“I want wine,” Diane said. “Let’s start over. Would you like some wine?”
There had been some champagne to accompany the caviar, but for ages, all she’d allowed herself was the taste, a hint to complement the roe they were pushing on buyers. She pulled a dusty bottle from the wine rack, a Bordeaux heavy with sediment.
When Diane hovered the bottle over her glass, Cindy nodded.
They steered the dinner to ostensibly safer topics. Cindy asked how Diane and Kyle had met. They met at a wedding, Diane said, sanitizing the truth: they actually met on Bourbon Street when she was a bridesmaid at a bachelorette party. She had ordered a complicated martini at a dive bar that only served daiquiris and beer, and Kyle, a total stranger, had laughed uproariously at her. She told him to fuck off, expecting to never see him again, but soon ran into him at a different, fancier bar, and so he had the exact martini she had tried to order at the first place sent to her table. “I know what I like,” she had told him, and he asked for her number.
Back then Kyle was a catfish farmer, living exactly the life his father had lived, exactly the life his father had laid out for him, and although the perpetual sameness sometimes disappointed him, Diane felt stirred by his determination to carry the family legacy. There was security in his commitment that she had always lacked, the daughter of a mercurial mother and a father of various business trips with nondescript objectives. She was still in her twenties then, and her career had already changed three times. When they met she was working at a vineyard, a sommelier gig that exceeded her credentials, but she knew she’d never be a master sommelier with a steady career. She lacked the nose for it. Her body had disappointed her, even then.
They had married. They had planned on children. All those years ago, they had taken his business and tried something new. She knew what the restaurants were buying in Napa. They still wanted caviar, they just didn’t want the optics of obliterating a natural population. They kept the catfish running long enough to fund the gradual transfer to sturgeon. It took years for the sturgeon to mature enough to produce the eggs. It was a ten-year plan. Ten years to see the return on their investment and to finally start a family. All things led back to this in any conversation they had.
“May I see a picture of your niece?” Diane asked.
Cindy smiled indulgently as she pulled out her cell phone, tapped and scrolled through her screen, then slid it across the table.
Diane held it up so Kyle could see. A baby with tiny pink pustules across her cheeks and a deep brow crease glared up at them. “Oh,” Kyle breathed, and Diane pressed her knee against his under the table.
“She’s sweet,” Diane said.
Cindy burst into a quick cackle. “Neva had a mean case of baby acne. I didn’t even know that was a thing, but that’s how she came out, red and angry at the world. I thought my sister would blame me. Like my diet gave her acne or something.” She sighed. “She’s beautiful now though.”
Diane swiped to the next few pictures, a slideshow that aged Neva into a toddler with spiky black hair and gaping smiles.
“My sister has a story like yours,” Cindy said. “She’s my big sister. They’d tried everything.”
“Did she ask you?”
“No, she’d never. I offered.”
Diane swiped to a picture of Cindy, moonfaced and pregnant in a long floral dress. A woman with some kind of chemical formula tattooed across her clavicle embraced Cindy from behind, an arm curved over her stomach. In the photo, Cindy stared up, neck twisting to adore her.
Diane held up the screen. “Is this your sister?”
Cindy flushed and reached for the phone. “No. Sorry. That’s my ex.”
She put the phone back in her purse and took a large sip of her wine. They all took sips of their wine. Diane felt she’d seen something she wasn’t supposed to. A glimmer of Cindy’s what-might-have-been.
“Where’s your restroom?” Cindy asked, folding her napkin and placing it on the table.
“Just past the kitchen, to the right,” Kyle said.
Diane watched as she walked away, ducking into the dark foyer, then leaned into Kyle and asked, “What do you think?”
“We just met her.”
“I know, but keep an open mind.”
“Do you want to be married to this person? Because we will be linked to her, for life,” he said. “Do you want that?”
“Maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
“I don’t like her. She’s arrogant.”
