Breakable You (25 page)

Maud put her head down, to think. Eleanor became aware that what Maud thought mattered to her. She wanted to pass the test of her philosopher-daughter's scrutiny.

As Eleanor went to the refrigerator for a carton of apple cider, Adam appeared in her mind, wearing a mocking smile. Adam had recently told her that he'd finished a new book. His ninth. He was probably at his laptop, writing, at this very moment. While she, having published precisely nothing, was sitting in the kitchen pontificating about art and life.

Eleanor put two glasses on the table. Maud still seemed to be thinking about what Eleanor had said, still seemed to be pondering the question of choice in human life. As she poured the cider into Maud's glass, Eleanor had a dizzy spell—which might not have been a dizzy spell at all, but simply an excess of emotion. She was overcome by an appreciation of Maud's kindness, her essential goodness.

Maud, if she ever had a child, would be a wonderful mother. She would be the kind of mother who treated her children's thoughts with seriousness and respect. Eleanor suddenly felt sure of this.

She had no idea why she was thinking about Maud's possible future as a mother. The thought had come out of nowhere.

After Maud left, Eleanor cleared the kitchen table. Maud had barely eaten anything. It was only when Eleanor noticed this that it occurred to her that they'd never gone back to the subject of how Maud was doing.

Eleanor had told herself that she was going to find out why Maud was unhappy, and had then become distracted by the sound of her own voice.

She made herself a cup of coffee and, although she wasn't hungry, had a slice of pie.

The small ways we fail one another, every day.

Samir spent three days in Bethesda, working on a high-paying remodeling job that he'd made a commitment to several months earlier. He'd wanted to postpone it, but Maud had told him not to. With the frankness he admired, she'd said that she stood a better chance of figuring out what she wanted if they were apart for a few days.

He assumed that she was talking to her loved ones—her old friends, perhaps her brothers, perhaps her mother. He knew she found it helpful to consult the people she trusted.

He himself had only one person he needed to consult.

He got back on a Thursday night, and on Friday he visited the cemetery. It was the first time he'd been there since he'd begun seeing Maud. It had rained that morning, and the grass was still damp. His feet made little sucking sounds as he made his way up the hill.

Zahra's grave was unembellished. There were three lines of writing on her gravestone. On the first line was her name; on the second, the year of her birth and the year of her death. On the third line were the words we will always love you. That was all.

He stood at her grave for a long time, letting random thoughts pass through his mind. Remembering how eager she always was to "help Daddy." When she helped Daddy perform some task, it took three times longer, but that was a small price to pay for the privilege of witnessing her excitement. When she earnestly tried to fold one of his shirts as he was getting ready for a trip, or when she stood on tiptoes on a kitchen chair, stretching over the table as far as she could, so she could blow on his cup of tea in order to cool it, or when she carried the newspaper to him in the morning after Leila had picked it up from their doorstep, she always looked so proud, so important.

Remembering the first time she accompanied him to the laundry room. How stunned she was by the dryer: "Daddy! My clothes go round and round!"

Remembering the stories she used to love, stories about how she triumphed over the animals.

Without deciding to do this, he sank slowly to his knees in front of the gravestone.

The wetness of the grass seeped through the knees of his pants. He wished he were so pure-minded as not to even notice this, not to be detained, not even for a moment, by the thought that the pants might in the future be unwearable because of grass stains. He wasn't that pure-minded, however.

On his knees, he leaned forward and touched his forehead to the stone. Then he shifted his position and lowered his forehead to the earth.

His daughter was a few feet beneath him.

Even if the universe lasted for another billion years, Zahra would never come again. Zahra would never see another day. No one would ever hear the sound of her laughter.

It would not do to pretend that if he welcomed the new life, the new life that he and Maud had created, Zahra would remain undisturbed in the place she now occupied in his mind. His memory of her would grow dimmer. If he became accustomed to the laughter of another child, his memory of Zahra's laughter would grow uncertain. If he welcomed the new life, he would be pushing Zahra further into the land in which everything is finally forgotten.

His daughter, his poor daughter, in the earth, never to breathe, never to see snow, never to see light, never to see anything again. If the universe lasts billions and billions and billions of years, there will never be another Zahra.

"I don't want to live without you," he said.

He remembered her howling, howling, howling, at the age of ten months, as they pressed the needle into her jugular vein. He remembered her howling, at the age of three years, when she woke up in the recovery room after having tubes implanted in her chest. He remembered what she said about her dream: "I tried to roar back at them, but I couldn't scare them away." He remembered how she told the nurse: "My daddy won't let you!"

I wanted to protect you, my love. I wanted to protect you.

How can you do it? How can you contemplate having another child when she's gone?

He knew that he was going to embrace the new life. If he refused the new life, he wouldn't be honoring Zahra. The only way to honor her was to live.

But there would be a cost to this. It would not do to pretend there would not be a cost. The more completely he gave himself to life, the more her memory would fade.

He had been kneeling; now he simply lay down on the earth. He spoke softly into the grass.

"Forgive me," he said. "Forgive me, my love. Please forgive me."

"How was your week?" Maud said.

"It was interesting."

Interesting, she thought. A word that meant nothing.

It was a Saturday afternoon, his second day back in New York, and they had gotten together in Riverside Park, near the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument. They were walking near the water.

It was threatening rain. The river was gray and unmajestic, humping along in little dull lumps. It looked like thousands of moles stitched together.

She was unhappy about the fact that he hadn't called her until the morning of his second day back. She didn't know what he'd been doing on his first day.

"How was
your
week?" he said.

"Just a week. Taught classes, worked on the monster."

