The Birthdays

by Heidi Pitlor

  “That’s nice.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I only meant that, you know, let’s just sit here and enjoy what just happened. Let’s not have that awful conversation where we attempt to figure it out or define it by trying to decide what should come next.” She remembered she’d said something similar to George after their first night together. The thought of spending the entire next day with him and Camille had been stifling at the time.

  “Okay,” Alex said. She directed him to Jake’s road and tried to think of what she might say when she left him. Why did these moments always inspire such dread? She decided to try to soften what she’d already said. “I think I just need some time to unwind right now. Remember, I flew from California last night on the red-eye? Remember, I had to take the bus to the ferry from the airport, a two-hour drive with this woman bathed in perfume who talked to me the entire time?”

  “Remember? You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I didn’t?” It did, in fact, seem to her as if they knew each other better than they actually did.

  When the sky opened with rain, Alex didn’t slow the car any. His windshield wipers squeaked with each motion, barely clearing the glass of the small waves that splashed it. He sped through the streets (he clearly wanted to drop her off now and be done with her) and Hilary rubbed her stomach in an exaggerated manner to remind him it wasn’t just them in the car, please be careful, there was a baby too. The car seemed to float above the road. It swerved and straightened. She grew dizzy. She opened her mouth to shout, Slow the hell down, when they screeched to a stop.

  She opened her eyes and saw, through a scrim of rain, Jake’s house.

  “I’ll see you, maybe.” Hilary gathered her bag, her heart knocking in her chest. She quickly pushed open the car door and stepped outside into the storm. She rushed through the fast rain to the house and rang the doorbell. No lights appeared to be on inside. Alex’s car purred behind her as she waited, then rang the bell again, but no one answered. She pounded on the door, then tried the doorknob, but it was locked. Her family was probably trying to teach her some kind of lesson by locking the door, turning off the lights and leaving. You have to be here on time or you’ll miss everything. Her family, especially Jake, hated when she was late.

  She hurried back to Alex’s car and apologized, not quite sure what to do or say next. He bounced a palm against the steering wheel, his fingers rigid. Maybe he thought this was all a ploy, that she was some lonely, desperate woman—pregnant, to boot—and that now she’d want him to take her in, feed her, be a father for her child.

  “Listen, I’ve got to be somewhere,” he said, shifting into reverse and pulling out of the driveway.

  “Right.”

  “You want me to drop you back in town?”

  He was fading from her. She’d lost whatever novelty and intrigue she’d had earlier. “Sure,” she said.

  Rita lay flat on the back seat, licking her paws. When Hilary turned, the dog looked up at her through heavy eyelids. “Where do you have to be?” she finally asked.

  He pretended not to hear her, and she repeated her question.

  “I’m meeting some people.”

  “Who?”

  “People.”

  Alex slowed the car a little and they plowed through a wide puddle. “Ah. Them. Girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “What does it matter?” she said. “You can tell me. I won’t care—I promise.” Rita whined in the back seat and slapped her leg with her tongue. “You don’t call her your girlfriend,” she said. “But she thinks of herself that way.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You sleep with her. You go to her place late at night, you leave early in the morning. You like her. You think that someday, far, far in the future, maybe you’ll want to be with her more regularly, but not now. You call her your girlfriend. But something about her kind of annoys you. She’s too happy to see you sometimes. She gives you little presents. But she’s sort of attractive. And she has a good body.”

  “Amazing. You know everything about me.”

  “Am I right? Come on, tell me.”

  “You obviously want to be right.”

  “I’ve got to be close at least. Maybe there’re a couple of girlfriends?”

  “You want to know?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I do.”

  He smiled. “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “That’s not fair!” she said. “You’re such a tease.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he said, looking sideways at her.

  She’d gotten him back. Somehow, amazingly, he’d come back.

  4

  Phantom People

  Rain hissed down on the pavement and the grass, the cars and the ocean. A tiny unmanned boat in the bay lifted and slapped against the water. Brenda had run ahead with Esther to their car—she’d been dancing her around the parking lot just before the rain came—and had left Daniel to fend for himself. He willed his chair to move faster. Then he willed his legs to come back to life and run him to their car. He shielded his face from the rain but was unable to move the chair with just one arm, so he clenched his eyes shut and set his hands on his wheel rims. In a moment, he felt an enormous jolt. One of his wheels had slipped from the curb and he was stuck. He leaned all his weight to one side, but to no avail. His hair dripped down his face and his shirt stuck to his chest. Through the din of the rain and wind he heard a voice say, “You need a hand?” It was Vanessa.

  “Looks that way.” He felt his chair drop and careen forward. He sat there, riding along through the pouring rain like a baby in a stroller.

  When they finally reached the car, Vanessa went to take Esther and crawled in the back seat while Brenda struggled to help him into the front. His left foot caught on the door but she didn’t notice, and just shoved him harder toward the seat. “Hold it,” he yelled before she closed the door on it.

  “Thank you,” Brenda said to Vanessa, “for rescuing my husband.” See, she was thinking, witness the kindness of strangers.

