Amanda Bright @ Home (30 page)

“Amanda Bright!” Blumstein exclaimed, wandering into the waiting room and embracing her. “How wonderful to see you again. Are these
my
babies?”

Blumstein crouched down to look at Ben and Sophie, who were absorbed in trying to inflate surgical gloves that a nurse had brought in to amuse them.

“My, aren’t you both so big!”

She turned to Amanda. “Can you give me some urine?”

The other patients—most in advanced states of pregnancy—averted their eyes.

“Uh, yes, I’ll go back.”

“Fine. I’ll meet you in my office.”

This was another aspect of Sarah Blumstein’s philosophy: there was to be no squeamishness about bodily functions. Cramping, bleeding, breast-feeding—all must be talked about proudly and loudly.

Amanda left her children under the watch of the receptionist. She entered Blumstein’s office a few minutes later bearing a filled plastic cup.

“Just put it on the side table. I’ll have a look at it in a sec.”

Blumstein was sitting on a comfy, well-worn sofa. She did not use a desk (“too hierarchical”). She patted the seat next to her and Amanda joined her.

“So, a third! Are you happy?”

“I think so. It wasn’t exactly planned.”

“Just came on like the rains, huh?”

“That’s a good way to put it.”

Blumstein asked Amanda a number of questions about her recent health and then examined Amanda’s urine, holding it up to the light like a connoisseur of fine wine.

“It’s a nice rich straw color.”

She gave it a lusty sniff. “Good smell too. Very healthy.”

Amanda worried the midwife might taste it as well, but Blumstein replaced it on the table and began performing a test.

The office was tranquil; Amanda appreciated the soothing, oceanic strains of New Age music that washed gently through speakers hidden in the walls. Sarah Blumstein was about the same age as Amanda’s mother. She looked like her, too: the same ample body, the same cropped hair, the same casual clothes. The midwife eschewed lab coats and hospital scrubs, except in the delivery room, and today wore a baggy navy blue jogging suit. But where Amanda’s mother’s edges were hard, Blumstein’s were soft. Her opinions may have been as forceful as those of Ellie Bright, but they were expressed in the lilting earnest cadence of a guidance counselor.

“Hmm, I think you’re right, Amanda. Let’s have a look inside. Get out of your clothes, put on that terry robe hanging over there, and I’ll be right back.”

Amanda prepared herself and waited on the examining table. In a few minutes Blumstein returned with a young female obstetrician pushing a computer-laden trolley. This was another source of discontent for Blumstein—the medical center’s rule that only real doctors could use the equipment.

“Is this the patient?” the woman asked.

“This is my
client,
Amanda Bright,” Blumstein corrected her. “We don’t treat pregnancy as an illness in
this
room.”

“I’m Dr. Stark. I’ll be performing—”

“helping with
—”

“—the sonogram.”

The two women fiddled around uncomfortably inside Amanda’s lower regions. Amanda watched the ultrasound’s computer screen. A fuzzy black-and-white image of Amanda’s uterus flickered into view. There was an unmistakable oval shape floating in the middle, larger than she expected.

“There it is!” Blumstein said excitedly. “There’s your little bean!”

The doctor tapped at the keys and small white arrows surrounded the oval.

“I would estimate five weeks,” the doctor murmured. “Would you agree, Sarah?”

“For sure.”

The doctor hit another key and printed a copy of the picture.

“Here you are,” said Blumstein, snatching the picture from the doctor and presenting it to Amanda herself. “The first photograph of your baby!”

There it was, indeed. Amanda studied the picture while the doctor removed the trolley. It was real now, no doubt about it. Already she could feel the changes taking place: the waves of sleepiness, the slight nausea, a burning below her heart. But Amanda felt too—was it possible?—a twinge of eagerness. Despite everything, she could not be immune to the hard proof of her baby’s existence. She glanced at the picture again. It looked like a pebble thrown into a black pond, small circles radiating outward, circles that would continue to radiate outward, eventually touching all of them.

“Amazing, technology, isn’t it?” Blumstein allowed, after the doctor had closed the door. “Sixteen years from now you’ll be looking at mat picture, wondering where the hell it all went.”

