You Could Be Home by Now (14 page)

“Yeah?”

“Don't do that baby lotion thing. That stuff has a really high concentration of ispep. You'll break out like crazy.”

“Really? But it's gentle enough for babies.”

“Their skin hasn't started producing oil yet. It's a chemical thing. I've got to go now.” She hung up. Sierra wouldn't hear it now if her voice pitched high and tight. Lily examined the phone. Its screen indicated two missed calls from Veronica (mobile). She pitched it in the hopper of the soda machine. Low move, but someone would take it to the lost and found. And she
had
to toss it. It was a question of personal survival. Lily was quitting Sierra cold turkey; she'd last maybe a day phone-enabled. She headed back toward Gran, her mind electric with should've-saids. The woman who would years from now be Frau Rocky owed Lily big-time. There was no such thing as ispep. The word was
Pepsi
spelled backward.

S
ETH FELT THE SLOW TENTACLES
of a killer headache. He should never have told Nicky he'd follow up on those notes. He had to log into Facebook now. Look over some list of strangers who thought ticking a box would make any difference at all to the Roskos. He pulled up the site. His password was
dlaonuiiesla
, a scramble of his and Alison's middle names. He entered it, and with every keystroke he remembered. How he and Ali had dithered about Timothy's middle name. How they joked about setting up a bracket in the teachers' lounge. How one morning Ali said
Lawrence
and they couldn't believe it took them so long to think of it. How it hadn't wound up mattering. How there had been paperwork at the hospital—forms with meager spaces and nursery-pastel triplicates—and how none of those forms had a thing to do with naming. How that hadn't registered until he went to close out their Chettenford safe deposit box. How he'd felt in the bank that afternoon, seeing their passports, their unassuming sheaf of graduation gift bonds, and, paper-clipped together, their marriage and birth certificates. Seth Daniel Collier, Alison Louisa Mackey, the font elaborate and brutal: Certificate of Live Birth.

All that from a simple password, and then the Internet went and gave him this: Nina McCordle Henry at the top of his feed.
I'd sell my left arm for a full night's sleep. Only then I'd have only one hand to deal with two teething babies. Gah!! Twins!! :)

For fuck's sake. Nina was one-half of the couple they were closest to back in Chettenford. She was a civil engineer and not at all the kind of woman who used emoticons. Seth's stomach roiled. He remembered a potluck at the Henrys' last year. The curve below Alison's waist had just graduated from possibly beer to definitely baby. Nina wasn't drinking and everyone guessed what that meant. The women laughed, one to another. They say it makes you stupid for the first year and a half. Now Nina's profile picture showed a loaf-sized bundle in either arm.

You poor thing
, he wrote.
Alison and I slept BEAUTIFULLY last night. Peace and quiet at any cost! Love to Ross.
Seth hesitated, but only for a moment. The Henry twins' birth announcement had arrived three weeks after they got to Arizona. A postcard, the newborn pair snuggled and hazy. Their hats looked like the hat that the nurses had placed on Timothy's head when they brought him over to Alison's bedside. It killed him, that hat. The pretending involved in dressing a dead child. He clicked post.

That damn postcard. It was cruel. A letter would have at least had an envelope. A letter they could have trashed unread. This, they'd had no choice but to see. Ondine Violet (five pounds, thirteen ounces) and Linus James (five pounds, eleven). In their toothpaste-toned Arizona kitchen, Alison's eyes had gone gemlike, hard and bright. In the softness of the surrounding skin he could see the faint scoring he would come to know as wrinkles soon enough. “I hate them,” she'd said. She made her voice nasal. “We're Ross and Nina. Have you met our children? Ondine. Linus.” She'd kicked at the kitchen island. The surrounding cabinetry rattled, cheaply hinged. “Christ! I hope they wind up every bit as pretentious as their names.”

“They're good people,” Seth had said. “They didn't think.” But he hated the Henrys, too. And he'd hated Alison, at least for the moment. When it was her turn to fall apart, it had to be his to be rational. She slumped to the floor. She tented her legs.

“They should have thought,” she said. “Fuck them. Fuck them and their healthy perfect beautiful babies.”

Fuck them indeed.

