by Kim Edwards
“Three days,” his mother was saying, “and then you come home like—my God, look at you, David—like this and with this girl. Pregnant, you say? And I’m supposed to take her in, no questions asked?”
The girl flinched then and looked away, and Paul’s eyes had fallen to her stomach, flat enough beneath the coat, except that she had rested one hand there protectively and he saw the slight swell beneath her sweater. He stood very still. The argument went on; it seemed to last a long time. Finally, his mother, silent and tightlipped, had pulled sheets, blankets, pillows from the linen closet and thrown them down the stairs at his father, who had taken the girl very formally by the elbow and led her to the den.
Now she slept on the fold-out couch, her head turned to the side, one hand resting near her face. He studied her, the way her eyelids moved, the slow rise and fall of her chest. She was lying on her back; her belly rose up like a low wave. Paul’s own flesh quickened, and he was afraid. He’d had sex with Lauren Lobeglio six times since March. She had hung around during quartet rehearsals for weeks, watching him, not speaking: a pretty, wasted, eerie chick. One afternoon she had stayed after the rest of the band left, and it was just the two of them in the silence of the garage, light moving through the leaves outside and making patterns of flickering shadow on the concrete floor. She was strange but sexy, with her long thick hair, her black eyes. He had sat in the old lawn chair, adjusting the strings on his guitar and wondering if he should go over to where she was standing by the wall of tools and kiss her.
But it was Lauren who crossed the room. She stood in front of him for a heartbeat, then slid onto his lap, her skirt hiking up, revealing slender white legs. This was what people said: that Lauren Lobeglio would do it if she liked you. He’d never really thought it was true, but there he was, slipping his hands beneath her T-shirt, her skin so warm, her breasts so soft beneath his hands.
It wasn’t right. He knew that, but it was like falling: once you started you couldn’t stop until something stopped you. She hung around like before, except now the air was charged, and when they were alone he would cross the room and kiss her, sliding his hands up the smooth satin skin of her back.
The girl in the bed sighed, her lips working. Jailbait, his friends warned him about Lauren. Duke Madison especially, who had dropped out of school to marry his girlfriend the year before, who hardly played the piano anymore and had a haggard glancing-at-the-clock kind of look when he did. Get her pregnant and you’re more than screwed.
Paul studied this girl, her paleness and long dark hair, her scattered freckles. Who was she? His father, methodical, predictable as a ticking clock, had simply disappeared. On the second day his mother called the police, who had remained noncommittal and jocular, until his father’s briefcase was found in the cloakroom of the museum in Pittsburgh, his suitcase and camera in his hotel. Then they got serious. He’d been seen at the reception, arguing with a woman with dark hair. She turned out to be an art critic; her review of the show had been in the Pittsburgh papers, and it wasn’t pretty.
Nothing personal, she had told the police.
Then last night a key had turned in the lock and his father had walked into the house with this pregnant girl he claimed to have just met, a girl whose presence he would not explain. She needs help, he said, tersely
There are plenty of ways to help, his mother had pointed out, talking about the girl as if she weren’t standing in the foyer in her too-big coat. You give money. You take her to a place for unmarried mothers. You don’t disappear for days on end without a word and then show up with a pregnant stranger. My God, David, don’t you have any idea? We called the police! We thought you were dead.
Maybe I was, he said, the strangeness of his answer quelling his mother’s protests, fixing Paul in his place on the stairs.
And now she slept, oblivious, and within her the baby grew in its dark sea. Paul reached out, touched her hair lightly, then let his hand fall. He had a sudden urge to get into the bed with her, to hold her. It wasn’t like with Lauren somehow, it wasn’t about sex; he just wanted to feel her near him, her skin and her warmth. He wanted to wake up next to her, to run his hand over the rising curve of her belly, to touch her face and hold her hand.
To find out what she knew about his father.
Her eyes blinked open, and for a moment she stared at him, unseeing. Then she sat up quickly, pushing her hands through her hair. She was wearing one of his old faded T-shirts, blue with the Kentucky Wildcats logo across the front, that he’d worn a couple of years ago while running track. Her arms were long and lean, and he caught a glimpse of her underarm, stubbled and tender, and of the smooth rising curve of her breast.
“What are you looking at?” She swung her feet to the floor.
He shook his head, unable to speak.
“You’re Paul,” she said. “Your father told me about you.”
“He did?” he asked, hating the need in his voice. “What’d he say?”
She shrugged, pushing her hair behind her ears, and stood up. “Let’s see. You’re headstrong. You hate him. You’re a genius on the guitar.”
Paul felt the heat rising to his face. Usually, he thought his father didn’t even see him, or saw only the ways he didn’t measure up.
“I don’t hate him,” he said. “It’s the other way around.”
She leaned down to gather up the blankets, then sat with them in her arms, looking around.
“This is nice,” she said. “Someday I’m going to have a place like this.”
