The Birthdays (26 page)

“I thought you got Babe at a store.”

Joe smiled at him with a sparkle. “Don’t tell your mother.”

“I won’t,” Jake said.

Joe squeezed Jake on the shoulder and headed back inside, the box in the crook of his arm.

Hilary slipped off to the pink bedroom to lie down for a while. The mattress, yesterday too soft and short for her, now felt only a relief, and she closed her eyes.

Outside the room she could hear Liz ordering Jake to clean off the table, get her two eggs, find the mixing bowl, and Jake snipping that he was only capable of doing one thing at a time. Hilary could also hear her mother in the next room, picking up the phone receiver and setting it down every few seconds. Each time she did, the phone beside Hilary’s bed clicked. Finally Hilary picked up the receiver to hear ringing on the line and then a man answer, a voice that was faintly familiar. Ellen and this man asked each other about their weekends, and then she told him about Daniel and Brenda, about Hilary’s surprise pregnancy (“and she won’t tell us a
thing
about the father”), Jake’s beautiful house, the bad weather, and then returned to Daniel and Brenda, and the heartbreak of it, all of the unbearable heartbreak Daniel had weathered.

Hilary froze, her hand curled tightly around the receiver. When her mother finally stopped talking, there was an awkward
pause in the conversation and the man said, “I’m sorry,” and then nothing. Ellen continued on, repeating her sadness about Daniel’s fate as if she were trying to elicit something, anything more from this man. “I just don’t know what to say to him. I mean, what do you say to your son after he’s been through this?” she finally asked, and the man said, “I wish I knew. Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said, ‘Where there is sorrow there is holy ground’?” “Oh, I don’t know, but I’m not sure that would be adequate anyway,” Ellen said, and the man gently changed the subject to his daughter in San Francisco, and her kids, and what they’d all done together while he was there. Hilary tried in vain to remember which of her mother’s friends had kids in San Francisco—wouldn’t Ellen have given her their names and told her to look them up? He went on about MoMA, the Matisses and the Diebenkorns, all the exquisite daguerreotypes, and Hilary could practically hear her mother’s mind wandering back to Daniel and Brenda. Hilary considered hanging up but didn’t want them to hear her, so she stayed on the line. The man mentioned some plans they’d made for next week, some concert at the Gardner and maybe supper, and finally they began their goodbyes. “I miss you,” her mother said in a hushed voice, to which the man responded, “À bientôt, E.”

“Do you miss
me
?”

“Of course I do.”

“I mean, do you miss me as a person? I don’t mean the time we spend together, or the things we do. Do you really miss me?”

He paused. “Yes?” he replied tentatively. “Is everything all right?”

“Sure,” Ellen said. “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing here is
really all right at this point, is it? Haven’t you heard what I’ve been telling you?”

“What can I do?”

“You could say more. You could tell me that everything will be fine, even if it won’t. You could
comfort
me a little.” She paused. “You could come here.”

“I can’t do that. You have your whole family there. I’ve just gotten back and—”

“I know, I know.”

“I’m not sure what you want from me right now.”

“I suppose I want you not to say things like that. I want you to do something,
anything
, M. Let me ask you this: what is it that
you
want from
me
? What is it that you even feel for me?”

He swallowed. “Gratitude. The deepest, warmest, loveliest, most loving gratitude.”

Hilary held the phone away from her ear, then brought it back, just in time to hear her mother say, “… more?”

“Of course. I couldn’t have survived these last months without you. You’ve been my lifeline, you know that, my rope to sanity. I miss you and I do want you to come back here. I want us to go to the Gardner this week and I want to give you something I bought when I was away. It sounds corny, I know, but I do need you. I absolutely need you and I do love you and—”

“I have to go.”

“E?”

