Autobiography of Us (31 page)

Alex smiled brilliantly. “Not quite.”

“You’ll have to excuse us,” said Bertrand formally. He took out his wallet and left a few bills on the tablecloth. “My wife hasn’t been herself lately.” He looked at us. “So nice to see you both.”

“Nonsense. Stay and have some dinner,” Paul said magnanimously. “My treat.”

“Please,” I said. “Alex.”

“Goddamn it, Bertrand.” Alex stood up, fast. There was a low squeal like the last gasp of air escaping a balloon as the cocoon of blankets rolled down her legs and under the table, then a beat or two of shocked silence as we all stood, none of us moving a muscle. The baby started to scream. Alex stayed where she was; I was on my knees and scooping my arms under that little body before I stopped to think, the baby’s face already purple with rage, her mouth wide open, wailing.

“For Christ’s sake.” Bertrand started around the table toward where I knelt.

“Don’t you dare,” Alex said shrilly, stopping him. “Don’t touch her, you brute. God only knows what you want to do to her. She’d be better off.” She pointed to where I crouched, the baby’s face eggplant-colored now, spotting white. People were staring. The whole room had turned to gawk in our direction. “Damn it, Bertrand. She’d have a better shot if I left her right here.”

“There, there,” I whispered, the baby’s body cool and slightly damp. I shifted her up against my chest to get a better grip and she squirmed, desperate to get away. Alex finally knelt down next to me and I pushed the baby into her arms, those tiny feet kicking. For a moment it was just the three of us—Alex, me, the baby. Above us, the men kept talking.

“If everyone could please sit down,” said Paul.

“I’d like to apologize for both of us—” Bertrand began.

“Bullshit, all of it.” Alex put her free hand on my wrist. Her skin was still cold from the glass, the feel of her fingers like ice. The baby was shrieking, and she glanced down at her distractedly. “No one ever asked me a goddamn thing.”

“Listen to me,” I said firmly. “You’re not well.”

But she was looking at me with that gleam in her eye. “Dear Rebecca.” We might have been fourteen again—fingers pressed together, eyes squeezed shut.

“Please,” I said. “Sit down.”

“Poor Medea.” She ignored me. “Poor sweet girl. She must have felt just like this, don’t you think? Like no one was listening to a goddamn word.” She passed one hand wearily over her forehead, and then all at once her tone turned coaxing, intimate. She brought her face so close to mine I could feel the puff of breath with every word. “Except it doesn’t have to be like this.”

“Alex.” I felt desperate to stop whatever she was about to say. “I’m begging you—”

“Come on, Bex.” She’d never called me that before. No one had. “You and me. What if we made one goddamn choice for ourselves?”

* * *

And then she puts you in my arms, Violet—your wrinkled face furious, in the clutch of a rage.

“Empowered, my ass.” Alex looks at me one last time before she stands up, and now her eyes are clear, her expression serene. “I set the rules around here.”

“Come on, you two.” Paul coaxes. “Can’t we convince you to stay?”

Bertrand shakes his head. “Embarrassing, all of it.”

Alex raises her chin an inch. “
If it were done when ’tis done
,” she recites, her voice surprisingly strong, “
then ’twere well it were done quickly
.” I stand up just in time to watch her wave at Paul. I can’t move. I can hardly breathe, my arms full of you, your wriggling limbs. “I would have made a fabulous Medea, you know.” Her smile is sudden, dazzling. “I would have brought the goddamn house down.”

“She has become,” Bertrand declares to no one in particular, “someone beyond the realm of comprehension.”

“Sit down.” Paul speaks with the imperious authority of a drunk. “We’ll get something to eat.”

“Stop,” I manage finally. “Please.”

“You know me. Never much for goodbyes.” She glances down at you one last time. “Toodle-oo,” she sings, waggling her fingers. And then she is gone.

Paul stands with his glass in his hand. He looks at us foggily and a frown creases his brow as he finds you, focusing, and then raises his arm.

“Cheers,” he says, toasting me, you, everyone in the room.

IV

WHAT next? I left late that night. Escaped.
Got out.
I went back to the apartment and packed up a few things and then we drove north along the highway, the moon trailing us overhead. I watched you in the rearview mirror as I drove, your small face bathed in silver. You slept, Lucas beside you, Matthew in the passenger seat and restless once he woke, feet kicking the glove compartment until I asked him to stop, please. He was sitting in the passenger seat and he had certain responsibilities, I said. He was old enough, he insisted. He was soon-to-be six and I had promised, he said. He was too excited, he told me, for sleep.

