Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (25 page)

She turned on her heel and started walking. Less than two hours ago, I’d been eating bagels and reading the newspaper. Now I was watching my brother’s life fall to pieces in the middle of Sucker Mart. I placed a hand on my belly. “Breathe,” I told myself, “handle this.” I left the cart where it was and followed her.

“Miranda.” I kept my voice low, even though I wanted to bellow until jars fell off shelves. “Does Toby know about this?”

She didn’t answer. I didn’t exactly grab her, but I slid my hand around her upper arm so that she would stop walking.

“What?” She swung around to face me and hissed, “Toby is the manager of a ski shop, and it’s
the
best job he’s ever had. He doesn’t take anything seriously. Nothing. He talks about marriage like it’s this totally great luau we should go to. You think he’d make a good father? Honestly?”

“How far have you gotten with this?”

“Let’s just say I’ve looked into it.”

“And Toby doesn’t know.”

“Not yet.”

I didn’t know if Toby would be a good father or not. Frankly, it was a hard thing to imagine. But I was pretty sure of one thing. “He won’t let you. You can’t do it without him, and he won’t say yes.”

The sadness was back. “I know he’ll hate it. I hate it. It’s agony. But it makes sense. My brother and his wife adopted a baby from China two years ago. You should see them with her.”

“But, Miranda—”

That’s as far as I got. I didn’t even know what I’d been about to say to her, but before I could go on, she was shouting, “I am
not you,
Cornelia! Not every pregnant woman in the world is
you
!”

The store got so quiet that its discreet and upscale version of Muzak—what sounded like Glenn Gould playing Bach—seemed to get deafeningly loud, and I’m sure that people were staring. But I didn’t notice them. My eyes filled with tears.

“You’re right.” Even though Miranda was practically vibrating with rage, I took her hand and squeezed it, and she didn’t pull away. “I’m sorry.”

Later, in the car, I said, gently, “You do need to talk to Toby.”

“I know,” she said. Then she grinned forlornly. “I had this crazy idea that you might do it for me.”

“He’ll try to talk you out of it.”

“I know that, too,” Miranda said, miserably, and then she turned her troubled face away and said, more to the car window than to me, something else. Her voice was so small that I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. I think she said, “Maybe I’m hoping he will.”

That night in bed, after I’d told Teo about what had happened at Sucker Mart, I said, shakily, “Miranda says Toby wakes up happy every morning. She says happiness is his fallback mode.”

“That sounds about right.” I heard the smile in his voice. “He’s got other modes, though, probably a few he doesn’t even know about yet. He’ll get through this.”

“Hold on. You’re saying there’s more to Toby than meets the eye? Still waters run deep?”

Teo chuckled. “I wouldn’t call his waters still. But yeah, I’m saying something like that. There’s more to almost everyone than meets the eye.”

I thought about this, about Toby having hidden reserves of fortitude, humility, reason, seriousness, strength, something other than careless joy. I’d always been the first person to say that Toby needed to grow up. Now that he was about to have to, all I felt was a chilly, spreading sadness that seemed to seep into everything.

“Sometimes, happiness feels so fragile,” I said.

“Even ours?”

Teo expected me to say no. I sat up so I could look at him.

“Everybody’s,” I said, gently.

I thought he would touch my belly, but instead he touched my face. He slid his thumb carefully along my jaw.

“So what do we do about it?” Teo asked.

“You tell me.” I had my own ideas, but I needed to hear his. I held my breath.

“Live. Forget that it’s fragile. Live like it isn’t.”

I exhaled, kissed my husband, and found myself remembering Toby cliff diving on a family vacation to California, running full tilt, straight for the edge and over, flinging his body into nothingness with a whoop of exaltation. At the time I’d thought it was pure, arrogant recklessness, the dumbest kind of dumb fun. But what if it was something more? What if cliff diving wasn’t as much about recklessness as trust, trust in the air to hold you and the water to cushion your fall? Belief in a benevolent universe. Kierkegaardian theology in action. Maybe, just maybe, it was Toby’s version of a leap of faith.

The more you think about the physical world, the more impossible it seems. And I’m not just talking about Dev’s brand of physics—string theory, quantum mechanics, all the mind-blowing rest of it. Take something as old hat as sonar. Bodiless, invisible sound traveling, bouncing, entering liquid and coming out with an image you can watch on a screen. A tiny hand splaying against a cheek. A head turning toward you in the dark. A moving picture made of echoes.

