by Amy Boesky
Hamlet’s ghost.
“I have something for you. Do me a favor—” She shifted, pain flashed across her face. To be alive for her now was to hurt. She gestured in the direction of the bedside table. “Open up that drawer and see if you can find a little box—”
I walked around the bed. The drawer, like all her drawers, always, was painfully neat. On the shelf below the drawer, there was a thick blue volume. An oncology textbook. My father had told us she’d asked him for it sometime this summer. She didn’t want the dumbeddown version, she’d told him. She wanted to know what was coming, the official version, not Cancer Lite.
In the drawer, there was a tube of ChapStick. A black velvet box. A paperback—something from the Hemlock Society, whatever that was. This is what she kept next to her now. I took the box out, held it, waited.
“Open it, Mellie.”
Inside, there was Sylvia’s ring. The gold ring with the moonstone set in a bezel. The stone had a face carved in it. I knew this ring by heart—we’d always called it the “moon ring.” My mother had kept it in her jewel box, with several other family heirlooms. Sometimes, when she was getting dressed to go out on a Saturday night, sitting at her dressing table in her bedroom, she’d let Sara, Julie, and me take her jewelry out and lay it out on her bed. She kept the moon ring in a special box, way at the back of her jewelry case. It was always the one I begged to try on.
The ring had a special history. Sylvia had gotten it for her sixteenth birthday. She wore it every day, my mother told me—never took it off. Her godfather had it made for her in Africa. Other rings came and went—her engagement ring, her wedding band. But the moon ring was the one she always wore.
“I want you to have it,” my mother said now, and before I could protest, she told me she was giving an important piece of jewelry to each of us. Sara was getting the diamond ring Jerry’s father had given his mother when he was born—to celebrate. A boy, after three girls in a row. Julie was getting a ruby: my mother’s birthstone. All three rings passed down from one of my mother’s parents. Something of hers for each of us to have.
I stared at the ring.
I remembered how I used to beg her to let me hold it. I loved the way the light shone through the gray-mauve stone, the kindliness of the carved face.
Now, I wanted to close the box and hand it back to her. It was hers, and though I knew my mother had always been preemptive, a planner, that she wanted to give her treasures away while she still could—that this was, in some last, implausible way, a chance to see a glimpse of the future, to see her ring on my finger—I didn’t want to take it.
Maybe I thought if I didn’t, this moment would hang, suspended, that I could stave off what was coming. I wanted to tell her I couldn’t accept this, I couldn’t do what she was asking me to do. But her eyes were already starting to close. In a minute or two, she’d be asleep again.
I took the ring out of the box and slid it on my finger. The gold was slightly warm.
And it fit. Like all these years, it had been waiting for me.
Safe as Houses
THE BRITISH HAVE A SAYING, “safe as houses.” I remember hearing it while I was studying at Oxford, and it stuck in my mind. When Sandi opened the front door to the stucco house we’d been waiting to look at—there was something fiddly about the lock, it took a minute—that saying came back to me, because the overwhelming feeling that washed over me was one of safety.
Maybe it was because the house was made of stone, maybe because it seemed so solid—bigger than any of the other places we’d looked at, with higher ceilings. I’m not sure. I only know that as soon as we opened the door, a feeling of relief flooded through me. We stepped inside a vestibule inlaid with intricate red tiles. Beyond, we could see into a front hall filled with light.
In actual fact, the house needed lots of work. It had been built in 1910, and lived in by only three families, each for a quarter of a century. None of the previous owners had been ready to undertake the house’s most pressing projects, and by the time we saw it, it was a mess of bad wiring and desperately needed a new roof; we wouldn’t be allowed to open the side door that led out to the porch until we could afford to have the bricks relaid, and there were signs of water damage in the basement. We took all of this in, but none of it mattered.