Seth leaned forward and clicked through to Ross Henry's page.
My third shirt in four hours. Move over, Linda Blair. There are new babies in town . . .
In Ross' picture, a baby—the daughter? The son? It hurt to look, actually hurt, there, in the space Seth used to think belonged to his lungs—wore a Yankees shirt that was a size too big. Seth felt a momentary nudge from his old life. The itch to get a gibe in there. There were people who loved the Yankees, and then there were people who actually loved The Game. Instead, he wrote
Paternity leave sounds like hell. Ali and I had it SO much easier.

Seth tallied. He had one hundred and fifty-seven friends. One hundred and fifty-seven oblivious grinners. He typed quickly. North Chettenford's most beloved biology teacher was enjoying his first frozen custard of the summer and wondered why it had taken him so long. Seth wrote
Yum! I wonder what flavor my son would have liked best!
A girl he'd dated for about half a minute was setting off on a three-day bike trip.
Have fun, Jen! I used to daydream about teaching Timothy to bike.
His freshman roommate had posted a blurry ultrasound.
It's official. A boy for Maura and me.
Seth wrote
Wow, I didn't even know the two of you got married. Your son looks like mine did before he died.
One of Alison's cousins liked
Your Family Were Once Immigrants, Dingoes Ate My Anchor Baby,
and
What the Hell Are They Thinking in Arizona?
Seth wrote,
I'll tell ya, Sean, this Arizonian's thinking about how the hell to make it through another day with all this crushing grief. Also, dead babies aren't funny.

A ping and a pop-up.
You there?
A photo of Ross Henry's stupid Yankee baby. Seth ignored it and refreshed. His high school lab partner would be in L.A. for the weekend and wondered if anyone wanted to meet up.
I would, but I'm still in mourning.
One of Ali's bridesmaids wished her mother a happy birthday.
Awww, what a good daughter. I used to think our Timothy would be like that.
A former student declared the sweet potato hash at O'Rourke's to be the ultimate hangover food.
Ali craved sweet potatoes with Timothy. Remember Alison? AP European History? She and I had a son. He died.
Another ping. Ross again.
Seth, want to talk? It's been a while
. The asshole was probably typing one-handed, his other arm wrapped around the warm weight of a wriggling infant. Seth took a deep breath. The asshole probably felt his child's chest expand and crest against his. The asshole asked,
You doing okay?

As if the answer could possibly be yes.

Seth ignored Ross, typing away. He felt jittery and too-vivid, as if edging toward a fever.

A grad school classmate had booked her tickets to Belize.
I'd love a vacation from my reality. Did you hear? Timothy's still dead.
The son of his mother's best friend put up a picture of a gargantuan, meaty sandwich.
Easier to swallow than the fact my son died.
A woman he couldn't even place had taken a quiz that identified her power color as dusty rose. Seth typed
Wow, I'm so glad that you're alive to waste your time on things like that. My son isn't.
One Chettenford colleague thanked another for jump-starting her car and someone he had never heard of made an innuendo about it.
Long time, no talk, guys. Come visit me and Ali (just us. Our baby's still dead) in Arizona any time.
His uncle needed a backhoe for his imaginary farm.
That's great, Uncle Stu. I need someone to give a damn about Timothy.
The guy who'd done all the cartoons for his college paper couldn't get “Ice Ice Baby” out of his head, how randomly 1990.
And I can't get the fact that we lost our boy out of mine. When you figure out a solution, give me a call.
The first girl he ever kissed grumbled about the stress of med school.
Don't bother with it; doctors couldn't even save one tiny baby.

Seth?
It was Ross again.
You there?

He felt the seed of a scream beneath his Adam's apple.

Timothy was dead.

Timothy was dead and things like frozen custard still had the audacity to exist.

Seth closed out Ross' window. He clicked to Alison's page. Three hours ago she'd become friends with somebody named Mathieu Donaldson. Yesterday she had posted a picture of a watch and the words
I covet
. The watch was a runners' watch, black and bulky and covered with more buttons than the average dashboard. The day before yesterday she'd lauded Roy Halladay's perfect game. The day before that she announced she was finally getting a handle on Adah Chalk's handwriting. The day before that she bragged about clocking her best mile yet. Earlier in the week she'd posted a picture of a sunset that he hadn't even noticed her taking. That same day she'd asked for movie recommendations. She linked a review of a local gallery they hadn't visited and a hole-in-the-wall taqueria he'd never heard of. She appeared to have an ongoing list of Arizona wildlife she'd spotted on her jogs. She said that the cacti here looked like souvenir-shop cacti and that the sun was turning her into a giant freckle. She had registered for The Commons' Memorial Day Half Marathon. She said she was looking forward to it.

