by Laura Brodie
But now she knew the truth, that if she told him she hadn’t been using birth control he would be appalled. And why not? She was appalled. Appalled at her own capacity for self-delusion.
Of course a man like Nate would have no thought of consequences. That was a woman’s job, to deal with the awkward mess of contraception. All his life Nate had probably hopped from one bed to another without ever laying eyes on a birth control pill. For all she knew he might have fathered a child already; he might have peopled the entire East Coast with little dark-haired boys.
Sarah glanced over at the window ledge, where her niece’s American Girl dolls were seated like a panel of reproachful judges, assessing her from their vantage of wholesome sterility. Oh, what a mess she was making of her life.
• 29 •
The next morning she packed her suitcase and stood outside on the porch while Nate carried it to his trunk.
“I wish you would stay for a few more days.” Anne plucked small pieces of lint from the shoulders of Sarah’s coat. “The girls don’t go back to school for another week.”
“Thanks,” Sarah replied. “But Nate’s got work to do, and I’ve left Grace long enough.”
“You know,” Anne chided, “you can’t spend all your time with a cat.”
Sarah smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ll get a fish, too.”
How could she tell her sister that the normality of her world made Sarah feel ashamed of her own bizarre existence? This house, this holiday, Anne’s earnest face—it was all a cold reality check. As she waved good-bye to her nieces, huddled in pajamas inside the glass door, Sarah thought that it was wrong to live as she had, nurturing love affairs too secret and strange to share with her closest family.
Back in Virginia, within the safety of her house, Nate carried her bag to the bedroom and asked if he should stay.
“No thanks.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I’m going to take a nap.”
When his car was out of sight she headed straight for her master bathroom and opened the wooden cabinet that hung above the toilet. There, she pulled out a white rectangular box with a purple swirl of color: e.p.t., early pregnancy test, Easy to Read Results, 99% accurate. It was a remnant from four years ago, when she had first tried to get pregnant. Back then she had been the company’s most faithful customer, taking a test every month, the perpetual student, still at the mercy of a plus-and-minus grading system.
How she had hated those little blue minuses, every one like a flatlined EKG. She had experienced each blue hyphen as a painful subtraction, as if something was being wrested away from her body. What she hadn’t realized was that even after her first success, her first glorious plus, the victory could be removed, the plus returned to minus as if some arbitrary teacher had changed his mind.
Now she reached into the box and pulled out a tester, wrapped in foil like a Nutri-Grain bar. Inside the shiny paper lay a strip of white-and-lavender plastic, resembling a cross between a thermometer and a tongue depresser. The words on the instruction pamphlet were all too familiar: Place the absorbent tip in the urine flow for just 5 seconds. When she was done, she lay the tester on the counter and washed her hands.
The oval window on the white plastic contained a small circle, the size of a scrap of paper left over from a hole puncher. Across that circle she watched a faint wisp of blue emerge, spreading horizontally in a perfect diameter, unmistakably negative. She was not pregnant.
Sarah took a deep breath and braced herself for the coming misery, the tidal wave of disappointment that always emerged in the wake of these little blue failures. But as she stood there taut and expectant, the emotion that surfaced was oddly surprising. She felt buoyant, elated. She looked into the mirror and laughed out loud, because for the first time in her life she was relieved to see that minus sign, an indicator not of failure but of liberation.
What a wonderful feeling, not to want to be pregnant, to be content with the single life within her body. Only now did she realize how obsessively she had pursued the dream of a healthy pregnancy. It had become the driving force of her world over the past few years, crowding out all other thoughts, until the rest of her life had seemed insignificant. She had been wrong to base her happiness on something which she could not control. It had made her passive, all this waiting—passive and angry, and much too hard on David.
Of course she still wanted a child—that desire would not go away. But there were better ways to go about it, ways that did not involve using her brother-in-law as an unwitting sperm bank. In the meantime, there were other things that might grow within her. Things like generosity and ambition and joy. Sarah tossed the plastic tester into the trash, thinking that now, at last, she was awake.
Two days later Nate called from his office. “What are you doing for New Year’s Eve?”
“Going to bed early.”
“You should come to a party with me.”
She leaned back into her pillows. “I’m not much of a New Year’s Eve person.”
“Come on, Sarah.” His voice slipped into the cajoling tone that she had just begun to notice in recent days. “I think you’d like this. It’s become my annual ritual for starting the year.”
“Who’s hosting the party?”
“It’s a surprise.”
Sarah didn’t like surprises; there had been too many in the past few months. She pictured David, alone at the cabin, staring at another movie. By all rights, she should spend New Year’s Eve with him. She had planned to maintain a balance between the brothers, to give her life some sense of equilibrium. But here was Nate, warm and alive and promising a party, and perhaps this would be the best way to end their affair.
Because it couldn’t go on; she had felt that concretely in the last forty-eight hours. Lovely as Nate might be, the two of them were very different people, and their affair was nothing more than a temporary shelter. Soon she would have to say good-bye to her beautiful brother-in-law, and this party might be a nice send-off, a fitting culmination of the past six weeks.
“Okay,” she said. “Why not?”
