Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  After another surgery, after almost another year of trying, I got pregnant again. I found out in a hotel halfway to Chicago, where Aaron and I were driving to my friend Jen’s wedding. My parents were in Ithaca with Nico. I went to a roadside pharmacy and bought the test. At the wedding, Aaron drank enough for both of us and we dirty-danced and had hotel sex and dreamed our new life into existence, the way you can really only do when you’re in another place. The foreignness of Chicago gave us city-sized sights. We got home just before Christmas. My parents stayed with us, our first holiday in Ithaca. I wrapped the pregnancy test and gave it to them, and my mom howled with joy. “Did you pee on that thing?” my dad asked.

  * * *

  In January, we put the accessory apartment up for rent. The first call was from a woman named Emily. When she arrived that night to look at it, she had a one-year-old baby on her hip. Single mother, I thought. Her long red hair was piled on top of her head, a scarf wrapped up to her chin, her glasses foggy from the cold. She was maybe a little younger than I was, but that night she had the look of someone older, someone who had five minutes ago fled a war. It was a look I recognized, and that I would remember when I was the one, two years later, looking for apartments for me and my children. She didn’t smile or chat as I made faces at the baby, as she looked around at the little kitchen, the living area, the bed and bath. She did some math in a notebook, first month plus deposit. She’s not going to take it, I reasoned. It was too small; she didn’t like it. I was disappointed, perhaps because I wanted to help her—save her!—to be in proximity to whatever trouble she had been in, to watch our babies play together and to see her transform into a person who smiled. Ridiculous, that I was a landlord, yet I liked it, liked that it was a position that afforded me grace to give.

  She called a couple days later, though, and said, “I’ll take it.”

  * * *

  How does any mother raise a family without another woman and her baby next door? Well, having a husband who stayed at home helped. We were all in it, our little village. We took care of the kids together. She took Nico to her place so Aaron and I could go on dates. We took her daughter to our place so she could go to meetings. She came over to do her laundry while we all watched Yo Gabba Gabba. Some nights, she came over to watch a movie while her daughter slept on the other side of the wall and Nico slept upstairs, two baby monitors posed on the coffee table side by side. We played Just Dance and sat for hours in the playroom and Emily made the most amazing desserts, cookie dough balls frozen in chocolate, full of fat and not pretty. Her apartment was messy, clothes everywhere, little crescents of construction paper scattered across the floor. I loved it. Our side of the house was messy, too, the vacuum cleaner standing guard at the front door next to the bag of kitty litter, sippy cups abandoned in the couch cushions. My colleagues had kids, too, but I still had not invited any of them over. I was ashamed of our little house with its trash-heap porch and thrift-store kitchen. But when Emily knocked on the door, we did not clear the clutter. She was a compatriot.

  When the weather got warm, as my belly grew, we frosted the kids in sunblock and picnicked in the grass and they chalked the stone steps and licked Popsicles while we planned their wedding. We laughed. They were one and two years old.

  “No, I’m serious,” Emily said.

  I stopped laughing. “Me too.” Then we laughed again.

  The two of us pushed the kids in strollers down the shady country road, past the murder house, past the house with all the dogs, past the abandoned house with grass growing out the windows, past the rusty trailer with the rusty swing set hiding behind the fence, the sick smile of the clothesline that made me shiver. I told her some of our history, skimmed the surface like a lake, leaving the muck at the bottom. Emily told me about her marriage, though I could sense there was much she was leaving out, too. She told me about her husband, the man she’d followed to Ithaca for his Ph.D. at Cornell, only to find out he was having an affair with a woman back home. He came over now and then to pick up their daughter. He was a nice enough guy. Aaron helped him move. They had worked out custody while the lawyers worked out the divorce. Emily was a lawyer herself, licensed in California but not in New York. She was working at the Gap for now. A gap. She had a dark sense of humor that rivaled Aaron’s and a disgusting sweet tooth and knew everything about musicals and needed saving from no one, I was chastened to learn, least of all me. If she had been saved, she had saved herself.

