The Birthdays (20 page)

“Mom?” Jake suddenly appeared behind her in the doorway.

She sat down on one of the beds and felt her spine curl.

“It’s awful,” he said, and she nodded and looked away. He came into the room, sat down beside her, and as he did the bed sank toward him. He breathed deeply beside her, and Ellen wondered whether he now worried for his own babies. She reached for the thin curtains and rubbed them between her fingers, trying to think of something comforting to say to him.

But he spoke first. “Remember when Dan punched me out for telling on him when he broke Dad’s calculator? I think I was in fourth grade, maybe?”

Of all the things Jake could say right now. “Yes, I remember.” She gazed down at the curtains in her hands. Daniel was awful to Jake as a child. She probably should have intervened more, but the two always wore her down with their constant bickering and fighting, and eventually she just started ignoring them.

“He gave me a fat lip and a black eye, remember?”

She nodded.

“That was the last straw for me. He’d beaten on me so many times I completely lost my mind. I ended up telling his friends that he’d said all these terrible things about them.”
Jake looked at the floor as he spoke. “I told Rick Bernard that Dan had told me about the huge, ugly birthmark on his butt—which of course
I’d
seen before in the bathroom. And then I told Mark Sullivan that Dan said he slept with his parents because he was too scared to sleep alone.” Jake smiled. “I told Jeff Myers that Dan had told me he was the worst player on their baseball team. That he only played because Dan did, and he was jealous of Dan.”

“Those three were his best friends,” she said.

“I know.”

She thought about Daniel back then. “Those boys completely dropped him as a friend after that. He didn’t have friends again until he was in junior high the next year. And he started getting bad grades, and having so much trouble sleeping.”

Jake nodded.

“Well, it was a long time ago,” she said, trying not to betray a rush of anger.

“It was, I guess, but still. It was a cruel thing for me to do, both to Dan and to those guys.” He moved onto the floor and looked up at her. “I just remember being so completely mad at him for treating me like hell and still having all these friends and people around him who thought he was so great.”

Jake sounded almost like a child again. He had only wanted friends of his own. She let go of the curtain and forced herself to reach down and run a hand through her son’s hair. After a moment, the gesture came more naturally. He’d done what he had out of jealousy, and anyway, Daniel was resilient. He’d made new friends, begun sleeping better, improved his grades. It was Jake who hadn’t, even now, fully recovered from not being liked enough as a child.

Babe nestled beside a pile of wood chips. Jake leaned all his
weight against her legs, and they stayed like this for a moment, her hand still on his head, her eyes pressed shut.

After a while he stood, said he should get back to the others and left the room.

She heard muffled conversation in the living room and tucked her shirt beneath her lap. Babe lay perfectly still now. Outside, rain pounded the roof and the sky had finally grown black. She thought of Brenda and Daniel, alone in some cold room in some clinic on this island, surrounded by night. Ellen stood, marched into the living room and told the others she wanted to go to the clinic.

“It’s late, Ell, and didn’t Daniel say he was going to tell us when to come
tomorrow
? Didn’t he say visiting hours are over?” Liz asked.

“I’m his mother and I want to see him,” Ellen said, refusing to look at her daughter-in-law, or at the plush leather furniture and cherry floors and imported Persian carpet that suddenly appeared excessive to her, especially for a summer home. “I just want to see my son.”

“What about what he wants, Mom?” Hilary said, and Ellen could have struck her.

“We’ll go first thing in the morning,” Joe said. “We’ll wake up and go right there before doing anything else. I’ll see to it that we’re the first people who walk in that door.”

“First thing?” She sighed, defeated, and ambled to the couch. “All right.”

Joe followed and took a seat beside her.

Hours later, Ellen woke to dense darkness. The only sound she heard was Joe’s faint snoring. She lay in a small, stiff bed.
Had she died in her sleep? She had no idea where she was. Her eyes open to the night, she felt weightless, only a heavy torso, and she tried to wiggle her fingers and toes and was unable to at first. Soon the feeling returned, but she still didn’t know where she was. Joe slept in a small bed across from her, and when she pulled herself up out of her own bed and walked across the room, she felt a coarse carpet beneath her feet. Only when she opened the door and looked down a hallway to a living room, where a line of moonlight cut across a brown leather couch, did she remember that this was Jake’s house on Great Salt Island.

