Just Breathe

by Susan Wiggs

  Her attorney set down her notepad and leaned back in her chair. “And is this happy news?”

  “Definitely,” Sarah said. “I mean, it’s scary and crazy, but this is something I’ve wanted and dreamed about for so long.” She quickly explained the circumstances of the conception. “Of course, I didn’t quite envision being in this position when it finally happened...”

  “It’s going to be wonderful. I’m sure of it.” Birdie’s smile lit her face. Sarah was struck by a strong impression of family resemblance.

  “So now what?” she asked. “I’m guessing I need to tell Jack.”

  Birdie nodded. “The issue of child support comes into play.”

  Sarah took a nervous sip from her ever-present water bottle and voiced something she’d worried about all night. “Can he file for custody?”

  “He’d never get it, but visitation is a possibility.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “Do you expect trouble? Is he a threat to the child?”

  “Not physically, of course, although I honestly don’t know what to expect,” Sarah admitted. “I was so wrong about so many things...” She looked down at her hands in her lap. Ink smudged the fingers of her left hand. She had been drawing all morning. “When should I tell him?”

  “Soon. We’ll file to have your health plan extended. Pregnancy is a covered event, so that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “I’ll call him today.”

  “Are you feeling okay, Sarah?”

  “Yes. I don’t know what I would have done without your niece and your brother, taking me to the hospital.” She glanced at the framed photo on the shelf. “I was so surprised to see Will. Why didn’t you tell me he was in Glenmuir?”

  “It didn’t occur to me that you’d want to know.”

  “We were in the same grade in high school—”

  “So was Vivian Pierce. She’s still around,” Birdie said. “And Marco Montegna. He enlisted in the marines and came back from the Middle East on permanent disability. I can go down the whole list if you like.”

  “I get your point. Will is different, though. He’s your brother.” Sarah wanted to ask about Aurora’s mother but didn’t want to put Birdie on the spot.

  “Well.” Birdie made a couple of notes. “I’m glad the two of you reconnected.”

  “We didn’t have much of a connection in the first place. I wouldn’t say we were exactly friends in high school.”

  Birdie didn’t look up from her notes. “Maybe you’ll be friends now.”

  * * *

  Sarah headed toward the town marina, where benches along the dock faced the bay, the perfect spot to sit and stare at the horizon while dealing with difficult matters. It was also one of the few spots where she could get a cell phone signal. She knew she needed to get this call over with, but the small silver phone in her hand felt leaden and cold.

  She passed a mother and daughter who were window shopping, chatting animatedly as they discussed a display of handmade bags. She could tell they were mother and daughter instantly, not because of some obvious family resemblance but because of an affinity between them. They had the same posture as they leaned in to study something in the window, the same timing as they turned to look at each other.

  An unexpected wave of nostalgia hit Sarah. I’m pregnant, Mom, she thought. And I’ve never missed you more than I do right now.

  Gran and Aunt May had embraced the news when she told them. They had beamed with happiness and said all the right things. But at the center of all the emotion, Sarah couldn’t help feeling a huge, gaping hole. Being pregnant was the kind of miracle a woman shared with her husband, and then with her mother.

  A dizzying sentiment washed over her. A baby. She was having a baby, and she’d give anything to share the news with her mother. She pictured the abandoned loom in her father’s house, still strung with her cashmere yarn, the color of new roses in springtime. “Tonight, Mom,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you in my dreams tonight.”

  Jack could wait, she decided, putting the phone away. She went into the grocery store and bought some basics—eggs, lemons, oranges, potatoes, apples, broccoli, dog food. Though still prone to strange cravings, she was determined to take care of herself. “My refrigerator will be a virtual monument to the almighty food pyramid,” she vowed.

  On her way out, she passed three more women, hoping they hadn’t noticed her talking to herself. Clearly they had not, as they were absorbed in each other. All the women were attractive and stylish enough to belong in the cast of Sex and the City. Three friends, laughing and chatting away. Girlfriends. Now, there was a concept. I’m pregnant, she wanted to tell them. Isn’t it wonderful?

