Better Times

by Batkie, Sara;

  “I wasn’t looking for you, I swear,” he continued, keeping his eyes on the road. “I just stumbled across your number and address. Called a couple times. Never got an answer. So,” he cleared his throat, “I went to your apartment one day.”

  She remained silent, waiting to hear what he would say about her.

  “You were wearing a bright yellow coat when you came out. I was parked across the street. I meant to get out and say hello, but there was something in your manner, the way you walked, that made me stay where I was. You kept your head down, even when people passed right by you. You seemed so closed off. Not at all how I remembered you. Not at all how you are now.”

  “That wasn’t me,” she said. “I don’t own a yellow coat. You must have seen my neighbor Betsy. From a distance we look a little alike.”

  Stan chewed at his lip. Outside the buildings had fallen away, replaced by forgotten fields, vacant lots, the detritus of civilization that often scattered near places people went to get away from the place they were.

  “I guess it’s good I didn’t do anything, then,” he said.

  “What would you have done? If it had been me that day?”

  “Well, I would have acted surprised to see you. And pleased. And you would’ve been pleased to see me. Maybe we wouldn’t have embraced. But we’d have shaken hands at least. I’d have said I was in the neighborhood, asked if you lived around here. You’d have laughed and pointed at the building behind you. I’d have said that I interrupted you on your way somewhere, but you’d have invited me to walk with you. Maybe you would have been on your way to work at the department store. I’d have persuaded you to stop somewhere for lunch or a cup of coffee. And we’d have sat and talked. About all the things that had happened since we were kids. Where we’d been. What we’d seen. I’d have told you that I’d been married for a few years. And that I see my daughter every other weekend now. How I don’t love my job but I do love my work. How I look forward to fishing on the weekends. How every once in a while, when I’m out in the boat and nothing is biting, you’ll cross my mind and I’ll wonder what you’re doing at that moment. You’d have laughed when I told you this. And taken my hand. Before we’d part we’d have agreed to do it again sometime.”

  “That sounds like a nice day,” Betsy said, as Stan pulled the car into the airport lot. She knew it was just a story and not even one meant for her. But she wanted to be a part of it. It was better than any day she’d ever had, this day that had never happened.

  As he reached for the gearshift, she placed a hand on his forearm. “Let’s have it in Paris,” she said. “It’s what Vicky would have wanted, after all. After all the grief she put us through. Heaven knows,” she laughed, thinking of Ms. Cross, how resolute she seemed thrusting her daughter’s money into her hands, “she owed us more.”

  “Is that how you remember it?” Stan said. His gaze had a sour twang to it like a wrong note struck on a string, reverberating through his features. It startled her, this dubiety, and yet when she reached for his hand he gave it. Indeed, the confirmation of her flesh seemed to soften him. He put the car in park.

  It wasn’t until much later, after they’d bought their tickets, gotten through the line at security, and were comfortably in their seats as the plane began its ascent, the little houses outside the window growing as small in sight as they were in her esteem, that Betsy thought about what would happen if they crashed. What God she would call to, what she would say, who she would say she was. For surely whatever was left of her would not be identifiable as Fabienne. Not that it would matter to whatever was left of Stan.

  It was already getting difficult to tell what below them was land or sea.

  Stan reached for her hand, and she rested her head on his shoulder, the movements so fluid and natural between them it was as if they’d been making them all their lives. Perhaps they had been, or at least were preparing to. This was her reward, for being a patient person. She could wait for such a long time.

  Lookaftering

  Louisa hadn’t even realized she was pregnant when she gave birth to the eggs. She woke up late, after Wally had left, and so made her own breakfast. As usual when this happened she didn’t care for it. She felt fine while scraping the leftovers into the trash, but later, while lying out on the couch, she began to feel a strange uncoiling in her stomach, like a snake letting loose from a trick can.

  Wally found her that evening, standing over the toilet.

  “What is it,” he said, in that flat way that didn’t want an answer.

  “I’m not sure.”

  There were three of them, each one about the size of a fist, pale lilac in color. They’d made a dainty plop when they hit the water, sliding down to gather together in the crotch of the bowl.

  “What the fuck, Louisa,” Wally said when he came to stand beside her.

  “Well, this is just as much your fault as mine,” she said.

  “Whoa, now,” he took a step back, “let’s not go throwing words like that around.”

  “They got inside me somehow.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Wally said. “Anyway, I thought you were on the pill.”

  “I’m on a pill,” Louisa said.

  She crouched down, wanting to get away from him for a moment. The eggs were still; their shells showed no cracks from knocking against the porcelain. There was something peaceful about them. She wondered how heavy they might be, how delicate. There were so many others she had cracked thoughtlessly over the years, little white shards in her wake. She reached down and picked one up.

  “That’s it,” Wally said. “I’m outta here.”

  It settled in the center of her palm, the same weight and texture as a billiard ball.

  “Aren’t you going to help me with these?” she asked, to his departing backside.

  “Are you snake or bird?” she shouted to the empty doorway, but he did not return to her. Not for a couple days, at least.

