The Birthdays

by Heidi Pitlor

  “It’s been done before,” Ellen said, glancing around to make sure no one was listening. “When is the due date?”

  “November second. A Tuesday.”

  “Election Day!” Ellen smiled and leaned forward to push a long strand of hair out of her daughter’s eyes. “A day of decision,” she heard herself say, then instantly regretted it.

  Hilary scoffed. “You make it sound almost biblical. I’ll be having a baby, Mom, not standing in front of the Pearly Gates. At least I hope not.”

  “I’m just saying it’s an interesting date.” Ellen wanted to ask whether the father would be there for her, for the birth. Was he at all there for her during the pregnancy? She’d said he wouldn’t be a factor in the child’s life, but was he at least present for Hilary now? Had he ever been? Ellen hoped he had. She hoped that he’d loved Hilary, that he’d treated her well and that her choice to have the baby on her own was in fact her own, and not his.

  —

  Jake and Liz had left the house late thanks to him and all of his drama, and as they’d pulled onto Main Street, they’d found themselves behind a car crawling up the street. “Come on, COME ON,” he moaned.

  “We’ll get there,” Liz said. “Calm down.”

  “It looks like it’s about to pour. I don’t want them to have to wait around for us in the rain.”

  “There’s that shelter near the landing. They’ll be fine,” she said, and set her hand on her stomach, then shifted in her seat.

  He looked over at her. “Is everything all right? How are you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, Jake, I’m fine,” she snapped.

  He stepped on the gas and pulled up just behind the car in front of them.

  “I won’t be, though, if you ram into that guy. Slow the hell down.”

  “ALL RIGHT,” he yelled, and took his foot off the accelerator. He let the car slow, and when they reached a small hill, it nearly stopped. He eased his foot onto the gas again. He’d overreacted yet again—he supposed he was still a little on edge after this afternoon. But he’d been reading too much into what was undoubtedly nothing. She knew that people masturbated—for all he knew, she’d probably walked in on similar scenes with her parents.

  When they reached the ferry, no one was waiting at the shelter. And then a moment later the rain came and it was torrential. His mind raced. Once he found his parents, what could he give as an excuse for being so late? And where the hell were his parents anyway? Where should he even begin to look?

  “We should just go home. They have the address, don’t they? They can make their way there,” Liz said.

  “I’m not sure I gave it to them,” Jake admitted. “I told them I’d pick them up. Let’s drive around a little and see if we can track them down.”

  His parents were probably stumbling through the rain, searching for him. Maybe they were looking in the shops, carrying their many bags (they always overpacked, ridiculously so), their shoulders bowing with the weight. We’ll meet up with him eventually, Ell, his father would say, always the anti-worrier. It’s not the end of the world that Jake isn’t here yet. And his mother would try to calm herself by saying, Of course we will get there, and in the meantime, let’s enjoy the shops here—we haven’t been here in so long. Let’s look in here, at the Seafarer’s Gallery.

  This isn’t art, she’d say once they’d entered the small general-store-turned-gallery, but paintings of scenes that have been painted a hundred times. Ships, waves, lighthouses, moonscapes, sunsets. There are far better artists living here. She’d scoff at the silly scenes and raise her nose to them, but his father would warm to them—for, he’d say, wasn’t a sunset or a moonscape always beautiful? And when we see these things in person, aren’t we struck, so why can’t I be struck by the same thing on a canvas? Because, his mother would say, because it’s fake, it’s a fabrication of a million other fabrications, and that does not make art. Jake agreed that this might not in fact be art but could never account for the quiet comfort within whenever he saw similar paintings in his office or at the doctor’s.

  They drove past a couple of shaved plots of land where new houses were being built. Enormous new summer homes had begun to sprout up across the island, and Jake watched the growth with secret pleasure. Their summer house, which they’d bought for a bargain, was worth something now. Not that he wanted to sell it necessarily, but it was now worth an awful lot more than what they’d paid for it.

  “They’ll sink the island with those behemoths,” Liz said.

  “They might. Ours isn’t exactly small, you know.”

  “I guess not, but it’s not as big as those. I never thought I’d be the sort of person to own a summer home,” she said. “Did you?”

