by Mary Hogan
“That would be lovely,” he replied, trying to sound chipper for both of them. “Shall we grab a bite to eat? Bring the entourage!”
“Why don’t I swing by your place?”
Owen exhaled. His shoulders relaxed. The sexy whisper was back in Lidia’s voice. He could hear the twinkle in her eye. Finally, things were looking up. “Give me twenty minutes to change the sheets.”
Lidia laughed and Owen’s heart soared. On the way out of the office, he practically skipped. Conrad shouted, “You turkey leftovers this weekend or the main course, O-Man?”
“Why, I believe I’m dessert!”
Chapter 9
THE BUS STOP across Riverside Drive was empty, but Muriel knew the M5 would arrive soon . . . or in half an hour. You never knew with that line. The posted bus schedule was merely pole decoration. Something to read while you waited. In the early afternoon sunlight, the two sisters were on their way to lunch.
“Pick someplace fabulous,” Pia had said, “and wear your new scarf. And that white shirtdress I bought you for your birthday.”
Hearing the desperation in her own voice, Muriel had replied, “I bought heirloom tomatoes. I’m quite sure I can make something lunchy out of them.”
“Nonsense. I’m taking you out. I insist.”
Fearless teenage boys skidded their clacking skateboards down the stone steps of the monument in Riverside Park. Puggles tugged at their leashes, toddlers skittered after pigeons who walked from side to side in exactly the way they did. On teak benches in the shadow of young elms, Jamaican nannies and their charges met to gossip and dole out gluten-free pretzels. “Joshua, share with Aidan now.” For a brief moment, Muriel understood why people liked the outdoors. Then she felt the weight of her hair on her head and wished she was back in her apartment.
For the second time that day, Muriel’s body had melted into the shape of a wine bottle. A dress had meant shaving her legs. A white dress meant she couldn’t wear her black Spanx. And the scarf, well, that meant she’d feel more choked than she already did.
“Fabulous it is,” she had said, surrendering, knowing exactly where her perfectly perfect sister would want to go.
OWEN USHERED LIDIA into his tidy apartment with a sweep of his arm even as he ached to sweep her into his arms and ravenously take her on the freshly Hoovered carpet.
“Milady,” he said, opting for a more gallant approach.
Lidia smiled, but it was the type of smile that had more darkness in it than light.
“What’s wrong?” Owen asked.
“I have news,” she said.
Owen swallowed. “News?”
“We should sit.”
Right then and there he knew his life was over. Not in the dead sort of way, but in the never again the same way. No one delivers good news sitting down. Happy news inspires leaping, hugging, back slapping. All upright activities. Only dire news causes knees to buckle. At that moment Owen wished Lidia would quietly back out of his apartment the way she’d come in. Rewind herself. Really, they didn’t know each other well enough to share life’s disappointments.
They sat.
“Tea?” Owen offered.
“Thank you, no.” Lidia was suddenly as prim as a headmistress.
“All righty then. Your announcement.” Owen held his breath.
As the news washed over him, Owen struggled to maintain his dignity. Though he had recently vacuumed, it would have linted his wool slacks to do what he wanted to do: crumple to the carpet in a heap. The worst possible outcome of their brief outdoor encounters had occurred.
“I’m an honorable man,” he said, clearing his throat to camouflage his hyperventilation. “Whatever the cost to take care of this, I’ll pay. Plus a ride, of course. And absolute secrecy.” With his trembling right hand pressed onto his thudding heart he promised, “I will tell no one. I swear.”
“No,” said Lidia.
“No what?”
“No, thank you.”
Owen blinked. When Lidia repeated her refusal to even consider termination—announcing she was a devout Catholic—he reminded her that he was Catholic, too. God, he happened to know, was a world-renowned forgiver. His flock was entitled to a “Get out of hell free” card at least once in their lives. It was practically in the Bible.
“No,” she said flatly.
“No?”
“No.”
