When It Happens to You (5 page)

“He isn't Rory,” Greta said.

“God forbid you will ever think to yourself there was something that you could have done to save someone that you love. God forbid you should ever have to lie awake at night, playing it over and over again in your mind. What if I had called him that night? Rory would have come if I asked him. What if . . .” She stopped herself and closed her eyes. She reached her hand across to the nearest tree to steady herself. Pain, regret, and guilt mingled just under the surface, the aggregate of all her profound sadness.

“He isn't Rory,” Greta repeated softly.

“I know,” Ilse said, her voice tinged with anguish. “But I see so much of Rory in him. He's lost, Greta. He needs me.”

“He needs his
mother
,” Greta said.

Ilse flicked her hand, brushing away the unpleasant thought as if it were a cobweb. “And who is going to bring Laurel back? You? Please . . . your sister has made her choice,” she added bitterly.

They walked on, retracing their steps through the mist.

“I just don't want you and Dad to be disappointed,” Greta said. “You raised your kids—you ought to be enjoying life now.”

“You never stop raising your kids, Greta. And your kids' kids. Maybe some people can go on and wash their hands, but I can't.”

“Mama, he stole from you. He took money from you and Dad and went out and bought drugs with it. You are inviting danger into your home.”

“And what about second chances, Greta?”

Second chances. Greta tried to envision her own six-year-old daughter desperate and addicted. It was nearly impossible to imagine, but even in the hypothetical, it was clear that the chances Greta would give her were endless. Phillip had betrayed her, but unlike her daughter, the thought of giving him a second chance was agonizing to consider. Would it have been different if he had betrayed her in another way? Gambled the house away? If she had discovered that he was an addict?

But even as Greta considered the limits of her own tenuous capacity to forgive, she knew that it wasn't really Milo to whom her mother was giving a second chance. That was clear. By saving Milo from himself, she was attempting to right the past. She was reaching her hands into the wreckage of the car that Saturday night and carrying her son away with her alive. It was a chimera her mother was chasing, Greta knew, but she also knew that it was no use trying to hold her back. Her mother would die trying.

As they neared the exit, the mist had begun to dissipate. Sunshine was burrowing through gaps in the bushes and trees. Ilse pointed to a small tree with a dark brown trunk and heart-shaped leaves.

“Do you remember when you were little, you dragged one of these all the way home from the bus stop? Someone left it by the trash, and you insisted that we plant it in the garden. You took it on yourself to rehabilitate it. You stripped the quilt from your bed and wrapped it around the trunk.” Ilse smiled. “You remember that?”

Greta stared at the tree, searching her memory. “I think so. . . . But are you sure it wasn't Laurel?”

“Laurel never had any interest in the garden. It was you.”

Greta tried to connect the memory of the girl who nursed a dying abandoned tree to the woman she was now.

“It was a redbud,” Ilse said. “Like this one.”

“Mama?”

Ilse turned and looked at Greta. “What?”

Suddenly the urge to confess was overwhelming. Greta placed her open palm against her own mouth to stop herself.
Phillip betrayed me. My marriage has been over for almost half a year, and I don't know how to tell my daughter. I don't know what to do with my life. I'm so scared.
But something in her mother's expression arrested her. Perhaps it was the worry etched in her forehead or the frailty that had manifested itself in the gentle but marked curvature of her spine. As she stood in the returning sunlight, looking down into the pale blue of her mother's eyes, Greta felt the strange and heretofore unfamiliar sensation of something being lifted from her—a weight that only later she was able to identify as her childhood.

“What?” Ilse asked again. “What is it?”

“Let's go get Milo,” Greta said. “He's waiting for you.”

MY OLIVIA

OLIVER WAS JUST SHY OF
four years old when he asked his mother to buy him a dress for the first time. It was a simple red shift, almost a tunic, with a band of metallic rickrack just above the hem, but something in the color or the cut or the way that it was modeled on the fiberglass child-size mannequin in the boutique window made it unmistakably a dress.