  “Not really, I guess. I mean, I used to hope for certain things. My mom and I used to play this game—what would you do with a million dollars.”

  “And now you have so many millions.”

  “Mm.” He paused. “It’s not a bad thing.”

  “No, of course it’s not. It’s just sort of weird. Sometimes it hits me as really strange.”

  “Me too,” Jake said. “But good strange, you know?”

  Liz reached over and set her palm against his cheek.

  “You know?” he repeated.

  “Sure,” she said. She suggested they park on Main Street and check to see whether his family was in one of the stores there, and he agreed. He parked beside the post office, and they pulled their hoods over their heads as they hurried along the sidewalk. At one point, Liz stopped, opened her raincoat and stood, her chest to the sky. The rain pounded her face and hair. “It feels wonderful,” she said, and Jake opened his jacket too. “Doesn’t it feel great?” she said. Her blue T-shirt clung to her breasts and he could see the small peaks of her nipples.

  “It does,” he said, licking the drops from his lips, though he was in fact growing chilly, his shirt soggy. He wanted it to feel great, though. He wanted to experience joy in being soaked to the core. “And like it or not, you look sexy, my dear.” He couldn’t help himself.

  Liz leaned back to wring out her hair. “Onward?”

  “Onward,” he said. He reached his arm around her and massaged her wet shoulders as they walked toward town, stumbling through the puddles and every now and then bumping hips.

  Jake led Liz into a convenience store where gray-faced men in fishing clothes stood huddled in the corner, smoking. Jake and Liz then checked the gallery and the ice cream shop, but his family was nowhere to be found, and Jake was about to suggest they run back to the car when Liz cried, “They’re in here!” and tugged him inside Books & Beans.

  His mother’s eyes were on him, wild and happy and anxious all at the same time. “Thank God,” she practically shouted.

  Joe stood beside her, and Hilary behind the two of them. Jake hugged his mother and father, and as they stepped out of the way and Hilary moved forward, Jake saw that she’d put on some weight. Even her face and her hair seemed bigger.

  “Look at you,” he managed. He tried to make eye contact with Liz and see if she noticed the same things, but she was busy talking to Ellen.

  “Hello,” his sister answered. A man tried to squeeze past her, but she blocked most of the aisle. He gave up and headed toward another aisle. Jake glanced down at her stomach, which was quite protrusive. It couldn’t be. He stopped breathing for a second.

  “You have a good trip here?” he mumbled.

  “What do you think?” she asked, rubbing her belly. She looked at him. “I’m pregnant—that’s what this is, in case you were wondering. I haven’t just gotten fat.”

  “Pregnant?” It didn’t make sense. Did she suddenly have a husband?

  “Pregnant. I’m due in three months.”

  “Wow, I can’t really—I mean, how did that happen?”

  “Sex, Jake. You know, a penis, a vagina. They fit together pretty well.”

  He glanced around them, horrified th
at other people might have heard her.

  “Everyone has one or the other. I don’t think they’d be surprised to hear about what these things can do.”

  “Christ, would you keep it down?”

  She shrugged. “Anyway, so, yes, I’m pregnant, and just to get it out of the way, I’ll be raising the kid on my own. The father won’t be involved. It was sort of a mistake but I’m happy about it for the most part now.”

  “Oh,” he said dumbly, his throat tight. “Well, congratulations, I guess.” How careless she’d been, he thought, how terrifically, ridiculously careless to allow herself to get pregnant without even being in a relationship. It was willful and irresponsible and promiscuous and it had taken him and Liz over five grueling years to conceive.

  Joe was glancing over at them. He held a book against his chest as if it were armor. Beside him on the floor was a cage. He’d brought his turtle. He’d actually brought Babe. Whatever for? Was this the beginning of senility? “Let’s get out of here,” Jake said, and with the other hand scooped up Babe’s cage.

  “Don’t ask,” his mother whispered, gesturing toward the cage.

