Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

  I took a deep breath. “It’s right down the street from my apartment.”

  “Ah,” he said. That was all he said. I looked at his familiar face and tried to figure out what he was feeling. Angry, I thought, as my heart sank. God, he must be so angry at me. To lose a son and a wife in less than a month . . . “I’m sorry,” I said, knowing how completely inadequate the words were.

  He shrugged a little. His eyes were opaque, unreadable.

  “Do you want to,” I started to say. Then I stopped. I wondered about where he was living, whether he’d moved or whether he’d stayed in the place where Caleb had lived, right down the hall from where he died and I felt my heart breaking for him. For my son. For all of us.

  The driver, in a cap and dark coat, held a clipboard with the words JAMES KIRK. Sam held the door for me, then slid in beside me, and we pulled away from the curb.

  “Nice alias,” I said.

  He nodded. “Now, what were you trying to ask me?”

  There were a lot of things I wanted to ask—will you stay with me had been on top of the list—but what came out of my mouth was, “Do you still love me?”

  “Oh,” he said. And then I was in his arms, tight against him, and the smell of his soap and his skin were all around me, and I could hear his heart. “Oh, Lia.” I reached for his hands, wanting to hold them in mine . . . and wanting to answer a question. He was still wearing his wedding ring. I could feel it against my fingertips. So there was that, then. At least there was that.

  “You’re Caleb’s mother,” he said. “I’ll always love you because of that.” He stroked my head again. “And the new hair’s pretty hot.”

  I kissed his cheeks, his lips, his forehead, his hair underneath the cap. He held me tight.

  “So you disappear for nine months, then crook your finger and have me come running?” he muttered into my hair. “Is this some radical version of playing hard to get?”

  Words came tumbling into my mouth, but I kept them there. I slid into his lap, and I kissed him some more.

  He pulled away to stare at me. “You missed me, then, I guess.” His voice was breathless, almost panting, and I could feel him tremble as he held me. We hadn’t made love since Caleb had died. We’d tried, once, one night when neither one of us could sleep, but we’d both wound up crying and lost our good intentions.

  “I missed you so much,” I said, before bending my head to kiss him again. “So much.”

  He pressed a button, and a plate of smoked glass slid up between us and the driver. “Don’t want to cause a scene,” he said, fumbling at my jacket, my sweater, my scarf. “All these clothes. My goodness. These East Coast boys must have a terrible time.”

  “No East Coast boys,” I whispered. “Only you.” I leaned back, and with one swift motion pulled my jacket and my sweater off and over my head. I felt my heart race as he looked at me.

  “Very helpful,” he said. “Here, let me . . .” He unbuttoned his own shirt. His fingers were shaking. His skin was so hot. “Come here,” he said, pulling me against him. “I need to feel you.”

  I lifted myself off of his lap and yanked my jeans and underwear down to my knees. I gasped as I felt his fingers against me. I wanted to say something about how I’d waited for him, how I’d thought about him, how there hadn’t been anyone else, but then he was lifting me in his arms, holding me as if I weighed nothing until we fitted together like pieces of a puzzle. We rocked together, slowly at first, then faster and faster . . .

  “Sir?” came the driver’s voice over the intercom. I looked out the window, seeing the trees and storefronts and sidewalks.

  “We’re there,” I whispered.

  “Just keep driving!” Sam gasped. I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing. “Just go . . . somewhere!”

  The car stopped. Then the turn signal clicked and we were rolling again, and I rocked on top of him, my hands gripping his shoulders, looking into his eyes, slowly at first, and then faster, as our breath turned the windows gray. “Oh,” said Sam. His eyelids fluttered. “Oh.”

  At the last moment, the last instant when he could find breath enough and control to ask, I heard him whisper the question in my ear. “Is it safe?”

