Sarah's Window

by Janice Graham

  CHAPTER 37

  He felt Susan's hand gently squeezing his own and heard her reassuring him, telling him he was going to be all right. For a long time he lay there with voices swimming around him. He heard his mother and thought he might have heard his father, and there were sounds of doors opening and closing and brisk footsteps and sharp voices echoing down hallways.

  "Don't try to talk, honey." It was Susan's voice, and he heard the rustling sheets and the scraping of a chair.

  "Where's Will?" he whispered groggily.

  He tried to turn his head toward her and felt a sudden dull pain.

  "Stay still, John. You had a skull fracture," she said.

  He opened his eyes, but the light was bright and painful and he closed them again. Sounds were jumbled and loud. They were whispering and he could only pick out certain words.

  He tried again to open his eyes. They were all there, looking down at him with worried faces. Susan was sitting at his bedside, holding his hand.

  "Honey, the baby didn't survive. But you did. It was a miracle. Your skull was fractured and you'd lost so much blood...." Her voice cracked and his mother put a hand on her shoulder. Before he closed his eyes he saw his father step up to the bed. His father's face was white like a ghost's.

  This is his dream: a treeless landscape of high prairie, but it is also a river. He feels himself enclosed as if in a vast room, and yet there is an incredible sense of space. He is floating downriver on his back, as though on a bed. Everywhere there are people coming and going, around him all the time, people he knows; he senses this about them, that they are familiar. Still, this sensation of moving along with the water, of floating. There is a boat on the river, a fishing boat. Hortense sits in it, upright, and she is sleeping. She has tried to fool him but he recognizes her by her white hair. She wants to make him think she is Blanche, but he knows better. He struggles to draw himself closer to her, but he cannot raise himself because of the weight on his stomach. All the while he is distracted by the presence of others around him. Then the water is gone and Hortense is gone, and there is just this vast room and he is standing among all these people. He looks down at his body and finds he is naked. The heaviness has disappeared, and he is stunned to find he is healed. He is overcome by a profound sadness, intensely felt.

  They whisked him away, took him straight from the hospital to the airport and put him on a plane back to California. Armand Wilde had arranged for one of his graduate students to drive the Range Rover back to California for them, sparing them the long two-day-plus haul. The moving van had already arrived in San Francisco, but John knew there was more to their urgency. They closed ranks around him and secrecy informed their every move. He suspected they were rushing to remain one step ahead of him, making the decisions for him before he had time to reflect, giving him no opportunity to take up a position of opposition, to resist them. When John regained consciousness, Will had already been put in his grave, and from that moment on the child's name never crossed their lips. It seemed as if Susan and his parents were making every effort to erase an unfortunate episode in their lives, to weaken whatever power it still held over him.

  They were busy that first week settling back into their home, moving in the few pieces of furniture Susan had kept from her mother's estate, unpacking John's books and all their clothing and linens and dishes. Still, Susan found time to meet with a headhunter, and by the end of the week she had set up four interviews. There was a brightness to his wife during these days that she tried in vain to soften with a mask of sobriety, but John knew better, knew she had no burden of grief to bear.

  She came home one Saturday with three business suits from Saks, poured John a glass of cold Chablis, sat down with him in their living room with a view of the ocean, and told him about two job offers, both high-level positions with investment firms.

  He sat and listened, drank only a little of his wine, and when she tried to solicit his opinion he turned lusterless blue eyes on her and said, "I need to talk about him. We never talked about it. Not once."

  The smile left her face, and she sat back and crossed her legs. John thought her shoes seemed new, too, but he could have been wrong.

  Susan fingered the sweating wineglass. "It was just so painful..."

  "Was it?"

  She glanced up sharply. "Of course it was. I felt it deeply." She ran her hand along the smooth leather back of the sofa. "But not as deeply as you did. I'm aware of that."

  "I need to talk about him."

  With pinched lips he looked away, and she knew he must be fighting back tears.

  "John..." she whispered, and she reached for his hand.

  He fell quiet, as though he were sifting through troubling thoughts, but he seemed to be getting control of himself and she felt relieved.

  She patted his hand, then rose and picked up her glass. "I need to start dinner."

  His eyes followed her as she crossed the room.

  "What did you do with all his things?"

  She turned and answered soothingly, "I gave them away."

  "When? Where? I never saw a thing. Not one box."

  "I took care of it all."

  "You didn't save anything? Not a single toy? Nothing? Not the damnedest little thing to remember him by?"

  She hesitated, eyes averted, then sat down in the club chair opposite him. She set down her glass on the coffee table and leaned forward with a level gaze.

  "I didn't do it callously, John. I asked. I asked your mother, and the chaplain... and my therapist..."

  "Why didn't you ask me?"

  "I wanted to spare you the pain." Her eyes fixed on his, and he tried to read sincerity in them, but he could not. "John, through all of this, we put you first. We had your very best interests at heart."

  "And you're so damn sure you know what's best for me."

