by Marcus Sakey
“Jesus.” Tom put a hand to his pounding heart. “You scared me.”
“Easy to do.” Their tenant took a drag from his cigarette, paused to spit a scrap of tobacco. “Don’t you ever look around?” His voice was low and rich, a silk-smooth contrast to his generally pissy attitude.
“Just a little jumpy this morning, I guess.” Tom shifted from one leg to the other, the cement cold against his bare feet. He itched to bum a smoke, reminded himself that he’d quit. “Kind of a long night.”
It was the sort of comment that would prompt most people to say, Really? Why’s that? But Bill just looked away. Since he’d rented the bottom floor of their two-flat, they’d barely spoken. He kept to himself, never seemed to have guests, disappeared for long stretches of time, and on the rare occasions they did bump into each other, was always right on the verge of rude. But his check hit the mailbox every month, and that was about all Tom cared about.
Back in the kitchen he dumped the Trib on the counter, poured tea, flipped eggs, and tried not to think about acronyms.
IT WAS GOING TO BE FINE. The sky was blue, spring was here, and she was pregnant. Sunlight made all the difference. Who wasn’t nervous at 4:12 in the morning? A terrible hour to be the only one awake.
She reclined in the passenger seat, the back tilted thirty degrees to take some of the pressure off her belly. Her cramping was a little better, but her breasts were unbelievably sore. She’d had to dodge Tom’s hug this morning, and she could tell that had bothered him.
Which was fair. More than. She’d make it up to him. But right now, she could think about only one thing. And all the physical symptoms had to be good signs. She felt different this time than the others.
The morning rush hour was on, and people filled the sidewalks, men and women in business casual. Life casual. Her cell phone rang, and she leaned forward to dig it from her purse, wincing as her breasts swung. She flipped it open, checked the caller ID. Shook her head and tucked the phone away unanswered.
“Who was it?”
“Work.”
He cocked his head.
“I’ll call them later,” she said. “After.” She could feel his stare. “It’s just a phone call. Don’t read into it.”
The clinic was in a nondescript office complex. Orange pillars, bland signs, a cramped parking lot. Tom found a spot for the Pontiac and came around to help her out of the car. The air was cool but the sun on the top of her head felt good.
Even at a quarter to nine, the waiting room was packed. She signed in and took a seat. Tom had his BlackBerry out and was punching buttons, mouth curled into a small frown. Anna felt a surge of anger – not like e-mail couldn’t wait – but wrote it off to hormones.
She pulled a magazine off the table, a People three weeks out of date, the cover given over to the “Shooting Star” robbery. When it had happened, the tabloids had been full of it, and she’d followed the story with that voyeuristic tingle that came from something lurid happening in her backyard. But now, as she flipped the pages and stared at the photos – the Star raising one hand to block photographers, somber police standing outside a dance club, a driver’s license photo of the dead bodyguard – it couldn’t hold her attention.
When she’d been a kid, Christmas had killed her. The waiting, the anticipation, it was too much. She even had a special Countdown-to-Christmas dance, which basically involved flailing spasmodically in front of the tree, arms and legs flying, dizzy with need. Her parents had found it hysterical. The wait for their name to be called reminded her of that time. Maybe I should have a Find-Out-If-You’re-Pregnant dance.
Finally a nurse in blue scrubs led them back to an examination room. A poster on the wall detailed her anatomy, uterus and fallopian tubes and ovaries and the rest of it, all drawn in pastel colors and labeled.
“How are you feeling?” The nurse busied herself collecting swabs and tape.
“Okay. Some cramping, but I’m feeling better.”
The woman nodded. “Roll up your sleeve?”
After two weeks giving herself shots of progesterone, the prick of the needle to draw blood was nothing. Anna stared intently at the dark liquid filling the tube.
“Okay,” the nurse said when she was finished. “You can call for your results around noon. Any questions?”
“I know the hormones throw it off, but would it be really stupid to hit Walgreens and grab a home pregnancy test?”
The nurse laughed. “Hold out, honey. Just a couple more hours.”
Christmas had never been so far.