  By then Louisa had done her research. She’d dried the eggs, wrapped them in a dishtowel, and set them underneath her desk lamp, which she kept lit at all hours even though it made it difficult to sleep. Her fourth-grade class had done the same with chicken eggs for a group experiment once; she’d been the only one to see them hatch. They’d come out wet and wobbly, like chewed-up gum with a pair of legs. None lived more than a couple days. Six years later, in high school, she’d had to carry around a sack of flour for a day, treating it like an infant. When she wasn’t looking, one of the other girls had cut a hole in the bag. The next time she picked it up white powder spilled all over the floor. Louisa was determined to do better this time.

  Wally liked to make dramatic re-entrances into her life, so she didn’t bat an eye when he tumbled through the door, hair mussed, clothes polluted, the smell of lost spirits on his breath. She was seated at the kitchen table, one of her mother’s old encyclopedias propped up in front of her.

  “Did you know,” Louisa said, as he began banging around in the cupboards for the coffee, “that the female platypus, after mating, will construct an elaborate underground burrow from leaves and reeds to house her eggs? She drags these materials to the nest using her curled tail.”

  He sniffed the grounds he found, made a dissatisfied grunt.

  “And,” she continued, “that the female platypus doesn’t have teats. Milk is released through the pores in her skin.”

  “Please, Louisa,” Wally said, “I can’t handle this right now.”

  “But you will later,” she said, looking up at him. “Or else you wouldn’t be here.”

  He didn’t answer her then, but that night, reaching for sleep as one does for air underwater, he rolled over and put his hand on top of hers and squeezed.

  Louisa and Wally had been living together only four months but they’d known each other since college. She suspected it was because of these two combined factors that he came back to her, despite his reservations about the situation. They both were twenty-seven now, and though they had once
professed to grand plans for the future, they both worked part-time. He tended bar on weekday afternoons or, as he called it, the graveyard shift. She had been a receptionist at a gym but was fired two weeks earlier after mixing up Krav Maga and Capoeira, inconveniencing two trainers and thirty students. “It just doesn’t seem like you care enough about the Crush Fitness family,” her boss had said.

  She and Wally had never discussed having kids before. That was still something that only happened to other people, like parents with cancer or getting accepted to graduate school. They were pixels on a Facebook page. They were decisions, or at least accidents that became ones. But surely parenthood was not the word for what this was. Surely there was some other way to make sense of it.

  A week went by, during which the eggs didn’t seem to change at all. Louisa wanted to keep them in the kitchen because it was the room that got the best light. But that seemed reckless. And what would they do if friends came over? They never did, but still. Instead, she built a nest out of shredded old newspapers, adding a little more every day as the world carried on its own business. When she held them in her hand she swore she could feel a tiny pulse inside.

  Then one morning Wally announced, “I called your mother.”

  “Oh God,” Louisa said. “She’s not coming down here, is she?”

  Her mother had a house four hours away by car but had never been to visit. This was how she made her disapproval of their living situation known.

  “She thinks you’re being irrational and wants you to see a doctor.”

  Louisa rolled her eyes.

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Wally said.

  “Maybe I should see a vet instead,” she grumbled. But she knew he was right.

  Luckily, Doctor Sparks had an opening that afternoon. “Did you know,” Louisa said on the drive over to the offices, “that parrots nest in cavities, like tree hollows or cliff sides? And that both parents participate in the excavation? There’s often intense competition for spots. When the babies are born they don’t have feathers.”

  “I really don’t think you’ve laid parrot eggs,” Wally said. He’d insisted on bringing them along; Louisa held them in her lap, stored in a Tupperware container lined with cloth napkins.

  “I know I haven’t,” she said. “Parrot eggs are white.”

  “Plus, they live over a hundred years. I wouldn’t want our kids to be around that long.”

  Louisa smiled; Wally always joked like that when he was nervous.

  “Well,” Doctor Sparks said, after Louisa had positioned herself on the exam table, slapping his hands and rubbing them together like he was hovering over a steak dinner. “What seems to be the trouble?” She had been going to Doctor Sparks for six years, but she still never felt entirely comfortable around him. He had a bald head and a tall, thin frame, like a beaker turned upside down, and a jovial, forthright manner that she found irritating. She suspected he couldn’t be trusted to deliver bad news.

  “Hmm,” he said, after she explained what had happened. “Maybe it was something you ate,” and directed a barking laugh at Wally, who was seated between the sink and a box of toys meant to distract young children.

  “I think this is pretty serious,” he mumbled.

  Doctor Sparks cleared his throat, chastened, perhaps, or merely disappointed. “You have them with you?” he said, turning back to Louisa, who handed over the container. He popped it open and picked one up, holding it to his right eye while closing the left, spinning it with the counterfeit expertise of a pawnshop owner appraising jewelry.

  “Any lingering discomfort? Or spotting?” he asked.

  Louisa shook her head.

  “And while you were passing them, did it hurt?”

  “Not really,” she said. “It kind of felt like sex. But in reverse.”

  Nobody knew how to respond to that.

