What Came First (28 page)

For a moment, I don’t understand what he is talking about. “Your . . . oh! No. It was before that. I was married. Briefly. Three years. The year before our divorce, I got pregnant, but it just didn’t . . . take. I was eleven weeks along.”

“That must have been hard.”

“It was. For me, anyway. My ex-husband never wanted the baby. He was afraid it would have a negative impact on my future earning potential.”

“He didn’t really say that.”

“He really did. But he wasn’t—it’s not that he was a bad guy. On paper, we were a perfect match. But it turned out that wasn’t enough. Oh, look! Lunch is here.”

When Afton puts our baskets of food on the table, her breasts come within a foot of Eric’s face. Silly girl: she must assume he’s paying. She has barely left when yet another girl in orange hot pants, this one a green-eyed brunette with a girl-next-door appeal, balances on the edge of our spare seat.

“Aren’t those mahi mahi tacos good?” she asks me. “Those are the only kind of seafood I like. That and tuna.” She takes out a pen and adds her name to the cocktail napkin.
SENECA
♥. Yes, we got another heart.

I catch Eric watching her as she trots away. I smile. Everything will be just fine.

Back in front of the shiny building, I don’t offer to accompany Eric up the elevator to the clinic. I’d rather not distract him from the fresh memory of pretty Seneca.

Once he disappears through the front door, I circle around to the lot and park under a tree. I call the clinic and review the situation with the receptionist, who says she can push my appointment back to four o’clock to allow them time to wash Eric’s sperm.

I turn on my car to leave—then I turn it off again. Twenty-five minutes later, Eric comes out of the building, walks over to a small blue car, and drives away.

I dial the clinic.

“This is Laura Cahill. Just wanted to confirm my appointment for this afternoon. Will the donor semen be washed and ready?”

“Hold on a moment please, Ms. Cahill.”

After several minutes that feel like several hours, she gets back on the line. “Everything’s on schedule. See you at four.”

When I get home, Eric is sitting on the couch, reading and listening to his iPod.

I put my purse on the side table by the door. I can’t even look at him.

“How was it?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer.

I force myself to look at him. “Well?”

“Huh?” He blinks at me. Turns off his iPod.

“How was it?” I repeat. My voice shakes.

He closes the book. “Awkward.”

“And is she . . . when will it get put in?”

“It’s done. At least I assume it is. She had a three o’clock appointment, but there were some . . . issues. With my donation. When I left they told me she was coming in at four instead. She has better odds this way, using fresh—you know.”

It’s done. All day, I’d been hoping he’d change his mind—and if he didn’t, that she’d back out. But it is done. Over.

Wait a minute.

“What kind of issues with your donation?”

He leans back and looks at the ceiling. “My first try didn’t work. I just—it wasn’t happening. So Laura and I grabbed something to eat, and the next time it worked.”

“You and Laura—what?”

“We got some lunch. No big deal.”

“You mean at a restaurant?”

“Well—yeah.”

“Like a date.”

He scowls. “No. Not like a date. We were both hungry, that’s all. And she appreciates what I’m doing for her and her son, so she bought me lunch. Also, she paid me for the donation. Three hundred dollars. If you want me to use that money to take you out, I will.”

“Don’t you think it’s kind of funny?” I say, my voice rising. “You couldn’t get off the first time you tried, but after going out to lunch with Laura, you were fine.”

“We went to Hooters.”

Did he just say . . .

“What?”

“Hooters. She took me to Hooters.”

“Is she gay?” That would be awesome.

“No. At least I don’t think so. She just thought it might help get me in the mood. Which maybe it did, or maybe it was the beer.”

Laura. Hooters. Sperm. Beer. This keeps getting better and better. But I can’t get pissed. At least, I can’t let him see that I’m pissed. I said he could do this.

I say, “You said her odds are better this way. What are they?”

“Since the sperm was fresh, she’s got about a twelve percent chance of getting pregnant. If it’s frozen, it drops to six.”

“And if it doesn’t work this time, is she going to . . . are you going to . . .”

“There was enough for three tries. They were inserting one today and freezing two other vials.”

Eric’s sperm is in a freezer. If I pay Laura what’s-her-face three hundred dollars, will she sell it to me?

He says, “It’s over. Just forget about it, okay?”

The children claw at the glass slider like a couple of cats lusting after a sparrow. But it’s not a bird they want, it’s the swimming pool.

“Why can’t we wait for the swim ’structor outside?” Sydney asks, brown eyes fixed on the small patch of blue. Her sunscreen hasn’t quite soaked in yet. If she sees her white face in the mirror, she will pitch a fit.

Still, she and Harrison look seriously cute. They are wearing the bathing suits my mother gave them for their sixth birthday last month. Hers is navy with white-and-yellow daisy appliqués. His looks like an American flag. My mother also gave Harrison a white rash-guard shirt, but he refuses to wear it.

“You can’t be in the pool without a grown-up, and I’m not going in yet.” I’ve told them that at least four times in the last half hour. The both love the water and beg to swim even when the air and water are much too cold. I think of Eric Fergus. Laura said he surfs.

“We won’t go in till the ’structor gets here,” Harrison lies. Or maybe he thinks he’s telling the truth. As I look through the glass, our yard looks sunny, cheery, inviting—assuming you enjoy running on concrete and playing with gravel, as Harrison does. Open the slider, though, and harsh, hot reality would blast you in the face.

It is a hundred and nine degrees in North Scottsdale. According to the news, it’s a hundred and eleven on the southern, slightly lower side of town. If I were the optimistic type—which, obviously, I’m not—I’d be grateful for those two degrees, but what does it matter? I can take it up to a hundred and four, at least for short periods of time, but anything above that makes me loony.

