Just Breathe

by Susan Wiggs

  Her father opened a beer and offered her the can. She reached for it, then hesitated.

  “Not your brand?” he asked.

  In the pit of her stomach, she felt a swift, dull terror as the illusion shattered. Those years had happened to her.

  Her father studied her face. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No, I just... It’s been a while since I’ve had a drink. Before all this happened, we were trying to get pregnant.”

  He looked supremely uncomfortable, his eyes crinkling behind his shades. “So, um, are you...?”

  “No.” Part of her wanted to tell him about the clinic visits, the drugs and discomfort and nausea. Another part wanted to keep her pain private. “After Jack’s treatments ended,” she went on, “getting pregnant was my main goal in life.” Hearing herself speak the words, she felt a twinge. When had her priorities shifted from her marriage to her reproductive system?

  “Anyway, I’m not,” she said quickly, knowing this conversation was going to be a challenge, “and I’ll take that beer.” She took a swig, savoring her first gulp. God, it had been too long. “For the past year, I’ve been undergoing artificial insemination.”

  He cleared his throat. “You mean Jack couldn’t...because of his cancer?”

  She looked out across the water. “The doctors always encouraged us to set positive goals during treatment, the logic being that every reason for him to get better reinforced his recovery.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a baby’s job to be that reason.”

  Sarah felt a stirring of defensiveness. “We wanted to start a family, same as any other couple.” After all that had happened, she was forced to examine her real motives. Deep down, she had known for a long time that something was wrong, something that having a child would not fix.

  “So anyway,” she said, trying to get the conversation back on track, “I might as well celebrate my new freedom.” She tipped her beer in his direction. “And I promise, that’s all the detail you’ll get from me.”

  Clearly relieved, he slumped back on his seat. “You’ve had a tough break, kiddo.”

  “I hope it’s not too weird, me telling you this stuff.”

  “It’s weird,” he admitted. “But I’ll deal with it.”

  She ducked her head to hide a smile. Her father was a Marin man, through and through, trying to be sensitive.

  “You warm enough?” he asked.

  She savored the flow of the breeze over her face and through her hair. “I’ve been living in Chicago, Dad. Your worst weather feels like a heat wave to me.” She pictured herself in Chicago, shoveling snow off the driveway in order to get her car out. She had once drawn Shirl digging her way out of a second-story window and escaping to Mexico.

  “What’s funny?” her father asked, steering the boat around a landmark known as Anvil Rock.

  Watching the undulating green hills go by, she said, “Nothing, really. Just amusing myself with my own thoughts.”

  “You were always good at that.”

  “Still am. Birdie offered to give me the names of some therapists but I kind of like psychoanalyzing myself.”

  “How’s that working for you?”

  “It’s not that hard. I’m not a very complicated person.” She hugged her knees to her chest. “I feel so stupid.”

  “Jack’s the one who ought to feel stupid.”

  “I bargained with God,” she confessed to her father, speaking up midthought as if he had been in on her private reflections.

  And maybe he had been. He said, “What’d you bargain for?”

  “Jack to recover.”

  He nodded, sipped his beer. “Can’t say I blame you.”

  “So is this my punishment? God spares Jack’s life, and I have to lose Jack?”

  “God doesn’t work that way. He didn’t cause this. Your shit-for-brains, two-timing husband caused this.”

  She doubted Jack would see it that way. He was surrounded by friends and family who adored him, whose regard ran strong and deep. The same people who had rallied around him when he’d fallen ill were undoubtedly there to support him through his marital crisis. They would persuade Jack that he was as blameless in this as he had been in getting sick, that his wife had backed him into a corner, pressuring him to make a baby. She wasn’t there to observe this but she knew it was true because she knew Jack. The people in his life were his means of validation. He needed them in the same way she needed ink and paper to draw. Sarah used to think she was the one he needed most, but that was not the case, obviously.

  Jack claimed that she shared responsibility for the demise of their marriage, and in a traitorous part of her heart, she had to wonder if that was true. Had she played a part? In her dogged quest for a baby, had she put undue stress on Jack? One of the issues she’d had to face was the fact that their marriage had been in trouble long before she found out about Mimi. Yet despite the facts staring her in the face, Sarah still resisted the notion, digging in her heels and denying there was anything wrong.

  “Thanks for saying that, Dad,” she said, watching the majestic scenery. As an angry teen, she’d lost her appreciation of the dramatic beauty of the forests and cliffs reaching down to the sea. It was only when she settled in Chicago that she could look back and see that the prison of her adolescence, which had seemed so oppressive to her, was finally revealed to be a paradise. In Chicago she’d been like a tree uprooted and then planted in the wrong spot, a place where it wasn’t getting enough light or water. She tipped back her head and felt the sun’s warmth on her cheeks.

  “I’m too calm,” she told her father.

  “What’s that?”

  “About Jack. I’m too calm.”

  “And this is a bad thing?”

  “It would be normal to fall apart,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Normal for what?”

  “For me. For anybody.”

  “I honestly don’t know, honey.”

