“I think she should stay with us,” said Ricky now.
“Really?”
“I don’t know.Yes.”
“How long?”
“Straight through. Until the baby comes. I mean, and then some.”
This had turned out to be, as far as they could tell, the reason for Jess’s visit: she was with child. Not that she had asked them for a place to stay. Nor had she spoken of her pregnancy as the motivation for reconnecting. She’d simply felt the urge to travel, Jess said. She’d bought a cross-country Greyhound ticket and spent the past ten days making her way across America.Visiting friends here and there—an old family friend in Salt Lake City, a college roommate in Chicago. Eating at bus stations, highway rest stops. Reading
Leaves of Grass
(she produced the wellthumbed paperback with a small flourish, as if it were some sort of credential). Getting her guitar stolen: the one sour note. It disappeared from the bus while she’d been sleeping, she said, somewhere between Julesburg and Ogallalla, and the way she pronounced those names told Ricky she’d managed to make even that occurrence something not all-sour.
Only once the bus had left the Lincoln Tunnel that morning, pulled into the bowels of the Port Authority Terminal and discharged its passengers in the diesel-smelling dawn, had she decided to look the Ryries up.
John and Ricky had glanced at each other. It seemed strange, they said mildly. To have come three thousand miles, to have gotten herself within thirty-five miles of their house, and not have thought of seeing them until that morning.
Oh, it had been in the back of her mind, Jess said (and was she backpedaling, or simply clarifying?). It’s just that she hadn’t been sure she wouldn’t get cold feet. Even at Port Authority, searching out the booth for Rockland Coaches, she got such a thumping headache she nearly hadn’t bought the ticket to Nyack. She’d considered that the headache was a sign, a warning. She’d seriously deliberated leaving the line, picking up a packet of aspirin at Duane Reade, sitting down to wait for the next bus west. She already had her return tickets. Tickets, plural, because that was how they came, each leg of the journey printed on a separate sheet, all of them accordioned together like a Jacob’s ladder: she got that out of her bag to show them, too. Another credential. That was why she hadn’t contacted them in advance, because she hadn’t been certain, up until the very moment she’d let herself in through the unlocked door of their empty house, that she would make it all the way without chickening out. And no, truly, she didn’t want anything from them. Just a chance to see them again, say hello, find out how they were doing.
It still seemed strange, they both thought but did not repeat aloud (communicating only with the subtlest of glances, which served, in the moment, as a jarring reminder of the intimacy they still shared), that she would come all the way across the country, in her condition, by Greyhound bus, and then up to Nyack by Red and Tan, lugging that enormous duffel, simply for the purpose of saying hello and seeing how
they
were doing.Yet they couldn’t disagree that she possessed a distinctly un-needy quality. They could almost believe she wanted nothing from them except a reacquainting.
It also seemed strange, Ricky thought (and felt lonely thinking it, certain the coincidence would not strike John), that Jess had shown up nearly a year to the day after the baby’s birth, the baby’s death, shown up rich with the very gift they had lost, knowing nothing of their sorrow. She didn’t, did she? Ricky asked when they were alone, and John confirmed he had never told her.
Ricky appreciated Jess’s thoughtfulness in waiting until after Biscuit and Paul had gone to bed to tell them of her pregnancy. It had become evident, over the course of the evening, that Jess
was
waiting for something, a little glow of concerted patience burning brighter within her during the hours leading up to the children’s bedtime. Neither Ricky nor John had any inkling of what she wanted to say, but by unspoken agreement had convened in the kitchen after Ricky finished making up the air mattress on the floor of Biscuit’s room and saying good night to both kids. John and Jess were already there, John scooping Rocky Road into three bowls, Jess standing by the Dutch door, peering past the black panes that looked out on the backyard.
“Well, I do have some news,” said Jess when they were all seated. She proceeded to explain, with considerable gentleness, that she was pregnant, that she would keep it, that she was nine weeks along, that the guy was someone she had no future with, that her parents were dismayed. They wanted her to have an abortion. Here she paused, her eyes flicking briefly first toward John, then Ricky. In appeal? In order to gauge their reactions? At any rate, it seemed a testing moment, swollen with something she wanted or expected. Neither John nor Ricky spoke.
