Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Don't worry, it will happen,” the smug woman says suddenly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your baby. You'll have one. It took me six years and now I'm pregnant with twins. I can always tell when someone else is going through it. Dr. Soule is the best. And the reproductive endocrinologist she works with is amazing. It'll happen for you. I know it.”

  This violation of the unwritten rule of conception and infant-loss protocol stuns me. Just as you never, never ask a fat woman if she's pregnant, isn't it true that you never assume a fucked-up-looking woman in an obstetrician's office is trying to get pregnant? Isn't that something that simply isn't done?

  “Six years, one baby with hydrocephalus that we lost at nineteen weeks, four miscarriages, and three IVFs. And now Finn and Emmet are due on June nineteenth. So you see, it's only a matter of time. It always works out. Dr. Soule will make it happen. She's a miracle worker.”

  “Ms. Greenleaf?” a nurse in lavender scrubs dotted with violets says from the doorway. “Right this way.”

  “Congratulations,” I tell the woman, who suddenly seems to be entitled to her complacency. On my way out the door I touch my toe to the doorjamb and surreptitiously tap it three times. I no longer approve of naming children before they are born. It is too tempting of the evil eye to make such assumptions about a baby. Who knows whether a child whose life is so counted on will even take his first breath? Still not even I am superstitious enough to believe that I could have protected Isabel from my own negligence by referring to her forever as “she.”

  I imagine for a moment being asked to strip and don a paper robe for this consultation, this dressing-down, and although I know it is absurd, I am relieved when the nurse leads me into Carolyn's office and not into an examining room. It takes me a moment to figure out what disturbs me about this office, why it is at once familiar and strange. Then I realize what it is: the furnishings are identical to those in the office Carolyn decorated for Jack at Friedman Taft. There is the black walnut desk, polished to a high shine. There is the bookcase with the minimal scrollwork, there are the two visitors' chairs upholstered in an elegant interlocking geometry, there is the photograph of toddler William on the beach in Nantucket, sand stippling his skinny legs, his diaper sagging around his bottom. There, heaven help me, are the credenza and the Aeron chair.

  “I wish I had known that you intended to join your father and William at the filming of the movie in the park,” Carolyn says. She strides through the doorway and across the room as though she owns it, as of course she does. She is elegant in a long, slim black skirt, with boots and a high-collared sweater, also black. Her belly swells like a small ball underneath the fine wool. I have bought outfits like this, expensive ones, too, but no matter how much of her husband's money I spend, I never look like Carolyn Soule. She is right. In marrying me, Jack did slink back to his middle-class roots. I am not sophisticated, like William and his mother.

  She is sitting now behind her desk, rocked back in the chair. Her fingers are interlaced in front of her, the pads of her thumbs and pinkies pressed against one another. Her nails are as clean and well kept as I imagined they would be.

  She says, “Jack told me that you left him. He told me what happened the night Isabel died.”

  For a moment I am stunned. Then I accept it as inevitable. When he was faced with my ultimate betrayal, he did what would hurt me the most.

  “Quite frankly, I've never heard Jack like this, Emilia. He was absolutely distraught. He was crying.”

  “When did you talk to him?” My voice is a croak, unfamiliar to me.

  “On Monday night. William was very upset when he saw you leave with your suitcase, and I called to speak to Jack about it. Jack told me what you believe about what happened on the night your daughter died. And he asked me if it was possible. He asked if you could really have smothered the baby against your breast.”

  “He asked you?”

  “Jack knows to trust my judgment. My medical judgment, if nothing else.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  Her composure cracks just the littlest bit. She presses her pinkies together so hard they bend and whiten. She purses her narrow lips and the wrinkles stand out like the tines of a fork. “I told him it was possible. I said, yes, you could have accidentally killed Isabel. And I said you probably had, because any woman who could be so casual with William's safety could just as easily fall sleep and smother her own child.”

  Carolyn's manner, the clinical detachment of a physician combined with the suppressed yet still-pulsating anger of a wife and mother betrayed, lends a sure confidence to her words. My own confidence in the accuracy of her indictment stems from no such detachment and no such anger. I have not been betrayed, and I am no clinician. I just know that she is right.

  “Don't,” Carolyn says.

  Don't what? I wonder.

  She pushes a box of tissues across the wide desk to me. I wipe my finger across my cheek and am surprised to find that I am crying again.

  “That's not why I asked you to come here today. I'm not proud of what I said. It was a terrible thing to say, and I'm ashamed of myself. What I'm most ashamed of is that it took William to point that out to me.”

  “William? William knows?”

  She nods. “He overheard the conversation. I'm sorry. My apartment is quite small.”

  It is a prewar seven on Fifth Avenue. How loud was she yelling?

  Underneath Carolyn's smooth porcelain cheek, a faint, pink flush begins to spread. I have seen her enraged but I have never seen her embarrassed. “He was standing there when I hung up the phone, holding his Giganotosaurus and a book. He was waiting for me to read to him.”