  One day a delivery of flowers came to our door. We signed for them. When we handed them over to Emily, she blushed a little. They were from her mother, she told us. She sent her flowers on her sober anniversary every year. That year, I think, was seven.

  Some days, we heard her singing through the wall. Madonna. Top of her lungs, shrill as the ceiling.

  * * *

  Before I left for my book tour, I had Aaron take a picture of me standing with my new book—my book!—balanced on my head, my belly big in my pink maternity top. Look at me doing everything and having everything I’ve ever wanted. Look at me balancing it all. Dare it to fall. The picture was taken in front our new shower curtain. I cropped out the moldy bathroom tile.

  * * *

  I was across the country putting on mascara when the text came through: I have this weird rash. It was the first in a series of photos. I did not know that there would be a ceaseless stream of them. That in the future, my phone would be an objective archive of irreconcilable images, no buffer or blindfold, no trigger warning. A birthday party, a field trip, blood and bugs and bruises, a Saturday at the lake.

  You’ve seen those pictures before. Swipe past them.

  ME IN FRANCE

  In Toulouse, we eat baguettes with fig jam. A breakfast of it, the four of us each with our own, oui, just a baguette, s’il vous plaît. It is hot. By noon the bricks of Place du Capitole burn through the soles of our shoes. I listen to middle-aged French women ask me questions in a library, then in a bookstore, and think, Thank goodness for middle-aged women who keep libraries and bookstores open in every country, nod, listen to the translator translate their words to me and mine to them. I feel immeasurably lucky.

  We are here at the invitation of an international literary festival. A few days in Toulouse, then a few days in Paris, then nearly a week in London where I’ll be doing another conference. Two weeks in Europe, because we haven’t been to any of these places before, and because I’m almost forty and other people are paying for part of it and who knows when we’ll get the chance again.

  Two weeks. The rhythm of our lives. We have done our best to prepare for the worst. What if Aaron breaks out—inevitably, on the full moon, won’t he break out?—what if he goes mad, needs a hospital, in a country whose language we don’t speak? What if he needs me when I’m working? Will he even be able to walk around, see the city? I imagine him and the kids stuck in the hotel for two weeks, while Aaron sleeps, the kids zoned out in front of European TV.

  But in Toulouse, the sunshine, the novelty, the stately brick beauty, the ubiquitous cafés where beer and wine are drunk all day, are a shock to Aaron’s sick system. While I am driven to events by middle-aged women in European cars, he ventures out with the boys for sandwiches at the vegetarian place they’ve found, to the record store, the toy stores, before returning to the AC of the hotel, battered by the heat. At night, after the sun goes down—9:30, 10:00!—we meet under the big white tent strung with lights, entering through the courtyard that is neither inside or nor outside, eating dinner at long tables with other authors on tablecloths held down in the wind with half-full bottles of wine. We eat baguettes with fig jam. Henry asks for more, and more.

  By the third afternoon, a Saturday, it’s 104 degrees. The boys have ridden every carousel in the city, crouched in the shade of every statue. We walk to bookstores, cafés, a church, any place we think might be cooler than the streets, though there is no AC here, nearly none. It’s the summer of 2019 and cities across France are readying for a weekend of Ye
llow Jacket protests, and though we don’t see anyone in yellow jackets, we see hordes of police in riot gear, shields and helmets and guns, head to toe in thick black clothing that looks as though it’s made by Marvel Studios. We feel sorry for them and are vaguely on edge, mostly because we don’t know how on edge to be. This is not our country. In a square we see an ambulance and a cluster of people, hustling police, and for a moment fear a flare of violence, but it is just a woman who has fainted in the street of heatstroke. We retreat to the hotel. I don’t know how on edge to be because I am on a family vacation, and my husband is sick, and he is drinking, because it keeps him from being sick, and because he hasn’t gotten really sick on this trip, not yet. All day and night we come in and out of the hotel. Aaron loves a hotel more than anything and he loves this one. If we might just always stay in this air-conditioned hotel, the white marble lobby with its glass water jugs, one with slices of lemon, one with lime, perhaps he will never be sick again.