Paul gave a startled laugh. “You’re pregnant,” he said. It was his own fear in the room, the fear that rose up each time when, trembling, he crossed the garage to Lauren Lobeglia, drawn by the irresistible power of his desire.
“Right. So what? I’m pregnant. Not dead.”
She spoke defiantly but she sounded scared, as scared as Paul sometimes felt himself, waking up in the middle of the night, dreaming of Lauren, all warmth and silk and her voice low in his ear, knowing he could never stop though they were heading for disaster.
“You might as well be,” he said.
She looked up sharply, actual tears in her eyes, as if he’d slapped her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything.”
She kept crying.
“What are you doing here anyway?” he demanded, angry at her tears, at her very presence. “I mean, who do you think you are to latch on to my father and show up here?”
“I don’t think I’m anyone,” she said, but his tone had startled her and she dried her tears, grew tougher and more distant. “And I didn’t ask to come here. It was your father’s idea.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Paul said. “Why would he do that?”
She shrugged. “How should I know? I was living in that old house where he grew up, and he said I couldn’t stay there anymore. And it’s his place, right? What could I say? In the morning we walked into town and he bought bus tickets and here we are. The bus was a drag. It took forever to make all the crazy connections.”
She pulled her long hair back and yanked it into a ponytail, and Paul watched her, thinking how pretty her ears were, wondering if his father thought she was pretty too.
“What old house?” Paul asked, feeling something sharp and hot in his chest.
“Like I said. The one where he grew up. I was living there. I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” she added, glancing at the floor.
Paul felt something fill him then, some emotion he couldn’t name. Envy, maybe, that this girl, this thin pale stranger with the beautiful ears, had been to a place that mattered to his father, a place he himself had never seen. I’ll take you there someday, his father had promised, but years had passed and he had never mentioned it again. Yet Paul had never forgotten it, the way his father had sat down amid the wreckage of his darkroom, picking up the photos one by one, so carefully. My mother, Paul, your grandmother. She had a hard life. I had a sister, did you know that? Her name was June. She
was good at singing, at music, just like you. He remembered to this day the way his father smelled that morning, clean, already dressed for the hospital, yet sitting on the floor of the darkroom, talking, like he had all the time in the world. Telling a story Paul had never heard.
“My father’s a doctor,” Paul said. “He just likes to help people.”
She nodded and then looked at him straight on, her expression full of something—pity for him, that’s what he read there, and the thin hot flare traveled to his fingertips.
“What?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing. You’re right. I needed help. That’s all.”
A strand of hair slipped from her ponytail and fell across her face, very dark with reddish highlights, and he remembered how soft it had been when he touched it as she slept, soft and warm, and he resisted an urge to reach over and brush it behind her ear.
“My father had a sister,” Paul said, remembering the story and his father’s soft steady voice, pushing to see if it was true, that she’d been there.
“I know. June. She’s buried on a hillside above the house. We went there too.”
The thin flare widened, making his breathing low and shallow. Why should it matter that she knew this? What difference did it make? And yet he could not stop imagining her there, walking up some hillside, following his father to this place he’d never seen.
“So what?” he said. “So what that you’ve been there, so what?”
She seemed about to speak for a moment, but then she turned and started walking across the room to the kitchen. Her dark hair, in a long rope, bounced against her back. Her shoulders were lean and delicate, and she walked slowly, with careful grace, like a dancer.
“Wait,” Paul called after her, but when she paused he did not know what to say.
“I needed a place to stay,” she said softly, looking back over her shoulder. “That’s all there is to know about me, Paul.”
He watched her go into the kitchen, heard the refrigerator door open and shut. Then he went upstairs and got the folder he’d hidden in his bottom drawer, full of the photos he’d saved from the night he’d talked with his father.
He took the pictures and his guitar and went out on the porch, shirtless, barefoot. He sat on the swing and played, keeping an eye on this girl as she moved through the rooms inside: the kitchen, the living room, the dining room. But she did very little, just ate some yogurt and then stood for a long time in front of his mother’s bookshelves before she pulled down a novel and sat on the couch.
He kept on playing. It soothed him, the music, in a way that nothing else did. He entered some other plane where his hands seemed to move automatically. The next note was right there, and then the next and the next. He reached the end and stopped, eyes closed, letting the notes die away into the air.
Never again. Not this music, this moment, ever again.
“Wow.” He opened his eyes and she was leaning against the doorjamb. She pushed open the screen door and came out onto the porch, carrying a glass of water, and sat down. “Wow, your father was right,” she said. “That was amazing.”
“Thanks,” he said, ducking his head to hide his pleasure, hitting a chord. The music had released him; he was not so angry anymore. “What about you? You play?”
“No. I used to take piano lessons.”
“We have a piano,” he said, nodding at the door. “Go ahead.”
She smiled, though her eyes were still serious. “That’s okay. Thanks. I’m not in the mood. Besides, you’re really, really good. Like a professional. I’d be embarrassed to pound out ‘Für Elise’ or something.”
