“Believe me, I’m ready to fly down there and frog-march him back here,” I say, and she laughs.
This is the first person I’ve made laugh in weeks. I almost want to invite Dr. Levine out for drinks.
“SO WHAT exactly happened back then?” Sophie says to me in the cab on the way home. “Did Dad catch you two having sex and break up with you?”
I look out the window and don’t say anything.
“Never mind. I don’t really want to know anyway.”
NICKY HAS a completely different take on things, one that doesn’t automatically conclude that I’m a horrible person. He calls me to say that he thinks Grant is having some kind of midlife crisis or perhaps a psychotic break with reality.
“Mom, I swear, the drive up with him was like something out of a horror movie,” he says. “He was like Darth Vader, just breathing and seething. Meanwhile he’s driving like thirty-five miles an hour on the highway, and all these trucks are passing us and honking, but he doesn’t care. He just breathes.”
“I know, Nick. He was upset.”
“So wait. What’s going on? He found out about some guy you had a thing for in the past? Is that it?”
I hesitate. “It’s complicated, Nicky. There was a man I loved, and—well, your father didn’t ever want me to see the man again, and then I ran into him in New York and had coffee with him.”
“You had coffee with him, and Dad freaked out?”
“Yes, basically.”
“Okay, Mom. You gotta tell me. I can take it. Is my father insane?”
I laugh.
“So when is Sophie going to have this kid?” he says.
I tell him the C-section is scheduled for the twenty-fifth.
“I’ll be there,” he says.
“But you can’t. It’s the end of your semester—”
“Mom, I have to be. It’s so cool. I still can’t believe how that thing kicked and tried to get me to move my hand off, like I was trespassing on her house or something. It was so amazing. Do you just sit in there all the time and stare at Sophie’s belly and watch the knees and elbows go by?”
“Not so much,” I say.
“Well, you should,” he tells me. “That’s what I’d be doing.”
“Nicky, are you studying?”
“Uh, Mom, you’re breaking up! I can’t hear you anymore! Hello? Hello?”
“Nicholas David McKay, you are not fooling anybody. I hope you know that.”
He makes the sound of a dial tone and then bursts into laughter.
I GET back from the store one day and before I can even turn my key in the lock, I hear Sophie on the cell phone in her room. She’s shouting at Whit.
“But she’s in four of the pictures you just sent!” she’s saying. There’s a silence. Then she says, “Well, what it means is that she’s always around you. And that you obviously like the way she looks if you’re going to keep taking her picture.… No! I am not crazy! I know that. I know you don’t think—no! No, I don’t think I can trust you!”
Her voice drops, and I put away the groceries in the kitchen, wishing that I didn’t have that free-fall feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Then she says, “How can I know for sure? Everybody wants to sleep with you, and I’m here all alone and I’m as big as a house, and I don’t know if I can keep this baby inside me for as long as it takes! No, no, no! You shouldn’t have left me here! And—”
Then I hear her crying and she says, “I just found out that my mom cheated on my dad right after they got married. And now I don’t know who I can trust anymore. Nobody’s really faithful. And now my father isn’t speaking to her.” Silence. “No, he didn’t just find out, Whit. She saw the guy again! At least twice. She’s awful.”
I don’t hear anything more for a while and then she says, “Well, you can try to convince me all you want, but I just want to tell you one thing: this baby is going to be born on April twenty-fifth, and I want you to be there! … All right, then. Promise me! You promise? Okay.”
I fix us vegetable burritos for dinner and take hers into her bedroom an hour later. She’s lying on her side on the bed, staring out the window.
“Sophie,” I say. “Sophie, you have simply got to let this go. You’re making yourself miserable over something that has nothing to do with you. Really. Did you know that when I was twenty, my mother left my father so that she could go and sleep with another man, a scruffy artist who drove around in a van with drawings on it? My mother was the most conventional, straight person ever in the world, and she just went and had this affair, and went to feminist meetings and did all this wacky stuff, and do you think I stopped loving her or trusting her? I didn’t. I just tried to make room for it somehow, and then it all passed. Sophie, people aren’t put on this earth to meet every one of our expectations. That’s what makes life so interesting, honey. Can’t you see that?”
She turns and stares at me. “Is this supposed to make me feel better? Now you’re telling me that my grandmother cheated, too? How is that supposed to help?”
I have to admit, she has a point. What was I thinking?
ONE NIGHT I wake up with a start and find Sophie sitting on the edge of my bed picking at a loose thread of my quilt. I have no idea how long she’s been there, or how long I’ve known she was there. Her breathing seems to fill the room, so loud it had finally entered my dreams.
I sit up quickly and rub my eyes. “Are you okay? Is everything all right? Did anything happen?”
“I’m fine,” she says. “I guess.”
The clock says 2:34. When Sophie was a kid, she used to say we could make wishes when the time on the clock was consecutive numbers like that. She’d come running in to find me from wherever she happened to be just so we could make our wishes. At first I think that’s what she wants to do now.
“Wait. Are you crying?” I say.
“No. I was, but I’m not anymore,” she says.
