The Birthdays

by Heidi Pitlor

  “It’s late, Ell, and didn’t Daniel say he was going to tell us when to come tomorrow? Didn’t he say visiting hours are over?” Liz asked.

  “I’m his mother and I want to see him,” Ellen said, refusing to look at her daughter-in-law, or at the plush leather furniture and cherry floors and imported Persian carpet that suddenly appeared excessive to her, especially for a summer home. “I just want to see my son.”

  “What about what he wants, Mom?” Hilary said, and Ellen could have struck her.

  “We’ll go first thing in the morning,” Joe said. “We’ll wake up and go right there before doing anything else. I’ll see to it that we’re the first people who walk in that door.”

  “First thing?” She sighed, defeated, and ambled to the couch. “All right.”

  Joe followed and took a seat beside her.

  *

  Hours later, Ellen woke to dense darkness. The only sound she heard was Joe’s faint snoring. She lay in a small, stiff bed. Had she died in her sleep? She had no idea where she was. Her eyes open to the night, she felt weightless, only a heavy torso, and she tried to wiggle her fingers and toes and was unable to at first. Soon the feeling returned, but she still didn’t know where she was. Joe slept in a small bed across from her, and when she pulled herself up out of her own bed and walked across the room, she felt a coarse carpet beneath her feet. Only when she opened the door and looked down a hallway to a living room, where a line of moonlight cut across a brown leather couch, did she remember that this was Jake’s house on Great Salt Island.

  She made her way down the cool wood floors of the hallway and into the living room and suddenly the meaning of the silence occurred to her: the rain had stopped. It was a relief. She looked down at the stack of blankets on the couch, remembering they had been set out for Daniel and Brenda, and the day’s events came back to her. She clasped her hands together and made herself move forward, then back down the hallway. Jake’s door was ajar. He lay on his back, his arms across his chest in an ominous pose. Liz lay in an identical position, and seeing them, Ellen’s breath caught in her throat. Liz lifted her head. “Ellen?”

  “Shh, go back to sleep. I was just checking on everyone.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “No. Shh,” Ellen whispered again, and pulled the door closed behind her.

  In the next room, Hilary slept naked on her side, several pillows stuffed between her legs and under her arms. Ellen couldn’t help staring and observing how much her daughter’s body had changed with pregnancy. Hilary was a small whale in the darkness. Ellen couldn’t see her face, but she could see the rise and slope of the girl’s—the woman’s—silhouette and the pillows, like another body, shoved beneath and between her.

  Ellen entered the room, wanting for a second to go lie beside her daughter and hug her close, but of course this would wake her, so Ellen just went and sat on a short wooden chair in the corner. She wondered why she hadn’t looked in on her sleeping children more often when they were young. Joe was usually the one to check on them in the middle of the night. Ellen was always the one to put them down but once she herself was asleep, she was lost to the world. It used to worry her, the depth of her sleep. So much could happen and she’d have no idea about it until too late. But tonight, here she was, awake. It was a sort of gift—she was the one keeping guard, watching them breathe and dream. If only Daniel were here too. If only her children were all together here, under her eye, tucked in their beds.

  She stayed in the small pink bedroom for a while longer, and watched Hilary breathe.

  —

  Jake woke to hot sunlight on his face. He’d forgotten to close the shades, and where was Liz? He stretched his arms, blinked several times and sat up. Flames shot through his neck, and he remembered his fall yesterday. He stood, his neck stiff, pulled on his bathrobe and made his way into the kitchen, where Liz was placing sausage links in the heavy skillet.

  “We the only ones up?”

  “Your father and sister are out for a walk,” she said. The sausages popped in their grease.

  “Dan and Brenda,” he said. “God, I just remembered.” His mother was a ghost when she told them.

  Liz nudged the sausages around the pan with a spatula. “I called the clinic this morning. The nurse said they were sleeping, and to try back in an hour or so.”

  He thought of their argument on the porch last night. “Come here,” he said.

  “I’m cooking with hot oil, sweetie.”

