The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  As we walked home, Jeremiah and I couldn’t stop laughing about it.

  “Fucking Carly!” he said, shaking his head. He was pushing the twin stroller with Brice and Lindsay in it. “I can’t believe how she gets us into such scrapes. Is she unbelievable? Now we can’t have day care anymore because she’s a book thief! And you know what this means, don’t you?” he said. “For you and me. You know what this means.”

  “What?” I said. Just his saying the words “you and me” made me weak.

  “We’re going to have kids around all the time. She’s going to ask you if you’ll babysit them. Just watch.”

  She did, promising that she’d keep looking for other arrangements for them, but the time for her show—or happening; she didn’t like it to be called a show because that put too much pressure on the dancers, she was quite firm about this—was drawing close, and she needed even more hours out of the house. “Since you’re not doing art anyway …” was the way most of Carly’s sentences now started.

  “But do you want to do this?” Grant asked me. We were taking a walk that evening. It was late November, and at last it was truly cold outside. The leaves were mostly in piles, and I scuffed through them as we walked down the residential streets. I looped my arm around his so he would have to slowdown.

  “I guess so,” I said. “I mean, I like the kids and all.”

  “Well, then, the way I see it, there are two good reasons for it,” he said cheerfully. “It’s a way to pay them back for letting us live with them. And maybe you’ll get some experience taking care of kids so that when we have our own, you’ll be all set.”

  Something about that made me mad. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “What? What’s wrong with that?”

  “I think it’s sexist. I mean, why is it up to me to pay them back for letting us live there? And also, why should I be the only one to get experience taking care of kids? What about you?”

  “What are you talking about? I’m working a million hours a day. You know that. And what’s wrong with saying you need experience? We all need experience in things.”

  “But what about my painting? Don’t you care anymore that I’m not doing my art?”

  We had stopped walking. He stood there looking confused. “Well, then why don’t you paint if you want to paint? What’s stopping you?”

  I was as shocked as he was that I was having this fit, but I plowed onward. “What’s stopping me?” I said. “Just where am I supposed to paint? Where? In the corner of our tiny little room, where I can’t even keep bobby pins without them getting in somebody’s way? Or maybe on the kitchen table, where the twins constantly knock everything over? Where would you suggest I paint?”

  He looked stricken for a moment; his eyes were like holes in his face in the shadow of the streetlights. He held up his palms, the universal gesture of an innocent man being wrongly accused. “Hey, if you want to paint, then we can find a way to make that happen. You’ve never talked about this. Didn’t Carly know some people you could rent from … somewhere … and paint, you know, all together? A kind of co-op deal?”

  “I’m not going to paint with a bunch of artistic snobs.” I burst into tears.

  “What’s going on here? How do you know they’re snobs?”

  “Because they are! Because I met them. And because Carly thinks I just let everybody take advantage of me, and she doesn’t know that I’m not ready to paint with a bunch of people who think I’m just an amateur! I’m out of place here. I don’t know what I want to do, and so I’m going to do this damn babysitting thing because there’s nothing else for me to do, but I want you at least to know that I’m miserable.”

  “Great,” he said. “And what am I supposed to do about it? What do you want from me?”

  “What do I want from you? What do you think I want from you? I want you to be my husband, and be on my side and look out for me. I want you to bring out the best in who I am.” I struggled to think of words Carly had used. “I want you to empower me and make me use all my best self.”

  He laughed. “Good God! What is all this talk? You know I’m on your side. I love you! I adore you. Look, if you don’t want to do the babysitting thing, then say you can’t, and don’t. It’s simple.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want to do it.”

  He sighed and stared off into the distance, squinting. He looked adorable, with the wind sort of ruffling his hair. But then he had to do that throat-clearing thing he did, and the spell was broken. “I don’t get you. You want to do the babysitting, but you want to be miserable. Is that it?”