A man who was not her father had a nickname for her mother. He loved her and had given her a nickname and this vaguely familiar but ultimately unrecognizable voice, this complete stranger had now learned all about the weekend. Ellen said again, “I have to go now. I’ll call you when we get
back,” and quickly hung up. Hilary slammed down the receiver and looked around the room. She grew lightheaded—had she imagined this? Maybe through her growing fatigue and surging hormones she’d conjured this phone conversation. Maybe, in fact, this whole weekend was some sort of mirage, and she’d wake to find herself back in her apartment in San Francisco, Beatle scratching at the window, the sirens screaming past on their way to the hospital down the street.

“What the hell is she doing? What is going on here?” she said into the air. She ran her fingers in circles around her belly and tried to imagine a baby curled inside her, its head to her side. She could feel it there, positioned in such a way that it could have been looking up at her face. “Married people are nothing but miserable. You might never have a father, little one,” Hilary whispered. “I might be both of your parents. What do you think about that? Would that be all right?” The baby stayed still beneath her hands.

She sighed. She would try to find a place where neighbors watched out for each other, a real community. She would move somewhere less crowded than San Francisco, somewhere more contained, where everyone knew everyone and she’d get help raising her child merely because she lived here. She closed her eyes again and laced her fingers across her stomach. Despite everything that had gone wrong this weekend, there was something about this island, its unpredictable weather and small streets, its history, its people—the men who worked on the ferry, the cabdriver. They exuded a sort of innocence and earthiness and history—they seemed to have lived here for thousands of years. She thought of Alex. Maybe, she thought, maybe she could rent Jake and Liz’s
house until she found one of her own. But there was the girl in the bookstore, Alex’s messy apartment, his intrusive dog. More worrying and potentially more troublesome in the end, there was the way he drifted from Hilary when she was mid-sentence as if he were plotting an escape. There was no reason he should be a cause for her to move here. There was no good reason at all. What kind of person would move here for someone she’d spent one day with?

But he didn’t own the island. He shouldn’t have any purchase on her future one way or the other. If this was the right place for her, then so be it. She could find a job at one of the stores in town, or at a restaurant. She’d waitressed plenty of times before. She smiled to herself, relieved to have a new plan finally. And only then did she remember the phone call, and her mother, and the fact that soon she and the rest of them would all be seated around the dinner table, celebrating her father’s seventy-fifth birthday.

Hilary stood in the corner of the kitchen and watched Liz pull a steaming chocolate cake out of the oven. Ellen sat at the kitchen table.

“Have you been to the Gardner recently?” Hilary asked. She couldn’t help herself. Her mother looked up, surprised.

“Yes. I’ll take you when you move back home, if you’d like.”

“Actually—” Hilary said, but then stopped herself. She would wait until after dinner to announce her revised future. She didn’t want to upset anyone now, before the birthday celebration—and her mother, not to mention Jake, might well disapprove of her new plan to move here.
What sort of opportunity is there in a place like this?
they’d say.
What sort of men? Why
must you change your mind every five minutes? Pick something, anything, just make a plan and stick with it.

“Actually what?” Liz turned.

“Nothing,” Hilary said. “Forget it.”

She helped Liz prepare the icing for the cake, and as they worked, as her father dozed in the living room and her brother puttered around somewhere else, maybe on the back porch, Hilary noted a pleasant silence in the house. So much could be said right now—so many concerns could be expressed, so many accusations made—but no one was saying a thing, and this made her grateful. Hilary heard her father shift on the couch. Nothing was changing. Nothing was happening. Even Jake had let them be.

For her father she had brought a framed photograph of herself holding his hand on her seventh birthday (the two stood next to each other in front of an ice cream stand on the Cape), and another photograph of them a few years ago, when she’d come East for her grandmother’s funeral. (Hilary had just told him she’d gotten a new job in insurance, and he’d seemed skeptical even then of this career choice for her.) She’d also brought a third frame that was currently empty. In a few months, she would give him a picture of the baby, herself and Joe. The past, present and future, all neatly framed for him. She’d considered giving him photos of the entire family but her mother had filled their house with these. He had none of just her and him, and none of her recently. She’d wrapped each frame separately. They now sat on the bed in the pink room, and she went to gather them and asked Liz where she could start a pile of presents.

The cake was frosted, the steak nearly ready. No one knew whether Daniel would join them, but everyone seemed content to let the subject rest for now.

