by Jan Ellison
We were crossing a mile-wide dry river valley with cliffs rising on both sides. It was a high desert between mountains, astonishing in both its desolation and its beauty. There was a cold wind blowing down the valley from the mountains. We thought the valley was dry, but it wasn’t. There was water flowing, little rivers, seven or eight of them, down the center of the cracked earth. Each time we reached one of these rivers, we took off our hiking boots and tied them to our packs. We waded across barefoot, rolling our pants up to our thighs. The rivers got deeper and faster, until we were wet to our waists. Beyond the final river was a high cliff. On the cliff we could see a narrow path twisting its way up the side of a rock face. How were we going to get up there?
“We’ll find a way,” your father said.
Why did I expect him to know everything? Because he acted as if he did. It was one of the things I loved about him, all the time we lived together. He had an answer for everything. He somehow knew it was more important to be reassuring, to seem to be in command of the situation, than to be right. And he was always willing to give in when he was found out to be wrong.
The water in the river was waist-high and very cold. My feet were freezing. Then the water was rib-high and thick with current, and I struggled to keep my feet on the ground. Your father stopped, midstream. There was a little dot of black on the path high on the cliff—a man—yelling in a language we did not speak. But he made himself clear enough, motioning with his hands for us to go back, go back; we had come the wrong way. So we forded the seven little rivers again, taking our boots off and putting them on again seven more times. I was furious with Jonathan by the end. I wanted to be rid of him. I wanted to be alone.
In the distance was a smudge that grew into a shape as we moved toward it. It was a shack, smack in the middle of the bare river valley. There were three women in colorful Nepalese dresses sitting in front of the shack. They smiled and bowed and sat us down on the floor outside the hut. They gave us lemon tea. Your father shrugged. Then he smiled. He opened his arms to encompass the valley, and the mountains, and the brilliant colors that had begun to ravage the sky as the sun set. He was not going to let me stay angry with him. Already he seemed to have mastered me. Already he knew how to insist I be the best I could be. I grinned, though I tried not to. We drank our tea. We climbed the cliff back to the town in which we’d begun our day’s journey. We fell into a single bed, tangled up in each other, and slept for fourteen hours straight.
The next morning I woke up queasy. Your father decided I had giardia. He thought it would be a good idea to get me back to civilization. There was one flight a week, out of a town a day’s walk north. We made the walk. We took a plane to Pokhara, where your father found me medicine. He promised I would feel better in a day or two. We found a bus that would take us to Varanasi, across the border in India. At some point during that journey, your father’s pack was stolen from the top of the bus. We bought him new clothes at a roadside town. He looked regal, during our difficult time in India, in the white sari of the highest caste. He had not lost his passport, thank goodness. He could still prove who he was.
Thirty
VARANASI. One of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. The place considered by Hindus to be the holiest city, the final resting place, built on the shores of the River Ganges, the river Ma—mother of all rivers—as if named for the revelations we received there.
You’ve seen the photos, Robbie. You’ve heard how I fell in the river and a dead body floated by. You’ve heard it all except the bits we left out.
I remember the city as buildings like painted shoeboxes crushed together, rising in pastel splendor beneath an orange sky. I remember obelisk towers with spires and haunting music playing at all hours, music free of melody and constructed out of an alien scale. I remember the river, of course, and all the life and death it held in its body and on its shores.
I continued to feel queasy. We decided it was a virus; it would run its course and I would get better in time. We rode on a raft to the center of the river to witness a cremation ceremony one morning at dawn. I remember the dark seriousness of our guide’s face in the gray morning, the glow of his skin as the sun first appeared in the sky. From the river we watched people gathering on the stone steps of a temple on the shore. We watched little boys and girls brushing their teeth, scooping river water into their mouths to rinse, and women beating clothes against the stone steps. A dead cow floated by. It looked like a rubber cow, blown up. We heard music, and the ceremony began. The gray sky gave way to pink. The people on the steps, in their orange gowns, were singing and dancing a slow, ceremonial dance. The air smelled of burning hair. I felt sick. I leaned over to splash some water on my face, thinking it might shock the queasiness out of me. Did I fall, or did I jump? I don’t know, but I ended up in the river. My mouth filled with river water. I gasped and gagged. Your father lifted me out of the water and wrapped his jacket around me, not tenderly but brusquely.
“Why did you do that?” he asked me.
“I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“It looked like you did.”
The guide began to row us in. He maneuvered around another raft in which three boys were poking at something in the water with a stick—an object, wrapped in gauze.
“What is it?” I asked.
Your father leaned in to look. “A dead body,” he said.
A corpse, incompletely cremated, floating right in the spot I had just gone underwater. I threw up in my lap, all over my wet clothes. But it wasn’t the dead body that had made me sick. It was a new one—yours, Robbie—taking me firmly in its grip and not letting go until the fall.
YOU ARE THINKING about the chronology now.
You are thinking about what you’ve been told. The pieces dropped here and there at the dinner table over the years. We met in Ireland. We trekked in Nepal. We traveled in India. We ended up in San Francisco. We bought the house, and the following year you were born.
