by Ethan Joella
“Cheers, guys,” she says, and the four of them clink glasses. Ahmed looks into Ginger’s eyes as their glasses touch, and then he quickly looks away.
“To health and happiness,” Damon says.
“To Damon’s good looks,” Ahmed says. His default mode is to tease. He sees that Ginger is laughing, and he can’t get enough of a woman laughing at his jokes. “To Martin the traveling cat,” he adds, and everyone laughs. His back is sweating, but he feels looser now.
“Oh my God,” Suzette says, her voice a slight screech. She holds her glass by the stem and the wine trembles as her eyes lock on something. She points at the curtain rod above the living room window. “A bat!”
Ahmed feels his adrenaline boil to action. His heart pounds. He hates bats. And snakes. And mice. He wishes it were a spider. He would pick up the spider without hesitating and bring it outside and let it crawl away. He looks at the thick burlap-type curtain, and sees a small peaceful bat hanging from the rod.
Damon grabs a broom from a long cabinet and holds it like a baseball bat. “I’ve got it,” he says, and charges into the living room.
“Shit, shit,” Ahmed says. He wonders if Damon will let it scoot out the door, or if he plans on pulverizing the bat. He is gripping the broom so tightly that Ahmed can see the veins in his arms.
“Wait,” Ginger says. She puts down her wine and doesn’t look bothered at all. “Do you guys have an empty coffee can or something?”
“Here.” Suzette runs to the cupboard, grabs what looks like an expensive can of espresso, and dumps it all in the sink.
“That’s like ten bucks,” Damon says.
“Hush.” Suzette hands the can to Ginger. Ginger holds the can, picks up a brochure from the mail pile by the refrigerator, and tiptoes toward the sleeping bat while the three of them watch. In seconds, she stands barefoot on the dining room chair, guiding the coffee can under the bat, wiggling the brochure over it.
“Got it,” she whispers. Damon opens the French doors to the back, and Ginger walks outside with the can, her back straight, her hand keeping the brochure in place on top. She strides across the big stretch of grass to an oak tree and stands back as she releases the animal from its container like a magician. She smiles a satisfied smile as it flies up and disappears.
* * *
Later, after a glass of wine, after snacking on figs and cheese and spicy almonds, after Ahmed has fist-bumped Ginger and called her Bat Woman more than once, Damon goes outside to light the grill, and Suzette follows him with a plate of steaks and some kind of fish wrapped in foil. Ahmed looks at them through the French doors, and they don’t even realize it, but they are a painting out there. Young and good looking and full of promise. The evening spring sun on them, the stylish deck with two chaise longues. The big rhododendron blooming.
Inside, there is a glass bowl of salad on the kitchen counter, and a basket of sliced bread from a good bakery. He sits on one of the barstools around the kitchen island and Ginger starts to clear some of the appetizer plates. “So,” she says. “I never got a chance to apologize for that night.” Her words sound rehearsed, as though she has been anxious about seeing him, too.
“What?” he says. This feels like that moment when a roller coaster drops—that light-headed fear rushing at him. It would be easier to not have this conversation, to just keep it light. It’s funny that they barely know each other, but already he feels like he’s in a serious relationship. She makes him so nervous—the way no other woman has. “Oh, well. Nah, don’t apologize.” He gulps his wine.
“No,” she says. He can see the hint of blush on her. “It was a hard night.” Yes. He heard from Damon about how upset she was, how she stayed at her parents’ house for a while afterward, how Suzette would take long walks with her and tell her there was nothing she could have done.
“Yeah, I just wish I could have helped you. I stayed in the parking lot for a little while in case you needed me.”
She sits on a barstool next to him. “I should have told you about Luke when we were talking. I should have said how torn up I’d been feeling.”
“It’s your business, you know?” He hates being a guy at that moment, keeping his feelings so close to his chest. He can’t stop thinking about the wedding. How he kept engaging her in conversation, how she kept listening to him, the way her arm felt locked in his. It had been a perfect start. During dinner, during all the toasts, he kept hoping maybe at the end of the night she would lean in to kiss him—even if it was a quick one, even if he never saw her again after that. He remembers the nervous excitement and possibility the night seemed to have—before it didn’t.
