A Necessary End (18 page)

G
o big or go home, and I'm not going home—not to Leah in her spandex, pumping out her world-class tits and eyeballing my baby. She hasn't picked him up yet, and as far as I know, she only touched him that one time, on the foot. But the escalating nature of her involvement suggests I need to take precautions. She must have an iron will not to go near him, since he's totally adorable.

I can't take any chances. I need to start leaving the house with him, leaving her behind.

I've blown my hair out for the first time in weeks, and I put on a short sundress with a halter, since it's a perfect spring day. The dress feels almost like a costume, a relic from my former life. I don't need to display my womanhood this way anymore, when I've evolved into a fuller form of womanhood. But it's a little treat for Gabe. He got in bed late last night and I could feel him erect as a weather vane, pressing into my spine.

Maybe we'll have sex tonight. Or we won't. It's not that big a deal to me, which I take as another sign of my evolution. It occurs to me that some of my libido over the years has been a quest for reassurance:
I affirm my value for Gabe by fucking him silly; I do penance for whatever role I may have had in what happened to his brother; I keep us on an even keel. Our relationship shouldn't require that kind of maintenance. It should be stronger than that.

I strap Michael into his car seat, reading and rereading the instructions, double-checking the diagrams. He seems secure, but even so, I white-knuckle it all the way to the school. Unfortunately, the car seat is rear-facing so I can't see his face. I make lots of noises, hoping for a call-and-response, but he's silent. Panic nibbles at me until we're in the parking lot, where I see that he's fallen asleep.

He barely stirs as I put him in the BabyBjörn. He's used to that, loves when I wear him around the house strapped to my chest as I do household chores. Unloading the dishwasher is way more fun with his feet dangling over my abdomen and his happy gurgles in my ears.

I smooth my dress down over my ass, just in case I happen to run into Principal Jorgenson. I didn't clear my visit with her, and I'll do my best to avoid her. She'd just try to make me feel bad about myself, same as my own mother would have.

I stop off first at Mel's classroom. I've been feeling a little bad about how abruptly I ended our visit last week. She didn't deserve that, when she was just trying to look out for me. I'm not that good with people looking out for me. Leah and I might have that in common.

I knock, and Mel opens the door, smiling with such genuine delight that I know all is forgiven. “I wanted you to meet Michael,” I say.

“Hi, Michael!” she says in a high, singsongy voice. She waves me inside. “Everybody, look! It's Mrs. T and her baby!” She doesn't need to tell them his name, it's written across his onesie and across the matching cap. There are tears in her eyes as she turns back to me. “He's just beautiful, Adrienne.”

The kids surround us, and Mel makes them Purell their hands from the industrial-sized bottle on her desk before touching any part
of the baby. They ask questions about him but none of them ask where he came from. As far as they're concerned, he's all mine, there is no other mother, and I bask in that. It's an impromptu party, and Michael and I are the guests of honor.

I'm in high spirits as I cruise down the hall to my classroom. The door is opened by a plain-looking woman in her late twenties, her hair in a messy bun at the nape of her neck. “Yes?” she says, unsmiling. She looks at me like the interruption I suppose I am.

“Ms. Brewer?” I say.

“Yes?” she repeats.

“Oh, right.” I laugh. “We've never met. This is my classroom.”

She looks down at Michael, who's drooling a little. I wipe at his mouth with a burp cloth.

“I'm Adrienne. Mrs. T, if you ask the kids. And this is Michael.”

“I see that.” Her smile seems forced. She doesn't like monogramming? Or babies? Has she been taking etiquette lessons from Jorgenson? She doesn't move out of the way.

“I'd love to see the kids. I've missed them.”

“We're prepping for end-of-year testing. It's really not the best time.” She probably didn't like that I called it “my classroom.” She might be territorial. I get it. I'm no stranger to that emotion myself.

I toggle up and down, and Michael emits an adorable noise. I give her an ingratiating smile. “I really want the kids to meet him. It'll just take a minute.”

She finally steps aside. I poke my head in theatrically. “Anyone looking for a babysitting job?” I call out to the kids, before entering the room more fully.

There are exclamations and excited talk. They start to rush to the front of the room, but Ms. Brewer holds up a hand and they halt immediately. It's an impressive display of classroom management.

“It's okay,” I tell Ms. Brewer. “They can come up and check him out. I have Purell in the diaper bag.”

I have worlds within worlds in the diaper bag, enough for any
contingency I could encounter, so much gear that it's making my shoulder ache. I set it down on the floor.

“You said this would only take a minute,” she reminds me. To the class: “Stay in your seats. You can ask a few questions, and then we need to get back to the lesson.”

