The Birthdays (16 page)

Joe flopped down on a sofa and kicked off his muddy shoes. Jake rushed toward him and grabbed the shoes before the mud seeped into the new rug.

“Anyone like a drink?” Liz said from behind Jake, and though he knew she was really addressing the others, he said yes, “a beer, please.”

Ellen stretched her arms, looked around and said, “What a lovely place, Jake. I can’t believe it was ever run-down.”

“We had it gutted,” he said. “And we pretty much started from scratch. Liz was the mastermind behind it all.”

“I wish we could’ve seen it before,” his father said.

“You wouldn’t believe how much it’s changed.”

Liz appeared, handed him a beer and smiled politely. “It was a ton of work, but I think it was worth it in the end.”

Ellen looked around approvingly. “Indeed.” She leaned forward and ran her fingers across the wood floor. “These floors are beautiful. What is this, oak?”

“Cherry,” said Jake.

“Well, that must have set you back,” said Joe. “Is it tough to maintain?”

“Not at all. It’s no different from any other hardwood, really.”

Joe mumbled something and Ellen said, “Daniel’s new house has hardwoods too, but they haven’t got any rugs yet, and the place looks a little bare, to tell the truth. These are gorgeous rugs you’ve got.” She slowly knelt to pat the Persian carpet beneath the coffee table and her expression changed. “No one’s heard from him?” she asked.

“Not since earlier,” Liz said.

“I do hope he’s okay right now.”

“I do too,” Jake said, aware that her concern extended to more than just this moment. After all, his did too. At the strangest moments—at a meeting or on the tennis court—he found himself thinking about his brother. What was he doing right then? Was he able to swim anymore, to lift weights? What sort of exercise was he able to do? Daniel never talked to him much about the particulars of his new life, not that they talked that frequently anyway. But when Jake did call once a month, he didn’t know what to say about the matter. Or how to say it.
He had expressed as much sympathy as he could just after the accident and tried to offer everything he had—his time (he could run errands if need be), money, recommendations of the best doctors he knew. But Daniel shrank into a stone back then, and chafed at every suggestion Jake made. Daniel wasn’t used to being a person in this position—someone eliciting pity, someone so dependent on others. Each night in the weeks following the accident, Jake found himself recounting to Liz every physical thing his brother used to love to do when they were young—running track, swimming, hiking, wrestling with him in his bedroom, in the swimming pool, beating the hell out of him in their back yard—as if ridding himself of something (the old Daniel?), and then drifting off to a thick, dreamless sleep. Liz knew that Jake and Daniel had never been particularly close. Jake had annoyed his brother in myriad ways. Jake told her that Daniel loved animals and had constantly begged his parents for a dog. The bigger the better, he’d said. But Jake was allergic to dogs, cats, and the twittering of his father’s birds had kept him awake at night, so after the parakeet Napoleon died, the house remained petless until they’d all left for college, when his father got Babe.

After the long months that followed the accident, Jake had been glad to hear that Brenda was pregnant and that something good had happened to them, though Jake had mixed feelings about the fact of the donor. Despite everything, at least Liz was carrying his biological children. Of course Daniel and Brenda didn’t have many choices in the end, but still. What if the baby didn’t look like either of them? What if the donor had a history of mental illness and hadn’t informed the doctors? What if the man suddenly turned up and demanded to be a part of the baby’s life?

Jake took a long sip of beer and looked around his living room and down at the cherry floor, at his pregnant wife leaning against the wall and out the window at the stormy Atlantic, and grew appreciative that he had what he had, that he’d never gotten into a horrible accident like his brother, that he and Liz hadn’t had to resort to a sperm donor, that he had, in fact, a spouse he loved and a beautiful house here and another in Portland. A terrific job, good friends.

Why did it sometimes feel like a mirage? Why did it often feel as if he’d wake up one morning and find that everything—his houses, his job, Liz, especially Liz—had disappeared? He glanced over at his father, now fidgeting with the door of Babe’s cage, and wondered if the man ever had the similar sensation. Was Joe secure with what he had? And was he proud of his kids and his life—had that been enough for him? Jake thought that it probably had.

