The Vanishing Expert

by David Movsesian

  While Dee prided herself on being an excellent judge of character, even she knew that she was no match for Bo, her aging black lab. He was a large dog who was getting on in years, which was obvious from his greying muzzle and the distinctive gimp that had become more pronounced during the last year.

  Bo had always been wary of new people, and he tended to warm up to women faster than he did to men. When a man entered the house whom Bo had never met, the dog was either aloof or standoffish. Aloof, Dee knew, was as close as Bo ever got to acceptance of a man on his first visit; with those men who didn’t pass his initial inspection, Bo would stand at a distance and bark until Dee was finally forced to escort him to another room and close the door, from which he would usually go on expressing his displeasure from a distance until he was assured that the offending guest had finally left. Bo had never met Richard— the dog came along about a year after Richard was out of the picture— but Dee felt certain that Bo would have given Richard an earful.

  James was sitting on the sofa next to Jean when Bo wandered into the room. He approached James cautiously at first, as was his custom, and he spent quite some time sniffing James’s shoes and pant legs. When Bo made an abrupt exit from the room, Dee was certain the barking was about to commence, and she prepared to leap up to escort the dog into the kitchen. Instead, Bo returned with a tennis ball and placed it on James’s lap. When James didn’t immediately pick up the ball, Bo poked it with his nose into James’s crotch, enticing James to play.

  “I think you made a friend,” Jean said.

  Dee was stunned. “Honestly, I’ve never seen him do that.”

  James slid down onto the floor as he often did with Max, and Bo dropped down onto the floor beside him. He offered the tennis ball to the dog, and Bo gently took it in his mouth and rolled onto his back so James could scratch the dog’s barrel of a chest.

  “Well, James, it looks like you passed the ‘Bo Test’,” Dee said.

  Over dinner, Jean asked Christina what Eugene Sisk had discussed with her when she and James were sent out of the room.

  “He wanted to know if you were paying me to have this baby?” Christina said casually.

  “He asked you that?” Jean said, obviously offended by the suggestion. “What did you say?”

  “I told him I had several offers, but you two were the highest bidders.” She did her best to suppress a laugh, but finally gave into it.

  “I’m sure it’s something he has to ask,” Dee assured her sister.

  “Was that all he asked?” Jean wondered.

  “No,” Christina said. “He talked to me about how hard it was going to be giving up the baby and seeing it all the time. He told me that if I had any second thoughts I should tell you now because after the baby comes, it’s too late.”

  This quieted the room for a moment as everyone considered the attorney’s remarks. It was a fear Jean had kept to herself, but hearing Christina give voice to it made it suddenly real. It gave her the opportunity to finally speak about it. “And do you?”

  “Do I what?” Christina asked.

  “Do you ever have any second thoughts?” Jean asked. “Do you ever worry about the things he talked about?”

  Christina thought for a moment, and shook her head. “I wonder sometimes what it’ll be like when I come visit you. It’s gonna be a little strange, I think.” She looked deliberately at her mother. “But this is something I really want to do, so if you’re worried about me changing my mind, don’t.”

  “I’m not just worried about you changing your mind,” Jean said. “I worry about you, too.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me,” Christina assured her.

  “I’m your mother,” Jean said. “It’s my job to worry about you. You’ll see.”

  An awkward silence fell over the room. Realizing her mistake, Jean wished she could draw the words back, but it was too late; they were registering on everyone’s faces.

  It was Christina who rescued her. “Someday,” she said pleasantly. “There’s no rush.”

  Through all of this, Dee’s husband, Gordon, remained noticeably silent, though it wasn’t clear whether his deliberate lack of participation in the conversation was an indication that he had no opinion on the subject or was brimming with them and just choosing to keep them to himself.

  As the evening progressed, James determined that Gordon Whitehill was a likable but uninteresting sort who was a gracious host— quick to offer a refill on a drink or to make certain the temperature of the room was to everyone’s liking— but not much on conversation. The five of them were up late into the evening, and the conversation was often jovial, sometimes serious and introspective, but always seeming to happen around Gordon. He wasn’t excluded from the conversation— all of them, including James, tried to engage him— so much as he seemed to always be at the periphery of it.

  It was only later in the evening when James found himself alone with Gordon in the kitchen, away from the women, that Gordon offered an opinion on the subject of the unusual arrangement that James, Jean and Christina had made.

  “Christina’s not being completely honest,” he said. He wasn’t even looking at James when he said it. He was busying himself with making a fresh pot of coffee, and for a moment James assumed he was just talking to himself. Then the words sank in.

  James frowned. “About what?”

  “About the baby,” Gordon said. “About having second thoughts.”

  It seemed an odd thing for him to say after having so little to say all evening. “Why would she lie about something like that?” James wondered.

  “I mean with herself,” Gordon explained. “I don’t think she’s being honest with herself.”

  “What makes you say so?” James asked.