  “I don’t care. Come here,” he said again, and stepped behind her. He reached his arms around her waist. Her back was broad and warm against him, and he whispered, “I missed you in bed. And I don’t mean in a hubba-hubba kind of way.”

  She turned her head and smiled back at him.

  This was a miserable, tragic way to get a second chance, but a part of him felt relieved. And then guilty for this, and then merely relieved again at how silly and irrelevant their arguing now seemed.

  He looked out the window and saw the ocean blinking with daylight. It was the most beautiful thing in the world, he thought, the Atlantic just beyond his kitchen window, the morning sun hovering above the rippling mirror of water. He was glad his father and Hilary were out enjoying it. He wondered what they were talking about, and what it was that they usually talked about. Unaccountably, Joe and Hilary had soft spots for each other. She doted on the man, constantly asking if he was warm enough, cool enough, hungry, tired. Jake’s relationship with his father seemed to exist more in the silences between their words, in their simply listening and trying to understand each other. He wondered what it was about his sister, of all people, that his father connected with. After all, Jake was the one who called each family member regularly. He never missed a birthday, as his brother and sister often did, and whenever he passed something in a store he thought one of them would like, whether it was a sweater or a camera or a box-set photographic history of the automobile, he bought it immediately and sent it to them.

  He kissed the back of Liz’s neck and headed into the living room, where Hilary was now pulling the sliding glass door shut behind her. “I hope you realize you’ve got an incredible back yard,” she said, walking inside barefoot. Joe stood by the door, brushing sand off his shoes onto the mat. Hilary fell onto the recliner, completely ignoring the sand she’d tracked all over the rug. “Smells good in here,” she said, and she wiggled up her nose like a dog.

  “Sausages,” Liz called from the next room. “I’m making scrambled eggs too.”

  “What heaven,” Hilary said, and leaned her head back. Joe moved behind her and draped a sweater over her shoulders, and Hilary made a silly face up at him as if she’d forgotten all about the horrible thing that had just happened in the family.

  “What are we going to do about Dan and Brenda?” Jake said.

  “Mm?” Hilary murmured.

  “Do you think they’ll even still want to come here, you know, to the house?” He thought a moment. “It’s going to be hell for her to see you two pregnant.”

  She looked at him. “It might be.”

  Joe went to sit on the couch. He pushed off his shoes and peeled off his socks, lifted one foot onto his lap and began squeezing his toes.

  The bottom of Hilary’s stomach poked out from her T-shirt like a beer belly. “Does it make you feel a bit strange, you know, given your situation?” he asked.

  “What are you getting at?”

  He searched for safe words. “I mean of the three of us, you have to admit that they most deserved a healthy baby, after all he’s gone through this past year or so.”

  “Oh, I dunno, you and Liz sure deserve it after trying for so long. So, jeez, I guess that leaves me, who certainly doesn’t deserve anything good, do I?” She looked right at him.

  “They’re just a little more equipped for it,” Jake said. “There are two of them, after all. It was something they tried for.”

  Hilary opened her mouth.

  “Stop it,” Jo
e muttered—to whom, Jake wasn’t certain. Joe pushed his thumbs into his big toe over and over. “Just stop this, both of you, before you go any further.”

  “Jake, can you help me?” Liz called. Suddenly she appeared before him. “I need some help with breakfast.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him back to the kitchen.

  “What are you doing? We were getting somewhere,” he whispered. “I was about to teach Hilary that she’s not the only person in the world.”

  In the kitchen Liz released his hand. “I’m trying to make breakfast for your family and I need some help,” she said. She handed him a carton of eggs.

  Jake followed her across the room. “I just want to be prepared for when they get here. I don’t want Dan and Brenda to feel awkward when they see Hil.”

  “Honey, you’re not the only one who feels terrible about what happened.” She handed him a bowl and he headed to the table.

