She has turned back to her paperwork, so I can shake my head and say “yes” at the same time. I say this very quietly.
She looks up from the chart. “Well,” she smiles. “It seems you’ve maybe outsmarted those troublesome fibroids. Let’s do a blood test.”
The blood test takes only a few moments. I watch my blood pump into the little vial. The nurse comes in with a glass of water.
“Don’t want you getting dizzy again.”
The doctor says she’ll call me later that afternoon to confirm the results, and then she walks away, her feet shuffling on the carpeted hallway.
I say thank you. I wait a moment in my seat. But then I cannot wait any longer. I walk back down the hallway, ignoring the startled glances from the other two women in the waiting room, ignoring the nurse who looks up in alarm as I pass.
I knock, briefly, on the door I’ve seen the doctor go into. It’s her office. She is there behind a desk, typing something into a computer. It’s about me, I’m sure. She’s entering her notes from the appointment, she’s this kind of conscientious doctor.
“You must know,” I say. “I won’t keep it.”
She keeps very still. She does not react. So much so that I’m not sure she’s understood me. The nurse is behind me now, saying, “You can’t just walk back here.”
But the doctor must have understood me because she says, “It’s okay, Alice. Come in, Ella.”
So I sit on the chair in front of her desk and I say it again, “I won’t be able to keep … if I’m pregnant, I mean. Which I’m sure I am. Urine tests are rarely wrong, the blood test will confirm it.”
“We’ll know for sure in a few hours.”
“That’s fine,” I say, surprised at how firm my voice is. “But when we get that confirmation, I won’t be keeping it.”
She is silent. Watching me for a moment. Her office is small but lined with shelves and its shelves are filled with books and three-ring binders, all of them labeled very carefully. On each shelf sits a fern in a small pot. On each shelf the triangular leaves spill out across the book spines and binder columns.
“So the ferns are yours,” I say.
She furrows her brow. “What you’re saying is that you’d like to interrupt this pregnancy, if we confirm that you’re pregnant?”
I nod. I look her in the eye. Then, “They’re lovely. My husband would enjoy talking to you about them.”
She tips her head at me. “I do love ferns.”
There is a moment of silence. We stare at one another. Then she says, “I’ll call you this afternoon when we get the results. I’ll want to speak with you more at that time.”
“Of course,” I say.
“And you need to know that we don’t perform voluntary interruptions here in this office.”
“You don’t?”
She shakes her head. “It’s easier to leave this to the clinics. But I can refer you, if you’re sure.” She looks about to say something else, then stops.
“You don’t think it’s odd, mixing orchids with ferns?” I ask before I can stop myself. My hands are shaking. I hear the crazy in my voice.
There is a short pause, and then, “I think it’s an odd combination, yes. But it’s turned out rather lovely.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” she says.
21
“I’M GOING TO START GOING THROUGH the basement.” This is how Neil breaks our silence the next day, coming into the living room where I’m drinking tea and sorting the mail.
“The man from the insurance is going to call again,” I answer. I do not say, my doctor confirmed my pregnancy yesterday afternoon while you were out walking the dogs.
“Well, you know everything,” he says. The line of his jaw is tight, furious.
“I think so,” I say. I also do not say that she gave me the name of a clinic in north Seattle.
He stands in the doorway.
He stands in the doorway and I do not tell him that I called and made a first appointment.
In his hands is a paper bag from the bakery up the street. He folds it in half, then in quarters. He stands in the doorway, keeps folding the paper bag. “You should talk to him,” he says. The bag is now an eighth of its usual size, then a sixteenth, and Neil is pressing along an edge, trying to force a straight crease. I watch his hands, watch them working over the paper. He can’t seem to make it small enough and he just keeps pressing and pressing. His knuckles are white with the effort.
“I know, Neil,” I say. “I know.”
He drops the paper onto the table, “Are you willing to consider that you’re completely wrong?”
The paper slowly unfolds from its impossible creases. I look at Neil and I might be shaking my head, I might be holding very still, but it doesn’t matter because he’s already sitting down next to me at the table. He takes the stack of mail from me and he pushes it onto the floor. He reaches for me with one of his strong beautiful hands and I just stand up and back away.
“Please, Ella,” he says.
“We have to talk about this,” he says.
Ok, I think. Sure, we have to talk about this. “Where should we start?” I say, walking over to the bookshelf. All I will have to do is take out a book and flip to the back page, and there will be notes. Dates, facts, arrows pointing from one word to another. None of it will make any sense but it will show him how she was. My dad has gotten rid of many of her books but if I test every single book on this shelf, I’m sure I’ll find one.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for one.”
“For what?” He stands up.
“Just wait.”
There on the first shelf, however, is my dad’s address book. We’ve been looking for this; George asked us for it so he could extend all the right invitations for the memorial service. I pick it up and place it on the table, then return to the shelf and start skimming the titles. Gardening textbooks and mystery novels, my dad’s collection of baseball legends. All these old paperbacks. I’m sure some of hers will still be here.
But Neil stops me by picking up the little address book and saying, “Maybe she’s in here. Maybe it’s just that simple. We could see for ourselves.”
