Ultraviolet

by Suzanne Matson

  There had been a time when she’d been afraid she wouldn’t be able to do it: carry him. The doctor told her early in the second trimester—the point she is at now, actually—that the ultrasound showed she was slightly dilated. He suspected a slight anatomical abnormality because she was a DES daughter; her mother remembered taking—or thought she took, she knew she took it for Steve—diethylstilbestrol when Samantha was in utero because they thought then it was an effective prevention against miscarriage.

  He recommended a procedure called cerclage. Even before he explained it, she didn’t like the sound of the word, deceptively buttery and soft on the tongue, except for that one hard “c” in the middle. He described how they could stitch up the os, the way one might truss a turkey, to keep it closed until the fetus was full term. Of course, he admitted, there would be some risk to the pregnancy. Perhaps a ten percent chance of miscarriage caused by the cerclage itself. But most of the time, he said, the cerclage did its job.

  They said no to the cerclage. She’d been sent to her bed for a week, which felt like a punishment, but when nothing changed for the worse she was given permission to move about gingerly. The whole time she carried Michael it was with nervousness that he would fall from her too soon. He didn’t. Neither did Christopher, in spite of the pneumonia she’d had with him, and the early labor that they’d stopped with drugs.

  She’s been waiting for the quickening moment when this baby will move from idea to being. She pictures the fetal curl, like a translucent shrimp, or a small, moon-faced alien inside. It still feels improbable that he could go from such watery form to a big-footed boy like the ones jostling her for space in the cave of the covers.

  “Okay, time to move,” she announces.

  “Again, again,” the boys chant. So they do a last round.

  “Let’s be dinos,” Michael says.

  “What kind?”

  “Pterodactyls.”

  So they plunge beneath the covers one last time, roaring from their buried nest.

  The afternoon leaves no time for thinking about checklists, her writing, or anything else. Mark escapes to the supermarket—and that is exactly what it is, escape—and Samantha tries to fold laundry in the family room while helping the boys manage their train setup. She’s learned to let them create tracks that drift off onto carpet or dead-end into each other, because those scenarios of ending without purpose don’t bother them, but there are bound to be skirmishes over whether a piece should curve out or curve in, and she needs to be there to shore up Christopher’s side of the argument, so that Michael doesn’t get to call all the shots.

  As she folds, she sees Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s blond hair float up like a silvery sea plant, John strapped into his seat, his hands still gripping the controls. Does the salt water smooth away the expressions? She’s read that Carolyn didn’t want to fly with him. He claimed she did, though, joked about it with reporters when he was interviewed around the time he was getting his pilot’s license. My wife is the only one who will go up with me, he said. But other articles reported that she did all she could to avoid it. Did she have time to feel angry with him when the plane began its dive?

  Because Samantha has myths on her mind, her Demeter story that doesn’t want to be finished, her mind turns to Icarus, the prideful glee of a boy who just wanted to fly, no matter who said no. Maybe she should write one based on that.

  When Mark returns with the groceries and takes the boys to the park, Samantha settles herself at the kitchen table to call her mother. At first, the distance between them, the width of the whole country, didn’t seem too much. With every step Samantha took into her life—out of the house, then out of town, then to the other coast—her mother turned against her, fell silent and cold until she finally had to realize that the coldness wasn’t bringing Samantha any closer. They eventually achieved a kind of détente, visiting and calling. But things warmed beyond détente when she and Mark began having children. Her mother adored the little boys; the boys adored their grandmother. Just like that, there was nothing more Samantha could hold against Kathryn. She began to miss her.

  She usually calls her just once on the weekend because when her mother gets to talking she can’t quit. If Samantha could count on quick, five- or ten-minute chats—wedged in between work, the boys, the house—she’d call her several times a week. She’d actually like to.

  “Are you watching?”