Seth may have made a noise. A mewl of sorts. He was leaning very close to the screen.

Life goes on. People seemed to get a kick reminding him. And so Seth wrote on his wife's wall.
I love you.
He wrote,
I get your thing about Adah Chalk.
It was simple. There were no rearview mirrors on covered wagons. When people left, they left, faces to the setting sun. Letters might yet wing their way: tidings of farms that failed, parents who returned to earth, a niece or nephew baptized under such and such a name. But all that was words and paper. Kindling.

Seth closed out his browser. He crossed to Nicky's desk, wanting nothing more to do with any of this. He handed back the slip of paper the kid had given him. He said, “I'm going to let you field this one. All of it. Your source, your story. Go with your gut.”

Light came to the boy's face, and Seth ached all over. In another life, he had labored in a classroom, mining for that light. He returned to his office. On road trips as a child he'd had an Etch A Sketch. Even more than filling it, he had loved the moment of shaking it clean. He hadn't thought of that in forever. He took a full, rich breath. There was a logical progression here: If they were done, well and truly done, with all that had come before, that made this their life now. The Commons, Arizona. They had to make something of it. Alison had gotten that intuitively. She had started already; he'd seen as much online. His wife was waiting. All he had to do was catch up. So, a to-do list. He'd work out a fix for the condo's sagging built-ins and buy some decent patio furniture. They would explore Sabino Canyon and drive out to those graceful old missions. They lived in Arizona, for chrissakes; they had to Craigslist their snowshoes. Lobel could recommend a realtor, and they'd decide if they needed to factor in school districts.

And Seth would run Lobel's bullshit, why not? A sound investment. The boss would owe them. He sat. He pulled up a blank document. He thought of his wife in her office upstairs, working away. The elegant sweep of her spine. Elbows on the table. Hair in an improvised knot. Notes and photos fanned out like tarot cards. Her lower lip paler than her upper because she licked it when she read and no lipstick had a chance. Seth typed.
Slow Sale of Rosko House Due to Internal Error.
It read a bit clunky and he'd always felt vaguely amateurish writing out the headline first, but who was he kidding? This was hardly the stuff of Pulitzers.

I
NTAKE HAD
B
EN SHOW PROOF
of insurance and sign a dozen forms he didn't bother reading. Sadie claimed a pair of hard plastic waiting-room chairs. The granddaughter was off somewhere, taking with her the
I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to
that had sounded like a metronome in his ear the whole ride over. Sadie stood when he approached, removing the reading glasses he hadn't known she needed. She popped them into the front pocket of her blouse and the cloth between the buttons gapped ever so slightly. He settled beside her to wait. She smelled subtly of grapefruit. Veronica used to eat half of one for breakfast so that whatever the day threw at her thereafter, at least she had made a virtuous start. Goosebumps stippled Sadie's skin. She'd gotten him to the ER without grabbing so much as a sweater.

“Cold?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Liar.”

Sadie smiled, but her eyes weren't in it. Her cheeks weren't either. “I'm fine,” she said, but she rubbed her arms. She caught him looking and stilled. She folded her hands neatly in her lap. He could tell her watch had cost a pretty penny. Graceful. Silver. He heard it tick.

“You don't see those much anymore.”

“Sorry?”

“Watches. It's a beautiful piece.”

She fidgeted with the clasp. Odds were, the watch had been a gift from Gary. Ben's own wife had never liked jewelry that called attention to her hands. Veronica's nails broke easily and her fingers were stubby. She called them her plebe paws. Sadie crossed her legs at the ankles, uncrossed them, inspected her trousers, and plucked at an imagined speck. Posters hung at intervals around the room, encouraging him to quit smoking, to cover his mouth when he coughed, and to get more fiber, more exercise, and—because Knowing Is Sexy!—regular testing for STDs.