Well, Jess continued, she wasn’t going to have one. And when she’d told her parents, they’d kicked her out.
“They kicked you out?” John sounded gruff, either from anger or confusion.
“They don’t want anything to do with me.Well—it.” She spoke with a lack of bitterness that struck Ricky as unlikely. Her head was tilted a little to the side, her eyes were mild, forgiving. She’d laid it all out with such poise, such tact, that Ricky thought if ever some blow were going to be dealt her, she’d want Jess to be the one to do it. In her mind’s eye she saw briefly, from earlier in the day, the stateliness, almost courtliness, of the paramedics.
John, having taken the announcement of the pregnancy with apparent equanimity, became visibly upset when Jess described her parents’ reaction. “How can they say that?” he’d demanded. His consternation grew as it emerged Jess apparently neither had a plan nor felt the need for one. He kept asking different versions of the same question: “Where are you headed?” And later, “But how will you manage? What will you
do
?”
To which she’d repeated, patiently, that she hadn’t worked any of it out yet; she’d simply wanted to stop in and see them along the way.
“Along the way where? What’s your plan?”
“I’m not trying to be difficult.” She smiled. “I just honestly don’t know.”
Ricky heard the disclaimer not simply in practical terms, but as a larger, existential truth.
I just honestly don’t know
. She rocked in the rocking chair by the radiator and the ice cream melted in streams in her bowl. Of course what Jess said was so for everyone, for all time.You never knew what was going to be.
John cleared his throat. He rubbed his fingers audibly against the bristles on his face. Ricky felt tender toward him then as she would toward a fretful child.
John said, “Well, you need a plan.”
Jess, betraying a shred of defensiveness at last, and sounding childish for the first time that evening, said, “I’m twenty-three. Four years older than you when you got my mother pregnant.”
John’s brow darkly furrowed. “Well,” he’d growled, glaring for a long moment at his own bowl of runny ice cream, “I’m not sure how that relates to the present situation.”
Ricky had laughed.
The other two looked at her.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just . . . well, not
funny
, I don’t mean, but ...”
She was aware of the yellow softness of the kitchen, and how small, how nearly doll-like they were, the three of them, sitting in their three chairs, sitting with their three bowls and spoons. The warmth she’d always held in reserve for Jess—well, perhaps not; but the warmth she’d always felt as a latent possibility—swelled, as though finally having received its cue, and she found herself resisting the urge to put her arms around the girl, make her promises. She’d settled for announcing, at last, that there’d be lots of time for talk in the coming days, and that now it was time for everyone to get some sleep.
Once in bed, however, Ricky had felt untired, as had John, and they’d lain awake a long time dissecting and analyzing the situation from every angle, taking the aerial view and then zooming in to ground level, referencing the past, wondering about the future, until the quality of their talk developed a leisurely, almost recreational, rhythm and purpose of its own. Rather than wind down toward sleep, Ricky had grown to feel more lively as they talked, and John, if not entirely understanding this then liking it anyway, had been emboldened to move in and rest his head on her stomach.
Each was surprised when her fingers found their way into his curls. It silenced them. John closed his eyes. He drifted toward sleep (he could do this very rapidly; it was the envy of his wife, this ability to slip so easily from consciousness into R.E.M.). Then all at once, he jerked himself fully awake: he had neglected to tell Ricky what Gordie had said about Biscuit and the ashes.
John had confronted Biscuit about it, going to her room before dinner and closing the door behind him. “So what was that all about?” he asked.
She’d played dumb. Ashes? What?
He pressed and cajoled, tried concern and then anger, but she refused to acknowledge, let alone explain, her actions, until, “This is serious,” he’d said, raising his voice. “You could have drowned!”
To that she’d responded with a small, sweet smile that walked the line between contrition and condescension. “Dad. I wouldn’t have.”