  * * *

  In Paris, our hotel is decidedly less comfortable. We spend the first hour in our room chasing flies with a rolled-up magazine. From the balcony we overlook Gare du Nord, which at night is beautiful in its glassy light, but by morning is as romantic as Penn Station, with its honking cars and desperate cabbies and men selling cigarettes on the street. The sidewalks smell of piss. One morning I wake early to sneak out for coffee at the Starbucks in the station, and on the couch in the lobby, the night clerk is snoring, his hairy stomach hanging out of his shirt.

  In the identical bistros along rue de Dunkerque, we eat baguettes with jam. “So many baguettes here!” Henry remarks. We take taxis, rent Lime scooters, ride the Metro, to the Louvre, the zoo, Notre Dame with her scaffold sheath. On the train, Aaron makes a game with Henry, touching his nose when the alarm buzzes each time the doors open, then releasing it when the alarm stops. Henry laughs and laughs. In the Metro station, the boys want to take a picture in front of a Stranger Things season three poster, the characters hanging upside-down. We are in Paris and all you guys can think about is Stranger Things! Aaron makes another game, posing for pictures as though he’s capturing a landmark between his thumb and forefinger, the way tourists do, except he’s off, way, ridiculously off. He laughs and laughs. The kids do it, too. I can’t take you guys anywhere! Henry and I climb the stairs to the first platform of the Eiffel Tower. Aaron and Nico are scared of heights, and I realize as I am climbing the stairs of the Eiffel Tower, I am, too. When we come down, we all cross the street and buy crepes and ride the carousel, and Aaron is drinking a green slushie that tastes like Listerine, and laughing as the sun sets, as we try and try to take a family selfie in front of the tower. It makes me want to cry, my hunger to get us all into the frame, to live inside this memory, the goodwill and good health, to make it last.

  On a corner not far from the tower, a news column. Aaron pauses, slurping his slushie. It is the kind of old-fashioned column you see all around Paris: the round green pillar with a fancy hat, slapped with news bulletins and ads. Later, when I look them up, I will discover that they are called Morris columns.

  “That thing gives me déjà vu.” Aaron points. “I have a picture of myself in front of one of those.”

  “Here?” I ask.

  “It must have been at Epcot.” He shrugs. “Weird.”

  On our last night in Paris, we find the vegan restaurant we wish we’d found the first day. We walk until Aaron is too weak and the boys are whining, and then we take a cab. It’s late by the time we get there, ten o’clock. The couple at the table one foot from us is smoking, and we don’t care. We have become so Parisian! What is bedtime? We order pizza and waffles and burgers and little mugs of puddings and soufflés. Aaron orders gin and tonic and I order wine. From the table, at the threshold of inside and outside, we watch the full moon rise over rue Montmartre. It hangs like a clock tower over the cobblestone street. Aaron turns pale. His forehead sweats. His belly grows big. Our dinner lasts an hour, two hours. It is nighttime, summer, midnight. Dinner is so good we order it all over again. Aaron grows into an old man. Earlier in the day he was young, his chin stubbled, his waist slim. He posed for pictures in cafés, on the streets, in sunglasses and shorts, faking the Frenchiest faces he could make. Now his stomach stretches against the fabric of his blue Oxford shirt. Between the buttons, I can see the staring eye of his belly button; it’s as sudden and violent as if I can see into his guts. “Whoa, Dad,” the kids whisper, in awe. It is not the weight of two dinners, of two gin and tonics. But he flags the waiter and orders a third.

  * * *

  On the Eurostar to London, the boys don their enormous headphones and begin their season three binge of Stranger Things. No spoilers, I say across the aisle. I love Stranger Things but I don’t want to spend my European vacation watching TV. I know enough from the trailer to know that the characters are sickened by a dark parasitic life force. Aaron doesn’t want to watch anymore. Too close to home. Season three can wait. By the time I work up the courage to watch it, months from now, Brexit will have come, finally, and gone.

