The People We Keep

by Allison Larkin

  As soon as the door closes, Dr. Katim looks up from her clipboard, like she was only pretending to read it. “April,” she says, and kicks her legs to wheel her chair closer to me, “I wanted us to have some privacy, because I don’t know what the situation between you and Robert is.”

  “He’s the father,” I say. “He’s my—” I can’t think of the right word, because he’s more than my boyfriend the way Matty was my boyfriend, but we’re not married. I get a sinking feeling that’s just drowning without the happy. “Is my baby okay?” I ask, even though I think I know what she’s going to tell me.

  “Your baby looks perfectly healthy, has a strong heartbeat, and has to be at least eight weeks old.”

  She grabs a printout from the machine and shows it to me. It’s a photo of the static, but when I look closer, I can see shapes. I think maybe even a face.

  “See here,” she says, using her pen to point to a spot in the snow. “That’s one of your baby’s elbows. I can see feet and hands and even the beginnings of fingers.” Thin streaks of blue ink from a glob on the point of her pen drag across the photo as she points to different parts of my baby. “These are levels of development we can’t see until eight weeks. So we’re a bit off from Robert’s estimate.”

  She gives me the picture. My hands shake.

  “I didn’t put the fetal age on the picture,” she says, “because I want to let you have that discussion on your own terms.” She reaches out and puts her hand over my hand. “If there’s a discussion to be had.”

  * * *

  “Are you okay?” Robert asks when I get to the waiting room. “Is the baby okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s just overwhelming, you know? It’s just—it’s a lot.” The picture is folded up in my pocket. I don’t show him. He’d want to show Ethan and Ethan’s been reading about babies too much. He’d see the elbow. He’d know.

  Robert holds my hand as we walk to the parking lot. His fingers are still tapping out the heartbeat.

  — Chapter 56 —

  I buy a book. One that tells you everything you’re supposed to know about having a baby. I sit at the kitchen table and read the whole thing while Ethan is at a meeting. I hope to find some kind of wisdom that will put everything right in my brain, but each chapter makes me feel worse. There’s all this stuff about what you should eat and what you shouldn’t and pain management and tearing in places you wouldn’t even think could tear. Then there’s the section on how to take care of the baby when it’s actually here. None of it tells me what I most need to know.

  I don’t want to be growing a person in my body. Even if the baby was Robert’s, I think I would still feel like I am trapped inside myself and my skin is too small and I can’t breathe enough air into the deepest parts of my lungs. I press my forehead to the cold enamel tabletop, panting like a puppy on an August afternoon.

  “What are you doing, Angel?” Ethan asks when he walks through the door. “Are you okay? Is the baby—”

  “Ethan—” I try to catch my breath. “Ethan—” and for a moment I think I will tell him everything. Ask what I should do. But if he knows, this family we have won’t work the way we have it. Ethan could tell Robert. Or he could not tell Robert, and I don’t know which is worse. I don’t want him to have to carry my secret or exist in the middle. He was Robert’s friend first. “Ethan, there are bones in my stomach,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “There are bones. Like actual baby bones growing in my stomach.”

  “That’s kind of the point, right?” Ethan says, putting his bag down. “Babies are supposed to have bones. It’s a problem if they don’t.” He kisses the top of my head and gives my shoulders a squeeze. “What are you worried about, sweetheart?”

  So I say the other things I’m thinking instead. “What if I can’t do it, Ethan? What if I can’t stay in the same place? If I’m like my mom and I just can’t handle it?” It’s not hard to push aside the Robert problem when these fears are also true. I can remember watching my mother pack a duffle bag with clothes. And I can so clearly imagine myself in her place, saying, It’s just for a day or two. To clear my head, baby. I’ll be back by the weekend. It’s not that far a leap.

  “You aren’t going to wimp out on your kid,” Ethan says. “You’re the toughest person I know.” He fills two highball glasses with ice, pours us some sweet tea, and hands me a glass. Sits across from me, hands folded on the table, like we’re having a meeting and I have his full attention.

