Authors: Rachael Herron
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
7 p.m.
P
ree had intended to talk to Flynn when they woke up. A sleepy conversation while still wrapped in the sheets might make it go better.
But when she opened her eyes, he was already gone. He couldn’t sleep sometimes when he got a new idea in mind. He’d head down to the steelworks to twist molten metal while the rest of the world slept.
He deserved to know first. Of course. But she needed to go to work, which she did. Jimmy didn’t end up coming in until three o’clock and left at four, giving her only a short wave on his way past her desk. He was on the phone as he passed, smiling and laughing, saying something about T-ball practice. He smiled at her vaguely. As if they hadn’t even hung out in Union Square the day before. Pree kicked herself for thinking about him like that.
At home that night, Flynn still not back from the warehouse where he worked, Pree dialed her mothers’ number without thinking. Normally Isi would be at the restaurant at this time of night, but Tuesdays were a day off for her. Marta and she would be on the couch, eating popcorn and watching whatever reality program Marta insisted on watching. Pree loved that she knew this. It felt like solid ground, and she dug her toes into it while the phone rang.
When Marta answered, Pree just said, “Hi.”
“Isi! Pick up the other line!” Marta bellowed. Then, softer, “Hi, kid. How’s our girl?”
Pree gulped, surprised by the wave of emotion that filled her. “Good. I need to tell you something.”
“Are you hurt?” asked Marta.
“No, nothing like that.”
Pree heard a fumbling noise and a rapid-fire string of curse words. Then Isi, on the other line, said, “Are you hurt?”
“No. Can’t a girl call her mothers?”
“When we just talked to you on Sunday for your birthday? No. Something’s going on. What is it?”
At least she had something big she
could
tell them about. “I found Kate Monroe.”
Another thump, and Pree could hear Isi pulling out the soft green chair that was wedged near the hall closet. “Shit. Wow.”
“It was fine. I went to her art opening. She wasn’t anything like I’d pictured her. Younger, maybe, than I thought she’d be.”
Marta said, “You gonna trade us in, then? For the newer model?” Her words were light but her voice was tense.
“Never,” Pree said. “Never ever in a million, billion, trillion years. You’re my moms, the best moms. But tell me something.”
Pink relief colored Isi’s voice. “What’s that?”
“Tell me what happened. How you chose me.” It was the one thing they wouldn’t talk about when she was growing up.
She wanted the adoption closed,
they’d say.
It’s not good for you to have to wonder about someone you can’t ever know.
Pree hadn’t ever known whether that was an easy or a difficult suggestion for them. They’d told her only that they’d picked her specially, and that from her first moment of breath they’d been there. That she was
rare
. Precious. That was all she’d ever known.
“Shit,” said Isi again.
“You look like her,” said Marta. “It’s what I always think when I see you in photos.”
Pree rolled over and waited. She heard both of them take deep breaths. They wouldn’t keep it from her now, would they? Now that she knew Kate?
“She was so young,” Isi said. “We met her in the hospital for the first time. She was already in labor. There was a screwup, and we were already in the hospital to try to meet another baby, an emergency one.”
“Holy
shit.
There was another
baby
?”
Marta said, “It was a last-minute thing—that mom was all screwed up. At the last second, her family came in and they didn’t need emergency fostering. So when the agency called us, we thought they were kidding, telling us some huge cosmic joke.”
“I was second choice?” Pree’s brain stuck on this, whirred over something she’d never even imagined. That a child could be so easily passed over. Missed.
“Kate had been momentarily interested in us once, but we’d never been allowed to meet. We’d given up hope. But something went wrong with the couple that Kate had chosen, and the agency called us. Like I said, we were right there. In the hospital already.” Marta, as if taking Pree’s measure over the phone line, then said, “Kate had just changed her mind, and we ran into another couple that was coming out of her room when we were going in to meet her. Now that I do this for a living, I’m aware that’s the worst thing that can happen.” Marta worked for a foster-to-adopt agency in Malibu. “But I didn’t know that then. For all I knew, it was normal to see your competition in the hallway. And god, they were perfect. I remember he looked like a dark-haired Tom Cruise, only taller, and she was beautiful with long golden brown hair and a beautiful face. I hated them so much,
and
I was so nervous that the second I saw them, I almost threw up right there in the hall.”
Pree wanted to laugh, but she didn’t. She didn’t want anything to stop the story.
“So. Anyway. When we go in, Kate’s in between contractions. Her face is all scrunched up like she’s ready to cry, and she looks exhausted. I step forward, and I’m trying to figure out what I can say, since I’m sure she’s going to pick the beautiful couple, and instead Isi passes me and wraps her arms around Kate’s shoulders. ‘You poor thing,’ she says. ‘Who’s here to help you with this?’ Kate tells us no one is. Her mother had driven her but then freaked out and went home. She was clinically depressed or manic or something. Kate just looked like she’d almost expected it, though. I remember that.”
