How it Ends (26 page)

Everyone at school knew we were
in a fight but I don’t know if anyone knew the real reason why. Lacey could have told them, Seth could have told them, I could have but I didn’t. I was too miserable and the whispers were too intense and plentiful.

Seth must have gotten to school early that first morning because when I went to my locker, all the stuff I’d had in his locker was back in mine and all his stuff was gone.

I stood there numb, gray with shock, then tugged my first-period books free and turned to Sammi, who was sort of shielding me with her body and giving the rubberneckers her evilest
WTF are you looking at?
face. “Don’t let him see me, okay?”

“Okay,” she said without hesitation and steered me off on a brand-new hall route.

I don’t remember much about that day or even that week, only the times I caught sight of Seth in the distance, and then the clawed fist gripping my heart would tighten and shoot red streaks of pain through the numbing fog, and I would have to go into the girls’ room and, if it was crowded, shut myself in a stall and just sit there and breathe.

I didn’t even know if we were broken up or if he was just waiting like I was waiting.

I wanted to blame Lacey—it would have been
so easy
to blame Lacey, to tell myself that she had offered, so
of course
he accepted, to make an excuse for Seth just so I could stay blind and tell myself it wasn’t
him
who had done me wrong—but Lacey didn’t owe me anything.
Seth
owed me his loyalty and betrayed me, and it was as simple and as complicated as that.

School. I hate it. I am gray all day.

Sammi said she saw Seth in the hall and he looked stoned but not happy.

He didn’t look at her as they passed.

I went into the girls’ room and came face-to-face with Lacey.

I stopped dead, blocking the doorway. She went totally white and sucked in her breath and her eyes got huge and terrified and the weirdest thing was that in that moment I could have been a hunter and she a yearling, or a robber and she a counter girl trapped and frozen and helpless, because even though my heart was pounding and my adrenaline racing, I had all the power and I knew it. I could hit her, kick her, shred her with words, hold her there, rip out her hair, and throw her purse in the toilet and she couldn’t do anything back but cringe, crouch, cry, and in the end, hope I showed mercy and pray for it to be over.

I looked at her for so long that tears welled in and spilled out of her eyes. The sight of them cracked my bemusement and I stepped aside, out of the doorway, stepped far enough away and watched as she sidled by and slipped out.

And then I got a bad case of the cold sweats and had to wobble in
and sit down on a toilet and put my head on my knees, thinking of how close I’d come to being something I would have hated.

“Seth cheated on me,” I said to Gran. “I think we’re broken up.”

She trembled.

I hit play and cried silently, huddled in my chair with Serepta on my lap.

How It Ends

That Sunday night, after Peter gave me my birthday gifts—a single pearl suspended on a gold chain and a tiny little tin of Evening in Paris talcum powder—and I blew out the candles on my cake, we took the slices to bed with us, and while we were eating them, as if we had discussed it beforehand and decided it was time, we started to talk about our pasts.

Peter told me he had left Holland and come over to America alone at fifteen, two years after surviving the Hunger Winter of 1945, and that he hoped he never saw a sugar beet again for as long as he lived. He smiled when he said it but his eyes were bleak, and I was going to try and change the subject, but he shook his head and said, “You’re my wife, you’re entitled to know,” and told me a brief story no one else knew.

Until you, now.

Peter told me that between the time he landed in America at fifteen and the moment he met me, he had feared nothing in this world, for the worst had already happened before he left Nazi-occupied Holland.

He was the son of a music teacher and a gunsmith, the youngest of
three, with two older sisters. He was thirteen when the Hunger Winter claimed his sisters, thirteen and a half when the soldiers dragged the remaining villagers from their homes and made them stand at gunpoint and watch as they degraded the women, as his father lunged forward in animal rage and would have made it to his wife, half-naked and bleeding in the dirt, if he hadn’t been shot in the back, as his mother mewled and sobbed, trying to cover herself, to reach his body, as a soldier, smirking with cold disgust, hit her with his rifle butt, opened his pants, pissed on her, and then fired one last round.