Hilary rubbed her fingers together. She thought back to when Alex had pulled the car in front of the bookstore, when she’d leaned toward him and kissed him slowly just beside his lips. He’d turned and pressed his mouth firmly against hers. He held her face in his hands and she found she’d missed being touched this way. George was much softer. Gentler, and very innocuous.

“Well,” Alex said as he backed away.

“This was a great tour.”

“I’ll be working this weekend,” he said. “You could come by.”

She gathered her bag, careful not to answer him. She wouldn’t see him again. There would be no reason. Rita
pointed her wet nose near her face, and Hilary squirmed away. “’Bye, now,” she said, and shoved the door closed.

There should have been a grander ending, she decided now as she shuffled around, the baby turning inside her. Something more profound should have happened between them, though she couldn’t say precisely what. The moment had seemed so freighted, like she’d been saying goodbye to more than just one man.

Her mother was going on about how she couldn’t wait to see the petite Brenda pregnant. “How can a baby even fit inside her?” Ellen’s comments seemed to mask some kind of worry.

Next to Hilary, her father rested his arms over the cage. Though she was surprised to see the turtle at first, Hilary supposed she was glad Babe was here. Her father without his pet was a sad sight, a lonely boy bored and fidgety among adults. She’d missed Joe these past years. He was never entirely himself on the phone—he spoke quietly and a little formally, asking her predictable questions about her car and her bills, and whenever she tried to elicit more from him, was he happy, was he doing things that made him happy now that he was retired, he seemed not to understand that she was trying to gather a stronger sense of his well-being. He always replied with one-word answers—
Yes. Sure. Fine.
He tended to fade into the background of the family, and no one paid him enough attention. Especially not her mother, who demanded his constant focus, but what she didn’t realize was that he was always, in fact, paying close attention to her and to them all in his own way. When Hilary was a child, he’d wake her each morning and ask her to tell him about her dreams. Every single morning, he’d say, “Where have you come back from?”
and she’d tell him, if she remembered. If not, she’d make up a story about someplace she wanted to visit—California, China, the moon. He’d take it all in, listening intently, as if hidden in her dreams were clues to what she really wanted in life and maybe what he might be able to give her someday. That was how he operated—he listened. He watched. He absorbed the undercurrents that guided their conversations. Then he went into the next room to take care of his turtle and allowed people time and space alone. Her mother, though, had never been satisfied with this sort of understated attention.

Hilary squeezed his arm. “I missed you,” she whispered, and he smiled and said, “Me too.”

Liz showed Hilary to a small pink room at the end of a hallway. In the corner sat a single bed dressed in a frilly rose-colored coverlet and piles of lacy white pillows, like a little girl in her Sunday best. “This is you,” Liz said. “Towels are over there,” and Hilary noticed a stack of pink towels on the nightstand with small white fish embroidered along the seams.

“How’re you feeling? Are you having any morning sickness? I left work early every day for about eight weeks straight. I considered downing a case of Pepto-Bismol at one point.”

“I’ve been constantly exhausted, and I’ve had some nausea.” Liz straightened a gauzy pink curtain beside her. “But I’m happy to have it all, since, you know, it took us a while.”

“Of course.” Hilary searched for something more to say. Was she supposed to apologize for being pregnant? They’d never spent much time together—Hilary didn’t have a sense
of what Liz would want to hear right now. “You must be relieved.”

“In a sense. What about you? Are you nervous for the baby?”

“A little.”

Liz opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “Will he, the guy, help out?”

Hilary was surprised by Liz’s boldness. “No, not since he doesn’t know about it.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Hilary said, wondering whether she should’ve said so much. “You might not want to tell Jake. He’ll disown me. Actually, why not, go ahead. It’s probably only a matter of time before he does anyway.”

“Come on, he’s not that bad.”