She made her way down the cool wood floors of the hallway and into the living room and suddenly the meaning of the silence occurred to her: the rain had stopped. It was a relief. She looked down at the stack of blankets on the couch, remembering they had been set out for Daniel and Brenda, and the day’s events came back to her. She clasped her hands together and made herself move forward, then back down the hallway. Jake’s door was ajar. He lay on his back, his arms across his chest in an ominous pose. Liz lay in an identical position, and seeing them, Ellen’s breath caught in her throat. Liz lifted her head. “Ellen?”

“Shh, go back to sleep. I was just checking on everyone.”

“Do you need anything?”

“No. Shh,” Ellen whispered again, and pulled the door closed behind her.

In the next room, Hilary slept naked on her side, several pillows stuffed between her legs and under her arms. Ellen couldn’t help staring and observing how much her daughter’s body had changed with pregnancy. Hilary was a small whale in the darkness. Ellen couldn’t see her face, but she
could see the rise and slope of the girl’s—the woman’s—silhouette and the pillows, like another body, shoved beneath and between her.

Ellen entered the room, wanting for a second to go lie beside her daughter and hug her close, but of course this would wake her, so Ellen just went and sat on a short wooden chair in the corner. She wondered why she hadn’t looked in on her sleeping children more often when they were young. Joe was usually the one to check on them in the middle of the night. Ellen was always the one to put them down but once she herself was asleep, she was lost to the world. It used to worry her, the depth of her sleep. So much could happen and she’d have no idea about it until too late. But tonight, here she was, awake. It was a sort of gift—she was the one keeping guard, watching them breathe and dream. If only Daniel were here too. If only her children were all together here, under her eye, tucked in their beds.

She stayed in the small pink bedroom for a while longer, and watched Hilary breathe.

Jake woke to hot sunlight on his face. He’d forgotten to close the shades, and where was Liz? He stretched his arms, blinked several times and sat up. Flames shot through his neck, and he remembered his fall yesterday. He stood, his neck stiff, pulled on his bathrobe and made his way into the kitchen, where Liz was placing sausage links in the heavy skillet.

“We the only ones up?”

“Your father and sister are out for a walk,” she said. The sausages popped in their grease.

“Dan and Brenda,” he said. “God, I just remembered.” His mother was a ghost when she told them.

Liz nudged the sausages around the pan with a spatula. “I called the clinic this morning. The nurse said they were sleeping, and to try back in an hour or so.”

He thought of their argument on the porch last night. “Come here,” he said.

“I’m cooking with hot oil, sweetie.”

“I don’t care. Come here,” he said again, and stepped behind her. He reached his arms around her waist. Her back was broad and warm against him, and he whispered, “I missed you in bed. And I don’t mean in a hubba-hubba kind of way.”

She turned her head and smiled back at him.

This was a miserable, tragic way to get a second chance, but a part of him felt relieved. And then guilty for this, and then merely relieved again at how silly and irrelevant their arguing now seemed.

He looked out the window and saw the ocean blinking with daylight. It was the most beautiful thing in the world, he thought, the Atlantic just beyond his kitchen window, the morning sun hovering above the rippling mirror of water. He was glad his father and Hilary were out enjoying it. He wondered what they were talking about, and what it was that they usually talked about. Unaccountably, Joe and Hilary had soft spots for each other. She doted on the man, constantly asking if he was warm enough, cool enough, hungry, tired. Jake’s relationship with his father seemed to exist more in the silences between their words, in their simply listening and trying to understand each other. He wondered what it was about his sister, of all people, that his father connected
with. After all, Jake was the one who called each family member regularly. He never missed a birthday, as his brother and sister often did, and whenever he passed something in a store he thought one of them would like, whether it was a sweater or a camera or a box-set photographic history of the automobile, he bought it immediately and sent it to them.