The worst had happened as Peter, big for his age even then, started for the soldier and was knocked down, made to crawl past his father’s body—
don’t look don’t look don’t look—
to his mother’s, and when he closed his eyes, ashamed to gaze upon her nudity and defilement, his shame earned him a boot to the ribs, flipping him over and coming down hard on his throat, a boot caked with bloody mud…

And then a gob of spit and the rifle butt slamming down into his face, his mouth, shattering his teeth with an agony unlike any other, and in that instant his fear died. Later, when the soldiers had beaten others, killed two of his schoolmates, stolen their meager food supplies, ransacked their homes, and left, he rose, shaking, blood in his mouth, blood in his eyes and ears, and limped to his mother, covering her nakedness with his own shirt, lifted her, and carried her home. He set her gently in her bed and went back for his father.

No one helped him, as they had their own dead to care for, their own naked shame to cover. He laid his father next to his mother, drew the quilt over them, and closed the door.

He stayed in the house, lost, dazed, until the smell from the room with the closed door became too much, and then he dug up the few valuables the family had left—kept only because there had been no food to barter them for—and left the village to make his way out of Holland.

Two years later at fifteen and armed with a false set of documents, a
new name, and little else, he stepped off the boat alone at Ellis Island.

He was silent and solemn, a young man of medium height who looked older than he was, with thick, black hair, a broad back, and corded forearms, with a quick gaze that saw and weighed everything. He never smiled, ashamed of the few shattered stubs of teeth left in the front of his mouth, and bore their frequent ache with stoic acceptance.

He kept to himself, worked in back rooms and docks, hauling freight, carrying boxes, doing heavy lifting, grunt work, hard, muscle-building work where the boss never spoke to you, never asked your name, and you never offered it because you were one of a sea of tired faces, hungry faces, desperate, dirty, drawn faces, those of immigrants who hid limps and old aches from badly set broken bones, men with withered arms, missing arms, with hungry children and crying wives, men who took the day labor and were grateful for the dollar, two dollars, five dollars handed to them at the end of the twelve hours.

“First thing I bought were these, and I had to put them on time payments,” Peter said quietly, pressing a thumb to his front teeth and avoiding my gaze. “It took me three years to pay them off. I hope you don’t mind I didn’t tell you before.”

“No, not at all,” I said, humbled by what he’d gone through. “I just can’t imagine how terrifying it must have been to leave your home and come to a whole new country—”

“It wasn’t,” he said, sighing and rubbing a hand over his knuckles. “Nothing was.” He glanced at me, gaze solemn. “There’s only one thing that can scare me now and that’s the thought of losing you. That’s the only thing in the world that would kill me.”

“Well, then, you ought to live forever because you’re never going to lose me and I’m never going to lose you,” I said and quickly fed him a piece of my cake and kissed him, and little by little the terrible bleakness faded. He said it was my turn, so I summoned my nerve and told
him my parents’ love story, all of it, including the shock of discovering they might not have been married and how I hated the word
bastard
now, and he said, “So why ever tell anyone again, Louise? They’re gone and you’re a married woman in a place where no one knows you. Why not just say they were married? Who can prove otherwise?”

And that, in a nutshell, is how the reinvention began.

We worked hard the next few years, scrimping and putting almost all of our money into a savings account for our first home. We were very careful making love, as we both wanted children but not until we had a settled place for them.

Peter took extra work whenever or wherever he could find it and that became our living money while most of the rest was banked.

The worst fight we had was after Peter stopped in at the diner one day for supper and saw one of the regular patrons, a burly guy with a roving eye and a belief that waitresses expected to be mauled for their tips, reach out and slap my behind as I whisked by with a tray full of hot food.