She shakes her head. “I was having a good time with you.”
This washes him in something. Joy. Longing. He feels a deep, deep pull. It meant something to her, too. It mattered. He sighs inside. “Yeah. Me, too.”
He feels like he’s the one out to sea now, out in the blank water by himself. He glances at Damon and Suzette. Suzette is pointing to something in the yard and Damon is listening. Probably planning a pool. Or maybe a guesthouse next to the barn. “Me, too,” Ahmed says again.
“And you were so nice to leave the wedding with me. When I got out of your car, I knew that was the last moment of something.” She shrugs.
He remembers looking over at her and her worried face. The darkness and passing headlights outside her window. He remembers wanting to pull her against him, to stroke her hair and say it would be okay. It would all be okay. “What do you mean?” he finally asks.
“I don’t know.” She bites her thumbnail. “I guess I just mean I knew all the heartbreak I was going toward inside. I knew, I had to know, that Luke was going to die. Like I loved him, I realized I still loved him, and it figures—he’s dead. I knew I was going into that, and leaving your car was the last time I would feel joy—just that easiness of a good time—for a long, long while.” She shakes her head. “I felt like I was jumping off a cliff, and you were the last person I saw before I did.”
He feels a lump in his throat. He will never find someone as good as she is. There is something so whole and decent about her. But he is gripped by a quiet longing now, a pain of regret. She won’t ever be over this guy. You don’t get over loving and losing someone like that. One way or the other, they needed resolution, and she’ll never have it. He hates Luke for a second. Hates what he didn’t know he had in Ginger, what he gambled with by doing drugs or drinking or whatever led to that accident. Screw yourself, Luke, he thinks, and then regrets insulting a dead guy who didn’t mean to die. Sorry, Luke.
“I almost yelled after you to come back,” he says, surprising himself. He looks at her. At her worried eyes. At her perfect neck with the small diamond hanging from her necklace. “I know that sounds ridiculous. I know it was a hard night for you. But before that, it was one of the best nights of my life.” He gulps. Something tells him to keep going. “I like you so much.”
She smiles, and her face crumbles slightly—as if she might cry. Her eyes are wet but sincere. Then she puts her hand on top of his. “I like you, too,” she says.
His insides get tight. He is on a raft, and she is pulling him in. He almost starts to shiver. He imagines his teeth chattering and how embarrassing it would be. Her hand. Her warm hand on top of his. He never wants this to end. He wants to put his other hand on top of hers to keep it there.
17. Just That Sort of a Day
After the man she always thought was her father left her mother, Iris stared at his things in her parents’ closet for months: a pair of two-toned golf shoes he had worn once, a tweed blazer, and two shirts (one pink, one gray) in a dry cleaning bag. She touched the thin plastic covering his shirts. She put her feet in the barely worn shoes. She smelled the dusty wool of the jacket sleeve. She would look at all her mother’s things—the robes, the sequined dress, the shelf on the floor of sandals and shoes—and wonder if he’d ever come back for his handful of left-behinds. Iris remembers reaching into his jacket pocket a
nd finding a ticket stub for a dinner dance he and her mother had gone to. She stared at the writing, the picture of music notes. Then, each time, she would slip it back into the pocket. Doug with the sideburns. Doug with his blond knuckle hair. Doug who seemed to have loved her.
And then it turned out Doug wasn’t her father.
And she had a new father.
She was so young then, only four or so, but she remembers everything. She remembers New Dad’s car in the driveway, something shiny, expensive. She remembers how cool yet cordial he was to Melinda, who made Iris wear a blue lacy dress that day with the sash tied too tightly. Melinda had pulled Iris’s hair into small braids and washed her face with a hot washcloth. Suddenly the moment seemed to be about Iris, her mother, for once, standing back. This man with his kind eyes and worn face, shiny watch on his wrist, shirt so white and starched, a thick gold wedding band. She remembers he handed her a gift: a jack-in-the-box she still has.