  “Such a shame. That poor family.” Her mother starts detailing the whole Kennedy saga, from Joe to JFK to Rosemary to Kathleen and onward, leaving no space to make it a conversation. Samantha says “Yes” and “Uh-huh” and “I know,” and this is perfectly satisfactory. She has enough leftover mental space to flip through the baby-naming book she left out. It’s too early, but she can’t resist. And even though everything in her assumes boy, she starts with the girl pages, just to see. Abaranne, Abebi, Abelia, Abellona, Abia, Abigail—the first six entries. Abebi (Nigerian) means “she came after asking.” Abelia (Hebrew) simply means “sigh.”

  They have been through this before, of course, all the improbable choices before settling on the solid and familiar. But she likes the freedom of this moment, the becoming-before-the-became. Her mother doesn’t know about the baby yet, no one besides Mark does, and Samantha toys with the idea of telling her now. She doubts it will be a girl, but she likes the name Kathryn, maybe shortened to Kate. Her father used to call her mother “Kay,” but after the divorce, she became mostly Kathryn again, whenever she introduced herself to someone new.

  “Remember?” her mother asks.

  Samantha’s lost the thread. She plays back her auditory memory; her mother was up to Bobby’s assassination.

  “I do.”

  “You were so grown up; even people who wanted to shut the door in our faces would take a leaflet from you.”

  “It was fun.” Until it wasn’t. Their whole family had canvassed, then gone to a rally at some hot, downtown hotel. Samantha remembers Robert Kennedy’s rabbitty grin, the limp forelock of hair. They stood in line to shake his hand. He had to adjust his gaze downward to smile at her, and she didn’t have time to tell him that she helped with the leafleting before she was pressed forward by the crowd. Then he was on to California.

  “The Realtor came by today,” her mother says. “She thinks the house will sell quickly.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Except I’m not ready; well, I’m more than ready, I can’t cope with the upkeep anymore. But I’ll never be able to pack all this up.”

  “Yes, you will. I’ll help.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course I will. I’ve told you.”

  “But you won’t be able to stay very long.”

  “Then we’ll have to be efficient.”

  “I don’t think I can do it.”

  “We’ll do it.” Although Samantha is thinking about the baby, teaching, the fact that she lives more than three thousand miles away, and the extra work for Mark with the boys while she’s gone.

  “And I’m not sure about the place in Tacoma. It doesn’t have any green space.”

  Samantha waits. They’ve covered this ground several times. The Tacoma retirement apartment is just two miles from Samantha’s brother and his family. When Samantha and Kathryn priced places in Boston, it was clear her mother would never be able to afford one near her.

  “When it comes right down to it, I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “I know.”

  “But I just can’t handle all this on my own.”

  “Yes. That’s what you’ve got to remember.”

  Mark and the boys come in trailing sand out of Tonka trucks. “Out on the patio with those,” she tells them. “You can keep playing for five more minutes.”

  “Mom, Mark and the boys are home from the park. I should finish getting dinner.”

  “It’s so wonderful, the help you get from your husband. He’s a good man.”

&
nbsp; “Yes.”

  “Still, I don’t see how you do all you do. Of course, I did work, when I had to. We could never make ends meet on what your father earned. I never wanted to be away from you kids, though.”

  “I know. Mom, I’ve got to—”

  “Is that Grandma?” Michael asks.

  Samantha covers the receiver. “You want to say hi?” she asks him.

  “Tell her to come visit.” He races off behind Christopher.

  “Mom, Michael says you need to come visit soon.”

  “Oh, the little sweetheart. Tell him I love him. And Christopher, too.”

  “I will. I’ll call you soon. Let’s get you on a plane before I go back to school.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “You can! Nothing to it. Next time we talk we’ll plan a date and then I’ll send you a ticket.”

  “I couldn’t let you do that.”

  “Yes, you can. Okay, my spaghetti sauce is ready. Mark says hi.”

  Mark looks up from his pager and waves.