The day after Miranda’s visit, I had an ultrasound. I’d had them twice before, but this one wasn’t planned.

I’d gone in for a regular visit. Blood pressure, weight gain, sugar levels, all fine. No swelling in my ankles. No varicose veins. The tape measure pulled across the arc of my belly gave the right answer: the centimeters matching up with the weeks in the usual, magical way.

Dr. Graham checked for the fetal heartbeat, and I waited for the emphatic thrummings, the beautiful galloping iambs.

And they didn’t come. Just empty, anonymous, undersea sounds.

Dr. Graham frowned.

You can imagine what I can hardly stand to remember. A moment to rip out and burn. Airlessness. My body rigid as wood. Fear a mounting screech in my head, an icy black wave towering at the end of the examining table.

Then Dr. Graham slid the monitor to a different part of my belly, and there it was, in the room with me, Penny’s blessed assurance: “I am, I am, I am, I am, I am.”

Dr. Graham’s face relaxed, along with my clenched muscles and the entire clenched world. I shut my eyes in gratitude and sank into the sound, letting the heartbeats rock me like a mother’s arms.

When I opened my eyes, Dr. Graham was frowning again, but with proof of Penny reverberating around me, I couldn’t care.

She pressed on the base of my belly with her hand. Her frown deepened.

“There’s something here,” she said.

The “something here” turned out to be something that had been there all along. I’d even seen it just ten weeks before, and at the time it had seemed entirely innocuous, tiny, vaguely egg shaped, and tucked into the lining of my uterus. The obstetric radiologist had pointed it out but said he wasn’t worried. He said this kind of thing was very common. He told us it was too small to matter. I’d pushed away the word “tumor”; I’d embraced the word “benign.”

But it had grown.

A uterine fibroid, inside the lining, but crowding its way—like an elbowing bully—into the space that rightfully belonged to Penny.

The doctor Dr. Graham sent me to was named John Goode, a name so trustworthy that I decided it canceled out the suspicious blond streaks in his hair and the fact that he looked about sixteen years old. He had excellent posture and a slow, genteel, Deep South accent that made the phrase “submucosal myoma” sound like music.

“What does this mean?” I asked him. “What happens now?”

“Well, we bump you up to high risk, the perk of that being that you’ll have a lot more ultrasounds. You’ll get a new doc. Also, regular nonstress tests, which are entirely painless. In short, we’ll keep a close eye on that baby of yours.” It took John Goode a very long time to say all of this, but I hardly heard because my attention got stuck early on, at the words “high risk.”

“Why high risk?” I asked him. The question came out more tremulously than I wanted it to. I cleared my throat. “What risks?”

“Well, I should begin by saying that more often than not, women with fibroids do fine. Yours is bigger than we’d like for it to be, but women with fibroids a lot bigger than yours go full term and have deliveries that come off without a hitch.”

While this sounded like good news, I could tell by his voice that he wasn’t finished, that there was news ahead that wasn’t so good. I waited, wanting Teo. He had left his hospital in Philly as soon as I called, but he hadn’t arrived yet, and I wanted him.

“I’ll tell you, though, I find the location of yours somewhat concerning. A little too close to the placenta for comfort. If it keeps growing, we could see an abruption, the placenta getting displaced from the uterine wall. I’m not saying I think that’ll happen, but it’s a risk. A lot of women go full term with a minor abruption. If it’s not so minor, well, we might be looking at preterm labor.”

“Tell me what to do. No exercise, special diet, bed rest. I’ll do it.”

John Goode gave me a rueful smile. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do to fix it. But the flip side of that is there’s nothing you can do to make it worse either. Exercise is fine. You’ve been doing a beautiful job of taking care of yourself so far. Just keep it up.”

He kept talking to me, but my own heartbeat was so loud in my ears that I couldn’t really hear him. A sob snagged in my throat. I waited until it subsided. Then I said, “Can I look at the baby again? Please?”

Penny was turned sideways and was more babylike, less space alien in profile. I could see the small, definite ski-jump nose, the noble forehead. As I watched, Penny kicked out a leg, extending one perfect five-toed foot.

“Look at that,” said John Goode, softly, “he or she is sucking his or her thumb.”

I looked. Penny was. I was somebody’s there, and the somebody whose there I was was sucking its thumb.

I am, I am, I am, I am, I am.

