The Stuff That Never Happened (12 page)

God, I was a horrible sister.

My mother said, in a low voice, “This happened to punish me. That’s the only thing your father and I know for sure. It’s karma, you know. For leaving like I did. I leave, and my son nearly gets killed.”

“Oh, Mama, that’s not the way the world works,” I said. “Look around you at how many people do terrible, terrible things and nothing bad ever happens to them. Karma is either the most faulty system ever, or else it’s just one big joke.”

She started to cry. “Please, please don’t say that. We can’t ever argue with each other, not ever again. People should stand by each other, and that’s what I’m going to do. I was wrong to leave your father and think only of myself. And if David lives I am going to stand by everyone for the rest of my life and just tell you all every day how much I love you.”

I cried, too. I was the worst, most guilty person in the whole story. And yet I knew that when I told Grant everything, he would defend me. He would say, Don’t be ridiculous. These things happen. Your brother would have discovered weed on his own, even if you hadn’t given him that first clobber of it in the spaghetti.

That’s what he would say, and his eyes would be placid and gray and his voice wouldn’t go up or down in tone. He just accepted things, the good and the bad. I wanted to be back at home with my mother, to hold her hand and tell her that she didn’t have to tell me she loved me every day. I already knew it.

I said that I would come back home, and she said, “But you’re on your honeymoon,” and I said, “That doesn’t matter.”

She started to cry in earnest then and put my dad on the phone—I heard him protesting in the background that he didn’t see the point of talking, but she made him anyway. He was monosyllabic, like somebody who’d been awakened in the middle of the night. He didn’t seem even remotely well enough to have any opinions. I asked him if the two of them were eating, and he didn’t seem to know why I would ask a question like that.

When I hung up, I went over to Grant, who was now in the truck, looking at the maps and whistling. I told him what had happened. A bead of sweat rolled down the inside of my tank top, tickling me all the way down to the waistband of my shorts. “I’m so sorry, but I need to go back home,” I said. I shielded my eyes from the sun and looked up at him in the truck. “I don’t think I can go with you to New York anymore.”

I watched the color leave his face. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “We can turn around now and we’ll stay there a couple of days, until things settle down, and then we can set out again for New York.”

“I don’t think things are going to be all right in a couple of days,” I said. I ran my hand along the inside of the truck’s open door, wondering what it would be like if the door were to slam on my fingers. Would that make the pain in my heart better or worse?

“Well, then, as long as it takes,” he said. “Surely they’ll know more in a few days, at least. We can get things squared away there, and
then
go to New York.”

“No,” I said. I knew I wasn’t going to be ready to go to New York in a few days. “Listen,” I said. “You have a job waiting for you, and you’re supposed to turn in the truck in New York City, and we’re already on such a tight deadline. You go on ahead and get settled, and I’ll go take care of my brother—”

But didn’t marriage count for anything? He said we were married, damn it, and that’s what married people did: stand by each other in times of difficulty. Hadn’t that been what I agreed to when we got married? This was our first test. Didn’t I know what “for better or worse” even meant? He and I had made
vows
. This is how his parents had lasted so long. They stayed with each other. His father never would have let his mother go off alone. This is what you
do
.

I told him I didn’t think that applied here. It was too soon, for one thing. And this was a situation that had nothing to do with our marriage, or him, or anything about the future. I pointed out that he’d lose the job that was waiting for him—the one with the man he’d most wanted to work with in his whole adult life, the guy we had taken to calling The Great Man Himself. Plus, there was the deposit he’d put on the truck. If we went back to California now and then to New York at some later time, we’d have more trouble finding an apartment later on. I really believed all this stuff I was saying.

“Really,” I said. “I need to do this.”

The truth was—and I didn’t know this until I got on the plane, until I’d clicked the seat belt closed and accepted a martini, my first ever, from the stewardess—the
truth
was, I didn’t want him with me. I wanted to have this experience all to myself. This was
mine
. Grant had no place in the tiny hierarchy of people who could know about my brother’s drug deals gone wrong, and my mother’s crazy theories about karma and her foray into feminism and all the rest of it, and the way my father closed his eyes when the world demanded even the slightest thing of him.

These were
my
people—my flawed, crazy people—and they were in trouble and I needed to go back and stand with them. Grant would be fine. I had told him that: we’d be a married couple later on, I told him. I had some unfinished sister-and-daughter work to do. It was bad luck, is all.

“I’ll call you,” I’d said to him in the coffee shop at the airport.

“But will you ever really come to New York?” he asked. “I’m your husband, and I don’t want to be away from you.”