  For nearly a week, we have an Airbnb apartment in Fulham. The ad doesn’t mention that it’s in a housing project, but the old brick building is lovely, with the laundry hanging off the balconies, the wrought-iron gates, and the stray cats crossing the courtyard. In the back is a wooden play structure that the boys take to, and I watch them play from the second-story kitchen window as I hand-wash the dishes in the cast-iron sink and pretend I am a housewife in post-war London, that all I need are these four small rooms, the washer with its powdered detergent, the toilet with its fussy pull-chain flush. Around five thirty each evening, the song of the ice cream truck can be heard from down the street, and by the time it’s pulled behind the playground, the kids have run downstairs with their fists sweaty with pounds. The four of us eat Popsicles on the wooden bench in the shade, and by then it is our house, our park, we have written ourselves into these summer evenings, our chins sticky with sugar.

  My husband’s antipathies are smug and well-advertised. His list includes almost every place we have lived, every house, every city, none more than Ithaca, which has let him down fundamentally, first by making him sick, then by failing to cure him.

  So, to see him fall in love with London, the kind of love he once had for New York, for Florida, makes me a little breathless with hope. He loves our little neighborhood with the Pizza Express on the corner, the convenience store that sells liquor!, the coffee shop with perfect foam cappuccinos and vegan banana bread. He makes a habit of walking there on his own first thing in the morning. One afternoon, he takes the boys there shortly before closing, then comes home with a bag of goodies. “Guy gave me all these free pastries! Nice guy. Good dude.”

  “You always say that,” Henry points out. He imitates him: “‘He’s a good guy.’”

  “Yeah,” Nico laughs. “Why isn’t everyone just automatically a good guy?”

  “I always say that,” Aaron says, “because everyone’s a good guy. I’m a good guy. I love everyone. Everyone’s great.”

  “You love everyone here,” I say.

  “I know!” Aaron says. “It’s weird.”

  We take the tube to Hyde Park, London Bridge, Big Ben with his scaffold sheath. We walk along the Thames from Borough Market to the London Eye, finding benches for Aaron to rest on along the way. “Like Papou,” Henry says. On one bench, he falls asleep for ten minutes, then wakes up, disoriented, and moves on. Can you go on? He can go on. At the Natural History Museum, we visit the Museum of the Moon exhibit. A giant glow-in-the-dark moon hangs from the center of the room. Henry tries to hold it in his hands, the way everyone is doing. Aaron does not want to think about the moon. He leaves the room and goes to look at the petrified animals.

  He should have broken out by now, is what we think but don’t say. We are pressing our luck.

  Still, as the week comes to a close, we dare to dream about what a life could look like here, outside Ithaca, an ocean away from ou
r problems. What if he hasn’t broken out because there’s some copper balm in the river air here, or some axial proximity to the moon? I don’t want to believe it’s just the alcohol. I don’t want to admit it has that power.

  “London is stupid expensive,” our cabbie tells us on the way to Heathrow. “You don’t want to live here.”

  Nico is riding in the backward jump seat. It’s the boys’ favorite spot in London cabs, but not wise, we’ll later realize, while playing a Nintendo Switch and eating a package of Sour Cream & Onion Pringles. We’re almost to the airport when he vomits all over his lap. When we park, we change him into new clothes, clean the seat, and leave the cabbie a big tip. “I’m just going to go home now,” the cabbie decides. In the airport bathroom, we throw out the soiled clothes. The dream is over.

  * * *

  Throughout our trip to Europe, in a black billfold in Aaron’s backpack, tucked among pounds and francs, are five American hundred-dollar bills.

  On the morning after we land at Newark—we have stayed the night with my cousin Butch in New Jersey—Aaron and I take an early Bergen line train to Penn Station. The boys are sleeping when we slip out of the house. They will spend the day building and painting their own skateboards with Butch in his workshop. They are happier perhaps than they have been on the whole trip to Europe, happy enough that they’re not sad about not coming into New York with us.