Isi said, “As if there’s anything more important than being with your
daughter.
”
“Isi told her that we didn’t care if she picked us or not, just asked that she let us stay with her for the birth. To help. I thought she was lying. I wanted that baby, you, so bad I was ready to say almost anything, but Isi said later she meant it. She would deal later with whatever happened, but in that moment she just wanted to help that girl.”
Isi cleared her throat. “That girl was six years younger than you are now. And yeah, you do look alike.” Pree could almost hear Isi rubbing her head with one hand. She always joked that she had Lesbian Haircut Number Eleven, gray flat-top, shaved on the sides, but it looked good on her. It was just her. Pree’s Isi.
“So,” Pree prompted. “You told Kate you were staying.”
“Yeah,” said Isi. The fierce sound of love in her voice warmed Pree. No matter what, she’d always known Isi loved her more than anything else in the world. Honestly, that was a pretty great feeling for an adopted kid to have. It’s not a prerequisite for adoption, but it should be. A form letter should be signed and notarized:
Do you agree to throw yourself in front of a moving bullet to save your child? If not, please consider purchasing several new computer games or maybe a pony on which to spend your money and time.
And even knowing all this hadn’t ever stopped Pree from worrying she could do something to make all that love dry up. Maybe what she was hiding from them, her own biggest fuckup, literally—maybe that’s what would finally push them away. She felt sick with dread.
“Tell her what happened next,” said Marta, her voice as dark green and soft as moss.
“Then Kate said we could stay. That she wanted us to. And
you
,” Isi said, “came out fast after that. Not more than an hour after we got there. What little time she had between contractions, she fired off questions at us, one after the other, and not one of them about how we would raise a child.”
“She asked where we’d traveled to. Wanted to know if we’d ever been to Buckingham Palace. And Venice,” said Marta. “She wanted to know if we’d ever been on a gondola, remember?”
“When I told her that we’d taken a
traghetto
instead because we were cheap and that you’d fallen out because you were so excited to be crossing the Grand Canal, she laughed her way right into another contraction.”
Pree could hear Marta grin. “She wanted to know what languages we spoke.”
Isi said, “I changed the subject since we don’t know any and told her we could ballroom dance.” Funny, Pree had never noticed that Isi’s voice was almost the shade of pearlized pink as Flynn’s was. She could see it. Both of them loved her hard, stubbornly, as if she couldn’t do a single thing to push them away.
Marta gave a burst of laughter. “I’d forgotten that. You made me fox-trot between the IV pole and the chair.”
“There was three feet of space.”
“We did good, though.”
“Then you came out,” said Isi simply. Her voice sounded funny. Isi was the tough one, the one who could manage eighteen waiters at her busy restaurant, fire two, and hire two extras while managing to serve a perfect espresso and seat the mayor, all at the same time. Her voice never got that shake in it, the one Pree heard now.
“And then what? She just gave me to you?”
Marta took up the story. “You weren’t squalling, just bright red and covered with the whitish—”
“Yeah, I get that. Then what?” Pree didn’t need to hear that part. She wasn’t ready to think about the blood and pain and fear.
“She told the nurse to hand you to us,” Marta said.
“Was she upset?”
“No.”
Pree couldn’t help saying, “She didn’t . . . mind?”
Marta said, “I didn’t trust it. I had a friend who got the baby taken back six days after she’d received her, because the mother changed her mind. I thought that was going to happen with you. Kate just didn’t have enough . . . emotion, I guess. I thought we would leave that next day with you and that we wouldn’t get to keep you. That whole first year, even after the grace period was over, I kept expecting that call. So I got my master’s and went into adoption counseling. It was too important. All of it. Even now when the phone rings sometimes I wonder if it’s someone who wants to take Pree back.”
Isi humphed. “No one can take her back. She’s ours.”
Pree relaxed into the warmth. She couldn’t tell them, not until she’d talked to Flynn. But they would love her no matter what. Right?
“You’re always ours,” said Marta.
There were things the moms couldn’t protect her from. Things that she’d screwed up by herself. No matter how loved she was, no matter how much they wanted to protect and take care of her, Pree was still going to have to figure out for herself what the hell she was going to do and how she was going to fix it.
Pregnant.
After hanging up with the moms, Pree rolled onto her back and tried to feel the life inside her. Could she commune with it? Feel it? Should she say something deep and wise? Could it help her decide what the fuck to do next?
She had to talk to Flynn.
She had to stop thinking about Jimmy.