Diane felt mildly stunned, the same sensation she’d had as a kid roughhousing with her brother when he’d accidentally bopped her on the nose. It was akin to embarrassment, a form of rejection.
“Arrogant?”
“If we do this,” he said, “we need someone we can trust.”
“You keep saying these words, and I don’t know what you’re attaching them to.” But she wondered. She knew Kyle grew up in a small-town Baptist family. His mother still said things at Christmas dinners that alarmed her. That was their usual holiday couple’s fight: sharing harsh whispers in his childhood bedroom, a room that had thankfully shed its camo bedspread years ago. “You need to speak up to her,” she would say, and Kyle would reassure her that they were on the same team but his mother was stuck in her ways. What good would it do, he had asked, to only share bitter words with a woman who would never change, who had aged rapidly in recent years? Last year, Diane noticed that his mother could no longer walk with a straight back. She leaned on the counters as she worked the kitchen, shooing away anyone who tried to help her. Diane felt trapped by these visits. They sullied her admiration for Kyle, a man she thought agreed with her about the poisonous aspects of what some people called tradition, but whose priorities became contradictory when faced with family. But she felt it too, the futility of trying to change a woman who cried easily at any gesture of familial generosity and who also assigned articles before categories of people, spouting offhand remarks about “the gays” or “the Mexicans,” failing to connect these terms to townspeople she did business with every week.
“I’m just saying, she’s clearly a flighty artist type,” he said. “We need someone who will be healthy and reliable.”
“You thought I looked healthy and reliable, but joke’s on us both,” she said, then added, “Don’t take away our options.” Even as she said it, she felt a jittery rage coursing through her, a desire to swipe her arm across the figurative tabletop of options and see which pieces Kyle would glue back together.
“You’re the one who said no to IVF,” he said.
“Shush, she’s coming back.”
She could see Cindy checking her cell phone. Whatever she read, it made her smile. Another picture of her niece, perhaps, but no, it was probably too late in the evening for that. Maybe, she worried, it was a new girlfriend. How could you convince a woman to carry your child when she was trying to start a life of her own?
“Would you like dessert?” she asked, as Cindy situated herself. “We have lavender sorbet. You can eat that, right?”
“That’s really nice of you, but please don’t trouble yourself,” Cindy said.
Diane worried that Kyle seemed relieved. She squeezed his knee under the table and glanced pointedly at him, prompting him to say, “Really, it’s no trouble.”
Diane forced a smile, like she was having a sudden inspiration rather than following a script she had mapped out days before, and added brightly, “And we have sherry, a really wonderful sherry that you absolutely should try.”
“That sounds nice,” Cindy said, “but I can’t stay out much later. I have to open the bakery in the morning.”
“You mean The Basket? I didn’t know you worked there.” Diane would go each Friday morning, the one morning she allowed herself to arrive late to the hatchery, and buy a cinnamon roll and a latte served in a large ceramic bowl. It was one of her purest mundane pleasures, and now she pictured herself sitting at the counter, talking to Cindy as she arranged the baked goods
in the display; Cindy smiling as she wiped the flour down the front of her apron and, with any luck, that apron stretching across an expanding belly until one day Diane would insist that Cindy stop working. Please, she would say, I’ll cover your expenses. Just stay home and relax. Maybe she would bring cinnamon rolls to Cindy’s apartment. Or whatever baked good that Cindy could eat. Maybe Cindy, great with child, would crave the yolky, soft dough.
“I just started,” Cindy said. “My resumé is pretty random at this point.”
“You’re still young,” Diane said.
“Not that young,” Cindy said. “Old enough that I can’t write things off as simply having fun or discovering myself.” She said the last two words like she was mocking someone real, someone who had judged her harshly.
“You have time.” Diane reached across the table and touched her hand. You have time I may want to take from you, Diane thought, feeling suddenly disingenuous. But couldn’t it be a ripe year for them both? I will make it count for her, as well as me, she thought. If this happens, please, she wished. Please, if this is allowed to happen.
