by Ann Packer
“Well, then I don’t know,” Trina said.
“No ideas?” Laura said. “Should I just send Dad home?”
“I need it.”
“Well, then give me a little help here, honey. Where did you last have it?”
There was a silence, and then Trina sobbed, “I had a terrible day in case you’re interested.”
Laura looked at the fireplace. She imagined herself pierced from head to toe, roasting on a spit over a huge, hungry fire. She flopped onto the couch but got up again because she’d sat on something hard. “Never mind,” she cried. “I found it, it was on the couch!” It was under a blanket Trina had brought down from her bed. “Let me take it out to Dad. You’ll have it in fifteen minutes.”
“We were supposed to be with you tonight,” Trina said, still sobbing.
“I know, sweetie,” Laura said. “I know.”
It was only twenty yards, but she put on her coat and gloves before she went outside. She took her time, careful not to slip on the icy steps. The clouds had mostly lifted, and there was a crevice of dark sky straight overhead that would widen by morning, letting the real cold in.
Adam saw her coming and rolled down his window. He took the book and set it on the passenger seat. “What about tomorrow night?” he said; Trina and Charlotte were supposed to be with him. “You can have them if you want.”
“I have no idea about tomorrow night. I’m supposed to do things, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Matt’s kids. I’ve got all three of them in there, and I don’t know—” She put her hands over her eyes. “God,” she said, and she squatted suddenly, or fell—she wasn’t sure what happened. She was still on her feet, but her knees were completely bent. She steadied herself against Adam’s car. Her own car was a few feet behind her, and she stayed like that, closeted by metal, her breath visible in the freezing air.
“Let me help you,” Adam said. He started to open his door, but it pushed her off balance and he stopped. “Do you want to get in for a second? Just to catch your breath?”
“I don’t know if I can stand up.” Saying this annoyed her, and she stood, then immediately lowered her face into her hands, she was so dizzy.
“Get in for a sec,” he said. “They can wait.”
She circled the car and got in. He drove the same Subaru he’d had during their marriage. She remembered deciding to walk home after a counseling session they’d just come from, and how he drove along beside her for a few seconds, crept along beside her, casting looks at her through the open window. Ask me to get in, she thought, ask and I’ll get in, but he just looked.
She said, “So I actually have some news, kind of. Information.”
When she finished talking, he sat in silence, staring straight ahead. She’d given him the bare bones but for some reason had included the name of each place where Matt finally turned around during his previous disappearances, and as she thought of these again—Vancouver, Arkansas, and Baja—a silly question came to her: Did he bring home souvenirs? She laughed and clapped a hand to her mouth.
“What?” Adam said.
“Nothing. The good news is you shouldn’t have to drive out here anymore. Once I find a place.”
“You’re not going to leave him?”
“Are you kidding? I’m not living with this. I would never go through this again.”
“But you won’t have to,” Adam said. “You’ll know.”
“I need to go inside, the kids are waiting.”
She got out, crossed in front of the car, and started toward the house.
“Laura,” he called.
She stopped and looked back.
“The good news is he’s alive.”
His eyes were on hers, determined but watchful, and she stood there, frozen, until at last he started the car and backed away.
In the house, the smell of popcorn drifted out of the kitchen, and she heard Lizzie’s voice along with the other two. Should she join them? Or let them have the time together without her? She wondered what would happen, how it would be to see them once she’d moved out. How would it be for Trina and Charlotte to see them? That would happen all the time: at school, at the movies, down at the Confluence. Worst would be the Confluence, where the two sets of kids had been introduced; it was the spot where the north and middle forks of the American River joined to form one body, and Matt had made a little speech about how it was the perfect place for their first get-together. Laura remembered the friendly, awkward picnic beside the rushing water, and the tense game night a few weeks later, and the surprisingly easy ski weekend some time after that: the early assemblies of their fledgling nation-state. Trina’s contempt for Kevin, veiling a crush; Lizzie’s insomnia the first few nights she slept under the same roof as Laura. Laura recalled Matt coming home from returning the kids to Sandi after one of those sleepless nights: she was groggy, sitting on the front steps when he drove up. His blue eyes were bloodshot, his face was drawn. This isn’t going to work, she was afraid he would say. But he eased himself down next to her and shrugged. “What shall we do,” he said, “go back to bed or go for a swim?” It was summer, hot and bright; they could be at Lake Clementine in twenty minutes, moving side by side through the cool, clear water. But she was so tired. She leaned back and stretched. The rest of the day was wide open, and so was the evening, and so was the next day. There was something to be said for the lulls in parenting, each emptying of the house a new season, bringing weather you remembered or perhaps had never known before, it could feel like such a lovely revelation. “Both,” she said.
On that first date, at the café Dwell Time, the midday crowds thinned, and soon Laura and Matt were the only people in the place. They had drunk coffee, two cups each, and eaten lunch, and now it was clearly time to go.
“Dwell Time,” she said, not wanting to break the spell yet. “Funny name.”
“It’s the amount of time the water’s in contact with the coffee grounds. With some coffeemakers you can adjust it. I have one—there’s a switch.”
“And you use it?” she said. “More dwell time for certain kinds of coffee?”
