by Jamie Mason
But we were both doing it, changing our ways and being coy about the adjustments. Patrick’s little stash of money proved that he hadn’t trusted the setup of our lives for some time. It wasn’t all that different from the pharmaceutical trick I’d played to hedge my bets. Recognizing my own tactic in him tickled in the unease that had always been part of our background music.
• • •
“Can we try?” Patrick asked into the dark a week and a day later when he’d moved back into our bedroom. “Or is this it? Just you and me?”
I rolled onto my side toward him, my body stretched out along his, close enough to feel his heat, but not touching him. I was afraid to touch him, not knowing if he wanted me to. I was ashamed. And also still reluctant. I thought it might telegraph in contact.
“Yeah. We can try.” I risked the reach, trailed my fingertips down his chest and heard his breath catch. I’d startled him. “But, Pat, no calendar, okay? Let’s just see what happens and not push it.”
“Why don’t you want to have a baby?”
“I do. Or I don’t know that I don’t. It’s just a lot of pressure.” I scooted closer and kissed his bare shoulder, a peace token to steady the scales.
“How is it a lot of pressure? It’s just what people do. They have kids. You always said you liked my family. You liked the way I grew up. But I grew up with brothers and sisters. It’s so damned quiet around here.”
“I know. But, Pat, you like the quiet. You say so all the time.”
“I do like it. Or I did. But after almost ten years, I think we need more.”
“More what?”
“More of everything. More life.”
I tried not to be offended. More did sound good. He wasn’t wrong.
“Look, I’m not saying I want a zoo around here, Dee. I had more than enough of that my whole life growing up. We don’t have to have half a dozen, but even your mom had kids. Obviously.”
“Well, if she’s the example to follow, I’ll need a new career. . . .”
“She was awesome. You could do worse.”
“But could I do better? Or even half as well? It’s a lot to think about. I just don’t want to force it. We don’t need to. There’s plenty of time. Can we just see what happens?”
Patrick sighed. “You know what happens.”
“Then I’ll go with it.”
“You will?” He didn’t completely believe me; I heard a stubborn edge of a dare in his voice. A Prove it that went unsaid.
“I will.”
The pills had never been to hurt him. Not then and not when I renewed the doses two months later after a short lull of détente. They would protect us both for just a little while longer. It was a cautious testing of the bridge, a bridge that, once crossed, would transform an abstract vow made at a church’s altar into a very real baby in a pastel, converted guest room.
In my hope for a change in my own heart, I only hid the package better this time.
The memory of his confrontation in the kitchen mugged me now and again. I couldn’t get the replay of it to leave me be. It jumped out of nowhere when I was having a sip of coffee or stepping out of the shower or fuzzing out of focus during a call at work. I could still hear the bright rattle of the pills against the foil and feel the same scalding fear that had burned through me when he’d thrown them down on the counter on that Thursday afternoon.
The whole plot with the pills had always been a hedge against my growing concern that I’d probably got it all wrong, from the very beginning. It was a common enough mistake, and that was somehow comforting.
I had chosen Patrick for what he represented, not for who he was. But he should have forgiven that, because I had forgiven him for it. We shared it as a common bond. It wasn’t just my error. I had certainly disappointed his expectations of me, but I always would have. His forecast of who I would be was made of wishes, not evidence.
Because I had no blueprint for what I imagined normal should look like in the details, I knew now that I may have drawn it all cockeyed. In which case, unlike some mothers I knew, I would never put a cradle in the middle of a minefield.
• • •
As often as I cited her as the cause for my troubles, though, thoughts of my mother propped me up through the twitchy awkwardness of reconciling with Patrick. Unlike me, I’m not sure she had been capable of feeling graceless. Merely remembering her made me stand taller, and replaying the stories she told, and the way she told them, it guided me to the right things to say. He thawed when I mimicked her. So I mimicked her.
