Amy Inspired (19 page)

“Why did you stay on campus for Christmas?” I asked. “Why didn’t you visit your aunt?”

“She passed away two years ago. A stroke.”

“I’m sorry.”

He lifted his shoulders, a very gentle shrug of resignation. “She didn’t suffer. And she was lonely as a widow. I visited as often as I could, but there was nothing I could do to fix that loneliness.

“I haven’t seen Aden in years. He’s never quite forgiven me… .”

He left the thought unfinished. Eli was always surrounded by a crowd. I had never thought of him as someone moving through life alone.

“You know I’ve lived a lot of my life at the hospitality of other people,” he said. “And I never accept someone’s hospitality without appreciating it. It’s good of you to let me stay in your place until I get things sorted out.”

“Of course—it’s nothing.”

“Don’t say that. I know it isn’t nothing. Well, maybe it’s not for Zoë—she couldn’t care less—but I know it matters to you. You’re kind of a cat person.”

“A what?”

“You’re one of those people who likes things the way she likes them.You’re structured.”

My expression must have amused him. He asked, “Am I right?”

“It’s not a very flattering description.”

He was nonplussed. “I don’t mean it as an insult.”

Turning the corner to my street, we had no choice but to walk directly over a large frozen puddle. He toed forward, inch by inch, his hands perpendicular to his body for balance.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“It’s slippery.”

“It’s just ice.”

“I don’t want to fall,” he protested. “I’ve seen people really fall. You can nip the tip of your tailbone right off.”

I laughed. I was happy and full and glad to be out in the night air, talking to this man who never failed to surprise me.

At home, I fell into bed half dressed and wide awake.

There was a bang on the wall as the futon fell against the wall.

“Sorry,” he called.

“It’s all right.”

I waited for him to say something else—Good night or See you in the morning, but there was only silence.

The next morning Zoë thanked me for taking Eli out to dinner. I didn’t know what version of the story Eli had given her, but I went along with it.

“We had a good time,” I said, reaching for the coffee, hoping it would magically compensate for a meager four hours of sleep.

“Well, just for the record, I appreciate you loosening up.”

I said you’re welcome, sure that if Zoë knew just how much I’d loosened up—how much I’d said and how much he’d confessed— she’d be more concerned than grateful. There was Eli’s girlfriend to think of. Jillian had been her old roommate, after all.

I did not intend on loosening up around Eli again.

9

I went to Valerie’s baby shower reluctantly, knowing I was the only one from our graduate class who’d been invited. I didn’t know the woman hosting or the women attending, and three hours of sharing cheap cake with strangers was not my idea of a fun Saturday afternoon. The house was new and smelled of paint and wood, of still settling construction. During lunch I held my fruit punch with both hands, nervously eyeing the white carpet while the ladies swapped stories of losing their virginity with the pride of veterans recounting battle wounds. The youngest in the group was getting married in a month and wanted to know whether she and her fiancé should stop having sex now or just give it up for the last week. She wanted the wedding night to be amazing.

“Good luck,” one woman said. “We collapsed. You’ll be too exhausted to even think about it.”

“How many times did you do it on your wedding night?” Valerie asked the host.

“Nada.”

“Seriously?”

“Are you counting night or night and the next morning?”

“Wedding night,” someone piped.

“Both,” another protested. “If your wedding goes late, you don’t have much of a window of time. Morning should count as part of the wedding night.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“All who vote to keep the morning after as part of the wedding night, lift your punch.”

I escaped to the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the toilet to wait out the conversation. The yard outside the window to my right was too nice, square allotments of sod clumped together like patches of a quilt. A single sapling stood in the lawn, supported by wires knotted round its trunk and plugged into the ground. The wires were so taut you could imagine things the other way around: the wires held the tree down, not up, and if you clipped the strings, the sapling might escape.

By the time I returned to the party, Jake and another husband had returned from the gym, and on their arrival the subject of wedding nights had been temporarily suspended. Everyone moved to the table to admire the bassinet cake that said
Congratulations, it’s a girl!
in sweating curls of hot pink icing. We stood in the kitchen eating slices off paper plates. Valerie raised her shirt to show off her rounded belly. Jake gazed at her with a doting adoration I had only seen in teenage boys and in grooms.

At home, I stuffed a pillow in my shirt and considered my newly rounded figure in the bedroom mirror. Too light. Babies weighed seven to eight pounds and that wasn’t counting the fluids and whatnot. I would probably need a bowling ball.

“You’ve been busy.”

Zoë stood in the doorway. I held my cupped hands an inch from my chest. “My breasts would have to be bigger.”

“Your everything would have to be bigger.”

I pulled the pillow out from my shirt and tossed it at her.

“How was the shower?” She sat on my bed.

“It was all right. Valerie seems happy; she was quite literally glowing.”

“Michael told me that he finds pregnant woman incredibly sexy,” she said.

I sat beside her on the bed. “Do you ever think about having children?”

“Occasionally, but it never seems real to me that I could be a mother. I guess I imagine myself with older children—teenagers. Five boys, all football players. But I can’t see myself with a baby. Can you?”

I didn’t say anything. I lay down on my back and ran my hand over my stomach, wondering at its latent power.

Mom called at six thirty Monday morning to say there had been a kidnapping at Harvard and I should be on my guard.

