The Stuff That Never Happened (17 page)

“Anyway, aren’t you a little bit happy here?” he said softly, crooningly, after a while. “I can tell that you like Jeremiah, at least. And he likes you. I see the happy way you two get when you talk to each other at dinner. Even if you don’t really like Carly, you always seem to have a million things to talk about with
him
, right?”

My blood froze, and I felt my mind start racing backward, defensively. Was I going to be accused of something here? Did I need to start marshaling some arguments?

I didn’t say anything, and after a moment, my blood settled back in its old familiar tracks, stopped beating in my ears. Grant was merely stating something lovely that he’d noticed. There wasn’t any recrimination there at all. When we got to the front door of the apartment building, he took me in his arms and placed me on the bottom step, and then he stood on the sidewalk—so that we were almost eye to eye—and kissed me lightly on the lips, over and over again, a hundred little kisses.

And I just stood there and let his kisses rain over me, but what I was thinking was that maybe Jeremiah would still be awake when we went inside. Maybe he would smile at me again the way he had at dinner.

Part of me hoped he’d be there, but there was another part of me that just wanted to take Grant’s hand and run away with him in the darkness. Maybe we could go back to California, live on the beach in a cave, and hide from this thing that was hunting me down just as surely as if I had a bull’s-eye painted on my forehead.

[eleven]

2005

“M
om. Mom, wake up. I have to ask you something.”

I sit straight up in bed, on my ready-to-jump-in-a-taxi alert. The word
Mom
has always been able to do that to me—even uttered from five rooms away and in a hoarse whisper, it can jolt me out of the deepest sleep. I think of it like the special red phone in the White House.

“Oh, baby! Baby! Are you all right?” Before I’m even fully awake, I’m on my feet and turning on the light. Sophie is lying on her side, propped up on her pillow. Her eyes are dry, and she doesn’t seem to be in pain. My heart rate settles back down to the normal range. “What’s the matter?”

The clock on the bedside table says 2:47.

“I’m okay. I made up my mind not to wake you up, but I just keep thinking, and I can’t sleep,” she says in a perfectly wide-awake voice. “Then I was lying here, and I decided that some things are better when you talk about them in the middle of the night anyway. Have you ever noticed that? That in the middle of the night you talk about different things? Whit and I used to have some of our best discussions then. Maybe people are more real then. Do you think so? They don’t have their defenses up.”

She is obviously out of her mind and nowhere near sleep, so I rub my eyes and try to bring my mind into focus. “Okay. My defenses are certainly still asleep, so what kind of thing do you want to talk about? Are you feeling anxious?”

“I want to talk about open marriage.”

“Open marriage? Really?”

“Yeah. That’s where you’re married, but you can have other partners and so can your husband—”

“Yes. I’m familiar with the term.”

“Well, I want to know if you think it works. Because this woman I work with says she and her husband were going to split up, but then they decided instead to have an open marriage and sleep with other people, and she told us that saved their marriage because neither one of them gets jealous or anything. Like when her husband is with his other partner, then she just goes out with her friends and does whatever she wants to do, like go to parties and maybe meet new people, and she says that when they get back together, they’re both happier. What do you think about something like that?”

“Wow. It may be
too
much in the middle of the night for this discussion,” I say, “but my initial impression is that she’s lying to you. I don’t think it works. Not with most people.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought, too,” she says slowly. She stares at the ceiling.

“It’s one of those great ideas that turns out to be just not practical. It doesn’t fit with human nature.”

“But think about the Winstanleys,” she says. “What if they could have had an open marriage? Don’t you think it might have been better for them, really? I mean, if Mr. Winstanley got a little crush on someone else, then couldn’t he just get it out of his system and still stay with his wife, and then the whole family wouldn’t have had to suffer?”

“Maybe, but I’m not sure Mary Lou would have gone for that deal.” I laugh a little, picturing practical, down-to-earth Mary Lou kissing Clark good-bye as he walks out the door, arm in arm, with Padgett.

“So what do you think? Could you have ever done it—forgiven Dad, I mean, if Dad was the type to get crushes? I mean, if you love somebody enough, won’t you do anything to keep them?”

•   •   •

THIS IS not what we’re talking about.

