The Paternity Test (22 page)

“Also, for a long time, what did I do? Nothing. No job—only watching television. Danny was in charge: his country, his house. Everything I had comes from him. We don’t have much money, but still he says no, I can’t leave the house to go working. What I can do, anyway, but maybe, you know, McDonald’s, and
‘No wife of mine is flipping burgers!’
Three years of a life like this, or four—can you believe?
This
is why I came to America, I am thinking? To sit around and sit around and . . . nothing?

“But then,” she said, her shoulders slackening, “then we saved enough, and Danny says it’s time to have a baby.” She spoke the word precisely, as if she had rehearsed. “Just like this, I’m pregnant, and everything—pa!—it’s different. My belly gets so big, and I am like an
expert
. People ask me, ‘Boy or girl?’ they ask, ‘How far along?’—and now I know exactly what to say. I’m good at something!

“Other women—I met them at the doctor’s, pregnant also—they don’t like the way so many strangers look and touch: ‘Just because we’re having babies, what gives them a right?’ But me, oh, I liked it—I adored! Walk into a room and the people turn to stare, maybe like they think my dress is pretty. But no, it’s not the dress, you see? It’s
me. I’m
the thing. I’m what all the people want to look at.”

Now she pulled her arms up, her fsts full of sand. Wetter than the surface sand, finer grained, darker.

“And Danny,” she said.

“Danny what?”

“Danny also . . . looked.” She dumped the sand. “And touched, too. He liked it.”

“Of course he did. Women are so glowing when they’re pregnant.” Another cliché, but I was too late to catch it.

“Yes, but you don’t know,” she said. “I think you maybe don’t. Hair on the . . . down there, grows longer, very big. And the skin here”—she traced a path southward from her belly—“makes a strange, dark kind of line. Darker nipples, also. So dark! But Danny, well, he liked this, he played with all this hair. He liked
everything
, more than in a very long time. It’s okay to tell you this? Yes?”

“Yes, of course. Tell me all you want.”

Debora looked both bolder and more bashful. “Even after seven, eight months pregnant, we made sex. With fingers, tongue—for
me
, not just him.”

“But don’t you, well, do that now? I mean, didn’t you tell me? Danny is ‘so good with his hands’?”

“Yes,” said Debora, “but that doesn’t mean . . . not
these days
, you know?”

“Wait, then. He doesn’t really, after the insems—”

“No, no. I wanted you to think so.”

The tide was creeping higher, matching my distress. Exactly at the line dividing dry beach from moist, the crabs sat, awaiting inundation.

“What I still don’t get,” I said, “if pregnancy was
all that
? Why don’t you just have another kid? Don’t you want one?”

Debora made a sound that wasn’t laughing, quite, or sighing. “Don’t you see? I
do
want, Pat. I do.”

“So why don’t you?”

“It’s Danny. He won’t. He’ll never let me.”

“Why, because Paula ‘keeps you busy’? Didn’t he say that? Or no, wait. ‘How would we ever top her?’”

“Pat, you didn’t—you couldn’t really believe that.”

No, I guessed I hadn’t. But doubting wouldn’t have gotten us as far along as faith; therefore, I’d chosen to believe, or not to disbelieve.

“So,” I said, “you lied about that, too. Anything else?”

“No,” she said. “No, no. Please don’t call this lying. Please, can I explain the situation?”

I shrugged. I looked out at the water.

“Remember how it was,” she said, “when I came frst to here: Danny was the only thing I have. But then Danny, he says, he has to tell a secret. What he tells? When he was a new student in the college, he made some girl, by accident, pregnant. She wasn’t even his girlfriend. Only some girl who visited sometimes to see her cousin.”

He’d offered, Debora explained, to pay for the girl’s abortion. At least, to pay her
back
for one, as soon as he had money. But the girl wouldn’t do it; her parents wouldn’t let her.

“The father was police,” Debora said. “A Catholic cop. He made Danny sign, I don’t know, some piece of paper, to make Danny pay, every month, to help the girl. Every month until her child would have twenty-one years old.”

Danny himself was only nineteen, a frst-year college student. He couldn’t pay for child support and tuition all at once.

“Did you know what he wanted?” Debora said. “To be a lawyer. A lawyer for the public. What’s the name?”

“A public defender?”

“Yes,” she said. “To help the poor. But now he had to stop. This is when he started building houses.”