  “I do feel it,” I confess, swirling my tea to hear the ice cubes clink. “That thing I think she felt. The only way I know to fix that kind of restless itch is to put miles between me and wherever I was.”

  “You’re self-medicating with survival,” Ethan says, studying my face as if he knows there’s something there to find. “You’re addicted to drama.”

  “Sure,” I say, pretending I know exactly what he means so maybe he’ll drop it. I worry whatever thread he’s tugging will lead to what I’m trying to hide.

  “If you’re in survival mode you can keep problems buried, because the way you grew up, that wasn’t okay. When you upend your life, you don’t have to sit with how unfair it was. And whatever drama you come up with won’t be worse than the anger and hurt you’re carrying around, because that was the original hurt. That’s the deepest cut.”

  He might be right about the part he understands. When I close my eyes, I always see it: pine needles, my mother’s diamond ring, and my broken guitar, Irene’s Christmas tree, and the stars on Matty’s ceiling, like every moment of my life gets loaded in that motorhome. Everywhere I go, I’m dragging it with me, collecting more hurt and loss and sad sweet memories that I don’t want to hold. But this time I think the drama could be the worse kind of pain. If I tell Ethan and Robert the truth, I could lose everything that’s good, and if I don’t, I’m ruining the good thing anyway.

  “I could be your drama sponsor,” Ethan says. “We’ll have meetings, and when you’re about to grab your keys and hit the road you can call me and we’ll stage an intervention. I’ll bring donuts.”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works.” I wish he could fix everything the way he thinks he can.

  “Don’t say no to donuts,” Ethan says, grinning.

  I wish I could go back to what it felt like when Ethan knew everything about me.

  — Chapter 57 —

  July 1997

  Asheville, NC

  The baby is four and a half months for real, but three and a half to Ethan and Robert. It gets harder every day to remember that their timeline isn’t the real one. Late at night when Robert is working and I don’t have to play, Ethan is asleep, and I’m alone, I have to remind myself. When it’s just me and the baby, I put my hands on my stomach and remember what’s true.

  Robert rubs my belly all the time. “You’re carrying precious cargo,” he says.

  I feel like a steamer trunk.

  On the fridge in his kitchen, he keeps a list of all the dad things he wants to do. Every time I’m over, he’s added something new. Fishing and riding bikes and seeing a Rolling Stones concert, camping in the Great Smoky Mountains, sailing on Lake Julian, Frisbee at the park, building a tree house, catching fireflies in a jar.

  “I was raised by my stepdad,” Robert tells me one night while we’re lying on the couch after dinner. He runs his fingers through my hair, coaxing out the tangles. “I always felt like a guest. I can’t wait to have someone who’s mine.”

  His fingers snag a knot in my hair, and he thinks that’s why my eyes start tearing. “I’m so sorry,” he says.

  The baby kicks for Ethan, but not for Robert. He keeps trying.

  Ethan calls the baby “our little overachiever” for kicking so early. Every time he says it, I feel like it really means April is a big fat liar. I feel like they should just know. They should have figured it out. Sometimes I even hate them for not knowing, but I love them too much to tell the truth.

  Since Robert wor
ks late, I stay at Ethan’s mostly. They don’t want me to be alone, just in case. They’re overprotective.

  Robert buys an old dresser for my room at Ethan’s. He strips it down in the garage and paints it white to match the daybed. “We’ll move it into the baby’s room next door, after,” he says, like it’s already decided where I’ll live. I like having two houses. I like living with Ethan. I don’t tell Robert that one house would make me feel caged. I don’t tell him that sometimes even two houses doesn’t feel like enough space.

  On the nights I stay at Ethan’s, I think about calling Justin. I listen to Ethan brushing his teeth in the bathroom. I hear him spit, swish, spit again. Pee, flush, walk into the hallway. I’ve memorized his patterns like a song. Two steps, creak. One step, creak. Five steps, big creak.

  “Night, Angel,” he yells.