He smiled. “Told you I was a geek.”
“I wouldn’t use that word for you.”
His eyes were on her. She wondered if he’d ask what word she would use. That would be the flirtatious thing to do. Don’t, she thought. Flirting would be sexy, but she didn’t want that. She didn’t want only that.
“Well …” she said.
He grinned, revealing for the first time a nickel-colored crown toward the back of his mouth. “I couldn’t agree more.”
They slid their chairs back, looked at each other, stood. He held open the café door and she walked out, into such yellow sunnyness, such warmth that she gasped.
He said, “Are you OK?”
“No, it’s just so nice out. It’s beautiful. The perfect spring day.”
“Would you like to go up to the park? Take a walk? I mean, I know we should go our separate ways now and I should call you tomorrow and ask you to dinner next week, but what do you think? We could drive separately.”
“Can we drive together?”
They were at her car, and so it was into her car that they went. She was impressed: he was ten years older than she, almost from another generation—a generation of men who were not comfortable being driven by women.
He slid the seat back to make room for his long legs. “You know what else dwell time is?”
She’d started the car but turned to face him, hand on the gearshift.
“It’s how long soldiers have between deployments. By contract they’re supposed to have a certain amount of downtime before they can be shipped off again, but not this war. This war they just keep getting screwed.”
Laura smiled.
“What?”
“At the 7-Eleven I didn’t peg you as a liberal.”
“Am I one?”
“Fair trade, an
tiwar.”
“Better get my hair cut.”
At the park they strolled past spring flowers, past a play area crawling with small children. She saw young families, couples so new to parenthood that they didn’t have any idea of the dangers ahead, the way having kids could split you apart. That had happened with her and Adam. That and other things.
She looked at this man at her side—this Matt. We met in a 7-Eleven, they would say; or the whole thing would dissolve into something that had barely happened, and she might wonder, ten years from now: Wasn’t there a man once, in a parking lot, shortly after the divorce? She’d have an image—a man who looked like a marine, a convenience store parking lot—but she might not know if they were actually linked, or if a trick of the brain, a pair of crossed wires, had brought them together by accident.
Matt’s kids were in the kitchen and she was upstairs, lying on the bed, still in her coat and gloves. The room was close, warm air rushing up from the vents. She covered her mouth and breathed in, her gloved hand like something inanimate against her skin.
Dwell time. How long would the next one be, the next period at home before he went off to war again?
But no. It seemed home was war. He left for downtime, to rest before returning to battle. Was that how he felt? About marriage? Is that what got into him?
He had to leave, he had to leave, he had to get out of there. That wasn’t the full story, was it? He had to get out of there, and he had to tell no one. You were part of it—your feelings were part of it. Your terror, your confusion.
If she stayed, she wouldn’t be afraid next time. Not that she would stay, but if she did: she wouldn’t be afraid, she’d be mad. If he were ever late, she’d be angry, automatically. Looking at her watch, adrenaline starting up. A nightmare.
A week was all she’d need to find a new place. She and the girls would start again. They had become a good threesome over the years since the divorce—and she didn’t have much time left with them. Maybe she’d even go back to her group, the eight or nine divorced women who met weekly to talk about their new lives, their children, the future. Would you marry a man with diabetes? they asked each other. How about emphysema? No, most of them said. I am through taking care of people. One woman, though—a shy bank teller with tidy dyed blond hair—told Laura privately one evening that she had met someone, a man with a pacemaker and clammy hands and a habit of cleaning his fingernails in front of her, and she was thinking of marrying him. Just to have a man, Laura thought, and, as if she had read Laura’s mind, the woman said: It’s not to have a man, it’s to have a person.
A pacemaker, clammy hands. A habit of running away. Everyone has something.
Laura sat up and took off her gloves. The curtains were still drawn in front of the balcony door, and she went over and slid them to the side. The balcony overlooked the backyard, a half-acre of groomed lawn that ran all the way to the fence separating the yard from the hill behind it. She opened the door to see, but the whole of her view was steeped in darkness.
What if she could be blasé, indifferent? Take away from him the part of it that wasn’t his anyway: her reaction. It was fine, she could tell him. Feel free, whenever you want. Would that spoil it for him? Enough to keep him from doing it again?
It would take a great effort to pull it off; she’d have to find just the right tone. And it would work only if he never found out how she really felt: the vivid dread, the excavated heart.
She crossed the bedroom and turned off the overhead light. Behind her, a swath of snowy air blew in through the open door. She returned to the balcony and stepped outside again. Soon she could see better, the snowy lawn, the faint trace of fence dividing it from the snowy hillside. She leaned on the rail.
Matt? she could say if he called right now. Honey, is that you? Oh, don’t worry, never mind that—I have to tell you something. Listen, it snowed, and I’m standing on the balcony, and you can’t imagine how beautiful it is. It’s all over the grass, and the trees are dusted with it, the branches are frosted. And you know how snow lightens everything? It’s almost like daytime out here. The longer I stand here the lighter it gets. We’re so lucky, she would say to Matt. We’re so lucky we live here.
