Sisterland Read online

  “I know,” he kept saying. “I know. I know.” But of course he didn’t.

  Chapter 19

  When Kendra came over to babysit the next week, I left both Owen and Rosie at home, picked up my father, and drove with him to Hacienda to meet Vi; after lunch, my father and I would go to the grocery store. Vi had suggested inviting our father, and she was—this still seemed remarkable—driving herself to the restaurant.

  It turned out there was a reason she wanted our father there. She was already waiting when we arrived, seated at a table for four with Stephanie next to her. As we approached, she said, “Dad, this is my girlfriend, Stephanie. I’ve been wanting to introduce you.”

  Stephanie smiled broadly. Without batting an eye—also, presumably, without understanding that Vi meant girlfriend girlfriend—my father shook her hand and said, “How nice to meet you.”

  I leaned in and hugged Stephanie. “Good to see you again,” I said, and she said, “Likewise.” As if the world hadn’t gone topsy-turvy since we’d last crossed paths, as if this were just an ordinary Wednesday in October. Which, if I hadn’t known better, I might have believed it was: Already, there seemed to be few references to the non-earthquake on the radio and in the Post-Dispatch, and certainly the national media had left the story behind. Hank and I hadn’t communicated since Rosie, Owen, and I had left his backyard four days earlier, which felt deeply strange—I’d have the urge in my fingers to text him before remembering why I couldn’t—and I hadn’t told Jeremy what I’d done. This meant that I was buzzing with a constant guilt, which, like cicadas on a summer evening, would sometimes surge in volume until I was able to hear nothing else. But apparently the sound was inaudible to others. If anything, Jeremy was more doting than usual, repeatedly offering to watch both children if I wanted to take a nap or run errands alone, as if he were the one who needed to atone.

  Two days before, my father had told me over the phone that he’d received a clean bill of health from the doctor. At the restaurant, Vi said she’d drink to that and ordered a Corona, then Stephanie said she’d have one, too, then my father said he thought he’d join them. Before I requested one as well, I had a fleeting, unpleasant recollection of my lunch at Blueberry Hill with Jeremy and Courtney.

  My father asked where Stephanie was from, and it turned out he’d been to Cave City, Arkansas, more than once back when he’d sold carpet. “If you were ever there in the summer, I hope you tasted our famous watermelon,” Stephanie said, and after that, the conversation never really lagged; she was as warm and patient with our father as Jeremy was.

  When we’d finished eating, Vi followed me to the bathroom, and from the next stall she said, “Are you impressed that I listened to you about Stephanie?”

  “I knew she’d take you back.”

  Vi was peeing. “Did you hear I was mentioned on Letterman? Patrick said Letterman didn’t say my name, but the joke was about how Congress should get economic advice from the psychic in St. Louis.”

  So references to Vi’s prediction hadn’t gone away entirely; that was too much to hope for. And undoubtedly Letterman had been mocking her, though Vi seemed pleased rather than offended. The dismantling of her prediction, its erasure, was more gradual than I wanted. I wanted it to be immediate and complete, but there were lingering reminders, like scraps of trash after a festival. And surely I wanted it all done away with as soon as possible because the faster and further we moved from her prediction, the faster and further we’d also be moving from my complicity in it and from my betrayal of Jeremy. But later, when I looked back, those weeks immediately after the earthquake hadn’t happened still seemed to be such a raw time, so close to the day itself. It had been unrealistic of me to be impatient.

  When we’d left the restaurant and my father and I were in the dairy section of Schnucks, I said, “Dad, I think Stephanie is Vi’s girlfriend as in they’re dating.”

  “Is she?” My father’s tone was as mild as it would have been if I’d said, I think Stephanie is a Cardinals fan.

  Had he still not understood? How could he not have, unless it was intentional? And even if it was, it seemed that the time had arrived to get this over with; I had the impression that Stephanie could be around for a while. “I’m pretty sure Vi’s gay now,” I said. “And Stephanie is her partner.”

  My father was lifting a tub of cream cheese from the shelf, and he looked over at me briefly and nodded. His tone remained mild as he said, “Stephanie seems like a nice woman. And what a coincidence that she’s from Cave City.”