  Her mother lavishes unstinting and unconditional love on her boys. It takes Samantha’s breath away sometimes, how they respond, want to be by her, listen to her read stories in silly animal voices. But it shouldn’t. That was the mother she had, too, when she was little.

  She leaves the table to stir the spaghetti sauce.

  Mark has picked up the naming book and is paging through. “Where do they come up with these? Viridis, Vida, Viveca? Walburga, Walda, Wanetta?”

  She returns to look over his shoulder. “You skipped Virginia and Vivian.”

  “Still.” He flips over to the boy’s side. “First page I open: Dearborn, Decimus, Declan, Deems, Delaney.” He tosses it aside. “We need a new book.”

  “Or a narrowing principle. Like only considering family names.”

  “How about waiting until we see him?”

  “Him?”

  “Or her.”

  They’ve already said no to the amnio. A nod at fate or God or nature. Whoever comes is theirs. She’ll be forty when this baby is born; the Down syndrome risk is one in one hundred.

  Some nights she wakes up with a nameless feeling of dread, the same dream or vision she had when she was in the ICU with pneumonia, eight months pregnant with Christopher. She is at the bottom of a canyon surrounded by high, sheer walls, with no footholds to help her climb out. The sky and rocks are both a merciless, depthless gray. She doesn’t know how she got there, or why she is so alone, or why this landscape has no sound, like a mute button has been pushed.

  Then she’ll become aware of Mark breathing by her side, and see that the gray is really the gray of before-dawn light, and that everything is about to be bright and loud. She is glad when the day explodes into alarms and small-boy voices with urgent needs.

  By the third day, the operation changes from rescue to salvage. They winch up the fuselage, the seawater pouring out, and then it is over. Everyone knew it was over from the beginning; it was a game they all colluded in, that it wasn’t over. The networks keep doing their best to make good viewing out of what remains, namely grief, keeping their cameras as close as they can to the faces of the bereaved. Samantha turns it off.

  Meanwhile, there are the lists. Michael’s day-care group is taking the T downtown to the aquarium, and for once Samantha kept her name off the chaperone list. She is tired. She is paying money to the day care to get rest. But she ticks off the items of the packing list for his knapsack—his lunch with disposable wrappings, his sunblock (applied, and in the bag), his windbreaker (they will be down near the wharf), and his hat, which she is certain he will lose. That’s okay, but they have a brief tussle over which hat it will be, his favorite with the truck logo, or one he’ll never miss if it’s left on the train. She wins by distracting him, drawing him into a conversation over whether he thinks the scuba diver at the Aquarium will be feeding the fish in the giant tank when he’s there, and why doesn’t the shark ever eat him up?

  Michael is knowledgeable about this, as he is about all things having to do with the aquarium.

  “They’re not hungry, Mom,” he explains patiently. “They feed them so much that they don’t need to eat the divers. They don’t need to eat the other fish, either.”

  “I find that remarkable,” Samantha says, and she does. That a little nourishment can lull the predator into a torporous calm, content to circle and circle, but never strike.

  Christopher is jealous of Michael’s field trip, so she reminds him that the teachers have made this a wading-pool day for the younger kids, and he cheers up a little. But he is slow to separate this morning, sticking close to her while they watch the big kids line up with their chaperones, two kids to each parent or teacher. She holds hands with Christopher, the two of them waving to Michael as the line troops off, around the corner to the T station. She stays with him for the morning free play outside in the yard, where the teachers have set up an activity table with cans of shaving cream for the kids to squirt. She likes these stray moments alone with Christopher, who soon will be the boy in the middle, likes watching him forget all about her in his concentration, tunneling his little truck through the shaving-cream mountain.

  When he is fine and doesn’t need her, running off to rinse his mentholated hands, which make him smell, oddly, like his six-foot father, she heads home to the glow and the trial of an empty morning. Where to start? The kitchen, as usual, with its jumble of dishes and cereal boxes. As she loads the dishwasher, she realizes that the thing she’s been keeping at bay on some barely conscious level now wants to be acknowledged. The low cramping, the backache, which she has been pushing out of focus because of breakfast, lunches, sunscreen, swimming suit, and towel. But now there it is, not just incidental, but real. And not just in the background, but—as if it realizes that she can finally pay attention—insistent.