All I get is a quick round of show-and-tell? I can see that the kids are disappointed, too, that they really want to be up close. I forgot how little they are. Not when compared to Michael, but still. Now that they're in front of me, I miss them terribly, and it's like they're behind glass. I can't touch them, and they can't touch me.

I glance around the room. Ms. Brewer's given it a complete remodel, and none of my old displays remain. Now there's nothing but poster boards with addition, subtraction, and phonics. She's managing to take all the fun out of introducing the kids to my baby, so I can only imagine what she does to grammar and math.

“Go ahead,” she tells them. “Ask your questions.”

Understandably, they're stymied for the moment. What should have been enjoyable is now high pressure, a mini-test.

“This is Michael,” I say, smiling around at them. “He's three weeks old.”

“Do you love him?” Angie asks, stroking her left braid. Oh, Angie, sweetest girl.

“I do.” I smile wider. “I love him very much.”

“He's not really yours, right?” Dominic says. Such a predictable little asshole he is. I actually feel a swell of affection.

“He's really mine.” I keep smiling. “Someone else gave birth to him, but he's my son.” Dominic is scraping against an uncomfortable truth, though, one I try to forget: In an ordinary adoption, Leah would have signed her rights away weeks ago. Technically, legally, Michael is still her son.

He lets out a piercing scream. It's his hunger cry. “Sorry,” I say to Ms. Brewer. “I'll just get his bottle.” It's actually a bottle of ready-made formula; all I have to do is put the nipple on top. It didn't seem sanitary to bring Leah's milk, unrefrigerated. I prefer formula, anyway.

“We should wrap up,” Ms. Brewer says. “We really need to . . .”

I ignore her and rummage in the diaper bag. Michael is increasing in volume. A couple of the kids put their hands over their ears, as if it's an air raid. After a few fumbles, I get the nipple on the bottle, and the bottle into Michael's mouth. It's an odd angle, with him in the Björn, so I unstrap him and let him rest sideways in my arms. It's his usual position, but he starts struggling against me. “Sorry,” I mutter, my face beginning to flush. “I don't know what's wrong with him.”

“Let's all thank Mrs. T for stopping by!” Ms. Brewer says.

“No, really, he'll be fine.” I shift him and sing softly, but he's still resisting the bottle. Oh, shit. That's what it is. He's rejecting the formula; he wants Leah's milk, which he's been drinking exclusively. He doesn't want what I can give him. He wants what only she can provide.

I think of Dominic's comment—“He's not really yours”—and the blood pounds in my head, suffusing my face. I've been exposed as an imposter. I'm not the real mother; I can't even feed my child. They're watching me flounder, and fail.

“At home, he never does this,” I say. Ms. Brewer is looking at me with sympathy.

I dimly remember the pride I felt in Mel's classroom. But it seems like another epoch, like it happened to somebody else.

I
t wasn't my best day at work, to put it mildly. I'm off my game. Selling cars is about sensing each customer's pulse points, and when and how to apply pressure. Before the kid arrived, I used to coast on my intuition. Now, to use a sports analogy, I've lost my flow.

On the one hand, work's still an oasis. No one knows about the kid, so no one can ask about him. But he intrudes anyway. I get these images of him with Adrienne—nothing that should be creepy, just generic mother-son stuff—and yet, I'm creeped. Then I realize that I'm actually the creep for thinking like I do. It's pretty hard to focus on anything when you're hating yourself.

Today I come home and there's Adrienne, sans kid, hair silky-straight, looking hot in a short dress, smiling and saying, “I made you dinner.” The lights are low and there are candles on the table. I want to ask where the kid is, and where Leah is (are they actually off together? Is Leah babysitting?), but I feel like that might kill something. So I'm going to assume that Adrienne's got it all under control.

“I've been neglecting you,” she says, twining her arms around my neck and looking into my eyes. It shoots right to my gonads.

“It hasn't been that bad,” I say, because I can afford to be magnanimous.

She gives me a kiss on the lips that lingers, though she doesn't open her mouth. I guess she wants to have dinner first. That's okay, I can wait. All signs point to a sure thing.

We drink wine and eat pasta. I'm trying to hurry because who knows how long we've got before the kid has some need she has to attend to.

“I've been so wrapped up in Michael,” she says, skewering penne and popping it in her mouth. I pause as she chews. I want to hear the rest of this. But it seems there's no rest. That's it, just an acknowledgment.

That's enough, though. Obviously, she's doing something about it right now. The kid's in his room, presumably, and I see the baby monitor is on the kitchen counter, not on the dining room table with us. She's letting me know it's going to be different from now on.

I put my hand on top of hers. “I understand,” I say. “You're finally a mother. You did it.”

She grins at me, but there are tears in her eyes. “We did it.”