  And then—for assuming my father harbored the same prejudices I did, for imagining he was several steps behind me when the reverse was true—I felt humiliated. There was nothing for me to do but point down the shelf and say, “You need eggs, right?”

  Perhaps it was because I’d already dispensed with my dignity for the day that I asked the question I did as we were in the car waiting to turn out of the grocery store parking lot. I said, “Dad, do you have senses?” It’s none of our business—that was what I’d told Vi.

  “Oh,” my father said. “Well, sometimes, sure. Sure I do.” He motioned left and said, “Be careful, because some of the drivers come around there awfully quick.”

  Had this been part of what frustrated my mother, his indirection? But no, if anything, she’d shared the tendency.

  As I pulled onto Manchester Road, I said, “You’re psychic—you have psychic abilities?”

  “Don’t tell your sister, but I’ve never been fond of that word. It’s cheap-sounding.”

  “What kinds of things do you have senses about?”

  “Oh, the same as you girls—this and that.” He laughed in a small way. “Some things I want to know, some I’d prefer not to. I was sharper when I was a younger man, as with everything.”

  How bizarre it was to be on the other side of this conversation, to hear another person say he had this ability and for the admission to prompt in me curiosity and disbelief.

  My father’s tone was still casual as he said, “But I was always more like you than Violet, not encouraging it. It can be quite a double-edged sword.”

  “And Mom knew?”

  “She didn’t care for it. She thought it was voodoo.”

  All of this—simultaneously, it was astonishing and it explained so much. Vi and I had probably frightened our mother: her unexpected twins, with our creepy powers.

  “Did you tell Mom before you were married or after?”

  “Now, that’s hard to recall. It’s been so long, hasn’t it?” And I thought, You told her after. Our poor, ignorant twenty-three-year-old mother, abruptly surrounded on all sides by freaks of nature.

  I said, “When Mom was pregnant, did you know we’d be twins?”

  What a strange expression there was on my father’s face. It was as if he’d at last been caught for a petty crime committed decades earlier but also as if he’d wanted to be caught; the energy it took to outrun the past had become greater than the punishment he’d receive.

  He said, “I did bring it up. Wouldn’t it be something if there were two babies? But she was firm about only wanting one. She was already worried about the delivery.” When there had been two of us, had that been when she realized he was prescient? And after he’d played along as she’d decorated a nursery for a single baby—she must have felt deceived by him, manipulated. But maybe he’d doubted his own foreknowledge.

  “You were wonderful girls,” my father said. “So lively and happy.”

  Yeah, right, I thought, though after a few seconds, it occurred to me that his statement wasn’t necessarily untrue. I’d let the onset of my mother’s gloom cast itself backward over the years prior to my awareness of it, I’d let the shades she drew when we were eleven be drawn over everything before. But there was all that time when Vi and I had danced and sung, the afternoons we’d spent hanging from the mulberry tree in the yard, the games we’d invented. “The first time I saw your mother,” my father said, “when she was standing behind
the front desk at the hotel, I had a sense about you and Violet. I could see you at three or four, in your red bathing suits. You probably don’t remember those.”

  I didn’t remember, but there was a photo of Vi and me in matching bikinis, and the familiarity of the photo was almost like a memory.

  “I had been a bachelor for such a long time,” my father was saying, “and suddenly I understood that it wasn’t my fate to live alone after all.”

  Did he mean to imply that he’d married my mother so we could exist? That it hadn’t simply been my mother’s beauty that attracted my father to her but the life he’d envisioned with all of us?

  “I always believed things would get better for Rita,” he said. “I knew it would be hard in the beginning, when you were babies, but I thought as you got older, she’d enjoy being a mother.”

  The implication that she hadn’t—it was nothing I didn’t know, but it still stung.

  “She just couldn’t forgive herself, though,” my father said. “If she had, I imagine things wouldn’t have been as tough.”

  “Forgive herself for what?”

