The Book of Why (8 page)

WE CHOSE NAMES
before we tried. Lucy and Vincent for Lucy Vincent Beach, our favorite place on Martha's Vineyard.

Cary was against it: she was content living in the present; she didn't want to pretend something was real when it wasn't.

To believe, I told her, is to make it real.

She smiled at me, rolled her eyes. Our differences, then, endeared us to each other. I believed in knowing; she believed in uncertainty. I believed in control; she believed in surrender. I believed in what could be; she believed in what was.

“But you wrote me a fan letter,” I joked. “Chapter 6 cured you of your bucket problem.”

“I was flirting,” she said. “Besides, I still have my bucket problem.”

“Sweetheart,” I said, “you need to read my next book.”

In my mind, we already had twins, a girl and a boy, Lucy and Vincent. Born before they were born.

I reminded Cary that she had done something similar with Ralph. Her previous boyfriend didn't want a dog, and so for a year Cary pretended she had a dog named Ralph—a joke, yes, and to annoy her boyfriend, but also to win him over, to convince him that having a dog would be fun. She pretended to walk the dog; she set a bowl of water on the kitchen floor; she bought a collar, a leash, and a rubber bone.

The boyfriend didn't find this funny or charming, but aggressive. No surprise, they broke up, and a few months later a friend called about a litter of puppies. Cary fell in love with the first one she picked up, a German shepherd that looked exactly like the dog she'd been imagining.

“You see,” I told her. “We really do see the universe the same way.”

“But I'd imagined a male dog.”

“Small detail,” I said. “You wanted a Ralph, you got a Ralph.”

The first time we tried, Cary felt a sharp pain in her abdomen. She was the type not to make a fuss over pain, but it became so severe that I had to take her to the emergency room in the middle of the night.

She sat beside me, her eyes closed, and tried to take deep breaths. Every so often she winced, then returned to her breathing. She was good at living in the present even if it was unpleasant.

It was August, hot and humid. A sweaty young man, too skinny, hair in a ponytail, paced the ER, his shoulder bleeding through his white shirt. He had large, frightened eyes and the long, delicate fingers of a pianist. A short, overweight woman sat across from us, moaning. Her legs and arms were stubby, but her face was beautiful. She took off her shoes and socks, as if this might help. Her feet were dry and calloused, her toenails painted pink. A nurse had to call the woman three times before she looked up; it was as if she'd forgotten her own name. She took her shoes with her, but left the socks behind.

When a nurse called Cary's name—we had been waiting two hours—she turned to me and said, “My sister was pregnant when she died.”

I didn't know how to respond; it was the last thing I expected her to say.

“When I told you the story, I left that part out.”

“It's not your fault,” I said.

“I just wanted to tell you,” she said, and together we went to see the doctor.

It was one of the first stories she told me about herself when we were dating. She bought her father flying lessons as a retirement gift; he had retired early, in his late fifties. After he earned his license, he planned a day to take Cary, her sister, Parker, and their mother for a flight over the Berkshires. But Cary woke that morning with the flu and couldn't get out of bed. She hadn't been that sick in years—not since the chickenpox in sixth grade. Her father said they could reschedule, but Cary said they should go without her; there was always next time.

Even had anyone remembered that she'd bought the flying lessons, that it had been her idea, no one would have blamed her.

At the funeral, Parker's husband—widower, rather—leaned over to Cary and said, “She was pregnant. She told me a few days before.”

“Maybe we're not supposed to have children,” she said. “Maybe it's something we have to accept.”

We were making a salad. I was peeling carrots, Cary was chopping lettuce. The knife against the cutting board, the pile of carrot peels in the sink, the whir and suck of the garbage disposal—we both had strong déjà vu. It was as if the conversation we were about to have had already happened, as if we were reading a script. I knew all my lines. I even knew that I was about to say something foolish, that I was about to make a mistake.

“You accept things too easily,” I said.

“Life's easier that way.”

“Your life, maybe. But this is
our
life.”

“It's my body.”

“I don't think you should give in so easily.”

“You heard the doctor.”

“Doctors don't know everything.”

“Things happen for a reason,” she said.

“But we've talked about having children,” I said. “They have names.”

“That wasn't a good idea.”

“I saw them,” I said. “They were real.”

