“There’s something I need to say,” Lucy says, when I come back on the phone.
“Of course.” I wait for her to lay into me, to tell me I’m a shitty friend for not showing up to her child’s funeral.
She starts crying. “Fuck, I’m so tired of crying.”
Up on the second floor of Kamal’s house, the curtains part slightly and Laila peeks out. I wave, give her a half smile.
“Only Josh knows this. And the medical examiner.” She gets her voice under control and begins speaking with the flatness of a confession: words she’s rehearsed for some jury, for me. “He had such a hard time staying asleep. I told you that. He flailed around in his crib. Even when we swaddled him, he’d burst out of the blanket. So a week or so before he—I started putting him down on his stomach. He slept better that way.”
“Okay,” I say, to encourage her to continue, and the composed voice is gone.
“No, it’s not okay. Don’t you know? You don’t do that these days. Back to sleep. Always put your baby down to sleep on his back. So if he has some—I don’t know—some breathing problem, something wrong with him for some unknown fucking reason, he’s less likely to suffocate. I wanted him to sleep. And he never woke up.”
Lucy is wailing so loudly now I think protectively of Laila, though of course from her second-floor perch, she couldn’t possibly hear.
“But they’re not faulting you, right? It’s not illegal to put your baby down that way. People have done it for years, and their babies—you didn’t cause his death, Luce.”
She doesn’t respond, but she’s stopped sobbing, and so I keep talking, telling her in as many ways as I can think of that she cannot blame herself, that she must not, that I will not allow her to. This is why she’s called, why she’s saved this secret for me. Because she knows I’ll deliver, that this is my wheelhouse—the thing that makes you feel just a tiny bit better about being your faulty self—and my voice gets stronger and stronger with relief over having something to talk about that isn’t just the raw terrible truth of it, which matters beyond anything and which nothing will change.
When we hang up and I get out of the car, Laila opens the door before I can knock, and asks, “Who were you talking to?”
“My friend Lucy.”
“Does she live in Seattle?”
“No, she’s in Rhode Island. Far away.”
Laila studies my face, and for a moment I wonder if Kamal said something to her. But no. There would have been no reason for him to do that.
“Do you want to hear a joke?” she asks.
“Sure.”
“Why was the baby ant confused?”
“Why?”
“Because his ants were uncles. I mean, his uncles were ants.”
“Good one,” I say, laughing at her flub despite myself, despite the conversation in the car that weighs heavy on my chest.
“I messed it up.”
“It’s still funny, though.”
“Papa’s working. I’ll go get him.”
She zips off, and I think about stopping her, grasping her thin shoulders and peering straight into the eyes that look so much like her father’s and yet are hers alone. Actually, it’s you. You’re the one that I want.
I’m not sure who will break up with whom and when, but I think it will be mutual. I think it will be soon. We’ll be civil and tastefully sad—no hysterics, no dramatic declarations. Perhaps we’ll have one final night of quiet sex. If I see Laila again, it will be only by accident: down the aisle of a Middle Eastern market in the International District, across the cavernous fountain at Seattle Center. There can be no custody arrangement between an ex-girlfriend and boyfriend and his child with another woman. No Wednesday evenings or Sunday afternoons together. Not even the lesser holidays: Columbus Day, Veterans Day, April Fools’.
When I was fifteen, though I’d spent eight weeks longing for that wretched summer camp to end, on the last day I was heartbroken. That I was no longer going to lock eyes with Lucy at breakfast every morning, while Eva Braun led the senior girls in a camp cheer. Or hang out at the canteen in the evening, drinking orange soda and popping Mike and Ikes, trying to soothe ourselves for not fitting in by critiquing everyone else. I was heartbroken that we lived in different states; that I wasn’t sure she needed me as much as I needed her.
Our friendship survived. Still, I know how easily it could have gone the other way. If she hadn’t been the one to call me first and ask, “What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza?” If she hadn’t talked me through parents that didn’t understand and relationships that fell apart, and taught me that humor can be what saves you. So that I could grow up to be a woman waiting for her to tell me a joke again and make me laugh—even after what she’s suffered, even when I should be the one building the boat, setting out from the forest to find her, as fast as the river will carry me.
Love Bug, Sweetie Dear,
Pumpkin Pie, Etc.
He called her by her name, Serena, only under certain circumstances. When they were about to be late for some event because she was still in front of the mirror, frowning at her hair. When she stewed over some small mistake she’d made. When she predicted a negative outcome instead of a more hopeful one.
Otherwise, he called her all of the things she used to wonder if she would ever be called when she was thirteen years old, shy and pimply, and falling asleep at night listening to 92.5 KISS FM on her headphones: Honey. Darling. Sweetie. My love. My lover. Sometimes he riffed on her name: Serenita, serenade me. Having studied in Argentina for a year in college, he had a repertoire of telenovela-style endearments for her too: Mi vida. Mi corazón. Mi alma. He was a big man with a carefully shaved face, who walked around the house singing Cole Porter tunes, ’80s pop, and Puccini arias. He loved William Blake, Frank Lloyd Wright, Maurice Sendak, spaghetti carbonara, air-conditioning, and the smell of vanilla. As they stroked and sighed their way toward sex, he would murmur in her ear: You, you, you, you. The word transformed her; she became someone lovelier than herself. When their personality differences plunged them into dispute, the tension could lead to grim silence for days at a time. And then she would miss the familiar harmonies of his voice—relating bits from his constant reading, humming tunes from his repertoire of songs, buzzing the buzz of their lives together.