Yesterday she spent a great deal of time at the computer, staring at the pictures Whit has sent her. At one point she called me over, and I stood next to her while we looked at the photos he’s sent. They are mostly of adorable, dark-eyed children who regard the camera with shy smiles, and of construction workers building the new orphanage. There are vast, verdant fields with vegetables growing, and a shiny, stainless-steel kitchen where we see smiling people stirring and serving giant pots of food. There is the pleased but harried face of the director, and photos of the film crew, mugging for the camera, hoisting beers, walking around a town, playing Frisbee with the children.

And in one picture, just one picture, there is Whit, standing next to a woman who actually looks a lot like Sophie—a pert, ponytailed cutie in a green T-shirt and denim shorts—and for that second when the picture was taken, forever captured on camera, his arm is draped across her shoulders and he is looking down and smiling at her, a totally unself-conscious, beaming grin that could mean anything at all but of course means only one thing to Sophie.

Whit has fallen in love in Brazil.

When I saw it, I flinched just a little. And I wasn’t surprised when Sophie flashed right past it, and then when we were all done, I saw her go back to that one and bring it up on the screen. I excused myself and went to make another pot of pregnancy tea and then I suggested we watch something fun on DVD. I grabbed
Sleepless in Seattle
, which has no scenes of marital infidelity in it. We didn’t need any of that.

But now it’s the middle of the night and the black dogs are howling in her head, and she is asking me if I ever would have forgiven Grant, and what can I say? I look at her and can’t think of anything truthful that could help her. Am I to just pat my lonely, left-behind, pregnant daughter and offer some sweet assurance that she’s married to a wonderful man, a man who would never, ever hurt her? Do I even believe that?

Who knows what to believe? What’s clear is that it’s three o’clock on a dark winter morning, and she is in her seventh month of pregnancy, and in Brazil her husband is either sleeping alone or he isn’t, and either way, Beanie Bartholomew is coming into this world and will need love and sustenance and, more than anything else, a mother who believes herself to be loved.

I say slowly, “I guess I would try to understand. But it would depend on the circumstances, and if your father was really in love with someone else or just was lost and trying to make sense of things within himself.”

She sighs a big, loud sigh and smiles at me. “You can’t even relate, can you?” she says. “It’s beyond belief for you, is what it is.”

ONE DAY the phone rings, and it’s Cindy Bartholomew, Whit’s mother. She seems surprised to find me on the other end of the phone, so I have to explain about the sudden bleeding. She is suitably chagrined. We met at the wedding at our house, of course, and at the time I remember thinking she seemed charming and funny. She exclaimed that New England was just the most beautiful place ever, and she loved our house, our friends, the whole bit. We insisted that she and her husband stay in our guest room, and if after a few days I found her tendency to talk baby talk to her husband just the tiniest bit irritating, I enjoyed them overall. They told funny stories, especially when they’d been drinking. She and Clement are always jetting all over the country, monitoring their various investments, and whenever they’re in New York, they try to come and check on Sophie and the progress of their grandchild. They’d like to come for a little visit. Would that be possible?

“Of course,” I say. “We’d love to see you.” Sophie, meanwhile, is shaking her head and diving under the covers even as I’m arranging the time.

“They’re
family,”
I tell her when I hang up. “Why don’t you want to see them? And don’t they, in fact, own this apartment you’re living in?”

“Yes.
God
. They own everything. I feel like when they’re here, they’re making sure I haven’t done some terrible thing to destroy the place. I always just want to get out of here.”

“It’ll be okay. It won’t do us any harm to be nice to them. We can set up a party platter in the bedroom.”

“Ugh. I suppose.”

The Bartholomews arrive on a Sunday afternoon, and the four of us settle awkwardly in the bedroom, which is where Sophie and I have done all our entertaining. But this time it’s unbearable. I immediately see what Sophie means: Clement, who is about twenty years older than Cindy, is a restless type, always looking as though he’s just about to go to a meeting at which he expects to be told that he’s been elected the king of the universe and that things on the home planet have gone terribly wrong. He paces around the apartment, huffing and sighing, opening cabinets, and tapping at the bricks on the fireplace. Cindy is obviously used to this kind of behavior; her well-made-up eyes follow him, and she keeps calling him Grandpa and telling him to go and do all the “Grandpa” things he needs to do, although I can’t imagine what they are.