  “What book?”

  She knits her beautifully shaped eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

  “What book?”

  This is not the part of the story she expected me to latch on to. “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile,” she says.

  I smile.

  “He's a very loyal boy, Emilia,” she says.

  She doesn't need to tell me that. For more than two years I've watched him be her most loyal accolyte.

  She says, “He was very angry with me for saying that about you. He told me that you loved Isabel, and that you could not have killed her.”

  I am flabbergasted. The loyalty about which Carolyn spoke was to me? William defended me? And to his mother, no less?

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  She pauses, and I can almost see her deciding whether or not to tell me the truth. “I told him that I hadn't said you killed the baby. I told him that you might have accidentally smothered her. The way you accidentally threw him in the Lake.”

  “Oh.”

  “He corrected me.”

  “What?”

  “He reminded me that it was the Harlem Meer. Not the Lake. He said that the Lake is much farther south, below the Reservoir. And then he informed me that the word ‘meer' means lake in Dutch.”

  And then something amazing happens. Something that has never happened in all the time that I have been a stepmother to this woman's son. We share a smile of rueful impatience, tinged with pride. He is so smart, we say, wordlessly. And such a little know-it-all.

  Carolyn pulls the tissues out of the box herself, since I am incapable of actually taking them. She pushes them into my hand. “He asked me to help you. He said that since I was a doctor I could find out what really happened to Isabel.”

  I blow my nose.

  “Your pediatrician was sent a copy of Isabel's autopsy report. I had his office fax it to me yesterday, and I reviewed it with a medical school classmate of mine who is at Stanford. She's a pathologist and is something of a specialist in neonatal cases. She's testified at criminal trials. She confirmed the coroner's conclusion. She said there is absolutely no evidence to indicate that Isabel was smothered. Smothering always leaves traces—a torn upper lip frenulum, signs of positional asphyxia, dots of blood in the lungs. In Isabel's case there were no physica
l indications of smothering. You can't have smothered her; you did not kill her. Isabel died of SIDS.” Carolyn's voice softens, almost imperceptibly. “You just had the terrible misfortune to be holding her when she died.”

  “Your friend is a pathologist?”

  “Yes.”

  “A perinatal specialist?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she reviewed the autopsy report?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she said . . .” my voice trails away. I need her to repeat it. I need to hear it again, and for some reason Carolyn understands this.

  Very slowly she says, “My friend the pathologist said that she is confident from the autopsy report that Isabel's death was not due to smothering. She said that while without an exhumation she cannot make a final determination, she does not recommend that you and Jack take that step. She said that she feels secure in her conclusion that Isabel died of SIDS. She also said that she would be willing to tell you this herself, if you'd rather hear it directly from her, or if you have any other questions.”

  I now understand why the women on the UrbanBaby.com Web site like Dr. Carolyn Soule so much, why they so confidently put themselves in her competent and compassionate hands. My husband's ex-wife repeated herself, slowly and clearly, gently and patiently, for as long as it took for me to stop crying and start believing that my daughter was dead not because I was so careless and wretched that I left a swath of ruin in my path but because sometimes babies die, sometimes they just slip away, the electric pulses of their brain turning off, shutting down, shorting out, for some mysterious reason, for no reason at all.

  Chapter 29

  I leave Carolyn's office stunned—I feel a lightening that I know must be joy but feels more like relief. I can go home now. I must go home and tell Jack what I know, what I've learned today, what his ex-wife and my father have taught me. I am also happy because as I was leaving her office Carolyn announced to me that she is getting married.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “When is the wedding?”

  “We're not having a real wedding. My fiancé's brother is a judge and he'll do a simple ceremony in his chambers. And then we'll have a small dinner at our favorite bistro. A week from Friday.”

  “That's so soon!” I said.

  She smiled and patted the small drum of her belly.

  Before I leave the warmth of the lobby of Carolyn's building, I call Jack's cell phone.

  His greeting is muted.

  “It's me,” I say, unnecessarily.

  “How are you?”

  “Good. I need to talk to you. Where are you? Are you still at work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you leave? Are you busy?”

  We are faced, suddenly, with the dilemma of where to meet. I do not want to have this conversation in Jack's office, with Marilyn so close by. Going home is too fraught with symbolism. It is still early, but we decide to meet for dinner on the East Side, not far from Jack's office. I have time to stop at Barneys on Madison and pick up my jeans, but I don't. I don't want them, even though they fit me perfectly. Even though I paid for them. I have so many pairs of jeans in my closet at home. I won't need these new ones because I'll be going home now. Won't I? Won't I be going home?

  I arrive at the restaurant before Jack and am seated at a small table along the wall where I can see the door and a bit of the sidewalk through the narrow-paned windows. There are few diners at this early hour, and I have an unobstructed view. When I see Jack I feel an instant of vertigo, like in a dream of falling when you suddenly awake. His dark overcoat flaps open behind him, the ends of his scarf trailing. Even through the window I can see that his cheeks are reddened by the cold air. He is like Snow White: ruby lips, raven hair, rosy cheeks, blue, blue eyes.