  The comment awakened an old ache inside her, of the reality of her relationship with her father. In the deepest possible way, they simply did not know each other; they never had. For no reason she could think of, they had never done the work of building a relationship. Maybe this was their chance to do that. In the suck-ass situation she found herself in, perhaps there was an unexpected opportunity.

  “Dad—”

  “It’ll be dark soon.” He brought the Sea Chaser around and headed back toward home. “Hang on.”

  Nine

  In the wake of Aurora’s outburst, Will finished his dinner unhurriedly. Experience had taught him that it was pointless to follow her to her room when she was like this. She’d just wail about the injustice of the world and refuse to listen to a damn thing he said. She needed time to cool off; then he’d sift through the ashes of her mood and try to determine the cause.

  After a long shift, he liked to come home to a little peace and quiet, catch up on the mail and bills, maybe play a round of one-on-one with his daughter in the driveway. Lately, however, he never knew what to expect when he got home. His cheerful, predictable daughter was going through growing pains, and he was seeing more pain than growing. She had learned to push his buttons by bringing up the subject of her mother. He couldn’t tell if she was truly tormented by what Marisol had done, or if this was a way to get to him.

  Feeling weary, he got up and took his dishes to the sink, leaving Aurora’s on the table. She could put her own supper dishes away. That was the rule, and he’d be damned if he’d change it just because teenage aliens were taking over her body.

  Yeah, that was it. His sunny, funny daughter, whose face used to be as open as a flower in springtime, had been hijacked. In her place was this moody stranger who argued and challenged, whose secretive silences perplexed him, whose wounds he could neithe
r see nor heal.

  Damn. She scared him, a fact he could barely admit to himself. It was true, though. Will Bonner, fire captain and ace public servant, was terrified that he was going to do something wrong or irreparable with this child, who had come to him so damaged and needy. This was a life, not a toy, and everything mattered so very much. He was scared because he didn’t want to blow it. He was constantly questioning himself. Am I being too harsh with her? Too lenient? Should I change this crazed schedule, find her a therapist? A mother?

  The notion poked at him as it sometimes did when Aurora brought up the topic. He used to have no problem being everything she needed in a parent. Then puberty hit her, and a new, tense dynamic arose. The young woman inside Aurora was a stranger to him, and she seemed to need things he couldn’t give her. But a mother wasn’t something he could provide by the sweat of his brow, like a roof over her head.

  Restless with worry and discontent, he caved in and cleaned up her side of the table. There was no crew or team of investigators to help him solve this one. He wanted to protect his daughter and give her a happy life, but despite his best efforts, she seemed to be slipping away from him, and he didn’t know how to get her back.

  “Special delivery,” called a voice through the back door.

  Will went to open it for his sister. Preceded by a giant bouquet of white peonies, Birdie came into the kitchen and set the pail of flowers on the counter. “Left over from that wedding in Sausalito,” she explained. Their parents’ flower farm did a brisk business in weddings. “I thought Aurora might like them.”

  “Thanks, but Aurora doesn’t like anything these days.”

  “Aren’t we in a good mood,” she observed.

  “We’re in a shitty mood,” he admitted. “That kid could pick a fight out of thin air. Tonight she played the you’re-not-my-mother card and got all pissed off about...” He could hardly remember. “About nothing,” he concluded.

  Birdie found a pair of mason jars under the sink, spread a newspaper on the table and took out a pair of scissors. Watching her, Will felt a glimmer of insight. A guy knew flowers were pretty enough in their own right. He would have left the pail on the counter and that was that. It would never occur to him to arrange the flowers in a vase or jar. The more Aurora acted like a girl, the harder she was to comprehend.

  “You know, little brother,” Birdie said over her shoulder, “I don’t call myself an expert on child rearing, but this seems like normal teenage behavior to me.”

  “What’s normal about being miserable?”

  “It goes away, like the fog in the morning. You watch. In a few minutes, she’ll be back to her old self.”

  “For how long? I might look at her the wrong way and she’s back to hating me.”

  “I’d say that’s actually a healthy thing.”

  “What, hating me?”

  “Think about it, Will. She’s perfect in every other area of her life. Perfect in school, perfect when she’s with Ellison and me, perfect when she’s with Mom and Dad. And yet she’s human. She has to have some way to express things that are less than perfect. A safe way.” She snipped off the flower stems to a more manageable length.

  “And I’m that way.”

  “I think so. On some level, she knows that no matter how bad she is, how angry or rebellious, you’ll never leave her. You’re her soft place to fall.” She stepped back to study the flower arrangement, tweaking them here and there.

  Will was quiet for a moment. Maybe Birdie was on to something. Maybe Aurora did save all her bad behavior for him. He’d never, ever leave her, and she knew it.

  “I’ll talk to her,” he told his sister.

  “Let me know if I can help,” Birdie said. She paused and looked at the spread-out paper. It was open to the comics section. “Ever read the funny pages?” she asked.

  “Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “I guess.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “My newest client is a comic strip artist. Remember Sarah Moon from high school?”