When the doorbell rings, the children race out of the kitchen to the front door. I follow, reknotting the oversize scarf I’ve tied around my waist. As a swim cover-up, it’s half fabulous, falling all the way to the floor and completely covering my cellulite-dimpled legs. The exposed half of my swimsuit isn’t too bad: green-and-blue floral, with a low V-neck meant to draw attention to my boobs and away from everything else. Still, I’m self-conscious about my flabby arms. Plus, it’s been several days since I’ve shaved my armpits.

I love the young swim instructor on sight, if only because she’s unapologetically fat. No flattering V-neck for her! A high-necked, green-and-black racing suit flattens her chest and highlights enormous shoulders. Gray gym shorts reveal chunky thighs. Her long yellow hair hangs in a thick, stiff braid down her back. A whistle hangs from a cord around her neck.

“HEY! YOU MUST BE WENDY! I’M SAMANTHA! FROM SWIM SAFE!”

Clearly, this is someone accustomed to holding conversations outside. Or perhaps underwater.

She holds out her hand and proceeds to crush mine.

“Nice to meet you,” I grunt through the pain.

She strides into the living/toy room (sometimes I think of it as the Living Toy Room). Sydney and Harrison back up, semifrightened brown eyes stuck on Samantha, half smiles fading fast.

Hands on generous hips, Samantha grins at the wreckage of the room. “HEY! I GUESS YOU GUYS LIKE LEGOS!”

Harrison nods, just a tiny bit.

“This is Harrison.” I put a hand on his bony shoulder. “And Sydney.” She sidles over to me, snuggles against my arm.

Samantha claps her hands. The kids and I flinch as if a gun has just gone off. “YOU GUYS WANNA SHOW ME THE POOL?”

Showing Samantha the pool turns out to be just that: standing next to it without going in. When Harrison dips a toe into the soupy water (ninety-three degrees, last I checked), Samantha turns up the volume even more.

Unused to having anyone but me yell at him, Harrison draws his foot out of the water.

“They gotta understand they can’t go in whenever they feel like it,” Samantha tells me. Maybe she’s lowered her voice, or maybe I’ve just gotten used to it.

“It
is
hot out here,” I say. It is also five minutes into the fortydollar, half-hour lesson.

“Safety first,” Samantha says. Her deep brown skin isn’t even damp with sweat. I don’t have to ask whether she’s grown up in Arizona. Natives develop a lizardlike resistance to the heat but turn blue at the edges and put sweaters on their pets whenever the thermometer drops below sixty.

She crosses her arms over her flat chest. “They can float?”

“Yeah, sure. They’ve had lessons every summer since they were three. But Harrison will only swim underwater, and Sydney will only swim above it. You know—dog paddle. She’s afraid to put her head under.”

“Hmm.” She narrows her eyes, smiles a little. “We’ll take care of that.”

“When can we go in the pool?” Sydney asks.

“Any second,” I say. Sweat bathes my entire body. I can’t wait to escape into the air-conditioning and then, once SAMANTHA has left, I will join the twins in the pool.

At the sound of Samantha’s angry voice, Sydney stumbles backward, her face tight with fear. She hasn’t even touched the water. I no longer like this Samantha person, no matter how fat she is.

Oh. She isn’t shouting at Sydney. She is scolding Harrison, who has followed her instructions to stay out of the pool. Instead, he plucks at a pile of river rocks lined up to look like a stream at the edge of the lot.

I touch the side of my face. I think she has injured my eardrum. “Can you start the lesson now?”

“This is part of the lesson. Safety is rule number one.”

“Right,” I say. “But they’ve only got five more lessons, and I was hoping they’d learn their strokes this year.” Which will be difficult if they stay on land.

She narrows her blue eyes (which are already pretty narrow from a lifetime spent squinting in the sun), picks up the whistle, and—ouch! This time I think she really has injured my eardrums.

At the sound of the whistle, Harrison scurries across the yard like a puppy sniffing raw hamburger meat.

“WHEN I BLOW THE WHISTLE AGAIN, I WANT YOU GUYS TO JUMP IN THE POOL.”

“Sydney won’t jump in,” I tell her.

Samantha ignores me and picks up the whistle. “ONE! TWO!”

I sprint for the slider. The whistle burns my ears, but not as badly as last time. Behind me, I hear one splash.

There is a brief pause, after which Samantha yells at Sydney. “NO! YOU CAN’T JUST CLIMB IN! WHAT IF YOU FELL? WHAT IF SOMEONE PUSHED YOU? YOU GOTTA KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO GO UNDER! YOU GOTTA BE ABLE TO GET OUT!”

I escape into the house before I hear Sydney’s reply.

The thermostat is set at eighty degrees, but all that sweat makes me shiver. A pile of pool towels sits on a kitchen chair. Damn—I meant to take them outside before the lesson. There’s no way I’m going out now, though, not while Samantha is going
mano a mano
against Sydney. There’s no doubt that Sydney will win, that I will have paid forty dollars to have her spend thirty minutes sulking on a pool chair rather than jumping in the pool. But that doesn’t mean I want to hear about it.

I mop my face and chest with a Cinderella towel and glance through the slider just in time to see Samantha scoop up Sydney, step to the edge of the pool, and—no! She can’t possibly be planning to—!

The slider muffles the splash, but there is no barrier in the world thick enough to mute Sydney’s screams once she comes back up. She sounds more angry than frightened. No, she sounds more furious than terrified. No, she sounds like she is going to rip Samantha’s head off.

A dark shape moves underwater; Harrison has wisely retreated to the bottom of the pool, just as he does when I’m not paying anyone to teach him otherwise.

Samantha turns her head slightly. Is she really smiling? Because she threw my six-year-old into the pool? Sydney’s wail continues like a car alarm. She treads water with swift, jerky strokes. Her wet hair falls in dark ringlets around her red face.