The Language of Sisters (39 page)

Martin nudged the edge of his foot against mine beneath the table. I nudged his back and took a deep breath before speaking again.

“Like I said, I haven’t thought about it a lot, but if I found the right man, then yes. I’d want to have a baby with him.” I looked at Martin. “Someday.”

Two months after that luncheon, Martin asked me to move into his Capitol Hill apartment. My mother approved of this living arrangement; his mother did not. The fact that Martin didn’t let Alice’s opinion sway him reassured me. For a while, we enjoyed that honeymoon stage of nesting, when I still found it adorable that he needed all the canned food labels facing in the same direction and he didn’t complain that the contents of my closet were strewn across the bedroom floor.

That blissful period of time came to an end on a crisp December evening. I was curled up on the couch with a book when he stepped in from our bedroom, holding a white sheet of paper.

“A note from my mom,” he said, waving it at me.

“Let me guess,” I joked. “Thanking me for all my help at Thanksgiving?” I had not been allowed in the kitchen to help with the food preparation during my first holiday spent at Martin’s childhood home. “Oh, no,” Alice said. “Don’t bother. Really. I’ll take care of it. You just sit. Relax.” So I lounged in the living room with Martin while she whirled around like a madwoman between the dining room and kitchen. The conversation over the dinner table began with her dramatic lamentation: “I can’t believe I did this whole meal all by myself! I swear I’ll have to hire help next year.” I had enough social graces to keep my mouth shut, though Martin and I laughed about it in the car on the way home.

Standing there in our apartment a couple of weeks later, Martin looked uncomfortable, clutching the e-mail. “No, no thank-you note,” he said. “Actually, she made a list of what you ate. With calorie count.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing visibly up and down beneath the thin skin of his neck.

My mouth dropped open. “Are you kidding me?”

He took a step toward me. “Now, don’t get upset …”

“Unbelievable.” I threw my book to the floor with a loud
thump.
Martin stopped in his tracks. “You’re going to
defend
her?”

“She read an article, honey,” he began. “With a list of the calories people typically consume …”

“Stop.” I held up my hand, just in case he was tempted to believe I wasn’t serious. “Just stop it right there.” Pursing my lips together, I pushed a couple of breaths out through my nose. “Why are you telling me this? Maybe
you’re
concerned about my weight?” I was not a gym bunny. I had a belly. When not safely ensconced in the proper combination of wire and spandex, my breasts bordered on cartoonish.

“No,” he sighed. “You know I love your body. She just asked me to tell you about it. I really think she meant well. She says she’s concerned about your health.”

I snorted at this. “Please. My health is just fine. You’re the one with the high blood pressure. Did she make a list for the food
you
ate?”

“No, but—” he attempted, but I cut him off.

“You know what? She can go fuck herself. You both can.”

It was our first official fight. The next day, I found the e-mail in the recycle bin and experienced great pleasure in pushing it through the paper shredder at work. Martin brought home flowers that night and apologized profusely for his misstep.

“It’s just the way she is,” he said. “Maybe you could talk with her. Tell her how you feel.”

“I’d feel a little strange doing that,” I said. “Couldn’t you do it?”

“And say what?”

“That her e-mail was totally offensive. That she hurt my feelings.”

He sighed. “She won’t get it. She’s a very factual person.”

“What would you do if it was you? If she hurt your feelings like this?”

“I don’t let her hurt my feelings. And even if she did, whining about it is not who she raised me to be. I told you she’s old-fashioned. She’s also a very strong woman. It’s not worth the energy trying to get her to change. She won’t.”

I forgave him, of course.
Nobody is perfect,
I reasoned.
He just made an error in judgment. Mother-child relationships are complicated.
Since my relationship with my own mother was fairly distant, I attempted to find it sweet that Martin shared a close relationship with his. I understood it, to an extent. Martin was an only child. After his father’s death, Martin and Alice became partners in life just as much as they were mother and son. I rationalized her blunt insertion in our relationship as a result of her heritage. Germanic women just said what they thought—no sugar-coating necessary. That was just who she was. Over time, though, this logic wore thin. Martin didn’t see it, calling me paranoid. I called him a mama’s boy and an idiot. Yes indeed, it does take two people to end a marriage. I’m not so delusional as to think I played no part in our downfall. However, I am still child enough to proclaim that my husband is the one who started it.