  “Listen, what I really, really want is for us to move into our own place, and I want to have my own career, too. You’re in way over your head, you’re gone all the time, the only people I really know are Jeremiah and Carly, and now I feel like I have to take care of their kids so we can stay here, and I’m not doing my art—” I couldn’t stop myself from crying and saying all these nonsensical things that I wasn’t even sure I believed.

  What I wanted was for him to keep holding me, to say I was beautiful, to say, Don’t be in love with Jeremiah. Love me instead.

  He shifted his weight to the other foot. “Annabelle,” he said, “let’s not fight. I’ve got a million papers to grade, and I’m writing a proposal, and I’ve got a student coming in at seven thirty tomorrow morning to talk about his grade. Just do what you want. I’ll back you up. If you want to paint, if it’s a real calling for you, then do it. If you want us to find another place to live, go back to checking with Realtors. If you don’t want to watch Carly’s kids, tell her you’ll help her make other arrangements. Now let’s go home. Can we?”

  “Home, he says. Like we have a home.”

  “It’s our home for now. And you can find us another place. Okay, baby?” He put his arm around my waist and leaned me against him, and we slowly started to walk back. We walked in silence for a long time. I couldn’t believe how far we’d gotten from Carly and Jeremiah’s apartment. The night air was crisping up. I leaned in closer, and he tucked me into his coat with him. I felt the anger draining away and was relieved. It had been like a small storm, nothing so serious after all.

  “Anyway, aren’t you a little bit happy here?” he said softly, crooningly, after a while. “I can tell that you like Jeremiah, at least. And he likes you. I see the happy way you two get when you talk to each other at dinner. Even if you don’t really like Carly, you always seem to have a million things to talk about with him, right?”

  My blood froze, and I felt my mind start racing backward, defensively. Was I going to be accused of something here? Did I need to start marshaling some arguments?

  I didn’t say anything, and after a moment, my blood settled back in its old familiar tracks, stopped beating in my ears. Grant was merely stating something lovely that he’d noticed. There wasn’t any recrimination there at all. When we got to the front door of the apartment building, he took me in his arms and placed me on the bottom step, and then he stood on the sidewalk—so that we were almost eye to eye—and kissed me lightly on the lips, over and over again, a hundred little kisses.

  And I just stood there and let his kisses rain over me, but what I was thinking was that maybe Jeremiah would still be awake when we went inside. Maybe he would smile at me again the way he had at dinner.

  Part of me hoped he’d be there, but there was another part of me that just wanted to take Grant’s hand and run away with him in the darkness. Maybe we could go back to California, live on the beach in a cave, and hide from this thing that was hunting me down just as surely as if I had a bull’s-eye painted on my forehead.

  [eleven]

  2005

  “Mom. Mom, wake up. I have to ask you something.”

  I sit straight up in bed, on my ready-to-jump-in-a-taxi alert. The word Mom has always been able to do that to me—even uttered from five rooms away and in a hoarse whisper, it can jolt me out of the deepest sleep. I think of it like the special red phone
in the White House.

  “Oh, baby! Baby! Are you all right?” Before I’m even fully awake, I’m on my feet and turning on the light. Sophie is lying on her side, propped up on her pillow. Her eyes are dry, and she doesn’t seem to be in pain. My heart rate settles back down to the normal range. “What’s the matter?”

  The clock on the bedside table says 2:47.

  “I’m okay. I made up my mind not to wake you up, but I just keep thinking, and I can’t sleep,” she says in a perfectly wide-awake voice. “Then I was lying here, and I decided that some things are better when you talk about them in the middle of the night anyway. Have you ever noticed that? That in the middle of the night you talk about different things? Whit and I used to have some of our best discussions then. Maybe people are more real then. Do you think so? They don’t have their defenses up.”

  She is obviously out of her mind and nowhere near sleep, so I rub my eyes and try to bring my mind into focus. “Okay. My defenses are certainly still asleep, so what kind of thing do you want to talk about? Are you feeling anxious?”

  “I want to talk about open marriage.”

  “Open marriage? Really?”