When Bob returned home, he looked as though he’d been to see a doctor as well—one who’d told him that while his disease was not terminal his life would be gravely restricted from here on. He tossed his jacket over the downstairs banister and riffled through the mail without really looking at it.

Amanda handed him a Scotch before he asked for it.

“Where’s your mother?”

“She’s taking a shower.”

“The kids?”

“They’re watching a video.”

“Let’s go in here.” Amanda guided him toward the couch in the living room. He sat down and rose again, and began pacing in front of her, clutching his tumbler of Scotch.

“Here’s the upshot,” he began. “I’m not going to be investigated …”

“Oh, Bob, what a relief.”

“… nor am I going to be fired.”

“So it’s all going to be okay then?”

“Not exactly.” He took a large gulp of his drink and winced slightly as the liquor burned a path down his throat. “They’re moving me off the case.”

“What?”

“Frank spoke to the division’s ethics officer. I think he also spoke to Hochmayer and maybe even to Chasen. Everyone is convinced that I did nothing that warrants investigation. But Frank also feels that appearances have been compromised, and it would be best if they transferred me somewhere else. You know how politically sensitive this is—”

“So the
National Standard
was right,” Amanda said grimly.

“Maybe. Jeez, I don’t know.”

“Where are they transferring you to?”

“I’m not sure yet. They’ll let me know in a few days.”

“Who will be taking over the case?”

“Frank’s now talking about bringing in some star lawyer from the outside—on a contractual basis, to be the face of the thing.”

“He’s bringing in someone from the private sector?” Amanda felt truly betrayed.

“Yeah.”

Bob shrugged semi-ironically, the way we sometimes greet fate when it deals us an unexpected blow:
Isn’t it a queer thing that we should have been standing in that precise spot when the truck careened around the comer? If we had only had the foresight to stand two feet back it might have missed us.
Amanda’s mind was cast back to that day, so many years ago now, when Bob had started at Justice. She’d met him for lunch. He waited for her by the main entrance, between two magnificent stone lions. An inscription chiseled above the doors read:
the place of justice is a hallowed place
. The sleepy majesty of the lions suggested that not only was the place hallowed, but it had long been so and would continue to be so for a long time hence. The department’s employees passed in and out: like the lions, they seemed to take it for granted that the nation’s justice would be carried out to the punch of a clock. Bob was enchanted by the dingy magnificence of it all: the vaulting rotundas, the Art Deco murals, the silvery leaf that trimmed the moldings, the plaster and yellow marble that covered everything else; this contrasted with the battered government-issue furniture, the drooping flags, and the crookedly hung photographs of the current president and attorney general. When Bob and his colleagues walked into a courtroom to face a slick battalion of private lawyers in two-thousand-dollar suits, he felt—he told Amanda excitedly at lunch—like one of those marshals in an old Western movie confronting the diamond-pinkied elite of a corrupt frontier town. Those folks might have the money, but in his shabby brown briefcase Bob carried the might of the U.S. government—and there was no sweeter moment than the one when those slick bastards discovered that they were outgunned.

And now it was all at an end. After the drama of the past few months, it was a sorry little end. Bob would hang on, he would continue to breathe in the air of the Department of Justice, but it was all over.

Amanda had nothing of comfort to say.

Suddenly a sharp voice shouted from upstairs: “Is that Super Bob?”

Amanda’s mother descended, barefoot and dressed in the large muumuu she wore as pajamas, her wet hair spiked around her face like a hedgehog’s.

“How’s my hero?” She crossed the room and gave Bob an enormous embrace.

“Hello, Ellie.”

“I see I’m missing the cocktail hour.” She turned to Amanda. “White wine will be fine.”

Amanda fetched two glasses and a bottle of wine from the kitchen.

“Aren’t you having any?” her mother asked.

“I don’t feel like wine right now.”

“Hmph. That’s not like you.”

Ellie Bright settled herself in the sofa, her plump toes not quite grazing the floor.

“So tell me, Bob, what have you done to piss off Mike Frith today?”

Amanda interceded. “They’re pulling Bob off the case, Mom.”

Her mother looked stricken. “That’s impossible! They can’t do that!
Why
would they do that?”

“They have their reasons,” Bob replied.

