Everything Here is Under Control

by Emily Adrian

  To Carrie, I say, “I miss him.”

  “You’re the one who came here without him.”

  “It was a bad idea.”

  “Really?” Carrie leans back against the window. I wish she would move toward the center of the room. “I think it’s been pretty great.”

  “Um, you didn’t even want me here. When I knocked on your door, you looked at me like I was your landlord.”

  “What landlord? I own the house.”

  I roll my eyes at her pride. Houses in Deerling cost less than a year of Gabe’s salary. “I know that. I’m saying you looked at me like I was going to make you move all your furniture into the kitchen so I could paint your living room an ugly color and justify raising your rent.”

  It’s Carrie’s turn to roll her eyes. “I was just surprised, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t look surprised. You looked like you’d been dreading my arrival for years.”

  “Yeah, well.” She throws up her hands. “Maybe both things are true.”

  I am moving gradually toward the door, straining to hear Jack’s cries. All I can hear is the whine of the elevator. “Seeing you has been great,” I say. “Spending time with Nina has been great. But I’m finally starting to feel like myself again, like maybe I’m going to wake up from this postpartum nightmare soon, and I want to get home. I want my life back. You have to remember how that feels.”

  “Not really.” She has slipped into that strategic boredom, her expression opaque. I could shake her.

  “What do you want from me right now?”

  She gnaws on her thumbnail. “I want you to stay in Deerling another two weeks.”

  “Why do you want that?”

  “Nina’s excited to see her dad.”

  “We can come back another time.”

  “No.”

  “Carrie, he’s my husband.”

  While technically untrue, it’s something I say in New York all the time. No one there knows the difference. Now, claiming Gabe as a member of my own small family while excluding him from Carrie’s is the equivalent of shaking her. As she rises from the windowsill, her lips curl into a smile—one part disbelief, two parts scorn—and I know I’m doomed.

  “You know, you’ve never even thanked me? I could have said no.”

  I swallow. Swallowing hurts. “No to what?”

  “When you told me Gabe kissed you. That you wanted to go to New York with him. I could have said no.”

  “I wasn’t asking your permission.”

  “Well, Gabe did.”

  Not knowing where my baby is makes my heart pound twice as hard.

  “When?”

  “Before he kissed you, he asked if I wanted him to stay. He had already talked to NYU, and they were going to let him defer for a year. We would’ve moved out there after Nina’s first birthday, and then gotten married after Gabe finished school. He had a whole plan.”

  I can feel my lips twitching into a defensive smile. “You’re telling me Gabe proposed to you.”

  “He said if we were ‘reasonably happy’ we could get married.”

  My laughter is stunned and hollow. “How were you guys going to determine if you were ‘reasonably happy’?”

  Carrie sighs. “I don’t know, Amanda. We didn’t get that far.”

  My breasts choose this moment to fill with milk. The sensation is like turning into stone. I grip my shoulder and hope Carrie can’t tell I’m applying pressure to my nipples, countering the pain. Through the window behind her I can see the city’s final burst of fireworks. It’s an antagonizing eruption of color and sound and God-bless-America. I try not to cry.

  The colors blur.

  “He never told me any of that,” I say.

  It’s almost imperceptible, but Carrie softens. She was correct to guess that he never told me, but it was only a guess. “Yeah, well, Gabe always tries to do the right thing.”

  “Which would’ve been . . . marrying you?”

  “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  “I need to go get my baby.” Refusing eye contact, I turn and rush out of the room, letting the door slam behind me. It was insane to let Nina take him away. He’s heavy and squirmy and Nina’s arms appear as thin and weak as raw spaghetti. What if she decided to joyride the elevator? What if she carried him outside to roam the streets of Cleveland?

  What if I can’t find them anywhere?

  It will be Gabe’s fault, my panic decides. Gabe’s fault for not being here already. Gabe’s fault for offering my life to Carrie before he offered it to me.