  Gordon considered the question for some time, frowning as if he wished he hadn’t said anything at all, and James wondered if Gordon would suddenly become silent again.

  “She puts on a brave face,” Gordon told him. “But how could she not have second thoughts? How can she have any idea what this is going to be like for her?”

  James said nothing. To argue against Gordon’s opinion would have been self-serving, he thought (he desperately wanted Gordon to be wrong); to consider that what he said might actually be true was even more troubling. He decided not to discuss it any further with Gordon; he’d take it up with Christina if he found himself alone with her.

  As it turned out, they left Sunday morning after an enjoyable visit without James ever raising the subject with Christina, though Gordon’s remarks bothered him throughout their stay. Even when he found himself alone with Christina on more than one occasion, and the opportunity presented itself, he chose to let it pass, avoiding the question that was on his mind. Each time, he recalled Christina’s own words when she visited him in October and had cautioned him against telling her mother the truth about the baby’s father: No good can come of it, she’d told him at the time. James decided the same was probably true now.

  24

  The Wedding Tree

  When James and Jean would look back later, the last two months before the baby arrived would be a blur to them. When Jean wasn’t at the gallery, she was working at home, converting the third bedroom into a nursery. James helped her at first, but Jean quickly decided she wanted the nursery to be her project, not because she felt the need to do it without James, but because it occupied her mind during those quiet hours when she would otherwise be inclined to worry about how much change this baby would bring to their lives. When her imagination was left to wander unchecked, she knew it could be overwhelming. It was better, in her opinion, to keep busy.

  When James wasn’t working or preparing for the baby with Jean, he worked feverishly on Ben Jordan’s boat. Once the baby came, he knew, he’d be consumed with fatherhood and would be less inclined to spend his spare hours in Ben’s dusty garage. By the end of March, James had finished repairing the hull, which meant replacing all of the
planks and several of the braces so that the hull was once again as straight and true as it had been when it was new. He then set himself to the task of reassembling the boat, preserving as much as he could, replacing what he couldn't repair.

  So as not to fall behind, he spent long hours working on the boat. He worked all weekend while Jean was at the gallery, and at least one night each week, often driving directly from the day’s job site to the garage and working late into the night. Since it was always late when he finished and he was usually beyond tired and in need of a shower, he slept at his apartment on those nights; on most other nights, he slept at Jean’s house. He still thought of it that way— it was Jean’s house; Jean’s bed.

  Their lovemaking was increasingly spontaneous and natural. Where James had, at first, worried that it would be awkward for him knowing his history, brief as it was, with Christina, he quickly realized that when he was with Jean, he thought of nothing and no one else. They both found that their bodies fit so perfectly together that even on those nights when one or the other of them was just too tired for anything but sleep— sometimes it was both of them— they found that just lying together in the bed was satisfying. On those nights, they often began with Jean lying next to him, her head resting on his shoulder, her hand on his chest; eventually she would turn away from him and press her back against him, his arm wrapped around her, his hand on her breast. Occasionally, she would move against him, just slightly, but in such a way that she realized she’d aroused him, and she would playfully do it again, and they would find that last bit of energy that had eluded them earlier.

  They made certain they found quiet moments together outside the bedroom, too, knowing that the baby would soon make almost constant demands upon them. Jean knew this from experience— there was indescribable joy in having a baby in the house, but there was a good deal of work as well, and it never stopped. She knew they would one day look back on these months before the baby came and wish they’d found more time to just sit and enjoy the quiet, so she made certain they did that as much as possible.

  They kept their Sunday dinner dates as if they were sacred, and no matter how busy they were during the day, that Sunday dinner was a promise between them they would never break. The only difference in their ritual was that they frequently seized the opportunity to dine out at some of their favorite restaurants on the island, knowing it was a luxury that would become much more difficult with an infant.

  Without realizing it, they developed the habit of starting or finishing sentences with ‘Once the baby comes…’ and it often had the implication not only of change but of sacrifice. Usually, though, it meant they should savor those simple quiet times. For James, who eagerly anticipated the arrival of their child, those comments were made without any remorse or regret, but he sometimes worried that Jean’s remarks hinted at exactly that. More and more, he wondered if Jean ever questioned her decision.

  On that night in May— it would be their last night alone together before the baby arrived, though they didn’t know it at the time— they lay in their bed, Jean’s head resting on his shoulder as she did almost every night. It had been a long day and she lay with her eyes closed, inviting sleep to overtake her, but relishing their closeness and the feel of his skin against hers.

  “This is nice,” she said dreamily; she was somewhere between waking and sleep, her own voice sounding distant to her, as if it were coming from another room. “Once the baby comes, there won’t be much of this.”

  “Sleep?” James wondered, his fingers lightly stroking her hair.

  “That, too,” she said. “But this.”

  James took it to mean those quiet, tender moments when it was just the two of them and they weren’t listening for some small sound that meant one of them would have to leap up to tend to the baby. Still, he wondered.

