An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (5 page)

Rachel thinks of this often as the days pass and Harry doesn't call. Maybe Mary had known something, after all. Maybe she even knew about the kitchen table. Or the job. She would be upset that Rachel hadn't told her everything. So would she then keep some information from Rachel? Throughout the weekend—it rains every day—as she thinks of ways to occupy Sofia, she almost calls Mary several times. She almost calls Harry. But in the end she just helps Sofia make a large floor puzzle of Madeline and Pepito, watches
Mary Poppins and The Wizard of Oz
too many times, and eats a lot of junk food. By the time Monday comes, Rachel is relieved to see Sofia off to day care, relieved even to go to work at the toy store.

R
ACHEL HAS COME
up with a list of excuses. He knows that Sofia is away this coming weekend; he will ask her out for Friday night. He is waiting the obligatory week between dates. He is in Paris. He is dead.

She goes to the interview in Boston on Wednesday,
dressed in her most sophisticated suit and a pair of borrowed patent leather Mary Janes with chunky heels that her friend Liz swears are “in.” Although she does not expect to see Harry, she decides that if she does, he will see how great she can look.

In fact, she doesn't see him. Instead, she sails from office to office in Government Center, talking to different people who are delighted to see her—
Harry says you're perfect for this job!
—and who, finally, simply, offer her the job. She can start in September. She will have to move to Paris. They have lists of apartments, of schools for Sofia, of shipping companies for her furniture; they give her maps and a guide to Paris and a little booklet called
Now that You Are an American Living in Paris. They say, Harry was right! You're perfect for this job
.

Still, no word from Harry.

But Rachel feels her life has taken a right turn, after three years of wrong moves and bad decisions. She looks around her crummy apartment and imagines where she and Sofia will be in two short months. Fuck Harry, she thinks. And when she explains to Sofia about the job, her daughter's eyes grow wide. “Will I meet Madeline?” she says. “And Miss Clavel?” Rachel, for an instant, almost thinks they might.

T
HE FIRST THING
that goes wrong is that Rachel forgets to pack Sofia's Madeline doll for her weekend with Peter.

“I'm not even going to discuss her overdependence on her T-O—” Peter barks into the telephone.

“T-O?” Rachel asks him. She is already edgy. They are in
the middle of a huge thunderstorm and she hates talking on the phone during storms.

“Transitional object,” Peter explains. Rachel is sure this is something Yvonne says. “The point right now,” he continues, “is that she's hysterical and I can't change her overdependence in one night, so you have to bring it over right now.”

Lightning scars the sky.

“Drive all the way down there? In this?” Rachel says. It's a half hour in good weather. There are curvy roads, traffic.

She can hear Sofia crying in the background.

“I'm on my way,” she tells Peter.

But before she can leave the phone rings again. Maybe he has calmed her down, Rachel thinks, and answers it.

“Rachel? It's Mary.” She sounds nervous. “I have to tell you something.”

“This isn't a good time,” Rachel says. “Sofia is with her father and she's upset—”

“Harry is back with Victoria. There. I've said it. Ever since that day at the playground I've been feeling just awful, because I knew they were back—they got back together the very next night after you met him—”

“The next night?” Rachel asks, to be certain she is hearing correctly. She sits down, holding Madeline on her lap. “That's impossible.”

“Maybe he saw you for lunch just to be polite, to be friends, you know,” Mary is saying.

Rachel thinks about him strutting naked around her kitchen. “I don't think so,” she tells Mary.
That's why I called,
he had said. About the job. She thinks of her poached chicken, the open bottle of wine, and feels embarrassed.

“Look,” Mary says, her voice easier now, “the point is I wanted you to know. It's crazy really. They're actually getting married. Can you believe it? All in a matter of days. It's crazy.”

“I think Dan's cousin is a shit,” Rachel says. “A real shit. Trust me, he did not come over here for cookies and milk and a round of ‘Kumbaya.'”

Rachel hears Mary's sharp intake of breath. “I'm certain I don't know,” Mary says.

