The Third Child

by Marge Piercy

  He loved to surprise her, and even more, he loved control. Most of the time that didn’t bother her. At worst, she felt he was preparing a maze for her to run correctly or badly. She would be judged. At best, she felt planned for, cared for, supremely important, as she had never before been to anyone.

  They headed toward Philadelphia, but when they got to I-80, he turned west. They stopped for lunch in Stroudsburg in the Delaware Water Gap, as much to warm up as to toss down chili and a hamburger, then stopped a couple of times more just to stretch and use the facilities. Why should she be so happy? But she was. When they rode off together, she held tight to him and wanted to grin or whoop with joy. She felt as if everyone they passed could glance at them and see a couple, mates, the real thing. Love seemed to her much rarer than it was supposed to be. Once upon a time she had loved her mother and her father passionately. Her mother loved her as someone with many dogs might love the runt of the litter, the one she could not sell but had to keep around. Her mother approved of her most when she was quiet. Rosemary would have preferred her mute and stuffed. Gradually, she admitted it to herself, she had stopped loving them. Quiet and obedient, a dog successfully put through its training by someone paid to do just that, that was the only time she pleased Rosemary. Dick had lost interest when she grew out of her early girlish cuteness.

  In her classes, among her friends, she heard much about dysfunctional families—parents who fought wars over or around their children, fathers who drank, mothers who did drugs, bitter divorce and custody battles. But privately she sometimes wondered if the worst luck wasn’t being the child of parents who doted on each other, who loved passionately and found each other fascinating. Yet Rich had done just fine. Merilee had enjoyed fulsome attention from both of them. Melissa was the superfluous one. Perhaps if she were gorgeous, like Billy, they would have forgiven her for coming along unwanted, untimely. But she was just herself, pleasant looking but no beauty. Nothing spectacular that Rosemary could feel was worthy of them. But Blake found her special and he made her special. She still felt a shiver of shock every time she remembered that he was her husband. She was his wife. Sometimes she felt she had dreamed the whole thing, or that it was just a hoax. No real wedding could slip by the bride’s attention, could it? Were they really married?

  He left I-80 heading south, along the river. They came to an old industrial town, grimy and depressed, downtown mostly boarded-up stores. He handed her an envelope with an address and instructions scrawled on it in his scarcely legible handwriting.

  “Turn right on Elm,” she read off. After three more turns, climbing up from the river, they arrived at a double-barreled frame house that had perhaps once been white. It listed visibly downhill in a line of elderly houses the color of smoke and rust straggling around the corner wedged against the granite of a mountain. All had tiny dark backyards tucked under an overhanging ledge that almost hit the houses. It had been a while since the trash had been collected. A man sat on the stoop smoking and staring at nothing. He glanced at them and away, then his gaze returned to Blake and he glowered. He did not move aside for them and they had to step around him.

  The doorbells did not look functional, hanging on exposed wires. Blake found the name he was looking for, Grabowski, and they climbed to the third-floor right front apartment. “I hope she’s expecting us,” Blake said. “I’ve been in contact with her.”

  She was Sharon Grabowski, a harried-looking woman Melissa judged to be forty. She opened the door perhaps an inch on its chain. There were grey streaks in her dark blond hair. “Mrs. Grabowski? Karen put us in touch with you, if you remember. Karen Dickinson.”

  “I remember Karen.” She stood aside, opening the door for them. They walked into a cluttered livingroom. A fat child was sitting on the floor banging on an empty tomato juice can. “That’s Bobbie. He’s seven now.”

  “Seven?” Melissa repeated. He didn’t look nearly that old.

  “Down’s syndrome they call it,” Sharon said. “He’s a sweetheart, full of love. He’s just so good!”

  “You’ve lived on the river all your life?” Blake asked.

  “My father worked at the plant. My mother sold bait. She used to have these metal rods that gave a shock in the ground, and the night crawlers would come right up so we could catch them in cans like that one.” She pointed to the big can that had held tomato juice. “She liked to fish too.”