“Hey, Patrick,” I said into the phone before he’d got through his rapid-fire work greeting. “There will be daffodil gimlets on the deck when you get home. So don’t be late.” I used my mother’s voice, which was more cadence than accent. “Today’s the day, I’m happy to say. But it’s bullshit this year. We’re going to have to wear sweaters. It’s not getting out of the fifties. Brrrrrr.”
Patrick laughed, his younger-days, not-mad-at-me laugh that had been on leave of absence for longer than I’d admit. “I’ll be there.”
“Or you’ll be square.”
My mother celebrated the first bloom of daffodils with a vodka-gimlet party. The challenge was to drink the exact amount of Grey Goose and lime juice, and not a sip more, that would leave you as sunny between the ears as the little green-sworded, lion-headed harbingers of spring looked on the lawn’s border.
I smiled over our good-byes and sagged, both happy and sad, back into my office chair. I’d win him over first, then tempt myself back into line.
• • •
If I had reason to still doubt Patrick’s devotion and to play it coy with my brother after the pill debacle, it was rooted in guilt, as many suspicions are. And not just my guilt either.
My brother understood what I’d done with the birth control and my husband forgave me. Well, not forgave, perhaps, although that’s the word we used for a while. We moved on as a new couple afterward, relocated as it were, hand in hand, a little closer to the cliff ’s edge than we had ever been before.
I watched Patrick and I watched myself, uterus on pause, as things grew calmer and somehow stranger. The peace felt insistent over natural, less happy than trying not to be mad. I sensed his impatience vibrating in the air, the expectation of return on the investment of ten years’ time. I held on to the misgivings as they were transmitted down the tingling antennae of intuition. Vodka gimlets honoring the daffodils and extra effort celebrating the glow of reunion eventually gave way, as they must, to business as usual. Only it wasn’t our usual usual.
Patrick didn’t know that I realized he’d taken up a dark and distanced perch for an entirely new view of our lives, but I sensed it in every exchange. I felt it every time his shadow crossed mine, and I felt him try to hide it when we moved closer than that.
I folded down the unease to a portable, neatly hidden size. In the moonlit murk of our bedroom, listening to the rhythmic sigh of his sleep, those doubts grew paranoid flowers that, for the longest time, I pruned off in the rational light of day.
• • •
As Patrick drifted away, even before the frequent extended golf weekends and late nights at the office, my radar that I so hated pinged the truth time and again. I resisted snooping and calculating to the extent that I could, for as long as I could, soothing myself with the knowledge that national statistics bore out that at least four women on our street were flagging in the same quagmire I was. They just didn’t know it. I steadfastly looked the other way and tried to suppress what was in my blood. I never hassled him over my discoveries, so he assumed I’d never made them.
His shortcomings breached the vows no more than I’d failed an unwritten clause in our agreement—to be interesting and to make babies. And I was just happy we weren’t constantly, but casually, vigilant for a call on a special line in the den that hardly ever rang. No dedicated line, no stuffy diplomats dropping in with or without preamble, no hoodlums in military green skulking in for a
conference under cover of night. The lack of it all meant that we’d got it right, according to me. I’d kept the parts of life that my mother had used only for set decoration, and I’d jettisoned the rest.
I bided and abided. I could change it if I chose to. I could start and he could stop and we could be what we’d set out to be. I felt guilty that my hyperprimed intuition was an unfair advantage over him.
But I always thought of my mother when a wedding anniversary loomed. I counted off on my full complement of fingers and smiled at her little saying. I’d kept my man already for more years than my mother had fingers. But now I was down to my last pinkie, and Patrick had drawn dark on me.
11
Friday
Well, I’ve had my first look at Carlisle Inc. The highway engineers cut in this road around these low hills in wide, skirting loops in the most level ground they could find. The view just opened up in the last left-hand sweep I took, and there it was: an eight-foot-high chain-link fence that pens up half of all the eye can see from this side of the hill. A baby-blue sign, with plain white, block letters announces the company’s name and at the same time makes the point that there aren’t all that many places to buy aluminum dome sheds. There wasn’t any sense in paying for a fancy logo to set themselves apart.
