The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (35 page)

That night, when Emily climbed into bed, Charlotte came armed with
Where Babies Come From.
She introduced the book with the necessary parental confidence, keeping her tone clear and firm as she read phrases like “the man's penis fits into the woman's vagina” and “this liquid contains what is called sperm” and, worst of all, “because the testes are shaped like balls, they are often referred to as simply
balls.
“ Assured as she sounded, Charlotte was dying to get it over with. She wanted to hurry downstairs where she would reward herself with a little TV; she'd purposefully chosen that day (a Monday) and time (9:00
P.M.
) so Emily would go right to sleep after and Charlotte could watch
Northern Exposure.
It was about charming people in a small town in Alaska, and was one of her favorite shows.

The plan didn't work, of course. It shouldn't have surprised her. For a child whose curiosity was piqued by where grapes and raisins come from,
Where Babies Come From
was a windfall. Though another child might have felt awkward and wanted the sex lesson to end, Emily was bursting with questions.

But what happens to the eggs the sperms don't get to?

What about the sperms that don't get to the egg?

What happens to the eggs if a baby's in there?

Charlotte spent nearly an hour trying to address her concerns-many of them concerns in the literal sense, as Emily seemed genuinely worried about the fate of the various sperms
and eggs that didn't succeed in becoming a baby. Finally, close to eleven (she missed all but the final credits of
Northern Exposure
),Charlotte surrendered
Where Babies Come From
to Emily's bookcase, where it mingled unabashedly with
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, A Wrinkle in Time,
all the Ramonas and Anastasia Krupniks. Emily kept it there all through high school—for its “kitsch value,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

Charlotte looks up, blinks at the teenage receptionist.

“Are you Charlotte?”

“Yes?”

“Okay, Charlotte,” the girl says. “Want to follow me?”

Fear floods her heart. It's bad news. It must be. Something is wrong with the baby. Emily has asked her to be brought back, have Dr. Joyce explain what's happening, let the Dream Machine muffle what they're saying. In a haze, Charlotte stands and follows the girl across the waiting room, past the humming Dream Machine and down a long hallway, wood floors creaking and slanting under their feet. Charlotte focuses on the scrunchy nestled in the girl's ponytail. Thick, purple, sprinkled with yellow stars and slivered moons. It looks homemade, as if fashioned from an old bedsheet. When the girl pushes open a door, Charlotte prepares for the worst. Emily is lying on a table, feet up, belly exposed. Walter is sitting on the edge of the bed holding her hand.

“Mom,” Emily says. She is smiling. “Look.”

Charlotte turns toward Joyce, who is standing beside a TV screen.

“Isn't it incredible?” Emily breathes.

On the screen is a blur no bigger than a thumbprint: white, fuzzy, with a pulsing dot in the middle.

“That's the heart,” Emily says, as Charlotte steps toward the bed. “That white spot. Do you see it?”

Charlotte's eyes swim with tears. It's unmistakable: bright white and beating, the only thing moving on the screen. How fitting that the heart is the first part of the body that's recognizable, the first detail of any new life to be defined.

“Do you see it, Mom?”

“I see it,” Charlotte says. She blinks through her tears until the tiny heart regains its focus. “I see.”

Joyce turns a series of tiny silver knobs. “Listen,” she says, smiling, and a moment later the room is filled with beating. Emily reaches out to grasp Charlotte's hand. With the other, she touches Walter's cheek. The three of them sit there in silence, listening to the sound of this new heart beating, so tiny yet so fearsome, a sound that drowns out Charlotte's own completely.

Charlotte and Emily sit on the porch. It's getting cold out, but Emily thought the air would be “refreshing.” They're nestled into wicker chairs, armed with heavy blankets, jackets, mugs of chamomile tea. Emily is wearing her fuzzy orange scarf and a light blue wool hat with flaps over the ears. She pulled a ski cap over Charlotte's head—“How could you come to New England without a
hat,
Mom?”—brown and snug and smelling of stale snow. Charlotte obliged her, though normally she avoids hats; she feels self-conscious in clothing she can't see.