“Oh, but he is. Did he ever tell you about the time he caught me breaking into our parents’ liquor cabinet? Yes, I was thirteen, and yes, it was the middle of the day, and yes, my boyfriend at the time was five years older and waiting for me in my bedroom, but Jake, who’d gotten home early from school, lectured me for about two hours on alcoholism and statutory rape. He scared the living hell out of me. Then he made me go to my father that night and tell him everything, and when Dad tried to hide a smile at first, Jake screamed at him that he was a terrible father and that his daughter would probably end up dead on the street one day.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“I’m not!”

“I know he means well.”

Hilary looked at Liz, and they both smiled.

“Okay, maybe not,” Liz said, “but what’s he going to do,
make you call the guy who got you pregnant and tell him about it? Who cares what Jake thinks anyway? It’s not his life.”

“True.”

“So who is he, this guy?”

Hilary walked to the bed and sat down. She looked around at the room, crowded now with her bag and one of her mother’s in addition to the bed and dresser, the large hamper, an overstuffed pink chair. “He’s a musician,” she said. She thought of Bill David, of Beatle and Jackie. Then of George and Camille. “And a carpenter. His name is George David.”

“How come you two aren’t together, you know, together together? How come you don’t want to tell him?”

“I guess because, I don’t know, I guess because I don’t really want to marry him.”

“Oh,” Liz said. “Well, that makes sense. I’m sorry to be so nosy. I shouldn’t pry this much. I promise I won’t ask anything else.”

But Hilary almost admired her sister-in-law for having the courage to be so direct. “I’ll think of some equally probing questions for you and ask them when you least expect it.”

“Deal.” There was a shuffling in the hallway, and Liz turned to leave. “Make yourself at home, Hil. If you need anything, just ask or help yourself.”

In a moment, Hilary overheard her and Ellen talking in the hallway about the island (people were buying up all the land) and the rain (whenever would it stop?) and the joys and trials of pregnancy. “You’ll be wonderful parents,” Ellen told Liz.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s easy to imagine this house teeming with children. And you’re a great cook and Jake is the biggest worrywart in
the world,” she rattled on. “Really, you two will be the best parents.”

Hilary wished Daniel would hurry up and arrive so she could tell him what their mother had just said. They could discuss Jake’s extravagant house that looked as if the entire thing had been delivered, furnished, from a catalog. She could tell Daniel about Liz’s surprising candor and ask him about their father’s happiness—what did it mean that he’d needed to bring Babe this weekend? She wondered what Daniel would have to say about it all.

She hadn’t seen him since a few months after his accident, when she’d flown East. She’d taken the red-eye and arrived first thing Saturday morning, and Brenda picked her up at the airport and drove her right to the hospital. Daniel lay there in bed, a little thinner than when she had seen him last at their grandmother’s funeral. His legs remained, of course, perfectly still beneath the sheets, and Hilary tried to ignore the nervous flutter in her chest when she first saw him. When Brenda left her and Daniel alone to go drop off some film at the lab, Hilary closed the door to his room, pulled a bottle of vodka from her backpack, and she and Daniel took swigs until they found themselves at once laughing and crying about Hilary’s then-boyfriend, an undergraduate at Berkeley who’d serenaded her the night before with his mandolin.

Hilary couldn’t wait to see her brother again.

The water was
choppy and the ride bumpy. Brenda and Vanessa chatted the entire way about the wonders that were Freeman Corcoran and Maine and having a baby (Daniel surmised that the baby’s father had been some sort of one-night stand). Vanessa said that she actually loved raising Esther on her own, and Brenda asked all sorts of questions: “Don’t you ever just want someone else to change her diapers? Do you feel closer to her, do you suppose, being her only parent?”

“You know, I do. We have our own little world and our own language. I’m the only one who understands what it means when she cries a certain way or when she sticks her thumb in her ear. Freeman tries to translate, but he always thinks she’s hungry. I’m sorry, but only the mom knows the nuances. I’m
sure of it. I’m the only one who can make her stop crying right away.” She looked at Daniel’s shoes. “You love them like nothing else. It’s the most bottomless love—you’ll see.”

