by Drew Perry
“Quiet,” I said. “He goes away.”
“That’s what Carolyn says, too.”
“I think he doesn’t have any idea what to say to her.”
“I’m not surprised,” Alice said. “I don’t think he possibly could.”
I started sleeping as much as possible. I took naps. I slept late into the mornings, through Alice calling me from the balcony, telling me the parachutist was coming by, that he had a new flag, a fireman’s helmet, a tape deck belting out show tunes. I went to bed before the late-night talk shows came on. The way I had it tallied was this: I needed all my rest now, because once we had little Bosporus or Dardanelles in the house, I’d need to spend every night lying awake, being ready at a moment’s notice to fail to rescue her by boat.
Hurley poured new foundations. The Twice-the-Ice people sent a man to tinker with the brain inside Number Two, and he got it to make ice as advertised. I went to see Robbie at Me Kayak about the stolen kayaks. They were still stolen. And Robbie was right: There were too many employees by half. Mid told me we shouldn’t fire anybody. He said one or two of them would quit soon enough, or, less officially, just disappear, their final paychecks sitting in the office, ready but never picked up. He said kids disappeared all the time. I flipped through the stack one afternoon—a dozen checks for a hundred, two hundred dollars. “You just leave them here?” I asked Mid.
“Writeoff,” he said.
I went to the grocery. I bought off-brand Triscuits. Weav-Its. Alice had a thing for the store brand, ate them by the boxful. She started drinking cranberry juice. All the combo flavors. Grape-cranberry, blueberry-cranberry. She’d never liked cranberry juice before. At the classes—we started going to the birthing classes, where everybody was much more pregnant than we were—they said cravings were perfectly normal. The books said that, too, and the pamphlets, and everything all over the Internet.
I hated the classes, not because they scared the shit out of me, which they did, but because of how much shined-up glimmering joy they forced into the room. Everyone smiled at every moment, and when they didn’t smile, they cried, and then everybody smiled about the crying. We were in Condensed Baby and Delivery. There was regular Baby and Delivery, but it was full. There was a cheery desperation that hung on the instructors, a husband-and-wife team who seemed sorry for us. “Now, if this was regular Baby and Delivery,” they’d say, again and again, and then drop some joyful piece of information about birth plans or cervix dilation, and Alice would smile, and everybody would smile, and I would stare off at the wall of brochures. Mom, You’re Beautiful. Post-Partum Questions. Choices and Changes. The perfect families on the fronts of the brochures were in assorted states of smile.
The extra sleeping left me plenty of time to wake up in the middle of the night, lie in the half-dark, look at all the paintings of birds, and know this: Mid was in a full-fledged racket. Alice was past halfway.
“Something I’d like to run by you,” Mid said. We were sitting in the Camaro at Twice-the-Ice Number Two, watching people buy ice. We were betting out of piles of quarters on the dash on whether people would go bag or bulk. His heart wasn’t fully in it, but he was killing me. He had the knack for it.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“It would be totally fine if you said no.”
“Got it.”
“How would it be if Olivia came to live with you guys for a little while?”
“What?”
“Just a couple of weeks,” he said. A guy drove up in a hybrid. Mid picked up a quarter, spun it through his fingers. “Bag,” he said.
“He’s a bulker,” I said.
“There’s no cooler in there. You watch.”
The man walked around the back of his car, popped the trunk. No cooler. I said, “Live with us how?”
“Like a little summer camp, I guess, is Carolyn’s idea. She and Delton cooked this up.” The man went over to the Twice-the-Ice, put his money in, and the machine delivered a bag. I put another quarter on Mid’s side. “Be the bag,” he said. “That’s your problem.”
“I don’t think that’s my problem.”
Mid said, “You’ll bounce back.”
“Are you serious about this?” I said. “With Delton?”
“As a heart attack.”
“Would she even want to live with us? She barely knows us.”
“Carolyn says she’s got some bond with Alice. And she likes you. She says you’re normal.”
“Normal.”
“She means it as a compliment.”
“I have to talk to Alice,” I said. “I mean, I’d want to do that first.”
“Carolyn talked to her.”
“She did?”
“She thought it’d be best to clear it through her first, and then ask you.”
I said, “Could you maybe start over and go a little slower?”
He leaned back in his seat. We had the windows down, had found a little shade to park in. “So we grounded Olivia,” he said. “For six or eight years. Or until she hits menopause.” The compressor up on top of the Twice-the-Ice was humming. “But it’s not going so well. We’re not doing a very good job of it, I guess. There’s a kind of general distrust around the dinner table. Plus she keeps lodging all these complaints.”
“Complaints?” I said.
“We suck, we don’t understand her, we don’t listen, Nic’s going to be a teacher.”
“That’s not a complaint. The teacher thing.”
“You explain it to her. And she’s on the tapes, by the way. She’s not buying, thank God, so they can’t really hit her with anything, but she’s there. Her dumbass friends are still buying. Agents Friendly and Helpful called me up yesterday to let me know. I’m supposed to meet them at some Waffle House in Ocala to see the thing.”
