Pictures of You (6 page)

She looked at him. “I make you really happy, don’t I,” she said, and when he said yes, her face bloomed into a smile. The road swam before them. Charlie saw the signs. They were only a mile away from the house. “I love you. And I think we should get married,” April said. “Then wait until you see how happy we’re going to be.”

T
HEY WERE MARRIED
in the fall by a justice of the peace. Charlie’s parents hired a car to come up, baffled and affronted because this was the first time they had met April and because Charlie wouldn’t have the wedding in Manhattan where all their friends were. Charlie’s father handed him a sizable check in a pale blue envelope and his mother stared at April, who was in a simple, long white dress, a rose Charlie had grown himself tucked behind one ear. “That’s what she gets married in? It looks like a nightgown,” Charlie’s mother whispered to Charlie. But still, she embraced April. “Mom!” April said, and his mother sighed. Ten minutes later, Charlie and April were husband and wife.

Oh, but married life was wonderful! They cooked elaborate dinners and ate them by candlelight. They made love for hours. She always slept with her arm draped over him, and the one time she didn’t—when a bout with the flu had him up all night—he came back to bed to find her cradling his pillow.

Of course, they both wanted kids. “We’ll be a
family
,” April said. “A family!” They sat up nights listing all the ways that their family would be different from the ones they had grown up in.

Two years later, on the coldest day of the year, Charlie crouched beside April in the delivery room, holding her hand, watching Sam being born. When the doctor held Sam up and Charlie saw his small face, the blue eyes wide open and looking right at him, he burst into tears.

“Why are you crying!” April asked, alarmed. “Is everything all right with the baby?”

“Everything is wonderful,” Charlie told her, wiping at his tears and kissing her.

Charlie’s mother offered April a baby nurse as a gift. “With a baby nurse, you can get out. You can have your life back.”

April was horrified. “My life back! The baby
is
my life,” she said.

“You let me know when she changes her mind,” Charlie’s mother said. “And believe me, she’ll change her mind. I know I certainly did.”

“April’s not you,” Charlie said.

April might not have taken Charlie’s mother’s advice about baby nurses, but she pored through baby books, tomes she piled up by the bed and underlined in blue highlighter. She couldn’t walk in the park or the beach without cornering other young mothers and asking their advice, without plunking herself down next to a nanny and whipping out her notebook. She talked calmly to Sam while she diapered him, telling him about books she was reading or what was on the news, and when Charlie teased her, she shrugged happily. “It doesn’t matter what you say,” she told Charlie. “Babies just need to hear your voice.” She sang to Sam in his bath, and when he squalled in the middle of the night, she was up and by his side before Charlie even reached for his robe. “I was born to do this,” she said.

For the first time since they’d been together, Charlie began to worry that she was a speeding train and he was a sputtering car, falling behind. He’d never tell her, never want to mar her happiness, but the thing was, though April seemed to have embraced
motherhood, he wasn’t so sure about being a father now that he had a baby. He knew it was selfish, but April was spinning away from him, into her orbit of babies. He couldn’t help thinking that he hadn’t had her to himself long enough. At night, April remembered Charlie like an afterthought, reaching for him at night while he slept, ruffling his hair as she glided by, lost in her own thoughts. She used to be voracious for sex, but now she was tired or she just wanted to read one of her parenting books. When they did make love, she seemed far away, her eyes open and watchful, one hand on her stomach. Afterward, he reached for his wife and held her. When the baby cried, Charlie said, “No, let me.”

He got up and stood in the baby’s room. It was flooded with moonlight and Sam smelled of powder. Sam had deep blue-black eyes and a dusting of dark hair, and as Charlie rocked his son, Sam put a tiny hand on Charlie’s shoulder and Charlie felt a shock. His son. He was holding his son. “Sam,” he said, “Sam,” and the baby yawned and then studied him, as if at any moment they might share an incredible secret.

Charlie took two weeks off to be with his infant son, but most of that time he ended up doing the housework, tackling laundry piles that seemed to be mating and breeding; cooking whatever was fast and easy and wouldn’t use much cutlery or dishes; tidying up and vacuuming the rugs. Then he’d stand over the crib with April, the two of them mesmerized by Sam, who slept and cried and wet his diapers with astonishing regularity. Charlie would bend low into the crib, inhaling. He’d lift his son up and burrow his face into the baby’s soft belly.