  “In the river?”

  “Yeah, the river.” Sharon waved at the couch. “Sit down. Would you like some coffee?”

  “I’d love some,” Melissa said. She was still cold through and through.

  “No, thank you,” Blake said. “I don’t drink coffee. Lissa, are you sure you want coffee? It makes you jittery.”

  That was weird. Of course he drank coffee. Gallons of it.

  “Tell us about your mother,” Blake went on.

  “She was a good woman. She never hit any of us. She did her best for us. After all the fish died off in the river, she took up hooking rugs. She was always collecting rags and making these rugs with big fish on them. People liked them.” She pointed to her feet. “That there’s one of hers.”

  Melissa looked down to see a braided rug of concentric ovals with a big bloated-looking blue fish filling the center. “It’s wonderful,” she said lamely.

  “Is she still around?” Blake asked.

  Sharon shook her head wearily, passing her hand across her forehead and eyes. “She died of kidney failure two years ago. She was fifty-one.”

  Melissa was startled. So then Sharon could no way be forty herself. “Fifty-one?” Melissa repeated, to make sure she’d heard right.

  “A lot of people around here die pretty young. The cancer gets them.”

  “And your father?”

  “He’s in the hospital. Lung cancer.”

  “Sharon, maybe you could talk a little about what happened in your marriage. Melissa wants to write about all this, what’s happened to the people here. I would really appreciate it if you could explain.”

  “My husband and I, we moved up the mountain. He liked woods and he hunted a lot. In and out of season, like guys do around here, you understand. It’s what they’ve always done. We weren’t that far from town. We planned to have a family. My husband, his name was Broderick but everybody called him Brud.

  “Brud and I, we planned a big family like we came from, both of us. So when I got pregnant just two months after our wedding, we were glad. But I lost the baby in the fourth month. Six months later, I got pregnant again. That one I carried to term, meaning the whole nine months. But the baby, a little girl, she was born dead. The doctor, he goes, It was a mercy because something was wrong with her. Her intestines didn’t reach all the way. She would have starved to death.”

  Sharon did not look at either of them but into her lap as she related the next three miscarriages. “Finally, Bobbie was born to us. It’s true, he’s got problems, and the doctor says maybe he won’t live so long, but he’s a real kid and he’s alive now….”

  Sharon was quiet so long, Melissa was trying to put together a sentence of condolence when she spoke again. “It was too much for Brud. He just took off. He said our luck was rotten and there was no use trying to go on.”

  “Did the doctors ever tell you what caused all these problems?”

  “PCBs in the river water. We been drinking it all our lives. The doctor who spoke to us said it was from eating the fish. I saw him on local cable. The governor said they were cleaning up the river, they were going to make it right for us. But people go on dying. It hasn’t stopped.”

  Melissa almost dropped the coffee she had been sipping. Carefully, as if it might blow up, she put the cup down on the coffee table. That was why Blake had tried to warn her.

  “I really want to thank you for talking with us, Mrs. Grabowski. I know it’s hard for you to speak about it.”

  “We don’t talk about it to each other, you know? We see those movies about pollution and justice and s
uch, but there’s no way out for us. So it’s kind of a relief when somebody from outside comes and acts interested. We just stew in our own juices and we can’t do anything about it.”

  When they left, the guy was still sitting on the steps. He ignored them until they had stepped around him. Then he spat.

  Before they got on the Honda, Blake said, “That was what Karen was investigating when they locked her up in the loony bin. There’s a lot of horror here. Pain and misery.”

  “But my father didn’t pollute the river.”

  “Neither did he clean it up as promised. He ended up giving the polluters the right to go on polluting and charged the minor cleanup to the taxpayers.”