It might have been partly exhaustion that led us through room after room, wide-eyed, touching the tips of each other’s fingers, breathing out to each other little phrases of admiration. “High ceilings.” “Another fireplace.” This was the house Jacques had asked about a while ago, a square stucco house set just a bit too close to a street just a shade too busy—that’s why we even had a chance of being able to afford it. That, and the fact that the owner, a tall ebullient woman with a shock of white hair and penetrating eyes, had recently determined she was done with the suburbs and wanted to move downtown. The owner had seen as many buyers as we’d seen houses. Rejected on all counts. Sandi and the other agent whispered speculatively to each other—the difficult buyers meeting the difficult sellers. Who would have believed it? And who would have believed that we’d like each other right away, all the difficulty on both sides evaporating?
We loved the house. We loved the old bell system that let people buzz different rooms from the kitchen. We loved the old stone porch, the wide staircase. The house was closer to the university than I might have liked, and Jacques, list in hand, was stricken by how much work it needed, but there was a tacit understanding between us that these things were tolerable, that what mattered were other things—how solid the floors felt. How the back door opened into a garden that was level, if overgrown. At the top of the stairs and to the left was the room that settled it for me. It had belonged to the owner’s daughter before she went to college; she’d scratched her name in one of the many windows that lined the room on two sides, overlooking the bramble-filled garden. I knew right away this would be Sacha’s room. We were done looking, this would be home.
It worked, the way things sometimes do after lots of effort spent elsewhere, with surprising ease. The negotiations were amiable, the owner fair, the lawyers polite, the closing date speeded up, and because the house was less than half a mile from the House with the Green Shag, the owner let me come with my blueprint paper and my measuring tape and my video camera, and I took notes on dimensions and hired painters in advance and took videos for my mother, room by room. Sometimes my hand shakes when I take pictures, and that day it shook even more than usual. I still seemed to have whatever stomach bug had been bothering me off and on for the past few weeks—I was probably fighting off the flu—so I knew the movies were coming out a little fuzzy, but at least she’d get the main idea.
My mother had had a better week—Julie had been out visiting with Maddy, and she’d sounded brighter, almost good. I thought of days like this as Optical Illusion days. If I squinted one way, I saw a lady with a hat instead of two vases. Seeing it like that, I thought, she could rally. Listen to her! Maybe we could get her out here somehow for Sacha’s first birthday. Maybe we could bring her here to see the house, the big squares of sunlight moving in patterns on the old tile floor, the beautiful weedy garden, the bushes with their tawny, un-plucked crop of hydrangeas. Then there was something—a coughing fit, a pause—and the lady with the hat was gone and all I could see was two vases and I couldn’t believe I could have seen it any other way. She was sick, unbelievably sick, she could barely make it down to the kitchen anymore let alone navigate an airplane trip to Boston.
The owner accepted our offer in early October, and we signed the purchase and sales agreement. We hired electricians, going back and forth between the House with the Green Shag to what we now called Our House. I still wasn’t feeling well, and finally, squeezed in between everything else, I went to see Dr. Pierce, who prodded my stomach, listened to my lungs with a stethoscope, and drew some blood.
“Periods regular yet?” she asked after I told her I’d stopped nursing in July, and even before the words were
out of her mouth, I realized what was wrong. Why I’d been feeling so crummy.
Of course.
I was pregnant again.
It all made sense. Fell into place instantly—how could I not have realized it earlier?
“I think I know what’s going on,” I said shakily, not sure whether to laugh or cry, immediately starting to count backward. August? July? She leaned over to pat me on the shoulder before going out to ask one of the technicians to bring me a pregnancy test. But I was sure of the results even before I took it. I was trembling slightly all over, trying to add and subtract months in my head.
When?—
Two emotions flooded through me as I asked her if I could use her phone to call Jacques. One was utter joy. A second baby. Unasked for, but so deeply wanted—a gift of life in the midst of the deepening sense around us of death and dying.
The second feeling, wrapped around the first, was sorrow. This baby would be born, and my mother would never know her (or him).
I pushed the sorrow down.
Maybe she could make it. Six more months. Half a year. It was possible—
It depended when the baby was coming.