“They were never real,” she said.

I couldn't bring myself to tell her what I really believed: that her guilt about her sister—about her entire family, but especially about her pregnant sister—was causing her endometriosis. Her guilt, unless she changed her thoughts, would never allow her body to become pregnant.

The doctor was recommending that her ovaries—each covered with a grapefruit-sized cyst—come out immediately, before the cysts could rupture. Her bladder, bowels, and uterus were covered with scar tissue.

We went to see a fertility specialist, who gave us an option other than hysterectomy: surgery to remove the cysts and scrape away the scar tissue, followed as soon as possible—whenever Cary recovered—with fertility drugs and hormone injections.

Cary was in the hospital four days, recovering from surgery; I slept on a cot beside her bed, answering letters from readers. During the first few nights, when Cary had a tube in her nose and was too weak to talk, she'd tap on the sides of her bed, and that was how I knew she was thirsty—I'd feed her ice chips—or wanted me to sit with her for a few minutes.

On the third day she was able to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. I asked if she needed my help, but she said no; she walked past me holding her hospital gown closed.

She'd been in the bathroom ten minutes, so I went to the door; that was when I heard her crying.

I opened the door. She was looking down at the scar.

“Were we supposed to do this?”

“If we want children.”

“This doesn't seem natural,” she said.

We fought quiet fights. Sometimes I think I was the only one fighting. She was usually unflappable: when she was angry, she sang; when she was happy, she sang. No matter what, she went into her studio at home and sang: songs she'd sung a hundred times or songs she wrote as the words came out of her mouth. Some songs—beautiful songs that made me forget what I'd been angry about—she sang only once; I never heard them again. I'd ask her—my way of making up, of saying sorry—if she would sing a song I especially liked. “The one about waking from a dream,” I'd say, and she'd say, “I'm not sure which one you mean,” and I'd say, “The one about dreaming—it goes like this,” and I'd hum the refrain as best as I could, and she'd look at me blankly as if she'd never heard it. “I'm sorry,” she'd say.

I believed her.

Most people have it in them to be that aggressive, to refuse to give something so beautiful, something only you can give, a song no one else knows. But she didn't have that kind of aggression in her, or if she did, she was bigger than it. So I believed that she didn't remember; believed when she said that it really hadn't been
her
singing—it was something singing
through
her; it passed through her the way water and air and life pass through a body.

Those songs are lost; I can't remember them. She didn't mind losing them. Everything came and went, she said, and that made them more precious while they were here. Hello, goodbye, the only story we know.

We got to practice hello and goodbye: I was traveling to promote my second book,
It's On Its Way: Creating the Life You've Always Wanted,
and she was singing at some clubs on the East Coast. If we were gone at the same time, she took Ralph with her and they stayed with friends or in pet-friendly hotels. She'd call me in my hotel room and say
park
and
run
and
boy,
words to make Ralph bark into the phone.

“See,” Cary said. “She misses you.”

“She's happy wherever she is,” I said.

If Cary was ovulating, we'd come home; we never wanted to miss a month. I'd fly home from Seattle even though I was speaking at a conference in Los Angeles the next night; Cary would drive home from Boston—she didn't fly—even though her next show was two hours away, in Northampton, where she grew up.

Every morning, after waking, and every evening, before sleep, I closed my eyes and meditated on the children we'd have. Lucy and Vincent.

I believed in miracles and had hundreds of letters as evidence: people who had read my first book then cured themselves—with only their thoughts—of diabetes, hypertension, multiple sclerosis, liver cancer. A man who was told he'd never walk again, a devout Pentecostal for whom even the laying on of hands hadn't worked, read my book, believed that he'd walk again, visualized it, acted as if it would happen. He removed the wheelchair ramp leading to his front door. Two weeks later, when he hadn't walked, he still believed, and as evidence of his faith he gave away his wheelchair. The next day, he walked. “I wasn't surprised,” he wrote. “Everyone else was, even my wife, but not me.” A seventh-grade girl wrote that her hair had fallen out—she, like her father, had alopecia—and that her mother read my book and taught her some of my techniques. The girl made a creation box, and inside the box she put photographs of herself before she lost her hair, and she believed that her hair would grow back, she even gave away all the hats her friends had given her, and after only a few months of sending out her intention, of believing, her hair began to grow back.