We lived together about a year before I found out I was pregnant. Not a minute after I stepped out of our bathroom with the positive test in hand, he smiled and said, “Marry me.” I said yes immediately—he was smart, funny, and sweet; all the good things I thought a husband should be. I loved him. I also didn’t want to be like my mother, resigned to survive my life alone. I was certain having a husband would make motherhood that much easier to navigate. And besides, Martin was delighted to become a father. I could still be a journalist. I could still live the life I’d planned. I’d just have Martin and a baby living it right along with me.

Alice, of course, was thrilled to learn she would be a grandmother. We told her about the baby a few weeks after the impromptu wedding. At her urging, with the sudden knowledge he was about to become a father, Martin surprised me by leaving the public school system, parlaying his technical savvy into a cushy, well-paying programming position with Microsoft.

“But you love teaching,” I said when Martin informed me he was switching careers. Martin’s intense fondness for his students was one of the things that made me believe he would be the kind of father neither of us had ever known. “What about becoming a principal someday? Isn’t that what you’ve wanted?” We were driving during this conversation, on our way out to dinner. My hand rested on the curve of my stomach, a first attempt at cradling our child.

Martin shrugged. “The benefits at Microsoft are amazing, Cadee. They’ll pay for everything … your pregnancy, the birth, insurance for all of us. Plus, there’s the opportunity to move up in the company.” He threw a brief glance out the window. “I’d never get that with teaching. Not really.”

“But—” I began, and he cut me off.

“I want this, honey. I do. I want to be the kind of father my dad would have been proud of. I want our child to have everything we didn’t.”

I hadn’t argued with him further. I tried to be supportive the way I assumed a good wife would. Not that I had any firsthand knowledge of what a good wife actually looked like. But since life presented me with the opportunity to have everything my mother never did—husband, kids,
and
a career—I wasn’t going to screw it up. I was going to have it all.

For a while, it felt like I did. Toward the end of my pregnancy, with the security of Martin’s new job, I left the
Herald
and started freelancing. My first few articles sold quickly, so I assumed I’d have no problem picking it back up a few months after Charlie’s arrival. Aided by a perfectly timed spinal block, giving birth was easier than I expected it to be, though learning to take care of an infant was much harder. Charlie was colicky, and no matter how many times we tried, he refused to take a pacifier or a bottle. The first six months of his life, if he wasn’t sleeping, he was nursing. Sleep became a rare luxury, and even with breastfeeding, my body didn’t bounce back the way all the books I’d read promised that it would. Instead, it clung to fifteen of the thirty-five pounds I’d gained while pregnant. I was puffy and exhausted. I also discovered that I really didn’t want sex anymore; that overwhelming physical desire simply ceased rising up beneath my skin. This startled me and had a profound, immediate effect on my marriage. The one place Martin and I always connected was in bed.

At first, Martin was patient. He said he understood. We’d climb under our covers at night and he’d just hold me. After a couple of months passed, though, that wasn’t enough. He’d hold me, but then start to kiss my neck. His hands moved over my hips, urging me to him. I knew what he wanted. I felt guilty, so I forced my body to mimic the correct motions, despite my mind silently screaming to be left alone. This was a new sensation for me. I was used to wanting him, too. At that point, the only craving I felt for physical connection was cradling my child in my arms.

OUTSIDE THE LINES

A gripping novel about a woman who sets out to find the father who left her years ago, and ends up discovering herself.

When Eden was ten years old she found her father, David, bleeding out on the bathroom floor. The suicide attempt led to her parents’ divorce, and David all but vanished from Eden’s life. Since childhood, she has heard from him only rarely, just enough to know he’s been living on the streets and struggling with mental illness. But lately, there has been no word at all. Now in her thirties, Eden decides to go look for David, so she can forgive him at last, and finally move forward. When her search uncovers other painful truths—not only the secrets her mother has kept from her, but also the agonizing question of whether her father, after all these years, even wants to be found—Eden is forced to decide just how far she’ll go in the name of love.