Ever the gentleman, Owen didn’t say, “Screw you, then.” That would have been uncouth. Instead, he promised to compile a list of respected adoption agencies. “Imagine the number of suitable families looking for Caucasian children. There must be hundreds. Maybe thousands. God will praise your selflessness. Think of the joy you’ll bring to an infertile couple!”
“No,” said Lidia again, this time punctuating it with a petulant stamp of her foot.
Owen gaped at her. What the hell did she want? Good lord, they’d only done it twice. They were practically strangers. Well, not practically. They were strangers! He’d wanted to see Death Wish II the night they met, for God’s sake. They didn’t even have the same taste in movies.
“You can’t possibly think we should marry?” he asked, his mouth hanging slack.
“I don’t. But God does.”
Owen almost laughed. It was the eighties. Had the woman never heard of the sexual revolution? Women’s lib? The pill? Had God never spoken to her about the twentieth century?
Lidia abruptly stood up. She took Owen’s hand and placed it flat on her slightly rounded abdomen. “There’s a human life growing inside of me.”
God forgive him, Owen wanted to jerk his hand away. But Lidia took Owen’s other hand and pressed both of them hard against her body.
“Our creation, my darling,” she whispered, bending down so she was right up to his ear. There, she inhaled his earlobe into her mouth and nibbled on it as if it were a tiny cob of corn. Letting her feathery blond hair spill all over his face, she kissed him. First his eyelids, then the tip of his nose, then his bottom lip, then both lips. Her tongue found the roof of his mouth and danced there. Sliding her skirt up over her thighs, she straddled him. With his hands still on her torso, Owen was as tiny limbed as a T. rex. He fell backward on the couch, helpless, moaning as she unzipped his wool slacks. He muttered, “Oh God,” as she somehow maneuvered his manhood through the maze of fabric that separated them. With his girlfriend on top of him, moving in the most exquisite undulating manner, Owen decided it might not be so very terrible to make her his fiancée after all.
Chapter 10
PAPA CZERWINSKI MADE a call or two. He knew people. His tentacles spread far beyond the tiny state of Rhode Island. There were men he’d grown up with in the old country, other bakery owners on the East Coast, restaurateurs, loans he’d made, favors offered and accepted. He was a man with options. His daughter needn’t be a topic for tut-tutting over afternoon tea and pączki. “Such a big baby for a preemie. So soon after the wedding. You’d think a couple who barely knew each other might want to wait one Christmas, at least.”
Above all else, Papa Czerwinski was a businessman. Already he could hear the way his customers would grumble: “The Irishman will be making the babka now? What, tradition has become a dirty word?” Best to get the new husband and the large baby with the Celtic last name out of town before the rabble had a chance to be roused. He picked up the phone. He made a call or two. While Pia was still a baby bump, Papa arranged for his new son-in-law to accept a position at an engineering firm in midtown Manhattan.
“Oh! Manhattan is fabulous!” Lidia’s dark eyes were alight. “At last I’ll see the world.” To the baby still in her belly she said, “See how much you’ve given me already?”
Owen’s parents saw the entire situation differently.
“ ‘A lack of willingness on either side can void the marital contract and annul divine sanction,’ ” Owen’s father read from a pamphlet his parish priest had given him. “It says it right here, son, a lack of willingness. You can still get out of thi
s thing.”
“How can I be unwilling to claim my own child?” Owen asked. “Give him or her a legitimate last name?”
That shut him up. A child, of course, complicated everything.
“I’m afraid it’s a done deal, Dad.”
What else could anyone say?
The reality was, Owen felt like a cartoon character hit by a two-by-four. Everything happened so fast, his cranium was still metronoming back and forth; his ears rang so loudly he could barely hear anything else. One moment he was marveling at the divine geometry of a woman who could swivel her hips on top of him in both a circle and a square, the next he was watching that same woman walk down the aisle toward him wearing an empire-waisted wedding gown at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow.