  She clung to him as they roared off downhill and then upriver to the interstate. She was glad they could not talk. That poor woman. She wished she could bring her father to meet Sharon, but it would never happen. Would he say she was sentimental? That was Rosemary’s insult. Rosemary would say, How can you prove it’s the water? It’s probably genetic. Inbreeding. She wanted to believe that, but she couldn’t. This was what political decisions turned into, a woman with five miscarriages and a little boy with Down’s syndrome.

  When they stopped for coffee a couple of hours into the trip, she said to him: “You’re educating me, that’s what you’re doing. Right?”

  “I’m reminding you why we began this project. What it means in human terms.”

  “I feel so ashamed sometimes. I resented my parents because of the way they treated me. I wonder, if they’d been warmer to me, would I just go along with what they do in the world? Would I agree, because it was them? I ignored the politics, because I was so focused on myself.”

  “That’s what growing up is all about, Lissa. Understanding the bigger picture. Looking farther than the ends of our noses.”

  “And you’re worried now that I have a secret weapon against them, that we’re actually married, I will just walk off and forget everything.”

  “I suspected it wasn’t feeling as urgent to you.”

  “Well, the bottom line goes that I want to please you. I want you to get what you need too. So I won’t ever walk away.” She put her hand over his on the tabletop beside the remains of not very good cherry pie.

  “I want it to matter to you too. Come on, let’s see how far we can get. You don’t mind traveling in the dark, do you?”

  “With you, I don’t mind it at all.”

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE •

  Melissa found several messages upon her return. A phone call from a classmate who had missed Friday’s French was easy to deal with. An e-mail from Rosemary said,

  We tried to reach you Saturday. Where were you? We tried as late as midnight. This is alarming.

  She e-mailed back,

  I went to New York with two new friends from my Sociology of Politics class, Heather Grimes and Lindsey Rockingham. Merilee knows Lindsey’s brother Stu. We went to a rock performance and then dancing. We had a wonderful time.

  Both the women she mentioned were in her sociology class, but she had never done more than share a cup of coffee with Lindsey and talk about doing a project together for class, maybe in a local mall.

  She tried twice to return Karen’s call, but Karen did not yet have an answering machine. Finally on the third try, she caught her in.

  “Listen, Melissa. Tom has been busted. And the FBI is somehow involved.”

  “Tom?”

  “The gay guy I put Blake in touch with. Who used to work for your father?”

  “Busted for what?” She remembered he had been arrested in a men’s room once. “Was he caught trying to have sex?”

  “No, it has something to do with being accused of stealing your father’s papers and selling them. Because Dick was governor, and the papers crossed state lines, it’s more serious.”

  “He never knew who I was,” Melissa said. She had an instant stomachache, pulsating.

  “But he could describe you both. Blake is rather distinctive-looking. Ask Blake what he said when he made contact with Tom, because if he talks, you could be in serious trouble.”

  She ran to Blake at once, for he had long since taught her to say nothing that could hurt them in e-mail or on the telephone. He frowned, straddling his desk chair. In that position, he looked all arms and legs. “I’m trying to remember what I told him. I knew him as Tom, no last name. I told him my name was Sam.”

  “Why Sam?”

  “It was the first name that came to mind when he asked me. Do I know any Sams? Yeah, Si had a cousin in Baltimore named Sam. But he’s dead.”

  “No Sams in my family. Quick thinking.”

  “I can’t remember what I said to him. I’ll concentrate and see if I can bring it back.” He dug at his scalp, frowning still. “Let’s hope he doesn’t get chatty.”

  “What could they actually charge him with?”

  “I don’t know. At some point I should ask Si. I hate to involve him, but he’s the only person who can answer questions like that.”

  Blake brought up various newspapers on the internet. The Inquirer had a photo. “That’s him,” Melissa said. “He has a cap in front of his face, but his ears are memorable.”

  “I better call my dad,” Blake said grimly.