  Susan sat back, crossed her arms at her waist, and turned a tight mouth toward the wide bay window where the hues of sunset spilled into the sky.

  There was a tinge of bitterness when she spoke, and restrained anger. "You would have self-destructed long ago if it hadn't been for people who had your best interests in mind. And by that I mean your mother and father and me. People who love you most in the world."

  He turned a stunned look on her.

  She laughed sharply. "What? You think I don't know that about you?"

  She leaned forward again, and a veiled anger shone dully in her eyes. "I did not wish for this to happen, even though you might think I did. And I don't take one goddamn minute of pleasure in that little boy's death. But I won't deny that I'm relieved, and I don't feel in the slightest bit guilty because of it. I intend to get on with my life and be happy, and I wish you'd do the same." She rose abruptly to her feet, snatched her glass, and strode out of the room.

  That evening he took himself off to his study with his books and a bottle of scotch. When he'd had enough to drink he picked up the telephone and called. Jack Bryden answered.

  "Jack?"

  "Who wants to know?"

  "John Wilde. Is Sarah there?"

  "Nope."

  John waited for an elaboration of some sort, thought it would be forthcoming if he gave the old man a minute, but there was only a heavy silence coming down the line.

  "When would be the best time to call back?"

  "She's not here."

  "When will she be back?"

  "I don't keep tabs on Sarah."

  He could see the old man's face behind the gruffness, see the downturned mouth and the eyes like shields.

  "Yeah, okay, well, tell her I called, will you?"

  There was no response, and John wanted to take the telephone and slam it into that awful wall of silence. Finally there was only a click on the other end, and then the dial tone.

  After that, John never tried to call her again.

  He threw himself back into his work that summer. He even took up handball with a professor new to the theoretical physics group, a high-strung, fast-talking
young man with neither wife nor children and little interest in either subject. The two men would reserve a court for the entire evening and play one brutal match after another, pushing each other to the limits of endurance until they were worn down. Afterward John would drag himself to the campus cafeteria and eat a hot meal before he crawled back to the lab and collapsed onto the sofa. He would go home every few days to pick up some fresh clothing, which he kept in his locker at the faculty club, and if Susan was home they would speak pleasantly, congenially, to each other, about their work, their day, but it was all anecdotal. There was never anything of substance, nothing heartfelt. It occurred to John one night as she slipped into bed beside him and turned off the light that things were very much as they used to be, and it seemed to John she was not discontent.

  CHAPTER 38

  "Mrs. Sullivan," she'd say, "leave no one near it. It is my nest and my cell and my little prayer-house, and maybe I would be like the birds and catch the smell of the stranger and then fly away from ye all."

  Frank O'Connor, The Bridal Night

  The line advanced and Joy kicked the suitcase forward a few feet.

  "Damn, I wish you'd put this off."

  "I can't. Can't change my ticket," Sarah said.

  "You go sit. I'll hold your place in line."

  "I'm fine."

  "I bet you've got a fever."

  "I'm just fine."

  "You should've seen a doctor before you left."

  "It's just the flu."

  "It's probably some strange virus you got from the floodwater."

  "It's just the plain old flu."

  "There is no such thing as the plain old flu. Back in the Middle Ages entire populations of Europe were wiped out by the plain old flu. And you're probably importing some rare strain with you."

  Sarah wrinkled up her face, gave Joy a suspicious look. She was sounding conspicuously unlike herself.

  "Where'd you read that?"

  Joy adopted a smug expression. "In that guidebook you bought. You left it in the kitchen the other day. I was reading it."

  The line advanced another foot, and again Joy nudged the suitcase forward.

  "Hell, you could've at least gotten a new suitcase."

  "That one's fine."

  "Won't hold up."

  "It's fine."

  "I want you to go to a doctor as soon as you get there."

  "I'll be over it by then."

  "Promise me."

  "Yes, Mother."

  They checked her bag, and then they sat at a coffee shop in the airport terminal and Sarah had a cappuccino while Joy picked apart a banana-nut muffin with her red-lacquered nails.

  "Honey, really," she said, "I'm worried about you."

  Sarah kept her eyes lowered, ripped open her sugar packet and sprinkled the sugar over the foamed milk.

  Joy leaned forward across the table, peering up into Sarah's face. "You just get so closed up. The times you should be reachin' out to others and instead you just pinch that old shell of yours shut like a clam and God help any of us who've got their fingers in there."

  Sarah dismissed this with a shake of the head. "You're trying to read all kinds of things into this. It's just... well, it's time for me to do it. It's something I've always wanted to do. I'm going to see things I've always dreamed of seeing." Her eyes swept past the faces at the counter, fixed on some distant point in space. "Always it's been books. Reproductions. Now I get to stand in front of the real works of art. The very names of these places are like magic to me. Lord, I've put it off long enough."

  Joy held out a chunk of muffin.

  "Sure you don't want anything to eat?"

  Sarah shook her head. "I'm sure."