  This time, instead of looking caught, my father looked so lost in the past that it was as if I wasn’t in the car. “She took some money from her parents,” he said. “Before she left home. Not a great deal, maybe forty or fifty dollars. And she repaid it after she was on her feet in St. Louis, but when she sent it home, her mother wrote back saying Rita was no longer their daughter. They didn’t approve of her moving away, living in a city.”

  Sixty dollars—she had taken sixty, and I knew this because of my last night at Mrs. Abbott’s house, when she had called me Rita and told me to take that amount from her pocketbook. Which surely meant the universe had absolved her, even if her family hadn’t. And my poor mother, estranged from her parents and sisters until she died over such a pittance. Or maybe the money hadn’t been the real reason, just the excuse to punish her for other choices they disapproved of.

  My father still seemed preoccupied when he spoke next, so much so that at the time, I wasn’t even sure he was talking to me. He said, “We all make mistakes, don’t we? But if you can’t forgive yourself, you’ll always be an exile in your own life.”

  I arrived home just before Owen’s second nap and Rosie’s first one. As I paid Kendra, I said, “Did they torment each other?”

  “They did great,” she said. “Right, guys?”

  Kendra and I were standing by the staircase, and we both turned toward the living room, where Owen sat on the floor and Rosie knelt in front of him. “Hi, Owen.” She was gripping his left hand with her right one. “Hi, baby. It’s nice to meet you.”

  For a few days after Hank and I had slept together, I’d avoided our usual parks anytime I knew Amelia wasn’t in school, but when Rosie burst into tears as I turned the stroller into the acorn park for the fourth afternoon in a row—besides being the site of her split lip, since healed, the acorn park had no climbing toy—I turned around and walked to Oak Knoll; the next morning, we went to DeMun. (That its nickname was MILF Park now seemed, even if just in my own head, more cringe-inducing than funny.) Surprisingly, though, and despite Rosie’s many queries about them, we never ran into Hank and Amelia. Either they themselves were avoiding these parks or they were going when Hank knew Rosie and Owen would be napping. As the days passed, I stopped anxiously scouting for them.

  On Thanksgiving morning, I woke wondering if the Wheelings had really ended up going to Hawaii. After Jeremy had set our turkey in the oven, I realized we had less than a cup of sugar left and I hadn’t yet made the cranberry relish or the pumpkin pie. I took Owen with me to Schnucks, and I hadn’t decided ahead of time to buy a pregnancy test—I still hadn’t gotten my period since Owen’s birth, and I hadn’t consciously thought about it—but as I passed the pharmacy, I abruptly turned the grocery cart down the aisle where the tests were and grabbed one. In the checkout line, after I’d paid, I jammed the box into the inside pocket of my coat.

  At home, in the upstairs bathroom, I sat on the toilet and stuck the wand between my legs, peeing onto its tip. Then, so as to keep the wand horizontal—I no longer needed to read the instructions for a pregnancy test—I set toilet paper on the tile floor and placed the wand on top of the toilet paper. We had begun potty training Rosie in the beginning of November, and the only reading material in the bathroom for the three minutes I had to wait to get the results was a copy of Everyone Poops, which I had memorized weeks ago. (“Some stop to poop. Others do it on the move….”)

  I sat on the floor against the tub, crossed my legs, and closed my eyes. From downstairs, I could smell the turkey cooking and hear Jeremy building a fort with the children.

  Please, no, I thought. And I’ll never tempt fate again. I’ll always be good, for the rest of my life. Because if I was pregnant yet again and Jeremy was the father, it would be bad enough; I doubted I had more to give, additional reservoirs of patience or attention beyond what Rosie and Owen depleted every day. But if I was pregnant again and Hank was the father, it would be unimaginable; it would be cataclysmic.

  It’s impossible, of course, to remember every moment of every day, impossible sometimes to remember any moment of a particular day. Certain instants come to stand in for whole swaths of time, and these three minutes, sitting on the bathroom floor on Thanksgiving, my back to the tub, Rosie laughing downstairs, is what I now remember when I think of being pregnant with Gabe. These moments were the last ones in which I didn’t yet know that I was pregnant, or didn’t know for sure, when I still felt a terrified wishfulness. It was when my third pregnancy seemed like an extremely unpleasant hypothetical condition rather than the start of a new life.

