Something Wild

by Hanna Halperin

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2021 by Hanna Halperin

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Halperin, Hanna, author.

  Title: Something wild : a novel / Hanna Halperin.

  Description: New York : Viking, [2021] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021010040 (print) | LCCN 2021010041 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984882066 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984882073 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Sisters—Fiction. | Mothers and daughters—Fiction. | Psychological fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A54865 S66 2021 (print) | LCC PS3608.A54865 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010040

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010041

  Designed by Amanda Dewey, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Lynn Buckley

  Cover art: Separisa / Shutterstock

  pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  For Sofia and Gabe

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  When they were young, Nessa and Tanya Bloom played a game where they chased each other up the stairs of their house. Whoever was doing the chasing would get close, just at the heels of the other, reach out and grab her ankles, pinch her sides, smack her butt. It was fun at first, the thrill of running away, the thrill of chasing. They’d laugh, giddy with the fight or flightiness of it, until the one being chased would scream out, Stop, I’m getting the Wild Thing!

  The Wild Thing was the kind of feeling they had in dreams—of not being able to run fast enough, of somebody’s long, grabbing, proprietary fingers, right there, on the verge of reaching them. They didn’t actually hurt one another; they weren’t the tackling type and they didn’t wrestle. They fought all the time, just not physically—over who got to go first, who got the pink one, who got the blue. They would scream over what was fair, what was just, who was more deserving. Their mother used to hold out her index finger. “Do you two want to fight over this speck of dust?” she’d ask. Usually they did.

  They didn’t fight when they were on the stairs, though. It was a game, until one of them got the Wild Thing, and then, just like that, they’d stop.

  On a car ride from the Berkshires back to Arlington—their parents up front, sisters in the back—Nessa and Tanya watched an old man cruise by in a red convertible. The man caught the girls’ gaze, and then, like he’d been planning it, grinned and lifted one finger to his lips: Shhh. They began to shriek—out of surprise, out of embarrassment, out of rage—out of what exactly, they didn’t know. It was electrifying. Feeling the Wild Thing out there on the highway.

  “Aren’t you going to do something?” they implored their parents. “Don’t you want to kill the creep?”

  This was when their parents were still together. But their mother and father just laughed. Tucked away in the backseat, Nessa and Tanya had felt safe enough. Their little family car had seemed as secure and foolproof as a spaceship, speeding down the highway. Nessa remembers it, every time she drives down the Mass Pike, the way the man in the car had looked at them, like he knew he was going to get away with it.

  * * *

  —

  IT HAD RETURNED over the years—the Wild Thing—and not just on the stairs, but out, at other places, with other men. Nessa can’t help but think that her body must have anticipated a certain kind of danger before she herself had understood it.

  The worst the Wild Thing had ever gotten, and the time she and Tanya never talk about—not even to acknowledge it happened—was the night at Dan’s house fourteen years ago. The worst mistake, Nessa thinks, of her life. But in her darkest moments, the whole thing feels like an inevitability. That somehow, she was meant to end up on that decrepit porch with the sagging sofa, her little sister in tow. All her life, that was where she’d been heading. That when she and Tanya chased each other up the stairs of their house when they were young, they’d been preparing one another for what was to come.

  I.

  Frankly, Tanya Bloom doesn’t have time to drive up to Massachusetts and clean out her childhood house. She has dozens of cases to work on and though she’ll bring her computer, the chance of getting anything done is slim. Moving her mother out of 12 Winter Street is a daunting job, and Nessa will be no help. Really, it would be easier to send her mother and her sister off into Boston for the day, so Tanya could do it herself, go through the house with industrial-sized trash bags, throw the majority of everything away. Her mother has a hard time saying goodbye to almost anything.

  The move makes no sense. The so-called property in New Hampshire that her stepfather, Jesse, recently inherited is nothing more than a dusty patch of rubble. The house itself is so bleak and dated Tanya could barely scroll through all six photos on her phone before calling her mother to talk her out of it.

  “Jesse’s going to fix it up. We have big plans for it!” Lorraine kept repeating in such a psychotically cheerful voice that Tanya realized Jesse must have been sitting right there beside her mother. The conversation hadn’t lasted more than three minutes.

  Tanya is taking two personal days off from work to make the trip—Thursday and Friday, the first personal days she’s taken since starting her job as ADA in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, one year ago.

  “What will you do without me this weekend?” Tanya asks Eitan, her husband, that morning. “You should take Will out,” she says. “Help him meet somebody new.” It’s six thirty, the latest they’ve both stayed in bed together for a long time—months, at least. On any other Thursday, Tanya would’ve already been coming home from the gym by this time, ready to jump in the shower and begin the mad dash of getting dressed in order to get to the Seventy-Ninth Street subway stop no later than 7:50 a.m.