I stared and stared at the gray-and-white image, at the precise and fiercely alive being that resided inside my body, and a cooling, silvery peace began to fall upon me like moonlight.

A nurse put her head inside the door and said, “Your husband just called. He’s getting on the elevator. He’ll be here any minute.”

I knew what I’d do when he got here. I would leap. I would stare down doubt and fear and choose joy. I’d point to the stalwart creature on the screen, the one with hands and feet and a face, our brave, thumb-sucking kicker, and I’d tell Teo, “Put your faith in the Penny.”

F
OURTEEN

S
he could have forgiven the infidelity. She would not forgive it because, while Piper detested the role of victim, she had always found solace in justified anger the way other people found solace in liquor or God. But she could have. What she could not forgive was what he had done to her house. Because it had been distinctly
her
house, always, from the first time she and Kyle had walked through it seven years ago.

Piper recalled that day with perfect clarity. Kyle had stood with his hands in his pockets extolling the virtues of old houses to Roxanne, the young realtor with the high-pitched voice and higher-pitched, jutting breasts, as if he hadn’t spent the last two weeks campaigning on behalf of Presidential Oaks, a new subdivision distinguished by a nearly complete absence of trees, oaks or otherwise, and by the fact that every model home bore the name of a different U.S. president. Kyle’s particular favorite had been the Kennedy, naturally, and he’d gone on endlessly about the grand foyer and the five walk-in closets in precisely the tone of voice he was now using to sing the praises of “original wainscoting” and wide-plank floors.

“That’s crown molding, genius,” Piper had muttered. “And those boobs wouldn’t fool a six-year-old.”

But Roxanne’s and Kyle’s voices had faded along with Piper’s annoyance, as Piper shifted from merely looking at the house to actually seeing it. Ruthless, efficient, her mind excised from the living room the current owners’ exasperating modern furniture, the leather-and-metal sofas, the glass tabletops, and the stupid geometric lamps. It yanked off framed posters and garish paintings, and smoothed café-au-lait-colored paint over the mottled gold, Venetian plaster-effect walls of the dining room. In the kitchen, Piper issued approval to the oak cabinets and stainless-steel appliances; vowed to fight the owners for the iron pot rack over the island, on the grounds that it was not furniture but an intrinsic part of the room; and placed the whimsical backsplash of black-and-white tile in the “don’t-love-but-can-live-with” category. By the time Kyle and Roxanne caught up with her, Piper was mentally hanging periwinkle curtains with dime-size white polka dots in what she knew would be the bedroom of her first, as-yet-unconceived child and the house was irrevocably and, she believed, eternally hers.

But Kyle had ruined it. Somehow, in leaving the house, he had infiltrated it. Piper recalled a newspaper article she’d read years ago about toxic mold, how it had silently, secretly taken over a family’s home, creeping into the walls, the floors, the pink lungs of the children. Although Piper’s house looked the same as it always had, Kyle had insinuated himself into every room, like rot, like poison, so that she could barely stand to be inside it. She hated him for that. It shocked her that he could accomplish such a thing: turn something she loved and owned into something repulsive. Even back before the problems began, when they were like any other married couple, she would have scoffed at the idea that he possessed that kind of power.

But Piper could not enter the master bathroom without remembering the morning after Elizabeth’s funeral, Kyle’s voice telling her about the woman, the words exiting the hole of his mouth.

The funeral had been easier than she had expected. In the car on the way there, on a hill about a mile from the church, there’d been a bad minute when Piper had been overtaken by the sensation of free fall, as though the car had hit ice and gone into a tractionless, hockey-puck slide. She’d pressed her hand to her stomach, and Kyle had said, “You doing okay?” A question irrelevant for so many reasons that Piper wanted to laugh.

But at the funeral, she did do okay. The funeral was a production, a play complete with costumes, stage directions, a musical score, a simple script. You stood on your mark, you said your lines.
This is why people have funerals,
Piper had thought.
Because we all know what to do at them.
She looked around her at the social moment, at the people in dark clothes shaking hands and sitting in their places.
How convenient,
she thought, gratefully, in what turned out to be the day’s single rush of emotion,
that this is what we do with death. How lucky.

Afterward, at the reception brunch, she had grown brisk and brittle, turning sideways to edge through the crowd, consulting repeatedly, tersely with the country club’s director regarding the unforgivably runny Hollandaise, the browning petal edges of several white lilies, the malfunctioning spout of a silver coffee urn. She glared at one guest’s loosened tie so pointedly that he spilled his drink tightening it. Her neck ached; her smile was a fissure in her face. She felt like a secret service agent and a high school principal.