  “Yeah. That’s where you’re married, but you can have other partners and so can your husband—”

  “Yes. I’m familiar with the term.”

  “Well, I want to know if you think it works. Because this woman I work with says she and her husband were going to split up, but then they decided instead to have an open marriage and sleep with other people, and she told us that saved their marriage because neither one of them gets jealous or anything. Like when her husband is with his other partner, then she just goes out with her friends and does whatever she wants to do, like go to parties and maybe meet new people, and she says that when they get back together, they’re both happier. What do you think about something like that?”

  “Wow. It may be too much in the middle of the night for this discussion,” I say, “but my initial impression is that she’s lying to you. I don’t think it works. Not with most people.”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought, too,” she says slowly. She stares at the ceiling.

  “It’s one of those great ideas that turns out to be just not practical. It doesn’t fit with human nature.”

  “But think about the Winstanleys,” she says. “What if they could have had an open marriage? Don’t you think it might have been better for them, really? I mean, if Mr. Winstanley got a little crush on someone else, then couldn’t he just get it out of his system and still stay with his wife, and then the whole family wouldn’t have had to suffer?”

  “Maybe, but I’m not sure Mary Lou would have gone for that deal.” I laugh a little, picturing practical, down-to-earth Mary Lou kissing Clark good-bye as he walks out the door, arm in arm, with Padgett.

  “So what do you think? Could you have ever done it—forgiven Dad, I mean, if Dad was the type to get crushes? I mean, if you love somebody enough, won’t you do anything to keep them?”

  • • •

  THIS IS not what we’re talking about.

  Yesterday she spent a great deal of time at the computer, staring at the pictures Whit has sent her. At one point she called me over, and I stood next to her while we looked at the photos he’s sent. They are mostly of adorable, dark-eyed children who regard the camera with shy smiles, and of construction workers building the new orphanage. There are vast, verdant fields with vegetables growing, and a shiny, stainless-steel kitchen where we see smiling people stirring and serving giant pots of food. There is the pleased but harried face of the director, and photos of the film crew, mugging for the camera, hoisting beers, walking around a town, playing Frisbee with the children.

  And in one picture, just one picture, there is Whit, standing next to a woman who actually looks a lot like Sophie—a pert, ponytailed cutie in a green T-shirt and denim shorts—and for that second when the picture was taken, forever captured on camera, his arm is draped across her shoulders and he is looking down and smiling at her, a totally unself-conscious, beaming grin that could mean anything at all but of course means only one thing to Sophie.

  Whit has fallen in love in Brazil.

  When I saw it, I flinched just a little. And I wasn’t surprised when Sophie flashed right past it, and then when we were all done, I saw her go back to that one and bring it up on the screen. I excused myself and went to make another pot of pregnancy tea and then I suggested we watch something fun on DVD. I grabbed Sleepless in Seattle, which has no scenes of marital infidelity in it. We didn’t need any of that.

  But now it’s the middle of the night and the black dogs are howling in her head, and she is asking me if I ever would have forgiven Grant, and what can I say? I look at her and can’t think of anything truthful that could help her. Am I to just pat my lonely, left-behind, pregnant daughter and offer some sweet assurance that she’s married to a wonderful man, a man who would never, ever hurt her? Do I even believe that?

  Who knows what to believe? What’s clear is that it’s three o’clock on a dark winter morning, and she is in her seventh month of pregnancy, and in Brazil her husband is either sleeping alone or he isn’t, and either way, Beanie Bartholomew is coming into this world and will need love and sustenance and, more than anything else, a mother who believes herself to be loved.

  I say slowly, “I guess I would try to understand. But it would depend on the circumstances, and if your father was really in love with someone else or just was lost and trying to make sense of things within himself.”

  She sighs a big, loud sigh and smiles at me. “You can’t even relate, can you?” she says. “It’s beyond belief for you, is what it is.”