Charlotte holds the mug under her chin, letting the steam warm her face. Inside, Walter is poking at the wood stove, and the sound of snapping logs drifts through the window. She watches smoke rise from the chimneys of neighbors' houses, houses in which sensible people are no doubt propped in front of space heaters and fireplaces. She looks at her car, sitting
patient in the driveway. From this distance, Sunset Heights feels like another world—unreal, almost cartoonish. And yet, come tomorrow she'll be heading back there. She knows she has to say this now, before she goes.

“I want you to let me pay for a real doctor.”

After mounting in her for the past eight hours, the sentence comes out oddly flat, as if numbed by the cold. When Emily doesn't respond right away, Charlotte wonders if she said it out loud.

Then: “Joyce is a real doctor, Mom.”

“She certainly seems like a nice person, honey.” Charlotte has anticipated this. “But you have to put the baby first. The baby needs to have the best care.”

“Mom—” Emily shifts in her chair, yanking the blanket up around her shoulders. It's one of Mara's creations: a patchwork of salvaged bridesmaids' dresses, squares of gaudy pink and peach and periwinkle blue.

“It's not even an office.”

“What do you mean?” Emily sighs. “It's an office.”

“It's a house. It's probably no more sanitary than
this
house.”

“What's wrong with this house?”

“Well, nothing. Now.” Charlotte sets her mug down. “But it'll be different once you have a baby.”

“Why?”

She pauses, and something clicks in her brain. “You're not raising the baby
here,
are you?”

“Why wouldn't we?”

Cold sidles under Charlotte's blanket, tightening her spine notch by notch. She hasn't rehearsed this part. The explanation seems so obvious, she doesn't know where to begin. “Well.” From inside she hears logs pop and sputter, like a cue from off the
stage. “There's not enough heat, for one thing. It's much too cold for a baby.”

Emily's mittened hands appear at the top of the blanket, two small red fish.

“And there's that staircase—it's so steep and curvy. It's not well lit. A baby could just go tumbling right down it.” At the click of Emily's tongue ring, she decides to skip over the controversial litter box and cigarette-filled coffee can. “You just can't live here after the baby's born.”

“Mom.” Emily draws her feet onto the chair, knees to her chin. “This place is fine.”

“Fine for young people. Fine for living on your own for the first time. But you're not going to live with—with Mara and Anthony once you have a baby.”

“Why not? They're good people. Our house feels like a home. You said so yourself.”

“Yes, but—” Charlotte closes her eyes, then bursts. “A newborn can't have
roommates!
”

“It's fine.”

“It's
not
fine.” Despite her freezing nose, her numb earlobes, anger is making Charlotte warm, reckless. “You just—you have no idea what you're getting into.”

Charlotte looks out at the sky, a thick salting of stars. Against the dark mass of pines, the birch trees look stark, stripped of their leaves, bleached by the cold. It seems to have gone from fall to winter in the three days she's been here.

“The thing is, Mom,” Emily says, “this isn't a situation we're stuck in, you know? We chose it. I just wouldn't be comfortable raising my child in the suburbs. I
want
a doctor who's untraditional. I
want
wood stoves. I
want
fresh air.”

In essence, Charlotte thinks, she doesn't want to raise her
child the way she was raised. She wants to be a different kind of mother. In other words: she doesn't want to be like Charlotte.

“It's not a criticism,” Emily says, reading her mind. “It's just that we have different opinions. We don't have to agree on everything, do we?”

“No.” Charlotte feels tears start to thicken in her throat. “But do we always have to disagree?”

“What do you mean?”

Charlotte swallows. Her eyes are blurring. She feels numb on the outside, but the cold seems to be having the inverse effect on her insides, making them unfreeze. From the kitchen, she hears the sound of Walter's footsteps and prays he stays inside.

“Mom?”

“I mean …” She keeps one ear trained on Walter. “I mean,” she says again as, thankfully, his feet clomp faintly up the stairs. She lowers her voice. “I mean, it is possible to make a life choice I'd actually agree with.”

Emily's face twists in confusion. “I didn't know we weren't.”

“Weren't what?”

