Bitter Sweet (54 page)
Down in the fish-cleaning shack the water stopped plopping and the light flicked out. As the brothers stepped outside,
Nancy
left her car, slamming the door.
‘Eric!’ she called, friendly, approaching the two men across the patchy darkness beneath the trees. ‘Hi. I found your note.’
‘
Nancy
.’ His tone was cool, unwelcoming. ‘You could have just called.’
‘I know, but I wanted to see you. I bare something important to tell you.’ As an afterthought she tossed out, ‘Hi, Mike.’
‘Hello,
Nancy
.’ Turning away, he added, ‘Listen, Eric, I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Yeah. Goodnight.”
When Mike left, silence fell, broken only by the nightcails of thick summer. Standing within her approachable radius, Eric felt threatened, impatient to be beyond her scope.
‘Give me a minute to wash my hands and I’ll be right back.’ He stalked away without inviting her to wait inside.
Hall, he’d finally admitted she’d never liked his mother or his mother’s house. Why should he be noble at this late date?
He returned five minutes after, wearing clean jeans and a different shirt and smelling of handsoap, striding toward her as if he wanted to get this over with.
‘Where do you want to talk?’ he asked before reaching her.
‘My, so brusque,’ she chided, taking his arm, resting her breast against it.
He removed her hand with deliberate forcefulness. ‘We can talk down in the Mary Deare or in your car. You name it.’
I’d just as soon talk at home, Eric, in our own bed.’ She rested a hand on his chest and again he removed it.
‘I’m not interested,
Nancy
. All I want from you is a divorce, and the sooner the better.’
‘You’ll change your mind when you hear what I have to tell you.’
‘What?’ he snapped, with as much indulgence as a father removing his belt in the woodshed.
‘It’s going to make you happy.’
“I doubt it. Unless it’s a court date.’
‘What have you always wanted more than anything in the world?’
‘Come on,
Nancy
, quit playing games. I’ve had a long day and I’m tired.’
She laughed, forcing the sound from her throat. She touched him again on the arm, knowing he resented her doing so, wanting the satisfaction of feeling the shock strike him. She had a momentary flash of doubt: what she was doing was reprehensible. But what he’d done was, too.
‘We’re going to have a baby, darling.’
The shock hit Eric like high voltage. He struggled for breath. Backed up a step. Gaped at her.
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘It’s true.’ She shrugged with convincing nonchalance.
‘Around Thanksgiving time.’
He did a quick calculation: that night he’d taken her on the living room sofa.
‘
Nancy
, if you’re lying ‘Would I lie about a thing like this?’
He grabbed her wrist and hauled her to her car, opened. the door and pushed her inside, then followed, leaving the door open so the dome light shone down.
‘I want to see your face while you say this.’ He gripped her cheeks and held them, forcing her to meet his eyes. To his great dismay he could tell she’d been crying, which increased his dread. Still, he’d make her repeat it so he’d be sure.
‘Now tell me again.’
‘I’m three-and-a-half-months pregnant with your baby, Eric Severson,’ she said sombrely.
‘Then why doesn’t it show?’ He released her cheeks and passed a dubious glance down her length.
‘Take me home and look at me naked.’
He didn’t want to. God forgive him, he didn’t want to.
The only woman he wanted to be that close to was Maggie.
‘Why did you wait so long to tell me?’
‘I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a false alarm. A lot of things can happen in the first three months. After that it’s safer, I just didn’t want to get your hopes up too soon.’
‘So why aren’t you upset?’ he grilled her, his eyes narrowing.
‘About saving my marriage?’ she asked reasonably, then did a superb job of acting puzzled. ‘You’re the one who seems upset, and I don’t know why you should be. After all, this is what you wanted, isn’t it?’
He sank back against the seat with a sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘But goddamn it, not now!’
‘Not now?’ she repeated. ‘But you’re always pointing out that we’re not getting any younger. I thought you’d be pleased. I thought...’ She let her voice trail away piteously. ‘I thought...’ She conjured up several tears which prompted the response she expected. He reached over and took her hand from her lap and held it loosely, stroking its back with his thumb.
‘I’m sorry,
Nancy
. I’ll... I’ll go in and get my things and come back home tonight, okay?’
She managed to sound even more beleaguered and pitiful.
‘Eric, if you don’t want this baby after all the years we’ve -‘ He silenced her lips with a touch of his finger. ‘You caught me by surprise, that’s all. And considering the way our relationship has deteriorated, it’s not the healthiest environment to bring a child into.’
‘Have you really stopped loving me, Eric?’ It was the first sincere question she’d asked. She was suddenly terrified at the idea of being unloved, of having to build a relationship from the ground up with some other man and go through all the exhausting groundwork it took to reach an amicable married status. Even more terrified that she wouldn’t find one to do it with.
She received no answer. Instead, he released her hand and said heavily, ‘Go on home,
Nancy
. I’ll be there soon. We’ll talk tomorrow.’
Watching him disappear into the shadows she thought, what have I done? How can I hold him once he learns the truth?
Walking back to the house, Eric felt as he had when the old man died- helpless and despairing. More: victimized. Why now, after all the years of coercing and convincing? Why now, when he no longer wanted her or a child by her? He thought he might cry, so he went out onto the dock and stood beside the Mary Deare. The aftershock quivered in his belly. He doubled forward, hands to knees, submitting to abject despair, letting it shake him so that he might move beyond it towards unemotional reasoning.
He straightened. The boat lay listless in the water, the rods uptight in their quivers, the mooring lines drooping to the dock. He arched, looked high at the constellations which the old man, with wisdom brought from the old country, had taught him to identify. Pegasus, Andromeda, and the Fishes. The fishes, yes, they were in his blood, in his lineage as surely as the colour of his hair and eyes, passed down from some blond, blue-eyed Viking long before Scandinavians had last names.