  He listened to her chest through a stethoscope, prodded her stomach with his fingers, offered to send her down the hall for a sonogram, but Louisa declined.

  “I can’t find anything wrong with you,” Doctor Sparks said.

  “Well,” Louisa replied, “I guess that’s a relief.”

  They were both silent on the drive home, at least until they pulled into the apartment building lot. “For the record,” Wally said as he eased the car into its space, “I didn’t think anything was actually wrong with you. I just wanted to be sure you were safe.”

  “I’ll be sure to note that down in my ‘Pro Wally’ column,” she said, pinching him affectionately on the upper arm.

  That night she fell asleep listening to phlegm rattling like a sticky marble in Wally’s chest. It sounded like growing old together.

  A week later Louisa answered a knock at the front door and found a reporter for the local news station standing there.

  “What do you want?” she said, more curious than malicious.

  The woman was young, perhaps as young as herself, and she seemed as tightly wound as her hair. She’d matched her nail color to the shade of her blazer and skirt so meticulously that Louisa found herself staring at her, wondering which decision had come first. The woman stared back, waiting for her to notice the camera crew that stood behind her and the puffy-headed microphone she held close to her breast.

  Wally was at work and usually much better at turning people away from the apartment, so she didn’t realize what a mistake she’d made until they were inside, eyeing with unkindness the unframed concert posters on the walls, the loose screws in the Ikea furniture, the stacked dishes listing in the sink. “May we see them?” the newswoman asked. She’d introduced herself. Her name was something alliterative, but Louisa had already forgotten it.

  “See them?” she repeated.

  “The eggs,” the woman said. “They are real, aren’t they?”

  Louisa winced as if threatened with a blow.

  “Tell me,” she blurted, “are you familiar at all with the emperor penguin?”

  Later that night, when the segment was airing, the eggs looked dull, dishwater gray, neglected in their large, shabby nest. The light from above reflected on their surfaces like tiny windows, the camera moving steadily closer until they nearly filled the screen, grainy and utilitarian as a missing person’s photograph.

  “Do you sit on them?” the woman’s voice asked, before the view cut to Louisa propped on the same living room couch from which she watched now with Wally.

  “Do I look tired?” she murmured, reaching up to touch her face. But Wally shushed her: “I want to hear what you say.”

  They stared at her funhouse mirror image before them, waiting.

  “No, I don’t,” the image said. “I think the weight would be too much for them.”

  “Was that a good answer?” Louisa asked. Wally shrugged, keeping his gaze on the television.

  “What do you imagine is inside them?” the woman asked.

  “I don’t know, but I hope they look like me.”

  “Would you call yourself their mother?” she prodded.

  “I think I’ll wait to hear what they want to call me.”

  Wally laughed. “That’s a good one,” he said. There was a beery glint in his eyes that Louisa didn’t like the look of.

  “You know,” the woman continued, “many parents struggle to prepare even for one child. What are you going to do with three?”

  “I think I’ll manage,” Louisa’s image said. “Lots of women deal with much more.”

  “So you’re raising them alone then?”

  Onscreen Louisa shrugged and the camera cut abruptly to the outside of the apartment where the newswoman stood, a veil of grave concern over her features. She began intoning about absentee fathers and single mothers, the scourge of unplanned parenthood on the land.

  “Wait, they cut me off!” Louisa said. But Wally was already getting up from the couch. “I said you would be helping me. I said they could find photos of us on the fridge. I took them in the kitchen and showed them. I told her we were like emperor pe
nguins, how the female transfers the egg to the male after she lays it. How sometimes during the process couples drop the egg and the chick inside freezes. I told her we wouldn’t be like that. We’d be like the ones who recognize one another’s calls.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Louisa,” he said. “You should never have let them in to begin with. Why? Why did you do that? Why did you show or tell them any of it?”

  “Because she didn’t believe me.”

  “Who cares?” Wally spat.

  “I needed her to believe me,” Louisa said. “We can’t be the only ones who believe.”

  Wally shook his head, stalked into the bedroom, and shut the door. The news had moved on to the weather. There was a week of sunny days ahead.

  There weren’t many of them, at first. Just a few neighborhood ladies with hair the color and style of cotton candy peeping through the front windows. When Wally saw them he rapped the window with his knuckles, as if to scatter them like birds. But they returned the next day, and the day after that, growing in number each time.

  “What do you think they want?” Louisa would ask, but Wally was still not speaking to her, at least not directly.

  One day after Wally left for the bar she ventured out to them. Some had brought lawn chairs and sat knitting or flipping through magazines; others loitered further back, leaning against the railing that rounded the property. When Louisa stepped out they all turned toward her in unison, like creatures in some nature documentary. She paused in the doorway, waiting for one of them to say something. But they were waiting too.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  The women exchanged glances of covert import. “No,” one of them said. “We’re here to help you.”

  “That is,” said another, “we want to be of help.”

  “We saw you,” another said, “on the news.”

  “You seemed lost,” shouted one from the rear.

  “That boyfriend of yours, always coming and going,” the first said, and the others shot her disapproving looks.