“Of course I will!” I said. But as the plane took off and I took the first sips of the martini, what I was feeling was something else altogether: as sad as my brother’s trauma had been, there was something else flickering in the back of my mind, something I didn’t even want to admit to. And that was that I had received a reprieve, a pardon, a free pass out of marriage and another chance at being back in my home again, with my mother and father—and yes, a sick, injured little brother, all of whom I needed so desperately. I never should have left.

I had gotten to run back into childhood just before the gate shut me out forever.

GRANT TRAVELED the rest of the country to New York in record time, staying in concrete campgrounds and listening to talk radio to his heart’s content, I’m sure. And once he got there he discovered it was much harder than he’d imagined to find an apartment and set up housekeeping. It was one man against the whole unfathomable system of city landlords and rental agencies. Besides, he said on the phone, how could he possibly figure out what type of place
I’d
like? How could he be sure he’d pick just the right apartment? Perhaps I’d forgotten, in my absence, how inept he was at daily life. Instead, he told me in one of our late-night phone conversations, he’d accepted an invitation to live in the meantime with The Great Man Himself, of all people. What fantastic luck!

The Great Man Himself had a wife and twin toddlers, and an apartment they were willing to share. Yes, they’d invited him! In fact, Grant had been given the wife’s study for his bedroom, which was just great because she was a dancer putting on a show and she needed to work at the studio now instead of at home. There was already a double bed in there anyway, along with a desk and boxes of family photos and Christmas decorations and all the paraphernalia of family life, boxes of old baby clothes and toys. It was sweet, he said. The toddlers came in and woke him up with kisses and pokes in the eye every morning. One of them insisted he wear the toilet plunger for a hat, which was apparently a great honor.

It was a perfect arrangement, he said, because—well, because it gave him a chance to get acclimated to living in New York and to working for the university without being quite on his own. Had I been there, he told me, he probably wouldn’t have relied on others. And then he would have missed out on the greatest friendship of his life. He actually said that: the greatest friendship of his life. With good dinners and conversation and wine.

“And they can’t wait to meet you,” he said. “Please, please come soon, whenever your family can do without you.”

I told him I would. David had awakened from his sleep, but he was paralyzed from the waist down and had lost the sight in one eye and some of his hearing. He was going to be staying in rehab for a long time, it looked like. There wasn’t much more I would be able to do for him.

Grant said, “Well … he’ll have people who can help him recover,” and I could hear glasses clinking and laughter in the background. I heard a man’s voice say, “Tell her we’re turning you into a New Yorker, plying you with bagels and brioche. And tell her this—tell her we’re already half in love with her just from her picture, although we suspect that’s just a decoy photo you’re trying to impress people with!”

“Wow, The Great Man Himself has a normal human voice,” I said. “He doesn’t boom like I thought God would sound when he talked.”

Grant laughed. “I know! Did you hear him?” he said into the phone. “That was Jeremiah. I think he’s beginning to believe you’re not really real. So you see, you
have
to come and prove him wrong.”

[nine]

2005

I
love this, being back in New York. You know what it’s like? It’s like being young again. I feel anything is possible.

Sophie and I settle into a nice, easy rhythm with each other, as I knew we would. I’m enough like her to know what cheers her up, and so we do plenty of it, as much as we want. We loll about in bed watching movies and napping and eating off and on, whenever we please. I get to play the part of Lady Bountiful, making chicken soup and homemade wheat bread, roasted vegetables, stir-fries. I bring in
People
magazine, romantic comedies on DVD, fragrant moisturizers, lip glosses, nail polish in a variety of colors. It’s as though we exist in a kind of bubble—an overheated, one-room, exclusively female bubble, surrounded by everything we could want. Outside, branches scrape against the windows of her apartment, the sun rises and sets, the wind blows, and car horns honk. Inside, we give each other manicures and pedicures, and I comb her hair into upswept hairdos with tendrils, and the radiator bathes us in plumes of warm air. We decide we should both wear bangs. I comb mine down and straight until I look like Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer of The Pretenders, which I have to explain to Sophie was a band from the years I lived here before. Sophie wears wispy bangs, combed to the side, that emphasize her wide gray eyes.

We both are working, too. I’ve set up a makeshift drawing table in the corner of the bedroom, and I’m finishing up the Bobo pictures, concentrating on getting the expressions just right. How’s this for a distinction? My editor says I’m the queen of making animals look like they’re brimming with goodwill and human feelings. “One millimeter speck of brown paint in the wrong place, and people suddenly remember that squirrels are just rats with tails,” she said once, which made me laugh.

Sophie, who works as an assistant to the deputy editor for
La Belle
, a general-interest magazine for young women, has been assigned during her confinement to read unsolicited manuscripts—stories that ordinary people send from everywhere, hoping they will get printed in the magazine. Most of them don’t have a chance, but Sophie’s job is to read them and decide if they should get seen by an editor. It could be a discouraging job, having to dash so many people’s hopes, but some of the stories are funny and touching, and she’ll often read paragraphs aloud to me while I paint.