  "Look, hon, it's not that you're doing this, that's not what worries me." Joy popped the bite of muffin into her mouth and washed it down with a swig of coffee. "You're still grieving. And for more than just that little boy, I think."

  Sarah's eyes darted away, fixed on the back of a man counting out change for the cashier.

  Joy dropped her voice, spoke gently, and her eyes were gentle, too. "You've never talked to me about him."

  "There's nothing to talk about. Nothing happened."

  Joy prodded. "I'm not gonna judge you. You know me better than that."

  But Sarah's face was closed, and Joy knew that look well, so she shifted to the present, to the future.

  "You will send me postcards?"

  Sarah relaxed, broke into a weak smile. "I just wish you could come."

  "I know. I'm sorry. Timing's just rotten. But you'll meet people. It's always easy to meet people when you travel alone."

  "Yeah, right, like you've done so much traveling alone."

  "That's what they say."

  But then she noticed the tears in Sarah's eyes, and how she was struggling to blink them back, and she felt her own throat swell.

  "Come on," Joy said, patting Sarah's hand. "Let's go take a look in that gift shop. Find you a good magazine to read on the plane. Something fun."

  There was a baggage handler strike when the plane arrived in Paris the next morning, and she waited at the baggage claim for well over an hour, sat on a metal bench next to a white-scarfed Muslim woman with two small children and waited. It was almost noon by the time she boarded an Air France bus to take her into the city, and she found a window seat and pressed her nose to the glass, full of expectation. But as they approached the outskirts, all she could see in every direction was urban sprawl, ugly pollution-streaked concrete blocks, and her heart sank.

  The bus dropped her in a busy street at the foot of a cluster of high-rises on the outer rim of the city. From there she took a taxi to her hotel in the Latin Quarter. Under an overcast sky, Paris struck her as a place without a beyond, enclosed in monochromatic stone and dense gray light. But then the people seemed to compensate for this, and Sarah, who was used to vast, unpopulated space, found a certain beauty in the way their lives were organized, with the shops and markets and cinemas and churches just below their windows, along the wide boulevards and down the narrow streets.

  There was nothing exceptional about the hotel, and her room was small, but it had its own bathroom and had been recently papered in a cheerful floral print. She sat on the edge of her bed with her open suitcase behind her and thought perhaps she might take a shower and then go for a walk through the streets, maybe over to the fountain where she had glimpsed a crowd of young people loitering beneath a statue of St. Michael slaying his dragon, perhaps try one of the sticky sweet cakes from the Tunisian bakery on the corner. But after her shower she crawled into bed and lay there shivering, curled tightly in a ball, smothered in a down comforter she had found in the armoire. She felt ill, and lonely and afraid. Still, homesick as she was, she could not bear the thought of returning to Bazaar, to a room with a view of treeless hills and vast skies, to the portrait of a child hovering over the shoulder of a poorly executed God.

  Tucked back in a residential neighborhood of nineteenth-century town houses, the hospital had not been easy to find. But it was well known, she had been told, and many notable and wealthy Americans went there to be treated by American doctors. Nevertheless, she had been wary, had conjured up an image of a shabby waiting room with peeling walls and broken chairs, but she found instead a thoroughly modern and comfortable clinic, and a doctor who greeted her with a southern accent.

  He said little but examined her thoroughly, then sent her back to the waiting room while lab tests were run.

  It was a long while before he reappeared in his white coat and flashed her a tired smile and gestured to the door of his office.

  He sat down behind his desk and waited, hands crossed over his stomach, while she took a chair opposite him.

  "Miss..." He hesitated, bent forward to check the file in front of him.

  "Bryden," Sarah prompted.

  "It is 'miss,' is it not?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, as I suspected, it's not the flu."

  "It's no
t?"

  "You're pregnant."

  She sat motionless before him, as if he had spoken not to her but to some other woman sitting in that chair facing him at this moment. It took her a few seconds to find her voice.

  "You must be mistaken."

  "You didn't suspect..."

  "That can't be."

  "I'd say from the size of your uterus you're a good nine weeks."

  "It must be something else..." Her voice trailed off.

  "It's not a tumor, Miss Bryden. Your urine test is positive."

  "That's impossible."

  "I'm afraid not."

  "But it's not possible."

  She struggled to keep her voice from shaking as she told him about John's medical history, about his infertility and the subsequent adoption, although she omitted anything about Will's death.

  After she finished, she listened in stunned silence while he clarified a few points, explained to her that the gentleman in question apparently was not completely infertile, that oligospermia was easy to misdiagnose, that chances of conception were so slim that lab tests fail to indicate any possibility whatsoever.

  "But in this case"—he smiled expansively—"you beat the odds. I've seen it happen. Couples try for ten years, then all of a sudden the woman becomes pregnant. The chances are there, you know. Somewhere in the universe at some point in time, someone beats the odds. It does happen."

  He could see she was in shock, the waves of confusion, of disbelief, passing across her face.