  I find them about twenty feet down the hall, swaying beside a vending machine. Jack is sleeping peacefully, his cheek flattened against Nina’s shoulder.

  “He likes the sound,” she says, meaning the electric hum of the machine.

  “He’s a connoisseur of white noise. Supposedly, it reminds him of the womb.”

  Nina arches an eyebrow. “Your womb sounds like a vending machine?”

  “With a thunderous heartbeat, I imagine.”

  She appraises me, her concern sweeping my body. In the course of the evening, Nina seems to have aged a decade or two. “You look weird,” she says.

  “Weird how?”

  “Like, nervous weird.”

  “I didn’t know where you’d gone.”

  Nina strokes the top of my baby’s perfect head. “Literally nowhere,” she says.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I read on the internet that she, or he, is the size of a blueberry,” Carrie told me. “I know I should be freaking out, but I actually feel so calm.”

  It was Halloween. We were sitting on the porch of my childhood home, swaddled in sweaters and scarves, depositing handfuls of candy into the pillowcases of neighborhood Spidermans, Harry Potters, and Tinker Bells.

  “You’re having it?” I asked as one group of trick-or-treaters receded and another approached. What I meant was, You’re not getting an abortion? Abortion was a word, maybe the only word, I couldn’t bring myself to say aloud. In 2002, in rural Ohio, teenage girls made their choices quietly, without slapping pro-choice stickers on their notebooks. Someone would have complained, the librarian with the crucifix around her neck or maybe Mr. Wallace, the chemistry teacher, who relished September and June, when nearly every day granted him the opportunity to summon a girl to the chalkboard, ask the class to identify her violation of the dress code, and send her to the office. There, she would be made to don an oversize deerling high school sweatshirt of shame.

  Carrie nodded.

  “Just because you go to church?”

  Snow White asked how many peanut butter cups she could take, while a pirate plundered the bowl. When they were gone, Carrie said, “Look, the test turned positive, and I expected to fall apart. To sob or something.” She looked at me. “If I felt like sobbing, I would terminate. I really would.”

  What if I feel like sobbing? I wanted to ask but didn’t. Carrie was making a body with her body. Privately I wished she wouldn’t, but intuitively I understood the project demanded absolute deference.

  “What I felt instead was . . .” Carrie pressed her hands into her midsection. With a sincerity that made me uncomfortable, she said, “pure joy.”

  My lips formed a word which began as Carrie but. against my will, veered into “Congratulations.” And as soon as I’d said it, I meant it. When you love a person, there is no way to avoid loving that person’s child. Trust me, I’ve tried.

  Carrie rested her head on my shoulder.

  “We should tell Gabe,” I said, my heart breaking on the smooth stone of his name. They had been a couple for approximately six weeks. (Fewer than two menstrual cycles, I’ve since noted.)

  She hesitated. “We?”

  “Yeah?”

  She took a breath. “I don’t want to tell him until after m
y first trimester. There’s some chance I’ll miscarry before then, in which case, he might as well not know.”

  I knew what a miscarriage was—Jaclyn would sometimes refer to the discovery or nausea of a pregnancy between me and my brother, one that hadn’t lasted—but I believed it was a tragedy particular to my mother’s relentlessly difficult life. If I had understood it was common, maybe I would have rooted for Carrie’s pregnancy to fail.

  Luckily, I was naive enough to dismiss Carrie’s concern as paranoia. From the beginning, I took her baby for granted.

  * * *

  The Feldmans showed up the summer before our senior year. Mr. Feldman—as I’ll always think of him, though I’ve tried calling him “my father-in-law” or “Jack’s grandpa” or “Hank”—was temporarily transferred to Deerling after his employer, an East Coast consumer goods corporation, acquired a handful of midwestern factories. The day Carrie and I first laid eyes on Gabe, we were fighting. Or else not fighting but bickering, pausing to get high, and laughing at ourselves for having achieved old-married-couple status—until our buzz faded and we resumed bickering.