Except it wasn’t the following year. It was that year. In January, we went to India. In June, we got married. In July, we bought the house. In September, you were born.
We agreed that if you ever asked, if you made your calculations and found a discrepancy, if you came upon our marriage certificate, for instance, and noticed that we were married in the year of your birth, we would tell you the truth. You never asked, though. And I have wondered of late whether it was only to save us from embarrassment. Some reticence you inherited. Some resistance to putting people on the spot. A natural tendency toward restraint. An ability to put the comfort of others in front of your own.
I wish you had asked. I wish we’d come clean years ago. Then these revelations surrounding your conception and birth would not be huddled together in secrecy, ready to pounce on you all at once.
We had planned to travel to Agra and Jaipur and then Goa. But I was too sick. I felt my sickness was somehow tied up in the city, Varanasi. Its filth and crowding and its fetid river, where corpses floated and little girls brushed their teeth at dawn. Where there was endless, formless music rising out of the heat and humidity and coalescing into a single dirty song.
We lay in our filthy room that night on the sagging bed under the slowly turning fan.
“I want to go home,” I said.
Jonathan turned on the lights. He looked at me, lying in a fetal position on the bed.
“You don’t look good,” he said. “You look green.”
“I feel green,” I said. “Actually, I feel black.”
“Maybe … you couldn’t be pregnant, could you?”
I looked at him.
“We’ve been so careful.”
“But that first time … when it slipped.”
“But I had my period.”
“Still.”
He scoured the city and found a drugstore that sold a Western home-pregnancy kit. We stood together in the seedy bathroom down the hall from our room. There were spiders everywhere, and ants. There were dark s
tains in the bottom of the sink.
I peed on the stick. We watched the line form, then darken.
It’s astonishing to me, now, how shocked we were. Astonishing that we had not known all along.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
“I’m really sorry about this.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“What do we want to do?” he asked me. Not what did I want, but what did we want, together. I was grateful to him for putting it that way, because all alone, I had no idea what I wanted.
“Go to a clinic, I guess. Get it taken care of.”
“All right,” he said. “But not here. Obviously. We need to get back to the States.”
THREE DAYS LATER, we were in San Francisco, staying at a motel south of Market. Your father found a Planned Parenthood clinic near City Hall. He made us an appointment for the following day. In the morning, we went to a diner for breakfast. I ordered a hamburger, even though it was only nine o’clock in the morning. Beef and bread—those were the things I’d discovered I could keep down. Jonathan ordered eggs and corned beef hash. I ate the hamburger. The nausea briefly receded.
It was a glorious winter day, bright and cold, with white sunlight glinting off the windows of the skyscrapers. In the back of the cab to the clinic, I rolled the window down for air. The wind blew my hair around. I held it back with one hand. Your father reached for my other hand and held it in both of his. But his hands were trembling, and that was the thing that finally made me sad and afraid.
When the taxi stopped, Jonathan opened the door for me. He took me by the hand and led me along the sidewalk. We passed City Hall. Did I think he might say something then? Was I secretly hoping he would suggest that instead of going to the clinic, we turn in to that mass of stone and do whatever it was people did—procure blood tests and marriage licenses and the strength to be faithful and true? If that hope existed, it existed alongside the wish to get the whole thing over with so I could continue with the business of being healthy and normal and young.
The sun was high and full on our faces. The wind was cold. The sky was an aching blue. It had rained the night before and we could taste the residue of water in the air. We stood holding hands on the sidewalk, and it seemed to me for a moment anything might be possible. We might, the two of us together, be capable of beauty and bravery and unfounded optimism. He felt it, too, I think, right then—the possibility of an alternate path.
At the clinic, we went to the window and gave them my name. They didn’t ask for his name, only his money. It was my ordeal, apparently. It was my child. Did I think of you as a child? At least a part of me did. I may have worked hard to shrug off my Catholic training, but I had not been entirely successful. Inside me, very much alive, were reminders I would have preferred right then to forget. Bloody posters held up by protesters in front of clinics. Words, warnings, debates. The tricky question: When does life begin? Trying to reason it out is like trying to imagine what existed before the universe. There is a point at which human intelligence falls short. It’s one of the reasons I hate an election year. All those debates. All that certainty. It seems so frail to me. It seems pointless, and even fraudulent, to pretend to have answers to unanswerable questions. I could not persuade myself that the life inside me was not a life. I could imagine a baby readily enough. A fetus that, uninterrupted, would grow eyes and eyelashes and limbs and fingers and toes. It would open its eyes and they would be blue, like your father’s.
On the other hand, there were all the things I had put in my body since the night the condom slipped—hash and liquor and dirty river water—that might have given you brain damage. I felt an intolerable rush of guilt and regret. You had begun with the potential to become a perfectly formed being, and now you were impaired. Was that a reason to terminate you? Such a terrible word, terminate. A word from a brave new world in which only the flawless are allowed to be born. And here I was, your mother, your protector, the one to introduce the possibility of flaws. Now I was about to heap sin upon sin. I was about to pay for my appetites with a tiny life.