Read on for a look at Amy Hatvany’s

Outside the Lines

Currently available from Washington Square Press

Excerpt from
Outside the Lines
copyright © 2012 by Amy Hatvany

The call came at three thirty in the morning, a time slot predestined for the arrival of bad news. No one calls to tell you you’ve won the lottery in the middle of the night. Your boyfriend doesn’t call you to propose.

The shrill of my cell phone dug into my dreams and wrenched me from sleep.
This is it
, I thought.
He’s dead
. Six months ago, I’d given the morgue at Seattle General my number along with a copy of a twenty-year-old picture of my father. “I don’t care what time it is,” I told the hospital administrator. “If he turns up, I’ll come right away.”

The picture was the last one I had of him. In it, his blue eyes were bright and his smile was wide. My father was a tall man, whip thin but sinewy and strong. He had wavy black hair like mine and wore it parted down the middle and to his shoulders, like Jesus. His expression in the photo gave no clue of the chemical anarchy wreaking havoc in his brain. It was invisible, this enemy that attacked his moods. “This is
not
an illness,” he said insistently. “This is who I
am
.” He pounded his chest with his fist in emphasis, in case my mother and I were confused as to whom he referred. The medications changed him, he said. They brought on such terrible mental inertia that every one of his thoughts became an unwieldy, leaden task. He preferred the wild highs and intolerable lows to a life of not giving a damn. At first, as a child, I didn’t blame him. After he disappeared, blaming him was all I did.

I dressed hurriedly in the dark of my tiny bedroom. Jasper lifted his head, wagged his tail two times, then promptly put his head on my pillow and let loose a guttural sigh. He was ten—an old man of a dog. His brindle coat was wisped through with silver; he slept pretty much twenty hours of the day. I happened upon him in the alley of one of my first restaurant jobs, luring him toward me with bits of pancetta. He wiggled his fat little puppy butt in response and I was a goner. I took him home that night.

Before leaving the house, I walked to the kitchen to put food in his bowl, then returned to my room and scratched his head. “Be a good boy, Jasper,” I told him. “Make sure to bite any robbers.” His tail gave one solid thump against my mattress in response to my voice but otherwise, he didn’t move. He wouldn’t venture to the kitchen until after six, our normal waking time. I joked with my friends that Jasper was the best and most predictable man I knew. With him, I’d shared my longest and most successful relationship.

It was early October and the chill in the air had taken on a crisp, palpable bite. I sat in my car for a few minutes with my hands tucked between my thighs, waiting for the engine to warm up. My thoughts seesawed between the hope that the man lying on a slab in the morgue was my father and the prayer that he wasn’t. I was ten years old the last time I saw him, numbly watching from our front porch as the medics took him away. This was not how I wanted our story to end—my father dead before I had a chance to heal the hurt between us. But at least it would be an ending. At least I could finally let him go.

After backing out of the bumpy gravel driveway on the side of my house, I maneuvered through my quiet Green Lake neighborhood and headed south. The streetlights glowed eerily amber in the early morning fog as I drove toward downtown. The Columbia Center tower loomed in the distance, about ten blocks from my destination. I’d spent enough time on the streets of downtown Seattle to have its geography stitched into the grooves of my mind. Off the Union Street exit, the hospital was to the east, a well-known homeless shelter fourteen blocks west, an illegal tent city three blocks from there. I pictured the cobblestones of Pioneer Square and the railroad tracks beneath the viaduct where so many of Seattle’s homeless population dwelled. I wondered where they had found him. I wondered if he had thought of me before he died.

This last question repeated in my mind as I parked in the hospital garage. I quickly found my way to the basement and was escorted into an icy room barely lit by bluish fluorescent bulbs. On my left was a wall that looked like a stainless steel refrigerator with multiple square floor-to-ceiling doors. The air hinted of something black and fungal beneath an intense antiseptic overlay of cleaning products. I imagined that scent was death.