Her one soft moment was for Tom, when she met his eyes and he mouthed, “Almost over,” and smiled. She raised her eyebrows in a way that meant “My thoughts exactly,” and gave him a discreet, heartfelt thumbs-up.

Cornelia and Teo had come, Cornelia in an unexpectedly appropriate charcoal wool jersey dress, jewel necked, A line, and just below the knee. Black suede pumps with a slim Mary Jane strap.

Just before they’d left, Cornelia had touched Piper’s arm and Piper had whirled around, steeling herself for yet another “I’m sorry for your loss,” but Cornelia’s voice was all firm kindness and no pity when she said, “I’ll take Meredith and Carter tomorrow morning. Around eight thirty.” It was clearly not a request, but before she could be annoyed by such presumptuousness, Piper found her fingers around Cornelia’s hand, holding on, found a thank-you caught at the base of her throat, found her head nodding yes.

The next morning, with the children gone and Kyle at work, Piper realized with her entire body that she was alone for the first time in months. There was nothing else she should be doing, no child waiting just outside the door. Piper had lived for so long inside the small chalk circle of Elizabeth’s dying, like a figurine in a snow globe, and as she stood naked, the bathroom tile cooling the soles of her feet, her world widened around her, stretched out on every side, dizzyingly large, frighteningly empty.

In the center of this space, Piper began to assess her condition. Gingerly, starting with her feet, she ran the flats of her hands over her body, impersonally, taking stock. Her legs needed waxing; there was a dull, slight pain in her left knee, her hip bones were sharp, her stomach flat but soft. She took a breast in each hand, strummed fingers over her ribs. Tension burned between her shoulder blades, inside her neck and jaw. Probably she’d been grinding her teeth in her sleep again. A pain began just above her left eye and radiated upward, then down the back of her head. It was a pain she recognized from other times: a sinus infection, pretty far along, too. The glands under her jaw were actually swollen. How, she marveled, had she been sick without knowing it?

What started as an assessment turned out to be a reclaiming, and in the end, it wasn’t the small changes in her body, but its familiarity that undid her, that sent grief barreling into her like an assailant who’d been waiting in the shadows. Grief that was not for Emma and Peter or for Tom or Astrid, that was not even for Elizabeth, but that belonged wholly to Piper. A fact: Piper was embodied, and Elizabeth was not. Piper stood reeling, her hands pressed to the center of her chest, pain flooding her body, pouring down her limbs.

Afterward, as the bathwater clattered into the tub, she thought, with incredulity, how she had not known that sorrow could make your body hurt, and then, as she lay in the tub, the hot water up to her chin, she understood, with equal incredulity, that she felt better. Not happier, but more normal. Found, like an object washed up on a beach.

“You’re here,” she whispered, “you’re still here.”

Finally alone with her sadness and her living body, Piper closed her eyes.

There was a click and a ripple of air and Kyle was in the room.

“It’s the kids’ pediatrician,” he barked.

Piper didn’t move, just opened her eyes to stare at him. He was jacketless, his shirtsleeves rolled up as though he were preparing to street fight or scrub a pot.

“A knock would have been nice,” she said, finally. “And what the hell happened to work?”

“You won’t listen to me. Ever,” he said. “I had to catch you when you weren’t expecting it.” His voice managed to be querulous and triumphant at the same time.

“You pretended to go to work? What did you do, drive around the block until Cornelia came for the kids?”

“As a matter of fact, I drove to Dunkin’ Donuts for some breakfast. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“A second breakfast? You ate breakfast before you left. An English muffin. Whole grain.”

Kyle’s chest heaved in a protracted sigh. “Did you even hear what I said? It’s the kids’ pediatrician. We’re in love. We’ve been together for over two years.”

Piper leaned her head back against the edge of the tub to laugh.

“What’s so goddamn funny?” demanded Kyle.

“You’re trying to tell me that you’ve spent the last two years fucking Leo Feldman?” It felt good, it felt
heavenly,
to say “fuck,” to use the verb form, no less. Heavenly, like a huge bite of chocolate cake.