But maybe none of this is true. Maybe I wasn’t thinking any of that. Maybe I was thinking that if I kept you, your father would marry me, and I would become a doctor’s wife. I would never have to go home again. And where was home, anyway? A condominium in Burbank directly beneath the flight path of an airport. What was the future there? A degree from a community college. A career like my mother’s career. A life like my mother’s life.
On the other hand, a doctor’s wife. What did I imagine such a woman might look like? What would she do with her days? I imagined walks across the city in expensive clothes. I imagined tennis, or possibly sailing. Long lunches, during which I would drink iced tea and stare out at the boats in the bay, battling the wind under the Golden Gate Bridge. I’m not sure my vision included a child at all. Or if it did, it was a stylized version, a cartoon baby with bright eyes and round red cheeks, stashed away somewhere while I conquered the city.
I sat in the clinic and began to imagine a bargain. In this bargain, I would promise to be good. I would give up drinking. I would stop being impulsive and selfish. I would stop thinking of Patrick. I would be faithful to Jonathan in mind and in deed. Instead of oblivion, I would seek equanimity and purity of purpose. I would strike out on a new path and forge a new kind of life. I would save the child inside me from termination, and in exchange for my goodness, that child would be born free of imperfections, with all his fingers and toes and mental faculties intact. It’s not so different from the bargain I made again last August, when I spewed out my confession and broke your father’s heart. I faced my sins, and promised to be good, and hoped to be forgiven.
In the clinic that day, I didn’t say any of what I was thinking out loud. I sat next to your father and filled out the forms and turned them back in at the counter.
We didn’t have long to wait. They called my name and I took a step forward. I gave your father a weak smile.
He stood up. He took me by the elbow and sat me down again. He spoke in a low, tender voice, the voice I had until then heard him use only in bed. “You know what?” he said. “I think we could handle this.”
“Handle what?”
“Having a baby. Getting married. All that.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“But do you want to?”
“I do. I really do. If you will.”
We left the clinic. We took another cab, back to the diner. I ordered another hamburger, but it was too late. The interval between meals was too long, and I was too sick now to swallow. I sipped a glass of water. Your father ordered a pastrami sandwich and wolfed it down. There was a red vintage gumball machine next to the hostess stand. He stood up and put a quarter in it and turned, but nothing came out. He tried again, but again, he had no luck. The hostess had disappeared, so he walked back to the kitchen and returned with a screwdriver. He pried off the red metal lid and set it on the ground. I watched from the booth as he burrowed down with his hand, pulling out prize after prize, each encased in a clear plastic capsule with a blue top. Finally he held a prize up to the light, then slipped it into his pocket. He screwed the lid back on the gumball machine. He returned to me and bent down on his knees beside the booth and fished the plastic capsule out of his pocket. He popped the blue lid off. Inside was a ring.
He asked for my hand. I gave it to him.
“That’s the wrong hand,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
I extended my left hand. The cheap metal band of the ring was painted a bright gold. There was a stone—an imitation diamond. It was very large. The band was not solid but open on one side, so the size could be adjusted.
Your father slipped the ring onto my finger. He squeezed the band hard, until the metal was pinching my skin. We laughed a little, a high, private laugh at the absurdity of it all. He lifted my hand up and kissed the ring. He leaned i
n and kissed me on the lips. He pressed his forehead against my forehead.
“Will you marry me?” he whispered.
He kept his forehead crushed against mine, and his face was so close to my face, it was as if I swallowed the question as soon as he posed it. I felt our held breaths as the words burrowed down inside me, where you were burrowing, too, so small but so certain, and where, right beside you, an answer had already been waiting.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll marry you.”
PART II
Thirty-one
SATURDAY MORNING. The girls will be home from Wisconsin tomorrow. Before they arrive, I’ll hide everything again in the hatbox, then I’ll return it to the hall closet. Between now and then, I wonder, can these artifacts carry the story? They say a picture paints a thousand words; do you need so many more words than that?
The hatbox came into my possession when I purchased an off-white silk pillbox hat with a little veil in the spring of 1990 at a bridal store on Union Street. It was a bizarre headpiece for a young bride, in retrospect, but I suppose I felt a full white virgin veil would be too much, given my condition. Taped to the inside of the hatbox, still, is an envelope in which the store clerk placed the receipt for the hat. I’ve never looked at it. I’ve never needed to, because I remember how much it cost—seventy-eight dollars—much more than I wanted to spend, but an extravagance I allowed myself because I had money left over from the check my mother had sent me to buy a wedding dress, which I managed to purchase at a secondhand shop.
The hat has long since been given to Goodwill, but the hatbox has endured. It’s like the keep in Canterbury, the place for things that need to be hidden from invaders. The first thing I put in it, as I recall, was the sealed envelope in which I’d placed the notes from Patrick. The second was the toy ring in its clear plastic shell—fished from the gumball machine the day your father proposed—which he promptly replaced with a cubic zirconium, another placeholder, he promised, until he could afford a real diamond.