I thought of how he’d faltered when he met K.C., the lawyer. At the time, I’d figured his discomfort was mundane—nothing more than unfamiliarity—but now I saw what must have been his anger and his envy. K.C. had achieved what he’d abandoned.

“But wait,” I said. “What happened with the girl? She had the baby?”

“A son,” said Debora. “Nine years old already when Danny told me. Oh my God, I cried, Pat. I
cried
. But what I was supposed to do? Here I was, married, living in a country where I almost couldn’t talk. No money for a ticket home, and even if I had it, how I could go back there, to my mother?
Mother, you were right: I’m so dumb
.”

Danny had said she’d never have to meet the son, the woman; in fact, the boy’s mother would forbid it. He promised there were no further secrets.

“So,” said Debora, “I stayed. I tried to trust. I had to.”

Soon, she told me, Paula was born. Things were looking better. But Danny had been burned. Kids, for him, meant sacrifice; kids meant you had to kill your hopes.

“He loved Paula—he did—but two kids was enough, he said. What I said, I told to him, ‘We don’t have two kids.
You
do. But us, together, we have only one.’ I ask him shouldn’t Paula have a little brother or sister? Do it for her, I say, not for me. But no, Danny says. He has no more to give. And after this,” said Debora, “he touched me less and less. Now there’s sex together almost never.”

Danny’s jerked-tight voice, the day we’d met, came back to me:
Our own family’s finished
, he had said.

“I’m sorry,” she went on. “To tell this, I have shame. But that’s why Danny said okay, I think, for me to surro. Or didn’t try, not so hard, to stop me. Guilt, I think. He must feel very guilt.”

“Boy, you had me fooled,” I said. “That frst lunch? When we met? The way you were looking at him, all starry-eyed and . . .
wifely
. Wow, I thought: this husband must be something.”

Debora groaned. “The truth? We fought so bad, driving there, Danny almost wouldn’t come inside. But then I put a smile on. I made him do it, also. Because, you know, if we weren’t perfect, you would never want me.”

“Right,” I said, “of course.” The logic snapped in place. “And, well, you
had
to have us want you. Because, you thought, if you could make the surro plan seem real, Danny’d get so jealous that he’d change his mind, is that it? And you could have another kid with him?”

What, I wondered, would Joseph think of this twist on the hackneyed trope?
Making a threat to have a stranger’s baby to save the marriage
.

“No,” said Debora. “No, that’s not why.” She scraped her sandy palms together punishingly. “Or maybe very early, yes”—scrape, scrape, scrape—“maybe this was something in my mind. But this was just a stupid thought,
much
before I met you. By the time I wrote to you, I wanted to have your baby. Really, please believe, Pat. Please believe. You have to.” She reached out her thin, shaking arms.

I looked at her—the wet flecks of sand along her arms, her body but a fleck on the planet’s sandy skin—and felt, to my surprise, less indignation than kinship. Confusion, too, and some annoyance, to learn of all her secrets, but most of all, a soft commiseration. Here we humans are, I thought, grotesquely on our own, smidgens that will wash out to sea; we build connections and cling to them at any cost—we
must
. Wasn’t that what Stu and I were trying?

Maybe she’d been using us, more than she admitted, hoping we’d provoke a change in Danny. Or maybe she had truly quashed that thought a long time back. In any case, of course she had her own private motives. So did we. Everyone always did.

Debora’s eyes were bloated with the threat of backed-up tears. She would understand, she said, if now we didn’t want her, if we couldn’t look at her the same . . .

Well, we’d have to see. I’d have to talk with Stu. Tell him and decide if we could trust her.

That was what I should have said, and what I should have planned. Instead I told her, “No, you’re still . . . you’re the one we want.”

We
, I said. Even though I only thought of
I
.

I took her hand and held it—her smooth, nimble hand—and felt her anguish start to wick away. “But what if
you
don’t want this,” I said. “What if what you really want is still for you and Danny . . .”

Debora pulled her arm away and shook it, shedding sand. She stared over the welted-looking water. From our deck, on cloudless days, you could see to P-town, all the way across Cape Cod Bay. From here, though, the view was blocked; the earth’s curve obscured the far shore.

Debora said, “We have a word in Portuguese.
Saudade
.”

I tried to say it after her, but couldn’t get it right.

