If I don’t pass, I’ll die,” she says to Claire.

Claire can dimly remember a time when getting her license seemed like the most important thing in the world. In the end, she supposes, many things that once seemed so important to a person fade away. It’s just impossible to imagine at the time you’re going through them.

Four years ago, for instance, she would never have imagined herself spending her life with any man other than Mickey. And now look at her—pregnant, and planning to marry Tim. Sitting on her front porch with him last night, she felt so peaceful. At the time he was just telling Claire about bringing the salmon back to the Connecticut River. His department at the college has a grant from the state to build a couple of salmon ladders in Bellow’s Falls. He had this look of such pure joy on his face, delivering this news, that she had leaned over and kissed him. “I want to make you proud of me,” he said. “I want to be the best husband to you. The best father to our baby.”

This is a good man, Claire told herself. Don’t let him go
.

A couple of years ago, in the middle of the custody hearings, Claire would have supposed she could never again look at her ex-husband Sam without wanting to spit, she hated him with such passion. These days she is like Mount St. Helen’s, back where she comes from, in Oregon. The entire top of the mountain blew off when the volcano erupted. The trees burned down. The animals died. The molten lava destroyed every living thing for miles around. But now there is this new green growth sprouting up.
Forgiveness
.

“You don’t have to blow so hard all the time,” Mickey told her. “Just blow.”

With Sally, too, Claire is recognizing that there is no longer any way to control what she does with her life. Her getting a license is only the beginning. No matter how old her daughter is, Claire will never stop worrying about Sally or stop being her mother, and she will never stop trying to guide her as wisely as she can. But she is also realizing lately that even as she embarks on this late-life pregnancy of hers, a particular phase of her mothering of this particular child is drawing to an end. Like the paper boats she used to make with her children every spring that they launched into the brook behind their old house, her daughter’s little craft will soon go bobbing out of sight. Then all Claire will be able to do is hope she stays afloat, or that when she takes on water, as she surely will, she’ll bail hard and swim if necessary.

“I was just thinking, driving around the traffic circle with you, how long it’s been since you and I had a chance to talk,” Claire tells Sally from her unaccustomed spot in the passenger seat.

“We talk, Mom,” says Sally. “You should see how it is in some kids’ families. It’s lots worse. Travis’s family eats their dinner in front of ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ every night.”

“Well, to me it seems as if we’re out of touch,” Claire says. “And now here you are about to get your license. You’ll be gone even more now.”

“You’ll still see me, Mom. It’s not like I’m moving out or anything.”

“You may not be going anywhere,” says Claire. “But your life is changing. Mine too.”

“Can you believe what he did there?” says Sally. “Guy changed lanes without even putting his blinker on.”

“You haven’t told me much about what’s going on with you and Travis, but I figure it must be pretty serious by this point,” Claire tells her. “I hope you’d always feel you could talk to me about that.”

Sally is concentrating hard on the road. She checks the rearview mirror and adjusts it slightly. Claire is suddenly struck by her daughter’s extraordinary beauty. She is not quite sixteen yet, but for a second Claire catches a glimpse of what she will look like as a woman. A heartbreaker.

“I trust you to make good decisions for yourself,” says Claire. “I just hope you make your choices based on what feels right for you. Not anybody else. I didn’t always do that myself at your age. I was so eager to please everybody.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” says Sally. “I’m fine.”
Just pregnant, probably
.

“And the other thing is, if the moment comes where you and your boyfriend become sexually active—whatever boyfriend it might be at that point—and it’s something you want to do and you feel you’re ready, it’s so important that you protect yourself. I know you hear that all the time at school, but sometimes in the heat of the moment, people don’t always behave so sensibly.”
Claire should know
.

“Mom,” says Sally. “I know this stuff.” This would be the perfect moment to tell her mother that as a matter of fact, there isn’t much point anymore in having this conversation because the very thing her mom’s so afraid of has happened already.

She might just tell her, too. For a second there she thinks with longing of what it would be like to lay her head on her mother’s shoulder and cry her eyes out the way she used to when she was younger
.

“I wouldn’t want you to ever think because I’ve got a boyfriend myself these days that I don’t care about what’s going on in your life,” says Claire. “Nothing matters more to me that that.”

Sally is silent. Just driving.

“I know you and your brother aren’t crazy about Tim and Ursula,” she says.

“What you do is your business,” says Sally. “I don’t have to love the guy. Or his kid.”
Here’s a whole new thing to dislike about Tim and his kid, Sally thinks: The way the two of them keep popping up right in the middle of something that’s going on in her family, taking up everybody’s energy. She was actually having a decent conversation with her mother just now. She might even have pulled the car over and collapsed in her mother’s arms and told her that she’s scared out of her mind, too scared even to take the home pregnancy test that has been sitting in her closet for almost two weeks. But now it’s like those two red-headed idiots in their bike helmets just hopped in the backseat of the car to join the conversation
.

“I was wondering how it would be for you if Tim and I, you know, made it more official,” her mother is saying. She’ll save the baby part for another day.

“What do you mean, Mom?” Sally says. She stares at the road.

“We’ve been thinking we might move in together before long. Get married.” She wishes Sally would say something, but she just grips the wheel and stares straight ahead. She’s supposed to concentrate when she’s driving, but this is different.

“Do what you want, Mom,” says Sally in a flat voice. “I’ll be gone in a couple of years, anyway.”

“There’s lots of wonderful things about him if you’d give him a chance,” Claire is saying. “Ursula too …”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Sally. “I’ll be going to college soon, anyway.”

P
ete’s in luck: The spacey blond cashier is at the register at Coconuts.

“New Elvis Costello tape come in yet?” he asks her.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” she tells him. “It’s not supposed to come out till next week.”

“I didn’t mean that Elvis Costello tape,” Pete says. “I meant the other one. The one before that. The one where he sings country.”

“Jeez, I never heard of that one,” she says. “Take a look in the
C
’s.”

“Would you mind checking it for me?” Pete asks her. “I have this problem with my vision today. Pinkeye.”