“Well, what is it? Do you want to talk?”
“I just want to know one thing. Was it worth it?”
I let a beat of silence go by. “Seeing Jeremiah again, you mean?” I say.
“No. The affair. What you got out of it. Was it worth it, really?”
“Sometimes,” I say, “sometimes you don’t do things because of whether they’re going to turn out to be worth it. You—you’re just compelled by something that feels almost other. It’s hard to explain to somebody else, but … well, do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Well, I guess I would have to say that one thing that was happening was that the times were so different then. I almost can’t explain how back then it didn’t seem exactly like cheating. It almost seemed right, in those days, to reach out and grab what you needed for your life. You almost owed it to yourself. And, Sophie, I don’t know if you can understand this, but I was barely married. I didn’t even know myself as a married person. You’re ten times more married than I was then. I’d met your father at school, and he did this kind thing of letting me stay at his apartment when my father stopped paying my rent, and then I went back to take care of my family and never expected that anything would come of your father and me—and then one day he just showed up and asked me to marry him because he was moving to New York. And I said yes.”
She narrows her eyes. “You said yes? But why? Did you love him?”
“I did,” I say slowly. “I really did. But now I know that there were pieces missing in myself, pieces I didn’t even know I was supposed to have.”
She’s looking at me calmly. “I’m not going to be falling in love with somebody else.”
“No,” I say. “No, I don’t think you will. The times aren’t the same, for one thing. And you’re way more grounded than I ever was. But, sweetie, other things will happen. You and Whit are going to face pressure, and you’ll fight about money and sex and who does the dishes and who should change Beanie’s diaper and a whole bunch of stupid things that you
can’t even imagine right now. But when that happens to you, don’t let it freak you out and get you blaming yourself or Whit or boredom or the government or God or whatever. It’s just life. And you’ll get over it.”
She’s picking at the blankets again. “Mom, do you think Whit is cheating on me in Brazil? Because I really, really don’t know if he can be away for—”
“Sophie, this is going to sound weird, but I think you’re just going to have to get comfortable with the idea of living with some uncertainty in your relationship with your husband. You can’t ever completely know or completely control another person. And when you make your whole life about trying to figure out what he’s doing at any given point—well, then I think you’re going to rob yourself of some of the joy of simply being together. Because ultimately that’s all that matters.”
“But what if love, as you say, ‘just comes’ for him?” she asks. “What if he ends up loving somebody else and wanting to leave me?”
“And what if he does? Anything can happen, darling. That’s what life is—uncertain and crazy,” I say to her. “You’ll survive it if it happens. But remember that you have a shot of keeping it from happening if you let yourself truly love him instead of just trying to control him. Let him know how valued he is instead of how suspicious you are of his every waking moment.”
She’s quiet for a moment and then she says, “Whit is coming home on the twenty-third. And he says there’s nothing between him and Juliana, except that he now loves to play double solitaire all the time.”
“Well, that’ll give you something to do while you nurse the baby,” I say lightly.
We both laugh, and then we lie there in the darkness. After a while, her breathing becomes deep and even, and I know she’s asleep. I lie there until the sun comes up, thinking about Jeremiah and how I can’t summon anymore that lighter-than-air feeling I used to get when I’d think of him. The fantasy Jeremiah who wanted me so much and who was somewhere in the world missing me and pining for what he had thrown away doesn’t exist for me anymore. Maybe I don’t need that.
I look over at Sophie sleeping next to me, her face catching the gray early light coming through the window. She is no more ready to be a mother than I was, and it will take all the courage and strength she has to pull this marriage together and embrace the uncertainty. Did I fail this child somehow, give her the mistaken impression when she was growing up that life is serene and easy? Did everything come too easily for her—friendships and love and success, so that when troubles come, she has no idea how to cope?
Maybe. But lying there, I realize that I know something else now that I didn’t know before: here I’ve been championing Whit and thinking he had to go to Brazil and that it was so important for his career, but now I know he shouldn’t have gone. His place was here, and he’s going to have to work hard to earn her trust again.
And there’s another thing I know now, in the gathering dawn. Sophie has seemed so weak and emotional throughout this time, and I’ve often felt as though she was playing a passive, victim role in her own life. But it’s not really been like that at all. She has never closed off her emotions, the way I would have done or her father would have done. No. The tough times came, and let it be noted that Sophie yelled and shouted, screamed and fought for her marriage.
That’s something that neither her father nor I did.
We just walked away. And that’s what I have to live with.
[twenty]
2005
I try to call Grant because I badly want to tell him this thing I’ve figured out about walking away, but he doesn’t answer his phone. Not through the whole morning nor in the afternoon. I picture him looking at the caller ID and seeing that it’s me and deciding he doesn’t have the energy.
He is still walking away.
That’s okay. I know now that we’re all in a waiting mode. There is nothing to be done when the time isn’t right yet.
Right now it is enough that Sophie and I lie on her bed together in the evenings, Sophie knitting a blanket and me doing sketches of a baby in a café in Paris.