Oliver was Marina's only child, the result of an impetuous island holiday she had taken with girlfriends in order to lift her spirits after yet another failed relationship. She had never been to the Caribbean, and her girlfriends Merle, Trudie, and Una pooled their funds to splurge for a suite right on the water. It was a raucous, rum-soaked weekend full of girlish tear-stained confessions and ninety-minute massages in the height of hurricane season. When Marina returned to California with stuffy sinuses and a sudden dislike for the smell of coffee, she was sure that she had contracted a bug.

Being in her late thirties and never having had anything close to a pregnancy scare, Marina had always assumed that she was simply infertile. But unlike her friends, who went from fearing pregnancy to pursuing it, Marina viewed her situation as a convenience or even a luxury since she had never once heard the ticking of her own clock. She assumed that the clock was broken along with her reproductive machinery and didn't concern herself much with it. The inability to sustain a relationship with a man was far more worrisome.

It was Trudie who first suggested to Marina that she might be pregnant, after Marina ran to the bathroom twice while watching Trudie feed her baby pureed leftover spaghetti and meatballs with a spoon. It had been just over three months since the Barbados holiday.

“It isn't possible,” Marina insisted. “I got my period.”

“You might want to get a test, just in case,” Trudie told her in a singsong voice. “Zachariah was a surprise. Weren't you, my little Zach pack!” She kissed her boy extravagantly on the mouth and licked the sauce from the sides of her own lips, sending Marina sprinting to the toilet again. That night she picked up a pregnancy test kit on the way home from the gym and was stunned to see the plus sign materialize. She stared at the contraption in disbelief, doubting its accuracy. When the blue cross appeared on the second test, even more rapidly this time, she sat down on the edge of the bathtub, shaking her head. Holding the innocuous-looking piece of plastic in her hand, she was transfixed by the bright blue stain in its tiny window. It was like she had found a bruise that had appeared on her body overnight, with no knowledge of how or when the injury had taken place.

 

What Marina had assumed to be her menstruation was actually implantation bleeding; the cluster of cells that would later become her son was burrowing into her uterine wall. By the time she discovered the pregnancy, she was already well into her second trimester. Marina was dumbfounded. The thought of becoming a mother was unfathomable to her. She had only ever been vaguely interested in her friends' children, a notable source of contention with her last serious boyfriend. One of their recurring arguments had been her patent lack of interest in having a family.

“There's something wrong with you,” he insisted. “You have the maternal instincts of a black widow.”

“Black widows eat their mates, not their young,” she replied. It was a useless correction, however; she could tell by the sad smile and the way that the corners of his eyes tilted down that it was already over between them. And it was true, Marina had no interest in motherhood. She relished her freedom with a zeal that only grew stronger as she watched her girlfriends' steady marches toward maternity. One by one, their personalities became as disfigured as their bodies. They were perpetually fatigued and unkempt, their walls were covered with sloppy finger paintings housed in expensive frames, and their speech was taken over by motherese—peppered with the words “potty,” “wee-wee,” and “wa-wa.” One night, Una actually licked her finger and rubbed it across Marina's cheek, only realizing her gaffe when she saw the dumbstruck expression on her childless friend's face.

“Oh! Sorry, honey.” Una laughed. “Mommy's got baby brain!”

Marina wanted no part of it. As soon as she escaped the mommy brigade, it took twenty minutes on the elliptical until she began to feel like herself again.

And then for five long months, she watched her body metamorphose into exactly what she disparaged in her friends. The years that she had spent perfecting those twin lines down the sides of her abdomen, the delicate sloping inside toward her navel—she would have to say good-bye to these forever. At night, if she was really quiet, she felt as if she could hear the muscles tearing.