And stopped drinking coffee. And stopped drinking diet soda. And stopped eating tuna, because of the mercury levels. And constantly did mathematical calculations in my head, she thought, trying to imagine how many cells now composed this alien life-form growing inside me. But she wasn't going to mention anything about this—not until he did.

"That was all?" he said.

"What else is there?"

She wasn't pleased with herself for being so snitty, if that was a word. But she couldn't help it. He should have come straight to her door after he returned, stopping only to dash into a flower shop, and appeared at her threshold with an armful of roses, and told her that she was his destiny.

They were walking past the Boat Basin. A colony of houseboats. Maud imagined raising her child alone, out here on the Boat Basin.
In landlessness alone resides the highest truth
. The two of them, Maud and her child, nobly seasick.

"When I was gone," he said, "I did some thinking."

At last, he was getting to the subject.

"What did you think about?"

She was afraid that he was going to say he wanted to go ahead with this, afraid that he was going to say he didn't.

"I thought about you," he said. "About us. About the baby."

"What did you think?" she said.

But she already knew. You don't say "the baby" if your wish is to dump the thing in the trash.

It made her happy and it made her afraid.

Just south of the Boat Basin was an abandoned baseball field where people walked their dogs. You had to be careful where you stepped.

"I want us to be parents together," he said.

Here we are, she thought. We're grown-ups.

They walked along in silence for a while.

She remembered walking along this same path with her first boyfriend, Daniel, on a late-summer day almost twelve years earlier, just before she went off to college. Before her first breakdown. At seventeen she'd thought that her life was good and that it would only get better. She hadn't had an inkling of the troubles that lay in wait for her: her breakdowns, or her parents' divorce, or the many splintered relationships she was destined to endure, or the subtle fogging of her mind through years of unhappiness, or the subtle fogging of her mind through years of medications prescribed to keep the unhappiness in check. She had anticipated none of these things. Whenever she visited the park, she remembered that walk with Daniel, and whenever she remembered it, it seemed to represent a Utopian moment, a state of high possibility to which she had no chance of returning.

But now, as she walked beside Samir, she thought that there was a chance that she might return to that state of grace after all. There was the possibility of a good, sane, productive, fulfilling life. She could see herself in ten years: teaching philosophy, happily married to Samir, happily raising children together.

Happily married, she thought, and she asked herself what this idea meant to her. What it meant to her was that they would still be enjoying each other and still be challenging each other.

She knew that she wanted to be with him. The feeling of rightness that she had with him was bone deep. And although she had always worried that she wouldn't be strong enough to raise a child, she believed that she
could
be strong enough if she was doing it with Samir.

A minute or two had passed since his pronouncement, and she thought it was probably time for her to respond.

"That makes me happy," she said.

She had to force the words out of herself, because her throat was constricted by fear. But despite the fear, despite the fact that she had to force them, the words were true.

Samir smiled at her. His smile was quizzical, but kind. He seemed to understand that she was struggling.

Maybe, she thought, the two-minute pause was a tip-off.

"
Does it
make you happy?" he said. He didn't sound hurt; he didn't sound as if he were interrogating her. He sounded as if he wanted to know.

"I think so," she said.

The sky was gray and grave and grim and the river was dull and humped and hunchbacked, yet she found all of it stirring, because the day was anything but bland, but at the same time as she was glorying in it, in the large-souled moodiness of nature, she had to keep glancing down to make sure that she wasn't about to step in dog shit, and she tried not to think of this as a metaphor for the human experience.

"I hope we can both embrace this," he said. "But I want you to take as much time as you need. I don't want to force you into this."

She stopped walking and turned to face him. It seemed important to be facing him when she said what she was going to say.

"Thank you," she said. "I appreciate your saying that. But… you couldn't."

"I know that, actually," he said.

He took her hand, and he didn't seem to mind that her hand was sweating like mad, and for the first time she felt that she could do this, that they could do this, that it was going to be all right.

Maud hadn't yet introduced Samir to anybody from her world. She was a little bit afraid to.

For one thing, she was afraid that people just wouldn't
get
him. He'd come a long way during the past several months, but he was
still
perennially reticent, perennially serious, perennially uninterested in small talk. As they used to say in nineteenth-century novels, he wasn't clubbable.

And she knew he wouldn't try to
help
anybody get him. He'd opened himself up to her only after she'd devoted months to the effort to crack the code of his guardedness. And the only reason he'd been willing to spend those first months in her company was that she gave such irrefutable blow jobs. It had worked for them, but it would be an impractical way for anyone else to get to know him.

As far as she and Samir had come, she still couldn't imagine them living a normal life together. She couldn't imagine them spending weekends visiting friends and family. So far they'd spent almost all their time alone. She had no doubts about his essential nature: she knew that he was intelligent and interesting and solemn and serious and kind; she knew that he'd be faithful; she knew he'd be a good and careful father. But she didn't know if he'd ever want to let other people into his life. Sometimes she envisioned a future in which it was just the two of them and their child, or their children, against the world, a future in which she saw her friends by herself or with the kids, but never with Samir. She feared that life with Samir was going to be a hard life.

When she examined her own reluctance to introduce him to the people in her world, she also wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that he was an Arab. It wasn't that she was afraid that he and the other people in her life would get into arguments. She wasn't afraid of arguments. But it was all too easy to imagine some bit of casual anti-Arab prejudice escaping from the lips of her friends or family, or some scrap of casual anti-Semitic prejudice from his.

But now they were going to have a child together, and she needed to let him into her world.

When Ralph called her one Friday afternoon, suggesting they do something the next day, she knew it had to be him.