“What?” Outraged and disbelieving, his hands on his hips, his cheeks puffed out, Kyle looked exactly like a pitcher in a baseball game who thinks he got a bad call. Kyle loved baseball, but Piper found the players ugly and ridiculous, with their fat bottoms and their spitting and their mouths full of God knows what. Kyle looked like he was about to rip off his cap and throw it to the ground.

“You’ve gained some weight, haven’t you?” she told him, narrowing her eyes. “I hadn’t noticed. Those pants could stand to be let out a tad in the seat.”

Kyle’s red face got redder. He spluttered, “I know what you’re doing, Piper. You’re taking over. You’re trivializing. This conversation is not about the size of my ass. Or about Leo Feldman, whoever the hell that is. It’s about me and Colleen.”

Colleen. A flash of reddish hair and brown eyes. Light orange eyebrows.

“Colleen Mullins? The nurse at Candlewood Pediatrics?” said Piper. “Did she tell you she was a doctor?”

Decent, maybe even dewy skin, very white teeth, but a small droop beneath the chin, a wattle in the making. With the back of one finger, Piper tapped the taut spot between her own chin and neck.

“She’s a nurse practitioner, Piper. She has a goddamn master’s degree, and she sees her own patients, who call her, by the way, Dr. Mullins.”

“Our children’s pediatrician is Dr. Leo Feldman,” Piper said coolly, “M.D.”

Confusion clouded Kyle’s face. “But I took Carter in when he had the ear infection. That’s when I met her.”

“Newsflash: Carter has had a dozen ear infections. If you’d taken your children to the doctor more than once in their collective lives, you would know that while Dr. Feldman is their actual doctor, when he’s not available, other doctors fill in, and, when none of the real doctors is available, they see Nurse Mullins. Who has apparently been passing herself off as my children’s doctor to their father.”

“No,” protested Kyle. “We just don’t talk about the kids that much.”

“Really?” said Piper, corrosively. She noted with some weariness that she was angry again. The twenty minutes she had spent alone in the bathroom had been the first sustained anger-free period she had experienced in a very long time, but at the mention of her children, the anger came boiling back. “How civilized of you, to keep them out of your sordid affair. Or maybe you just forget your children exist when you’re with Nurse Colleen?”

Piper expected Kyle to yell some more, to stomp around and rage, his eyes bulging. But Kyle’s face turned sad and open. Abruptly, he sat down on the bathroom floor, his hands limp in his lap, his trouser legs riding up to show the skin above his carefully pulled-up socks. Kyle was particular about his socks. It was something he and Piper shared. Oh, no, Piper told herself, no going soft over a pair of Wolford cotton/wool blends or over the sight of your husband splayed on the floor like a hurting child.

“I love my kids,” he explained, quietly, “but I love Colleen, too. I want her. I can’t tell you how much. I belong to her. I can’t live here anymore. Please try to understand.”

As soon as he’d finished talking, the light in the room seemed to sharpen, and Piper lay in the tub with the stark, wretched fact of her own nakedness. Because she did understand. The honesty in his voice was unmistakable. This was not some sloppy fling, a ludicrous mistake for her to clean up. Kyle was in love. He would leave his family. His children would grow up the children of divorce, which could not happen. Piper would be a divorced woman, which she could not be. None of it could be happening, but it was. Oh, God. She was naked in a room with a man who would leave her. Piper shuddered and sat up, pulling her legs tightly against her chest.

“Get out,” she whispered, and then corrected herself. “Leave the bathroom, please.”

“Piper, we need to settle things.”

Piper gazed bleakly at him over the peaks of her own knees.

“Don’t do this,” she said, pleading.

Kyle met her eyes. “Oh, Pipe,” he said, “if only I could help it.”

It was the first Monday in March, exactly a week after Kyle had moved out the last of his belongings, that Piper and her children spent the night at the Donahue house for the first time.

At least, that was how it felt to Piper. It wasn’t literally true. They had spent the night there before, during Elizabeth’s three days of dying, but it was impossible for Piper to think about those days as existing within the ordinary flow of time and events. Those three days were exempt; they counted too much to count. Anyway, back then, the house had not been, in Piper’s mind, the Donahue house, but Elizabeth’s house. And Kyle had been there, too. They had been two families together, keeping vigil.

Piper tried to tell herself that she had not meant for it to happen. Then she told herself that, for God’s sake, it was no big deal, a onetime thing. But even the next morning, hurrying home in the pearl gray, gathering light, she knew: she had made it happen; it was a big deal; it would happen again.