“Me and my men,” April said.

“Does he look like me?” Charlie asked. “Do you think he has your eyes?”

April laughed. “Don’t be silly. He’s the image of me.”

The first week Charlie went back to work, he thought he’d feel relieved. No laundry to tend to, no meals to cook. But, while putting
up sheet rock, he kept thinking about the color of Sam’s eyes, as blue as a brand new pair of jeans. He kept imagining his son’s face. “Take over, I have to leave,” he told his foreman.

He drove home taking the shortcuts. He bounded into the house, and when April and Sam weren’t there, he went to all the places he thought they might be. The park. The playground. And finally to Johnny Rocket’s, where he found them in a booth. He was hot and sweaty, his heart skipping. “God, you look terrible. You feel okay?” April said. Charlie sat down and took his son’s tiny hand. “Now I feel just fine,” he said.

The Nash family. He loved to say it. He put it on the answering machine: “The Nash family isn’t home right now.” The Nash family went for pizza every Friday at The Leaning Tower of Pizza. All the waitresses knew April and gave the Nash family extra cheese on their pie. They fussed over the baby and teased Charlie. The Nashes went to drive-in movies (the Cape being the one place where they still existed), and while Sam slept in the backseat, Charlie and April held hands, stuffed themselves with popcorn, and watched double features. If the movies weren’t very good, they didn’t really mind. They went to the beach, spreading out soft blankets under a huge umbrella. They went to Manhattan to visit Charlie’s parents, who cooed over their grandson and pushed his stroller all through Central Park, from the zoo to the duck pond. They hugged April and told her she was too thin, even for New York City standards, and had she seen how great the parks were here? Had she thought about going back to school?

April laughed. “This is my school,” she said, smiling down at Sam. When her friend Katie started up a new bakery, the Blue Cupcake, April took a job to help out, just for a few hours a day. The place was small and homey, with wood tables and comfortable chairs, and every time Charlie walked in, the air seemed soaked in sugar. April could bring Sam in his carrier, and he’d sleep or play with his toys. She could sit at a table and have muffins and sip tea and talk to the locals.

A
T FIRST
, S
AM GREW
like a tumbleweed. At three he was reading. At four, he was the smartest one in his preschool, a small, sturdy boy in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, curled up in a chair, trying to write a story with a pad of paper and a blue crayon as thick as his thumb. He liked musicals, especially
Grease
, and he would sing for hours into the toy tape recorder April and Charlie had bought him. You’d never look at them and think, This is a family with a problem.

You’d never look at Sam and think, Oh, what a shame, he’s so sick.

I
SABELLE’S EYES JERKED OPEN
. She gulped air and gave a good long cough. Her mouth tasted as if she had been chewing on cans. Everything was blurred and white—walls and curtains and ceiling, the starchy sheet and waffled blanket thrown over her, a faint blue stain on the hem, all of it swimming in front of her. She blinked at two bolts of orange before she could remember the name for what they were. “Pitcher,” she said aloud. Her voice sounded funny and faint, as though it had been smothered in cotton batting.

A hospital. She was in a hospital room.

She tried to move and pain shot through one leg. She felt like throwing up.

A crash. She had driven into a car accident.

She tried to sit up, wincing. She reached for the pitcher on the right, and her hand touched air. Someone had put her in a hospital gown, and her right leg was throbbing, but before she could examine it further, a doctor with a bright red T-shirt under his lab coat strode into the room, a young nurse trailing behind him. He smiled brightly when he saw her, as if they were old friends. “What day is it?” he asked her.

“Saturday,” she guessed.

“Give the lady a prize. You got here Friday.” His smile broadened.
“You are one lucky woman. Your car crashed and you managed to get out and walk away,” he said cheerfully.

She started pleating the sheet with her fingers. “I walked away?”

“Oh now, now, don’t look like that,” he said. “You’re going to be fine, Isabelle.”

He knew her name, but she hadn’t the foggiest idea what his was. Isabelle struggled to remember him, to remember anything, but all there was, was here, in this hospital room. “My eyes,” she blurted, panic fluttering through her. “I’m seeing double.”