Brenda gazed at Esther as Vanessa spoke. Daniel felt the steady tumble of the water beneath them. His stomach began to lurch, and then settled. He glanced up at Vanessa—at her sharp nose, her square jaw, her muscular arms. She was both motherly and fatherly. Though he couldn’t remember being as young as Esther, he did remember the sensation that his mother was the primary thing surrounding him, keeping him safe and whole, a sort of protective balloon. As he grew up and when he left for college and even during grad school, he was to some degree still contained and protected by this sensation that had become a part of his consciousness until—until when? Until the accident, he supposed.

He reached over and took his wife’s small hand. He felt calmer than he had all day, and he told himself to enjoy this quiet inside. He could have, after all, gotten rankled by Vanessa’s pronouncements on motherhood. He easily could have grown testy about Brenda’s pointed questions.

The ferry slowed, turned, pulled backward into the slip and finally jerked to a stop. They would soon be free to move forward with the day now, just Daniel and his wife, and as the people around them gathered by the door and swayed on their feet, waiting for the gangplank to be set up, as they inched forward and he pushed himself down the gangplank, his wheels brushing the wooden rails, Brenda behind him, carrying their bags that knocked against his back, and as they headed out into the rain yet again, it was as if nothing at all had wedged between them. They were headed to see his family, and he was ready now, and she was
there, his wife of almost a decade, behind him and all was well again.

Beneath a small shelter overlooking a street crowded with stores, Brenda and Vanessa exchanged phone numbers and hugged goodbye. Daniel watched Vanessa squeeze Esther to her chest, hurry across the street through the rain and disappear into a car. He reached in his pocket for Jake’s phone number. “See a phone?” he asked.

“There’s one.” She pointed across the street to a small group of people standing beneath umbrellas in front of a phone booth. He rushed down the sidewalk, and she stepped behind him yet again to push him faster (had she already forgotten how this had tired her out before?), bouncing him over the cracked pavement, off the curb and onto the street. At one point, she slowed just before a broad puddle. People ran past them, pulling their hoods over their heads. “Bren, I’ve got it.” He set his hands on his wheels, but she said nothing. She quit pushing him and just stood there a moment. Stopped cars hummed beside them, and after another moment she followed him. Once they’d reached the tall curb of the sidewalk, she stopped again and leaned her face toward his. “It’s been too long since the baby moved,” she yelled into his ear.

“How long?” Daniel curled his hands above his forehead against the rain. He should’ve brought his raincoat. He was sure he’d brought his umbrella, but where was it now? “Listen, do we need to be discussing this out here?”

“Something’s wrong, Dan. My belly and my back are cramping,” she said. The rain continued, relentless, and seemed to stretch the following minutes into hours. Vanessa reappeared, Esther still in her arms, and when Brenda told her that she thought she needed to go to a hospital, Daniel
said she was overreacting—surely she only needed something to eat or drink, or maybe just to rest for a while. But she insisted, and Vanessa herded them down the street a little ways and into the back seat of a rusty car, then helped Daniel into the front. She struggled to get the wheelchair into the trunk as he held Esther on his lap. She wailed and squirmed and kicked in his arms. Daniel turned to see Brenda clutching her stomach and staring at her shoes. “I don’t know what’s happening,” she said to the floor of the car, and then Vanessa slid into the driver’s seat and drove them to a clinic, a small, squat building only a few minutes away.

In a waiting room near the emergency department, he and Vanessa and Esther watched a doctor hold Brenda’s arm and rub her lower back as he led her down a hallway. He hadn’t seemed to notice that she’d come here with anyone else—he’d looked right past Daniel and Vanessa at first. She should have slowed down—he’d told her twice earlier to slow down and stop rushing. So what if they got a little wet? Anyway, this was surely some kind of stress or exhaustion, and he expected the doctor to give her a glass of water, tell her to relax and send them off. Esther began to wail again and Daniel said, “I can handle it from here. You should just go home.”

“I’ll stay. I don’t mind,” she said, shifting the baby on her hip. She ran her fingers through Esther’s thin hair. “I want to make sure everything is all right.”