At three o’clock on December 31, Sarah pulled up at Nate’s condominium. Her overnight bag was filled with jewelry, perfume, and lace underwear, a pair of rhinestone-studded heels, the burgundy dress from Washington, and, tucked inside her bathroom kit, her old diaphragm.
Nate greeted her at the curb and transferred her bag into his trunk.
“We’re leaving right away?”
“Yes. We’ve got a plane to catch.”
He did not see the color drain from Sarah’s face as he walked inside. He did not notice how she braced her arm against his car, trying to breathe deeply. This was her punishment for choosing the wrong brother. David would have known how she hated to fly, how she dreaded being strapped into a metal shell and hurled across the sky. Ever since childhood she had suffered the doubts of the unscientific, dumbstruck in the face of radio waves and roaring jet engines. God in heaven was more conceivable than her television set.
An airplane flight was a miracle only to be attempted after weeks of mental adjustment. Faced with an impending trip, she always took time to reconcile herself to the possibility of death. Now, with only a few hours before takeoff, she felt as if she were going to hy perventilate. Breathe, she told herself, bending forward almost to her knees. Breathe deeply; spontaneity was a gift.
“Are you all right?” Nate asked when he came outside.
“Sure.” She straightened up. “Just a cramp.”
The Charlottesville airport had six gates and one tiny lounge, where Sarah ordered two vodka tonics. Nate laid a plane ticket on the bar before her: Nassau, Bahamas.
“I didn’t pack a swimsuit,” she said as she squeezed a lime into her drink.
“You can buy one at the hotel.”
“And I didn’t bring my passport.”
Nate pulled it from his jacket and placed it beside the ticket. “I got it from your desk drawer when I dropped you off after Christmas. I’ve been planning this fo
r a while.”
I bet you have, Sarah thought. The McConnell brothers were always so damn confident, so certain that she would follow their lead. And why not? She had never given them reason to expect otherwise. Maybe this was the time to walk away, to tell Nate that he assumed too much. Their affair had been nice while it lasted, but she must learn to stand alone, without substituting one brother for another.
Sarah stared into the bottom of her drink. It would be wise to turn back, but her soul craved sunshine, and outside the terminal’s plate-glass windows Virginia remained locked in a wintry gray.
Thirty minutes later Nate held her elbow as they climbed the metal stairs onto a twenty-seat plane. He gestured toward the front row, and Sarah smiled weakly: “First class?” She sat down and stretched her legs, her toes touching the curtain that separated cabin from cockpit. When the propellers roared to life, she whispered the only prayer that came to mind: “If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Halfway through the third recitation the wheels left the ground, and she felt the sickening sensation of dipping, as if the plane’s tail was going to scrape and spark, but outside her window, the world shrank into a soft patchwork of farmers’ fields, and the squares of green and gold soothed her mind with the illusion of many gentle landings. She closed her eyes and the blur of vodka merged with the buzzing of metal.
Late that evening she sat beside a wall of glass in a restaurant perched on a latter-day pyramid. The hotel balconies zigzagged down in concrete steps, and Sarah’s eyes followed them to the edge of the palm-ringed pool.
“No one could leap to their death from here. You could only break your ankles, jumping from floor to floor.”
“A charming thought,” said Nate. “How about a bottle of wine?” Far below they could hear the music of a steel-drum band, calling to them as they ordered scallop croquettes and Caesar salads. Its song continued all the way into dessert, a reggae Pied Piper that coaxed the diners to come outside and join the party. Eventually Sarah and Nate rode a glass elevator down to the mezzanine level, where a vast, red-carpeted casino stood between them and the doors out to the beach.
“I’m going to stop by the bathroom.” Sarah turned left, and by the time she had returned Nate was sitting at a roulette table, stacking little towers of chips on multiple numbers. He had lost three thousand dollars in six minutes, a fact which Sarah found staggering. If David had gambled away that sort of money she would have strangled him, but she realized that she had no control over Nate. He was her date, her dance partner, her alternative to Zoloft. He was her brother-in-law, and this was his element, this world of casinos and five-star resorts and weekend getaways. It was all very pretty, Sarah thought. Very comfortable. And in the end, it had nothing to do with her.
Nate dismissed the table with a flick of his wrist, and together they walked out to the free-form pool, with its waterfalls and swim-up bars and tipsy tourists slopping rum punch into the chlorine. At the poolside buffet, a woman with a fan of ostrich feathers waved buzzing flies away from mounds of mango and papaya. Nate led Sarah beyond a line of palm trees, onto the beach where a bonfire exhaled thousands of sparks into the night sky.
“I like these fireworks,” she said, watching how the smooth water mirrored the glow; women in cocktail dresses waded through the flames. She took off her shoes and followed Nate down the beach, away from the fire and food and laughter, deep into the shadows, where he put his right hand behind her back, twined her fingers with his left, and rested his cheek in her hair. And there, in the cool sand, they began to dance, the dance that had been overdue for seventeen years. It was hardly even a dance, that slow shuffle, but Sarah felt that a circle was completing itself, their unfinished business was being put to rest.