  “How the hell did she let herself get pregnant at this age? It’s not like she doesn’t know any better. No one else in this family even seems to care,” he said. Perhaps Hilary rankled him so much because she didn’t seem to get to anyone else at all. Objectively, factually, she was one of the most irresponsible people he knew. How did this not bother any of them? Yes, his mother seemed mildly irritated with her, but not nearly as confounded as he was. Even Liz wasn’t fazed. “Anyway, it’s Dan and Brenda we should be thinking about. What do we even say when we first see them?”

  “We just let them lead the way and take it from there.” He imagined she spoke in this measured tone to her students.

  “That just doesn’t seem like enough. I don’t know,” Jake said, and began to rub his temples. “I just wish I could do something else for them.”

  “To make yourself feel better about what happened?”

  “No. Maybe. What’s wrong with that?”

  Liz shook her head. The light flooded in the window behind her, and he could barely see her face. “We’ll need all those eggs, so get beating,” she finally said.

  —

  They gathered around the kitchen table for breakfast. Hilary sat as far from Jake as she could, for she worried she’d wing a sausage at him if he said one more word to her. Next to her sat her father, and across from her, her mother, who’d just woken, which was strange, for Ellen had always been the first one up in the house, and often before dawn. Hilary still remembered, with some nostalgia, the sound of her mother puttering around in the kitchen downstairs while the rest of them lay in their beds upstairs. “You all right?” Hilary asked her.

  Ellen gazed at her plate, cut a sausage into thirds with the side of a fork and popped one into her mouth. She swallowed and said, “I just didn’t sleep so well last night.”

  “Maybe because you’re away from home,” Hilary began, in an effort to establish some civility between them, when Jake interrupted with, “It’s going to be so hard on them,” apparently for the benefit of their mother now. “It’s going to be so hard for Brenda to see Liz and Hil. I’m not sure it’s such good idea for them to come here at all. Maybe we should get them a room at a bed and breakfast or something, or maybe they should just go home after Brenda’s released. I wonder if she’s in a lot of pain. How do these things work, does anyone know? Is it like a normal birth?” he asked Liz. “Did she have to push?”

  Hilary held a forkful of eggs before her mouth and stared at him.

  “I’m going to look up D and C, that was it, right, Mom?” he asked after no one answered him. She nodded gently, and he marched off. Hilary searched for a way to stop her brother. She glared at Liz, who shook her head and then focused on the plate before her. Jake returned a moment later with a large medical reference book (and why would a person need such a book at his summer home? Hilary didn’t understand one thing about him) and scanned through it until he found the page he was looking for. “After adequate anesthesia has been administered, bla bla bla. But how does it work exactly? What’s the recovery like?” he said as he flipped the page, then shook his head. “It doesn’t really say anything.” He set down the heavy book and his glass jumped, then he picked up the book again. “I wonder if it says how common these kinds of things are.” He glanced down at Liz, who stood, her face now pink, and began to clear the plates.

  “I think I’ll call some B&Bs,” he announced, “and see if they’ve got any vacancies. Then I’ll go to the drug store and talk to a pharmacist, see what he suggests—maybe a heating pad? We can bring some food to them at the clinic—well, just me and Mom and Dad, not you, Hil and Liz.”

  As usual, Ellen was the one to step in and calm the hysterical boy. “Jake,” she said, and stood. She went to him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Don’t try to fix everything at once.”

  Standing beside the table, Liz set her hands on her hips and said, “Well, here’s a way to change the subject. You all might as well know that Jake and I are having twins.”

  “Liz.” Jake coughed.

  Hilary swallowed the food in her mouth. “Wow,” she said, and glanced at her father. He looked just as surprised as she was.

  “It’s wonderful news,” her mother said. “It’s just wonderful.”

  “Indeed,” Joe said.

  “We’d wanted to tell you all at the same time,” Liz said quickly. “We wanted to sit you all down and announce it to you so we could see your faces, but if Dan and Brenda don’t come, and we don’t go see them, I’m not sure when we’ll get the chance.”

  It had to be the fertility drugs, the twins. Jake and Liz were lucky it wasn’t triplets. Hilary took a bite of her buttery toast, and then another. She imagined two tiny Jakes. Two judgmental little Jakes.