  ONE DAY the phone rings, and it’s Cindy Bartholomew, Whit’s mother. She seems surprised to find me on the other end of the phone, so I have to explain about the sudden bleeding. She is suitably chagrined. We met at the wedding at our house, of course, and at the time I remember thinking she seemed charming and funny. She exclaimed that New England was just the most beautiful place ever, and she loved our house, our friends, the whole bit. We insisted that she and her husband stay in our guest room, and if after a few days I found her tendency to talk baby talk to her husband just the tiniest bit irritating, I enjoyed them overall. They told funny stories, especially when they’d been drinking. She and Clement are always jetting all over the country, monitoring their various investments, and whenever they’re in New York, they try to come and check on Sophie and the progress of their grandchild. They’d like to come for a little visit. Would that be possible?

  “Of course,” I say. “We’d love to see you.” Sophie, meanwhile, is shaking her head and diving under the covers even as I’m arranging the time.

  “They’re family,” I tell her when I hang up. “Why don’t you want to see them? And don’t they, in fact, own this apartment you’re living in?”

  “Yes. God. They own everything. I feel like when they’re here, they’re making sure I haven’t done some terrible thing to destroy the place. I always just want to get out of here.”

  “It’ll be okay. It won’t do us any harm to be nice to them. We can set up a party platter in the bedroom.”

  “Ugh. I suppose.”

  The Bartholomews arrive on a Sunday afternoon, and the four of us settle awkwardly in the bedroom, which is where Sophie and I have done all our entertaining. But this time it’s unbearable. I immediately see what Sophie means: Clement, who is about twenty years older than Cindy, is a restless type, always looking as though he’s just about to go to a meeting at which he expects to be told that he’s been elected the king of the universe and that things on the home planet have gone terribly wrong. He paces around the apartment, huffing and sighing, opening cabinets, and tapping at the bricks on the fireplace. Cindy is obviously used to this kind of behavior; her well-made-up eyes follow him, and she keeps calling him Grandpa and telling him to go and do all the “Grandpa” things he needs to do, although I can’t imagine what they
are.

  Finally he comes back into the bedroom doorway, where he looms like André the Giant, and makes a pronouncement. “Okay, I’m ready now to take three beautiful women to lunch.”

  Oh, but we can’t. It is explained to him again. We can’t leave the house. Sophie, in fact, can’t leave her bed. To my surprise, Sophie stands up and declares that it won’t hurt if we just go out for a little bit of lunch. It might even do her good.

  “Wait,” I say.

  “No. Mom! How’s this really going to hurt? I’ll go downstairs, get right into a cab, and go to the restaurant and sit down immediately, eat, get into the cab again, and come right back.” Her eyes are pleading, bright and intense. “I mean, I go to doctor’s appointments—why not one lunch out?”

  “I think they want you lying down,” I say, but clearly I’m embarrassing her. Cindy Bartholomew is starting to make little henlike noises, trying to smooth things over, as if there’s about to be a huge argument.

  Clement is snorting. “I’ll take responsibility for this,” he says.

  I’m aghast. There’s no taking responsibility. An unborn baby could be in danger—how do you take responsibility for that? I wish I could tell Grant this story. The old Grant. We’ve always laughed about men like this, men who think they’re so powerful they can intervene in matters of life and death.

  Cindy twitters around us, worried. Clement assures us he will call the doctors, if necessary. He can get us a wheelchair if that would help … he’ll have his cell phone and there will be three of us to watch her every second. It’s not such a big deal.

  Sophie is frantically signaling me with her eyes that this is something that must be done. She wants this.

  So we go outside, blinking in the light and air. Clement hails a cab, and it parks obediently by the curb, like a trained puppy. The day is prematurely warm, filled with sunshine and promise. At home, there wouldn’t be a day like this until late May. But here in New York, it seems like anything is possible. Sophie declares that it feels wonderful to be out in the air, and not on her way to the doctor. She is positive that the bleeding was just a onetime thing, an anomaly. It is important for her, in fact, to feel that her body is competent enough to hold on to a baby even when she’s upright. This is great, great, great.