We drive through the night and into the next morning, though the ride is not long enough, not nearly. Too soon we are through Connecticut. Too soon the sign welcomes us to Massachusetts—the name, I tell Matthew, from the Indians, the fact making its way to the surface of my mind like a bubble rising up from the murk of dirty water, signs of lost life. Massachusetts, I say, meaning
at the great hill
. It has been years since I drove and I find I’ve missed it, the thrum of the engine, the loaded spring of the gas pedal under my foot. Dawn shoots webs of sunlight across the sky, webs that shatter and spread—not webs at all, then, but something live, their insides leaking crimson. We drive and drive. We barrel down the highway until we hit ocean and can go no farther. The water gold by the time we get to it, the sun draining into the waves. I have never been to Massachusetts, I tell you, lifting you into my arms. I have never, truth be told, been anywhere, but the moment you came into my life I promised I would go.

Where? Somewhere, is the point. Anywhere.

Listen, I tell you. I promise to do the best job I can.

Then what? I baptize you in the freezing Atlantic while your brothers shuck their clothes and run screaming along the beach, their skin gone goose-pimpled within minutes and bluish from the chill. The air is thick with salt, shockingly cold. Though you don’t seem to mind the cold. You bring one arm down against the water, splashing and splashing long after I have wrapped you up in your blanket and am holding you—too tight—against my chest. You splash and splash, your arm moving with such enthusiasm it occurs to me that you may well never have made that motion before. You may never, quite truthfully, have felt that particular freedom and you are having the time of your life with it, your eyes—when they turn to gaze at me—already your mother’s, that same luminous green. I tie a scarf around my head and brush the sand from your blanket. I suggest breakfast. Pancakes, I say. The boys shriek with delight; they turn giddy cartwheels down the beach. It is morning and they are somewhere new and the fatigue, the strangeness of this all, has not yet set in. They spin and spin until they fall down on the sand. You kick your little legs. We begin all over again.

* * *

But the truth is something less extraordinary. I rode home with you from the restaurant that night in a daze, the bag of formula and diapers your mother had left behind resting at my feet: There were enough of both packed away to make me wonder. Beside me in the taxi sat Paul, his patrician face inscrutable as a painting. He didn’t say a word until we were all the way through the park. He was, he said finally, confused. Just—he pulled out a cigarette and lit it with that great sense of intention drinking gave his every motion—well, to put it bluntly, he didn’t understand. What was it that he was supposed to understand? Was there anything about any of this that made any sense at all? His eyes as he glanced at you focusing, unfocusing. Was I really going to sit there and say nothing? His words slid back and forth as though oiled. And I—I stood somewhere far from that humid taxi, the stink of cigarette smoke rising from the cushions. I stood—where? Down by the canal with your mother, the bullfrogs loud enough to drown out any thought at all. In the middle of Arroyo Seco, with the hawks spiraling above me. In darkest Brazil, where smooth-chested women wheeled and banked like schools of fish. I stood, I mean to say, far from anywhere, as far as I could get from that rocking taxi and Paul beside me, still talking, talking.
Think
, I told myself.
Dammit
, think.

* * *

We lived together one more month like that, our odd little family. Difficult to imagine we lasted as long as we did. When I think of it now, I wonder if I am remembering it wrong. Perhaps it was no more than a week, each day so full of you it stretched in my memory to the length of two days, three. The story I told Paul in the taxi amounting to little more than fabrications and approximations, after all, a story stitched together like one of my mother’s samplers, bits of this and that sewed together to form a whole, a sum that might appear—the thinking goes—more pleasing than its parts. Alex had asked me to take you for a few weeks while she recovered, I said. She was in no condition. A sanatorium was in the cards, somewhere where she could rest. The healing effects of a little peace and quiet not to be underestimated. The stress of the new baby, I said, too much, and poor Bertrand already struggling at work and the twins—God, the
twins
.

Not that I believe Paul bought it for an instant. He may have proven many things over the course of our years together—vain and careless, self-absorbed—but he was never a fool. I believe he simply needed time to think, that because of that he allowed it to go on longer than I might have anticipated. Divorce in those days was still frowned upon, understand. Certainly it was nothing to be entered into lightly, not to mention the disappointment to Bitsy and Jed. He would have thought very hard about that. The boys, meanwhile, seemed alternately amused and bored by you, your china-doll face, the unpredictable timing of your screams. We are having a new experience, I told them. We are opening our eyes.

