He led me over to the couch and handed me a ceramic bowl full of chocolate ice cream and mango sorbet.
“Ben and Jerry’s,” he said. I stared at him, my head still staticky, remembering that he’d brought me dessert once before, when I was in the hospital. “Remember when we talked about ice cream in class?”
I looked at him blankly.
“When we were talking about trigger foods?” he prompted. And I remembered then, sitting around the table a million years ago, talking about things I liked to eat. It felt unbelievable that I had ever liked anything… that I’d enjoyed regular stuff. Food, and friends, and going for walks and to movies. Could I ever have a life like that again? I wondered. I wasn’t sure… but I thought that maybe I could try.
“Do you remember all of your patients’ favorite foods?” I asked.
“Only my favorite patients,” he said. He sat in the armchair across from me while I ate it, slowly, savoring each mouthful. I sighed when I was finished. It had been so long since I’d eaten this well; so long since anything had tasted good.
He cleared his throat. I figured that was my cue to go. He probably had plans for the night. He possibly even had a date. I racked my brain and tried to remember. What day was it? Was it the weekend?
I yawned, and Dr. K. smiled at me. “You look so tired,” he said. “Why don’t you rest for a while?”
His voice was so warm, so soothing. “You like tea, not coffee, right?” I nodded. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
He went to the kitchen and I stretched out my legs on the couch, and by the time he came back I was half asleep. My eyelids felt so heavy. I yawned, and tried to sit up, as he handed me a mug.
“Where were you going today?” he asked.
I turned my head away, reaching for the blanket that was draped over the back of the couch. “I just went for a walk. I guess I got kind of lost or something. I’m fine, though. You shouldn’t worry. I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” he said, sounding almost angry. “You’re very obviously not fine. You’re half-starved, you’re stomping around the city, you quit your job…”
“Leave of absence,” I corrected. “I’m on a compassionate leave of absence.”
“You don’t have to be ashamed to ask for help.”
“I don’t need help,” I told him, reflexively. Because that was my reflex, ingrained as a teenager, honed over the years. I’m okay. I can handle it. I’m fine. “I’ve got everything under control. I’m fine. We’re fine. Me and the baby. We’re fine.”
He shook his head. “How are you fine? You’re not happy”
“Why should I be happy?” I shot back. “What’s to be happy about?”
“You have a beautiful baby” “Yeah, no thanks to anyone else.”
He stared at me. I stared back, furious. Then I put down my tea and got to my feet.
“I should go.”
“Cannie…”
I looked for my socks and my duct-taped shoes. “Could you take me home?”
He looked distressed. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You haven’t upset me. I’m not upset. But I want to go home.”
He sighed, and looked down at his feet. “I thought…” he mumbled.
“Thought what?”
“Nothing.”
“Thought what?” I repeated, more insistently.
“It was a bad idea.”
“Thought what,” I said again, in a tone that wasn’t taking no for an answer.
“I thought that if you came here, you’d relax.” He shook his head, seeming stunned by his own hopes, his own presumptions. “I thought maybe you’d want to talk about things”
“There’s really nothing to talk about,” I said. But I said it more gently. He had given me dinner, clean clothes, an orange Popsicle, a ride. “I’m okay. Really. I am.”
We stood for a minute, and something passed between us, some small easing of the tension. I could feel the blisters on both feet, and how my cheeks felt tight and painful with sunburn. I could feel the cool thin cotton of his T-shirt on my back, and how nice it was, and my belly full of good food, and how nice that was. And I could feel my breasts, which ached dully.
“Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have a breast pump in here?” I asked. My first attempt at a joke since I’d woken up in the hospital.
He shook his head. “Would ice help?” he asked. I nodded, and sat back down on the couch, where he brought me ice wrapped in a towel. I turned my back to him and tucked the ice under my shirt.
“How’s Nifkin?” he asked again.
I shut my eyes. “With my mom,” I muttered. “I sent him to stay with her for a while.”
“Well, don’t let him stay away too long. He’ll forget his tricks.” He took a sip of his tea. “I was going to teach him how to speak, if we’d had a little more time together.”
I nodded. My eyelids were feeling heavy again.
“Maybe some other time,” he said. He kept his eyes politely averted as I shifted the ice around. “I’d like to see Nifkin again,” he said. He paused and cleared his throat. “I’d like to see you, too, Cannie.”