  I could have told him that nothing was safe and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares. You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street. Your marriage could fall apart when you weren’t looking; your husband could lose his job; your baby could get sick or die. I could have said that nothing is safe, that the surface of the world is pretty and sane, but underneath it’s all fault lines and earthquakes waiting to happen. Instead I just whispered the word “yes” into his ear. A minute later, he was groaning a word I couldn’t make out. And then everything was quiet except for the sound of our breath.

  AYINDE

  Three weeks after Ayinde and Richard had brought Julian home from the cardiologist’s office, Clara tapped on Ayinde’s bedroom door. “Someone here to see you,” she said.

  Ayinde looked at her curiously. “Who?”

  Clara shrugged. Then her hands sketched a belly in the air. “Embarazo,” she said.

  Pregnant. Ayinde felt the hair at the back of her neck prickle, as she lifted Julian into her arms and followed Clara down the stairs.

  The woman was standing in the doorway in a pink-and-white wrap dress far too flimsy for the Philadelphia winter. Pale legs traced with bulging blue veins, high heels on her feet, and an expensive pink leather purse dangling from one wrist. Blond hair pulled back from the face Ayinde recognized from the tabloids. No winter coat because you wouldn’t need a winter coat in Phoenix.

  Ayinde’s breath rushed out of her as if she were a punctured tire. “Clara, take the baby,” she said, handing Julian over as the woman—the girl, really, Ayinde saw—stood there shivering on the porch.

  “What do you want?” Ayinde asked, looking the girl up and down, seeing how uncomfortable she was in the cold and not caring. “Richard’s not here.”

  “I know that.” Tiffany’s voice was soft and twangy, the vowels elongated. Her outfit and hair and makeup were too old for her, but her voice made her sound like she was twelve. “I came to see you. Ayinde.” She pronounced the name carefully, as if she’d been practicing.

  “Why?”

  She wrapped her arms around herself and tucked her chin into her chest. “I came to say I’m sorry for what I did.”

  Ayinde blinked. Whatever she’d been bracing herself for—some kind of lurid confession, a plea for more money—this wasn’t it.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said again.

  “How did you get here?”

  “The night I met Richard . . .” Nicely put, Ayinde thought. “He went to sleep, and I went through his cell phone. I found his home phone number, and I got the address from that. I thought, if I ever needed to get a hold of him.”

  “I’d say you got a hold of him just fine,” Ayinde said.

  The girl swallowed hard. “So I had his address, and then . . .” She shrugged, struggled with the zipper of her fancy bag, and pulled out a computer printout. “Mapquest.”

  “Aren’t you clever,” Ayinde said coolly. “Your parents must be so proud.”

  The girl was shivering. “No, ma’am, they’re not.” She lifted her chin. “I know you probably won’t believe me, but they didn’t raise me for . . .” She looked down at her belly. “For this. They’re ashamed of me.” She dropped her head again, and her words were almost lost in the wind. “I’m ashamed of myself.”

  Ayinde could barely believe what she was doing when she opened the door. “Come inside.”

  Tiffany walked as if her legs belonged to someone else and she’d just rented them for the day. Her belly swayed with each step she took as she followed Ayinde into the living room and sat perched on the edge of the couch. The cook edged into the room with a tray of tea and cookies, then hurried out with her head down.

  “What do yo
u really want?” Ayinde asked.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I was sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for your troubles.”

  “What do you know about my troubles?” Ayinde asked.

  “I read that your baby was sick,” said the girl.

  Ayinde closed her eyes. TOWNE TOT HEART TERROR, the tabloid headlines had read, and the hospital had written them a letter promising to get to the bottom of the incident and find out who’d violated patient confidentiality. “So some orderly loses his job,” Ayinde told Richard wearily. The damage was done, and at least there weren’t pictures. And Julian was fine.

  “I just wanted to tell you,” said the girl. She bent her head over her teacup, then set her saucer down and rubbed her hands against her legs, leaving pink streaks on her skin. “I know this sounds funny, coming from me, but your husband’s a good man.”

  For what he’s going to be paying you, you ought to be walking up and down Fifth Avenue with a sandwich board saying that, Ayinde thought.