“Tell me again how this is just the cops trying to bust your kitchen guys, and not something bigger.”
“Relax,” he said. “You and Carolyn. I think they got some grant to use their tiny cameras, and they’re bored.”
“That’s what you think? Honestly? Doesn’t all this seem elaborate to you?”
“I’ll give you that much.” He took off his sunglasses, put them on the dash with the quarters. “I’ve got you totally walled off, OK? You’re all set. Don’t let any of this wad your panties.”
“That doesn’t make me feel a ton better,” I said.
“I can’t help that. Anyway. Listen. She’s grounded, right? But kids keep showing up in the driveway, and she keeps riding away with them, standing around on videotape while they purchase recreational pharmaceuticals, that kind of thing.”
“That doesn’t sound very grounded.”
“I told you we were doing it wrong.”
“How would living with us do anything?”
“No clue,” he said. “But we sat her down, told her things weren’t working for us, and asked her what she thought we should do.”
“And she chose this?”
“She had a lot to say about needing her space. I don’t think she knows what that means, but she said it.”
“And Carolyn talked to Alice?”
“Yes.”
“And Alice said yes.”
“She did.”
“Are we supposed to keep her grounded, too?”
“We’ll all sit down,” he said. “We can figure out some rules together, if this is OK with you.”
“But you said she doesn’t follow the rules now.”
“These will be new rules. They’ll work much better.”
“What’s going on with her, anyway?” I said.
He shook his head. “I think she is fifteen in America. I think that’s what’s going on.” A pickup truck, spray-painted green, pulled into the lot. Mid said, “One more time? Double or nothing?”
“Double or nothing won’t do anything for me,” I said. “I’m too far behind.”
“Come on. You choose. I’ll take whatever you don’t pick.”
I looked at the truck.
“Bulk,” I said.
“You’re not even trying.”
“Sure I am.”
“Bag,” he said. “Has to be.” An older guy got out, shuffled up to the chute, pressed BAG. “See?” Mid said.
“How can you tell?”
“You have to have a feeling.”
“I had a feeling.”
“You have to have a different feeling. Let’s get you home.”
I slid another quarter his way, and he swept his winnings off the dash.
Alice was in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, pants down around her feet. The door was open. “I’m bleeding,” she said. She’d been crying. She wasn’t anymore.
“How much?” I said.
“Not very much.”
The inside of my head went church-still. “It’s probably the same thing as before.”
“It’s not the same. It’s new. Something’s wrong.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We have to call the doctor,” she said.
“Is Delton coming to live with us?” I was floating, confused. “Did that happen?”
“Walter. Go call. Please.”
I went to the kitchen, dialed the number off the fridge magnet, waited while music played on the other end of the line. I could only see directly in front of me. Everything on the edges blurred and dimmed. A nurse picked up and I told her Alice’s first and last name, her date of birth. I told her about the blood. She wanted to know how much. “Not very much,” I said.
“Well, we’re probably not supposed to be bleeding at all, are we?” she said. Everything was always very we at North Florida Fertility.
I said, “Probably not.”
“So let’s just go on and get you in here this afternoon, then. How’s two-thirty?”
I checked the digital on the stove. One o’clock. “Sure,” I said.
“Super. Now the most important thing we can do between now and then is to relax. Can we do that?”
I figured it was best to give her the answer she wanted. “We can do that.”
“Great,” she said. “So we’ll see you soon, alright?”
“OK,” I said, and hung up the phone.
One thing I knew without question—of the many places where my life didn’t add up anymore, here was a good one: I still and still did not want a child, did not want to be up at three in the morning singing Steely Dan into a screaming baby’s ear, did not want to have to decide between cloth diapers and whatever disposable chemical weaponry was on sale at the big box. And I did not want, later on, to have to explain the vagaries of half-cooked semi-sexual attraction in our busted species to a crying twelve-year-old home too early, heartbroken, from her seventh grade Winter Ball—if they even had such a thing in a place like Florida.
But in equal and opposite measure—and this was true, gravitationally so—I did not want anything to be more difficult for Alice than it already was, than I’d already made it. I did not want the bogeyman arriving at our doorstep in the form of undercover cops, of Mid kicked out of his house, of Delton running from Mid, or from Nic, or from herself. And I knew this, too: I surely did not want calamity to present in the form of two teaspoons of bright red blood in the toilet. As much as I was wholly unprepared for a child to arrive, bidden or unbidden, in our lives, I did not in any way want Alice to bleed her into the middle of Aunt Sandy’s ducks-and-geese wallpapered bathroom on the fourth floor of a beachfront condominium we had no business living in. That we had no real business living anywhere else anymore didn’t play much into the equation. Nothing did. There was no equation. There was only Alice, and there was only me. And even those numbers weren’t exactly right.
