On the way home, Melanie mentioned to Peter that the afternoon had worn her down, she hadn’t had much fun, probably because Ted and Vicki weren’t there.
“Life is too short,” Melanie said. She said this every time she thought of Vicki now. Peter nodded distractedly; Melanie intoned this sentiment so often, its meaning was diluted. But Melanie meant the words urgently: Life was too short to fritter away in a constant state of yearning, aching, wanting. Waiting for something to happen.
At Exit 1 on I-95, they hit traffic and Peter cursed and they slowed to a crawl.
Now’s the time, Melanie thought. And she said, “I think we should try again. Once more.”
She steeled herself for his reaction. He hadn’t wanted to pursue in vitro at al . There was something about it that felt forced to Peter, unnatural.
Melanie had pushed the issue not once, not twice, but seven times, promising that each round would be the last. And then, a few weeks ago, she had real y, real y promised; she and Peter had made a pact of sorts, sealing it with their first spontaneous lovemaking in nearly a year. Afterward, Peter talked about a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, just the two of them. They would stay at a resort that didn’t al ow children.
Melanie was ready for Peter to be annoyed that she was revisiting the topic yet again; she was ready for anger. But Peter just shook his head, and with his eyes on the bumper of the car in front of them, he said, “I’m involved with someone else.”
It took Melanie a moment to understand what he meant by “involved,” but even after the obvious occurred to her, she stil wasn’t sure. “Involved?”
she said.
“Yes. With Frances.”
“Frances?” Melanie said. She looked at Peter. He had drunk several beers at the picnic. Was he impaired? Should he even be driving?
Because what he was saying didn’t make any sense. “You’re involved with Frances? Frances Digitt?” Melanie could only picture Frances as she had just seen her—in a pair of red nylon running shorts and a white T-shirt that said Mad River Glen, Ski It If You Can. Frances Digitt was twenty-seven years old, she had a butch haircut, she was into al these extreme sports, like rock climbing and backcountry skiing. She had hit a home run during the softbal game and she ran the bases pumping her fist in the air like a sixteen-year-old boy. “You’re having an affair with Frances?”
“Yes,” Peter said.
Yes: They were having the sleaziest kind of office sex—in coat closets, in the deserted restrooms after hours, on top of his desk with the door closed and locked, in his swivel chair, Frances’s skirt hiked up, straddling him.
When they got home that night, Peter moved into the guest room while Melanie took a bath and cried. Peter did not move out—he claimed he didn’t want to, and Melanie couldn’t bring herself to demand it. They slept under one roof, in separate rooms. He was not wil ing to end his
“involvement” with Frances Digitt, not yet, he said, but maybe someday. Melanie was tortured by this. She loved the man, and he was using her heart for target practice. Most nights he came home, but some nights he cal ed to say he would be “staying in the city” (which meant, she could only assume, staying with Frances Digitt). He rendered Melanie powerless; he knew she didn’t have the courage to divorce him and take al his money, which was what everyone encouraged her to do.
When Melanie started feeling sick, she wasn’t surprised. Extreme emotional stress, she thought. Depression. She couldn’t keep food down. She would think about Frances Digitt and gag. She was overcome with exhaustion; she took three- and four-hour naps in the afternoons. Her cycle had been manipulated for so long with hormones that she didn’t notice when she missed her period. But then her breasts started to tingle and ache, and smel s she normal y loved—coffee, fresh sage from the garden—turned her stomach. She went to a drugstore three towns away, where nobody knew her, and bought a test.
Pregnant.
Of course, she thought. Of course, of course. She was pregnant now, when it no longer mattered, when it was a painful and complicated discovery instead of a joyous one. Melanie was aching to tel Peter. Every time she looked at him, she felt like she was going to burst with the news.
She thought he would be astute enough to figure it out on his own—because she rushed to the bathroom to vomit, because she slept al the time.
Peter either didn’t notice these obvious symptoms or he chalked them up to Frances Digitt–inspired melodrama. Melanie decided she would not tel Peter—she was resolved in this—until something changed. She wanted Peter to leave Frances Digitt because he loved her, Melanie, and not because there was now going to be a baby. A baby. Their baby. After al that trying, after al the needles, drugs, treatments, counting days, scheduling sex, it had happened on its own. Even Peter would be amazed, even he would shout with joy. But she couldn’t divulge the news yet. The pregnancy was her only currency; it was al she had left, and she didn’t want to share it.
So . . . get out of town. Go with Vicki—and her sister, Brenda—to an island thirty miles out to sea.
Melanie hadn’t told Peter she was leaving; he wouldn’t realize it until seven o’clock that evening when he found her note in an envelope taped to the door of the mudroom. He would be stunned by her departure. He would realize he’d made a horrible mistake. The phone would ring. Maybe. He would ask her to come home. Maybe.
But maybe he’d be happy she left. Relieved. Maybe he would count Melanie’s departure as his good fortune and invite Frances Digitt to move into their house and tend Melanie’s garden.
One bad thought was al it took. Melanie rushed to the communal bathroom and vomited bitter green bile into the toilet, which was spotted with urine because Blaine could not yet clear the rim. She pooled water in her hand and rinsed her mouth, glanced at her reflection in the brown-spotted mirror. Even the mirror looked sick. She stepped onto the rickety bathroom scale; if the thing were right, then she had lost three pounds since discovering she was pregnant. She couldn’t keep anything down, not ginger ale, not dry toast, but she kept at it, eating and vomiting, because she was hungry, ravenous, and she couldn’t stand to think of her baby starving and dehydrated, shriveling up like a piece of beef jerky.