Cindy used her free hand to pat Diane’s before pulling away. The evening was slipping. She wanted something to happen that hadn’t yet. She knew it was too much to expect any resolution about surrogacy, but she wanted a token of progress, a sense that tomorrow would be incrementally different than the thousand days preceding it.
“Let’s hang up your art,” she said, rising from the table.
Cindy retrieved the chimera of driftwood and nest and asked from the shadows of the foyer, “Where do you want it?”
“I was thinking our guest room,” Diane said.
She left Kyle clearing the plates, which he happily did to avoid further conversation, and led Cindy to the guest room on the other side of the house. Although their house was large, it was all one story, a sprawling midcentury ranch. The house had been on the property neighboring the hatchery that Kyle had inherited from his father, who had commuted each day before sunrise from his tiny hometown an hour away. The same week that Kyle proposed to Diane, he took her to this very house and told her of his plans to buy it: how work would always be close, they would always be close, and the kids would be just down the hall. She had teased him when he had said they could grow old here, explaining excitedly that there weren’t any stairs.
Diane flicked on the lights of the guest room, revealing walls the color of lemonade and a fainting couch tucked beneath the window in the corner so that someday (she had originally thought) she could breastfeed there and watch the breeze swaying the wisteria vines, which were prettier than the gingko leaves that had once sprung from the now-dead tree.
“We want to make this the nursery,” Diane said. “We’d take out the bed, obviously, and put the crib in that corner.”
“I like that it’s yellow. It’s a happy color,” Cindy said, still holding the driftwood. “Where were you thinking this would go?”
“I was hoping you could help me decide.”
“It needs to be out of reach, wherever it goes,” Cindy said, tapping a thorn of rusted barbed wire tucked into the nest.
“Oh, of course.” Diane sank into the plush duvet of the bed. “I’m an idiot.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Cindy said, sitting on the foot of the bed, a few feet away, the driftwood in her lap.
“Sometimes I think maybe I’m just not supposed to be a mother.” There was no stopping it then. She felt an audible sob welling up in her.
“Supposed to?” Cindy said. “No such thing.”
“Sorry,” Diane said, wiping at her eyes. “It must be the hormones.” Even though she hadn’t taken those in ages. It was an old reflex, to use that excuse.
Cindy reached across the bed, placing her hand on Diane’s knee. “Sometimes I dream that Neva is my daughter. Sometimes I wake up and I can’t remember the dream itself, but I know that’s what it was. When I do remember, it’s like a memory of a thing that never happened, so real that it takes a moment to process that this is my life, not the memories of my dreams. But I have these visceral memories of her calling me Mom, memories of when she’s grown up already.”
“I don’t know that I could handle that,” Diane said.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Not giving me a platitude.”
“If you could go back in time, would you still do it?”
Cindy nodded. “I think so.”
They decided instead to hang the nest in the living room, where they found Kyle, absorbed by his phone and sipping whiskey, an unstopped decanter beside him.
“I think it should be high above the mantle,” Cindy said. “High enough that it exists by itself, no visual clutter nearby.”
Diane saw Kyle smirk into his crystal highball glass.
“Will you get the ladder?” Diane asked him.
“It’s at the hatchery.”
“I really should go soon anyway,” Cindy said.
“Sobriety checkpoints at Highway Seven and along Jackson,” Kyle said.
Diane jumped in before Cindy could respond. “Why don’t you come with us to see the hatchery? Let the wine fade a bit.”
“She doesn’t want to,” Kyle said. “She probably thinks it’s a prison fueled by fish tears.”
“Kyle!”
Perhaps it was pity or a need to resist Kyle’s assessment of her, but Cindy responded, “I’ll go. Let’s go.”
They crammed into Kyle’s truck with Cindy sandwiched between them in the front bench seat so that her thigh was unavoidably pressed against the length of Diane’s. She could smell something astringent, like eucalyptus but milder, wafting from her skin. When the truck swerved on gravel, Diane held onto the door handle, trying not to slide further into Cindy’s space.