This is a call to my granddaughter to come and save us. I’ve seen babies do this trick before, so I know it is possible. Maybe it is the only thing that will work.
AND THEN, less than a week later, Sophie gets up predawn to go to the bathroom, and through the cotton batting of sleep, I hear a calm voice saying, “Mom. Mom, can you come in here, please?”
I disentangle myself from the covers and go to her, and then everything starts unfolding just the way it did in the heartbreaking scenario I had been imagining and fearing the most. In the harsh fluorescent light shining down on the white tile, in the white, white bathroom, there is bright red blood, alarming amounts of red, lots more than I would have thought possible. It is flowing and flowing, and Sophie stands in the middle of the bathroom, her face white, but she is not screaming, and she is not falling down, so we have that going for us. She lets me wrap her up in her bathrobe, and then I ease her over to the closed toilet seat, and I get my cell phone and call 911.
“My daughter is thirty-six weeks pregnant, and she has placenta previa, and she is bleeding—a lot,” I say into the phone, and I give the address to the dispatcher, who promises an ambulance will be right there, as though we’ve all rehearsed our parts.
May I just say that it scares me how serene Sophie is? In a way I’d be happier if she were doing her usual yelling and screaming and railing against nature and Whit and even me. If she were screaming about how unfair this is, how she’s scared or hurting or anything, but instead, she’s closed her eyes and is breathing softly and deeply. They start an IV right there in the ambulance, and we ride through the glistening wet streets in a rainstorm, with the headlights falling away to let us through on our path.
This must be really serious, I think, if even New York traffic is willing to let us take the street without argument.
At the hospital, things are a bright, fluorescent blur, as if the whole thing has been filmed with a handheld camera. Nurses and doctors gather around, and they’re all doing things to Sophie, who is still the worst kind of calm, like she might be leaving, is what I think. Maybe she’s not even really here with me, not even now.
No, no, no! Don’t think this way.
“Sophie,” I say. I squeeze her hand and lean down and brush the little tendrils of hair off her temples. “You’re doing fine. Everything’s okay now. You know that, right?”
She smiles with her grayish lips.
Don’t think this way. If my eyes even fill up with tears, they will send me out of here. I’m permitted to stay because I sit right there beside Sophie with my hand loosely holding hers, because I’m the person she can count on, the support person.
The medical people have apparently come to a decision, and then they scatter, hurrying off to get equipment and more people. I hear some of the words—“bleeding under control … clamped … take her upstairs … get this taken care of!”
“What is happening, please?” I say to a curly-haired nurse who is pulling the chart out of the holder on the door.
“Oh!” she says. “They didn’t tell you? They’re going to do the C-section now.”
“But—is this wise? Is it time?” I say.
“She’s thirty-six and a half weeks,” she says cheerfully. “The baby’s lungs are fine. No sense waiting for another bleeding episode.”
“Can I be there?”
“Of course you can, Grandma. You’re going to sit right up by Mom’s head and keep her company. You’ve got the most important job of all, didn’t you know that? They’re bringing the stretcher for her now.”
“Oh,” I say, and sit back down. “Sophie, open your eyes, honey. Sophie, you’re going to have the baby now. Did you hear?”
“I heard,” she says softly. She looks at me with her wide gray eyes. “It’s okay, right?”
“What?”
“It’s okay? Are you fine?”
This is a joke from way back
when she was two years old, scared of going into the swimming pool, scared of the dark, scared of feathers and dust. For weeks she went around muttering to herself, “Are you fine? Are you fine?”
I laugh. “We’re all fine, honey. And Beanie’s coming! This is her birthday, your baby’s birthday,” I say, and squeeze her hand.
And then the stretcher comes, and we take off for the birth room—all us chatty, smiling, emergency-competent people, bearing Sophie along with us, as though she’s a queen and we’re escorting her to the sacred temple.
A C-SECTION doesn’t take long, and you don’t see much, so even if you’re squeamish, it’s okay, I tell Grant. There’s a screen blocking your view, and so I just sat with Sophie telling her how exciting this was, and then there was a cry, and the doctor—not Dr. Levine—said, “She’s here!”
“Wow,” he says.
She is six pounds and four ounces and she has a fringe of brown hair and blue eyes. But I guess they all have blue eyes at first—isn’t that what we’ve heard? So who knows what color they will turn out to be. The important thing is that she’s healthy, and they stopped the bleeding for Sophie, and she’s fine now. Everything went as well as could be expected, no damage to the uterus. All’s well that ends well, et cetera, et cetera.
I tell him about the blood and the ambulance ride, the way the emergency-room people made the decision and somehow didn’t tell us. My words are tumbling all over each other. It’s not the way he likes to hear stories. We haven’t really spoken in detail since the day he left New York, nearly a month ago, and so when the story runs down, there is a moment of awkwardness.
“Well,” he says. “This is all good news. How’s Sophie’s mental state?”
“Good,” I say. “You would have been very proud of her, Grant. She was calm and in control, never once panicked, never cried.”
“Good, good,” he says.
The Stuff That Never Happened Page 32