I’m not ready to be there yet. I’ve had one glimpse of the place and already my heart is thudding in my temples. I pull in each next breath with greater effort, forcing the air down a narrowing path. The muscles in my arms are jumping under my skin.
I coast to the shoulder of the road and push the gear selector to park. For now, I’m still a good citizen. As such, I hit the button for the hazard lights, just as a good girl should; just as a normal person would. The rhythmic clicking jacks dread right up my spine. It sounds like panic and insanity marching in step. I slap it quiet.
I know why I’m here, and any reasonable person would say it’s Patrick’s fault. Or my own. And they’re not wrong, but I’m not reasonable. Not right now. I stalk myself through the flashing memory of my life. Everything I’m upset about, everything I’m angry about, everything I don’t have that I want and everything that I don’t want and somehow still have, and everything I’ve always wanted to know, but wasn’t told, they all have one thing, one source in common: Paul Rowland.
• • •
Patrick had just recently given up with his fascination with Deirdre, the girl at the coffee counter. He started buying his brew elsewhere, and I cleared his name as best I could with Simon. I’d forgiven Patrick without his asking, or indeed without his knowing, and was satisfied in my nobility, if not in our harmony.
Then Uncle Paul showed up unannounced one night after ten o’clock, soaked to the skin with a chill November rain. We hadn’t seen him in a long time, not since my mother’s funeral more than three years before, and it was hardly anything I’d peg as a welcomed intrusion.
“Sorry to drop in so late without calling,” he said.
“I’m sure.” I helped him drag the soggy coat off his shoulders. Paul had never got all the way to fat with age, but he had gone a bit walrusy in the shoulders, now heavy and rounded, somehow without losing height. He was always taller in person than he was in my memory. His hair and his mustache he’d let go a bit longer than he used to, lengthening his face to a slightly more glum version of himself. They were shot through with silver now.
“Where’s my candy?” I demanded.
“God, you looked just like her when you said that.” His smoker’s laugh had grown thicker in the intervening years. Everyone in Paul’s orbit smoked, even as it fell out of fashion.
“You couldn’t see me. I was behind you.”
“I can see with my ears as good as you can, Dee. And feel with my eyes, and hear with my fingers. Your mother learned her games from somewhere, you know.”
“What can I do for you, Paul?” Any sort of banter with him was just land mines in the field of my relative tranquillity.
Paul sat Patrick and me down in our own living room and told us that we had a little money now. My mother had socked away savings for decades in a hidden, numbered offshore account. She had willed it to me and Simon in the event of her death, via Paul’s administration over a lawyer’s or accountant’s. It had taken him, or more likely Them, a long while to secure the legitimacy of the funds and to follow the paper trail to a point of reassurance for everyone. But of course she’d done it right. Every i was dotted with visible ink and each t crossed with a verified flourish. The timing, though, stung.
I said, “Yeah, you know, this would have been really helpful last year. We had a pretty tight time and had to dip into the retirement funds to get by.” I didn’t offer Paul another beer even though his empty bottle had been sitting on the table since just after the pleasantries.
“Don’t imagine I didn’t think about that, Dee. Times are tight for everyone. I know how it is when you’re counting on bonus money that doesn’t come in. It can be a real bitch to the bottom line, not to mention the nerves. But at least you two kept your jobs. I just couldn’t bring this up until we’d checked it all out. Money is gasoline and curiosity is matches.”
I didn’t ask him how he knew about our circumstances, and Patrick hadn’t seemed to notice. Before any of our other troubles, my mother’s death had wounded my husband. Our lack of a baby for all his reading up on it had frustrated him, then the added insult of canceled bonuses in the face of economic downturn, and the slowly mounting money shortage, had all stacked up to humiliate him more than he’d say out loud.