While Lidia happily lost the last vestiges of her elfin waist at her parents’ bakery, Owen drove four hours down Interstate 95 to find his soon-to-be family a suitable home in their new state. On the way, in the blessed quiet of the car, he had time to think. Lidia, he decided, was being foolish. Manhattan was out of the question. Raising a child in an apartment with no yard? No school down the block he or she could walk to? No street to play kickball in? It was absurd. If she had a fever in the middle of the night, what, they were going to wait for an elevator—perhaps stopping along the way for one of their drunken neighbors—then stand in the rain for a cab? It was virtually child abuse! Plus, Manhattan was so noisy. Who could hear themselves think with all those groaning buses and their screeching brakes? He had a better idea.
“Queens?” Lidia had said, aghast, when Owen called to tell her he’d found them a nice house across the river. “What are you talking about? When I told you I wanted to live on the east side, I meant the Upper East Side of Manhattan.”
“Four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a yard big enough for a swing set, eat-in kitchen.”
“Or maybe Sutton Place. I’m sure I was quite clear.”
“An entire house instead of an apartment, Lidia.”
“Were you not listening? I specifically ordered a doorman building.”
“Ordered?” Owen got quiet.
“You know what I’m saying. I’m not the Queens type.”
Inhaling slowly, Owen replied, “The town is called Middle Village. It’s a family neighborhood—a village—and only a subway ride to the city.”
“Queens isn’t me, Owen. It’s not us, I mean.”
“You haven’t even seen the house. It’s lovely. And light. And very much me. I mean, us. You’ll like it there, Lidia. We all will. I promise.”
“Isn’t Queens Italian?”
Owen’s grip tightened on the phone. “What on earth does that mean?”
“I’m just saying, at the very least, if push came to shove, we should live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There are five Polish bakeries on the main avenue alone.”
“How do you know that?”
“Papa has connections.”
“We don’t need your father’s connections. I have a good job in the city. A straight shot on the subway from our house in Queens. I can walk to the train station.”
“Without my father’s connections, you would have such a nice job in midtown Manhattan?”
Owen stiffened his jaw. Lidia said, “I’m just saying.”
It was useless reminding his new wife that her old-school father had set up his job to protect her from their lip-flapping neighbors. That he’d loved his firm in Central Falls and hated to leave it, hated to leave Rhode Island, period. Even more useless was putting words to the thoughts he couldn’t push out of his mind: I told you I’d run down the hill for protection. I offered money and a ride and absolute secrecy. Lidia made life-changing choices without one whiff of concern for him. How dare she?! Most frustrating of all was her habit of pushing all culpability right out of her mind, as if it never had been the truth from the start.
Manhattan is fabulous! he’d heard her say. Owen pressed his molars together. He had always despised people who used the word “fabulous” and now he was married to one.
“You see my point, don’t you?” Lidia asked, softly.
“Yes. I know exactly what you’re saying.”
“It’s settled then.” Relief flooded her voice. “You’ll do the right thing, mój piezczoch.”
Owen answered, “I already have. Our deposit on the row house in Queens is nonrefundable.”
After slamming down the phone, Lidia had refused her husband’s calls the whole time he was in New York setting up their new life. Which, Owen discovered, wasn’t so terribly awful after all.
PIA JULA SULLIVANT was born on a hazy summer afternoon in a Queens hospital not far from the row house in Middle Village where Owen and Lidia lived in polite cohabitation. In the delivery room Owen couldn’t help but notice that his blushing bride had morphed into Satan. Several times she growled at him like a rabid dog. Once, Lidia barked, “Get out of my face, you prick!”
“Hee hee whoo whoo. Breathe, darling.”
“Cram your own damn breath down your throat and die!”
Owen’s equilibrium was shot. His tidy life was a shambles. He could barely feel his limbs. Still, he persevered at his new wife’s bedside, even as her eyeballs bulged out of her head and he waited for her head to spin in full circles on her neck. She smelled like a hungover bum. Ungrateful, she frequently ordered him out of the room (even screamed for a priest!). Still, he persisted. It was the gentlemanly thing to do as much as it—physically—pained him. Lidia pierced the skin of his palm with her long fingernails more than once. In the grip of a contraction, she squeezed his hand so hard he feared for his metacarpals! Literally adding insult to injury, she turned her mottled face toward him and spewed profanity. Already stunned by the physical disgustingness of childbirth—Good lord, had she shat?—Owen was shocked by her bad manners. In spite of her pain. Sure, he understood lashing out when your insides felt as though they were being ripped out through your private parts. Still, he’d been nothing but kind and accommodating. Calling him a “dickwad” was uncalled for.