  Eitan makes a face. “It’s too soon,” he says. “Besides, Will’s too soft for New York women.”

  “His ex was from New York.” Tanya rolls over on her side and looks at Eitan. She likes him best this way: before he’s showered or shaved or brushed his teeth, blurred around the edges with sleep. No one else in the world gets to see him like this.

  “Even so, he needs someone kind,” Eitan says. “Maybe someone from the Midwest.”

  “Do we know any kind people?”

  “Not really,” Eitan says, smiling. He reaches for her hand. “Hey, what about your sister?”

  “I think she’s seeing some deadbeat she met at work. And, there’s no way I’d let you set Will up with Nessa.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s too nice for her. Or maybe she’s too nice for him.” Though nice isn’t exactly the word Tanya’s looking for.

 
“What’s wrong with that?” Eitan asks.

  “Two really nice people can’t be together. They’d get bored. There’d be no tension.”

  “So I take it I’m the nice one in our relationship?”

  “Of course you are. You’re one big giant pushover.” Tanya pats his stomach.

  Her phone vibrates on the nightstand and Tanya leans over Eitan to check. It’s a text message from Nessa.

  Fuck I think I have a UTI

  An ellipsis appears and several more texts follow in quick succession.

  Is it normal to pee 7 times in 1 hour???

  My vagina feels like it’s going to fall off

  Not normal, she texts back. Do you want Eitan to write you a rx?

  Yes please!! Nessa responds.

  K, Tanya writes. Hydrate

  Tanya puts the phone down. “Nessa needs you to write her a prescription for antibiotics. She has a urinary tract infection.”

  “She should really get a urine sample before—”

  “Eitan, a woman knows when she has a UTI.”

  “It’s so that she can be prescribed the correct type of antibiotics.”

  “Write what you usually write,” Tanya says. “Don’t be annoying about it.”

  “Fine.” Eitan pulls Tanya’s hand to his mouth and kisses it. “So,” he says. “You’re really not going to tell them. Not even Nessa?”

  Tanya shakes her head.

  “You don’t think they’ll be able to tell?”

  “No,” she says flatly. The only person who knows Tanya’s body well enough to notice anything different is Eitan. She’ll start showing soon, though, according to the books and to her doctor, and the thought terrifies her.

  * * *

  —

  TANYA MET EITAN THREE YEARS prior while she was in her second year at Columbia Law and he was in his third year of medical school at Mount Sinai. She’d been taken with Eitan Abrams right away. He was gentle and solemn. He was Jewish, like her father, his Semitic features handsome and familiar. She liked his eyes, long lashed and heavy lidded, the color of green Kalamata olives; sharp. There was something noble about his nose.

  They hadn’t been trying to get pregnant. They were both twenty-eight, practically a decade too young to have a baby these days, in Tanya’s opinion. Their lives were full and busy and satisfying; they didn’t need a child on top of everything else.

  But then last month her period was late, and on a whim she bought a pregnancy test from Duane Reade during her lunch break. She wasn’t expecting anything. In fact, the impulse to buy a test had surprised her. She normally didn’t get nervous about these things; she was always careful and she didn’t have a lot of sex, anyway. She chugged a water bottle, took the test into a single-person bathroom in Starbucks. Double pink lines appeared promptly in the window. Her first thought had been: Will I have to miss work to get an abortion? Her second: There’s a person—half me, half Eitan—in my uterus right now at this very moment.

  That evening on her commute home, packed onto the 1 train with barely enough room to breathe, Tanya glanced at the seats closest to the doors, the ones reserved for the elderly, the handicapped, the pregnant. Something akin to anger passed through her. She didn’t want special treatment. She didn’t want to be expected to sit. She’d have an abortion, she decided; no question.

  When she arrived home half an hour later, the hallway of their building smelled like garlic cooking on the stove. It was Eitan, making dinner. He would want it, she knew. Fucking Eitan would want it more than anything.

  He’d broken away from his Orthodox upbringing years ago—he was no longer a religious man. He was not moralistic, and he was certainly not pro-life. But he was a family man. It was something about him that Tanya knew she was supposed to covet.

  He’d been raised Modern Orthodox, the youngest, and only boy, in a family of five kids, and even as a child he’d been aware of the sect’s hypocrisies. In shul, while he and his father prayed downstairs with the other men, his four older sisters and mother sat in the balcony, where it was hot and crowded; where in the summertime, the fans were so loud that the women could barely hear what the rabbi was saying downstairs.