The maddening thing was, he agreed with her; he could not help feeling she was right, that she was essentially not in danger. But what, then, was she up to? Why all the mysterious absences? Now, as every time, she would not say. She either remained stubbornly, serenely vague or affected lack of comprehension.
At last John had heaved a sigh, rubbing a hand across his brow and down his beard. “It’s got to stop, Bis. That’s all I can say.”
Although she had not voiced any argument, he knew already, as he left her room and went downstairs to start dinner, that his words would prove ineffectual and that he’d come no closer to understanding what lay beneath either her truancies or any of her peculiar, largely secretive activities.
John knew he ought to fill Ricky in on all of this now. He would. He’d count to five and then bring it up. But how he dreaded saying even the word “ashes.” For all it would invoke.
He’d already made sure, of course, that Biscuit hadn’t somehow found them. He’d done that first, before going to speak with her in her room. Right after saying good-bye to Gordie he’d gone straight up to their bedroom and looked in the closet, feeling around on the back of the high shelf where he’d buried the corrugated cardboard box beneath a mothy old sweater. He was the one who had hidden it, the only one who knew where it was, Ricky having asked him to take charge of it almost a year earlier. “Put it away somewhere,” she’d said dully from the bed, her eyes closed, her face turned away.
But Biscuit was such an avid spy, and knew no bounds when it came to property or privacy. So that afternoon when John checked, he’d been relieved to find it still in its place, still sealed with clear packing tape. Relieved and then clobbered, blindsided: in his hands, in this small box, this small definite box with its definite dimensions, its definite significant weight, rested all that remained of his son, the son he’d never held in life, in flesh. It made the walls reel about him. He’d replaced the box beneath the holey wool and gone unsteadily from the room.
John drew a breath to tell Ricky about Biscuit, but the mattress quaked then and Ricky was in flight, having extracted herself from under him and sprung from the bed in a single move, childlike in her fleetness. He propped himself on an elbow and watched her cross in the direction of the closet. For a moment he thought she’d read his mind, was searching out the box of ashes. But she went to her dresser instead.
He waited, but she did not offer any explanation. “What are you doing?”
“I think . . . I still have . . .” She was fumbling in the top drawer, groping around at the back, her arm thrust deep. She withdrew it, victorious. “Yes—I didn’t throw it away.” She brought to their bed a plastic bottle: turquoise, he could just barely make out.
“What’s that?”
“Prenatal vitamins.”
“Oh, Ricky.” They’ll be expired, John thought but did not say. “Are you crying?”
“No.” And it was true: her voice held no sound of tears. She set the bottle on her nightstand and got back under the covers. He wanted to comfort her but she seemed almost giddy, and it was she who placed a hand on either side of his face and guided his head back to rest on her sternum. He listened to her heart, felt it like a small animal stirring within her ribs.
The ashes. Biscuit’s “ashes,” whatever they had really been. They had to talk about Biscuit. He lifted his head again, made a sound preparatory to speech.
But, “Shh,” she told him, touching his mouth. “Don’t worry about me. Don’t worry so much.” And she undertook to stroke his face, the wiry coils of his beard, the smooth depression of his temples, his lips again. He held himself still and wondering, propped above her on his forearms, his breath shallow. She traced the frill of his ear, then the cord that led from the base of his ear to his clavicle. Drew the backs of her hands down his stomach. Slid her fingers inside the waistband of his pajamas. Here, without warning, was more intimacy than she’d offered since before the baby’s birth. He would not speak now to save his life.
AT THE FAR END of the hall Paul was sitting up in bed, wearing pajamas and the porkpie hat he’d bought at a vintage clothing booth at the street fair last fall. He was drawing. He drew in bed whenever he couldn’t sleep. In the past his mother had reprimanded him for getting ink on the sheets, but as no sign of reform ever made so much as a cameo, she’d resorted to looking the other way (at which point Paul had spontaneously decided that pen and ink were too troublesome to manage in bed; now when he drew from a reclining position his implement of choice was his antigravity pen—the kind used by the astronauts—which wrote like a ballpoint but worked at any angle, even upside down).