Crooked Little Heart (33 page)

Lank said, when they told him Simone’s news, that what life boiled down to was a pregnant teenage girl. Life’s only intention was to recreate itself; he remembered some scientist somewhere saying that the chicken was only the egg’s way of making another egg. Elizabeth looked over at the closed door to the bathroom. Simone, darling, she imagined saying, we have a moral responsibility not to have children we can’t take care of in a really grown-up way. You must not inflict life on someone who will be resented.

But she knew she would not say this. Her heart felt so troubled, her breathing so constricted, that she wondered if she might be having a heart attack. She felt such terrible fear for the baby’s future that she realized she was, truly, having an attack of the heart, way down deep inside. She stroked her own shoulder for a moment and remembered Rosie at four or five, crying out that her neck hurt when really she had a sore throat.

The bathroom door opened slowly, and Elizabeth glanced at the moon one more time, as if it might have an answer, might suddenly give off more light, but its silver crescent glow must have been all the moon could manage.

S
TRAY
blonde hairs, wavy and fine, had escaped from the barrette that held Simone’s hair back. She had crawled back into bed. “I’m still bleeding a lot,” she said. She pulled the sheet and thin blanket back up over her chest and then twisted a patch of the sheet into a spike of cotton. Elizabeth sat back down in the bedside chair.

They were both silent for a while. There was someone else in the second bed on the other side of the curtain, and they listened to her
breathe. When Simone finally spoke again, she sounded grim and strangely mature. “I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know you’d all be glad if I lost the baby. I know you all think I’m still a little girl. But do you see how the men look at me?” Elizabeth nodded. “Do you see how James looks at me?” Elizabeth lowered her eyes. It was true, it was true. “Can’t you just wish for me to not lose this baby? Can’t you believe I can do a lot more than you think I can, that just because I look a certain way doesn’t mean I’m not smarter and better than you and everyone thinks?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Of course I can, baby. We all know how smart and good you are. That’s not the issue, though. The issue is that it would simply be easier for us if you weren’t pregnant. If you hadn’t started having sex yet. Or if you lost the baby.”

“But easy’s like, who cares? Easy’s like, how much is easy going to get you?”

Elizabeth nodded in agreement. “When I got pregnant with Rosie, I wasn’t a kid, but I felt like one, faced with the momentousness of that huge a change. And I also felt like no one understood me, but I felt like the baby would because it was of me, like you said.”

“You thought Rosie would understand you?”

Elizabeth paused and smiled, surprised that Simone was thinking the thoughts of a mother; she was moved by this unexpected alliance. “I hoped,” she said finally. In that moment she understood something about the fragility of borders, her own and Simone’s; she understood that Simone believed she might dissolve if she were ripped open by an abortion. If she were haunted by the fear that the world is empty, then this was a way of making meaning, of turning toward life. Elizabeth remembered being fourteen and fifteen, how clearly she saw the nihilism of the world, and how it ate away at all meaning and connection, and so how, in Simone’s stomach, a little sprout of utterly misplaced hope was growing.

S
IMONE
fell asleep at midnight. Elizabeth yawned. Where on earth was Veronica? She must not have come home yet and found Simone’s note. Elizabeth looked around the room, desperate for something to read; finding nothing, she closed her eyes and tried to breathe deeply, calmly. But she couldn’t sit still in her skin; it no longer fit. She reached for the
phone and dialed home, but after several rings the answering machine came on. James must have gone to bed, she thought, and she sat there resenting that he hadn’t called to check in with her one last time. She hated this, the tedium; it put her smack in the middle of herself, which was her least favorite place to be these days. She’d never understood people who liked to meditate. The concept—that it made sense for her to sit and listen to her head—was ludicrous. Watching Simone sleep filled her with a fearful grief. There was no getting around the truth that Simone was becoming a woman, and suddenly a shutter clicked, and in a different photograph, developing more slowly, she saw that Rosie was, too.

She was shocked by this thought; it was as if it had never occurred to her. Before when she’d thought about the change in her daughter, it was of her becoming an alien, an
other
, a teen. Strange hospital sounds—gurney wheels rolling past in the corridor, talk radio from the nurses’ station—ricocheted in the chambers of her mind, tiny pings, buzzes, beeps, as she watched a slightly older Rosie walking away into the future, waving without even turning around. She pressed her hands against her eyes. She saw only a spangly darkness at first, but then she saw Andrew, the Andrew she saw in Foreverland, on yet another beach, turn to wave good-bye to her as he walked toward the gentle waves where she could not follow.

She wrung her hands, like a worried old woman in a fairy tale or a baby. It was as though a new season had come to her of darkness and rain while everyone else had summer and clear bright days. She got up again to look at the sky, hoping to see a shooting star. But she stared out at the night through the window for quite some time without seeing any movement at all.

The door opened not long after, and Elizabeth turned, expecting a doctor or nurse, but there, miraculously, were James and Rosie. A soft cry of happiness escaped from her lips. Rosie was so sleepy that she looked slightly drugged, in sweatpants and one of James’s long-sleeved white T-shirts, acres too long, the sleeves rolled up six inches. She peered at her mother, full of both longing and fear, and after a minute walked over to her and into her arms.

“I’m not staying,” said James. “But I all of a sudden knew Rosie should be here.”

Elizabeth smiled, grateful, and hugged Rosie too tightly.

Simone awoke, blinking with confusion, and then gasped and held her arms open to Rosie.

R
OSIE
and Elizabeth were still awake when Veronica finally showed up at two, heavily made up, alone. She wore a little black cocktail dress that showed off her breasts, her shapely legs, and big round bottom. She looked like a tipsy call girl stopping by for a visit on her way home—and she looked like Simone probably would in twenty years, like someone who had been around, lived hard, danced hard. Rosie was lying beside Simone, looking very proprietary and wary, and Elizabeth still sat in the chair by the bed.