She remembers only wanting Doug when New Dad asked her about nursery school. Wanting Doug’s song about the bear going over the mountain. Wanting to crawl into Doug’s familiar lap when New Dad sat on the living room chair while he folded his handkerchief into something as she stared. But now she has mostly forgotten Doug. One day, she can’t say when, she noticed Doug’s things were gone from her mother’s closet, and she forgot what Doug’s voice sounded like. Doug, who her mother said got a job in Florida and that’s why he left. Doug. Another casualty of her mother’s. Doug, who will forever be thirty-something, broken, shrugging as he blew her a kiss and walked down their porch steps.
And New Dad, who introduced himself as Alex, was wonderful. He would tell her stories about being in the army, which fascinated her (a soldier in real life, and he was her father!). He would do that thing where he made his thumb tip look like it came apart from the rest of his finger. He would give money to her, as well as necklaces and a jewelry box. He’d kiss the top of her head, call her Sunshine in a way that made her heart soar. She found out, years later, he didn’t even know about her until that time he first showed up. Another Melinda game, she guessed.
Now, twenty years later, Iris says, “Love you, bye,” to New Dad on the phone and hits end. Alex Lionel, who lives an hour away but calls to check on her every day. “How are you feeling?” he always says. “Get some rest now while you can.” She smiles and takes the portable baby heart rate monitor she got from Amazon out of its package. She looks up at the sound of the door scraping open as Melinda walks right into the apartment without knocking.
“Cold in here,” Melinda says, holding a white box from the bakery. “Here, babe, sticky buns.” She plops the box onto the table and looks around. Melinda is always looking around. Always a small piece of green gum in her mouth. Always flipping her hair.
“I can’t eat those,” Iris says. She almost salivates. She feels an urge to rip the box open and push a whole bun into her mouth. Her favorite. She imagines the glazed pecans, the warm dough.
Melinda rolls her eyes. “Oh, they just tell you that stuff.” She looks down at the box and starts to pick at the tape with her nail. She tugs and tugs but nothing happens. “What’s that?” she asks, and zeros in on the heart rate monitor. Iris remembers Dave made coffee this morning, but she doesn’t offer any to her mother yet. Maybe in a minute. Outside, she hears car motors and an occasional horn. The hanging papier-mâché angel she got from Mexico moves with the breeze from the open window. She loves springtime.
“It’s a listening device. Now I can hear Phoebe’s heartbeat whenever I want.” She turns the small white machine over to see if it needs batteries.
“Phoebe. You’re still going with that?” Melinda lifts her eyebrows. “Where’s Davey?”
“At the store.”
“Buying you a ring?”
“Please.” Iris opens the battery compartment, and there are two factory batteries already inside. Jackpot. “The stroller arrived at the baby store, so he borrowed his mom’s SUV to pick it up.” She thinks of Dave leaving that morning. Quiet Dave, with the small ponytail, who broke her rule about men in ponytails. Dave with glasses sometimes. Dave who now kisses Phoebe goodbye, too, bending to smile at Iris’s belly.
Melinda’s high heels click as she walks. Iris knows her mother thinks the apartment should be vacuumed, that the kitchen counters have too much clutter. Whatever. She’s pregnant. She’s in grad school with an internship at the hospital. She does what she can.
Melinda sniffs for a moment. She is always sniffing, ready to point out any smell: dust, garbage, the neighbor’s cat. She is a good-looking woman for sixty, but her style got stuck at some point in the late eighties. For one, her bleached hair is overprocessed. She wears clothes that are too tight, even though she’s in good shape, and today she wears jean leggings and a long-sleeved bodysuit. Dave calls it her Flashdance attire. Iris smiles. Once, in a horrible fight, Iris called Melinda trashy, which she regretted immediately. Melinda’s mascara smeared with tears as she slammed the apartment door. “Go to your father’s uptight wife then! Go see her on rich bitch lane,” Melinda had screamed.
“What are you looking for?” Iris says now.
“Scissors.”
“I can’t have a sticky bun, Mom. Please don’t.”
Melinda opens drawer after drawer, clicking her tongue with each one. She finally rummages through the junk drawer and finds the scissors with the blue handle that barely cut. “Honey, don’t believe everything they tell you. They always go with the worst-case scenario. Baby diabetes. I never heard of such bull.”