The house was quiet. Vicki and the kids were sleeping, and Brenda was outside talking to . . . that handsome kid from the airport, the one who had offered Melanie first aid. It figured. Melanie hadn’t gotten the whole story about Brenda and her student, but it didn’t take a wizard to figure out that Brenda was a loose cannon. Promiscuous. Easy. Look at the way she was touching the kid’s shoulder, then shaking her boobs at him. And he was just a kid, in his twenties, though quite adorable. He had smiled at Melanie when he offered the first aid, like he’d wanted to help but wasn’t sure how. Melanie sighed. When was the last time Peter had smiled at her? She pul ed the shades against the sun. The only good thing about pregnant sleep was that she was too exhausted to dream.
Brenda was the only adult awake when the phone rang. She had cleared Aunt Liv’s tea set and al the ceramic knickknacks and enamel boxes from the coffee table so that she and Blaine could play Chutes and Ladders. The baby, meanwhile, would sit in Brenda’s lap for thirty or forty seconds, then climb over her folded knees like Hannibal over the mountains and he was off, crawling across the satiny floorboards, pul ing at lamps, fingering electrical cords, plugs, outlets. Somehow, while Brenda was teaching Blaine to count out spaces on the board, Porter put a dime in his mouth.
Brenda heard him gagging, and she picked him up and smacked him on the back; the dime went flying across the room. Blaine moved himself forward an il egal fourteen spaces, and Brenda, although desperate for the game to be over, made him move back on principle. He started to cry.
Brenda gathered him into her lap, and Porter crawled into the kitchen. At least he was too short to reach the knives. But then, as Brenda explained to Blaine that if he cheated at games no one would ever want to play with him, she heard a muffled thud that sickened her heart.
“Porter?” she said.
He gurgled happily in response.
Brenda slid Blaine off her lap. Aunt Liv’s banjo clock chimed; it was six-thirty. Vicki and Melanie had been in their respective rooms with the doors closed since three. Brenda would have welcomed three and a half quiet hours for herself—but she was not pregnant and she did not have cancer. Cancer, she thought. Did the word ever get less scary and horrible? If you repeated it often enough and understood it better, did it lose that Grim Reaper chil ?
In the kitchen, Brenda found her two-hundred-year-old first edition of The Innocent Impostor splayed on the floor like a dead bird. Porter sat next to the book, chewing on something. The cap to Brenda’s pen.
Brenda cried out. Gently, she picked up the book, amazed that as old as it was, it hadn’t crumbled into dust from the impact. She never should have taken it out of the briefcase—the book, like an elderly person, needed to be coddled. She smoothed the pages and swaddled it in its plastic cover, nestled it in the bubble wrap and locked it up, safe from grubby little hands. She plucked the pen cap out of Porter’s drooly little mouth and threw it, with some force, into the kitchen trash.
Her problems were smal beans, she reminded herself. In comparison, that was. She did not have cancer, she was not carrying her cheating husband’s baby. Out of three bad situations, hers was the least dire. Was that a blessing or a curse? I am grateful for my health. I will not feel sorry for myself. I am here to help Vicki, my sister, who has cancer. Two hours after the news of Brenda’s dismissal hit Champion’s campus, Brenda had received an e-mail from a col eague of hers at the University of Iowa. Rumor has it you’ve been axed, Neil Gilinski wrote. Rumor has it you committed the only sin that can’t be forgiven other than out-and-out plagiarism. Brenda’s heart had tumbled. The news of her disgrace had traveled halfway across the country in two hours. It might as wel have appeared on Page Six. But she would not feel sorry for herself. She would be grateful for her health.
“Auntie Brenda!” Blaine cal ed out. “Come on! It’s your turn!”
“Okay,” Brenda said. “I’l be right there.”
At that moment, the phone rang. The phone hung on the kitchen wal ; it was white, with a rotary dial. Its ring was cranky and mechanical: a hammer hitting a bel . The sound made Brenda’s breath catch. Fear seeped into her chest. Brian Delaney, Esquire, had already left two urgent-sounding messages on her cel phone. Call me, please. Dammit, Brenda, call me. But Brenda didn’t want—indeed, couldn’t afford—to cal him back. Every phone cal cost her a hundred dol ars. If Brian had good news, such as the art restoration professional at Champion had found no permanent damage to the painting in question and the English Department had decided to drop al charges, then he could leave a message saying as much. And if Brian had bad news, she didn’t want to hear it. Every time her cel phone rang, she prayed it would be Walsh. That it should be her lawyer added insult to injury. But the cottage’s ringing phone took Brenda by surprise. She had known the phone number at Number Eleven Shel Street since she was a little girl, but she hadn’t given the number to Walsh or to Brian Delaney, Esquire. Which meant it was probably her mother.
“Hel o?” Brenda said.
“Is my wife there?” a man asked. He sounded even angrier than Brenda.
How did people live without cal er ID? “Ted?” Brenda said.
“I said, is my wife there? This is the number she left on the note. A note! ‘Gone for the summer.’ What the hel ?”
“You mean Melanie?” Brenda said. She was impressed that Melanie had bolted with only a note.
“Yes, Melanie!”
“She’s here,” Brenda said. “But she’s not available.”
“What does that mean?”
“I can’t explain it any more clearly,” Brenda said. “She . . . is . . .not . . . available.”
“Put her on the phone,” the husband said.
“No,” Brenda said. She gazed at her briefcase and felt fresh relief that it hadn’t vanished into the purgatory reserved for lost luggage, and then she checked on Porter, who had found the other half of Brenda’s pen. His mouth was bleeding blue ink. “Oh, geez,” Brenda said. When she lunged for the pen, Porter crawled away and Brenda nearly yanked the phone off the wal . In seconds, Porter and the pen were inches from Vicki’s bedroom door. “I’m sorry,” Brenda said. She hung up on Melanie’s husband.
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