They remained beside each other, neither saying any more. The waiting room was long and narrow with several orange plastic chairs and a pile of old toys in the corner: a Raggedy Ann doll missing an eye, a jack-in-the-box with a rusty spring sticking out of it, other broken toys that looked as if they were patiently awaiting a doctor. Daniel heard a high-pitched beeping
somewhere, but on the whole, it was quiet. Much quieter than a hospital or clinic should be. He tried to think of something to say to Vanessa. He drew her in his head—a thin, short woman made up of lines, holding a big, round baby. Her arms in a circle around Esther. The baby began to cry again, and Vanessa said, “She’s just tired.”

“You should really go home. If you’d like, I’ll call you later and let you know that everything’s all right. Brenda has your number.”

Vanessa reluctantly agreed. “Promise you’ll call me. I’ll be waiting to hear from you,” she said, and he agreed. She leaned down to give him a stiff pat on the back, and headed off. Daniel found himself relieved to be alone.

A short doctor with a gray mustache eventually appeared and Daniel hurried over to him. “I’m Dr. Waller, the OB on call,” the man said, and one half of his mouth smiled nervously. He explained that Brenda had begun to bleed heavily, and that an ultrasound had been done, and unfortunately it appeared that intrauterine demise had occurred.

“She’s still alive?” Daniel blurted, and Dr. Waller looked at him sideways. “Yes, yes, but because the bleeding hasn’t stopped, and because she’s medically unstable right now, though most likely she’ll be fine in the end, we’ll have to perform a D and C—a dilatation and curettage—to remove the tissue,”

“Tissue?”

“Yes, the tissue from the fetus.”

“The baby.”

“Yes, the fetus,” Dr. Waller said in a deliberately soft voice, and Daniel asked, “Is the tissue, the fetus, going to be okay?”
only then acknowledging the weight forming at the bottom of his throat. “I think I see.”

“I’m so sorry.” Dr. Waller explained the operation, and that Brenda would soon be anesthetized, but the whole thing wouldn’t take too long.

“Okay.” The weight rose in Daniel’s throat.

“If you need anything, just ask one of the nurses. Oh, and Mr. Miller, chances are fairly good that Brenda will be able to conceive again after this. Some people, that’s their first question.” Daniel looked up at the man’s mustache, which poked at his lower lip. “I’ll come find you after the D and C, okay? She’s going to be just fine,” the doctor said, and patted the back of Daniel’s chair. He hurried back down the hallway.

Daniel looked over at the one-eyed Raggedy Ann and the empty orange chairs lined neatly against the wall. The morning of his accident, he’d decided to stop jogging. His knees had begun to ache when he stepped out of bed. His age had been announcing itself in places he’d never much thought about before, but mostly in his knees. He’d take up something else that’d be easier on him, he decided, maybe swimming or biking. Maybe, he now thought, maybe in the end he’d unwittingly chosen his fate. He’d given up on his knees, and his entire legs—his entire life—had been taken from him. He’d grown ambivalent about being a father and spiteful of Jonathan White, and now their baby had been taken from them. But this was a pointless, suspicious line of thinking, and no one had such control over the future. Really it had been Brenda who’d been pushing
him
too hard. If she hadn’t been exerting herself, or if they hadn’t been on their way to visit his family, if it hadn’t been raining so hard and she hadn’t had to
deal with his wheelchair, his goddamned wheelchair, maybe nothing would have happened.

He headed to the corner of the room, picked up the Raggedy Ann doll and hugged it to his chest.

Brenda was groggy when Dr. Waller first brought Daniel to her. Tucked under a thin white sheet, her head lolled to one side when he entered the room. He rushed to her and nearly slammed into her bed as he reached for her hands. “Mm,” she mumbled. An IV tube pierced the underside of one of her wrists, and he could see the small reddish lump like a worm beneath her skin.

“Bren?” he said, and she murmured something unintelligible.

The doctor said that although she was stable now, he wanted to keep her here for at least the night, and Daniel asked if he could stay beside her, in the empty bed there. “Of course you can. I’ll just let the nurse know.”

