Afterward, he kissed her neck, a dry, close-lipped kiss, like a thank-you note.
In total there were three times, all of them in the rehearsal room after everybody else had gone, twice on the table, once in a hellacious, back-aching position involving two folding chairs and a French horn case. He seemed to want to experiment, either already tired of their routine or else wanting to make things more exciting, perhaps degraded, in accordance with whatever fantasy he had about adult sex, and she tried to accommodate him. It was the least she could do.
She hoped three times would be enough. After each one, she took stock of her body, weighed and surveyed it, but she couldn’t tell any difference, and was desperately afraid.
Dan came into the bathroom as she weighed herself, squeezing her breasts. In the mirror, their eyes met.
“You’re beautiful,” he said mechanically. “You aren’t fat.”
She smiled at him. Fat was what she wanted, but he couldn’t know that yet. “Thanks, honey.”
The way she said it—her ease and placidity—alerted him. He cocked his head. “What’s going on with you, anyway?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You dress differently. Walk differently. You have this vacant smile all the time.”
“I’m still wearing the same clothes.”
“You’re wearing dresses instead of pants. In
January.
You’re putting on makeup every day.”
“Maybe it cheers me up.”
“For God’s sake, Lisette, do you think I don’t notice? Are you seeing someone else? Is it that father from the Christmas concert?”
“Oh, honey,” she said, and turned to him, away from the mirror.
“Don’t touch me right now,” he said. “Just don’t.”
He spent the night in the guest room, the one they’d planned on turning into a nursery. The next evening, when she got home from rehearsal, he’d moved his clothes in there too. And he himself wasn’t home: no note, no message saying where he was. At midnight, she heard him come in, run the water in the bathroom, and get into bed.
She thought she’d give him some space. She was far enough gone, at this point, to think that space was what they both needed.
Then, strangely enough, they lived for a time as cordial strangers. They ate meals together and inquired politely about each other’s day. The shell of their former life held fast even as its contents were emptied. Dan lost weight, looked exhausted. Once, in the middle of the night, she got up to pee and heard a strange sound
from his room, like choking or throwing up. She paused outside the closed door to listen, realizing, gradually, that it was the dry, painful twisting of sobs torn from a man unaccustomed to them. She put her palm on the door, then opened it.
“Go away,” he said immediately. “Just go away.”
In the morning, they acted as though this hadn’t happened.
Three weeks later, she peed on the stick and got a positive result.
“Oh, thank God,” she said out loud.
That night, she made steak and mashed potatoes, Dan’s favorite meal. When he came home from work and saw it, he took a wary step back. He had the look of a dog that’s been beaten and can’t help expecting the next blow. And this, she knew, was the next blow. But it was also a gift—eventually, he would recognize it as such himself.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. From the other end of the table, she could see herself reflected in his eyes—a torturer, a demon—but she stood with her fingers clenching the back of the dining room chairs they’d bought as newlyweds.
“Whose is it?” he said.
“It’s ours,” she said.
“Lisette, are you crazy? What have you done?”
“It’s a miracle,” she said firmly. “It’s our family.”
He stood there shaking his head. “We’re not a family anymore, Lisette,” he said.
To Tyler she said: “My husband knows. It’s over.”
They were in her car, after rehearsal, their breaths visibly streaming
toward the dashboard. She crossed her fingers inside the mitten of her left hand. This was the chance she’d taken: that he could let go as easily as he’d latched on. If he fought, if he cried, if he struck out in anger, he could ruin everything. She’d given him that power over her life in exchange for what she needed. It was the biggest risk she had ever taken.
For one quiet, dark moment he looked into her eyes, then turned away. He reached his hand up and absently plucked the front of his winter coat. Seeing this nervous gesture again, she felt a great tenderness she could only describe as maternal, twisted as that was. And Tyler: he’d been fumblingly sweet, he’d stroked her hair, but she knew he wasn’t in love with her. She’d given him experience and some passing satisfaction and he already knew how to separate these physical facts from the emotional ones. There was a girl who played the flute, and Lisette had seen how he looked at her, queasy with wanting. The girl didn’t reciprocate, though, so Tyler had taken what he could get. The only question now was whether he could leave it behind.