These manuscripts get brought to her each week by Christina, another assistant from the office, who will often stay and have tea with us. She’s charming and quirky, and I love how she gets Sophie laughing about the office gossip and politics. Soon she becomes a regular for dinner, which is good because we get sick of ourselves sometimes and need new life to be brought in from the outside.

“You have to be careful around my mom,” Sophie tells her, and slides her eyes over to me. “My mom has this talent—I guess you could call it a talent—for adopting people. You’ll talk with her for five minutes and she’ll get you to tell her all your secrets, and by the end of the night she’ll know everything about you.”

“Sophie, that is so untrue,” I say, laughing.

“Nobody knows how she does it.”

Christina laughs and says she has no secrets, which is of course not so, and pretty soon she and Sophie and I are talking about men and bosses and living in New York, and how you know when you’re happy, and whether men experience happiness the same way women do—which are all fascinating subjects. Not long after that, Lori and her roommate, Tara, start coming up, too, and in the evenings we have something of a salon. We all gather on the bed and on pillows on the floor, knitting and talking and laughing and eating.

Everybody has man trouble of one sort or another—there are men who are noncommittal, and men who are too clingy, and men who leave wet towels on the floor and who are
also
too clingy, and then, of course, men who have chosen to go to Brazil—and I love how we sift through the layers of feeling, telling stories, trying to explain the mysteries that can’t be explained. I feel as though I’ve been doing this all my life.

“How is it that you can know for sure that you don’t love somebody anymore, but then when you hear he’s getting married all of a sudden you want to throw yourself out the window?” asked Lori one night.

“It’s just wanting what you can’t have,” Christina said. “Human nature.”

“If you got him back, you wouldn’t really want him,” Sophie said. “Whatever was wrong before would come right back in no time. And you’d just throw him over again.”

“But what if everything had changed? What if you were wrong before? What if you made the wrong decision?” asked Lori. “How do you know?”

“My mom’s the one with the happy marriage,” Sophie said. “Ask her how you know.”

They all looked at me, expectantly, and my throat got clogged and I couldn’t speak. I know less than anyone on this subject.

ONE DAY Sophie and I are sitting on the bed and I get out my paper and watercolors and start to paint her. I make her look hopeful and radiant. I have noticed that every day she’s getting stronger and happier, except that she always seems to feel down after she and Whit have talked on the phone or after she’s read his e-mails. I don’t think he’s saying things to upset her, but I know that sometimes a man can break your heart worse when he is far away but happy, and you realize how tangential you are to his real life.

Grant calls her several times a week but does not ever ask to speak to me. And one day he sends a box of Hershey bars with almonds with a note that says: “Just in case you have the same cravings your mom did.”

“So, I guess you must talk to Dad when you go out to the market or something,” she says once.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I never hear you talking to him. I thought he’d be calling you every day.”

“Well, he’s pretty busy with his book.”

“Oh,” she says, and I can feel her looking at me even as I go back to my drawings. I’ve decided that Bobo’s mother’s sweat suit needs just a bit more shading.

One day while I’m out I call Ava Reiss and let her know that I wish to suspend our therapy sessions for the foreseeable future.

Making that phone call felt great. “Thank you for all that you’ve gotten me to think about,” I told her voice mail cheerily. “But for now I’m looking forward to simply being with my daughter and living the unexamined life.”

How lucky it had been not to get Ava Reiss herself on the phone. She does not believe in the virtues of the unexamined life. She would have said, “But Annabelle, we have to explore the fact that you said you don’t want to be married anymore. What about that?”

Maybe she wouldn’t have said that, I don’t know. I am on vacation from my marriage to Grant; from his silences; from our dark, cold house; from missing my mother; from the way the wind blows against the siding on the north side of the house and makes a howling sound and the way the snowpack builds up on the shady part of the driveway; from feeling that I constantly need to lose ten pounds and make lunch dates with my friends so I can hear of the demise of their marriages and their fears for the future; and from that feeling of dread I have just under my breastbone each morning when I wake up.

Sophie and her friends are women who have been disappointed by men, but I can tell they are sure that this is only a temporary state; they believe that love will come and transform them. Men will start behaving correctly, or new men will come and carry them to a time when they won’t be confused or disappointed again.

But then there is Lori’s question: “What if he was the one, and I’ve missed him and can’t get him back? Will I always have to live in uncertainty?”

That would be the worst thing, they all agree: living with uncertainty.

ONE DAY I’m working on my watercolor of Sophie, complete with pink cheeks and tendrilly hair, looking like the epitome of young, healthy impending motherhood, and she says, “Will you paint a picture of the lima bean?”