  “Heard of the Moon family, of course.” He frowned, trying to recall someone named Sarah.

  “She was in your graduating class, moron. She drew that anonymous comic strip everyone was obsessed with, the one that satirized practically everyone in the school.”

  Will clapped his hand on his forehead. “I remember her.” He flashed on an image of a sharp-featured, skinny blond girl, slipping around corners when you least expected her, owlishly observing everything with a critical eye. She had drawn blistering parodies of Will in high school, depicting him as a brainless side of steroid-pumped beef. “She was a nightmare. So what about her?”

  “She just moved back to Glenmuir.”

  “Oh. Is she in some kind of trouble?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you if she was.”

  Didn’t matter, Will thought, not in a town like this. He’d find out the whole Sarah Moon story through the mysterious and invisible grapevine, sooner rather than later.

  Part Three

  Ten

  Sarah woke up in her childhood bedroom, her heart pounding with terror. Since returning to Glenmuir, she had been stalked by unremembered nightmares—nameless, faceless fears that plagued her sleep and caused her to awaken drenched in sweat and gasping for air. She struggled to calm herself, trying to focus on the familiar details of the room.

  For a few moments, the sense of unreality was profound. The softly draped, white iron-railed bed felt like a raft set adrift in time. Practicing a set of breathing exercises she’d learned in a yoga class, she floated beneath a duvet cloud.

  The sweat gradually evaporated and her heart slowed down. There was a time when she might have tried to recapture her nightmares, pick them apart, try to discover the meaning hidden within. These days, she didn’t want to remember. She just wanted to escape. And she knew damned well what the meaning was. She had cut the moorings of her old life and she was lost at sea. She was grief-stricken, mortally afraid, physically ill. Depressed.

  Being aware of the condition didn’t make it bearable, unfortunately. It simply made her feel more powerless than ever. At some point, she should probably drag herself to the doctor, get some meds for it. When Jack was sick, she’d been offered a menu of ways to cope, with pills at the top of the list. She hadn’t taken advantage of any of it. Weirdly, she felt compelled to suffer. Her husband had cancer, and trying to escape through a little hexagonal pill seemed artificial and cowardly. Instead, she had disappeared into her art, drawing, working her emotions through made-up figures on a blank white page.

  She didn’t have to suffer for Jack anymore. She didn’t have to suffer at all. She needed to see a doctor, go on medication, but she was too depressed to get out of bed.

  She had no idea she possessed the capacity to sleep so much. Normally, she loved getting up early. In Chicago, she would awaken at the crack of dawn with Jack, fix a pot of coffee for him. With Morning Edition playing on the radio, they’d each go through “their” sections of the paper. Business and sports for him, editorial and lifestyle for her, with special attention paid to the comics section.

  This had not been the scenario in the very earliest days of their marriage. Back then, the morning news had been the last thing on their minds. The radio would be set to sexy blues or gentle cabaret music, a soundtrack for their newlyweds’ lust. They used to make love for an hour or more, until Jack realized he was going to be late for work. Then, with Sarah laughing at his haste, he’d rush through his shower and make a dash for his car, an English muffin clamped between his teeth, a thermos of coffee in hand and the twinkle of a satisfied husband in his eyes.

  Then, along with illness came an end to those early days. Instead of massage oils and muted jazz tunes, their nightstands became littered with bottles and blister packs, trays for catching vo
mit, crumpled instruction leaflets from the medical team and reams of seemingly endless paperwork related to Jack’s treatment and its cost.

  There was no returning to the couple they’d been as newlyweds. Sarah thought she’d accepted that. She pretended not to mind the more tame morning routine they followed—traffic reports on the radio, the crinkle of newspaper pages turning.

  “I’m an idiot,” she whispered to the sloping ceiling of her bedroom, her gaze idly tracking a bar of sunlight that seeped through a gap in the drawn curtain. She had told herself she and Jack were maturing as a couple, not drifting apart. Somehow, she had managed to delude herself that this distance was a normal phase in any relationship.

  But she had never managed to convince herself to be happy about the gradual shift. Her subconscious kept whispering that something was wrong. She tried to shut it up as best she could, burying herself in work, dreaming about the family they’d have one day and trying to think up ways to revive her intimacy with Jack.

  What a waste of time, she thought now, reaching for her sketch pad and favorite drawing pencil, which she always kept on the nightstand beside her. She made a rough sketch of Shirl telling her mother, Lulu, “I should learn to listen to my subconscious.”

  And Lulu, a wisecracking divorcée recovering from a boring thirty-year marriage, replied, “Dear, you don’t need a subconscious when you have me.”

  “Oh, man,” Sarah said, the sketchbook slipping from her fingers and flopping on the floor. “Don’t do it, Shirl. Do not do what I think you’re about to do.”

  She burrowed under the covers and shut her eyes. Shirl sometimes had a mystifying habit of exhibiting a mind of her own. Losing control of a figment of her imagination was probably a form of insanity, but Sarah couldn’t deny that it happened. She never knew what Shirl was going to do until Shirl made up her mind.