When. That had always been the first question in our family.
“But,” Jacques said, when he came home early that night to celebrate, “there’s another way to look at it, too.”
I had tears streaming down my face. He was the only one who knew. Tomorrow, I’d call Julie and Sara. Annie. When I worked up my courage, I’d call my parents. Maybe my father, first. And then my mother.
I looked at Jacques, waiting.
“You feel like you’re trading,” he said in a low voice, picking up my hand. “I know you. You think, because you wanted another baby so much and now this is happening, that somehow you’ve made some kind of deal with the fates.” He shook his head. “It isn’t like that, OK?”
I kept crying. Hormones, along with everything else.
“It doesn’t work like that,” he said.
For an ultrarationalist, Jacques had a strangely mystical way of looking at this. He thought the new baby would somehow be connected to my mother. A reminder of renewal, of new life beginning.
To my surprise, Julie said more or less the same thing when I called her the next day. She blew her nose for a while, cleared her throat. Then said, “It’s a good thing, Mellie. Really.”
I still didn’t want to tell my parents. I kept putting it off. One more day. I found an obstetrical practice—a friendly group out in Wellesley, half midwives, half doctors—and one of the doctors gave me an exam, and told me my due date. March 15.
AS LONG AS I COULD remember, my mother was the one I told whenever something good happened. In college, I used to call her to tell her when I did well on a test or paper. “Remember that history final I thought I messed up? Well, it turns out I did really well—” And she’d be there, riveted, glad for me. “You’re kidding! An A? Can you read me his comments?”
Did I call her when things went wrong? I don’t remember. I don’t think so—not usually. But she called me every day anyway, so if no good news was forthcoming, she’d probe. “What is it? You don’t sound right.” Or she’d remember to ask. “Did that guy ever call? What happened with that interview you were supposed to have?”
Now, I had this wonderful news, and I couldn’t bear the idea of telling her.
I went up into the study and closed the door behind me so I could focus. Dialed, heard that familiar ring. Ray answered, saying (sounding aggravated) that she’d have to go upstairs to see if my mother could talk. I thought I could hear the workmen hammering in the background.
Finally, my mother picked up.
She sounded extremely slurry. Either more morphine today, or she’d just taken it.
I got right to the point. “Mellie,” I said. “I have news.”
“Hang—on—” she said. I could hear her breathing. Struggling with the pillows. More breathing. “OK,” she said at last. More a whisper than a voice. “Go on.”
I closed my eyes, tilted back in the office chair, trying to slow myself down. “I have—” My voice broke up, like on a radio station you can’t pinpoint. “There’s something—”
Her voice sharpened. Mother’s intuition. “Are you OK?” she asked, suddenly focused. “Is everything all right? How’s Sacha?”
“I’m fine, she’s fine,” I mumbled, starting to cry. Hormones. I was a mess. “Mom.” I almost never called her that anymore. I went right in—no lead-up. “I’m pregnant. We’re having another baby.”
There was dead silence on the other end. Then—it cut between us like a knife—she said it. The word that has always been our mantra.
“When? ”
“March 15,” I said. The Ides, they used to call it. Caesar gets warned about it in Shakespeare’s play. For the Romans, it was a festival day. They considered it auspicious—a day of good luck, of fortune.
We hung there on the phone together and neither of us spoke, and for some period of time—a minute, a few minutes, I have no idea—we both cried.
Ashkenazi Jews customarily name their babies after relatives who have recently died. My parents had their own version of this: They kept the first letter. Sara was named for Sylvia. I was named for Alexander, my father’s grandfather. Julie lucked out: Nobody died, and they picked her name just because they liked it.
This new baby would be named for my mother, Elaine. We both knew that. An E.
“Are you thinking about names?” she asked slowly.
“A little,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I wonder . . . which names you like.” I didn’t want to say anything before she did about the letter E. I didn’t want to admit out loud to her what that meant. That by March—
Of course, her planning gene kicked in, trumping everything. “If it’s a boy,” she said, tentatively, thinking out loud, “I like Edward. Do you?”