His name was Henry and Serena called him Henry. There’d been a time early on when she’d tested out a few pet names for him, but they sounded phony, like she was trying to be some other kind of softer, sweeter girlfriend—maybe one who enjoyed yoga, knitting, making soup—or like she was imitating him.
After they married she could present him to others as my husband, and that appealed to her categorical impulses. She worked as a research librarian at the nearby university. He was a freelance book designer, working from home in a studio in their attic. She paid for their health insurance. He drew funny pictures on the napkins that came with their takeout dinners. She liked sitting behind her desk at the library, surveying the vast, orderly collection before her. He liked holding the book manuscript in his hands, still coverless, waiting for him to fashion its one perfect dress.
* * *
—
They were going to be that couple who didn’t have kids, who lived in a house free of soggy Cheerios on the floor and crayon marks on the wall, who could go out together spontaneously any night of the week. They were going to read thick classic novels and listen to the most inventive podcasts and travel frequently to foreign countries, serenely sipping their airplane cocktails above the clouds, while the inevitable children of other people squalled in another row. They were going to save well for retirement, and find doctors to prescribe medication they could use to kill themselves if it came to that, and die without leaving anyone except the rest of the world behind.
Then, when they were both thirty-seven, Henry started offering to hold b
abies, playing peek-a-boo with toddlers in restaurants. Serena often came home from work to find him next door, in the driveway of their neighbors’ house, shooting baskets with the nine-year-old boy. They went to see one of those European movies about a gruff older man befriending a winsome child, and Henry kept wiping his eyes. One Saturday morning, when Serena was making a rare attempt at French toast, he came into the kitchen and swept his arms around her.
“Honey, I’ve changed my mind. I want to have a baby. With you.”
“Not with Adrienne?” she teased, stalling for time. A divorced piano teacher, Adrienne lived down the street. The previous evening, at a neighborhood party, she kept swooping around Henry with her giant bosom and swirling hair, suggesting they make music together.
“She’s forty-three. You’re getting there, but you’re not that old yet.”
“I bet she could squeeze some milk out of those breasts.”
“You still don’t want to?” Disappointment made Henry handsome: his eyes greened, his lips plumped.
“We both didn’t want to.”
“People change. We could be the kind of parents we wished we had.”
Serena concentrated on whisking the bright eggs into milk. Seeing her friends become mothers had only solidified her lack of interest in becoming one herself. She was content to be the pseudo aunt, to buy the children beautiful picture books and fancy cupcakes, spend a few hours in their self-absorbed company, and then drive home in her clean car. She didn’t envy the interminable job her friends had taken on. The way they could never have an uninterrupted conversation when their kids were around. The way they complained about being so tired; the way they looked so tired. Even the occasional pleasure they seemed to take in their children—and sure, the kids were cute in ponytails or frog boots, and they said funny things sometimes—well, frankly, it embarrassed her. The exaggerated smooches on grubby cheeks. The crowing about some developmental achievement that, soon enough, would mean nothing at all. So the kid could eat solid food, walk, talk, recite the alphabet, pump his legs on a swing, memorize a Disney song. Who couldn’t, sooner or later?
But now Henry was under the spell of that biological enchantment: to recombine DNA for the hundred billionth whatever time. And what would be the marital compromise? Have half a kid?
“Sit down,” Serena said. She served them rubbery French toast and lukewarm coffee.
Henry wouldn’t stop looking at her. “So you’re completely set against this?”
“We should talk about it.”
“Okay.” He cut the French toast into four giant squares and drenched them in syrup. “Go ahead and talk.”
“Why do you want a baby?”
“It might be fun. It could be amazing. I know I used to say I didn’t feel the need to have kids, but that was probably just youth talking. Youth and fear. Now I’m getting old and sentimental.”
“You were always sentimental.”
“The other week, at Ed and Marta’s, when Julien was crying? I took him outside to look at the birds, and I thought, why am I afraid I’d be like my dad? I’m not a cold person. Why would I be a bad father?”
“You wouldn’t be,” she said. “But having your own child isn’t like entertaining a baby for an hour. It’s all the time. It’s constant.”
“Hey, I’m not naïve. I know how much work it is. I know I don’t even know how much work it is.”
She could foresee how this would go: the back and forth that calcified into entrenched positions. People left each other for less. People lived for years, decades, with grand resentments lodged like icebergs under the surface of every petty fight. It would be on her head: that she’d claimed Henry’s endearments for herself alone, prevented him from creating another human being upon whom to bestow them.