  “Any regrets?” he whispered.

  There was a long pause when he could hear only the sound of her soft breathing, and he wondered if she’d drifted off to sleep.

  “Never,” she finally whispered.

  Then she turned away from him and he rolled toward her and pressed himself against her as was their ritual. On that night, she didn’t stir; she didn’t playfully move her body against his. She drifted quickly off to sleep, leaving him alone with his thoughts and his vague sense of worry.

  The following morning, Christina Berkhardt was sitting on a chaise lounge on her aunt’s screen porch when her water broke.

  She’d spent the morning as she’d spent the last several mornings, watching her aunt busily working in her garden. It had been a spring ritual for her aunt, who took great pleasure in toiling over her rows of carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash, and whatever else appealed to her; that year it was oregano, basil, parsley and garlic and a variety of other herbs. She loved the idea of planting her seeds and watching day-by-day as everything slowly emerged from the earth. Everything just tasted better when it came from her own garden, and she relished the hours she spent in it, making sure everything was just so.

  For the last few days, she’d spent more time in her garden than usual; certainly more than was necessary. Her additional efforts wouldn’t make her crop grown any faster, she knew, but this year, she was biding her time, and she was grateful for the distraction. She was exactly like her sister in that way; it was always better to be busy.

  Christina’s contractions began early that morning while she was still sleeping, albeit fitfully. In fact it was a particularly strong contraction that woke her an hour earlier than usual, and the anticipation of the next one that prevented her from going back to sleep. Throughout the morning, they seemed to get no stronger and no more frequent, so she barely mentioned it to her aunt; just one remark over breakfast when Dee noticed the taut expression on her face.

  “I think we’re getting close,” Christina said.

  Her due date was just a few days away, so while Christina didn’t want to worry her aunt, she knew enough to keep her close by where she could call out to her if she needed.

  She was sitting in the chaise sipping a tall glass of water with lemon when a particularly strong contraction took hold of her. She flinched and then sat upright, taking slow quick breaths. When she felt the sensation of wetness, she assumed at first she’d spilled her drink. Then she realized that her glass was still full but her dress was soaked through.

  “Aunt Dee?” Christina called out.

  Her aunt was standing just a few feet away with her back to the porch as she watered her plants. She turned and regarded her niece with the same peaceful expression she always had when she was tending to her garden.

  “Yes, dear?” Dee inquired.

  Christina was awkwardly lifting herself from the chaise as if she’d sat in something unexpected. “I think I might have a situation here,” she said, her voice surprisingly calm.

  Christina insisted on changing her dress before they left for the hospital, and Dee took that opportunity to call Jean. It was a Wednesday morning, just before noon, and she assumed her sister would be at the gallery, so she dialed that number first. Jean answered on the second ring.

  “It’s time,” Dee told her sister. “Her water just broke. We’re headed to the hospital now.”

  Jean felt her heart begin to race. “Can I talk to her?” she asked.

  Dee called out to Christina and told her to pick up the extension to speak to her mother.

  “Well, that was disgusting,” Christina said as she picked up the phone. Her tone was very matter-of-fact, and Jean found herself smiling despite the tears welling in her eyes.

  “I know you have to go, but I just wanted to wish you luck and tell you I love you.”

  Christina could hear her mother’s voice catch. “I know, mom” she said. “I love you, too.”

  “James and I will be there in a few hours,” Jean told her.

  Christina forced a laugh. “Yah, well, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to wait that long.”

&nbs
p; Jean began to cry. “My baby,” she said, referring to Christina.

  “Your baby has to go have your baby now,” Christina reminded her. “We’ll see you when you get here.” She hung up the phone before her mother could respond.

  It wasn’t a leisurely drive down the coast this time. Jean had quickly closed the gallery, hanging a sign on the door that she would reopen in a few days and apologizing for the inconvenience, and she hurried to the home in Northeast Harbor where James and Peter were working. James hastily left the job site and met Jean at her house where he took a quick shower and retrieved the overnight bags they’d packed a week earlier. Then they headed for Portland by way of the turnpike.

  When they arrived at the hospital, they found Christina sitting up in her bed looking tired but lovely and no longer the least bit pregnant. Jean said nothing as they entered the room; she just hurried in and sat on the edge of Christina’s bed and wrapped her in a tight embrace. Christina hugged her back, looking especially pleased, but when she realized her mother was weeping and had no intention of stopping (or of loosening her embrace) Christina peered over her mother’s shoulder at James and smiled. At first he assumed the smile was in regard to her mother’s flood of emotion at the moment, but he soon realized there was something more in it, something about the secret they shared and her satisfaction in having given him this gift.

  When Jean recovered herself, she drew back, laughing at herself and wiping her eyes. James approached Christina from the other side of her bed and took her hand, then leaned forward and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  “So, what’s new with you two?” Christina joked.

  They all laughed and Jean gave her daughter a friendly pat on the arm.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get here in time,” Jean said.