She still hated his fishing.
She still hated Fish Creek.
She still wanted to be a career woman gone from home four nights a week.
Since he’d been at Ma’s he’d done’a lot of soul searching and talking with her and Barb and Mike. They had admitted to having difficulty liking
Nancy
all these years. He had admitted that the joy he’d known with Maggie made him realize what a state of quasi-happiness he’d lived in with
Nancy
all these years.
Now
Nancy
was pregnant.., and resigned if not happy about it.
And so was Maggie.
But he was
Nancy
’s husband, and he’d been begging her for years to have this baby. To abandon her now would be the height of callousness and he was not a callous man.
Obligation pulled with a gravity as powerful as the earth’s: the child was his, conceived by a woman who would make a formidable mother, if not a disastrous, absentee one; whereas Maggie - loving, kind Maggie - would in time welcome her baby, and would be ever-present, and guiding and judicial in its rearing, he was sure. Of the two children,
Nancy
’s would need him more.
He turned forlornly and shuffled up to Ma’s house to pack and face his purgatory.
Chapter 17
He slept little that night. Lying beside Nancy he thought of Maggie, her image appearing keenly in a dozen remembered poses: with her chin raised, yodelling in a bathtub; laughing as she served him a plate-sized doughnut; kneeling before a clump of withering flowers in a country graveyard; lifting her sombre countenance while rocking his world with her news; gravely predicting that Nancy would keep them apart until well after Maggie’s baby was born.
How right she’d been.
He kept to his side of the bed. Stacking his hands beneath his head, he made sure not even his elbow touched
Nancy
’s hair. He thought of tomorrow; he would, of course, tell Maggie then, but he would not compound his wrongdoings by going to her fresh from even the slightest intimacy with the woman beside him.
He closed his eyes, assessing himself and the hurt he would bring to Maggie, suffering already at the thought of inflicting it upon her. His eyelids trembled. This was no venial offence. He was answerable to both women, guilty of all accusations, lower than either of them could even express. He could handle
Nancy
’s wrath - and it would be vile when she learned the truth-but what of Maggie’s hurt?
Aw, Maggie, what have I done? I wanted so much for us. You were the last one I wanted to hurt.
In the
blackness, he agonized. Some little creature scurried across the roof- a mouse, probably- leaving a trail of ticks as of acorns rolling down the shingles. Down on
Nancy
’s baby was one minute older.
Maggie’s baby was one minute older.
He thought of the unborn children. The legitimate one.
The bastard- what a harsh word when applied to one’s own offspring. What would they look like? Would they have traces of the old man? Ma? Himself, surely. Would they be bright? (Coming from Maggie and Nancy, it seemed a certainty.) Healthy or sickly? Contented or demanding?
What would Maggie’s wishes be? To let her child grow up knowing who’d sired him or to conceal the father’s name? If the child knew, he’d know, too, who his half brother or half sister was. They’d meet on the street, at the beach, in school, likely as early as in kindergarten. Somewhere along the line some kid would ask him, How come your dad lives with that other family? At what age do children become aware of the stigma of illegitimacy?
He tried to imagine himself taking both his children out in the Mary Deare and putting fishing lines into their hands, teaching them about the water, and the constellations, and how to read the depth finder screen. He’d boost them up, one on each knee (for they’d be small yet), and hold them by their bellies so their inquisitive hands could grip the wheel while he faced them toward the monitor and explained: The blue is the water. The red line is the bottom of the lake, and that “white line just above it is a school of alewife. And that long white line.., that’s your salmon.
On a more real plane, the idea seemed unlikely, ludicrous even, that two mothers of two of his children would be so bending as to allow such a flaunting of tradition, even in today’s enlightened era. How stupidly self-serving of him to even imagine it.
Well, he’d know tomorrow. He’d see Maggie tomorrow, would suffer right along with her.
Saturday dawned unseasonably chilly, with cloud racks scudding before a brisk wind.
Nancy
was already at work in her office as Eric prepared to leave the house. He stopped at her door, drawing on a windbreaker, hi arms leaden from lack of sleep.
I’ll see you tonight,’ he said, his first words to her since rising. He’d fallen asleep some time after
, and had overslept and awakened to find
Nancy
already dressed and downstairs. She looked very downtown, in oversized spectacles, a knobby linen jumpsuit With a belt that looked like coconut shell, two pounds of earrings, a container of yogurt at her elbow and her hair belling out behind her ears like a hoopskirt. At his appearance she sat back and raised the eyeglasses onto her hair. ‘What time?’ She picked up the yogurt and ate a spoonful.
‘If this weather keeps up, early, maybe even this afternoon.’
‘Great!’ She arched a wrist and the spoon flashed. I’ll fix us something loaded with calcium and vitamim.’ She patted her stomach. ‘Have to be extra careful about proper nourishment now.’ She smiled. ‘Have a nice day, darling.’
Mentally, he cringed at her endearment and rebelled at the reminder of her pregnancy.
‘You, too,’ he returned and headed for his truck.
The weather suited his mood. Rain began falling when he was halfway to Gills Rock, smacking the windshield with a sound like breaking plastic. Thunder grumbled and rolled an unbroken circle around the flickering horizon. He knew well before he reached Ma’s that the morning’s charters would already be cancelled, but he drove on anyway, checked in with Mike and Ma, had a cup of coffee but passed up a piece of sausage, too preoccupied to eat. For a while he studied the soiled kitchen phone, the phone book on its string, with Maggie’s
Seattle
number still written on its cover, remembering the first time he’d called her.