TOM GLANCED AT HIS WATCH, winced. Shit. He’d told Daniels he’d be late, but this was pushing it. “Can you drop me on your way in?”
“I’m not going.”
He paused, then said, “You’ve missed a lot of work lately, babe.”
“I can’t sit at my desk and pretend to give a shit about budgets and timelines, okay? Not today.”
He sighed, jingled the car keys. Pictured the phone on his desk, the red message light blinking. Then he saw the look in her eyes. “Come on,” he said.
They drove downtown and left the Pontiac in an underground garage, rode the elevator up to Millennium Park. The sky was cloudless, and the brilliance of the day had people out in droves: students lounging on the benches, tourists snapping pictures, toddlers playing in the fountain. He got himself a cup of coffee and a juice for her, and they sat on the steps, watching people. Tom used his cup to gesture at a girl with purple hair and a nose ring. “Her.”
Anna followed his look. “She’s a chef. Her dream is to open a restaurant called Gloom. The servers will wear black eye shadow, and the menu will only have cigarettes, red wine, and fresh suckling pig.”
He laughed. “What about him?” An enormously fat man squeezed into a Bulls T-shirt.
“Twelve-inch cock. He makes his girlfriends call him Steel Blue Johnson. Tom, what if it’s negative?”
He looked over at her, his wife, this woman he’d known forever. The wind tugged waves of auburn hair around her face, and she used one hand to brush them out of her eyes. “It won’t be.”
“What if it is?”
“Then we’ll try again.”
She made a sound that was nothing like a laugh. “We’re in debt to our eyeballs.”
“Everybody is in debt to their eyeballs,” he said.
“Not everybody is dropping fifteen grand a pop on IVF.”
He took a slug of cold coffee.
“All this time. The doctor’s visits, all the shots. My God, all that money.” She shook her head. “If this comes up negative, it was for nothing.” Her eyes narrowed, and he followed them to a woman holding hands with a little girl. The girl’s hair was so blond it was almost white, and she wore a polka-dot sundress. They looked like they’d been cast by Hallmark. Anna stared, faint crow’s-feet etching around her eyes. When had those arrived? “Nothing,” she said.
Nothing, he thought, and knew she was right. This thing other people did so easily, for them it came with a long list of costs, not all financial. At first trying for a baby had been fun, had put a charge back into their sex. After a while, when nothing happened, the calendars and thermometers had entered into it. Three days a month became a nonstop fuckathon. He’d had these visions of himself as an oil derrick made of flesh, pumping endlessly and joylessly away. The rest of the month it just seemed like there wasn’t any point. And then acronyms had entered their lives.
Somewhere along the path, things had changed between them. He loved her, knew she still loved him. But it seemed like a habit now. The remnants of something.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said with more conviction than he felt. “It’s all going to be okay.”
She cocked her head and looked at him. It felt like a long moment before she turned back to the park. They waited. When the clock on her phone read 11:58, she said, “I’m scared.”
“Do you want me to?”
Anna took a deep breath, shook her head. “Christmas morning.” S
he started dialing before he could ask what that meant. The steps were cold through his slacks. Tom could feel his pulse as he listened to her tell the nurse her name. She fell silent, put on hold, and their eyes met, both of them thinking the same thing, focusing all their hope.
Then he heard the murmur of the nurse returning, and though he couldn’t make out her words, he could read the tone, and more than that, Anna’s face, the way she drooped, like everything propping her up had been knocked away, and as he saw his wife begin to cry, Tom Reed added an acronym of his own to the list.
FUBAR. Fucked up beyond all repair.
3
“OH, HONEY,” Sara sighed. “I’m so sorry.” The younger of the sisters, Sara had always been the cool one, the rebel hitting after-hours clubs and hanging out with actors, but now she had the maternal voice down.
Maybe that’s because she is a mom, Anna thought, and on the heels of that, Stop it.
“What are you going to do?”
Anna shook her head, then sighed into the phone. “I don’t know.”
“Will you try again?”
“I don’t think we can afford to. We’re pretty tight.”
“What does Tom say?”