Though Owen desperately wanted to back away from the birthing bed, slip into the restroom and wriggle sideways out a window, he stayed. He never let go of Lidia’s claw nor suggested someone spray air freshener. The brutality of childbirth unnerved him. And the very randomness of nature—the way a single sperm can derail an entire life—upset him deeply. One wiggling haploid invades an egg. A diploid is formed. Cells divide. The zygote fuses onto the uterine wall, leeching nutrients from its host. Expanding like a rising cinnamon bun, a heart begins to flutter; limbs, spine, nervous system take shape; weblike veins spread tiny lines of red throughout the organism. The host body changes, rounds out, seeks a nest, demands security. Choice evaporates like a droplet of rain in a cracked lake bed. The child must be born into a stable union. God has His rules. The parents have their say. The legal system intervenes with a contract that, really, was only established so males could ensure paternity. As if a marriage license could keep a woman faithful. Preposterous! The whole machine completely ignores the very real disruption of a baby. With barely enough time to adjust to the absolute presence of marriage—the required conversations across every dinner table, the sound of breathing in your bed all night in spite of those lusciously curved lips, the almost instantaneous ceasing of sexuality, the crossed wires that continuously spark, the inability to come home from work and silently retreat to the basement to fiddle with the water-purification unit you were creating out of river rocks and riparian soil, the wrenching loss of silence itself—a needy mammal is wiggling like an upended cockroach, utterly helpless, dependent upon you for its very life? How could nature allow such carelessness?
Yet Owen never uttered a word about it. He was not that kind of man.
“Breathe, Lidia, breathe. Hee, hee, whoo.”
“Cram it, you bastard!”
Owen Sullivant was many things. A bastard he was not.
Chapter 11
ADMITTEDLY, THEY SHOULD have taken a cab. But Muriel pr
eferred the bus. Cabs so often smelled like the driver’s hair pomade. Plus, did they ever disinfect those vinyl backseats? Even so, waiting for the Riverside Drive bus on a Sunday was maddening. Three separate flashes of white were false alarms. One was a FedEx truck, another the Access-A-Ride minivan. The third was a FreshDirect delivery. Muriel knew from experience that the bus never came when you scanned the horizon for it. You had to look away and pretend you had all day to wait.
“So . . . ,” she said to Pia, turning her back on the flow of downtown traffic, “how’s Emma?”
Attempting to appear nonchalant, Muriel jutted one foot forward at a sporty angle, then immediately retracted it when she noticed that her big toe stuck out of her peep-toe pumps like an unpedicured bratwurst. In the banana-colored sunlight, wearing the white shirtdress for the first time, its buttons tugging open in tiny diamond shapes down her front, she felt like a hulking transvestite. Suddenly, she couldn’t figure out how to arrange her arms in a feminine way. Pia’s pouffy handbag swung carelessly in the crook of her arm. “Lovely as ever,” she said serenely.
“And Will?”
“Working around the clock.”
“Mom and Dad? Heard from them lately?”
“I met Mama for lunch last week. Dad is Dad.”
Muriel nodded.
“You’re well?”
Pia nodded. That about summed up what they had in common and Muriel didn’t need to turn around to know that the bus wasn’t even out of Harlem yet. With her older sister, there was always more unsaid than said. And asking about their brother, Logan, was a waste of time. An artist living in New Mexico, he’d divorced the family years ago.
Silence expanded between the two sisters like a darkening oil spill. A razor nick on Muriel’s bare shin stung from the hasty grooming. And though she hadn’t dared look, she was fairly certain her panty lines were not only visible through the white fabric, they were unevenly situated on her ass, as well. One higher than the other, both causing unsightly butt bulge.