He said, “Okay.” He could.
He was seventeen years old, bound for Princeton in the fall. His skin was clearing, his shoulders getting broad. There would be a lot of other women in his life.
In the months to come, she found a doctor, alone, took her prenatal vitamins, alone, bought a crib and baby clothes, alone. Dan wasn’t with her for the first ultrasound, didn’t hear the baby’s heart beat, didn’t read
What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
On the other hand, he didn’t move out, either. So that was something.
· · ·
At the spring concert, she and Tyler shook hands. She was showing now, wearing sack dresses most of the time, but it didn’t seem to register on him. She led youth orchestra sessions in the summer too, but he was going to hike the Appalachian trail with his dad. This, then, was good-bye. He said, “I’ll miss you.”
She smiled. She couldn’t wait for him to leave. “Enjoy college,” she said.
Just then a woman whose son played clarinet came by and put her arm on Lisette’s shoulder. She was warm and friendly, a busybody, Dana. She taught biology at the high school and let the girls leave the room when they claimed to be too freaked out by dissections.
“Oh, Lisette!” she said. “I can tell just by looking. Are you? You are, aren’t you?”
Lisette nodded, blushing despite herself.
“Congratulations! When are you due?”
“September.”
“How wonderful. Congratulations again.”
Lisette turned back to Tyler, expecting to have to explain—but he’d already gone off to the refreshments table, where Kim, the flautist, was eating a brownie.
That night, though, the doorbell rang at eleven. Dan was upstairs, sequestered in his room. When she opened the door, Tyler was standing on the porch, his brown eyes anxious. Her heart pumping, she stepped outside, closing the door quietly behind her. The last thing she wanted was for Dan to come down now.
“It took me a while to process what that conversation was about,” Tyler said. “Is it what I think?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “Dan and I are thrilled.”
He stepped closer. In the vague glow of the porch light his eyes glinted, the fear in them naked. “It’s not—”
“No,” she said. “It’s not.”
He breathed a theatrical sigh of relief, his shoulders rising and falling. For a moment she saw doubt clouding his mind, and then she saw him dismiss it. His eyes cleared and he began to walk away, his palm raised in a gesture of salute, separation, good-bye. He wanted nothing more than to put distance between himself and a pregnant middle-aged woman. He would never ask her another question, she was sure, because he had his whole future in front of him, luxurious, unspoiled; because she’d told him what he wanted to hear; because she was an adult and he was, after all, a child.
The summer passed slowly, the weather sticky and hot. She worked in the garden and took birthing classes. The doctor asked her if she wanted to know the sex of the baby, and she said no, figuring that Dan wouldn’t want to know either. Dan spent most of the summer away, first visiting his parents, then on a long fishing trip with his college friends. While he was gone, she moved his things back into the master bedroom, his socks and underwear back into the empty drawers, his shirts back into the empty half of the closet. In the spare bedroom she assembled the crib, the Diaper Genie, a little white bookshelf, a mobile. She had been collecting these things for months. Above the bookshelf she hung a framed copy of their wedding picture, she in her white dress, Dan grinning down at her, on the day they said their vows and bound themselves to each other forever.
When Dan came back, he stood in the hallway outside this room, his hands on his hips. “You are something else,” he said, his tone almost admiring.
She stood a few feet away from him, keeping a respectful distance.
“Honey, I love you,” she said. “This is going to happen. There
will be
a baby.”
“Lisette,” he said. “Do you understand how close I am to completely hating you? Does it even matter to you anymore?”
For the first time, a cold shiver swept all over her, cooling her blood, and she felt faint to her fingertips, even her toes. In all this time she’d never thought that she would lose him. So intent, so focused on the goal, she’d set everything else aside. She had the urge to beg him, to cry, to make him pity her, or to yell at him, but none of that would work with Dan; he’d see it as manipulative and hysterical at once. His personality was rigorous and pure; his strictness undercut her own tendencies toward obsession and intensity, kept her moored. No, melodrama would make the situation worse and then she
might
lose him forever. Staying calm was the only way to manage him, hoping that he would come back to her in his own time, willing him to forget the price she’d paid and remember instead what she had purchased with it, that golden, shining good, their future.