He fingers the thin pages and I startle at the idea that it might be this easy. Turn a page, find a mother.
Neil says, “Maybe she’s fine. Maybe it’s all different than what you believe. Maybe you know nothing about it.”
“Stop,” I say, taking the book from him and holding it tightly closed. I’m thinking of my dad writing her name in its pages, her telephone number, like she were an ordinary person, a member of his usual circle of friends and family.
Neil has crossed his arms over his chest. He says, “You don’t really look the same, you know. I thought you did. But you don’t. Not at all.”
I’m thinking of my dad with a pencil in his hand, copying out the letters of her name and the numbers needed to reach her. I open the book and turn the thin pages. Quickly. I find everyone I expect to find: George and Lisa, myself and Neil, my dad’s neighbors and other friends, the members of his quiz team, and all the other ferry captains listed with the names of their boats—the Salish, the Yakima, the Champoeg, the Sealth. But there is nothing for Maggie Tomlinson. No “M”, no nothing. She isn’t there. I drop the book on the table with a small feeling of triumph.
“See?” I say.
“No, I don’t see. So okay, she won’t be so easy to find. But what does that mean? Aren’t you even a little curious to know about them? If your mother is better? As soon as we have to deal with the estate, we’ll have to anyway. If she’s alive, she gets the cabin.”
I interrupt him, I’m speaking slowly. “I do not want this trade. If you cannot understand that, then …”
“Then what?”
I can’t answer him.
“Not even for your dad? Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“This isn’t about them anymore,�
� I say, “This is my life.”
Neil is staring at me. His nostrils are flared, his hair a mess where he’s ruffled it in frustration. His eyes are wide, shocked.
“She left,” I say.
And I wait for a second because Neil looks down at his hands again. Is thinking of himself again, of what I told him we would never ever speak about.
“She became a different person, a crazy person, and then she left,” I say. “Is that what you wanted me to say?”
“My dad and I stayed,” I say.
“That’s not it,” he interrupts me.
“I know what happened. I know how we dealt with it. On our own. We didn’t need her.”
“Stop thinking you know everything. That you can control everything.”
“I know we learned to live without her,” I say.
Neil stands up, dismissing me. He narrows his eyes. “No. You did. We don’t know yet what your dad learned.”
He has backed into the kitchen and I’m up and after him, gripping his shoulder with a tight hand. But he shakes me off, stepping back, blinking at my anger. “You’re being completely unreasonable.”
His eyebrows come down. His lips press together. “Ella, I have torn the storage room apart, looking for an explanation. Something else. Letters, something to you. He would not have lied just to lie.” He throws a hand up. “And you know this, you don’t need me to tell you your dad was a good man. How much more evidence do you need before you’ll see that you’re getting it all wrong?” He waits for this, as if he needs to let it sink in, and then he spits the words, “Frankly, Ella, I’m disgusted at how little credit you’re willing to give him.”
I look away. Neil isn’t really disgusted with my anger at my dad. Worried, probably. Disgusted, no. He’s disgusted about us, about me. It must feel good to finally tell me this.
“I can’t …”
“Yes, I know.” His hands are shaking as he crosses them over his chest. “You can’t. You’ve made that pretty clear.”
I could try to find something to pull us out of our anger. A pledge. An explanation. An endearment. But I don’t. My rage is so much easier to live with. It wants so much less of me.
Neil pours himself a glass of water. I watch him wrestling to keep control. How far can I push him? When he’s done he rinses the glass under the tap and sets the clean glass down on the drying rack. Slowly. Too slowly. He opens a cupboard by the dishwasher and gets out Daisie and Trapp’s food dishes. The two dogs materialize by his side but he drops the empty dishes onto the floor and slams the cupboard door so hard it cracks on its hinges.
But before he can yell whatever he wants to yell, I am yelling first and God it feels so good to yell, and Neil must think so too because he yells back, and before we know it, we’re both just shouting and pointing our fingers, crossing our arms, tightening our bodies against the other with the assuredness of our opposing positions—
“Maybe they worked it all out!”
“You have no idea what it was like!”
“I don’t care how it was! This isn’t about ‘was’, this is about ‘now’!”
But no matter how much he calls me back to the question of my pregnancy, the details of my parent’s story come to rest between us like something Neil has picked up on one of his forest walks and wants to give me. Only, for the first time, he has no idea what kind of object he’s discovered and I do, I’ve seen this thing before, and I know he should have been more careful, he should not have picked this up with his bare hands, I know it might be radioactive or poisonous. I just want him to drop this thing, bury it right back into the ground, throw it into the river.
Trapp becomes so alarmed at all this yelling that he’s barking at us, and he jumps up on Neil, then down to the floor and jumps up on me in turn. I stagger backward, and he keeps barking. Neil shouts him down but he barks back at us, even baring his teeth. Trapp has never done this and it silences us. In our silence, he lies down on the floor between our feet, puts his head on his paws. I walk into the bathroom to find a tissue. When I return to the kitchen, Neil has fed the dogs and is standing with his back to me.