  He strides across the restaurant and brushes my cheek with his lips. This embrace is too swift and I cling for an awkward moment before letting him unwind his scarf and take off his coat. He hands them to the hovering waiter and orders a drink.

  “Since when do you drink vodka martinis?” I ask.

  “I don't,” he says. “It's just the first thing that came to mind. Do you want something?”

  You. I want you back. “Just water. No. A glass of red wine. Anything. Whatever they have by the glass.”

  The waiter is good and he does not ask any questions about what kind of wine I want, he just melts away.

  “I saw Carolyn today,” I blurt before we can begin making small talk. “And my father. I saw them both. My father and Carolyn.”

  “What?”

  “Not at the same time. First I saw my father, and then Carolyn. She called me, Jack. Carolyn called me.”

  I am having such a hard time figuring out what he is feeling. Usually it is easy to tell, his emotions dance across his face, scream themselves out to me, even when they are only whispering to him. But now it is like he has learned a foreign language, one that I do not speak. Instead of trying to discern what is going on under the indecipherable mask, I just plow forward. I tell him about Carolyn's friend the pathologist, about the physical evidence that does not exist. I explain how his ex-wife has exonerated me.

  “I didn't do it,” I say, finally. “It wasn't my fault.”

  “I know,” he says. He isn't looking at me. He stares instead at the edge of the table, or at the heavy silverware, or at the napkin folded in the shape of a swan.

  “What do you mean, you know? How do you know? Did Carolyn call you?”

  At this moment the waiter arrives with our drinks and we sit silently while he sets them before us.

  “Did she call you?” I ask again, once he is gone.

  Jack takes a sip of his drink and makes a face. He pulls out the olive and puts it into his mouth. “No, I haven't spoken to Carolyn in days.”

  “So how did you know?”

  He sighs, and spits the pit discreetly into his palm. “I never thought you killed her, Emilia.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I didn't.” He pauses and swirls his drink in his glass. “When you first told me, I thought it might have been possible. You seemed so sure. But then when I talked to Carolyn . . .”

  At that moment the waiter arrives to take our order, and it is a long minute of rare or medium, sautéed or grilled, before I know what he means. Once the waiter has left with our menus and Jack's empty glass I say, “But Carolyn told you I did it. She told you anyone who was so bad at taking care of William could easily have killed her own baby.”

  He shrugs.

  “I don't understand,” I say.

  “Carolyn had the reaction I would have expected her to have if I'd been thinking clearly. She's angry, and her anger makes her irrational. Hearing her say what she did made me realize how ridiculous and impossible it was. What surprises me is that she had the grace to call you afterward. That surprises me.”

  “Aren't you relieved?”

  “I'm relieved that you feel absolved. I'm relieved that you no longer feel the terrible guilt that's been crippling you for the past few months. So, yes, I guess you could say I'm relieved. But I never really believed you were responsible for Isabel's death. I never needed proof that you weren't.”

  I am not sure what to feel right now. I am grateful to him for his faith and his faithfulness, but at the same time, I almost wish he had thought me the murderer of his child. Because if he had, then now I could be forgiven.

  I am terrified of the self-contained coolness I see on the other side of the table and I wish there were some way I could push it aside, some way I could just make this stop right now.

  “I apologized to my father,” I say.

  “That's good.”

  “We talked about a lot of things. I think you're right about the way I've dealt with him and my mom, and about how that's affected how I look at relationships.” I'm about to launch into a speech about my misplaced search for perfection, and how that has polluted our relationship, and how I am determined to be fairer from here on to Jack and to mysel
f, when he holds up his hand.

  “Emilia, don't.”

  “But . . .”

  “None of this matters.”

  “What?”

  “I am so sorry, and I love you, Emilia. I do. But I can't be with you anymore. I can't do this to William anymore.”

  I feel like I have been sucker punched. My gut is twisting, my throat constricts, and I cannot breath. Or I am breathing too fast. I can't tell. Why does this man always do this to me in restaurants? I should have known better than to meet him here. I should have insisted on hot dogs from a street vender.

  I realize suddenly that Jack is talking.

  “What?” I whisper.

  “I said, it's not fair to him. He's my child. He has to come first in my life. Everything else, what I want, what makes me happy, all that has to come second. I need to do what's best for William.”

  I find my voice now. “And why does that mean leaving me?”

  Jack pushes his chair in, leans across the table, and takes my hand in his. His face assumes an avuncular expression: fond, gentle, condescending. “Emilia, you're thirty-two years old. You don't want an instant family. A school-age kid. An old husband. It's ridiculous. You're too young.”

  “You don't think it's maybe a little late for you to have this epiphany?”

  “It was a mistake. We made a mistake.”