  She lies down on the couch, her feet up. She is thinking of gravity, of her sudden fear of it. Then thinking: If bed rest, how? How to get the kids home from day care, how to get through the day tomorrow when they don’t have it, how to do anything? She can’t do anything at the moment but think these questions, because the cramps are mounting, not going away; because she knows her calls need to be first to the doctor, then to Mark.

  The phone is across the room, which means becoming vertical. Right now, she is a woman putting her feet up to rest. Once she gets up, anything about that story could change. She pictures Michael, off the train now, and walking through the aquarium. It is always crowded there, no matter when you go. What if he dashes ahead or dawdles behind? What if his teacher doesn’t notice until he’s run headlong down the spiraling ramp, past the eels and angelfish, lionfish and jellyfish, God forbid out the front doors? He’s only four; he’d be looking for her. Even though he came with his teachers, he’d forget that. She’d be the one he’d call for.

  Unmistakably, now, come tight waves of contraction. Little one, she thinks. Let’s be manatees. Let’s be ladybugs. Let’s play possum. She is not prepared for this threat coming in under the radar when what she expected were ATMs that wouldn’t accept her card, lines at the gasoline pump, cash registers everywhere refusing to open their drawers, or even, if it came to that, a failing hospital generator. The executive list-makers would have thought of backup generators, and backups for those. She has been mentally readying herself for a digital global predicament that could be managed with a stockpile of canned goods and duct tape and small bills. Not this slippage in the corner when nobody is looking.

  She dials 911; it’s the first time she ever has had to. Her first public declaration of unambiguous need.

  The voice that answers is brisk with challenge: What is her emergency?

  Her emergency is gravity. Melting states of matter. Her one heart beating through the separate, adventuring hearts of her sons, the smallest of them at this moment being pulled from her by a tide too strong, too deep, and too wide, leaving before she can even call him back by name.<
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  INSIDE PASSAGE

  From Seattle, 2007

  Day 1.

  When Steve and his wife, Peggy, arrive at the agreed-upon time to take them from Tacoma to the dock in Seattle, her mother is still buck-naked in the bathroom from her shower but at least packed (she’ll discover she forgot arch supports and her best walking shoes, though she has a pair she didn’t intend to bring. Steve, in turn, forgot to bring her Steinbeck’s Pearl). Kathryn finishes the last ten pages of The Grapes of Wrath in the car on the way, headed to Pier 66.

  Steve finds Bell Street in Seattle, heads downhill. There, visible in glimpses through buildings, almost two city blocks long, is the vast and shining cruise ship.

  Samantha can’t stop fingering their passports and embarkation papers. This has been too long in preparation and feels too irrevocable—probably the only cruise of her mother’s lifetime, just one sailing with their names on the manifest. It took six months and a congressman’s office to help Kathryn get a passport—no birth certificate from the hospital in Nainital—but finally someone in the State Department found her parents’ passport applications from the twenties with the children’s names listed.

  They snake through the line to load luggage. Samantha remembers that Mark warned her not to board first, but she has no idea why; she made him turn off the cruising infomercial before it ended so they could go to bed. In any case, they’re far from first, her mother just stepping out of the shower when they were supposed to be heading north on I-5, but they made it. Her mother’s eighty-fifth-birthday cruise.

  Samantha and Kathryn hand over their luggage, render their credit cards for onboard purchases, show their passports, and have their pictures snapped for cruising IDs. They give hugs goodbye to Steve and Peggy, then follow lines on the terminal floor to the gangplank, turning down the opportunity to purchase discount field glasses and the “best price” Alaska hat. They are required to stop and pose for a celebratory Embarkation Portrait.