  It was August, and we had passed most of the summer this way. I kept pestering Carrie to review and contribute to the list of colleges I’d assembled. Schools that boasted both art and business programs. All were out of state, none Ohio-adjacent. Carrie shared my restlessness, my impatience with the full year of high school looming ahead of us. But while the list gave me hope and purpose, it seemed to fill Carrie with dread.

  We were walking through the woods when she confessed, “I’m not sure I even want to go to art school anymore. I feel like art maybe can’t be taught.”

  “Fine,” I said, annoyed with her apathy, which was supposed to be my affect. “Then pick a part of the country, any part. I’ll go to school there, and you can do whatever you want.”

  “That’s stupid. You’re the one with actual goals. You should have the final say.”

  “So, you’d rather I pick?”

  “I’d rather talk about something else.”

  “What else is there?”

  It was the last question I would ask as the version of myself who did not know Gabe Feldman. Since then, most things I’ve said have had something to do with him.

  He was sitting cross-legged on a footbridge, hunched over a paperback copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a title that sounded to me like heady nonsense. Carrie and I froze on the path approaching the creek. She threw out an arm to prevent me from walking ahead, something she’d done in this spot before. In the spring we’d spotted a coyote, surprisingly slim and projecting a feline calm. In July we nearly tripped on the corpse of a turkey vulture, its clenched talons and wrinkled red head the stuff of nightmares. But this was different. Our shock merged with thrill. Here sat an uncharted boy. He was reading an actual book.

  At some point in the last twenty-four hours Carrie had straightened her hair, which meant she’d gone somewhere without telling me. Maybe to a church member’s wedding or funeral. Maybe to a classmate’s party. Now the humidity was restoring the curls near her temples and behind her ears.

  “Yo,” Carrie said, comically confrontational. Flirtatious. “We’ve never seen you here before.”

  Gabe studied her, then me. Her again. “I’ve never been here before.”

  “Ah,” Carrie said, “Mystery solved.”

  * * *

  When school started a few weeks later, Gabe and I were in the same English class. The teacher relied heavily on the alphabet to govern her classroom; not only were Feldman and Flood seated in neighboring desks, but we were assigned to work together on our inaugural assignment: a portrait of Deerling. A joint expression, either poetry or prose, of what our town meant to us.

  On the first Saturday of the school year, I drove the Toyota—the truck technically belonged to Carrie, but we shared it as casually as we shared sweaters, hair elastics, and tubes of cherry-flavored Chapstick—to the development where the Feldmans had leased one of a dozen identical homes. Two dormer windows were positioned like eyes above a garage door paneled with gritted teeth. I pulled into the driveway as the sun was breaking through storm clouds, restoring the premature dusk to broad daylight. Gabe answered the door, his trio of purebred dogs squeezing between his legs and the doorframe. He led me into the kitchen, where his mother was unloading the dishwasher.

  Mrs. Feldman did not work but was dressed the way my mother might have for a job interview. She looked down at my mismatched socks and said, “Oh, you didn’t have to take off your shoes.”

  My cheeks burned.

  She offered me soda instead of pop and a sleeve of seedy crackers. Or she could slice up an apple, if I preferred. Overwhelmed, I declined everything, though I wanted all of it. I expected Diane to leave the room, but she resumed segregating forks from spoons while Gabe and I sat down to work.

  “I guess I’m kind of drawing a blank,” Gabe said, “on what Deerling means to me.”

  Diane snorted. Behind Gabe, stuck to the fridge, was a certificate declaring him the winner of the Gladwyne Middle School 1998 Ravenous Reader award. The certificate perplexed me. I couldn’t fathom how it had come to be displayed so prominently in a house the Feldmans had occupied fewer than thirty days. Had it been on their refrigerator back in Philadelphia? Had his mother packed it up carefully, among the plates and wooden salad bowls? Did it belong to a rotating set of awards and blue ribbons exhibited throughout the house?

  Already, I understood that Gabe’s parents took him more seriously than anyone had ever taken me.