  She thought about calling a couple of friends in Chicago to tell them her news. But most of these friends were people who had known Jack “forever.” And they weren’t kidding. In Jack’s world, bonds were formed at a young age and endured through thick and thin.

  Except the marriage bond, she thought. Clearly he considered that one expendable.

  There, she thought, feeling a nauseating burn of anger in her stomach. Now I’m fired up. I can make this call.

  She decided to drive somewhere more private. She knew of a spot where her cell phone would catch a strong signal from the towers by the Point Reyes lighthouse. As she drove, she imagined her child growing up here, surrounded by the stunning beauty of the seashore, the crash of waves against towering cliffs, the mysterious fog shrouding the shoreline and the green shadows of the coastal forests. It was the first time she’d let herself create a specific mental picture of an actual child, barefoot and lithe as a fairy, running through a field of wildflowers or playing in the sand on a sunlit beach. She smiled at the image, knowing it was idealized, yet wasn’t that what daydreams were for?

  She pulled off to a gravel parking area near a marshy place with a mirrorlike lagoon and thick reeds fringing the water. While waiting for her call to connect, she watched a blue heron on stick legs in the shallows. Statue-still, the bird was fishing, instinctively knowing the most effective means to accomplish that task was to do nothing. It didn’t even seem to be breathing, but she imagined its heart racing as its beady eyes scanned the clear bay waters for prey. She wondered how long the heron was willing to wait.

  “Daly Construction.” Mrs. Brodski, Jack’s executive secretary, was another of those loyalists who had known the family “forever.”

  “It’s Sarah. I need to speak to Jack, please.” She took out a Sharpie marker, one she always kept in her purse.

  “I’ll see if he’s available, Sarah.” Mrs. Brodski’s voice was crisp with disapproval. No doubt she and everyone else believed Jack was the victim, abandoned by his weirdo wife from California.

  Idly, Sarah took a lemon from the grocery sack on the seat beside her. She drew a round-faced, sour-mouthed Mrs. Brodski saying, “I’ll see if he’s available.”

  Then Sarah used the Sharpie to draw Jack’s face on an egg. As the cartoon woman spoke, she was looking straight at Jack, asking him with her eyes if he was willing to speak with his wayward wife. They hadn’t talked in a while. Most communication lately was done through their lawyers. Just a few months ago, such a development would have seemed impossible, but now—

  “Sarah.” Jack picked up abruptly.

  Her marker bled onto the surface of the egg, creating an unexpected blob in the middle. Could an egg get egg on its face?

  “I have news,” she said, drawing a tail on the blob. Now it looked like a tadpole. Or a sperm cell. “It’s kind of strange.”

  “So what else is new? Everything’s been strange since you left.”

  Sarah clenched her teeth. He managed brilliantly to forget the circumstances of her leaving. He sounded wounded, bereft. The injured party.

  She took out one of the oranges an
d drew another Jack, this one with a befuddled look on his face.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said. “I just found out.”

  Jack fell into a rare lapse of silence. “No shit,” he said finally.

  “Nope,” she said, refusing to let her voice tremble. This was not how this conversation was supposed to go. Where was the tenderness, the wonder, the joy? “Kidding about this would be in extremely bad taste.”

  “Why? Your comic strip managed to make a joke out of my cancer.”

  A painful, shocked silence fell between them. This was why communicating through lawyers was preferable. Each time Sarah and Jack talked, they found new ways to hurt each other.

  “Can this not be about you, for once?” She kept drawing methodically, without thinking. Within minutes, every egg and piece of fruit had his face on it, each with a different expression. All lined up in the carton, the eggs looked like spectators at a baseball game. She eyed the sack of potatoes. Mr. Potato Head, she thought.

