Sisterland Page 42

  Jeremy hadn’t returned home, nor had he texted me, by the time I nursed Owen at ten. I brushed my teeth and got into bed without setting the security alarm. I didn’t think I’d be able to fall asleep, and first I was right, but eventually I was wrong; I realized I was wrong because it was after midnight, and I was waking up as Jeremy climbed into bed. There was something bad between us, I remembered, before I remembered what the bad thing was. Normally, he’d have rolled toward me or I’d have reached out and patted his thigh, but we didn’t touch each other or speak. He lay on his side, facing away from me.

  In the morning, our routine was the same as usual except undergirded by our mutual awareness of my betrayal, and Jeremy’s distance; he barely met my eyes and spoke to me only when necessary. When I came downstairs after showering and said, “What did Owen eat?” Jeremy said, “Oatmeal and pears,” and he didn’t say anything else to me for more than twenty minutes. Was it always going to be like this, from here on out? Because life with young children—it was hard enough without him hating me. Maybe divorce would be preferable to this punitive domesticity. But no, I needed to be patient, to let him absorb what I’d known for weeks.

  Rosie was drawing on construction paper, and she passed Jeremy a green crayon and said, “Daddy wants to draw Mama making a happy face.”

  “I’ll draw a turtle,” Jeremy said.

  Before he left for work, I asked, “Are you coming home for dinner?”

  After a pause, he said, “I guess.” Then, not in a mean way, just in a businesslike way that was, in its dispassion, almost worse than meanness, he said, “Call today and schedule a CVS.”

  That night at dinner, while I fed Owen a jar of squash and Jeremy, Rosie, and I ate pizza that Jeremy had told me via text he’d pick up, Rosie said, “Rosie’s birthday is coming up.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “In January. How old will you be?”

  “Is Mama coming to my birthday party?”

  “Of course,” I said. “You’ll be three.”

  “Is Daddy coming to my birthday party?”

  Jeremy said nothing, and I said, “Of course he is.”

  “Is the baby coming to my birthday party?”

  “Owen would love to come to your birthday party,” I said.

  “Is a purple cake coming to my birthday party?”

  “We can make a purple cake.”

  Jeremy set the slice of pizza he’d been eating on his plate, stood, and walked into the dining room. Rosie said, “Is a balloon coming to my birthday party?”

  I stood, too; when I looked into the dining room, I saw Jeremy by the windows, his back to me, his shoulders heaving. There was a noise coming from him, an almost imperceptible squeaking. “Is a balloon coming to my birthday party?” Rosie asked again. I had no idea whether Jeremy would want me to comfort him or leave him alone. Since I was the source of his unhappiness, it seemed safer to assume the latter.

  “Is a balloon coming to my birthday party?” Rosie asked for the third time, and as I returned to the kitchen table, I said, “Yes, a balloon is coming.”

  A few minutes later, I heard Jeremy leave the house. Again, he didn’t get home until I was asleep.

  The CVS was nine days later, performed not by my obstetrician but by a red-bearded maternal-fetal-medicine specialist, and Jeremy wasn’t there. Though I’d mentioned when the appointment was, it had seemed wrong to ask him to accompany me, and he hadn’t offered. A technician did an ultrasound first, to confirm that I was right about being ten weeks along, and the technician stayed, the view of my inhabited womb in blurry black and white remaining on the computer screen, while the doctor used a needle to extract the tissue sample. On the screen, I could see a shrimp shape with little limb buds, and just before the doctor inserted the needle, fear gripped me that the CVS would cause a miscarriage. If this happened, it would simplify everything, but still—I wanted the baby to be okay.

  The procedure was more uncomfortable than truly painful, and when the doctor was finished, they observed the baby’s heartbeat for several minutes; then he left and the technician helped me stand. “Do you have someone to drive you home?” she asked, and I nodded, which was a lie. But I’d hired Kendra until five-fifteen, when Jeremy would return from work. I walked slowly to the parking garage, climbed into my car in the semidarkness of the winter afternoon, then put the key in the ignition. At home, I texted Kendra from the driveway to tell her to take Rosie and Owen to the kitchen. Just before I opened the front door, I noticed outside it a brown paper lunch bag. My name was on it in Vi’s handwriting. Inside was a thumbnail-sized shiny red gemstone flecked with black, and a scrap of paper on which Vi had written, Jasper—for balancing emotional energy/stress—wear in your auric field (i.e., on you or carry)—can’t hurt! I slipped the stone and note into the pocket of my coat and went up to bed.