“Mom, it’s not even light out yet.”

“Turn on channel nine.”

“It’s Harvard. In
Boston
.” I pressed my face into my pillow.

“You can’t be too careful these days. Apathy killed the cat.”

I sat up, propping my elbow on my knee and my forehead in my hand while Mom relayed everything the Channel 9 News anchor said: “… Police canvassing the neighborhoods … no news from the campus … woman at the supermarket says she saw a man who fits the suspect’s description …” She turned the television down. “I should call Brian.”

“Mom,” I sighed. “Why do you keep calling?”

“I don’t want to waste my minutes,” she said.

“You don’t have any minutes. They’re
all free
,” I said. “Anytime you call me it’s free.”

“Precisely!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want to waste free minutes!”

“I’m going now.”

I felt more than saw Zoë listening at the open door.

“That Mom?” she asked.

“Yes. Someone should have performed an intervention when Brian decided to buy her that phone.”

“I told you it was a bad idea.”

“You said no such thing.”

“Get up. We can argue about it on the way to campus.”

I squinted at the clock, then at Zoë. She was carrying a pair of running shoes.

“Your morning run,” she stated.

I’d forgotten: today was trail day. I pulled the blanket back over my head. “I would prefer not to.”

“Come on, Bartleby.” She threw my shoes on the bed. “Michael’s meeting us in ten minutes. He hates it when people are late.”

“Us?”

“I’m coming with you.”

Michael was outside the student union checking his watch when we pulled into the parking lot.

“Ready to go?” He stood with his legs spread wide, his arms extended. Swiveling his hips, he stretched this way, then that.

“I don’t think I’m up for it today,” I said.

“You’ll feel better once your blood gets flowing.” He pecked Zoë on the cheek, then gave her a spank. “Let’s go, baby.”

It was a long, hard run. When Michael and Zoë got ahead of me I didn’t try to keep up. Michael had taught me how to pace myself, how to breathe correctly and how to keep my mind focused. When I ran I tried to visualize the work my body was doing, the pumping of the heart and the oxidation of cells, the contraction of muscle, puppeteer of bone. When a sharp jab of pain stabbed my side I pretended I was carrying a baby that felt the need to announce itself with a swift kick to the ribs.

Only a month without cable and I’d fallen off the wagon. After Valerie’s shower I’d spent five hours watching a marathon of
A Baby Story: Xena Princess Warrior
meets
Alien
. It made me want to scream and push, to be a part of a miracle. It provoked cravings for the sweet powder smell of a baby’s hair. I told myself this was a biological phase on par with the hormonal revolution that made prepubescent boys ache at the sight of breasts and bucks chase doe tails right into oncoming semis. But still.

I’d tried praying about these feelings, but had a bad habit of praying tangentially so as not to appear too shallow in my desires. (As ministers were fond of reminding me,
God is not concerned with your happiness but your character.
) All the years I’d wanted a husband, I prayed God would make me content as a celibate, confident that if He saw my willingness to remain forever His chaste servant, He would see fit to send me an unexpected blessing of a very handsome man who would make love to me the way Daniel Day-Lewis made love to Madeleine Stowe in
The Last of the Mohicans
. And now whenever the desire for a family of my own began to gnaw at my heart, I prayed for my students and thanked God for the brood He’d already given me.

Meanwhile,Valerie, who had never waited on God for a blessing in her life, was in the third trimester of her pregnancy and looked positively Rubenesque. Her rounded figure made me hate my flat stomach and my empty breasts, parts of my body I’d mistaken for ornaments.

Zoë’s shriek broke my train of thought. She’d baited Michael. He was chasing her into the forest. I hurried to catch up with them. At the tree line, the trail narrowed to a thin, meandering path of dust mottled with stones and roots. For fifty feet it ran parallel to a steep drop-off before winding down the hill, turning sharply to realign itself with the creek, and heading back up to the forest in the opposite direction. Zoë and Michael were just to my left yet some twenty feet down and running the other way. They stopped when they saw me.

“What are you doing way up there?” Michael called.

“Get your boo-tay down here,” Zoë commanded.

I raced to join them. Some strange freedom had come over us. They whooped and cheered, uncivilized and dirt-splattered as kids at summer camp, and halfway down the hill I threw my hands out and hollered along with them. I shouted in frustration and hope and desire. For two and a half seconds I felt entirely alive.

Then my foot stopped and my body kept going. There was a loud pop and a searing heat shot up my right leg to my eyes in a quick flash of white. I think I cried out but it didn’t much matter, Zoë and Michael were raising such a ruckus. I fell to my knees, rolled, and landed on my side.

Zoë was dancing with her knees locked so she wouldn’t pee her pants. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she gasped. “Oh, it’s not funny.”

I squeezed my eyes shut as a wave of pain overwhelmed me. Somewhere Michael was talking: “Zoë, stop. I think she’s really hurt.”

“Michael, I swear, don’t mess with me. Are you messing with me?”

I opened my eyes and saw Michael’s face. He said, “Let me look at it.”

I shook my head.

“Amy, let me see it,” he demanded. “We have to make sure it’s not broken.”

Zoë knelt beside him, sobered by the word
broken
. “Amy, are you okay?”

I straightened my leg hesitantly.

“Can you turn it?” Michael asked.