  “Fine. You having a baby has never been about me.” His tone mocked her. “So is it mine?” he asked.

  She held the phone away from her in disbelief. Very faintly, she could hear his voice, still talking. With every fiber of her being, she wanted to hurl the phone as far away as she could, into the water, but she’d already tried throwing a phone away while Jack was talking, and it hadn’t changed anything. She’d still needed a phone, and Jack was still an asshole.

  Instead she sat back and watched the shorebird. It darted like an arrow shot from a bow. The heron’s head delved underwater and then emerged, a gleaming fish clasped in its beak. The bird scarfed down the still-squirming fish and then took off like a seaplane, gathering speed and then soaring, its great wings beating with smooth strength.

  With studied gentleness, Sarah turned off the phone and put it in her purse. Then she got back in her car and drove until she could go no farther. Point Reyes was at the far edge of nowhere, standing sentinel above the vast Pacific. She stopped at a place where bitten-off cliffs towered over a raging sea and weathered signs warned against going too close to the edge. Approach With Caution, Particularly In Windy Conditions was spelled out in large letters.

  She parked and got out of the car, feeling the wind sweep upward over her, lifting the hem of her jacket, ruffling her hair. She walked to the edge of the cliff and for a long time, stood frozen and stared as though mesmerized by the swirling, white-veined swells that gathered like great fists drawn back for a blow, then smashed themselves against the rocks below, exploding into a spray of diamonds. Some of the spray was so fine that a series of rainbows were thrown up, fleeting and blurred, one after another. The pounding of the sea made a strange and compelling music, driving her to surrender to the feelings inside her.

  She watched a black crow pick up a clam and drop the shellfish on the rocks, repeating the process again and again until finally, the shell broke open and the bird took its reward. The small bite of food appeared to be worth the trouble, for the bird went after another clam right away.

  Perched on the brink of infinity, she felt both heady power and intimidating vulnerability. The breeze rippled against her, and stirred the tufts of wildflowers around her feet.

  Is it mine?

  Jack’s words seemed to ride the wind, starting in a whisper and crescendoing to a howl she couldn’t escape. Dear God, he’d actually said that. Her rage ran bone deep, a poison that could pervade her whole system, destroy her and the new life inside her if she allowed it to consume her from the inside out. She took in a deep breath, filling her lungs with mist and sea air, sharp with salt spray from the crashing waves. She reached her arms toward the empty air in front of her, spread them like wings. She didn’t feel fragile at all now, but supremely powerful.

  Then she thought about the advice Will Bonner had given her. Get mad. Throw things.

  She brought the sack of groceries to the overlook, took out an egg with Jack’s face on it and let fly. The egg soared high in a perfect arc into the sky. Then it plummeted to the rocks below and the waves surged in to carry the mess out to sea.

  She picked up another and threw it. Take that. And that. One after another, she hurled the eggs, and when she ran out, she moved on to the lemons and oranges and potatoes. With every throw, the poison ebbed as though sucked out to sea.

  Minutes later, the sack was empty. Her shoulders ached, her arm muscles felt slack and fatigued and her mind was quiet.

  Just as Will had promised.

  Twenty-Two

  “The first thing Jack did was ask if it was his,” Sarah told the divorce support group. “And I finally understood what some of you told me about anger. Prior to that moment, I didn’t realize how angry I really was. I’d buried it so well I didn’t know how deep it ran until he said that.”

  The group absorbed this in silence, but the lull felt safe, like a cushion of air. She had come to count on this group, an unlikely community of damaged souls, helping each other survive. She pictured them all huddled together in a lifeboat on a dark, stormy sea.

  “I thought I was furious with Jack before,” she said. “Now I’m thinking that rage was the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Some of us have been coming here for years.” The woman’s name was Mary B., and she was softly middle-aged, carrying herself with a sort of weary dignity. “There’s a reason for that. There’s no way you can know the breadth and depth of your rage, let alone deal with it. There’s no letting go. You just have to explore it. That’s what this group is for.”