I wait to see if she's going to talk about the elephant in the room, in every room—she loves the kid, and I don't—but instead, she tells me about their first outing.

She makes it funny, focusing on how she dodged Principal Jorgenson and on the stick-up-her-ass sub, Brewer, and on the perils of trying to feed a baby in a Björn. I laugh because she
is
funny, she always has been, but I feel like something's getting left out. There's some underlying pathos in this story. I can see it in her face.

I finish off the last of the pasta and then the wine. I'm aware that we've been sitting at the table for a half hour, and we're on borrowed time. At any moment, that kid could wake up and cock-block.

It's a dilemma: Do I probe to find out what else happened, or do I stick with Adrienne's version?

She'll tell me when she's ready to tell me.

I grab the back of her neck and pull her toward me. We kiss like we're famished. Then we're heading down the hall. As we pass Leah's room, I think I can hear her voice through the door. So she is home, but who she's talking to and what she's saying, that's not my business or my problem. For the first time in weeks, it's all about Adrienne and me.

In the bedroom, we claw each other's clothes off. I feast on her, traveling from her neck to her nipples to her stomach and beyond. After a few minutes, she pulls my head up and guides me inside her. Missionary sex is fine with me. Better than fine.

I could come in seconds, it feels that good to be accepted into her body again, but I want us to do it together. We need to be aligned again.

But when I look into her eyes, there's a sense of vacancy. She looks—is it possible?—a little sad. She's wet and pulsing around me, and I want to take that as an answer. Maybe she's not totally here with me but that's okay. It's normal. She's supposed to be listening for her baby, it's what mothers do.

I don't want to think of Adrienne as a mother right now. Nothing could turn me on less.

Instead, I stop thinking of her as Adrienne. I let myself get lost in fantasy: She's a hot mom that I just met at the dealership, and her baby is down the hall so we need to be quiet, she needs to listen for him, but a part of her doesn't care because she wants me that bad. She saw me on the lot and said, “Him. That guy. I've got to have him.”

Her fingernails grip my back, and I grind into her. She had to have me, above all else. It was all she could think about.

I don't look at her face. I won't look into her faraway eyes.

I'm all she could think about. All, all, all . . .

“Oh, God,” I hear her say, over and over, and then I let myself go. It's like pulling the rip cord on a parachute and coming down to earth. The adrenaline, the plummeting, the landing.

I fall against her naked chest and heave. Barely a minute passes,
and then, as if on cue, the kid starts to cry. Without a word, Adrienne gets up and yanks on a T-shirt and sweatpants. I watch her go.

I can't remember when, if ever, I've resorted to fantasy. But then, I can't remember seeing that look in her eyes. The elsewhere look. When we make love, all she wants is to be with me. So it wasn't just fantasy, it was memory.

But she is somewhere else, right now. She's in the nursery, feeding and rocking him. Soon, she'll be singing.

I could be there with her. Some of the distance between us is my doing. I've been afraid of the kid, imbuing him with some crazy supernatural power. He's not the ghost of my brother; he's a newborn baby. I need to get my shit together.

It's been a few minutes and he's still crying. Normally, he shuts up the second he sees that bottle.

I tell myself to get out of bed and go to her. She put in effort tonight, and now it's my turn. This might be one of his inexplicable crying bursts, and I should be there with her, with both of them. I can rock my son and sing to him, too. We can be a family, if I let us. Who's stopping me? Adrienne never told me to get lost; she never said she doesn't want me around. Sure, she nitpicks, but that could be a test. If I want my wife, I've got to reclaim her.

I do want Adrienne, badly, yet I can't seem to move. In my head, I hear that old Talking Heads song, the one about it not being my beautiful house or my beautiful wife. The one that goes, “My God, what have I done?”

I start coaching myself. Tough-love stuff like, “What kind of pussy doesn't take care of his own wife and kid? What kind of pussy hides out in his bedroom?” I'm channeling Coach Lake, my high school baseball coach. That guy was so scary, he got you to do things you would never have even tried. Come to think of it, he's got that in common with Adrienne, though their methods are diametrically opposed.

The crying's stopped. It's a good omen.

With Coach Lake's help, I manage to pull on my clothes and go to the nursery. The door is closed, and I think of knocking, but that might wake the kid. Michael, that's his name. I need to stop being afraid of it.

I push the door open as quietly as I can, and Adrienne is where I thought she'd be: in the glider, with the kid—Michael—sleeping against her. The empty bottle is on the floor, illuminated by the night-light. As my eyes adjust, I can make out what she's doing: She's trimming his nails with these tiny clippers. Trimming his fucking nails, like she's got all the time in the world. Like there's nowhere she needs to be, no one she needs to get back to.

I retract, pulling the door shut behind me. She never even noticed I was there.