  The CVS didn’t cause me to miscarry; I was still pregnant in the days after. I could tell because, besides not cramping or spotting, I was usually either queasy or ravenously hungry, and sometimes I was both at once.

  I didn’t know exactly when Jeremy had his DNA sample drawn, or how he directed the information to my obstetrician’s office, but eight days after the CVS, while the children were having their afternoon naps, I received a call on my cellphone from my obstetrician, a tall, merry, middle-aged Jewish woman who had delivered Rosie and Owen and whom I adored. “So I’ve got your results in front of me, and Jeremy’s DNA doesn’t match baby’s,” she said. Shame surged through me, and after a few seconds, she said, “Is that a surprise for you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I hope you’re taking care of yourself,” she said. “Eating well and getting plenty of rest.”

  “I am. Thank you for calling.”

  “Kate, if you’d like to talk to someone, I know a fabulous therapist in Clayton.”

  So Dr. Rosenstein, cheerful, frank Dr. Rosenstein with her dark, curly hair and her bright, unfashionable, vaguely ethnic wardrobe—I’d once seen her wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt under her white coat—Dr. Rosenstein now knew I was a slut who’d cheated on my husband.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “But thanks.”

  After I’d hung up, I texted Jeremy: CVS test results back. Your DNA does not match baby. I had no idea if sending this information in a text was an act of cowardice or mercy. At home, for the past few weeks, we’d been sleepwalking. After Owen and Rosie were down at night, Jeremy would read or grade in the living room, with the television turned to sports and muted. Once I said, “Do you want to watch Saturday Night Live?” and he said, “No, but if you do, I can go to the kitchen.”

  After that, I began getting into bed myself as soon as Rosie was asleep, even though it was seven-thirty. I ended up finishing the novel I’d started in June, and then I started and finished a memoir by Michael J. Fox. Jeremy never came to bed until after I’d nursed Owen at ten and gone to sleep. It occurred to me to try to get him to have sex, either to stay awake upstairs or just throw myself at him downstairs, but would I throw myself at him on the same couch where I’d thrown myself at Hank? Did Jeremy suspect that the couch was where Hank and I had had sex? Anyway, if Jeremy rebuffed me, it would be mortifying; it would be unbearable. What was it I’d thought that night with Hank about Jeremy not giving me compliments—that we were too tired for it? Which was true enough, but what I’d overlooked was how Jeremy’s daily kindnesses, the way he pulled me onto his lap, the way he washed the dinner dishes, were their own compliments, their own reassurance. In their absence, I could feel the corners of furniture more sharply, the drafty windows and cold floors.

  A minute after I’d sent him the text with the CVS results, Jeremy texted me back: Let’s talk tonight.

  There wasn’t ice cream this time around; because Jeremy and I no longer ate it at night together in front of the TV, I’d taken to consuming ice cream alone, in the afternoon, when Rosie and Owen were napping. Sometimes I ate it while crafting the email to my former boss, though I still hadn�
��t sent her anything.

  As during our last real conversation, I sat in the armchair and Jeremy sat on the couch. This time he was the one who spoke first. He cleared his throat. “When you told me we should just raise the baby and not explain to anyone why he has dark skin, I thought that was ridiculous, but I haven’t been able to come up with a better solution.”

  “You don’t want a divorce?” The words had leapt from my mouth; although they probably sounded pathetic, I didn’t care.

  Matter-of-factly, he said, “It’s not that I haven’t considered it. But the way you feel about an abortion is how I feel about a divorce. Everyone pretends like if it’s in the parents’ best interest, then it’s in the kids’, too. Or, you know, kids are resilient, they get over it. But plenty of kids don’t get over it.” He made a wry expression, an almost smile—oh, how I missed Jeremy’s smile—and said, “Plus, you’d marry Hank.”