Marina followed her obstetrician's advice and ate the minimum amount required to sustain the life of what she viewed as the alien growing inside of her, but even with that, there was no stopping the ruthless expansion; once she hit the thirty-pound mark over her ideal weight, she stopped stepping on the metal-and-glass bathroom scale. She grew deeply depressed when she could no longer wear her own clothes, and yet refused to buy anything that she wouldn't need again, thinking it wasteful. Her friends donated boxes of frumpy, drool-stained maternity clothes to her, which she thanked them for as she resigned herself to the ugly garments. Gritting her teeth, she avoided her own reflection and waited and waited and waited for the reprieve.

And then, exactly on the due date, Marina woke up with contractions. Three hours later she was holding her seven-and-a-half-pound son in her arms, staring in awe as he snuffled around her breast and fastened on with a hungry little rosebud mouth. She had never seen a face so fine and symmetrical in her life. He didn't look anything like her, but very much like the caramel-skinned surf instructor she had rolled around on the beach with during those last nights of her holiday. Her baby had a soft carpet of circles covering his tiny head, and gray eyes the color of pussywillows. He was the most beautiful creature she had ever laid eyes on, and Marina was shocked to find herself at the age of thirty-seven so deeply in love. She named him Oliver.

 

For the first few weeks, Marina was terrified that she would not be able to keep Oliver alive. Never had she had even so much as a plant to take care of, let alone a little boy. Growing up, her family had an outdoor dog, but mostly her father took care of it. Marina personally never had anything to do with the dog, and if her parents went away on vacation, they would hire a dog walker to come by each day, feed the animal, and give it a modicum of affection. This was so that they wouldn't return to a situation, as they did the first time they had left Marina home alone, where the dog nearly starved.

When Oliver was a baby, Marina found herself waking up in the middle of the night terrified that he had stopped breathing. She stripped his crib of any potential smothering hazards, getting rid of stuffed animals, pillows, bumpers, and blankets, but even with this precaution in place, Marina would find herself in his room night after night, camped out next to his crib, listening for the sweet inhalation and exhalation of his tiny lungs.

And despite or perhaps because of her fears, Oliver thrived. Though not particularly hefty, he hit all of his developmental milestones and was thought to be an exceedingly healthy child. He was breastfed longer than most children and never exhibited anything resembling an allergy: peanuts, shellfish, soy, dust, dander . . . nothing threatened him. The only thing to which he demonstrated an adverse reaction was a haircut. Oliver screamed anytime a pair of scissors came close to his long, curly hair. The first two words he uttered in sequence occurred when Marina brought him to a children's hair salon for his first haircut.

“NO, MOMMY!” He held out his arms to her, his gray eyes widened in terror. The experienced stylist tried to distract him with cartoons and, when that didn't work, to bribe him with lollipops and Hershey's Kisses, but Oliver continued to howl in protest. When it was clear that Oliver would not submit, Marina scooped him up and paid the woman anyway, overtipping as she mumbled an embarrassed apology and rushed out of the salon.

Now, at six years old, Oliver had dark, curly, shoulder-length hair. Marina mastered the French braid so that she could fake a short haircut when necessary, but most of the time Oliver wore his hair loose in soft glossy waves that arranged themselves around his delicate face. He was beautiful, but more than that, he was pretty. Marina was used to people asking her the name of her little girl. “
His
name is Oliver,” she would say. “He's a boy,” she would add, and smile at the ill-disguised looks of disbelief.

She wasn't exactly sure when Oliver became Olivia at home. Most of the time she called him Oll, or Ollie, but just after his fourth birthday—shyly at first and then with more insistence—he asked that she call him Olivia.

“But Oliver honey, you're a boy.”

“I want to tell you a secret,” he said.

They were snuggled in her bed reading
Raggedy Ann in the Deep Deep Woods
. She put the book aside and looked down at him.

“Okay, honey. What's the secret?”

“Well . . .” He looked nervous, and then grinned at her. “I wasn't going to tell you, but you're my mommy.”