“You’re almost there,” Hilary said, taking a seat beside Joe on the couch. Ellen was having an affair, but Hilary put it out of her mind. “Wasn’t it three-thirty
P.M
. you were born?” She remembered finding her parents’ birth certificates years ago on her father’s desk.

“I’d like to just stop forever at seventy-four.”

“Hear, hear,” she said. She grabbed a pen from the side table and held it in front of her mouth like a microphone. “Any last words of advice? Thoughts, impressions, hopes, wishes?”

“Nah,” he said. “Well, there is something you told me when you were about eight, it had to be. You’d run away into the woods and your mother sent me to find you, and when I did, you’d climbed way up high into an oak tree and I stood there down below you, wondering what on earth to do. I tried to talk you down. I started climbing up, even, but you yelled down to me, ‘Stop trying so hard. Just let me stay here, because eventually I’ll have to come down. You can’t always fix everything.’ You remember that?’”

Hilary tried but didn’t remember this particular scene. She’d escaped to the woods so many times they’d blurred together in her mind. “I said that?”

“You did,” he said. “It was good advice. You might want to remember it with your child.”

Hilary nodded. It seemed to her that her father had in fact
fixed quite a lot in her life; he’d listened to her litany of complaints about school and her mother and Jake over the years. Joe had decoded some of the mysteries of her brother; her father had secretly sent her what money he could when she’d needed it. She considered the ten or twenty birthdays that lay before him, the awful days to come that marked only the passing of time. She took his hand and squeezed it tightly.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, as if he sensed what she was thinking.

Liz had bought silver ribbon to wrap around blue silk napkins, and went to the deck to get two bouquets of daisies—and where and when had she gotten these? Hilary wondered as she stood to help. Liz stepped back into the living room and handed Hilary a handful of tiny plastic silver stars to sprinkle around the table. “Yes, I know, I go overboard,” Liz said, but Hilary replied, “Nah, it’s nice.” And it was, and Hilary was glad someone was guiding the day back to the reason they were all here—her father. She held the stars in one palm and they felt like sand in her fingers as she sprinkled them across the white tablecloth. They glinted in the day’s sunlight. Liz wrapped the napkins in the ribbons and carefully set them equidistant from each other—Hilary thought she noticed Liz’s eyes move in even paces between seats—and then went to the freezer for the chilled glasses.

With the three babies on the way, they would celebrate so many birthdays in the coming years. Hilary thought of Daniel and Brenda in some clinic on this island, then of the first time she saw Daniel in the hospital after his accident, his legs absolutely still beneath the thin blanket. She focused on the table before her and the hundreds of tiny silver stars and
thought of her own baby, how she would celebrate its first birthday here on the island with a roomful of new friends and neighbors, maybe even Alex, though maybe not. Probably not.

Liz turned on Hank Williams, one of Joe’s favorites, and asked her if she wanted anything to drink. Leaning against the kitchen counter, the two sipped glasses of lemonade, and Hilary asked Liz what she thought of the island as a place to live year-round, how many families lived here and what were the schools like. Liz looked at her sideways and asked what she was getting at, and when Hilary told her confidentially of her new plan, Liz clapped her hands and said it was the best idea she’d heard in years. “You can live here and be our caretaker,” Liz said happily. “And maybe when things get serious with that guy at the bookstore, he can move in.”

“Liz.”

“Yes?”

“He has nothing to do with my idea to move here.”

“Okay,” Liz said.

“I’ve only known him for two days.”

“Okay, okay,” Liz said. “I promise not to bother you about him anymore.”

“Thank God.”

“But promise
me
something. That when something more does happen with him, you’ll tell me about it.”

“Why are you so fascinated by this subject?” Hilary asked.

“What’s more fascinating than sex? What’s more interesting than pure physical attraction?”

Her words were laced with an uneasy combination of judgment and titillation and maybe something more that Hilary didn’t particularly want to consider. She shouldn’t have told
her about any of this. “I can think of plenty of things,” she finally said.