The drive was short. They could have walked if it weren’t for the ladder. From the hatchery’s parking lot, the windows of the house were still visible, leaking the amber interior light. The fishery itself was a large warehouse with a corrugated steel roof and sheet metal siding.
Inside, the water filters hummed and percolated. The tanks smelled like tide pools gone stale in the sun. Cindy wrinkled her nose, raised a hand to her mouth.
“You get used to the smell,” Diane said. It was only half-true. You grow desensitized, she thought, but if she focused on it, she could still detect a hint of ammonia, a brackish taste to the air.
They had two dozen tanks. Diane led Cindy to a tank of fish that were three feet long, dark shadows circling beneath the water.
“We’ve had these since we started,” Diane said.
“Siberian Beluga hybrids,” Kyle explained. “They mature faster. We needed fish that would produce in time to see a profit.”
“Hybrids,” Cindy murmured. “You made them?”
“Yes,” Kyle said, “and they’re better than either fish by itself. Tastes like Beluga without the difficulties of raising just Beluga.” Kyle smiled, then added, “They’re a little bit cannibalistic.”
“Stop it, Kyle.” Diane knew he was taking a victory lap, trying to drive home to Cindy how wrong she had been to judge him.
Cindy was staring into the water. “They look so strange.”
“Would you like to touch one?” Diane asked.
Cindy smiled with a childish earnestness Diane had not yet witnessed.
Kyle looked surprised, then stern. “Are your hands clean? Free of any lotion?”
Cindy nodded.
“Maybe you should wash your hands just to be safe,” Kyle said. “I can show you where. The sinks are by the ladder.”
He gestured for her to follow, but Diane cut in, “You go ahead Kyle. She washed her hands before we left the house. It’s fine.” She wanted the moment to feel spontaneous, for Cindy to feel swept up.
Kyle shook his head, then left for the back room.
The fish, stirred by the lights, were circling in a school, a stream of shadows closing in on itself. Diane wouldn’t normally risk th
e touching. There was always the outside chance the fish could get infected by some unanticipated pathogen. So much had gone into cultivating these fish, these hybrids that were the foundation of their business. But connection required risk, and maybe even sacrifice. She was making her offering now, guiding Cindy’s hand into the water, reaching for the closest shadow, a slower fish, curious to its detriment.
Cindy’s eyes grew wide and she gasped. “It’s so smooth. I thought it would feel different.”
As she watched the younger woman slide her hand along the fish, Diane felt her stomach pulling upward as if corseted to her spine and yanked by laces. She pressed her hand against her abdomen, bracing herself, conscious of the patches of abnormal skin beneath. It would be impossible, but she thought she could feel heat emanating from them. She missed the smoothness of her own skin.
“They don’t have scales exactly,” Diane explained, “but if you touch them on the ridges that line their back or sides, you’ll feel these bony growths that some people think are scales.”
Cindy reached in again, searching, and again Diane felt the tugging sensation, then a feverish dizziness.
Cindy flung her hand out of the water and looked at Diane. “How unusual.”
“What did it feel like?” She wanted to know, had Cindy felt what she felt?
“Like armor.”
Diane dipped her own hand in the water and slid her fingers along the jagged spine of a fish, but she felt nothing inside. She motioned for Cindy to touch the fish again.
“It’s okay,” Cindy said.
“Each one feels different,” she said. “Try it.” It was technically true, but no one would ever notice the minute differences of the touch. But for a moment her mind ran wild. She thought, What if I’m linked to them all, cursed by them all? Or if it’s just one, if I could figure out which one it was, I could keep it safe, treat it better than the rest…. Sturgeon could live a hundred years …
But Cindy wouldn’t help her. “Really, I’m fine,” she said.
“Just touch the damn fish!” Diane said, pointing.
As soon as she said it, Cindy backed away from the tank, retreated from Diane with the wariness of someone stumbling upon a snake on the trail, noticing it inches away when at first it seemed there had been only leaves.
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 5