“It’s not baby diabetes. It’s gestational diabetes. The baby doesn’t have it. I do, as a side effect of pregnancy. When the baby comes, everything should be fine.”
“Tuh,” she says, and slides the scissors into the bottom of the white box. “So we’ll hear our little girl’s heart with that thing?” she says as she breaks the tape. “Imagine: I didn’t even know what you’d be or what you were doing in there. I just hoped you’d be happy. Just be happy, that’s what I kept whispering.”
“And healthy.”
“Of course healthy.”
“We should be able to hear it. It got good reviews.”
“Here.” Melinda pulls out a sticky bun. The goo from the bottom drips back into the box. The nuts are syrupy and shiny, and the smell demobilizes Iris. Dear. God. She wants to pull it apart. She wants to bite into the sticky soft baked taste. She wants to wash it down with a freezing cold glass of milk. She could shake her mother for doing this to her. “Let me get a little plate.” Melinda prances through the kitchen, holding the sticky bun out in front of her and opening cupboard door after cupboard door with her left hand.
“Mom.”
“Huh?” She finds a stack of saucers and slides one out. She puts the sticky bun on the saucer and licks her fingers.
“I cannot. I can’t have one.”
Melinda puts the plate in front of her and smirks. “Just a bite.”
Iris looks down. She knows exactly how it will taste on her tongue, how her teeth will feel biting into its softness. She hasn’t had any dessert in weeks—since the diagnosis. Since the hospital nutritionist gave her a printout of what her daily meal plan should be: a bowl of Cheerios here, a turkey sandwich on wheat there, a small dish of blueberries before bed. She has thought about a sticky bun—just like this one—every day. But she wants Phoebe to be healthy. It’s more important. Every time she pricks her finger, she worries her numbers will be too high. She knocks the plate to the side. “Stop. Do you know how crazy this is?”
“Honey.” Melinda picks up another sticky bun with her red nails and bites into it. She shakes her head. “You’re missing out.”
Iris stands. She could have one. This morning her sugar was the lowest it’s been since being diagnosed. Back to normal, she could almost say. She goes to the refrigerator and lets ice fall into her glass. She presses the button for water. She watches her mother eat the sticky bun, the glaze around her lips. She hears bi
rds outside and the buzz of a hedge trimmer down below. She comes back to the table and fiddles with the monitor. She slips the headphones on and holds the white wand, rolling it over her belly.
“Let me listen, too,” Melinda says.
“I don’t hear it yet.”
“You’re not a doctor, that’s why.” She taps her fingers and watches Iris. “They shouldn’t even sell those things.”
“I just want to hear her. I like the sound.”
“Don’t you need that jelly to make it work?” Melinda’s nostrils flare as she talks. She clicks over to the sink and grabs a paper towel to wipe her lips.
“It’s not that sophisticated.” Iris holds the wand and keeps sliding it slowly. Piece of junk. She is frustrated, disappointed. She hears nothing but static.
“Maybe you need to—”
“Shh. Wait.”
Melinda sighs. She crosses her arms and stares at Iris, shaking her head.
Iris’s pulse is starting to beat faster. She just wants to hear Phoebe’s heart. Every time she hears it, it’s like getting a letter she’s been waiting for in the mail. It is so quick and constant, so steady and comforting. Ah, she always thinks. There you are. She has waited for three days since she ordered this device. She wants to hear it between appointments. She wants to slip the headphones on Dave’s ears while they are in bed. She hears nothing but the continued drone of static.
Melinda paces back and forth. She finds tape on Iris’s messy desk over by the window and seals the white bakery box shut again. “You’re gonna make yourself nuts trying to find it with a machine that cost two bucks.”
“Fifty dollars.”
“Aye yai yai.”
Iris glares at her and takes the headphones off. She puts the small machine down. She feels like she could faint, and nausea creeps up her throat. When did she last feel Phoebe move? Iris can’t remember. She’s gotten so used to the kicks, the twists and turns. Phoebe was always moving. A thump here, a wiggle there. Iris feels the room turn. Her mother seems far away. Last night? Wasn’t it last night? But not today. Not one thing today. A cold sweat spreads over her body. “Mom,” she says.