All these things he’d borne in blaring silence, his blood pressure playing ruddy in his skin. I had tried to see his playfulness with Deirdre as a bleeder valve for his frustration. The mortgage on his home and his childless wife were reminders of all that wasn’t going well at the moment. His little side bank account bothered me more for its fundamental weight. If it was a petty-cash fund, it was uncalled for. I didn’t hassle him about spending. But if that money was the bare ribs of a lifeboat in the making, well . . .
I would have waited it out for the chance to talk these things through, but first of all I would have had to craft a work-around to explain how I knew about them in the first place. In the midst of that puzzle came the reveal of my little birth control stunt, which had done nothing positive for his mood. The only upside to it was that I’d been relieved of the need to straighten out the rest of the mess. So instead, I waived off the balance as a wash and set my eyes on the horizon. I tried to make a blank slate of it.
After a short swell of renewal, his temper had been riding an increasingly short fuse and his patience was a heavy burden he’d shrug off at our doormat, leaving me to tiptoe around his delicate sensibilities. He’d stopped bringing up the subject of babies altogether, and I wouldn’t stoop to using it as a shortcut to sunnier conversations.
Paul had unwittingly rolled up just in time to miss the smoke end of the evening’s fireworks. Dinner had ended with me scrambling for a way back from a long drop into an unfathomable argument.
“Want me to get his number for you?” Patrick had wiped the corners of his mouth on his napkin. The globed candles that used to light the tables of our favorite local restaurant had been replaced by battery votives that pretended to live like their flamed counterparts. The effect was almost the same until you caught the repetition in the flicker pattern.
Patrick was lit from below in the too-dark restaurant. He looked unfriendly, sinister even, all sharp jaw and glinty sparks where his eyes watched from deep caves of brow shadow. Historically, he’d never been the jealous type.
“Huh?” I said.
“The waiter. I can ask him for his number if you’re too shy.”
“Pat, what are you talking about?”
“You’re tracking that guy all over the room. He’s a little young for you, don’t you think?”
“Oh, come on.”
“Yeah, I’m imagining it.” Patrick was simmering down from insult to pout. His complaint had lost momen
tum as soon as it was out loud in the air between us. It was ridiculous.
“Actually, I was just looking at him. I think he looks like Simon did when he was that age. I mean, if he had curly hair. Don’t you think so?”
“Okay, that’s not a little bit creepy.”
“What? Ew. Don’t do that. You’re the one saying I have motives, so I’m explaining myself. I’m just trying to catch a look at him in the light. It’s so damned dark in here. C’mon, Pat.”
The money my mother had left us—almost $500,000, after the taxes were paid—was a balm to some of his hurts, but his moods still blinked off and on, not unlike the votives at our restaurant. I just hadn’t picked up on the pattern yet. For certain, I saw him brighter in the brights and more grim in his lows, so I tread carefully, picking my way past his rise and fall, aiming for our old level ground. I reserved the right to hope the money would help us in more than just the finances.
Breathing room isn’t the same thing as happiness, but money can surely buy it.
• • •
What goes up, though, swings back the other way eventually. And sometimes “eventually” doesn’t take all that long to pounce. You’ve barely said your thank-yous for a little slice of good fortune and the rug’s back out from under you before you’ve got even a quick feel of the nap of it between your toes.
We’d not taken in three of the plumper bank statements when the text came in from a number I didn’t recognize. Mrs. Aldrich—I need to speak to you.
• • •
Of everything I ever resented about the way I was raised, the most persistent was the ghost of constant alert, the fixed cowering under a subtle pall of anticipation. From my mother’s return from the Long Trip onward, it felt as if I never fully exhaled. Something was coming. Something could happen at any moment. Wait for it. Be ready.
Of everything that ever bewildered me about my mother, her warm acceptance of inevitability was the oddest. She embraced it. She wanted it. Let it be bad, but if it was a sure thing, she liked it better than a “maybe.”