I took a deep breath. So we were admitting this, then. We were actually admitting—
Like my mother, I tried to stick with the name, tried to put aside what it meant. Edward. Eddy, Ed, Ted. I couldn’t picture a boy.
“If it’s a girl . . . ,” I began, coaxingly.
She was silent, pondering.
“If it’s a girl . . . ,” she murmured.
If it’s a girl, I thought, I’ll love her with all my heart, whoever she is. Maybe there was something to what Jacques said, mystical or not, because sad as it was to tell my mother about the baby, I was also glad she knew. Glad that as long as I lived, as long as this new baby lived, I would look at him or her and know: My mother knew about this. Just by talking about the baby together, it felt to me like my mother was giving it her blessing.
“You don’t have any girls’ names?” she asked, mulling this over.
I mentioned two, testing for her reaction: Eleanor. Eloise.
But there was no chance to get her feedback. It sounded like someone had come into the room. I heard something scrape; a low sound, either a cough or a muffled groan. “Ame, Ray’s here, she has to help me with something. I need to take some medicine,” my mother said. “I’ll have to call you back. . . .”
Another shift of position, some mumbling.
“Is that OK?”
“Of course,” I said. I set the phone down, looked around the study, and lay my head down on the desk, listening to the faint blood-beat pulsing in my ear.
“Elisabeth,” I whispered. The name I loved most, but hadn’t dared to say.
IT WAS LATE OCTOBER, AND Sacha was almost eleven months old. I was busy with teaching and meetings and we were closing on our house in just a few weeks, and I was at the end of my fourth month now, starting to show, and all of it felt real and affected me in important ways, but through it all, there was only one thing that really mattered, and that was how sick my mother was. People kept asking me how I was doing—the few of my colleagues who had found out. Annabel. I kept smiling and saying fine, I’m fine, but I felt like a sleepwalker. I got up earlier ea
ch morning—we’d set the closing for mid-November and the move for the end of the month, so we didn’t have much time left in the House with the Green Shag Carpet. This alone seemed to wake me, this sense of time running out. We were packing again. Rolls of tape, string, stacks of cardboard boxes leaned up against things. Bacchus hunched in the corner, chewed up rolls of tape in his mouth; the afternoons were brimful with golden light, the trees a color I’d forgotten could exist in nature. Eighteen-carat gold, rimmed with lapis.
Awake, Sacha watched everything. She dangled from the swing we hung from the doorway, eyes steady. She pulled herself up in the playpen in the living room, her eyes sober, fixed on ours. As she watched, her mouth opened and closed, mimicking ours. She was trying, I told Jacques, to speak.
It was words that separated her from us, words Jacques and I volleyed back and forth while Sacha, eyes big, fastened on us soberly at dinnertime, mouth shaping a little as her gaze flew back and forth. As October drew to a close, her syllables and sounds began to round into recognizable forms, almost words—ta-ta-ta-TA!; da-da-da-DA!—and I’d take out her alphabet book of laminated family photos and we’d pore over them endlessly: all of the aunts first, then Bomma and Boppa, my mother blooming with improbable health from some earlier incarnation, beaming mischievously at us from under a curling red sticky B. Some nights we never made it to Cousins or Dogs, so content were we to linger over our Bs. We lay on the floor of the room that had been Sacha’s since we moved here and I flipped through the pages and practiced saying out loud for her the names of the people I loved most.
“Bomma,” I said. “Look! Here’s Bomma!”
She could learn words early. It could happen, couldn’t it?
Physically Sacha was still small for her age, and in terms of motor skills, a month or two behind most almost-one-year-olds: She had no interest in walking yet on her own, she pulled herself up on things only to sink down again with a sibilant grin, crawled instead of walked, and at the playground in Brookline where we went on weekends, other parents guessed she was eight or nine months. Not almost a year. It was all normal, my pediatrician reassured me. Some babies walk at nine months; some wait till they’re a year and a half old.