Her Firstborn
Dean goes to the window and stares at the dark parking lot, half looking for Lise though she won’t arrive for another ten minutes. It’s after six and the lot is all but empty, just white lines glowing with new paint. He wonders what she’s doing right now. Finishing a snack? Or already locking up and heading for the car? Or, no: gathering their bed pillows and then heading for the car. Tonight is their first childbirth class, and the flyer said to bring pillows. He imagines them piled on her backseat—flowered, lumpy, faintly scented with the deep smells of bodies asleep—and he shudders. It seems wrong somehow, a broken rule of nature: no personal bedding outside the home, please.
She pulls in right on time, her headlights sweeping the wooden fence, and he shuts down his computer and heads out to the reception area, calling goodbye to Gregor as he approaches the elevator.
“Dean, Dean, hold on.” Gregor appears in the doorway of his office with a stack of CDs in hand, an amused look on his face. “I just want to give you a little encouragement.” Incurgement is how it sounds to Dean: Gregor’s from West Virginia, which shows up in about a fifth of what he says.
“Thanks,” Dean says. “It’s nice to know you care.”
“I do—in a kindly, avuncular way.”
Dean laughs: Gregor is thirty-eight to his forty-one, blond and robust to his dark and stringy. Gregor is about as avuncular as Dennis the Menace.
“Come on,” Gregor says, motioning Dean closer. “You want to be prepared, don’t you? It’s like anatomy class. When Jan and I went the woman had big illustrations and a pointer. She said, ‘This is the uterus, these are the fallopian tubes.’ ”
“That was in Morgantown,” Dean says. “This is Eugene, remember? There’s practically a street named Uterus here.”
Gregor laughs, but he’s looking Dean over all the same. “Everything OK?” he asks in a carefully blended mixture of concern and nonchalance.
Dean nods.
“Sure?”
“I’m fine,” Dean says. “Lise’s waiting, I’ve got to go.”
He pounds the Down button, then doesn’t want to wait for the elevator. The fire stairs are at the other end of the hall, and he takes off at a gentle jog.
“I want a full report tomorrow,” Gregor calls. “In exchange for bearing the lion’s share of our mutual burden here.”
Dean flips the bird over his shoulder, but he’s grateful: he and Gregor run a small company that publishes software guides, and this is their busy season, galleys to look over, a tight production schedule to stick to. Gregor’ll be here until ten or eleven tonight, easy. “You can’t have a baby in the fall,” he said when Dean gave him the news. He was kidding, but only just.
Outside, Lise’s car is idling at the curb. Dean slides in next to her and says, “Sorry, Gregor had to ride me a little.”
“Wimmin been birthin’ babies a long time, Dean.”
“No, it was about how Mickey Mouse the class’ll be.” He pulls her close for a kiss, then takes her hand from the steering wheel and kisses it, too, on the little valley between her first two knuckles. When she returns her hand to the wheel he notices a tiny oval sticker with the word “Kegel” printed on it, right at twelve o’clock. “Where’d you get that?”
“At my appointment today,” she says with a smile. “I got a whole sheet of them—I’m supposed to put them all over the house as reminders.”
A Kegel is a toning exercise for pregnant women: it’s like stopping your urine midflow, according to one of Lise’s books. For a while, Dean found himself trying it nearly every time he peed, just to see how it felt.
“I put one over the kitchen sink,” she says, “and one on my bedside table, but I figured that’d be enough.”
“Moderation in all things.”
He reaches for her belly and strokes it. “How was the appointment?”
“Fine, except I’ve gained five pounds. I’ve got to pace myself.”
“Like a marathoner?”
“I’ve got the carbo-loading part down anyway.”
They exchange a smile: Dean’s the runner in the family, although he’s tapered way down since their marriage. Used to be he wouldn’t miss a morning with his group, but these last two years have taught him to question pretty much everything he thought he knew about himself, like that running was the only path to well-being. Most mornings now he sleeps in, Lise breathing quietly beside him.
“Everything else OK?” he asks her.
“Yeah, the head’s down, I’ll have my internal next time probably.”
“That it?”
She doesn’t reply, and when an odd, faraway expression comes over her face he’s suddenly washed with tension, certain he knows what’s on her mind. But then she says, “And twenty, and that’s a hundred today, and that’s all I’m doing, damn it,” and he lets out a big breath. Kegels. That’s what she was doing, just Kegels, not thinking back after all.
The class meets in a church basement, in a room with plastic chairs set up in a circle and the air of having seen a lot of twelve-step programs in its day. Dean and Lise carry their pillows in and take seats opposite the only other couple there yet, the woman tiny and auburn-haired, dwarfed by her belly. Lise’s small, too, but her belly is more volleyball-size to this woman’s Great Pumpkin.
The woman leans forward eagerly. “How far along are you?”
“Thirty-three weeks,” Lise says. “How about you?”
“The same. Looks like forty, though, huh?”
“No, you look fine.”
“I look enormous.”
Lise shrugs but doesn’t disagree. She has a knack for getting along with strangers—not so much cultivating them as keeping her distance in the most amiable possible way. Dean’s just the opposite, comes off as an asshole even when he’s thinking there might be a friendship in the offing.