  “I asked if he wanted to see me again—you know, when he came to town for games—and he told me, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I love my wife.’ ” She cleared her throat and looked up at Ayinde. “I just thought you should know that. And I’m sorry for what I did. I guess I wanted what you had, you know? How you looked in all the pictures, you and him. So happy.”

  Ayinde found that she couldn’t speak.

  “But he loves you, and that’s the truth,” Tiffany said.

  “It didn’t stop him from . . .” Fucking, she wanted to say. “Sleeping with you,” she said.

  “I don’t think he meant to,” said Tiffany.

  Ayinde felt laughter, high and wild, rising in her throat. “So, what? He just fell in?”

  “More or less,” the girl said carefully. “And I’m sorry about it. I’m sorry I talked to the reporters, too. That was a mistake. I kind of got my head turned.” She shook her head and rubbed her legs again. “My mother says that.”

  Mine does, too, Ayinde thought.

  “And I’m sorry . . .” Tiffany wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth. Ayinde looked at her, wondering how far along she was and whether she was sleeping or whether she lay awake at night, by herself, feeling the baby kick. “I know I made a mistake with what I did. I’ve made a bunch of mistakes, and I want to do better, you know? For the baby?”

  “For the baby,” Ayinde repeated. She couldn’t believe it, but she felt—could it be?—sympathy for the woman who’d brought about so much misery. Her baby wouldn’t have an easy time of it—not black, not white, not one or the other, with a single mother, too. The world hadn’t changed much since Ayinde’s own parents had told her that she was a pioneer. It hadn’t improved fast enough.

  Tiffany wiped her eyes. “I’m going back to school,” she said in a shaky little voice. “I don’t think this dancing thing’s going to work out unless I go, you know, to New York or L.A., and now . . .” She pressed an embroidered pillow into her lap. “I was thinking of maybe sociology?” Her sentences tilted up like shallow bowls at the ends, turning statements into questions. Twenty-one, Ayinde remembered. She was only twenty-one.

  “I think that’s a fine major,” she said.

  “And I thought maybe . . .” Her words were coming quickly now, tumbling over each other. “I don’t know how you’d feel about this, but I’d like my baby to know its father. And brother. Half-brother, really. I want the baby to know that he has one.”

  Ayinde sucked in her breath.

  “Would it be okay if I called you sometime? After the baby’s here? I don’t want to bother you or your husband, but I just . . .”

  Ayinde shut her eyes against the trembling vision in pink that was Tiffany. It was too much. It was too much to ask of any woman, too much to ask of her. What would Lolo say? Why, she’d arch one of her pencil-thin eyebrows, tilt her cheekbones just so, and murmur something that sounded pleasant on the surface but was devastating underneath.

  Ayinde could hear Tiffany breathing, could hear the sofa creaking softly as she shifted her weight. She remembered her parents talking to her when she lay in her canopied bed, bending their faces close to hers, telling her what a lucky little girl she was to live so well, to go to such a fine school and travel to nice places for her vacations, and how it was her obligation, as a lucky girl, to be kind to those who weren’t lucky. She remembered how they’d instructed her to always have a few dollars in her pocket for the homeless men who slept outside of her building, how if she didn’t finish her dinner she was to have it boxed to go and leave the box beside a subway station because there was always someone poor and someone hungry who would need what she could spare. You have to be brave because you’re lucky, Lolo had told her. She was still lucky . . . but could she be brave?

  “I’m sorry,” Tiffany said, after the pause had stretched out too long. “I guess I shouldn’t have come. It’s just . . . well, I’m scared a little, I guess, of having a baby . . . I know I should have probably thought of that before. . . .” Her voice trailed off. “My mother won’t talk to me,” she said softly. “She says I got myself into this mess, and I have to get myself out of it. She says it’s my own fault for . . . you know. For what I did.”