I looked at him. “Why?” A rude question, I knew, but I felt like I was past the point of good manners… of any manners, really. “Why me?” “Because I care about you.” “Why?” I asked again.
“Because you’re…” He let the last word hang there. When I looked at him he was waving his hands in the air, like he was trying to sculpt phrases out of the air. “You’re special.”
I shook my head.
“You are.”
Special, I thought. I didn’t feel special. I felt ridiculous, really. I felt like a spectacle of a woman, a sob story, a freak. How must I look, really? I imagined myself on the street that night, my shoe falling apart, sweaty and filthy, my breasts leaking. They should take a picture, put my poster up in every junior high school, staple it in bookstores next to the Harlequin novels and the self-help books about find-ing your soulmate, your life partner, your one true love. I could be a warning; I could turn girls away from my fate.
I must have dozed off then, because when I came awake with a start, with my cheek against the blanket and the towel full of ice melting in my lap, he was sitting right across from me.
He’d taken his glasses off, and his eyes were gentle.
“Here,” he said. He had something in his arms, cradled like a baby. Pillows. Blankets. “I made up the guest bedroom for you.”
I walked there in a daze, aching from exhaustion. The sheets were cool and crisp, the pillows like an embrace. I let him draw back the covers, help me onto the bed, tuck them up over me, smooth the blanket over my shoulders. His face seemed so much softer without his glasses, in the dark.
He sat on the edge of the bed. “Will you tell me why you’re so angry?” he asked.
I was so tired, and my tongue felt heavy and slow in my mouth. It was like being drugged, or hypnotized; like dreaming underwater. Or maybe I would have told anyone, if I’d let anyone get close enough to ask. “I’m mad at Bruce. I’m mad that his girlfriend pushed me, and I’m mad that he doesn’t love me. I’m mad at my father, I guess.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I saw him… in California” I paused to yawn, to fight the words out. “He didn’t want to know me.” I passed my hands over my belly, or where my belly had been. “The baby… ,” I said. My eyelids felt freighted, so heavy I could barely keep them open. “He didn’t want to know.”
He brushed the back of his hand against my cheek, and I leaned into his touch like a cat, unthinking. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You’ve had a lot of sadness in your life.”
I breathed in, then out, pondering the truth of this. “That’s not exactly a news flash,” I said.
He smiled. “I just wanted you to know,” he said, “I wanted to see you, so I could tell you…”
I stared at him, wide-eyed in the dark.
“You don’t have to do everything alone,” he said. “There are people who care about you. You just have to let them help.”
I sat up then. The sheets and blankets fell around my waist. “No,” I told him, “that’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
I shook my head, once, impatiently. “Do you know what love is?”
He considered the question. “I think I heard a song about it once.”
“Love,” I said, “is the rug they pull out from under you. Love is Lucy always lifting the football at the last second so that Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Love is something that every time you believe in it, it goes away. Love is for suckers, and I’m not going to be a sucker ever again.” When I closed my eyes I could see myself as I was, months ago, lying on the bathroom floor, highlights in my hair and makeup on my face, the expensive shoes and fancy clothes and diamond earrings that couldn’t keep me safe, couldn’t keep the wolf from my door.
“I want a house with hardwood floors,” I said, “and I don’t want anyone else to come inside.”
He was touching my hair, saying something. “Cannie,” he repeated.
I opened my eyes.
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
I stared at him in the dark. “How else could it be?” I asked, quite reasonably.
He leaned forward and kissed me.
He kissed me, and at first I was too shocked to do anything, too shocked to move, too shocked to do anything but sit there, perfectly still, as his lips touched mine.
He pulled his head back. “I’m sorry,” he said.
I leaned toward him. “Hardwood floors,” I whispered, and I realized I was teasing him, and that I was smiling, and it had been so long since I had smiled.
“I will give you whatever I can,” he said, looking at me in a way that made it clear that he was, somehow, oh miracle of miracles, taking this all seriously. And then he kissed me again, pulled the sheets up to my chin, pressed his warm hand on top of my head, and walked out of the room.