  Safely inside the car, his limbs happily unsevered, he shook the rain from his hair and squeezed the water from his shirt. Vanessa and Brenda caught their breath and Daniel listened to the tapping on the car’s roof. Vanessa leaned in toward them. “I heard this might last all weekend.”

  Brenda groaned. “I certainly hope not.”

  “You were saying you’re a photographer. What kind of photos do you take?” Vanessa asked as Esther tugged on her hair.

  “Mostly boring pictures of running shoes lately to pay the bills,” Brenda said, but then went on to describe her pet project, the shots she’d been taking of other photographs found in unexpected places. An old Polaroid of an elderly couple in the middle of a field, a family portrait floating on a pond. Secretly Daniel found the project sentimental and verging on saccharine. He preferred her earlier photos of grizzled monks scrounging through garbage in India and emaciated women trying to breast-feed in Ethiopia. These pictures were unflinching, disturbing, and immediate in their impact. “Maybe I’ll send you one of my real photos when I get home,” she said.

  Vanessa said she’d love to see some, and plied Brenda with more questions about her work. She turned as far as she could in the driver’s seat, her face right next to Daniel’s as she went on about a child’s class photo she’d found in a puddle, a little boy trying in the most adorable way to look tough despite his freshly combed hair and starched, buttoned-up jersey.

  Daniel liked this one least of the bunch, maybe because the kid’s desire to appear as something he was not was so nakedly desperate, so clumsily obvious in his pleading eyes and tight sneer. Or perhaps because Daniel himself had always dreaded having those class photos taken. Overall he’d been a testy kid and plenty of things had grated on him. But when he thought about it, he supposed that the thing that had gotten to him the most
had been other people’s physical incompetence and weakness. He’d just hated watching his younger brother play basketball or soccer, watching him trip over his feet so frequently and so often miss the ball when he went to kick it, seeing him make a complete fool of himself in front of everyone else on his team. The sight of it made Daniel curdle. At the same time, he’d watched bigger, stronger, more graceful children on the soccer field with the deepest envy. He secretly wished they would fall or hurt themselves. Professional athletes too—when his father took him to baseball games he imagined a ball accidentally firing into the batter’s head and then somehow his being asked to take the batter’s place. Then, the day before his ninth birthday, his mother took him to an exhibit of van Gogh’s early drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts. He stared up at all of these tiny lines, the smudges and shadows. When he walked backward, these things formed living people and wild landscapes, and as he and his mother were leaving the museum, he thought he understood something. Art was messy up close. Something that was beautiful was also ugly. It seemed a significant thing to know. And though he tried to grow stronger and faster, and become a better soccer player and basketball player and swimmer, he also started drawing and painting most days after school. He drew scribbles and smudges and lines, and if he squinted and held them across the room, they began to look like the people and trees and airplanes he’d intended. More importantly, he never once harbored a terrible wish for any artist, and this fact ultimately made him feel like a better person.

  Vanessa was telling Brenda she’d lost her father five years earlier in a boating accident, and Daniel wondered how on earth this topic had arisen. Had Brenda for some reason told her about her uncle who’d died the same way? Had Daniel missed this?

  “I saw the whole thing from the beach. The other boat heading toward him, everything.”

  Brenda’s eyes sank as she listened to the rest of the story, which had begun to sound fabricated to Daniel. What kind of person told someone she met an hour earlier such intimate things?

  “Let’s get out of here, Bren,” he whispered after Vanessa finished. “We have time before the next ferry leaves. Let’s go find a restaurant or a coffee shop or something.”

  “What do you think, Vanessa? Should we make a run for it?”

  She looked from Daniel to Brenda. “There’s a place just across the street. Leary’s, see it?” she said. “You two go. I’ll wait in my car with Esther.”

  “You sure?” Brenda asked, and Vanessa nodded and slipped out of the car. She scurried across the parking lot, clutching Esther to her chest.

  Daniel turned to Brenda. A strange look had come across her face—shadows ringed her eyes, her lips had dried and cracked in the corners. A red blotchiness had spread across her neck. He began to wonder whether she’d looked this way all day, if he’d only noticed it now, and if he’d in fact caused it.

  She helped him out of the car once more, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the rain as he headed over the bumps of the parking lot. Because apparently he wasn’t moving fast enough, she stepped behind him and took over. Before long, his feet hit something and Brenda ran to open a door. The next thing he knew he was somewhere dry again, somewhere dim that smelled of fried food.

  “Leary’s,” Brenda said. “We’re here.” She was completely out of breath. He wheeled toward a table and motioned for her to follow him. “Come here, Bren, you need to sit.”

  “I’m fine,” she coughed.

  “You shouldn’t run like that,” he said. “And you shouldn’t be pushing me. I would’ve made it here eventually.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said, and held the table as she lowered herself onto the chair.

  “You’ll think we’ll ever get there?” he asked.

  “Where?”

  “The island.”

  Her breathing began to slow. “Of course we will.”

  “This day feels like it’s lasted a year,” he said, glad they were alone now.

  “Two years,” she said. “Didn’t we leave the house before I was pregnant?”

  “I think we did,” he said, running his hands through his wet hair.

  “If you had to draw this day, what would it look like?” she asked. This used to be one of her favorite questions—it was an easy way to access his thoughts.