“Well, I do. All he wanted was . . .” She struggles a moment, then says, “All he wanted was a good piece of ass. I'm sure he's very happy, the little rooster.”

She knows she has shocked Mary and for some reason, she's glad.

“I know you've got to go,” Mary says, sounding too composed. “I won't keep you.”

After they hang up, Rachel realizes it is the first time they have ever spoken without planning a play date.

B
Y THE TIME
she gets to Peter's the storm is over and Sofia is asleep. Rachel stands on the doorstep of the home he shares with another woman, holding the doll out to him. When she told him about Paris, assuring him it was just one year and that Sofia could spend a chunk of that time with him, he had been happy for her.
I knew you'd make your way
, he'd told her.

Now he is looking at her funny.

“What?” Rachel says.

Peter shakes his head. “You look so pretty,” he says.
“That's all.” When she doesn't say anything he opens the door wider and asks her inside. He tells her Yvonne is teaching a class at the Y on grooming cats.

Rachel tries not to study everything in the house. She sees that animal hair coats everything. She sees framed photographs of Peter and Yvonne, all smiling white teeth. She smells some kind of fruity candle burning, one of those cloyingly sweet ones that make her slightly nauseous. But she concentrates on Peter's back, the back she has followed through train stations across Europe, and up narrow stairways in pensions, and into crowds, and now through the house he shares with Yvonne. When he turns to ask her if she'd like a glass of wine, she is startled by him, by how she has loved him for so long. She actually gasps, she thinks. But he is too busy, uncorking and pouring, to notice.

She lets herself look around this room. Here is their television, their stereo, a rough Haitian rug that used to sit in the apartment Rachel lived in with Peter. Music is playing, something unfamiliar. A CD case lying on the floor says ENYA, but Rachel doesn't know if that's the group or the title.

“To Paris,” Peter says, raising his glass.

“Shut the door,” Rachel says. But she is thinking
je t'adore
.

She lets him kiss her. But she does the rest, the undressing, the reaching, the urging
yes, yes, yes
. For a few minutes they are somewhere else, on some forgotten bed in a foreign country, doing this same thing, learning each other. But when this is done, she feels something she has not yet felt about Peter:
it is over between them
. The thought strikes her, like a slap. Then settles into its proper place. It really is over, she thinks. When they hear Yvonne's car pull up, they both
scramble to their feet and dress hurriedly, without embarrassment.

For the first time, when Rachel sees Yvonne, she smiles.

“I was on my way out,” she tells her.

“We had a minor tragedy,” Peter says.

R
ACHEL GIVES HER
notice at the toy store and spends her days with Sofia at the playground, or at home packing. Her friends have started to give her going away parties. She feels full, happy even. Later, when she sits alone in her small bathroom, two weeks before she and Sofia are to leave, staring at the bright pink spot appearing in front of her—
a pink spot is positive!
—Rachel wonders if she ignored the early signs just to have those weeks of feeling so good. Her hands are shaking as she lowers the early pregnancy test with its positive pink reading. She wants to call Mary suddenly, Mary who she has not spoken to since that awful phone call. And as soon as she thinks about doing it, she understands why—this could have something to do with Harry.

T
HERE IS ONLY
one right thing to do. Rachel knows this. But still she calls her friend Liz—a
real
friend—and tells her. Liz is single, self-assured, a lawyer who wears suits in bright colors like magenta and tangerine.

“It could be Peter's?” Liz asks.

It is the one question that Rachel has not let herself consider. Because there, in front of her every moment, singing
“Frère Jacques” and skipping through the emptying rooms and splashing in her bath each night, is Sofia, the child she did have. Hers and Peter's child.

“It could be that rooster's too,” Rachel says, too quickly.

Liz recovers immediately. “That's irrelevant anyway,” she says, in what Rachel guesses is her lawyer voice. “Let's not waste time. Call your doctor. Set up an appointment.” Then, gentler, “You only have two weeks before you go.”

“I know,” Rachel says.