  “I won’t,” Jake said, but his thoughts quickly returned to his sister. Hilary pregnant. The idea was incomprehensible, and as they walked closer to their car, Jake worried about Liz—was she upset about it? Could she handle seeing his little sister knocked up (and this seemed a more appropriate term for the situation than “pregnant”) after all they’d had to go through? He reached the car before anyone else did, and left Babe’s cage on the ground in the rain as he fished around in his pocket for his keys. His father was on him, snatching up the cage and mumbling about the rain and Jake’s car—Why did he need such a big car? Why did anyone?

  On the way home, he found himself stuck behind yet another slow car. He hydroplaned for a second, swerved toward a tree, then back onto the road, but no one seemed to notice. Liz chattered with his mother, Hilary was knocked up and single and spoiled, his father whispered to her eagerly in a way he never did with Jake, his mother told him to slow down before her heart stopped, which wouldn’t be unheard of because she wasn’t young, there was heart disease in her family, and then what would happen? He slowed his own breathing, one, two, and lifted his foot from the gas pedal.

  Carrying everyone’s bags into the house was a production. Jake rushed to get the door, and Hilary thrust her bags at him when he returned to the car to help. Joe inched his way forward, holding Babe in his cage with both hands as if it were a wedding cake. The man had terrible night vision, and once Jake had deposited Hilary’s bags inside, he ran back outside and snatched the cage from his father.

  “Careful there,” Joe said.

  “I got it, Dad.”

  “Just be careful, Jake.”

  “He’s fine, Joe,” Ellen barked behind them, and hurried past, carrying too many bags.

  Once inside, Liz hurried around, turning on lights and taking their coats, offering them all towels and dry clothes. Hilary dropped her bags with a thud on the living room floor and looked around the house. Jake watched her register the original photographs, the coffee table they’d commissioned from a woodworker in Vermont, the sofas Liz had hired a Portland furniture maker to design. He felt both proud and self-conscious.

  Joe flopped down on a sofa and kicked off his muddy shoes. Jake rushed toward him and grabbed the shoes before the mud seeped into the new rug.

  “Anyone like a drink?” Liz said from behind Jake, and though he knew she was really addressing the others, he said yes, “a beer, please.”

  Ellen stretched her arms, looked around and said, “What a lovely place, Jake. I can’t believe it was ever run-down.”

  “We had it gutted,” he said. “And we pretty much started from scratch. Liz was the mastermind behind it all.”

  “I wish we could’ve seen it before,” his father said.

  “You wouldn’t believe how much it’s changed.”

  Liz appeared, handed him a beer and smiled politely. “It was a ton of work, but I think it was worth it in the end.”

  Ellen looked around approvingly. “Indeed.” She leaned forward and ran her fingers across the wood floor. “These floors are beautiful. What is this, oak?”

  “Cherry,” said Jake.

  “Well, that must have set you back,” said Joe. “Is it tough to maintain?”

  “Not at all. It’s no different from any other hardwood, really.”

  Joe mumbled something and Ellen said, “Daniel’s new house has hardwoods too, but they haven’t got any rugs yet, and the place looks a little bare, to tell the truth. These are gorgeous rugs you’ve got.” She slowly knelt to pat the Persian carpet beneath the coffee table and her expression changed. “No one’s heard from him?” she asked.

  “Not since earlier,” Liz said.

  “I do hope he’s okay right now.”

  “I do too,” Jake said, aware that her concern extended to more than just this moment. After all, his did too. At the strangest moments—at a meeting or on the tennis court—he found himself thinking about his brother. What was he doing right then? Was he able to swim anymore, to lift weights? What sort of exercise was he able to do? Daniel never talked to him much about the particulars of his new life, not that they talked that frequently anyway. But when Jake did call once a month, he didn’t know what to say about the matter. Or how to say it. He had expressed as much sympathy as he could just after the accident and tried to offer everything he had—his time (he could run errands if need be), money, recommendations of the best doctors he knew. But Daniel shrank into a stone back then, and chafed at every suggestion Jake made. Daniel wasn’t used to being a person in this position—someone eliciting pity, someone so dependent on others. Each night in the weeks following the accident, Jake found himself recounting to Liz every physical thing his brother used to love to do when they were young—running track, swimming, hiking, wrestling with him in his bedroom, in the swimming pool, beating the hell out of him in their back yard—as if ridding himself of something (the old Daniel?), and then drifting off to a thick, dreamless sleep. Liz knew that Jake and Daniel had never been particularly close. Jake had annoyed his brother in myriad ways. Jake told her that Daniel loved animals and had constantly begged his parents for a dog. The bigger the better, he’d said. But Jake was allergic to dogs, cats, and the twittering of his father’s birds had kept him awake at night, so after the parakeet Napoleon died, the house remained petless until they’d all left for college, when his father got Babe.