These people, whom I had inspired, now inspired me: if I had helped them believe, then their letters could strengthen my own beliefs.

I worked on the nursery; I bought a box of diapers; I bought two pairs of baby socks, two tiny winter caps. Three months passed, five, eight, ten, more time than a baby would have lived inside Cary. The answer, whether from a pregnancy test or Cary's body, was always no.

No, to me, meant
not yet
.

To Cary no meant
no
;
it meant
maybe never
.

And that was fine with her, she told me. If you accept whatever happens, she said, if you embrace what life gives you, there are gifts.

After a year of trying, the home pregnancy test said yes.

“That's what it
says
,
” she told me.

“I knew it!” I said. “I knew it would happen!”

“You never know,” she said. “It could be a false positive.”

“Jesus,” I said. “It's like you
want
it to be no.”

“No,” she said. “It's just that I don't want you to get your hopes up.”

“My hopes are up,” I said. “My hopes have
been
up.”

“That's what I mean,” she said. “You like to be sure, but how can you ever be sure?”

“You're holding
sure
in your hand.”

“I don't mean
this
.” She laid the pregnancy test on the bed. I didn't want to touch it; I was afraid I might make the pink strip disappear. “What I mean,” she said, “is that you can't be sure you're supposed to be doing something until you're doing it. Maybe we're not supposed to have kids.”

“Will you please stop saying that.”

“I'm not trying to upset you,” she said. “It's just that I don't
feel
pregnant.”

“But you are.”

“Maybe,” she said.

I was in Denver a few days later when she called. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew. I told her I couldn't talk, I was just about to leave for an interview, I'd call her when I got back to the hotel. There was no interview. I lay in bed, closed my eyes, and tried to will it untrue, what she hadn't said but what I'd heard in her tone, the way she said
hi
,
her first word, a little too happy, but beneath her happiness, fear.

The phone kept ringing that night, but I didn't answer. I like to think this was an act of kindness, a desire to protect her from me, from the unkind words I wanted to say, but there was meanness, too: I wanted to make her wait; I wanted her to spend those extra hours worrying about what I'd say.

“I'm sorry,” she said, her first words when I answered the phone, a few minutes before midnight.

“Me, too,” I said.

“I really am disappointed.”

“Me, too.”

“I wish you were home.”

“I'll be there in the morning.”

“Are you angry?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“I don't believe you.”

“I'm not angry.”

“You are.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“I can tell,” she said.

“I'm not angry!”

“Tell me again,” she said. “Say it like you mean it.”

THE YEAR HE
felt the pebble in his shoe.

Smaller than a pebble—let's call it a grain of sand. The one fear he couldn't meditate or positive-think away. He could take off his shoes and socks, shake them out, wash his feet, but the next morning, after he dressed, it was still there, he could feel it, a little bigger than the day before: the grain of sand, his greatest fear.

It's easy for me—the man writing this—to look back and say that was the moment, but even
he
knew it then.

Valentine's Day, the dog's third birthday. Seventy pounds, fully grown, but the hyper tail of a puppy, slaps the floor if you look at her. Ready to jump on you, even though she knows not to. She sits at the window, crying. Sniffs at a thin crack in the glass.

The girl—as he calls his wife—wants to stay in bed, too cold to get up. She wants the boy—as she calls him—to make pancakes. She doesn't like to exchange gifts that can be kept, and so pancakes can be his to her. She likes best things that can be used only once. She likes one-night-only performances. She likes art made to change or die, art you can experience only once, Andy Goldsworthy's snowballs that melt to reveal leaves, pinecones, twigs, thorns. When she hears a song she likes, she turns up the volume, closes her eyes, shuts out everything else, but has no interest in buying the album. Her best songs, what she considers her best, she doesn't record; she plays them only at her shows.

“Use real syrup,” she tells him. “And don't skimp on butter.”

While he's putting on a sweatshirt she adds, “Anything but round. Some other shape we can say we're eating for the first and last time.”

She used to live on the second floor, but now they live on the first and second. They bought the brownstone; they rent the third floor to a med student and a pianist, lovers or friends or friends who want to be lovers, they can't tell. They have heard fights, and so they wonder. The med student, a woman, crying. After, silence. Then the piano. Then more silence.