“He shuts down, tries to tell me everything will be okay. If you don’t acknowledge it, maybe it will go away, right?” She lay on her back on the bed, one hand toying with the fringe of the duvet. Life changed so slowly you hardly noticed. There had been a time they talked about everything. “We really shouldn’t have done it this time.” Her fingers twiddled on a brass button. “It’s just that I thought, one more try, just one more. I was sure it would happen.”
There was a silence, and then, “I could probably lend you-”
“No.” Anna spoke fast. “Thank you, but no.”
“But-”
“No, sweetie.” Her sister had a decent job as an editor at a television post house, but it wasn’t the kind of paycheck that would earn Donald Trump’s attention. And a huge portion of that went to day care for the Monkey. Raising a baby alone wasn’t cheap.
Yeah, but at least she – Stop.
“Want me to come over?”
“No. I’m going to take a bottle of wine into the bath and crash. May as well drink, right?” She heard the bitterness in her own voice, hated it, the drama. “Look, it’s okay. We’ll find a way. And if it’s meant to happen, it will, right?”
Sara caught the hint and changed the subject. “You still on for Wednesday?”
“Definitely.”
“I could call around, get a sitter instead.”
“No, I want to. I love hanging out with Julian.”
“You sure?
“Yeah.” She made her teeth unclench, got her voice back to normal. “I’m fine, sis. I promise.” She took a breath. “Look, I’m going to go. Don’t worry about me, okay?”
“Hey, it’s what I do. No charge.”
Anna forced a laugh, then said good-bye. Hung up the cordless and dropped it on the bed beside her. Stared upward. The blades of the ceiling fan were edged in black dust. It felt like she’d cleaned it not too long ago. Time snuck up on you in the stupidest ways.
She felt the tears somewhere in her throat, put her hands to her eyes. She didn’t want to cry. Her breasts were sore and her body bloated, every heave would hurt, and besides, she’d cried so many times.
So it might not happen for them. So what? Lots of people didn’t have children. They still lived fulfilling lives. She and Tom could spend more time together. Season tickets to Steppenwolf, pay off their debts, travel. Not like the world lacked kids.
She rolled on her side, pulled a pillow to her chest, and sobbed as quietly as she knew how.
WHEN THE SMOKE ALARM STARTED SHRIEKING, Tom was reading in the den again, and again she was locked in the bedroom. Same house, different worlds. They both had their escapes.
The suddenness of the alarm made him swing his feet off the desk, the chair rocking forward as he did. It was a sound he associated with cooking more than anything else – Anna was a great chef, but their ventilation was for shit, and whenever she pan-seared something, she ended up smoking them out of the kitchen and setting off the alarm.
But tonight’s dinner had been cans of Campbell’s nuked and eaten separately. The remnants of his beef stew were cold in the bowl, alongside a novel, the spine cracked so the book lay flat.
Once the panic faded, he realized that the sound was different, muted. Like it was coming through walls, he thought, and on the heels of that, he realized that it must be from their tenant’s apartment. The ventilation on the first floor wasn’t any better than theirs.
Tom sat back down, pinching the bridge of his nose. Muted or not, the screech wasn’t helping his headache. One of those lingering mothers that hung behind his eyeballs. When he moved them, it felt like something tugging at his optic nerve, a cold, nauseous ache that made him want to close his eyes. While he was at it, open them to find himself somewhere else. Somewhere warm, with a soft breeze and a hammock. Maybe the smell of the ocean. Sometimes he pictured Anna with him, lying against him: the old Anna, the old him, fresh and in love, before their dreams became a burden. Sometimes he didn’t.
He sighed, took a sip of bourbon, and turned back to his book, a novel about twenty-something American expatriates living in Budapest. They were looking for themselves, and for their fortune, and they were beautiful, and so heartbreakingly young it hurt to read, not because Tom couldn’t believe he had ever been that age but because he couldn’t believe he wasn’t still. In that secret center that he thought of as himself, he was in his mid-twenties, astride the intersection of freedom and responsibility. Old enough to know who he was and what he wanted, but young enough he didn’t owe anybody or need to get up twice a night to take a leak. A good age.