* * *
—
She got pregnant within the first month of sex without a condom, when she was flooded with semen and panic. All these years, then, birth control really had served as a protective shield against spawning a gaggle of babies. Now her belly grew bulging and sloppy; her small breasts gained heft. She craved potato chips, white bread, expensive fruit. She was disgusted by vegetables and anything that came from a cow. The ultrasound revealed a looming skull, a knobby spine, a girl’s budding genitals, a heart pulsing with barely a chest cavity to enclose it. There was an inscrutable creature inside her: was it angel or alien, darling or demon?
They’d gone around and around for a few months—a cycle of arguments and impasse—before Serena gave in. Any reasons she produced for why it would be better to remain childless couldn’t best the claims Henry made. Her side was founded on negation, while he was angling for something, someone, a life. She couldn’t win that one. It struck at the core of the fundamental clash between them—his native ebullience versus her inherent skepticism. But when she finally told him, Okay, let’s try, it had to be as if she were doing it wholeheartedly. She had to act like him now.
At night in bed, his arms the rings around the Saturn of her enlarged belly, he lobbed names in her ear. “Olivia?”
“Too popular. It’s number four for girls’ names.”
“You’ve done research?”
“It’s common knowledge.”
“Paige?”
“Cute. But too cute. Like, look, aren’t we bookish.”
Their daughter’s name would chime through the house, through their days—the most corporeal of words. It had to be special but not too special—a name sturdy enough to last a lifetime.
“Too bad we weren’t Soviets,” Henry said, humming a Slavic-sounding tune. “Anna, Olga, Tatyana. Were they allowed anything else?”
“Svetlana.”
“And Svetlana. That’s why people miss Communism, I guess. Freedom from too much choice.”
He kept trying till he got it right.
“Ella?”
“Still too popular—number twelve, I think.”
“Willow?”
“Too naturey.”
“Jade?”
“Too jewelryish.”
“You’re a pain in the ass. Belle. Bella. Beautiful beauty.”
“No B names, remember? B.S. It fails the initial test.”
Everything seemed wrong or already used up. Saturn lost its rings as Henry withdrew his arms and rolled away from her. “Okay,” he grunted. “Eve.”
Serena tested it out. “Eve Skolnik. Eve.” Brief yet lingering. An exhale, an incantation: summer, twilight, rooftops. An evening, an eve. It was both a delicate sliver of time and an ordinary occasion.
“I like it,” she said.
“Are you serious?”
“You suggested it.”
“I was joking. Playing God.”
“It’s actually a good name. Plenty of people are named Adam and no one thinks about the association. It’s not like Christian, or Jesús, or something.”
The beeswax candle on the bureau cast the shadow of Henry’s hand on the wall, a giant, animating shape. In the beginning was the name.
* * *
—
Eve was made of wailing, of banshee mouth and fighter fists. She might as well have been called There There, or What’s The Matter, or Please Shut Up Already. Two states of being were known to her: fury and sleep.
The only person Serena had known who got this mad, this close to her, was her father. Like a shrill whistle blowing through her childhood, he yelled about shirkers and swindlers, lights left on when no one was home and all the Raisin Bran gone. His blue eyes sputtered in his red face; his outrage torpedoed out at his three domestic targets. Serena’s mother yelled back sometimes, yelled at him to stop yelling. Her older brother developed a series of carefully modulated responses, tinged with irony subtle enough to fly beneath their dad’s radar. Serena said nothing. She cowered at his cartoonish displays, but she was also impr
essed, in her shyness, that someone could release so much noise into the world. By the time she moved out of the house for college, she’d come to see how his own emotions were too much for him. She almost wished he’d go ahead and finish off one of his outbursts by hitting something or even someone, but he never did. He was a fly knocking wildly against the glass of the jar he was trapped in. When she was twenty-seven, a few months before she met Henry, her father died of a heart attack, and though he collapsed in the condo her parents had retired to, she pictured him in the living room of the house she’d grown up in, where she used to watch him as a kid, afraid he was yelling so hard he would burst open, and then she could feel sorry for him. She could gather up the pieces and fit them together, like one of those three-dimensional wooden puzzles, and place his heart back inside his chest, where it would stay safe.
The book about how to calm your baby said to swing her vigorously back and forth. Swing her harder than you’d think. Serena paced the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, with all the lights turned out, sailing Eve like a boat in a stormy sea. The edge of violence in it gave her more satisfaction than those tedious maternal tactics: cooing, nursing, humming lullabies. Sometimes she wondered how much vigor was too much, how much more force she would need to apply to be on the wrong side of those public service announcements on the bus: Never shake your baby.
Surely any day now, the child’s real parents would return and collect her. Surely Serena and Henry were the surrogates, the starter parents. They’d done all right; they’d kept her alive. But soon they’d be relieved from their strange duties and change back into themselves. Time would resume its prevailing sensible arrangement: work by day, sleep straight through the darkest hours of night. They’d lie in bed embracing, two independent adult bodies, listening to each other’s unremarkable breath.
Occasionally Henry, prone to nostalgia, would reminisce.
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