  “Night, E.T.,” I yell back. “Bite the bedbugs.” I hear his bare feet on the stairs, and then I hear the bedroom door close and pop open and close harder. I imagine little white paint chips falling to the floor.

  I think about leaving and driving to Binghamton to tell Justin. I remember running my finger along the dent in his chin and the spikes of his new haircut.

  Justin’s shirt doesn’t smell like him anymore. It smells like a rabbit cage from the funny little cedar cubes Ethan puts everywhere.

  * * *

  Ethan thinks the baby is a girl. He says I’m “carrying high.” I’m sure it’s a boy. I don’t know why. I just am. I want to name him Max. Robert likes Rierden. It was his mother’s maiden name. Ethan likes Ethan. We never discuss what his last name will be. I’m going to give him Justin’s shirt someday. Maybe when he leaves for college. It will be cool and retro by then, like bellbottoms or a Stones t-shirt. I won’t tell him where it came from.

  — Chapter 58 —

  I go to Dr. Katim in secret, alone. Twenty-dollar bills counted out in my purse ahead of time. I still don’t have insurance. Robert keeps saying we need to fix that. I worry about the paper trail. Somewhere on something it will say how old the baby really is.

  “Does Robert know?” she asks.

  “I can’t,” I say. I cover my face with my hands and sob. Dr. Katim hugs me, awkwardly, around my arms. She smells like Listerine.

  It is a boy, just like I knew. She gives me another picture. When I get home, I peel back the lining of my guitar case and hide it with the first one.

  * * *

  The next morning, Ethan leaves early, before breakfast. Robert cooks eggs over easy. There are flowers on the table. He doesn’t talk while we eat. I don’t talk either. I’m afraid of what I might say. I drop my fork by accident, or maybe just to hear a noise, to have something happen. He goes to pick it up and then he’s kneeling. There’s a ring in a box and he’s shaking. “I should have asked you a long time ago,” he says. “I just—I was scared. Don’t say no. Please don’t say no. I want us to be a family.”

  Of course, I say yes. I can’t say anything else.

  The ring was his grandmother’s. He wants to go to city hall. He wants to be married before the baby comes.

  He holds me. My heart could shatter like river ice all over the kitchen floor.

  — Chapter 59 —

  I leave almost everything. I take my guitar, a few skirts, and the shirts that still cover my belly all the way. I leave my Ginger dress and Robert’s grandmother’s ring. I leave a note for Ethan. I tell him everything. I think it’s better that way. That Robert doesn’t have to read it. That it’s coming from a friend. I know it isn’t fair to Ethan, but what I’ve done is already unfair. Nothing will make it less wrong in the end. At least they’ll have answers and Ethan won’t feel like he has to stay here for me.

  I leave the note on Ethan’s sun porch. I leave him my buck knife. Prop the knife and the note up next to his canvas, the brown painting with the squiggles and curves. He’s been working on it for so long now, so many layers of color and light. I see it all of a sudden. It’s me. It’s my hair falling over the body of my guitar. It’s brown and gold and soft and beautiful. It’s me and it’s what Ethan thinks of me and it’s almost enough to make it impossible to leave. It’s almost enough to keep lying, but I can’t. I love them too much. I can’t make them responsible for this part of me they had nothing to do with.

  — Part Three —

  — Chapter 60 —

  November 1997

  Bradenton Beach, FL

  It’s twelve hundred and sixty miles from Anna Maria Island to Little River. I know, because I measured out the map key with a strand of my hair. My car has developed a wheeze, I’m two islands away from the mainland, and it’s a fucking Sunday afternoon—so I’m stuck in bumper to bumper traffic with all the tourists clearing the island to get back to their real lives, where they don’t wear Hawaiian shirts that smell like mothballs and ask the poor pregnant house singer at Ollie’s to play Margaritaville every single goddamn night.

  I’d rather stay on the island, but if I have to go, I’d like to speed. I’m eight months now. Max spends all his time doing tap routines on my bladder, like maybe he learned from Ethan and me and all the Fred Astaire movies when he was just starting to be. I’m going to have to stop so many times that it will take me eons to get there.