He planted elbows on either side of the book and rubbed sore eyes. Mid-twenties… D.C., the apartment in Adams Morgan, a second-floor unit above a bar-and-grill. He’d still been harboring dreams of becoming a novelist, had typed in the evenings to the smell of hamburgers drifting in the open window. Anna had her own place, but slept at his most of the time. They’d thrown a Halloween party one year, and she’d gone as an abstract painting, naked except for a flesh-colored bikini and swirls of fluorescent body paint. When they’d made love that night, the paint smeared the sheets with flowers, and she’d laughed about it, thrown her head back and laughed that good laugh, then wrapped her painted arms around his back and rubbed color onto him.
He took another sip of bourbon.
There was a tentative knock at the door. He said, “Yeah,” and Anna stepped in. She wore cotton pajamas and no makeup. Her eyes were round and puffy.
“Do you hear that?”
The smoke alarm was perfectly clear, but he fought the smart-ass remark, and just nodded. “Bill’s, I think.”
“It’s been going for a while.”
“Just a minute or two.” Even as he said it, he realized that this wasn’t like an alarm clock, something to ignore. Stood up. “I guess you’re right.” He stepped past her, tracing one hand along her hip as he did.
She fired a tired smile at him. “You want me to come?”
“Nah. Go back to bed.” He walked the creaking hardwood hall to the kitchen and grabbed the keys to the bottom unit. He and Anna had fallen in love with the building the moment they’d seen it: a brick two-flat, almost a hundred years old, in Lincoln Square near the river. The neighborhood was great, safe and full of families, and the house backed up to a park they had imagined taking their own children to someday.
Of course, the building ran two hundred grand more than they’d anticipated spending. But renting out the bottom floor let them swing the house payments, more or less. More or less: the modern way. Tom opened the front door and started down the steps. Mortgaging the present to afford the future.
The smell of smoke pulled him from his reverie. “Shit.” He hustled down, yelled over his shoulder. “Anna!” The door to the foyer stuck, and
he yanked hard to open it. Behind him he heard her footsteps, but didn’t stop, just stepped into the narrow vestibule. A trickle of gray slid beneath the door to Bill Samuelson’s apartment. Shit, shit, shit. Tom banged on the door, feeling silly, like the guy was going to hear knocks but not the smoke alarm. He fumbled with the keys, trying one and then another before he got the dead bolt open. Tried to remember everything he’d learned about fire. Touch the door, he thought, see if the flames are on the other side, if you’re going to feed them oxygen. But the wood was cool. Anna stepped behind him.
Tom twisted the knob. The front room was a haze of smoke, the aftermath of a rock concert. The alarm screamed panic. “Hello?” He couldn’t see any flames, so he opened the door all the way and stepped in. The room was spartan, just a battered easy chair and a big television propped on a particle-board entertainment center. A halo of swirling yellow clung to the top of the lone lamp.
The décor reminded Tom that he was in another man’s apartment, but he pushed the thought aside. This was his house, his building. He quickstepped down the hallway. The smoke grew thicker and darker. He pulled the hem of his shirt up over his mouth, sucked hot air through it.
The kitchen overheads drilled tunnels of shifting light. Tom could sense heat before he saw flame, primitive instincts feeding dread as he moved toward the stove, where spikes of yellow and green danced. The flames wrapped a blackened teakettle, cloaking it in fire, and for a split second he imagined that the kettle itself was burning, and then he realized that the fire was coming from the gas jets. He lunged forward, spun the knob to kill the gas, feeling the fire like a wave of heat. Nothing happened, and he realized the gas wasn’t the source, that the fire came from below and around the metal ring. Months of dribbled grease had caught and pulsed with a sweet black smoke. The wall behind the stove was blackened.
“Shit,” Anna said from behind him. “Does he have a fire extinguisher?”
Tom threw open the cupboard beneath the sink. The air was clearer down here, and revealed cleansers, a couple of half-empty liquor bottles, but nothing useful. He stood. There was a mug on the counter beside a jar of Sanka. He could fill it with water… Wait. Better. The dishwashing hose. Tom stepped to the sink, spun the water on, then reached for the gun.