He kissed the back of Liz’s neck and headed into the living room, where Hilary was now pulling the sliding glass door shut behind her. “I hope you realize you’ve got an incredible back yard,” she said, walking inside barefoot. Joe stood by the door, brushing sand off his shoes onto the mat. Hilary fell onto the recliner, completely ignoring the sand she’d tracked all over the rug. “Smells good in here,” she said, and she wiggled up her nose like a dog.

“Sausages,” Liz called from the next room. “I’m making scrambled eggs too.”

“What heaven,” Hilary said, and leaned her head back. Joe moved behind her and draped a sweater over her shoulders, and Hilary made a silly face up at him as if she’d forgotten all about the horrible thing that had just happened in the family.

“What are we going to do about Dan and Brenda?” Jake said.

“Mm?” Hilary murmured.

“Do you think they’ll even still want to come here, you know, to the house?” He thought a moment. “It’s going to be hell for her to see you two pregnant.”

She looked at him. “It might be.”

Joe went to sit on the couch. He pushed off his shoes and peeled off his socks, lifted one foot onto his lap and began squeezing his toes.

The bottom of Hilary’s stomach poked out from her T-shirt like a beer belly. “Does it make you feel a bit strange, you know, given your situation?” he asked.

“What are you getting at?”

He searched for safe words. “I mean of the three of us, you have to admit that they most deserved a healthy baby, after all he’s gone through this past year or so.”

“Oh, I dunno, you and Liz sure deserve it after trying for so long. So, jeez, I guess that leaves me, who certainly doesn’t deserve anything good, do I?” She looked right at him.

“They’re just a little more equipped for it,” Jake said. “There are two of them, after all. It was something they
tried
for.”

Hilary opened her mouth.

“Stop it,” Joe muttered—to whom, Jake wasn’t certain. Joe pushed his thumbs into his big toe over and over. “Just stop this, both of you, before you go any further.”

“Jake, can you help me?” Liz called. Suddenly she appeared before him. “I need some help with breakfast.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him back to the kitchen.

“What are you doing? We were getting somewhere,” he whispered. “I was about to teach Hilary that she’s not the only person in the world.”

In the kitchen Liz released his hand. “I’m trying to make breakfast for your family and I need some help,” she said. She handed him a carton of eggs.

Jake followed her across the room. “I just want to be prepared for when they get here. I don’t want Dan and Brenda to feel awkward when they see Hil.”

“Honey, you’re not the only one who feels terrible about what happened.” She handed him a bowl and he headed to the table.

“How the hell did she let herself get pregnant at this age? It’s not like she doesn’t know any better. No one else in this family even seems to care,” he said. Perhaps Hilary rankled him so much because she didn’t seem to get to anyone else at all. Objectively, factually, she was one of the most irresponsible people he knew. How did this not bother any of them? Yes, his mother seemed mildly irritated with her, but not nearly as confounded as he was. Even Liz wasn’t fazed. “Anyway, it’s Dan and Brenda we should be thinking about. What do we even say when we first see them?”

“We just let them lead the way and take it from there.” He imagined she spoke in this measured tone to her students.

“That just doesn’t seem like enough. I don’t know,” Jake said, and began to rub his temples. “I just wish I could do something else for them.”

“To make
yourself
feel better about what happened?”

“No. Maybe. What’s wrong with that?”

Liz shook her head. The light flooded in the window behind her, and he could barely see her face. “We’ll need all those eggs, so get beating,” she finally said.

They gathered around the kitchen table for breakfast. Hilary sat as far from Jake as she could, for she worried she’d wing a sausage at him if he said one more word to her. Next to her sat her father, and across from her, her mother, who’d just woken, which was strange, for Ellen had always been the first one up in the house, and often before dawn. Hilary still remembered, with some nostalgia, the sound of her mother puttering around in the kitchen downstairs
while the rest of them lay in their beds upstairs. “You all right?” Hilary asked her.

Ellen gazed at her plate, cut a sausage into thirds with the side of a fork and popped one into her mouth. She swallowed and said, “I just didn’t sleep so well last night.”