  He closed his eyes and imagined a tornado tossing them through the sky. He, shooting out of his wheelchair, and she, twisting through the air, her hair straight above her. And then something small and curled, something that looked like a baby flying from her and being sucked away and up into the sky. “A tornado,” he said. “A monster’s arm coming out of the sky. And a bubble saying, ‘You think you’ve had enough?’” In this past year and a half, bad luck often seemed possible at every turn.

  “Ugh. There’s more to come?”

  “No, there can’t be,” he said. “It’s probably just my instinctually pessimistic view of fate.”

  She half smiled, which was something at least.

  They ordered chowder and before long the waitress brought two steaming bowls. The white chowder sat before him, thick like gruel. Daniel didn’t have much of an appetite. Technically they’d been in transit for eight long hours, and in that time, they could have flown to Rome.

  Brenda pushed her spoon around her bowl, barely eating anything. Her hair, now soaked, had formed a cap on her head and her mascara had blurred beneath her eyes, giving her a gloomy, shell-shocked look. He wondered whether he looked this way too.

  “So,” she said, stopping her spoon in the center of the bowl.

  “So,” he said. “You think she was lying?”

  “Who?”

  “Vanessa.”

  “About what?”

  “Her father. The accident. It sounded pretty over-the-top to me.”

  “Daniel. That is awful. You can be a very awful person sometimes.”

  He swallowed and looked at the table. He wanted to tell her that he couldn’t help himself. She hated him right then, and she was wondering how she’d reached this point in her life with him. Married, pregnant. But not with his child, and that was the catch, really. The baby wasn’t his, and she could certainly leave him, take the baby and go off, knowing that the child was hers and this other person’s, this Jonathan White, this gentle but confident man from Milwaukee. Maybe this would make the leaving a little easier. Maybe one day she’d track him down and find that the man looked exactly like the baby. He was in fact closer to Brenda’s age, and maybe they had other things in common. Maybe Brenda would even fall in love with him. It was an almost satisfying exercise, Daniel found, imagining a man more patient, more sunny and sociable than he. Someone she could easily make love with. Someone who could drive a car and walk a baby around a room. Daniel didn’t have such thoughts with self-pity or anger, really. He experienced a subtle sense of magnanimity in creating a better man for Brenda, and he suspected such phantom people existed in other relationships, the person that fit the other in every way. He thought back to before his accident and tried to remember whether he was at least closer to being this man then. He liked to think that he was.

  The waitress reached across the table and gathered their bowls. “You done?” Daniel asked Brenda.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. “I’m not feeling so great.” She rested her hands on her stomach.

  “Neither am I,” he said, though of course she’d been referring to her pregnancy.

  “It’s been asleep for hours,” she said. “Hours and hours.”

  “Lucky baby.”

  After Daniel had paid the bill, they waited for the rain to subside. They talked about his family, and discussed what Liz might look like pregnant. “She said she’s filling out already, right, even though she’s only seven weeks? She was sort of, well, big to start with,” Brenda said. “She does love to cook.”

  “How kind.”

  “Please. You know you’re thinking the same thing. And what about me?” she asked.

  “Yes?”


  “What do I look like pregnant?”

  He couldn’t come out and say that she looked completely different, almost unrecognizable to him some days. “You look like a mother-in-the-making.”

  “I look matronly?”

  “No, no. You look great. You do, really. Beautiful.” She didn’t believe him but at least he’d said it. “I love you,” he added softly in British.

  The rain hadn’t slowed any, but Leary’s was dense with cigarette smoke and Brenda insisted they wait in their car for the ferry. She also insisted on rushing him back through the rain again, fast, too fast, and he yelled, “Slow down!” but she didn’t. “I’m fine if we slow down. I’m already soaked through anyway,” he called, but she didn’t respond. “Christ,” he said once they were inside the car. “You need to slow yourself down. Please, for me.”

  “Here comes Vanessa,” Brenda said, and Daniel saw the woman rushing toward them, Esther still in her arms. Brenda rolled down her window.

  “There’s a cargo ferry heading over now, and there’s room for us,” Vanessa said. “You got back just in time.”

  “Perfect,” Brenda said as she rolled back up her window, and quietly, twisting with some sort of cramp, she added, “I suppose I should have taken it easier back there.”

  “I’m really sorry I was slowing you down,” he said, and he’d meant it, but the words sounded sarcastic, almost nasty. He wondered whether he had become incapable of saying anything calming and earnest, anything at all genuinely empathetic. “I’m sorry,” he tried again carefully, “I am,” and this time it sounded better, a little softer. Maybe the only way they could really communicate now was by putting on voices that came from somewhere else.

  They hurried out of the car again, gathered their bags and rushed toward the boat. Brenda pushed him up a narrow gangplank, and in a small enclosed area near the front they joined Vanessa, now sipping a can of soda and bouncing Esther on her lap. He caught Brenda’s eye and lifted his mouth into a smile. It was not a sneer, he was sure. It was a genuine smile, although admittedly a little forced and maybe not even his, but at least someone’s genuine smile that he hoped communicated he was still there, still very much her husband.