  Sarah nodded, acknowledging her confusion. “To be honest, I don’t even know how I feel about my future, but I’m trying my best to be happy.”

  “Good for you,” said Mary. “Don’t let what someone else says steal your happiness from you.”

  “Thanks. The timing is far from perfect but it’s something I’ve dreamed of for a very long time,” Sarah said, and then settled back into quiet reflection. She did feel the excitement, though it was tinged with uncertainty and sometimes even panic. Yet, since the day at the cliffs, she found it easier to surrender to her emotions, even to the anger. Maybe, she thought, the secret to a happy life was learning to get through the unhappy periods intact.

  After that initial phone call, Jack had called her back several times, but she never answered, nor did she answer the calls from his mother, Helen, or his sister Megan. She erased all of his voice mail messages without listening to them and blocked his e-mail address from her in-box. According to Birdie, Jack’s lawyer claimed his client regretted his reaction to the news and wished to retract his unfounded accusation. Jack had been caught off guard and wanted to discuss the matter with her.

  She didn’t want to discuss anything. She was beginning to see a pattern in his reversals, which seemed to take place when there was a price to pay. She told Birdie to request child-support payments.

  Child support. The very idea was hard to grasp. As were the ideas of custody and visitation. Everything about the situation was hard to grasp. From the moment she’d been informed about the pregnancy, her world had gone through a paradigm shift. Now she had to make every decision with a child in mind. Prior to this, she was considering a move to San Francisco, maybe getting a bohemian walk-up in Bernal Heights. The pregnancy meant that was out of the question. For the foreseeable future, she was staying here, close to her family, knowing she and the baby would need them.

  The baby. She could close her eyes and picture her unborn child at every stage of development. She felt oddly guilty that she hadn’t realized she was pregnant sooner, despite the fact that after all the treatment she’d gone through, she considered herself an expert. She always thought she would know when it happened. A hundred times, she had visualized the ball of cells embedding itself in her womb, a secret smaller than the head of a pin. By the time she discovered what was happening, the child was a tiny curl of humani
ty with limb buds and its own beating heart. I wish I’d known sooner, she said to the baby. I wish I hadn’t missed a single second of your existence.

  She could imagine the baby’s weight and warmth in her arms, its smell and the smoothness of its skin. Boy or girl, she had no preference. Either would be precious to her. Little Pongo or Perdita. Rhett or Scarlett. Zeus or Hera. Wonder Woman or Captain America. She lay awake at night, generating long lists of possible names, and she found the whole process dizzyingly delicious.

  According to Birdie—and to the laws of common sense—she had to decide what Jack’s role would be. It was easy to cling to righteous fury, but ultimately, there was another person involved here. A child who had two parents and deserved the best possible life Sarah could offer. No one had to tell her that nursing hate and anger for this child’s father was a bad idea.

  After the meeting, Gloria Martinez came over to give her a hug. “I’m really happy for you.”

  “Thanks. I’m still adjusting to the news.”

  “You’ve got plenty of time to plan for this.”

  She nodded. “When I was married, I wanted a baby so much sometimes I couldn’t see straight. I was sure it was the one thing missing from my life, and that once I got pregnant, everything would fall into place.”

  “And now?”

  Finally, Sarah smiled. “Now that I’m going to be single again, I don’t need a baby to glue my marriage together.” She brushed her hand down her abdomen, a gesture that was fast becoming habit. “But I still want this child more than I want the next breath of air.”

  “That’s good,” Gloria observed. “It’s got to be hard on a baby, gluing a marriage together. Just a wild guess, but I think kids do better when they don’t have to be anything but kids.”

  Sarah nodded, watching two of the newer people leaving, a man and a woman. He held the door for her, then followed her out to the parking lot. “What about dating?” Sarah asked.

  “Some people meet someone in group, but it doesn’t happen very often.”