I listened as the door closed and as he settled his long body onto the couch. I listened until he’d clicked the lights off and his breathing became deep and regular. I listened, holding the blankets tight around me, holding that feeling of being safe, of being tucked in and taken care of, around me. And I thought clearly then, for the first time since Joy had been born. I decided, right there in that strange bed in the dark, that I could go on being scared forever, that I could keep walking, that I could carry my rage around, hot and heavy in my chest forever. But maybe there was another way. You have everything you need, my mother had told me. And maybe all I needed was the courage to admit that what I needed was someone to lean on. And then I could do it— could be a good daughter, and a good mother. Maybe I could even be happy. Maybe I could.
I slipped out of bed. The floor was cool on my bare feet. I moved stealthily through the darkness, out of the room, easing the door shut behind me. I went to him there on the couch, where he’d fallen asleep with a book falling from his fingers. I sat on the floor beside him and leaned so close that my lips practically touched his forehead. Then I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and jumped into the water. “Help,” I whispered.
His eyes opened instantly, as if he hadn’t been sleeping, but waiting, and he reached out one hand and cupped my cheek.
“Help,” I said again, as if I were a baby, as if this was a word I’d just learned and could not stop repeating. “Help me. Help.”
Two weeks later Joy came home. She was eight weeks old, and she’d topped seven pounds and was finally breathing on her own. “You’ll be fine,” the nurses told me. Except I decided that I wasn’t ready to be by myself yet. I was still too hurt inside, still too sad.
Samantha offered to let us stay with her. She’d take leave from work, she said, she had weeks built up, she’d do whatever it took to get her house ready. Maxi volunteered to fly in or, alternately, to fly us both up to Utah, where she was shooting a cowgirl epic with the unwieldy title Buffalo Girls 2000. Peter, of course, was first in line to tell us that we could stay with him or that, if I wanted, he could stay at my place with us.
“Forget it,” I told him. “I’ve learned my lesson about giving men the milk for free and then expecting them to buy the cow.”
He turned a gratifying shade of crimson. “Cannie,” he began, “I didn’t mean…”
And I laughed, then. It was still feeling good to laugh. I’d gone too long without it. “Kidding,” I said, and looked at myself ruefully. “Believe me, I’m in no shape to think about that for a while.”
In the end, I decided to go home— home to my mother and horrible Tanya, who’d agreed to put her loom in storage for the duration and give me and Joy back the Room Formerly Known as Mine. Actually, they were both glad to have us. “It’s so nice to hold a baby again!” said my mother, considerately ignoring the fact that tiny, bristly, sickly Joy, with her sleep apnea monitor and myriad health concerns, was not exactly the sort of baby a grandmother would dream about.
I thought it would be for a week or two— just a chance for me to regroup, to rest, to get used to taking care of a baby. In the end, we stayed for three months, me in the bed that had been mine when I was a girl, and Joy in a crib beside me.
My mother and Tanya let me be. They brought trays of food to my door and cups of tea to my bedside. They retrieved my CDs and a half-dozen books from my apartment, and Tanya presented me with an afghan in purple and green. “For you,” she said shyly. “I’m sorry about what happened.” And she was, I realized. She was sorry, and she was trying— she’d even managed to quit smoking. For the baby, my mother had told me. That was nice.
“Thanks,” I said, and wrapped it around me. She smiled like the sun coming out.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
Samantha came a few times a week, bringing me treats from the city— grilled grape leaves from the Vietnamese food stall in the Reading Terminal, fresh plums from a farm in New Jersey. Peter visited, too, bringing books, newspapers, magazines (never Moxie, I was pleased to note), and little gifts for Joy, including a tiny T-shirt that read “Girl Power.”
“That is so great,” I said.
Peter smiled, and reached into his briefcase. “I got you one, too,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
Joy stirred in her sleep. Peter looked at her, then at me. “So how are you really?”
I stretched my arms over my head. I was very very tan, from all that time walking in the sun, but things had started to change. I was taking showers, for one thing. I was eating, for another. My hips and breasts were coming back, and I felt okay with it… like I recognized myself again. Like I was reclaiming not only my body, but the life I’d left behind. And all things considered, it hadn’t been such a bad life. There were things that I had lost, true, and people who wouldn’t ever love me again, but there was also… potential, I thought, and I smiled at Peter. “Better,” I told him. “I guess I’m doing better now.”