We got her dressed and out the door and down to the parking garage, got her belted in, got us out on A1A and then the interstate. Alice was far away, off somewhere else—back in Charlotte, maybe, before any of this. Back to when we could grow flowers out by the little brick stoop of our little brick house, when we could sit in the lawn and do nothing other than watch the weeds grow. I held my hands at ten and two, checked my mirrors. I wanted to throw up. Palm trees and pine and swamp ran by us on both sides of the road, interrupted only by the occasional crane supply company or low-rise call center. We went over the river and I looked down at the naval base, at the outline of the few downtown skyscrapers there were. Jacksonville. It could have been any city. I found our exit. Everything was still in the same place it had been last time. I drove Alice right up to the door, stopped there in the drop-off lane.
“I’m OK,” she said.
I said, “I’ll walk you in.”
“I’ll be fine. Just park the car.”
“Are you sure?”
She stared out the windshield, ran one finger along the smooth hollow of her neck. She didn’t get out.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you, too.”
“We’ll be fine,” I said, hearing it, knowing I sounded like Mid. “This will be fine.”
“You can’t know anything about that,” she said.
“Sure I can.”
She said, “I thought you were the one who was panicking.”
“I am,” I said. “That’s me.”
“Then what’s this?”
“I’m on morale,” I said. “For right now. I’ll go back to panic soon.”
“The BOJ is not happy,” she said.
“I know that.”
She sent the lock up and down in the door. “I told Carolyn that Olivia could come and live with us,” she said.
“Mid was saying.”
“I think she needs something. I think maybe we could give her whatever that is. Is that alright?”
I said, “I think it’s the same as anything else.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’ll learn to live through it,” I said.
A couple crossed in front of our car. “Do you think I’m ruining our lives?” she said.
“Do I think you’re what?”
“Ruining our lives. Yours, at least.”
“No,” I said. “That’s me. I’m the one doing that.” I was supposed to have found some way to stand between Alice and the world, between Kitchenette and the world. That was my job. It was all of our jobs, what we were supposed to do for each other. “I know I’m supposed to be better,” I said. “I know I’m supposed to be some kind of father.”
Alice took my hand and held it, rested it on the gearshift. A bus rattled by out on the road. “Park the car,” she said. “Park the car and meet me in there.”
“I’ll take you,” I said.
“I want to do it.”
“Alice,” I said.
“I want to do it. Really.” She sounded recorded, her voice drained out of a jar. She got out, shut the door softly, then turned and walked inside the building. The mirrored double doors opened and shut for her automatically, swallowing her, and then all I could see was the wavy reflection of our hatchback, of some dumbass guy—me—sitting behind the wheel. I checked her seat for blood. There wasn’t any. I found a space and parked the car.
The waiting room was completely empty. No Alice. She was gone. All the frosted windows up at the desk were closed. I heard a child crying somewhere behind one of the walls. I stood there as long as it took the Muzak to cycle through a song, or maybe two or three. I couldn’t tell. It would be so much easier, I’d thought the whole time, if there was no baby. Now I knew that was not true. That there was no easy thing, no simple place to land. And if we lost it—would she think I was secretly happy? That this was what I’d wanted all along? My ears were ringing. Another song came on. A nurse in turquoise scrubs opened a door, leaned out into the waiting room like she didn’t actually want to set foot in it. She said, “Mr. Ingram?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why don’t we come back this way.”
“Where’s Alice?” I said. “My wife?” I walked toward her.
She checked her clipboard. She said, “Let’s get set up with
the doctor, and he’ll answer all your questions.” She moved to one side to let me through the door, and when it closed behind me, there was quiet. No music. Nothing. “We’re just right down here,” she said, easing past me, and I followed her down the hallway, past scales and benches and bathrooms. When she got to the last door, the door that had to be Alice’s, she stopped. “Sir?” she said. I was too far behind her to see into the room. I stopped walking, stood still. I could feel my heart pushing blood through my body. “Sir,” she said again, only this time it wasn’t a question at all.
6
“Hey, there he is,” said Dr. Varden, who was standing at the counter, pulling on gloves. There was another nurse in the corner of the room. “Now we’re ready.”
“Where were you?” Alice said.
“In the waiting room,” I said.
“Doing what?”
“Waiting.”
“You took a long time.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
She was already in the paper gown. Varden rolled a stool over, had Alice put her feet in the stirrups. He said, “All we’re doing here, Dad, is eliminating a few of our questions from the get-go. I think we’re going to find that all’s well, but let’s take a peek to be on the safe side.” I’d expected him to talk to us first. There was nowhere good for me to sit. Three different corkboards covered in pictures of babies hung on the walls. He said, “So here’s one possibility. That cervix is pretty inflamed. He could certainly be our culprit.” He looked up at Alice. “Bright red blood?”
“Yes.”
“And only today, right? Not regularly?”
“Right.”
“Pain? Any cramping?”
“Not really,” she said.
“Mom, when you say ‘not really,’ what is it that you mean?”
“You didn’t tell me that,” I said.
She said, “Just let me think.”
“Take your time,” Varden said, gently. He’d slid across the dial—he was more priest now than motivational speaker. It was impressive. He opened a drawer in the exam table, dropped the speculum inside. There was blood on it, I could see, before he knocked the drawer back closed with his knee.
“Not cramping,” she said. “Not pain. Just this morning I felt—weird.”