  “Is that what you think?” The suggestion was weirdly flattering, the implication that marrying Hank was an option available to me, but even more so, the implication that Jeremy could still feel jealous—that he didn’t loathe me completely.

  He shrugged. “Except I don’t know how you’d support yourselves.”

  “I’m not going to marry Hank,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Anyway.” Jeremy pressed his index finger to the bridge of his glasses, pushing them up. “For about a minute, I was thinking we could tell the baby he’s adopted, but it’s too fucked up for him to believe his real mom gave him up. And then he’s sixteen or eighteen and wants to find her and—it’s just not fair to him. Plus, Rosie’s probably old enough that she’d understand you’d been pregnant. So then I thought that we say we went to a fertility clinic and they mixed up the sperm, but that’s way too much detail, and who’d believe we were going to a fertility clinic when we had a six-month-old? So I thought, okay, we tell people the truth. Too bad if it embarrasses Kate. But you’ll be relieved to hear that I decided telling the truth would create its own set of problems. If anyone ever gets to learn the truth, it’s him—the child, when he’s older. But we don’t tell anyone else anything. People are so rude that I’m sure they’ll ask, and we’ll just say there’s Greek blood on my side.”

  “Is there?”

  “No. But Greek blood, Italian, whatever—we pick an ethnicity and stick with it.”

  “Not black blood?”

  Jeremy shook his head. “It’s too close to the truth.”

  “What do we tell your family?”

  “That there’s Greek blood on your side.”

  My heart was thudding. “Thank you, Jeremy.”

  “There’s more,” he said. “We leave St. Louis. We move away. Because if you think you can hide this baby, you’re crazy. The minute Hank sees him, he’ll know. And the idea of getting into some custody battle with the Wheelings—” Jeremy made an expression of distaste.

  “I doubt Courtney would want anything to do with the baby.”

  “Sure,” Jeremy said. “Courtney wouldn’t.”

  We both were quiet, and finally I said, “Not that I want to tell Hank, but is it legal not to?”

  “I have no idea.”

  We were quiet again. “Where would we go?” I asked.

  “I emailed Lukovich, and the deadline for that Cornell job was December first, but he’s willing to slip my application in. And it’s not guaranteed, obviously, but I have as good a shot as anyone.” Jeremy looked at me, and it wasn’t a warm look—he was telling, not asking. He said, “If we can, we’ll go to Ithaca.”

  So this was to be my punishment: Not divorce. Not abortion. Just a move. A move of almost a thousand miles, to a part of the country where I’d never spent time, in a state where I knew no one, where I’d be looking after three young children. We’d need to find a new house, new parks, a new pediatrician. And what of my father and Vi? Could I train them to look out for each other? Vi would have to learn which brands our father liked to buy at the grocery store, and she’d have to be patient when he passed his coupons to the checkout person.

  No, a move wasn’t ideal. It was what I’d thought I could count on not happening as long as my father was alive. But still, comparatively, I’d be getting off easy. I swallowed and said, “Okay.”

  Many times, starting as soon as later that night, I have recalled this conversation and marveled at our naïveté, all the possibilities we failed to consider. Would we never again send out a Christmas card? Even if we didn’t, did we think we could prevent a friend from taking a picture of our son at a birthday party and posting it on Facebook? And whether or not Jeremy worked in the same department as Courtney Wheeling, he’d see her regularly at conferences; they’d always know countless people in common. Two and a half years have passed since our decision, and Jeremy and I have not yet been caught, or at least we have not been confronted; most important, we have not been confronted by the Wheelings. What others might suspect, I can only guess. But surely—like an impending earthquake—our unmasking awaits us. And maybe we knew at the time we were being unrealistic; maybe it was a situation in which being unrealistic was the only way to proceed.

  “This is the last thing,” Jeremy said in the living room. “For all intents and purposes, I’m the baby’s father. It’s my name on the birth certificate. There’s no asterisk. He’s my son.”