After concentrating for a long moment, Pree only felt an ache at the back of her calves and the urge to itch her nose. Someone was making fish soup downstairs and the smell made her queasy.
Maybe Flynn would be home soon. Or maybe not. She rolled onto her stomach and pulled out some blank stickers. She started to draw. It was the only thing to do.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
11 p.m.
K
ate made herself go to book club, even though she hadn’t read the bestselling tearjerker Elizabeth had picked for them. Just touching the cover of the book was enough to put a lump in Kate’s throat. And by the conversation that swirled around her, she knew she wouldn’t have made it through the book in one piece, anyway.
It was good enough to sit in Dierdre’s living room, surrounded by the other seven women, listening to them chatter. She spoke exactly enough to keep them from noticing that she wasn’t really saying anything. When she thought about that little person under the overpass, her teeth chattered quietly. The shame she felt about the lost sleeping bag felt like frostbite, skin burned by ice.
Dierdre knew something was going on. She cornered Kate in the hallway after she came out of the bathroom.
“Your art show was amazing on Sunday. I’m so glad we went. I felt so
cosmopolitan.
Even though every person I talked to probably assumed I drive a station wagon with more than a hundred thousand miles on it. Which I do, of course.” Dierdre smiled at her warmly. “How are you?”
Kate used her most chipper voice. “Good. Busy!”
Dierdre placed her soft hand on Kate’s forearm and said, “This time of year must be hard for you.”
Kate forgot to breathe in her panic—how did Dierdre know about Pree and her birthday? Jesus. Who else knew?
How
did they know?
“I have a hard enough time with Mother’s Day coming up this week and my kids are just far away. I’ve been thinking about you.” Dierdre didn’t let go of Kate’s arm. The pressure remained, steady and warm.
“God. Fuck, yes.” The weight of the day, the realization of how close it was, was almost too much. That, mixed with the loveliness of Dierdre’s home—a perfect suburban haven of subtle potpourri, dried-flower arrangements in oversized vases, matching wineglasses, and coasters that were actually put to use—made Kate swallow back the terrifying urge to scream.
Dierdre, though, wasn’t her house. She’d made this home perfect, but Dierdre herself wore her thick green glasses unself-consciously, left her roots undyed for months, and loudly lamented her varicose veins. When she leaned in to hug Kate, Kate folded into her softness, accepting it. She was pigment to Dierdre’s linseed oil, assimilated completely, and Jesus fucking Christ, Dierdre’s arms around her were the best things she’d felt in months. Maybe years.
As she pulled away, Dierdre touched the side of her head with one hand, brushing back Kate’s curls. “It’ll be okay.”
A lie. A wonderful, perfect lie for which Kate was so grateful.
After she got home that night, Kate was ravenous. She’d forgotten to eat at Dierdre’s, overwhelmed by the choices of tiny handmade crudités.
So she made a sandwich. It was her favorite—the one neither of her boys would ever eat with her. Havarti cheese, tomatoes, sprouts, and avocado on toasted sourdough bread. She padded out to the back deck and pulled a lemon off the tree that seemed to always have hundreds of small yellow fruits on it. She squeezed the juice over the top of her sandwich fillings. A twist of salt, then she mashed the sandwich together and cut it carefully in half before placing it on a plastic plate covered in small blue rabbits. Robin’s plate.
Before she went to the garage, Kate picked up her cell and hit the speed dial. She listened to the dialing, to the abbreviated ring, then to the automated voice that told her she should check the listing. Her mother still didn’t answer. The pain was a kick in the chest, just another bodily thump. Was it possible she was getting used to the dull thud of sorrow? Could that ever actually happen? When Sonia had died, she hadn’t felt a thing for three days. Not one thing. Not sorrow, not relief, not grief. She’d found her mother’s old compact in her purse and had taken it to bed. It had smelled like Sonia—chlorinated and dusty. Kate had stared at herself in the tiny mirror, willing herself to be able to find the grief, to locate it somewhere inside her own gaze. But her eyes looked the same. Just like any other day. Kate had thought she was broken, that after Robin’s death she’d never be able to feel sad about losing anyone again.
Then, on the fourth day after her mother died, she woke up howling, her whole body shivering under the covers, feeling more alone than she’d ever felt before.
Now she held her cell phone tighter, as if it were flesh, as if it were warm. Then she put it back in her pocket.
A deep breath.
She needed a candle.
Kate took the three steps down into the garage and placed the sandwich on Nolan’s old workbench. She lit the candle with the book of matches she’d found in the tool drawer and set it, flickering, next to the sandwich. Nolan had always been good about keeping things around, things that were handy, and he always knew where things lived, where they belonged. If Kate couldn’t find something she thought Nolan might have owned, she simply took a moment to think like him.