  I’d rather stay as far away from Little River as humanly possible. I’d rather eat rusty nails and slurp down dirty shoelaces like noodles. But what kind of person doesn’t go see her dying father? What kind of person doesn’t even go back for that?

  * * *

  I’d gone to the pay phone outside the library to call Margo at two o’clock because that’s our schedule. Every Sunday. We started up again when I got to Florida. She’d update me on Ida Winton’s latest food aversion and Gary’s new twenty-five-year-old whore of a girlfriend, and I would promise her I was fine.

  Mostly I talked about the tides and oranges and confirmed what The Weather Channel told her about Florida that day. I never said anything about the baby. I didn’t know how. I didn’t want her to tell me to come home.

  Today when I called, the phone didn’t even ring. Margo grabbed the receiver on the first microscopic blip of sound.

  “Hey, honey,” she said softly.

  “Hey, Margs, what’s up?”

  She took a breath I could hear.

  “What is it?”

  “Sweetie, your dad’s dying,” she said, and burst into tears.

  I’d never heard her cry before. I didn’t know what to say. It was too much at once to even feel anything.

  “Lung cancer. It’s bad. I don’t think he has much longer.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “Last Sunday? The week before that?”

  “Girlie, your dad is the only one who knew. Not even Irene.” She let out a big sob. “He didn’t want treatment. Said he didn’t want to lose his hair. Likes smoking better than he likes living.”

  “How long?” I touched my fingers to each of the phone buttons without pressing them in.

  “Maybe a week, maybe a few days.”

  “How did Irene not know? How did she let it get so bad?” I spelled out my name with the phone buttons—two-seven-seven-four-five.

  “You know how he gets in his own way. Him and Irene haven’t been getting along for a while. He’s been living in the motorhome for the past few months. Hiding from her. She’s with him now. That woman is some kind of saint, I tell you. It’s not her fault she didn’t know.”

  “I got to go,” I said, because I wasn’t in the mood to hear Margo talking about Irene like a goddess. “Ollie needs me to help prep for dinner shift, you know?”

  “Look, girlie. I’m not saying you’ve got to be here. Lord knows you got to have buckets and buckets of feelings about this. I’m just saying that if you want to be here, or you think someday maybe it’ll be hard that you weren’t here, then you should come.”

  “Love you,” I said, and hung up the phone before she could say anything back.

  I walked out to the beach and thought
about staying. Jumping in the ocean and floating on my back, watching my belly bob in the waves, forgetting I ever even had a father. But instead I got in my car.

  — Chapter 61 —

  I usually like the drive north from Florida. I call ahead, book gigs at places I’ve played before, take three or four weeks to wind my way up the coast. I like to drive the scenic roads and watch the palm trees disappear into hills and fall colors. I visit all the pockets of people I know and find some new pockets to replace the ones that disappear. If my friend Slim has work for me, I head to Nashville and record backup tracks for a few days. Otherwise I’ll drive straight to Savannah and spend a couple nights singing with the house band at a bar on Bay Street. Camp a few nights on Cape May, then make my way to Red Bank to play at The Downtown and stay with Cole while I book my next leg of gigs. It’s the way I pass time. A system that works for me. It’s not a bad life. I get to be nothing but wonderful to people I love and move on before it goes stale. But on this trip there’s no time for gigs or visits or seeing old friends or following the coast.

  My plan was to stay south this year. All summer, when I wasn’t playing gigs, I waited tables for Ollie. Took every shift my swollen feet would allow. I found a house on Bimini Bay with a roof partly covered with tarps, like the money for construction ran out. Plumbing still worked just fine and no one ever came around. Crashing there and living on shift meals let me save up money to rent a real apartment for a few months after the baby comes. Maria, one of the other waitresses at Ollie’s, has a toddler and said maybe we could trade off babysitting and shifts. I tamped down my panic about settling down with the idea that when Max is a little older, we’ll get to hit the road again. I want his world to be big, not just an island. I want him to know the ocean, but I want him to see seasons and meet all the people in my pockets too.