So she said nothing, and he left her.
When the school year started, he was living in a shabby efficiency next to the hospital. Dan was seen, of course, as a villain—who leaves his wife while she’s pregnant?—and he had to endure this gossiping disapproval on top of everything else. She didn’t speak
about him to the people they knew, a silence that was interpreted as high-minded. If she had thought too much about any of this, it would have crushed her. Therefore she thought only about the baby. Her body had to be nurtured; there could be no stress, only good food, sleep, rest. It wasn’t the life she’d dreamed of, but it was in motion. She’d done her body’s bidding and now would do its caretaking, too.
She gave the hospital Dan’s cell phone number, in case of emergency, but she didn’t call him when the contractions started, or when she took a cab to the hospital. By the time the complications started, the doctors talking about breech birth and emergency Cesarians, she was too out of her mind with pain to call him, so it was the nurse who did, telling him to get there as soon as he could.
Lisette, in a horror of sweat and pain, barely recognized his voice. It was so much worse than she’d ever imagined it could be, the worst thing that had ever happened to her, and she sobbed and screamed. It felt like punishment for all the bad things she’d ever done. She didn’t think,
Baby,
or
Help,
or
Be strong,
or
Breathe.
She just thought,
Make it stop.
Eventually, she lost consciousness or was sedated, she didn’t know and didn’t care; she only wanted to escape the grasping, evil hands of the pain.
When she woke up, she was alone. Her body, which had been her guide for so long, was numb. Outside the closed door she could hear distant hospital sounds, people walking, garbled announcements, phones ringing. The room smelled somehow musty and antiseptic at the same time. It smelled of sickness and solitude, like a place that had never been aired out. She was so weak she couldn’t move her hand to press the call button. She wondered if Dan was still around, or if he’d never been there and she’d hallucinated
his presence. She knew without a doubt she had failed, that the baby was dead and everything she’d sacrificed had been for nothing. The whole experience had been so terrible, there was no chance that anything as fragile as an infant could possibly have survived it. Maybe she was dead too. Maybe this was hell, specially tailored for her particular desires and sins.
Then the door opened and Dan came in, with the baby wrapped in a little blanket. His eyes were red from crying. He placed the bundle in her arms, and she found the strength to hold it without even thinking or trying.
“Oh, baby,” she said, tears running down her face.
“It’s a boy,” Dan said. He pulled up a chair and sat next to her. He put his hands on the bed next to her, not quite touching her leg. “I didn’t know if you had a name picked out.”
She shook her head. The baby was teeny, wrinkled, dark haired, red. She kissed his perfect, impossibly small forehead. Her body recognized him, wanted him close. “He’s so quiet,” she said. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” Dan said. “He was crying before. The nurse is coming in a couple of minutes with a lactation specialist. They’re just giving us a moment together.”
“That’s nice,” she said, still crying, then tore her eyes away from the baby long enough to look at him. “Thank you for being here.”
“You’re welcome.”
They were stiff as strangers.
Reaching over, Dan put his finger inside the blanket and drew out one of the baby’s hands. “Look how tiny,” he said, his voice catching. “It’s amazing.”
“It is,” she said. “It really is.”
The baby opened his mouth and began to wail, and Lisette
tried to open her gown but couldn’t quite manage to, with the baby in her arms, so Dan reached over and helped her, both of them unable to stop looking at the boy, whose little mouth was wide open, seeking what he needed.
Dan said softly, “That’s it. There you go.” And he put his hand on the baby’s back, leaning in close to watch.
She knew then that he would come back to her. Because they were a family, and because they had exchanged vows on that wedding day that now seemed so long ago. They hadn’t said:
I will ask you for things no person should ask.
Or:
I will hurt you so much it will suck you dry.
What they’d said was:
I will love you forever.
And every word of it was true.