  “Okay,” I said again. “Okay for all of it.” Then I said, “I know it won’t be now, but I hope that someday you’ll be able to forgive me.”

  He didn’t stand to hug me; he didn’t motion for me to join him on the couch. We weren’t about to watch TV together, apparently, or to have sex. He merely said, “I hope so, too,” and then he leaned forward and lifted a stack of papers from the table.

  But then we did have sex; later that night, we did. He got into bed while I was nursing Owen at ten (now that I was definitely having this baby, definitely not terminating, I would have to wean Owen before he turned one, I thought; even if it was biologically possible, I couldn’t see nursing him atop my pregnant belly). When I reentered our room, Jeremy was sitting up, shirtless, the covers pulled to his waist. He wasn’t using his phone. I’d already changed into my pajamas and had been reading before I nursed Owen, and I’d left the book open and facedown on my nightstand. I hadn’t yet closed the door behind me when Jeremy said, “Come here.”

  I approached his side of the bed instead of mine and stood a couple feet from him.

  “Take off your pajamas,” he said. I hesitated only briefly before pulling my T-shirt and then my nursing bra over my head; I hooked my thumbs into the sides of my underwear and pants and pushed them both down at the same time. The light on Jeremy’s nightstand was off, and the light on mine was on. He appraised my body. I was already gaining pregnancy weight again around my midsection, having never completely lost it since delivering Owen, and I couldn’t remember when I’d last shaved my bikini line, but some rite of penance was occurring, I understood, and debasing myself was part of it.

  Jeremy said, “When you were fucking Hank, did you think about me?”

  I bit my lip. “I was upset with you for leaving town. But, Jeremy, I only love you.”

  “Did you enjoy fucking him?”

  I wanted to defend myself, to explain, but I needed to answer his questions succinctly and carefully; after all, we were constructing the narrative we’d live with. I said, “The way you touch me—nobody else knows how to touch me like you.” Jeremy could say Hank’s name, but I couldn’t; I was pretty sure that was one of the rules of this exchange.

  “Did you come?”

  “You know what to do to make me come.” I stepped toward him, reached for his hand, and brought it down between my legs, where it was already wet. “See?” I said. And then I climbed onto the bed, onto him, my naked body on his, and I pushed down the covers, and he gripped my ass. I’m not sure it was a decision on his part so much as habit or reflex.

  When he was inside me, I said it again: “I only love you, Jeremy. I only l
ove you. I only love you.” Even when his breath broke against my ear, he didn’t say anything back.

  Things were better in the morning—not completely, but a little, and I understood that this was the most I could hope for. After breakfast, playing in the living room, Rosie said in an excited tone, “There’s pumpkin pie in Mama’s diaper!”

  “I don’t wear diapers,” I said. “I use the potty.”

  “But if she did wear diapers,” Jeremy said, and though he was ostensibly speaking to Rosie, there was something in his voice for me, too, “she would definitely have pumpkin pie in them.”

  At Christmas, which we hosted—Jeremy’s father and stepmother flew out for three days, and my father, Vi, and Stephanie joined us for Christmas dinner—Vi dried serving dishes as I washed them after the meal, and she said, “I dreamed last night of the earthquake again. Did I ever tell you that in my dreams, it’s all black people?”

  No, Vi, I thought. No more of this. I passed her the bowl that had held the sweet potatoes and said, “Yes, you’ve mentioned that.” After a few seconds, I said, “Dad is really quiet tonight.”

  “Dad’s always quiet.”

  Surely my recent nervousness about my father was nervousness about the prospect of moving. But I hadn’t yet brought up the job at Cornell with Vi because Jeremy had asked me not to, in case he didn’t get it. Even though I was certain that he would, I’d complied with his request. “I wonder if Dad’s been driving at night again,” I said.

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about that tonight.” Vi and Stephanie had picked him up. Then Vi said, “I just wish I knew where my earthquake is.”

  Was this never going to be fully behind us? No, it wasn’t. Even then, as I was washing dishes at the sink, my belly was swelling again; it wouldn’t be long before people other than Jeremy and Vi knew I was pregnant.