  Ayinde could hear the click in the girl’s throat as she swallowed. She could hear Julian babbling to Clara upstairs, making noises that sometimes sounded like actual words and sometimes sounded like Chinese and sometimes like a language all his own. His heart would eventually heal, the doctors had told them. Ayinde hadn’t believed it. You can live all right with a hole in your heart? Dr. Myerson had given her a wry shrug. You’d be surprised at what people can live with, he said.

  “Tiffany.”

  “Yes?” the other woman said eagerly.

  “I don’t think I’d feel comfortable with you coming here.”

  “I figured,” she said sadly. “I guess I’d feel the same way.”

  “But maybe you could give me your number,” Ayinde said. “I could call you.”

  “Really? You’d call me?”

  “I’ll call you,” she said. “Take care of yourself, okay? Take care of the baby.”

  “Thank you!” said the girl. “Thank you so much!”

  “You’re welcome,” said Ayinde. Once Tiffany was gone, she walked upstairs slowly. Clara was cradling the baby in her arms. She handed him over without a word, and Ayinde rocked him and kissed his cheeks. “You’re going to have a half-brother or half-sister,” she told him. He gurgled and grabbed at her earrings. She closed her eyes. Lucky, her parents had told her. She guessed it might even be true.

  BECKY

  In Becky and Andrew’s years of marriage and parenthood, Mimi Breslow Levy et al. had never sent them a letter.

  Phone calls, yes. E-mails—many of them marked URGENT and festooned with red exclamation points, certainly. Hundreds of faxes, packages by the dozen for A. Rabinowitz. But they’d never gotten an actual pen-and-ink missive until the Thursday afternoon Becky came home from work and found Andrew sitting on the couch staring glumly at a pair of handwritten pages.

  “What’s that?” she asked. Bad news, she thought, just from the look on his face.

  “It’s Mimi,” he said dully. “She’s disowning us. She says she doesn’t ever want to see us again.”

  Through a mammoth effort, Becky was able to suppress her first instinct, which was to break into a joyous buck-and-wing while belting out “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Wordlessly, he took Ava out of Becky’s arms and handed her the letter. Becky sank onto the couch and started reading.

  Andrew,

  I don’t know if I can find the words to express the way your actions of the past month have hurt me. Clearly, you and your wife have decided that you don’t want me to have any part in your life or to have a relationship with my granddaughter. I can’t imagine what I’ve done to make you feel this way . . .

  “Oh, please,” Becky murmured and snuc
k a glance sideways to where Andrew sat on the couch looking as though he’d lost a few quarts of blood.

  . . . but ever since your marriage, and especially since my granddaughter was born, you have done nothing but treat me with a shameful lack of respect.

  I have always tried to do what was best for you, even when it wasn’t easy or when it came at my own expense. I sacrificed my own wishes so that you would always have everything you wanted and everything you needed.

  Sacrificed what? Becky wondered. From what she’d seen of Mimi in action, there’d been precious little sacrificing and a whole lot of doing precisely what she wanted, garnished with a side of “I deserve respect” and a guilt trip for dessert.

  She kept reading. Your behavior has been nothing short of disgraceful. You are a disappointment as a son.

  “Andrew, this is ridiculous,” she said. He pressed his lips together, saying nothing. “You’re a wonderful son! You’re so good to her. You’re patient, and you’re kind, and you’re generous. You’re so much better than any other man I know would be. You’ve been nice to her, you’ve included her . . .”

  “Did you read the whole thing?” he asked.

  Becky let her eyes skim the final paragraphs. Disowning you . . . lawyers will be in touch . . . pushed me away . . . made a mockery of Christmas, which, you should know, is so important to me . . . I want nothing to do with either one of you ever again. One phrase jumped off the page and practically slapped her in the face. You have turned me away in favor of your wife and her family, who come from nothing and have no idea how to behave in decent company . . .

  Oy. Becky folded the pages. Andrew straightened up.

  “You know what?” he said. “Maybe we should just let her go.”

  She blinked at him. Her mouth dropped open. “What?”