Something about the sand and the water and the palm trees seemed oddly familiar, until it came to her.
“You’ve been here with Jenny.”
Nate stepped back and looked into her eyes. “Yes. Twice. How did you know?”
“The picture on your hall table.”
Sarah marveled at how she felt nothing, no disappointment or betrayal. It seemed completely natural.
“Why did you two break up?” she asked as they continued their shuffling steps.
“She wanted to get married . . . And more than that. She wanted to have children right away. You know how I feel about children.”
“Yes, I know. How old is Jenny?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“She’s young, then.”
“Sure, but she doesn’t appreciate it.”
Sarah leaned her cheek on Nate’s shoulder. “The two of you seemed well matched.”
“And you and I, Sarah? Are we well matched?”
She smiled, thinking that nothing could be further from the truth.
“For this one night,” she said, “in this one winter, we are perfect.”
PART FOUR
Resolutions
• 30 •
“What did you do for New Year’s Eve?”
David was standing over a chopping board, spreading mayonnaise on a thin slice of honey-wheat bread. It was the fourth of January and Sarah had come as an act of penitence.
She sat at the table, staring out toward the icy river. “I watched some fireworks. How about you?”
“I went to bed before midnight. But in the morning I got dressed early and walked outside. The first snow of the year had fallen, and I’ve never seen the world so quiet.” He washed his hands and came to the table with a plate of ham sandwiches.
“There were deer tracks leading into the woods, and I followed them for a hundred yards, but I didn’t find anything. The river was frozen in the flat sections, so I walked out onto the water about three yards from the bank, until bubbles came up under my boots. Then I stepped back to where the ice was thick, and I stood there on the river, looking up at the cliffs.”
His voice was unemotional, which made Sarah turn to face him. “It sounds nice.”
He shook his head. “It was too quiet. I’ve decided that this is the only winter I’ll spend here at the cabin.”
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”
David took a sandwich to the couch and turned on the same Lord of the Rings film that he had been staring at all morning. As Sarah watched him, she supposed that she had made a mistake, to have introduced a television into the cabin’s peaceful quiet. David had never been a screen addict back in Jackson; he had been too busy with patients and painting and dinner parties. But now his mind was filled with two-dimensional worlds. She sighed as she turned away from him, thinking that he was right; David should not stay here for another winter.
She pulled on his hiking boots and Gore-Tex jacket and walked toward the door. “I’m going for a walk, want to come?” He didn’t answer.
Outside the snow was melting, leaving puddles covered in thin layers of ice. She pressed one with the ball of her foot, and the surface cracked into a broad white web, reminding her of a traffic accident she and David had experienced years ago. For some reason she hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, and when a car rear-ended them at a red light, her body had lurched forward, the front of her scalp burrowing into the windshield. White cracks had spread like electric currents.
She remembered how gently David had touched her as they stood outside the car, waiting for the police. He had lifted her eyelids with the tips of his thumbs, examining her pupils for signs of concussion, and then, with equal softness, he had traced the bones of her brow and cheek, running his fingers across her jaw and pressing at the back of her neck.
“Does it hurt here? Or here?”
No, the only pain was beneath her bangs, where a bruise the size of a golf ball had swollen outward, lavender and lime and royal blue.
“The body is fragile,” he had said as he brushed her hair away from her forehead. “You must take care of yourself.”
His words came back as she stood beside the river, hugging
her arms tightly around her waist. She had loved him for his tenderness in those days, especially after her parents died, when she had wanted to be guided and pampered and soothed; she had loved his almost paternal care. It was only in recent years that his authority had begun to grate, and that her unhappiness with her own life had manifested itself in dissatisfaction with him. Then she had understood how it was possible for a man to do nothing wrong, and still to be wrong, day after day.
Now it was decision time, because if David was leaving then she must choose whether to follow him—to give up the house, the college, the town, and most of all, Margaret. The only New Year’s resolution she had made thus far was to say good-bye to Nate, a feat she hadn’t managed while they were in the Bahamas. It had seemed ungracious, to call things off after he had spent so much money, and she had wanted to enjoy the beach and the rum without any wounded feelings hovering between them.
But now there were no excuses. Sarah lobbed a stone high into the air, onto the opposite bank. She would have to end the affair with Nate, then decide what to do about David.
Over the next few weeks procrastination set in. Winter drained all impetus for change, and she resumed her old habit of staying in bed until noon, padding through the house in thick socks and terry cloth. Her few active hours passed in the kitchen, as she experimented with an ever-increasing bounty from the grocery store. For dinner she fixed pad thai and coconut-ginger soup; for breakfast she baked zucchini bread topped with pineapple cream cheese.
“I mean to get fat and sassy,” she explained to Margaret when she arrived at Friday tea with a platter of chocolate muffins.
“Instead of thin and bitter?” Margaret asked with a smile.
“You know me too well.”
She had made one resolution to which she managed to cling: she would no longer drive to Charlottesville. Passivity was almost a strategy; if she initiated nothing, Nate would eventually tire of the drive. The mountains formed a natural barrier, encouraging the two of them to blend back into their separate valleys.