  Since discovering him at the dump, Carrie and I had been including Gabe in our daily non-adventures. He rode in the narrow back seat of Carrie’s truck and followed us through the aisles of Walmart willingly if not eagerly, amused if not enchanted. Carrie stopped seeking excuses to spend hours away from me, which was a welcome return to normal. Slightly unbearable was the way she always sat on Gabe’s side of the booth at Denny’s, plus the way the two of them sprang apart, like corn kernels in hot oil, whenever I returned from the bathroom.

  In the Feldmans’ kitchen I said, “Our teacher’s super Christian. We could probably get an A if we wrote about how Deerling has more churches per capita than any other town in Ohio.”

  Diane looked up, aghast. “Is that true?”

  My palms were sweating. I couldn’t tell if I was sitting too close or, awkwardly, revealingly far from her son. “I have no idea,” I said.

  It was Gabe who finally proposed we get out of the house, buy a disposable camera from the drugstore, and make a photo essay. He was boyishly confident the teacher would love us for redefining her assignment, and I didn’t care about our grade; I wanted to be alone with him. We drove west, racing the sunset. Gabe rode shotgun and through the window snapped a picture of an apple orchard—the fruit still green and unreachable—and another of a man in a tank top tussling with a punching bag suspended from his front porch. Above a barn in the distance loomed a plume of bluish smoke. Gabe was alarmed.

  “Something’s on fire,” he said.

  “Probably just brush. Or garbage,” I said.

  “People set fire to garbage?”

  We passed a man and a woman standing in grass to their knees, their arms around each other as they watched a couch and two mattresses burn to nothing.

  “Amazing,” Gabe said.

  “You can say it. I won’t be offended.”

  “Say what?’

  “That you hate it here.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “You do. It’s small and depressing.” Small didn’t feel accurate—in fact, we had been driving in one direction for nearly twenty minutes without reaching another town—but it was something I’d grown up believing anyway.

  “It’s real,” Gabe said. He brought the camera close to my face. The shutter clicked. “You’re real.”

  We turned
back toward residential streets. Deliberately, I drove Gabe through Carrie’s neighborhood, where houses looked plausibly suburban, lawns mowed and driveways paved. I stopped the truck when I spotted a soft-bellied dad and his two sons hanging a Cleveland Indians flag above their garage door. The three of them wore red T-shirts and matching baseball caps. Taking the camera from Gabe, I rolled down my window, trusting the family was too preoccupied to notice us, and hardly caring if they did. It was almost dark. We could speed away; they’d never catch us.

  This was the photo that Gabe and I would submit to our English teacher. What did Deerling mean to the new kid and me? Family, we claimed. Baseball, we bullshitted. Lingering in the warm glow of a porch light after the September sun went down.

  We got an A.

  * * *

  When I returned Carrie’s truck to her driveway that night, I told her Gabe had called me real. “What do you think it means?” I asked.

  My best friend shrugged. She was furtively smoking a cigarette. Only her dad was home, and if he emerged from the house Carrie would thrust the Marlboro into my hand, a trick that never failed to soothe her parents, who weren’t fools but maintained a foolish faith in Carrie’s goodness. “That he’s a snob?”

  “He’s not a snob.”

  “That he’s trying to Velveteen Rabbit you?’

  I could have told her Gabe’s attention meant something to me. That I liked him, actually, and had since the day we met him. My gut feeling is that if I had asked her to, Carrie would have left Gabe alone. Perhaps, in her aloofness, she was daring me to ask. To admit aloud that I expected her to yield.

  But instead of admitting anything, I mimicked Carrie’s shrug of indifference, tacitly giving her permission to finish what she’d started.

  Several years into my friendship with Paige, when she was twenty-six and I was twenty-two, I finally revealed to her the real reason behind Gabe’s seasonal trips to Ohio. In boozy desperation—Gabe was in Deerling for Nina’s fourth birthday; I missed him; I missed her—I laid bare the devastating sequence of events and asked Paige what I’d never had the guts to ask Carrie.