  He went on to say that he was nervous about Liz’s pregnancy, given the dangers involved in carrying twins, but Liz interrupted him and said she wasn’t thinking about that, only about having a family and having it all at once. Two was the number of children they’d always wanted anyway.

  Hilary considered the strange poetry: Brenda’s miscarriage, Jake’s twins. A loss, a gain, and she herself—how did she fit in here? Was she the balance between them, one mother, one baby? The family had become a tipping boat, Daniel now sliding down toward the water, Jake sitting happily with all his money and houses and babies up on the other end. If only Daniel were there—Hilary wished more than anything she could see his face and know, really know, that he was still above water.

  “And how about you, Hil?” Ellen said. “You don’t have any more surprises for us, do you?” She wanted desperately to know who the father of the baby was. Her curiosity was devouring her.

  “Actually, Mom, I was telling Dad that I’m moving back East. I’ve put some stuff in storage and I’m going to sublet my place.”

  Everyone looked at her and then down at their plates. The ceiling fan above them purred.

  “Do you have a job here?” Jake asked. “And what about that job you have now, the one at the insurance firm?”

  “My contract ran out. I don’t have a new job, not yet,” she said. “But I’ve saved up a little money. And anyway, Dad said he could help me out if I need it, until I get on my feet with the baby.”

  Jake knit his eyebrows together and said, “Where will you live?”

  Her father said, “Of course she’ll move back home, at least for a while. We’ll figure out the details later—”

  “Nothing’s been decided,” Hilary interjected, and this seemed to quiet everyone, at least for the time being.

  They continued to eat, and Hilary heard, for the first time from inside the house, the push of the waves against the sand and rocks outside. It was comforting, a sound that had nothing to do with her or her family, the ocean churning away, oblivious.

  “I’m glad someone thought to let me in on this plan,” her mother said finally. She was angry. She was furious that Joe hadn’t let her in on their earlier conversation and consulted with her.

  Liz stood and began to gather their plates. “Don’t do everything yourself,” Hilary said, a
nd rose with Ellen while the men went to the living room. It was confounding how they fell into their prehistoric roles this way—sitting and talking lightly about things like cars and politics while the women cooked and cleaned. They might as well have been wearing loincloths.

  Hilary stood before the sink and turned on the tap. She felt a hand on her back. “Go, sit, I’ll do this,” Ellen said.

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “Go, honey. You too, Liz, you go sit with the others.”

  Liz went to join the men but Hilary remained in the kitchen with her mother, who nudged her to the side and took her place at the sink. Hilary rubbed her fingertips together as Ellen dunked the dishes in the soapy water. “So you’ll stay with us?” she asked, gazing down at the metal sink. Her eyes were shadowed, hidden beneath more wrinkles than when Hilary had last seen her.

  “I don’t know yet. Probably not,” Hilary said. “You’re angry. You’re annoyed Dad didn’t ask you about this first, and that he didn’t even tell you about it.”

  “It’s not that,” she said, “though I would like to have known. It’s more that, well, to be honest, I just can’t help wondering about this man, you know, this mysterious father of your child. Is it wise to be moving so far from him?”

  “I told you he doesn’t matter. I’m on my own in this—I’ll raise the baby by myself.”

  “Then I suppose you should come back and be closer to the family.”

  “You sound thrilled.”

  Ellen turned off the tap and stepped toward Hilary. “Listen to me: I’m glad you’re coming home.”

  “You’re not. You think it’s pathetic that I’m doing this on my own,” she said.

  “Why are you saying these things? I’m certainly not thinking them. Hil, if you want to know the truth, I think you’re incredibly brave. I think you always have been. Sometimes I wish I had a fraction of your courage.” Her words sounded thin, like words on a greeting card. Congratulations on your bravery! Best wishes on your independence! Anyway, it wasn’t bravery that led Hilary to this decision. It was necessity, a lack of options, a blind decision to move forward, because when else might she have a chance to have a baby? She was thirty-five, after all, and had never even been in a relationship that lasted longer than a six months.