“That's right, hon. I'm your mommy, and you can tell me anything. Anything at all.”

“I'm really a girl,” he said in a whisper.

She stared at him, wanting to say the right thing, fearing to say the wrong thing.

“You may
feel
like a girl sometimes . . .” she began.

“No! I
am
a girl,” he said, his voice rising.

She waited a moment for him to calm down and then, gently, she tried again to explain. “Do you remember when we had that talk how what you have between your legs is different than what mommy has and—”

“My penis is going to fall off,” he said. “And when it does, everyone will know that I'm not lying. I'm a girl. My name is Olivia!” He put his head down in her lap and cried. She ran her hands through the tangle of his hair and did the only thing that she knew how to do. She comforted him.

 

Marina sat in the shade of a silver maple tree next to the father of Oliver's best friend while they watched their respective offspring swing from the monkey bars. Though it was April in Southern California, the promise of spring seemed to have become the unseasonably punishing heat of summer. Marina hid beneath her sunhat while her friend sat beside her, exposed, getting redder and redder.

“Don't tell me you aren't wearing sunscreen,” she said to him.

Phillip fanned himself with the sheaf of papers in his hand.

“I'm a man,” he said.

“You're an idiot,” she said, grinning, and punched him in the arm. She opened her bag and took out a packet of moistened sunscreen wipes.

“You aren't going to put that on me, are you?”

“Are you kidding?” she said. “These things are expensive! I don't like you that much. Charlotte!”

She yelled at the blond girl dangling from the monkey bars behind her son. “Ollie, honey. You and Charlotte come here!”

The kids dropped to the soft dirt and raced over to their parents.

“Feel how hot I am,” Charlotte said as she climbed up on Phillip's lap and touched her cheek to his.

“You are hot,” he said. “And Daddy wasn't thinking when he didn't put any sunscreen on you this morning. . . .”

“Mama always puts sunscreen on me,” Charlotte said.

“I'm sure she does.” Phillip took a deep breath and let the air out slowly.

“Here, let me help . . .” Marina reached out and swiped the towelette across Charlotte's face, neck, and bare arms.

“I don't need sunscreen!” Oliver crowed. “I don't get sunburned 'cause I have dark skin already!”

“Not so fast,” Marina took another towelette and performed the same task on her son. “Skin cancer is for everyone,” she said, handing the used towelettes to her son. “Go throw these away, and then you can do more monkey bars.”

The children scampered off, screaming something unintelligible.

“Thanks,” Phillip said. “And the neglectful parent of the year award goes to . . .”

“Whatever. You owe me a Coke.”

Phillip smiled at her and then glanced down at his BlackBerry.

“Sorry, I have to put this fire out.”

“Go ahead,” Marina said.

She took off her hat and wiped away the perspiration from her forehead, then put her hat back on. It had been several months now since she and Phillip had begun meeting for a standing playdate, usually every other weekend when it was Phillip's turn with his daughter. Phillip and Charlotte's mother had separated some time after the holidays, and though Charlotte seemed to be taking the situation in stride, Phillip carried the air of a man condemned. Not wanting to pry, Marina didn't ask for the specifics of his marital difficulties, but she surmised from his guilty countenance that he was in some way responsible—while knowing enough about relationships to acknowledge that their failure was rarely, if ever, unilateral. They all have a built-in expiration date, Marina thought, and if people would just realize this up front they could save themselves a lot of pain. Why not just appreciate the time they have together—the exalted sex, the precious antecedent moments of rapture, the delight of finding the sublime in the banal? Instead, we demand that the other hold up a mirror and reflect back to us everything we hope to believe about ourselves. And we love them for it . . . until the mirror becomes too heavy to hold, or breaks altogether, and then the punishment never ceases. But, ah, this was coming from Marina. She had not had even one sustained relationship since her son's birth, and strikingly few before. For years she had more or less resigned herself to a life alone, but then recently she found herself drawn to the sad and guilty man beside her.