He nodded casually, as if she had told him she were having baked chicken for lunch. He took out a tiny flashlight from his pocket and shone it in her eyes, and when she drew back, startled, the nurse put one hand on Isabelle’s back and kept her still. The doctor clicked the light off and popped it back in his pocket. “You bumped your noggin. We’ll run some tests. Tomorrow, if your vision’s okay, you can go home.”

“What happened to the other people?” she asked. She saw them, the woman in the red dress, the boy, running.

“What other people?” He studied her leg. “Those bruises? They’ll fade in a week.”

“The other people in the crash. What happened to them?”

He scribbled something on a chart. “You’d have to ask their doctor.”

“Who’s their doctor?” she said, but he turned abruptly, striding out of the room.

“Wait!” Isabelle grabbed at the nurse’s sleeve. “Can you get me a newspaper?”

“Reading would strain your eyes right now. You just concentrate on getting some rest,” the nurse said, patting Isabelle’s shoulder.

“Someone can read it to me—” Isabelle said, and then seeing the look on the nurse’s face, blurted, “What about a TV? Can I get a TV?”

“I’ll send someone,” the nurse said, and then she was gone.

Isabelle slept on and off through the night, riding a wave of pain-killers. She dreamed she was freezing in Siberia. People were stuffing snow around her so she couldn’t move. She jerked awake. Nurses were packing ice under her armpits, along her thighs. “It’s to bring your fever down,” a nurse said.

“Where are they?” Isabelle said, her voice a rasp.

“I’m sure your family will be here in the morning,” the nurse said. Isabelle felt a prick in one arm. She fought, struggling to stay awake, but then the world went cold and white again.

When she woke the next morning, she was cool and dry. Someone had put her in a clean gown. The sheets and a soft white blanket were pulled over her. Her sight was still doubled, and she had a throbbing pain orbiting her head.

A specialist came in to look at her eyes, a woman so disinterested that Isabelle felt affronted. “Follow my finger,” she ordered Isabelle, waving her hand around in a blur so that it was all Isabelle could do not to get dizzy. “Touch your index fingers together.” She shone a light in Isabelle’s eyes and then stepped back. “Your sight should be fine tomorrow,” said the doctor. “You just rest now.”

Rest. How was she supposed to rest? She couldn’t read, no one had come around about the TV, and she didn’t have her cell phone to call anybody.

Luke. Had anyone called him? Had they even been able to find him? Was he too busy screwing his girlfriend? He wouldn’t know she had been leaving him, not unless he’d been home and had seen the note. And even then, he wouldn’t believe she could ever leave. He couldn’t imagine there was ever anything he could do that he couldn’t talk her into forgiving him for.

He was dead wrong.

She begged quarters from a nurse and made her way to the hall. She passed a newspaper and picked it up, but the nurse was right, the words were a blur.

She called her friend Michelle first and as soon as she said her name, there was an intake of air. “Oh my God, Izzy! Luke just told me. I’ve been frantic. How are you?”

“Luke told you?” Isabelle asked. How did Luke know? Two tables spun in front of her. “I’m fine. At least I think I’m fine.” Her voice grew small, as curled as a fist. She was about to say it again, louder, with more impact, because Michelle hadn’t responded. “Can I stay with you for a while?”

“Of course you can. God, when I heard about it—”

“What did you hear? What did Luke tell you? I don’t really know anything. Are the other people okay?”

There was an odd, funny silence. Isabelle twisted the phone cord around her hand. “Michelle?” she said.

“All that matters is you’re all right,” Michelle said finally. “I’m coming right out there.”

“No, no, I’m coming home soon. There’s no need.”

Behind Isabelle, a man coughed and sneezed. “Tell me what you know,” Isabelle said.

“I don’t know what happened to the other people,” Michelle said. “I just know it was a terrible accident and we’re all so lucky you’re okay.”

Isabelle turned and the man tapped his watch. “Did the newspaper have anything?”

“I didn’t get the paper or see the news.”

Isabelle held the phone closer to her face. Michelle was a news junky. She would no more think of not buying two different newspapers every morning than she would consider not brushing her teeth. “Can you turn on the news now?” and then she heard the dial tone. Michelle had hung up.