“You taught
glut
. I will teach you this,” she said. “Okay?” Slowly, then, she stood, tugging me up beside her. She paused like a schoolgirl solving sums. “Maybe I can’t explain it good. It’s hard. But I will try.
Saudade
—it’s a longing. A sadness for what is gone. You had a thing and dream of it to come back maybe sometime—oh, you want, you
want
it to come back—even though you know the chance, it isn’t very good.” She nodded once, sharply, as if in self-rebuke. “For Danny I feel
saudade
. For how we used to be. But I don’t think I’ll get it back. I don’t.”

Her eyes were moist—all those backed-up tears had broken through—but I might not have said that she was crying. The tears had the look of a vital lubrication, fluid that would keep her systems sharp.

“We love Paula together,” she said. “I know that Danny does. And when I see him loving her, I only love him more. But for him, I think, it’s different: his love for her, it takes away from what he feels for me. And maybe another baby—I wonder, you know, sometimes—maybe it would make him then have even less for me. And so,” she said, “not another. No. Not our own.”

“But Deb,” I said—the nickname Danny used, my frst time using it. “The baby
will
be yours. The one we’re going to make. How will you—how
could
you—give it up?”

Debora turned and started heading back the way we’d come. For a long time—too long—she didn’t speak.

The woman we had seen before, walking her retriever, passed us now, calling for the dog: “Molly, where the—come back down, right now! Molly? Come?”

“
Making
life,” said Debora at last. “This is what I want. Making it, not holding on, you see? Giving up the baby is the way that I can give.”

Now the wind was at our backs, whisking us along. The dunes towered, stately, on our left. From this angle, sunlight made the hills appear harder: less like sand than monumental marble.

“I don’t think I could,” I said.

“What?”

“Let go a baby.”

Debora smiled. “Of course not. That’s not what your job is. You’re the one who’s going to be the keeper.”

Horseshoe crabs are among the oldest species on earth. Ironically, the very trait that led to their survival—a uniquely adapted immune system—now threatens their further existence. An element in the crabs’ blood reacts to all contaminants, which makes the blood useful as a test for pharmaceuticals: if the blood reacts, the batch of drugs is tainted. To fill industrial needs for this naturally helpful substance, thousands of crabs are gathered every year. The crabs, after being bled, are brought back to the sea, but many of them die in the process.

Many? Some? Find stats to support this.

Some die in the process, and this, along with fishermen’s overuse of crabs as bait, and so on and so forth.

Classic case of natural order being disturbed by humans, and too: the thing that saves you also may doom you.

E-mail Steve. Any conceivable objections?

I sat on the deck, in sudsy morning brightness, vigorously scrawling on my notepad: every cell and synapse tuned to working. Blue jays pecked coyly at birdseed on the feeder; squirrels leapt from tree to tree above— all God’s creatures, doing what we should.

The phone rang inside, and I thought:
Let Stu get it
. Just because I worked from home—barefoot, in the sun—didn’t mean I didn’t need to work; but Stu, at the cottage, was simply, freely
home
. (He’d called in some chits again with Cynthia, his scheduler, and traded for today and tomorrow off, to be on hand for Debora’s ovulation.) Plus, the phone—
Get it, already!
—was always for Stu, lately. His mother would call, then Rina, then Walter, Rina again . . . all the Nadlers mobilized in crisis.

The trouble’s source was Richard: a change of heart, a waffling. Not about
whether
to adopt, but
from whom
. Rina had assumed they would find a Jewish child, a child whose birth mother was Jewish. Harder, of course. More costly. But continuity was priceless: the chain back to Abraham, unbroken. Richard had agreed, at frst; it seemed a no-brainer. “What else would we do?” he said. “Get some Chinese baby? Sorry, folks, but Ling-Ling Feinberg? Doesn’t quite sound right.”

But now Richard’s rabbi—his parents’ rabbi, really—was warning they would make a big mistake. The logic was obtuse to me, but Stu tried to help me understand.

Say a Jewish woman got pregnant in adultery, or even, God forbid, in incest. Her baby, in official Jewish terms, was a
bastard
, which meant it wouldn’t be eligible, ever, for Jewish marriage—and, for the Orthodox, that was like a death. Okay, so: what did that mean for Jews who were adopting? A Jewish birth mother could insist things were proper—her baby really, really wasn’t a bastard—but how was there a way to
truly
know? Safer to adopt a little gentile, then convert him, in which case the danger would be skirted, for conversion, if done properly, was foolproof.