“
Agreeing.
I feel like we're always agreeing. About everything. My entire life has been like one big happy handshake. At least on the surface. Deep down you were probably always freaking out about everything, but you never came out and said it.”

“I told you what I thought about the—”

“About the baby. I know. But that was like the first time ever. The first time I heard my mother express an opinion, and I'm twenty-two years old.”

Charlotte wants to disagree with her, but like a microcosm of the accusation itself, can't bring herself to say the words.

“And now you're speaking up, but I'm starting to think it's
only because—” Emily draws the blanket tight to her chin. “I think it's because I don't live with you anymore.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“I don't live with you,” she says, carefully, “so there's not so much at stake.”

“Oh, that's ridiculous.”

Emily sucks in her cheeks and closes her eyes, something Charlotte used to do when she was a young mother losing patience.
Inhale. Close. Count to ten.
But around four Emily opens and exhales, breath billowing into the air like a lungful of smoke. “You always, always say that when you hear something you don't want to hear, Mom. ‘It's ridiculous.' Maybe it's not ridiculous! Maybe you just don't want to believe it. I'm trying to
tell
you something here. I'm trying to tell you—” She falters, choking on the words, then her voice drops to a whisper. “God, you can be so hard to talk to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—that. There. You just did it. You get defensive. You don't stop to listen to what I'm saying. It's like you—you
refract
it. You don't want to
hear
anything.”

“Yes, I do,” Charlotte snaps. But she doesn't. This conversation is making her tremble. She looks at Emily and is surprised to see her top lip quivering too, the telltale pink splotches rising on her skin. In this cold, it is hard to tell what's affecting the face—the elements on the surface, or the emotion underneath—but this, she is sure, is coming from inside. “Tell me,” Charlotte says.

Emily lets out an unsteady breath, leaking into the air like thin clouds. “Okay. Here's what I think. I feel like things have changed between us since I moved out. I feel like, when I was little, you were really lonely. So you wanted to keep me happy.
So you always agreed with me. But now that I'm older and I'm out of the house and not coming back—”

—Charlotte feels a stab in her gut, though she knew this, of course she did, of course she's never coming back—

“—you can think what you want, and say what you want, and you can admit that you don't agree with me. Or maybe don't even like me.” In the faint starlight, tears cling to her lashes. “I don't even know.”

Charlotte's mouth feels like cotton. Her temples pound. She feels as though she's moving into uncharted territory, stepping inside the rooms of the heart, its thick, wet, swelling, pumping chambers, unsure of how or when she will ever find her way back out. “Don't like you?” she says, eyes swimming. “Of course I like you.”

Emily shrugs, trying to affect nonchalance, but her shoulders are a quick, miserable spasm.

“I love you,” Charlotte adds, but the words sound too mild for their meaning.

Emily looks out at the sky. “I know you do. I didn't mean that. I mean, I don't really think that. It's just that lately it seems like there are so many things you don't like about my life, it makes me wonder what was going on all those years I was in high school and college, if you were just pretending to back me up, or if you were kind of—I don't know, faking it. Because you were afraid I'd leave.”

“Leave?” Charlotte asks, but her heart jumps in recognition.

“Leave you.” Emily turns to her. “Go live with Joe, in Seattle.”

Charlotte wants to deny this, to disagree, but the truth of Emily's words is confirmed by the very precision of fear they recall. A fear of conflict with her daughter. A fear that her
daughter would stop wanting to live with her. A fear that her daughter would leave her. Because, unlike other daughters, Emily could have. Though Charlotte had legal custody, it was an unspoken fact that if ever Emily decided she wanted to live in Seattle, Charlotte wouldn't have stopped her, and the reality of that alternative life—a life on the West Coast with her father and his stylish wife/girlfriend and coffee shops and grunge music and ocean views—hovered always on the brink of their life on Dunleavy Street. Not that Emily ever actually threatened leaving. But she asserted the option in subtle ways: calling Joe when she was bored with New Jersey, or fed up with the stores at the mall, or frustrated with the kids in her high school—“provincial,” she called them—who only listened to Top 40 and hated the taste of coffee and had never traveled farther from home than the Jersey shore.