When Paul came into the bedroom those weeks or days later, whichever it was, he had to tell me he was leaving twice before I heard. I was holding you in my arms when he said it. I would do as I pleased, it seemed clear, and he had no intention of getting in the way. Neither did he care to fight. Things had been headed this way for years now, hadn’t they? Now was as good a time as any to cut our losses. He actually used those words:
cut our losses
. Frankly, we both deserved better, he said, his voice warming the way a politician’s does when he’s ready for the applause. Didn’t I think we deserved better?

“All these years we were living like this…” he said, running his hand through his mane. “Stupid to have let it gone on so long, in the end. Stupid and dumb.” He stood in the doorway with one hand against the frame. “Though we had our moments, didn’t we? There are the boys, for God’s sake. We did well there.” He gave me a tentative smile, his face made suddenly youthful. For a moment he looked like the man I had fallen in love with, the face that had appeared in the darkness all those years ago, radiant with concern. “We had a good run, didn’t we?”

I held you tighter. “I think we understand each other,” I said—oh, I was capable of such cruelty!

But he only shook his head. “That’s just it,” he said slowly. “I don’t think I ever understood the first thing about you.”

I smiled then; your hand had uncurled itself from a fist and it lay against my chest like a flower.

“What?”

I slipped my pinky finger into your hand and you gripped it. From the beginning, there was such a strength to you it took my breath away. “The heart wants what it wants.”

He looked at me, his handsome face surprised: Who knows what the lion sees? “Yes,” he said slowly. “I suppose it does.”

* * *

My lawyer said in all his years of practice he’d never seen such a civil divorce, Paul signing the apartment over to me without a word, taking only his clothes and his books when he moved out that next week, no furniture save the desk in his study and his favorite chair from the living room. It’s a terrible thing to say, but in many ways the whole thing came as an enormous relief. Paul had been right to say what he did. Stupid to have let it go on so long, stupid and dumb. We were kinder to each other in the aftermath of our marriage than we had been since those early days. There was space now for kindness, a new and welcome freedom, as though each of us had been sitting all those years in our own cramped little room, desperate to simply stretch our legs. When we moved to Brooklyn that winter—you needed room to run
,
you and your brothers, I decided; you needed
air—
it was Paul who called the moving company himself and arranged for everything to be packed up. He came out to our place on Cranberry Street and picked up your brothers every Friday for the weekend, and when you got older, it was he who asked if he could take you along. Would I mind, he asked. You were for all intents and purposes his daughter too.

As for Bertrand and your mother—I’m sorry to say I know very little of what happened after they left the restaurant that night. My lawyer said it was best I not speak with them during the adoption process. Mr. Lowell, he said, a bit of a loose cannon. Divorce proceedings began immediately after they arrived back in L.A., he told me, though custody of the twins remained under debate for some time. It must have been a terrible few months for them. Your sisters, Violet. You’ll want to be in touch with them now.

You should know your mother told her lawyer he was to place you in my custody before he got a dime. This he reported to me himself. She refused to so much as speak until the adoption papers had been signed, he said. Not one word. She wrote down everything she needed to say on a notepad and held it up at the divorce meetings.

GET THOSE PAPERS
, she wrote.
OR I SWEAR.

* * *

I began writing her again immediately—these letters I actually folded into envelopes and addressed, smoothing the stamp against the front with my thumb. I had them written into the official papers, stating that I would send
no less than twelve reports annually on the progress of the aforementioned child, Violet Lowell Turner.
And I did. I took down your first steps, the first cruel white corners of your baby teeth. I did my best to describe your repertoire of smiles. I copied down the words you said so deliberately, your serious mouth shaping every vowel.
Mama
, you said one morning on the park bench.
Mama
, and I tipped forward into love. And then, later, came the moments I found harder to describe. The ones when you started walking ahead of me on the sidewalk. The time you ducked, irritated, as I went to pin back a stray piece of hair your first day of junior high here in Marblehead. The day I started my work with the hospice and you asked, smirking, if I was going for Humanitarian of the Year Award.
Mom’s saving the world
, you told Lucas over the phone.
One sick old fart at a time.
But I told her about those too.
She’s asserting her individuality
, I wrote, because that was what the books said it was. I slipped in a photograph I’d managed to snap of you walking across the parking lot that first morning of high school, dark hair shorn to something daring—your strict instructions, as I understood them, for me to remain hidden from view.