The dog follows him down to the kitchen, takes a drink of water. He finds her chew toy, makes her lie down for it, throws it for her to chase.

Snow flurries overnight, white dust on the street. Not so much that he can't run later. His feet are cold on the kitchen floor. He doesn't own slippers, even though his wife assures him he'd look cute; he doesn't like dog hair on the bottoms of his socks. He stands in front of the stove, one foot warming on top of the other, then the other on top, as a circle of batter forms a pancake.

He remembers: not round. He reshapes the circle into a rectangle. Too easy, he thinks, so he thins the rectangle until it's a line. Boring, he decides, and divides the line near the bottom: a line on top of a dot. An exclamation point. Too enthusiastic, so he uses a spoon to curve the top of the line. A question mark. Perfect. She'll see it and tell him another knock-knock. She likes the dumbest ones best.

He hears the dog run upstairs. A game with the girl. She eggs on the dog to chase her room to room, through hallways, up and down the stairs. Ralph is faster than the girl and smarter than most dogs, so she wins. Catches the girl out of breath from laughing so much. He has played with them before, knows that involuntary laughter, that feeling, something chasing, closing in, right behind you. That rush of adrenaline even if what's chasing has no intention of harming you. Fear-laughter. Ralph doesn't know what to do when she catches them. All that effort, finally she has them, now what. She touches with her nose, circles, slaps her tail against their shins, looks for a tennis ball, needs something in her mouth. If she finds nothing, they'll bend down so she can lick their faces.

He can hear this game from where he stands, watching batter bubble in a pan. He moves his face closer to smell, then flips the question mark. He decides to make toast and scrambled eggs; he pours two small glasses of orange juice and starts a pot of coffee even though he doesn't drink coffee and messed it up the last time he tried to make it for his wife. She'll be happy with the gesture.

And then it happens. It began as a thought, a fear, a grain of sand, and then it happens.

He thinks to call up to her, as a parent might to a child,
Be careful up there, you don't want to get hurt.

Immediately following this thought is an image of his wife on the floor, not moving, and immediately following this image comes the feeling in his body, a chill that has nothing to do with the cold floor or the cold outside, the snow falling more steadily now, maybe he won't be able to run, after all, and immediately following this feeling in his body he hears her fall down the stairs.

He finds her at the bottom. The dog is halfway down the flight, unsure what to do; even her tail, between her legs, knows that the game's over. His wife lies on her side, unmoving, against the wall. He imagines she's broken her neck. He rushes to her, touches her back, says her name. She moves her hand. The silence that comes before crying. It terrifies him when the sound comes. A child crying. He thinks, I would rather she be unconscious. A stupid, selfish thought. I can say that now because I'm no longer him. The man who shares my name, ten years younger, no gray in his hair or beard, puts his hands on her back, tells her not to move.

He remembers—perhaps I'm remembering now, for him—the first time he heard his mother cry. It scared him then, too—the knowledge that adults could cry. It was the year after his
father
died. An unexpected thunderstorm. His mother hurried out to the yard to take in the laundry from the line—sheets and pillowcases and his school pants and one of his father's old shirts she sometimes wore to bed—and in her hurry she banged her knee on the open screen door. She fell to the ground and cried the way children cry: high-pitched and breathless, her face red and shaking. The boy who shares my name ran to his mother, tried to touch her knee, where she was holding. She kept swatting his hand away. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Please leave me alone.”

This is that fear, but worse. His mother, he secretly knew, was a child. His wife, too—a child. But different from the child his mother was. His wife was a child who skipped and sang and pouted and played games with the dog and was unafraid to get dirty, to ruin her clothes and shoes. If she cried, she would cry quietly. Not this. This was the sound she should have made, but most likely did not, when she heard the news that her father had crashed a plane into the side of a mountain and her family was gone.

My only hope, as I tell this now, is that she doesn't hear him. My hope is that she's in too much pain to hear when he says, “No more running through the house with the dog! No more! I
knew
this was going to happen!” My hope is that she doesn't hear, that she feels him rubbing her back.

He smells batter burning, sees smoke drifting in from the kitchen, the question mark has turned black, but he won't leave her, not until she stops crying.

“Stop crying,” he says.