  When I leaned forward to check the window on the wand, it said pregnant. I swallowed, and I didn’t cry; who did I have to blame but myself? To be pregnant and not to know who the father was, for his identity to be revealed when I delivered either a white baby or a black one—this was a situation from a soap opera.

  Before I went downstairs, I peed on the second wand in the package, and the word PREGNANT also appeared in its window. Then I returned both wands and their caps to the box, put the box inside an empty diaper package I found in Owen’s room, put the diaper package inside a plastic bag from Target, tied the handles of the Target bag, and carried it downstairs to the kitchen, where I inserted it in the only trash can in the house that had a lid. I mashed down the Target bag with my hand, letting other garbage rise over it—potato peels and wadded paper towels and a soggy piece of toast—and then I joined my husband and children in the living room.

  Would this be our last Thanksgiving as a family? I felt as if I were watching Jeremy and Rosie and Owen underwater. Though already, the suspense of my secret had shifted, the belief that being pregnant was the worst possible outcome. Now the worst possible outcome was that Hank was the father. Jeremy and I could deal with a third child that was ours; it would be hard, but plenty of people had three children, and we’d figure it out. If Hank was the father, however, it was not at all clear that Jeremy and I could figure it out, at least not together.

  Making the cranberry relish, I vacillated between considering the logistics of our impending meal and wondering if I’d wrecked my life. If I set the table ahead of time, would Rosie grab the utensils? Was it possible to find out who the father was before you gave birth? I’d put out everything except the silverware, I decided.

  I set Owen on the dining room rug and pulled the place mats and cloth napkins from the sideboard. Rosie was in the living room watching an episode of Olivia, and Jeremy was in the kitchen checking the turkey. “Maybe you should carve it before my dad gets here,” I called to Jeremy. “I feel like he’s been shaky lately.”

  Jeremy came to stand in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. “Sure, if you think that’s better. I can do that.” He didn’t move right away—he hadn’t guessed that I was pregnant, had he?—and then he said, “I understand why you threw in the towel on Courtney. And
I’m not saying you should change your mind. But I kind of miss hanging out with the Wheelings.”

  One could, while still pregnant, learn the identity of the father by two means, depending on how far along the pregnancy was: chorionic villus sampling, or CVS, if you were between your tenth and twelfth weeks—this was, coincidentally, the same procedure that had revealed that Courtney was carrying a baby with Down’s—or amniocentesis after. Both procedures carried a small risk of miscarriage, with the risk being slightly higher with CVS. To confirm paternity, you needed a DNA sample—a swab from inside the mouth, a hair with the follicle still attached—from one of the candidates or their first-degree relatives. In other words, I could root around on Jeremy’s pillow or I could take Rosie or Owen to a lab, options that all seemed treacherous and sordid.

  I discovered this information on the Internet at the Richmond Heights library, where I’d gone during Kendra’s babysitting hours the week after Thanksgiving. I could have found out sooner, I could have looked it up on my phone the minute my pregnancy test came back positive, but I didn’t want Jeremy stumbling across my search history. Not that he used my phone, but I didn’t want to worry that this would be the one time he did. Anyway, to not take action on my pregnancy was like not telling Jeremy I’d cheated in the first place: if it meant I had to bear the burden of guilt alone, it also meant my pregnancy wasn’t real to anyone besides me.

  From the parking lot of the library, I called Vi, and it was obvious that I’d awakened her. “I have a favor to ask,” I said. “Can I come over?”

  When Vi opened her front door, wearing plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a red T-shirt under which she had on no bra, I said, “I’m in a hurry, but I need you to do a reading for me. I’m pregnant again—”

  “Good Lord, Fertile Myrtle!”

  I shook my head; I wasn’t sharing good news. “Remember the night of your prediction, when you told me I smelled like sex? Well, I’d had it with Hank. And I’m not sure if the baby is his or Jeremy’s, and that’s what I need you to tell me.”