I missed the initial contact but, when I heard the commotion, set the tray on the table, and turned, Peter had the guy up against the wall by the throat and with dead, cold fury said, “Don’t ever do that again.” He held the guy’s bulging gaze, riveted with dead-on calm for a second longer, and then released him, tensed as the guy stared back, as the cook shouted, “Hey!” and came out of the kitchen with a cleaver, as I said, “Peter!” and the guy sneered and Peter waited, ready, and then the guy threw a couple of dollars on the floor, said, “Fucking immigrants can’t even speak English,” and sauntered out, and only my fierce grip on Peter’s arm, I think, kept him from going after him.

He was angry at me that night, both for not telling him about the guy in the first place and then for holding him back. We had a terrible fight with me saying I could have handled it myself and him
saying,
How, by smiling and ignoring it? By saying nicely, Don’t do that, please, okay? You think that’s going to stop a guy like that?
and me getting furious because he was right, I
had
already done both of those things and it hadn’t worked, but I still didn’t want him in there creating a scene, getting me in trouble and maybe even fired, and besides, the guy was way bigger than Peter. I made the mistake of saying that, and Peter lifted his head and narrowed his eyes and in a flat voice said,
I’ve handled worse,
and turned and walked out.

We didn’t go out much, maybe for a burger once a week or to the movies once every couple of months, and we didn’t do a lot of socializing because…well, because we were happy in each other’s company. We
liked
each other, liked walking in the door and seeing the other’s smiling face, telling stories or debating the stuff on the news or curling up reading or having tickling matches or French fries for supper.

We went on dates to the river (where we actually made love once in the water, out of sight of the road) and on Sunday drives, to fairs and carnivals and out for coffee. It didn’t matter
where
we were so much that we were together.

And within five years, we bought our first cozy little starter house in a neighborhood of starter houses. We dug a big garden in the back and planted vegetables. Scoured the newspaper for garage sales and slowly but surely furnished the rooms. We got two free puppies, a boy who was part beagle, part schnauzer and a girl who was part German shepherd and part Afghan hound, named them Sonny and Cher and watched them grow into a pair of devoted, smart, and mischievous beauties. I took as many hours as the diner would give me and Peter worked at least one railroad double shift a week. He’d moved up to conductor now and was always bringing home anything left longer than ninety days in the lost and found.

We had more lost hats, gloves, and umbrellas than everyone else on the block, combined.

And finally, after two more years and a comforting sum in the savings account, we decided to stop being careful about making love and start a family.

Thirty-four periods and much heartache later, I finally scheduled my first and much-dreaded visit to the gynecologist, a gruff, elderly man I’d chosen because Coral the waitress used him and I knew of no one else.

He noticed one of my old abdominal scars while examining me—I remember distinctly the way his face changed when he saw it—then lifted the embarrassing paper gown and located the other one. Pulled down the gown, pulled off his rubber gloves (just seeing them made me want to run screaming right out of the office), pushed back the stool, and told me to sit up.

He asked me if I’d had any abortions or any children while very young, children of unfortunate circumstance that I might have delivered and given up for adoption.

The nurse’s expression remained carefully blank, but mortified I said, “No, of course not!”

He asked me my IQ and when I looked at him, puzzled, and said I didn’t know, he asked if I’d been put in special remedial classes or had attended a normal high school.

“A regular high school!” I said.

And then, eyeing me as though every single answer I’d given was a lie, he said, “Was your mother an unmarried woman? Were either of your parents criminals, declared mentally incompetent, or—”

“I don’t understand why you’re asking me this,” I asked, voice shaking. “I came here to find out why I haven’t conceived and you’re—”

“Calm down, Louise.” He exchanged glances with the nurse, patted my knee, and rose. “I see women all the time who were just not meant to have children, and I’m sorry to say that seems true in your case as well.” He met my stricken gaze. “It isn’t the end of the world. You and your husband can still have a somewhat satisfying life. Just think of all the shopping and traveling you can do without…”

Shopping? Traveling? What the hell was he saying?

“But…we want a baby,” I said, hands twisting in my lap. “It’s all we want, Doctor, a family of our own, wait, you don’t understand…”