“Hey, there you are,” Elizabeth said kindly.

“I just got home and got her note. I called, but the switchboard’s closed.”

She walked fearfully to Simone’s bedside. “How is she?” she asked. “She was bleeding?”

“Yeah. She’d stopped, though, the last time she checked.”

Simone, her lips pouty with sleep, looked like a child of ten or so, flushed now and sweaty as if with fever. Veronica stared down at her and shook her head. “Is she having a miscarriage?” she asked.

“No. The doctor doesn’t think so. Her cervix is closed, which means she’s not miscarrying. The doctor wanted to keep an eye on her tonight.”

Veronica looked exhausted. She smiled the faintest shadow of a smile. “God,” she said, looking up. “None of this feels like it can really be happening.”

“But it really is.”

“Yeah.” Veronica turned to Rosie. “And you,” she said, “you are a wonderful friend.”

Rosie scowled, pleased and shy. Elizabeth could see the genuine affection between them.

“You want to lie down with her?” Rosie said, and after a moment, Veronica nodded shyly. Rosie climbed out of bed, came over to her mother’s chair and sat down on her lap. Veronica took off her spiky black heels, stretched out on the mattress beside Simone, and watched her sleep. The little black dress was hiked up past the dark thigh panels of her pantyhose, and her breasts were spilling out, and Elizabeth felt
pangs of exasperated fondness: slutty Veronica and ruined Simone, who snored softly. Veronica wiped at the smudges of mascara beneath her eyes. Then she brushed the damp bangs from Simone’s forehead and smoothed down the tangled hair, stroking her head, twirling some strands, letting blonde curtains of hair fall through her fingers like sand, all with the most elegant hand gestures, like those of a flamenco dancer, or a baby.

E
LIZABETH
and Rosie left a while later, when Rosie began dozing in Elizabeth’s lap. Elizabeth woke her gently. “I can’t carry you, baby,” Elizabeth said, smiling as she stood Rosie up on her feet. They went to the bed and hugged Veronica, rubbed Simone’s shoulder, promised to check in later that day.

They walked down the hall, waving good-bye to some of the nurses they’d met that night. Rosie appeared to fall asleep standing up in the elevator. Elizabeth took her hand when the door opened and led her out of the lobby, through the parking lot, and to the car. She opened the passenger door and waited while Rosie slid heavily into the seat. Then she buckled Rosie’s seat belt and closed the door. Walking over to the driver’s side, she happened to look at the moon one more time. The older part of the moon was showing: an eerie circle of shadow at the base of the full moon, as if the shining crescent were holding the missing part of itself in its arms.

S
IMONE
’
S
belly grew rounder. Elizabeth had called Veronica the day after the miscarriage scare to tell her that they all loved and supported Simone, but to ask if everyone—Simone, Veronica—was positive that a baby for Simone was really a good idea at this time. What she wanted to ask was, Are you
mad?
Are you fucking
whacked?
Veronica had been drinking and burst forth into a weepy diatribe about abortion, which made no sense until it turned out she was talking about her own, the one she had had when she was fifteen at a hospital in San Francisco, where she had to sign court papers claiming to have been raped. So that was that. And now life went on. Rosie seemed a little more cheerful, was growing taller before their very eyes, while Simone grew heavier, rounder—now bleeding, now not.

Now James was the one full of darkness, secrecy. He disappeared into his study every day and handed her pages to read late every afternoon. He was getting ready to send some of his new book off to his agent, and he needed her unconditional approval. But she only loved some of the book and did not know what to do. For the time being, she pretended to love everything he’d written so far. It was a fictionalized account of a woman he had loved for many years in his twenties. It seemed reasonable to Elizabeth that after having her read such an intense and erotic account of another woman, he might expect some reservations on her part, especially when so many of her own lines and foibles had been woven into a character who clamored for spankings and anal sex.

“Why all the butt stuff, darling?” she asked one night. “Couldn’t she be into local politics instead?”

“I just know it to be true.”

“I mean, am I crazy?” Rosie had heard Elizabeth ask Rae over the phone one recent morning, and Rae had said no, no. Rosie listened in silence on the extension. There was some beautiful writing, Elizabeth said, James at his best, fragile and askance, his basic American rube humor mixed in with the sense that everything is interesting if you just come at it from a place of wonder. And then there were parts that were so removed from James’s experiences, as Elizabeth understood them, of being a lover and a man and a son and a father, that the writing came across as vacant and chilling, and she wondered if she even knew him.

“I think it would help if you could actually tell him what you think,” Rae had said.

But it was clear to her that he did not want to hear. He was sullen and defiant.

Rosie, lurking around the house, listening in on the fights, on her mother on the phone, on the silences, felt invisible.

O
NE
hot summer evening, when Lank and Rae were over for another reading night, Rosie stared at her mother hypnotically until Elizabeth finally looked up, but as she did, Rosie glanced mournfully off into the middle distance.

“Honey, are you okay?” her mother asked. Rosie looked down into her lap. Couldn’t they see that she wasn’t okay, that she was troubled and lonely and still full of secrets? What did she have to do, go hang herself in the upstairs bathroom for them to notice how sad she was?

“I think I’ll go on up to my room,” she said, and got to her feet. She really didn’t even know exactly what was troubling her, whether it was the cheating, or Simone being pregnant, or if it was loneliness, a huge heavy loneliness. She was afraid people would say she was feeling sorry for herself.

“Shall I come upstairs with you for a while?” Rae asked, putting down her book, but Rosie shook her head. She had been noticing all night that Rae liked sitting near Lank on the couch, being quiet, reading, like James and Elizabeth, like the couple that everyone else was except her.