  After the long months that followed the accident, Jake had been glad to hear that Brenda was pregnant and that something good had happened to them, though Jake had mixed feelings about the fact of the donor. Despite everything, at least Liz was carrying his biological children. Of course Daniel and Brenda didn’t have many choices in the end, but still. What if the baby didn’t look like either of them? What if the donor had a history of mental illness and hadn’t informed the doctors? What if the man suddenly turned up and demanded to be a part of the baby’s life?

  Jake took a long sip of beer and looked around his living room and down at the cherry floor, at his pregnant wife leaning against the wall and out the window at the stormy Atlantic, and grew appreciative that he had what he had, that he’d never gotten into a horrible accident like his brother, that he and Liz hadn’t had to resort to a sperm donor, that he had, in fact, a spouse he loved and a beautiful house here and another in Portland. A terrific job, good friends.

  Why did it sometimes feel like a mirage? Why did it often feel as if he’d wake up one morning and find that everything—his houses, his job, Liz, especially Liz—had disappeared? He glanced over at his father, now fidgeting with the door of Babe’s cage, and wondered if the man ever had the similar sensation. Was Joe secure with what he had? And was he proud of his kids and his life—had that been enough for him? Jake thought that it probably had.

  —

  Hilary rubbed her fingers together. She thought back to
when Alex had pulled the car in front of the bookstore, when she’d leaned toward him and kissed him slowly just beside his lips. He’d turned and pressed his mouth firmly against hers. He held her face in his hands and she found she’d missed being touched this way. George was much softer. Gentler, and very innocuous.

  “Well,” Alex said as he backed away.

  “This was a great tour.”

  “I’ll be working this weekend,” he said. “You could come by.”

  She gathered her bag, careful not to answer him. She wouldn’t see him again. There would be no reason. Rita pointed her wet nose near her face, and Hilary squirmed away. “’Bye, now,” she said, and shoved the door closed.

  There should have been a grander ending, she decided now as she shuffled around, the baby turning inside her. Something more profound should have happened between them, though she couldn’t say precisely what. The moment had seemed so freighted, like she’d been saying goodbye to more than just one man.

  Her mother was going on about how she couldn’t wait to see the petite Brenda pregnant. “How can a baby even fit inside her?” Ellen’s comments seemed to mask some kind of worry.

  Next to Hilary, her father rested his arms over the cage. Though she was surprised to see the turtle at first, Hilary supposed she was glad Babe was here. Her father without his pet was a sad sight, a lonely boy bored and fidgety among adults. She’d missed Joe these past years. He was never entirely himself on the phone—he spoke quietly and a little formally, asking her predictable questions about her car and her bills, and whenever she tried to elicit more from him, was he happy, was he doing things that made him happy now that he was retired, he seemed not to understand that she was trying to gather a stronger sense of his well-being. He always replied with one-word answers—Yes. Sure. Fine. He tended to fade into the background of the family, and no one paid him enough attention. Especially not her mother, who demanded his constant focus, but what she didn’t realize was that he was always, in fact, paying close attention to her and to them all in his own way. When Hilary was a child, he’d wake her each morning and ask her to tell him about her dreams. Every single morning, he’d say, “Where have you come back from?” and she’d tell him, if she remembered. If not, she’d make up a story about someplace she wanted to visit—California, China, the moon. He’d take it all in, listening intently, as if hidden in her dreams were clues to what she really wanted in life and maybe what he might be able to give her someday. That was how he operated—he listened. He watched. He absorbed the undercurrents that guided their conversations. Then he went into the next room to take care of his turtle and allowed people time and space alone. Her mother, though, had never been satisfied with this sort of understated attention.