If I were a glue gun, where would I live? Nolan would put me next to the iron, where electrically operated heat items lived, above the washer.
And there it would be.
The candle flickered once, then came back to life. She turned off the garage overhead light at the same time that she pushed the button for the door. It whirred up, smooth as always. As she walked to her car in the driveway, she turned her face to the rain. It was cold and thrilling. She loved the smell that rose from the grass, from the wet asphalt, and she remembered when that kind of thing could make her laugh with pleasure.
Then Kate drove her car into the garage and shut it off.
Kate heard the final
kerchock-clang
as the garage door settled closed, followed by a metallic whir as it came to rest. She got out of the driver’s seat, picked up her sandwich, and got in the backseat, next to where Robin had last been seated. He’d always sat behind the front passenger seat so Kate would only have to turn her head a little bit to see his smile.
She ate her sandwich while staring through the front windshield at the candle. It winked at her, as if it knew a secret.
The avocado was perfect, just exactly the right texture against the bread. The lemon was almost sweet in its intensity. Kate felt a wild rush of pleasure as she ate, and pushed down the guilty feeling she always had.
Still alive.
She and Nolan were still alive, and Robin wasn’t. Robin, who had hated avocado and every single kind of cheese except American, which most of the time Kate refused to buy for him, maintaining that protein had to actually be made of something more than just colored chemicals. An ache tugged the back of her throat. She should have let him have more fucking American cheese. Cheez Whiz in a can. McDonald’s cheeseburgers. All the things they’d kept from him, to keep him what?
Healthy
. What a goddamn joke.
An artist Kate knew, Judy, had eaten only organic food. She’d raised her own fruits and vegetables most of her life, and was a vegetarian. She exercised and volunteered and went hiking in Nepal. She ran marathons raising money for worthy causes. She’d never eaten a single item of processed food. She’d died of ovarian cancer the previous year.
Kate licked her fingertips clean of bits of mayo and crumbs, then ate the tiny piece of tomato that had fallen onto the plate. Every last bit, eaten.
Then she reached forward into the front area and turned on the car.
The Saab’s engine was still strong—it gave a low growl as it came back to life and then purred quietly inside the closed garage with barely a throb as it idled.
Kate started to count, watching the candle on the workbench. One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand.
Then, when she reached forty, as the candle guttered for the first time, as her courage guttered in the same way, she leaned forward quickly and shut off the car. As she always did, she threw open the backseat door and ran to punch the garage door button on the wall next to the light switch. It rolled up angrily, shaking the wall she leaned against.
She blew out the candle and then sank to sit on the top step.
She stared at her car. She indulged in her ritual only every once in a while. It used to be more often, but now it was down to once every three or four months. Whenever she really, really needed it.
Kate knew (now) that carbon monoxide bound itself to the hemoglobin in the blood with a much higher affinity than oxygen did. Once bound, it wouldn’t let go, and less and less oxygen would be carried in the blood. It sounded like a violent takeover of the body, but actually it was peaceful, causing sleep, then death. It should be louder, she always thought. It should be something that was obvious, like the light of a candle going out, or the
shoonk
of a car door slamming shut. Not this silent, incredibly fast killer. A nurse in the ICU had told her it could take as little as five or ten minutes to cause death. A car idling in a cold garage. How many times did it happen accidentally in the United States every year? She’d read about an ambulance crew who had pulled into a cold bay at a hospital, forgetting to crack the outer door while they let it idle as the three paramedics napped, the heater keeping them warm. No one woke up. What must that have been like for the hospital workers, to come upon an ambulance full of their own? Accidentally asphyxiated.
Kate scrubbed her face with her hands. Her eyes itched suddenly and she rubbed them so hard she couldn’t see through the dancing black spots for several seconds afterward. Then she got in the car, pulled it out, parked it in its usual space in the driveway, and shut the garage door from the outside, one last time.
She squinted, ignoring the rain that seeped down the back of her sweater, and looked at her house, trying to see it with new eyes. It was sweet-looking. Quaint. The colors, dark green and brown, were old-fashioned. A stranger walking by would think that if anyone had died there, it would have been a lovely old couple who probably died within days of each other, unable to live without the partner they had spent sixty years needing.
Not an eight-year-old boy. And not, until the paramedics brought him back, a young father who would do anything,
anything
for his only child.
Still standing in the spring rain, she held the plate so tightly she worried it might break between her fingers, and felt the familiar feeling course through her. It felt like the playacting she did when she couldn’t do anything else. It felt like sleeping with a man you knew was dangerous, a man who could snap your neck while you came, who might wring your very final breath from your body, and still you had to sink to your knees in front of him. A terrible, awful fuck, one that you had to have, even if it was your last.