Daniel sat there, listening to the noise of running water somewhere and waiting for someone to say something else. “So what was the cause?” he finally asked the doctor.

“We won’t know for some time yet. A sample of the tissue was sent to Pathology down in Portland and they’ll do what they can to find something. It could have been related to the placenta, but really, for most patients, I’m sorry to say it’s indeterminable.”

Daniel wondered if at an actual hospital better pathologists might be able to determine more. “Could we have the tissue sent elsewhere?”

“It’s sent to a very reputable lab in Portland,” Dr. Waller
said. “Listen, try not to think about that right now. Your wife will wake up soon and you two will have enough to deal with.”

“You know,” Daniel said softly, “it wasn’t mine.”

“Sorry?”

“The baby. We used a donor.”

“Oh, well, that makes sense.”

“I just meant, you know, that maybe it was something to do with the sperm?” He realized he sounded rather desperate.

“Probably not,” Dr. Waller said, nervously half smiling again. “Again, it’s best not to think too much about that right now. We’ll try to have answers for you soon enough, and again, you’ll need to prepare for the possibility that, well, that maybe there are no answers.”

Brenda murmured something and Dr. Waller said he’d check in again soon, then left.

Daniel turned to her and squeezed her shoulder lightly. The corners of her lips were gummy, and he reached for the box of tissue on the table beside her bed.

“It hurts a little down there,” she whispered.

“Should I go get a nurse?”

She shook her head.

“You’ll probably feel better soon,” he tried.

She lay still, her eyelids sinking and rising. “Did you tell them, your family?”

“No, not yet. I wanted to see you first.”

“Okay,” Brenda murmured, and closed her eyes.

He leaned forward and dabbed at her mouth, but she didn’t budge.

A tall nurse appeared in the doorway. “She up?”

“She was, but I’m not sure she still is.”

“She’ll be in and out for a while,” the nurse said, and
checked the chart on a clipboard hanging from the end of the bed. Brenda’s head leaned to the side and her mouth fell open. The nurse returned the chart, avoiding his eyes, and rushed out of the room.

He squeezed the tissue in his hand into a ball. Brenda’s hair had bent into strange angles, and she looked like a child now as she slept, incredibly young and soft and breakable, at the mercy of everything in the world.

He soon grew fidgety and wheeled back down the hallway, where the only sound was the buzzing of a distant machine. Two nurses ran past him. An old man sat bent in a green chair outside an empty room. Daniel wandered back to the waiting area, where he sat alone for a while and listened to the long honk of a car’s horn outside.

Ellen and Joe would sleep in a square green room with two single beds. Ellen looked down at the soft beige carpet, at the thin green and beige curtains hanging by the windows, the ornate antique clock on the wall. She wondered if they’d hired an interior designer. “More towels are in the hall closet, as well as more blankets and pillows,” Liz said.

Joe set Babe’s cage on one of the beds and hefted his suitcase onto the other.

“Don’t worry, Babe won’t need his own room. He’ll stay with us,” Ellen said, and Joe shot her a look.

“I’m off to make dinner,” Liz said, and Ellen followed her into the kitchen, where the floors were rich auburn tiles, the countertops marbled granite. Heavy stainless steel pots hung in a circle above an enormous, shiny stove. The refrigerator and sink were sleek and metal too. The airy room and
everything in it looked as if they could survive a nuclear bomb.

Jake came in and took a seat at a round wooden table in the corner that was covered in separated families of food. He had met his female counterpart in Liz. Ellen wondered what made him so deeply organized, and whether she herself had had anything to do with it. Her house had devolved into chaos when he was growing up, as there had never been enough room for the five of them. No matter how hard she tried—and she tried incredibly hard—to keep the place clean and orderly, it was a constant clutter of car manuals, toys, books, clothes, notebooks, shoes, tools, newspapers. Perhaps Jake’s obsession with cleanliness was some sort of reaction to his childhood home. He was certainly in for a challenge with fatherhood.