He smiled too. “ ‘Für Elise.’ I know that one. We could do a duet.”
“A duet,” she repeated, nodding, frowning a little. Then she looked up. “Are you an only child?” she asked.
He was startled. “Yes and no. I mean, I had a sister. A twin. She died.”
Rosemary nodded. “Do you ever think about her?”
“Sure.” He felt uncomfortable and looked away. “Not about her, exactly. I mean, I never knew her. But about what she might have been like.”
He flushed then, shocked to have revealed so much to this girl, this stranger who’d disrupted all their lives, this girl he didn’t even like.
“So okay,” he said. “Now it’s your turn. Tell me something personal. Tell me something my father doesn’t know.”
She gave him a searching look.
“I don’t like bananas,” she said at last, and he laughed, and then she did. “No, honestly, I don’t. What else? When I was five, I fell off my bike and broke my arm.”
“Me too,” Paul said. “I broke my arm too, when I was six. I fell out of a tree.” He remembered it then, the way his father had lifted him, the way the sky had flashed, full of sun and leaves, as he was carried to the car. He remembered his father’s hands, so focused and so gentle as he set the bones, and coming home again, into the bright golden light of the afternoon.
“Hey,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
He laid the guitar flat on the swing and picked up the grainy black-and-white photos.
“Was it this place?” he asked, handing one to her. “Where you met my father?”
She took the photo and studied it, then nodded. “Yes. It looks different now. I can see from this picture—those sweet curtains in the windows and the flowers growing—that it was a nice house once. But no one lives there now. It’s just empty. The wind comes through because the windows are broken. When I was a kid we used to play there. We used to run wild in those hills, and I used to play house with my cousins. They said it was haunted, but I always liked it. I don’t know exactly why. It was like my secret place. Sometimes I just sat inside, dreaming about what I was going to be.”
He nodded, taking the photo back and studying the figures as he had so many times before, as if they might answer all his questions about his father.
“You didn’t dream this,” he said at last, looking up.
“No,” she said softly. “Never this.”
Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. Sunlight slanted through the trees and cast shadows on the painted floor of the porch.
“Okay. It’s your turn again,” she said after a minute, turning back to him.
“My turn?”
“Tell me something your father doesn’t know.”
“I’m going to Juilliard,” he said, the words coming in a rush, bright as music in the room. He’d told no one but his mother yet. “I was first on the wait list, and I got accepted last week. While he was gone.”
“Wow.” She smiled a little sadly. “I was thinking more in terms of your favorite vegetable,” she said. “But that’s great, Paul. I always thought college would be great.”
“You were going to go,” he said, realizing suddenly what she’d lost.
“I will go. I will definitely go.”
“I’ll probably have to pay my own way,” Paul offered, recognizing her fierce determination, the way it covered fear. “My father’s set on me having some kind of secure career plan. He hates the idea of music.”
“You don’t know that,” she said, looking up sharply. “You don’t really know the whole story about your father at all.”
Paul did not know how to answer this, and they sat silently for several minutes. They were screened from the street by a trellis, clematis vines climbing all over it and the purple and white flowers blooming, so when two cars pulled into the driveway, one after the other, his mother and his father home so oddly in the middle of the day, Paul glimpsed them in flashes of color, bright chrome. He and Rosemary exchanged looks. The cars doors slammed shut, echoing against the neighboring house. Then there were footsteps, and the quiet, determined voices of his parents, back and forth, just beyond the edge of the porch. Rosemary opened her mouth, as if to call out, but Paul held up one hand and shook his head, and they sat together in silence, listening.
“This day,” his mother said. “This wee
k. If you only knew, David, how much pain you caused us.”
“I’m sorry. You’re right. I should have called. I meant to.”
“That’s supposed to be enough? Maybe I’ll just go away,” she said. “Just like that. Maybe I’ll just take off and come back with a good-looking young man and no explanation. What would you think of that?”
There was a silence, and Paul remembered the discarded pile of bright clothes on the beach. He thought of the many evenings since when his mother had not made it home before midnight. Business, she always sighed, slipping off her shoes in the foyer, going straight to bed. He looked at Rosemary, who was studying her hands, and he held himself very still, watching her, listening, waiting to see what would happen next.
“She’s just a child,” his father said at last. “She’s sixteen and pregnant, and she was living in an abandoned house, all alone. I couldn’t leave her there.”
His mother sighed. Paul imagined her running a hand through her hair.
“Is this a midlife crisis?” she asked quietly. “Is that what this is?”
“A midlife crisis?” His father’s voice was even, thoughtful, as if he were considering the evidence carefully. “I suppose it might be. I know I hit some kind of wall, Norah. In Pittsburgh. I was so driven as a young man. I didn’t have the luxury of being anything else. I went back to try and figure out some things. And there was Rosemary, in my old house. That doesn’t feel like a coincidence. I don’t know, I can’t explain it without sounding kind of crazy. But please trust me. I’m not in love with her. It’s not like that. It never will be.”