Amanda excused herself to check on dinner. She heard her mother’s voice rising and cursing. “Don’t those assholes realize what they’re doing?” Dinner was doing fine. Amanda continued on upstairs to fetch the children, guiltily leaving Bob to handle the wrath of Ellie Bright by himself.

Later, after putting the dishes away, Amanda made a bed for her mother in the living room. It was only nine o’clock, but she was already desperately tired. The sleepiness of early pregnancy overcame her like a narcotic. Ellie Bright was brushing her teeth over the kitchen sink. Bob, in exchange for dealing with her mother before dinner, escaped upstairs with the children afterward.

The meal had gone disastrously, as usual, and only Ellie Bright had not noticed the disastrousness of it—which was also as usual. Amanda had long ceased to wonder whether this quality of her mother’s was unconscious or deliberate, for its effect was the same regardless: Ellie Bright would let rip some amazingly rude observation and then chew her food calmly, apparently unaware of, or indifferent to, the hurt she had just caused. If Amanda or anyone else dared to challenge her, she’d respond with offended innocence. Throughout dinner, Amanda and Bob had managed to steer her away from the topic of Megabyte, but this had only resulted in Ellie Bright redirecting her “observations” to Ben and Sophie. Ben’s decision to launch a pea across the table at his sister incurred a sharp lecture from his grandmother about the decline in table manners among children. “It’s because they watch too much television nowadays,” she said pointedly to Amanda. Amanda and Bob did not bother to argue, agreeing, with a mutual look, that it was better to let Ellie Bright feel that she had won the point. Her mother then pounced on a comment of Sophie’s—“Mommy, for Halloween can I be Thleeping Beauty?”—as an example of the corrupting influence of fairy tales upon little girls. Amanda, seeing the distress on Sophie’s face, assured her daughter, “You can be anything you want, honey,” to which Ellie Bright added, “Yes, maybe Sophie could dress up as a soccer star. That’s what her mommy did when she was a little girl.”

“Actually, it was Billie Jean King. But I
wanted
to be the Tooth Fairy.”

“You’re wrong, Amanda. I remember.”

Amanda was tucking in the sheets on the sofa when her mother padded in from the kitchen. Ellie Bright settled herself in a chair and followed Amanda’s progress over the top of a novel.

“Don’t worry about an extra pillow. I can make do with one.”

“I’ve brought two anyway.”

Amanda smoothed the blanket and stacked the sofa cushions in a neat pile by the fireplace.

“Okay, Mom, it’s ready. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. We keep meaning to replace this old pullout.”

“I’m sure it’s fine. I’ve slept on garbage bags in the rain, for heaven’s sake.

“The Women’s March on Washington, nineteen seventy-five,” her mother explained, when Amanda failed to ask.

“Right. Of course. Can I get you anything else?” Amanda waited by the archway leading to the front hall.

“Nope. Got my book. That’s all I need.”

“Okay then. I think I’ll go up and have my bath.”

“Amanda?”

Amanda had already started up the stairs. “Yes?”

“You know, I’ve been thinking about this Bob business.”

Amanda glanced longingly at the light shining from her bedroom. “Uh-huh?”

“Well, in some ways it’s not all bad. It presents an opportunity for you.”

Amanda knew her mother would not let her retreat if she was bent on a discussion. She wandered back into the living room but did not sit down, hoping her mother’s point would be brief. This, of course, was a mistake.

“How is it an opportunity for me?”

“I don’t know if Bob is going to continue on at Justice—”

“I don’t know, either.”

“—but maybe this is a chance for you to go back to work and give Bob some time off so he can figure out what he’s going to do next.”

“Yes, maybe.”

“Amanda, you’re not listening to me.”

“I am listening—I’m just tired of talking about this. It’s been a long evening. I can’t think about it anymore.”

“You ought to think about it. It’s only your entire future.”

“I will—tomorrow. But right now I just want to go to bed.”

“Fine.”

This time Amanda made it nearly to the top of the stairs before the pull of her own conscience drew her back down.

“Look, I know you’re concerned, but we can talk about this in the morning, okay?”

Ellie Bright ostentatiously absorbed herself in her book.

“Don’t do this, Mom. Speak to me.”

“You never appreciate when people are trying to help,” her mother said without raising her eyes.

“I don’t need help. I need sleep.”