  When he said “father” or “dad,” she always had a moment of disorientation, wondering which of the two men he was referring to. It made her feel alienated, remembering all he had not told her until she found out from Rosemary. It surprised her how much she resented that withholding, even now, even after so much else had happened between them. She still resented that he had not trusted her. It was a sore that would not heal. She sat with her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms clutching her legs, chilly in the too-warm dorm. At first she tried to follow the conversation, but Si was doing most of the talking. She tuned out. Blake would tell her what was going on when he hung up. All the news seemed to be bad, so why be in a hurry to hear it?

  He turned to face her, crossing his arms as if he too needed protection from something dangerous in the air. “He says Burt Sandoval is taking Tom’s case. He’s going to use the Pentagon Papers defense.”

  “What Pentagon Papers? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Before our time. The Times published secret papers about the Vietnam war. Some guy—Daniel Ellsberg—who had access stole them, because there was a lot of information about how the government had lied. The Times knew they were stolen and printed them anyhow. A judge finally ruled that it was in the public interest and a newspaper had the right to print such material….”

  “I don’t get what’s happening, who’s after who.”

  “Your father is after the Inquirer for publishing the stuff we leaked to Roger. Tom’s in trouble for stealing papers from your father’s office.”

  “I thought my father would claim they were bogus.”

  “He did at first. But there’s too much info that can be checked. He’s trying to bottle it up at the source by going after Tom, who took the stuff and passed it on, and the Inquirer, that published it, and Roger, who wrote it. They haven’t found out we were the middlemen—yet. I hear Mexico’s nice this time of year.”

  “Could we run away?”

  His laugh was more like a cough. “Not really. For the moment, I say we go with the flow and watch.”

  “Why can’t we run away?” She looked out his window on a bleak November day with pellets of snow circling aimlessly, vanishing as they hit the ground. A day without sun or color. A warm place far from her family had strong appeal: palm trees, a blue-green tropical sea swishing lazily at their feet.

  “And live on what? It’s premature to break and run.” He stretched languidly. “Besides, Mexico has extradition laws. And we’d have to be picking up checks from Si and Nadine to survive. We’d be easy to trace.”

  “Aren’t there other places? Places that don’t have treaties?”

  “Like China?”

  “People disappear in the U.S. all the tim
e.”

  “We’re kind of striking, babes. People notice us. You could dye your hair, but I can’t dye my skin. We should just sit tight and see what happens. We’re not on the spot yet.”

  “In Mexico there are a lot of mixed-race people, Blake.”

  “How well do you speak Spanish? I sound American, and I bet you do too.”

  In bed they clutched each other, even more passionate than usual. “After college, we’ll have children, won’t we?”

  He smiled into her eyes from two inches away. “One at a time, I hope. Yes. We have to have children. They will be absolutely gorgeous. Like us.”

  “I never thought of myself as gorgeous.”

  “You aren’t patrician looking like your mother. But you are beautiful in your own way, my girl. You’re built. You’ve got curves where you ought to. You’re the right height for me and you feel good. Oh how you feel good. You’re made of cream and velvet.”

  “I want to know we’ll be together for years and years, to get old together like my mother’s parents. They actually love each other still, you can tell, even though they’re really old, like seventy. I don’t know if I want to live to be that old, but if I do, I want it to be with you.”

  He held her face between his palms. “I want that too. I want to be a great-grandfather with a tribe of descendants. Multicolored like a quilt, some with your hair, some with mine, all of them strong and confident of belonging and being loved.”

  “I think that’s like beautiful.”

  “But we should wait to make babies till we’re graduated and we have a place to live and some money. I don’t want you to get pregnant too soon. I’ve seen what that does to people.”

  “I’m in no hurry, believe me. I just need to know we have a future we care about. Making plans even if they’re just pretend makes me feel good.”

  “They’re not pretend. We can do it. Why not? It’s not like we want to be President, the way your old man does, or want to be rock stars or basketball millionaires. What we want is simple enough, so why can’t we have it? Each other and a decent life together.”