Outside, Sofia's voice rises up to her through the open windows. It is late summer, the air has not yet turned cool. Everything around them has gone past green to gold and looks burned, parched. A wave of nausea washes over Rachel. Is it her first? She remembers thinking she had food poisoning at a picnic last week. She remembers thinking she might be coming down with something.

“I'll drive you,” Liz says. “Let me check my calendar.”

“No,” Rachel tells her. She is thinking of other things. That flight to Paris in two weeks. The way a plane points straight upward when it's first airborne.

“Look,” Liz tells her, “you're not alone here.”

Rachel knows this. She has Sofia, after all.

S
HE CANNOT FIND
a doctor to do it.

“My God,” she tells Liz the night before, “it's like the sixties or something. I mean, this is legal, right?”

In the end, there is no place to go except a clinic, where everyone else will be twenty years younger than her, clutching the hand of a frightened boy or a disappointed mother.

Rachel almost asks Mary to watch Sofia for the day. She has been asking,
Won't I even get to say goodbye to Sophia?
and Rachel has made up ridiculous stories about why they haven't played together. Now, after all this time of not calling, she cannot bring herself to finally do it to ask for a favor. She believes that Mary is sitting in her lovely cool home, expecting that Rachel
will
eventually call. But somehow that is even worse, the idea that she would call and Mary would gush, forgive, go back.

So she leaves Sofia with Peter and Yvonne, who acts troubled by the surprise midweek intrusion.
Sofia will have to stay with us at the office
, they say like a threat.
We have appointments to keep
. Rachel knows those appointments, the rabies shots and neutering and hairball removals. But Sofia likes that idea. She will help with the animals. She will make them better. Oddly, in these weeks before they leave for Paris, she has neglected her Madeline doll. She leaves it now, as she runs to her father, tossed in a corner like an orphan.

Rachel has decided to walk to the clinic; she is too nervous, pent-up is how she thinks of it, to ride in a car and circle around for a parking space. Liz will pick her up at two. She has opted for anesthesia and she will, they advised her, be groggy, too groggy to drive or walk alone.

The heat of the day makes her stomach flip-flop. And, walking, she is aware of her breasts, the fullness there. She is definitely pregnant.
Why now?
she wonders, when everything was finally going so right. But then she stops herself from that line of thinking. She has managed, hasn't she? She has packed up her and Sofia's lives, she has—long distance!—found them a new place to live. At night she listens to language
tapes, carefully repeating the phrases.
Comment ça va? Je m'appelle Rachel. Ou est la gare du nord?

And she has managed this. This phone calls. The hushed voices. The appointment. On the phone the receptionist had warned her that Thursday was known with pro-life groups as baby killing day. Rachel supposed that was a test, a way of asking if she had the guts to actually go through with it, if she was certain she was doing the right thing.

Now, though, as she turns the corner onto the street where the clinic sits, she realizes that the receptionist has given her a real warning. In the wavery heat, the clinic practically shimmers. Rachel thinks of Oz, and then of those religious sightings people have—the madonna in clouds, in tortillas, in tree bark. She thinks of those because when shown on television, some camera desperately attempting to catch a glimpse of the image, there is always a crowd, shouting. Praying, Rachel supposed. Here, in front of the clinic, is a crowd too. A shouting crowd, carrying signs.

A knife of fear stabs Rachel in the gut. It is wrong, she thinks, that she should have to walk through them to go inside. She watches a teenage girl get swallowed up by them.

“Baby killer,” they shout.

“What about the Commandments?” someone calls. “Thou shall not kill.”

Rachel waits, but she never sees the girl emerge. It is as if they really have swallowed her up.

She is not sure what propels her forward, closer, until she is right upon them. A van parked nearby says
CATHOLICS FOR BABIES RIGHTS
on the side. Rachel too was a Catholic, was raised that way. She thinks of the cathedrals in Europe,
the darkness of them, the heavy smell of incense, the way your footsteps echoed as you made your way forward.

“Baby killer!” they are shouting. At her, she realizes.

She is overwhelmed by the idea of her daughter, of Sofia. The softness of her skin and the brown sugary smell she carries with her. But even more than that. All the things that make her Sofia. The scramble of cells and genes. Everything.