The dogs finish eating and Neil leans over to remove their dishes. He rinses them in the sink, dries them, and then folds the dishtowel into a neat square. I pick up the address book again and finger the gold lettering on the cover. He stacks the dog dishes on the sideboard and despite the cold weather he opens the window over the sink. A thin knife of wind cuts into the warmth of the room.
Then, without turning around, Neil says, “You know as well as I do how much your dad would have loved a grandchild.”
This is true. This is so true I can no longer breathe. And for this awful moment, I am relieved that my dad has died. I am so thankful, for a few horrible seconds, that he is gone. That I won’t also have to answer to him. But after this fleeting feeling comes and goes, I want only to invite an attack by a rabid dog, to be torn limb from disloyal limb by its merciful teeth.
22
THAT EVENING WE EAT SUPPER WITH George and Lisa. From the moment we arrive, everyone is pretending. I am pretending not to want to vomit at the smell of the mussels cooking in broth on the stove, pretending that my body isn’t aching, my breasts swollen and painful. Neil is pretending not to ignore me. George is pretending that the sight of me doesn’t make him even sadder. Only Lisa is being honest, doing what she does best and trying to smooth out all of our wrinkles. She has lit scented candles and tactfully gotten George to forgo a beer for a mug of herbal tea. She is talking to Neil about aromatherapy, asking me if I’ll carry one of her healing crystals.
George and I sit on the sofa in the living room, away from Neil and Lisa in the kitchen. Their living room always smells of incense and this, unexpectedly, quiets my stomach. I cross my arms over my chest to ease the pain in my breasts.
We talk about George’s work, the weather, sports. He tells me about a small dispute with a neighbor. A problem with his truck. He rubs his face. When he pulls his hands away, I notice how red his eyes are.
Finally, he picks at a thread from a throw blanket and says, “You never told me what you found at the cabin.” I see the boxes and those strange items in the chest. The purple scarf. I feel my anger bubbling up again, the thought of this trade. The disorder of my mother for the quiet of my father. But that’s not even right. Because the sides don’t match up—my father’s lies for my mother’s mess? I don’t want that. And George should be mad about this, too. Instead he says, “What was there? Anything?”
“Nothing too interesting.” I am unable to keep my voice gentle, disinterested. “Fishing poles, dishes, some magazines and seashells.”
He pulls air in through his teeth. “You were his life, Ella.”
“One of them,” I say. “Let’s keep things straight, I was just one of his lives.”
“You know that’s not true. And we don’t know why yet. What else did you find?”
“Provisions.”
At his confused glance, I repeat, “Provisions. Which only proves that he was just as cracked as you-know-who. The place was filled with empty jam jars and cardboard boxes, if that tells you anything.” And once I’ve gotten started, I cannot stop. I tell him about the gourd utensils and the potpourri sachets, the knitted items and the candles. “All just a bunch of useless crap. And none of it means anything, not a tiny bit. Stuff my dad wouldn’t even have liked.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I!”
“Did you bring it back?”
“Why bother?” I say, frustrated that he wants to waste energy on this. Why is everyone treating this like a worthwhile mystery? “It was all just ridiculous. Meaningless.”
I’m about to go on, but he sits up and frowns at me. “That’s enough, Ella. You are not the only one who lost someone this week.”
My anger sharpens to a point. I resent the tone of his voice. Like he was speaking to a child. My dad never spoke to me like that. “I know,” I say, snapping, but the
n I remember that my dad kept things from me. This appears to be the graver sin.
“You know,” George continues, “I used to be jealous of your mother. She was outrageously funny, at least in the beginning. No one could get a room of people laughing as quickly as your mother could. But then she changed, and things were different. You don’t expect that kind of rapid change. You can’t.” He rubs one hand with the other, says, “He could have simply forgotten her. Left her out there somewhere, to die maybe, and moved on.”
I freeze with the thought that this is what I required of him. This is what I wanted him to do, wanted us to do.
“Didn’t you ever talk about her?”
The honest answer would be that we never talked about her because she took up so much space anyway. I shake my head.
“But didn’t you have questions?”
“Questions about what?” Lisa asks, bustling in from the kitchen. Neil is behind her, carrying three flat wooden boxes.
George offers me a small gift by answering Lisa with: “Nothing, honey. Don’t mind us.”
Lisa gives us both a look but doesn’t press us. Neil and I avoid each other’s eyes. Then Neil and Lisa sit down at the dining room table and Lisa pushes away a stack of papers and a vase of dried flowers.
“I found all of these with Sam,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to show you. To you, especially,” she says to Neil. It’s her collection of bird feathers. Sam is her oldest grandson but still young enough to enjoy walking with his grandmother to search out and gather forest treasure.
She has them all labeled and arranged in shallow glass-covered boxes, like picture frames, each quill laid out in careful rows. Neil ticks them off: Mew Gull, Laughing Gull, Bonaparte’s Gull, Franklin Gull.
There’s a box for songbird feathers, too.
“They’re stunning,” he says. He opens the latch on one of the boxes, draws out a tiny feather. At first it is just brown and boring but he holds it to the light, points at the striping, the vivid slash of yellow.
There is another box for pigeon, and one for crow and heron and raptor.
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