She means the baby. She’s been calling it a lima bean, or a baked bean, or just Beanie. “You mean … from the ultrasound picture?” I am trying to think how this could possibly work. A portrait of someone curled up like a Cheeto?

“No, no.” She waves her hand. “The way you imagine her to look. A portrait of our fantasy of her. When she gets born.”

“Um, excuse me. Back up just a second. Did you say … her?”

She laughs and squeezes her knees. “Oh, did I?”

“Sophie! Is that true? Oh my God! Beanie is a girl?”

She nods, and her eyes fill with tears even though she’s smiling. “She is. I’m having a girl. I just found out. That day …”

I put down my paintbrush and go over and hug her. “Oh, baby! Oh, my goodness! A daughter? This is so exciting! Wow, wow. What did Whit say when you told him?”

“Um, I haven’t told him yet.”

“No? Not yet? You’re waiting for just the right moment.”

“Yeah, and the right moment will be when he’s here and the doctor is handing her to him.”

I laugh. “Really? Wow, you have a lot of self-control. I’d probably not want to tell him, but then I’d be on the phone blurting it out.”

“No,” she says, still smiling, but it’s furious, chin-thrust-out smiling. In a moment, she could cry again. “It’s not self-control. I just don’t want to tell him. This is knowledge that is just mine, all mine—and well, now yours, too.”

I hug myself. “A
girl!
A little girl. I can’t get over it.” I sit on the bed next to her and hold her, and I can’t help it, I think of my mother—this whole chain of women we’re making, how far it stretches into the past and how much further it will go into the future. My mother would have loved to have been here for this moment. It’s almost as though she knew it would arrive. One day not long before she died I was visiting her in the nursing home, and we sat together in the sunroom, talking. She’d been divorced from my father for years by then, and had had a decade-long happy marriage to a man she met at a singles dance, who died one day of a stroke when he was taking out the garbage. After a few years on her own, she’d moved to a retirement community in New Hampshire to be near us. We sat looking out through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows. There wasn’t any sun, just snow heaped up on the pond outside, but it was beautiful just the same, we agreed. Not a California beachy kind of beautiful, but still, filled with the kind of scenic wonder you might see on a calendar on the January page. How in the world, I had asked her, had we California women been transplanted to a winter worthy of the January page?

And that’s when she shook her head and said, “All because of Grant—a man we didn’t even know for most of our lives. We couldn’t have predicted it. You being here. Of course, looking back, it was the thing that had to happen, but you’re so far away from what I thought your life would be.” She adjusted the turban she’d taken to wearing since her hair had fallen out. “And it’ll be that way for you and Sophie, too. You won’t recognize who she becomes. You know that, right?”

I squeezed her hand, too choked up just then to speak. She said, “I just hope she has a little girl so she can know what it’s like to be challenged every day of your life, the way we’ve been.” And we both laughed.

See?
says Ava Reiss in my head.
You think you can go on vacation from the unexamined life, but you really can’t
.

I turn and tell Sophie, whom I still recognize just fine, “You know what I think we should do in view of this new knowledge? I think we should get ourselves on the computer and order us some pink outfits. And a white wicker bassinet with ruffles.”

She looks uncertain, but then she says, “That’ll be so much fun. I guess it’s really real, isn’t it, when you know this is a person who actually has a gender. You realize you’re going to have to buy her stuff.”

I pick up her laptop from the floor by the bed and together we sit and cruise all the cool baby sites. We buy little onesies and stretchy suits with farm animals on them, bath towels and some newborn pajamas, little knitted booties, blankets, and hats. It’s a riot of fun. And then—
click
—we purchase a bassinet, the kind that comes with a canopy and gingham bumpers. Laughing, Sophie says she doesn’t know where she’ll put all this stuff when it arrives.

But you have to have things for the baby, I tell her. And besides that, there’s always room. You make room, is what you do.

IN THE game of chicken that Grant and I are apparently playing, he is the one who gives in first and finally calls me. This is a major triumph, of course. He has never liked long, involved phone conversations, and now he sounds like somebody who has a list of talking points in front of him. He ticks them off. He has a cold. Chapter six is giving him fits. His knees are stiff. It’s just snowed. The oil delivery guy came today. How am I? What is Sophie doing? How is the weather in New York? Do I get out much? What does the doctor say?

I answer him in a careful voice that is devoid of any anger or passion. I say I’m sorry about his cold, his chapter, and his knees, but then I don’t rush to fill the silences, as I would have done before I took a vacation from dealing with him. While I’m talking, I take a notepad and sketch a picture of Sophie’s bedroom, the bedside table with our cups of tea and a plate of brownies next to the lamp.