  Really it was his anger toward his parents, much more than any archaic rule or ritual, that led Eitan away from Orthodoxy. Still, though, Tanya sometimes saw flashes of traditionalism in her husband. They’d be walking down the street and pass a family and Eitan would smile approvingly in their direction—and Tanya could feel herself tense up. And not just any family; it was the big, conventional families that Eitan liked. A mother and a father, a gaggle of kids, all those genes mixed up and shaken out into different yet related forms. It annoyed her, the way his face brightened at the sight of a young couple pushing an infant in its carriage, or a father carrying a child on his shoulders, his pregnant wife dutifully by his side.

  Eitan insisted this wasn’t the case, but she knew that he didn’t just want babies with her—he wanted Jewish babies.

  When Tanya was young, her own family had done the Jewish thing, too. Hebrew school, lighting the menorah, going to services on the High Holidays. But when her father left her mother, most of that ended. Her mother was technically Catholic—although Lorraine hadn’t set foot inside a church since she was a girl—but without Jonathan around, they all gave up on being Jewish. There was no longer a point.

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT ARE YOU MAKING?” she’d called, stepping inside the apartment, gearing up to tell him about the test.

  “The eggplant thing,” Eitan called back from the kitchen.

  Tanya set down her purse and laptop and found Eitan in the kitchen. They kissed quickly. “How was your day?” Eitan asked, returning to the stove.

  She stepped out of her heels. “Interesting.”

  “How’d the meeting go?”

  “Not bad. But I’ll tell you about it later.” She took a glass from the drying rack and filled it with water. She was visibly shaking. “It was interesting for another reason.”

  “Yeah?” Eitan adjusted the heat on the burner and prodded at the simmering eggplant. “What’s that?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  She hadn’t planned for it to come out like that—so blunt, so un-prefaced. She didn’t even know how she felt, saying it out loud.

  Eitan whirled around. He looked almost comical, his eyes taking up half his face. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Does that seem like the kind of joke I would make?”

  “You’re pregnant?”

  “According to the First Response test I bought at Duane Reade.”

  Then Eitan smiled so huge that Tanya actually groaned. She was surprised, though, to find that she was holding back tears.

  He threw down the spatula and practically lunged at her. “Holy shit!”

  “That’s what I said,” she laughed, hugging him back.

  “Oh, Tanya.” He squeezed her then, so tight that she yelped: “Eitan, you’re going to kill it.”

  Eitan, naturally, began to cry.

  “Babe, the eggplant,” Tanya said.

  “Who cares about the eggplant?”

  She knew then that there would be no abortion. There would be a baby. There already was one.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WERE SEVERAL REASONS WHY Tanya was not going to tell her mother and sister that she was pregnant. She would tell them eventually, of course. She had no choice. But her plan was to put it off as long as physically possible.

  Tanya did not enjoy attention, particularly when it came to her body. Well, that was not entirely accurate. She liked attention, though only at certain times and by certain people—namely Eitan, though sometimes she liked the feeling of being admired by other men, and even other women, as long as it was from a distance, and they were subtle and not crude abo
ut it; and only if they themselves were attractive, too, in some way.

  But she was wary about showing. She saw the way people behaved around pregnant women. Suddenly their stomachs were open for public gawking and the inner workings of their bodies fair game for questioning: Are you nauseous? Do you have cravings? Is this your first? Will you have more?

  When Tanya was younger, she’d shared a physical closeness with her sister and mother that was comfortable and natural, and now difficult for her to imagine. There’d been a time when it was easy to be naked around one another. They went skinny-dipping; they hung out together in the bathroom while one of them showered. They used the toilet without closing the bathroom door. When Tanya got her period at age thirteen, Nessa had done a live demonstration of how to insert a tampon. And when Nessa decided one day that she was going to shave off all her pubic hair “just to see what it looked like,” she had shown Tanya immediately. They’d laughed and named it the Naked Mole Rat.

  Things had changed, though—with their bodies and with each other. Certain details about herself that at one time seemed harmless—underarm hair, pubic hair, those mysterious little bumps around her areolae—she now kept private. To Tanya, these things screamed of sex.

  Her mother and sister had a habit of staring—at themselves, at each other, at her. What are you looking at? she found herself wanting to yell sometimes, when they were looking too hard. But she never did because when it came down to it, she didn’t want to know the answer.

  Nessa Bloom doesn’t believe in God, but when she gets a UTI this severe, sometimes she feels as if she’s being punished for something, by someone. Sitting on a bus for four hours isn’t going to help. She would have preferred to drive to Arlington, but Henry persuaded her to lend him her car for the weekend.

  “Marvelous day,” her seatmate announces, seemingly to Nessa. Nessa glances over. The woman’s face is wide, dappled with age spots, purplish lipstick gathered at the corners of her smile. She smells of clothing that’s been sitting in a closet for many years.