Finally he comes back into the bedroom doorway, where he looms like André the Giant, and makes a pronouncement. “Okay, I’m ready now to take three beautiful women to lunch.”

Oh, but we can’t. It is explained to him again. We can’t leave the house. Sophie, in fact, can’t leave her bed. To my surprise, Sophie stands up and declares that it won’t hurt if we just go out for a little bit of lunch. It might even do her good.

“Wait,” I say.

“No. Mom! How’s this really going to hurt? I’ll go downstairs, get right into a cab, and go to the restaurant and sit down immediately, eat, get into the cab again, and come right back.” Her eyes are pleading, bright and intense. “I mean, I go to doctor’s appointments—why not one lunch out?”

“I think they want you
lying
down,” I say, but clearly I’m embarrassing her. Cindy Bartholomew is starting to make little henlike noises, trying to smooth things over, as if there’s about to be a huge argument.

Clement is snorting. “I’ll take responsibility for this,” he says.

I’m aghast. There’s no
taking responsibility
. An unborn baby could be in danger—how do you take responsibility for that? I wish I could tell Grant this story. The
old
Grant. We’ve always laughed about men like this, men who think they’re so powerful they can intervene in matters of life and death.

Cindy twitters around us, worried. Clement assures us he will call the doctors, if necessary. He can get us a wheelchair if that would help … he’ll have his cell phone and there will be three of us to watch her every second. It’s not such a big deal.

Sophie is frantically signaling me with her eyes that this is something that must be done. She wants this.

So we go outside, blinking in the light and air. Clement hails a cab, and it parks obediently by the curb, like a trained puppy. The day is prematurely warm, filled with sunshine and promise. At home, there wouldn’t be a day like this until late May. But here in New York, it seems like anything is possible. Sophie declares that it feels wonderful to be out in the air, and not on her way to the doctor. She is positive that the bleeding was just a onetime thing, an anomaly. It is important for her, in fact, to feel that her body is competent enough to hold on to a baby even when she’s upright. This is great, great, great.

Cindy gives me a knowing look, one that I can’t read. I take it to be a “we women know what we’re doing” look. But not quite. We get to the restaurant—an elegant, dim place with lots of polished wood and thick, cream-colored napkins—and Clement proceeds to order mimosas all around. But then I really do fight him, and Sophie does, too: pregnant women aren’t allowed to drink alcohol. No, not even one. Yes, times have certainly changed.

He sulks over this a bit, but then we manage to change the subject. Real estate, weather, the Bartholomews’ recent trip to Italy.

It occurs to me suddenly, after a few sips of my mimosa, that we haven’t mentioned Whit. So I do it. “Whit’s project seems to be coming along well,” I say. “Do you hear from him very often?”

The table gets quiet. Cindy nods and looks away. Clement orders another round, although we haven’t finished the first one. Sophie gamely tells a story that Whit told her, about a child he met in a village, who thought that she could maybe come back to the United States with him if the right person won the election. That’s what she thought an election was: a ticket. It’s a lame story, and not totally believable, and after a moment’s polite pause, Cindy asks me if it’s been a rough winter in New Hampshire.

Later, when I excuse myself to go to the restroom, she follows me there. “Sorry that was so awkward when you mentioned Whit,” she says. “It’s kind of a sore spot now, this whole situation.… Well, I’m sure
you
know.” She waves her hand in the direction of the dining room.

I am drying my hands on a paper towel. “Oh, yes. I know how
that
is. Sore spots,” I say. I think she’s come into the restroom to tell me something about her husband. I know the look of women who are about to report that their marriages are unsatisfactory in some way.

She is smiling at me. “Well, of course, right now you’re the one most inconvenienced by this whole deal.”

“Inconvenienced?”

“Yes, coming here. I mean, I’m sure we all agree that it was most unfortunate for Sophie to go and get pregnant at a time like this.” She leans close to the mirror and examines her lipstick, which has kind of fanned out around the lines of her mouth. “I have been telling my son since he was sixteen years old that he has to take responsibility for birth control. And he didn’t—and look.”

“Well,” I say, and I let out a tinny laugh. “I think couples sometimes make these decisions unconsciously. These kinds of things do happen.”