The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (15 page)

She wonders where Walter and Emily are right this minute. What if they're at some kind of clinic? It's late, but who knows what kinds of hours these places keep. Then she reminds herself of Walter's conviction just a few hours ago; she can't imagine he would bend so completely, so fast. Of course, even if he could prevent an abortion tonight, he's ultimately powerless.
I can't watch her every minute.

Charlotte is engulfed by a wave of helplessness. Maybe Joe was right after all: you
can't
plan anything. She certainly couldn't have prevented this. Though Joe, she can't help but think, contributed to it somehow. His laissez-faire, live-in
the-moment attitude. His
spontaneity.
Even when Emily was little, he set such a childish example—playing games, slapping fives, taking impromptu drives to the playground, the Dairy Queen, while Charlotte was left to deal with the important things: baths, meals, lights out. When Charlotte called them to dinner and reminded Emily to wash her hands, Joe would roll his eyes at her as if they were both children who'd been reprimanded.

Charlotte walks into the kitchen. She checks the oven clock: 9:16
P.M.
If it's 9:16 on the East Coast, it's 6:16 in Seattle. This seems a safe time, if ever there is one. Not so early that Joe is still lolling in bed (as he was known to do on Saturdays) but not so late that he and Valerie have already started yelling or throwing salads or reconciling on their deck with the red wine and the picture-perfect view.

She removes the cordless from its cradle, pages through her phone book to the gold tab marked “J.” Her fingers are trembling as she dials. It rings five times before Joe answers.

“Hello?” He sounds slightly out of breath, as if he's been jogging.

“Joe. It's Charlotte.”

“Char?”

Something about his breathiness, his aura of preoccupation, makes Charlotte's anger swell.

“Please don't call me that,” she says. “I don't like it when you call me that.”

“Whoa,” Joe says, laughing, his breathiness abruptly disappearing. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” This is his signature tactic: slowing down the world to match his own pace. “Slow down there.”

Usually she and Joe exchange words with a well-worn politeness, but tonight she can't rein herself in. “I won't slow down,”
she says, words tumbling out of her mouth before she can stop them. “I can't.”

He laughs again. He probably thinks this is like the last phone call, the one about the tongue ring. Her distress then was a little disproportionate, but still—she hates it when Joe laughs at her. She hates it so much that she rushes past their usual pleasantries, so much that a very small part of her relishes the moment when she says: “Your daughter is pregnant.”

She hears a faint crackle on the other end. It could be static, or the phone shifting, or Joe's joints cracking as he sinks into a chair.

“Joe?” she says, feeling a pinch of remorse. “Are you still there?”

“I'm here.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

His voice has lost its usual jocularity; it sounds dull, shell-shocked. “I heard.” He is silent for a beat. “What's she going to do?”

Charlotte feels her heat rise. “She wants to get an abortion.” Joe falls silent again.

“Well, are you surprised?” Charlotte says, unable to contain her bitterness. “There's no way she'd ever do anything but the
cool
thing, the cool
left-wing
thing, whatever the cool word for being cool is these days.” She is tripping over her tongue, words tumbling out haphazardly. “Thanks to you.”

“Wait.” Joe's voice is firm. “Hold on. Don't go throwing this in my face. I never told Em what to believe in, she did that on her own. And being pro-choice, there's nothing wrong with that. I know you probably don't agree—”

On the other end of the line, Charlotte hears the slow whine of a door opening. “Hold on,” Joe says. She can make out the
muffled rhythms of conversation: the rumble of Joe's voice under the receiver, probably pressed to his chest. A pause, another rumble, then the sound of a door closing—not quite a slam, but close.

Joe returns. “Sorry.”

Charlotte is dying to know if he told Valerie about the pregnancy—and what she said in return—but won't ask. “That's okay.”

“What was I saying?” He pauses, then adds, “I'm pretty sure I was just about to make a brilliant point.” It's as if seeing his wife has pulled him a few steps away from the situation, recalling him to his signature charm.

“You were about to say you're in favor of abortion.”

Joe sighs then, the playfulness gone as quickly as it surfaced. “No, actually, I wasn't about to say that. What I was about to say is that it's fine for Em to be pro-choice. And, yeah. Yes. I'm pro-choice. But that doesn't mean I'm glad she's decided to do this.”

“It doesn't?”

“No.” She hears a sound she knows to be Joe running one palm down the length of his face, as if washing it off. She can see him pinching the bridge of his nose, then letting go. “Not exactly.”

“You mean you want her to keep it?”

“Yeah, of course I want her to keep it. I don't know. I want to have a grand—” He pauses. “Jesus. Give me a minute. I'm kind of blindsided here, you know?”

Charlotte feels her heartbeat speed up. “Well, she isn't doing it,” she says quickly. “I mean, she hasn't done it yet. Maybe if you talk to her—”

Joe says nothing; thinking, she supposes. Charlotte begins pacing the kitchen while she waits, a tidy four-cornered square:
coffeemaker to refrigerator to toaster to table. Coffeemaker to refrigerator to toaster to table.

“It's Walter's, I assume?”

She stops, staring at the coffeemaker. “Well, of course it's Walter's.” She's furious that Joe would even suggest otherwise. “Who else's would it be?”

“I don't know. It could be anyone's.”

“Like who?”

“Like any guy in the state of New Hampshire! Who the hell knows?”

“Are you saying Emily's—? Why would you say a thing like that?”

“I'm not saying she's sleeping around. I'm just saying, we don't know a goddamn thing about her life. Christ, Char. Why are you making this even harder? I'm just being realistic! You should try it sometime!”

Charlotte stops. Blinks. Surprisingly, though, she doesn't feel hurt by his words, or even anxious; she feels something like electrified.

“Sorry,” he says.

She begins pacing again, coffeemaker to refrigerator to toaster to table.

“So it's Walter's. Does Walter have an opinion on all this?”

“Of course Walter has an opinion.” Charlotte feels emboldened, remembering her ally. “He has a very definite opinion. He wants her to keep it. The reason he followed her down here in the middle of the night was because he was so afraid she was going to get rid of it behind his back.”

“Jesus,” Joe says again.

Charlotte stops, facing the window. The plastic blinds have been returned to their original position, revealing only thin
stripes of night sky. She wants more from Joe than this. More than this passive reacting, this joke-cracking and cursing and sighing. Historically, he's the one with all the convictions. The one who's not afraid to take a stand.

“So that's it?” she says, feeling glib, careless. “You have no opinion?”

“No, Charlotte.” Joe sounds weary. “I don't have no opinion. I'm just not about to force my opinion on my adult daughter. She's very capable of making her own decisions. She's been doing it for twenty-two years.”

Charlotte's eyes fall to the table and the six chocolates swathed under plastic. She feels a tightness building inside her, words that have been lodged for years in her jaws, her temples, her throat. “She hasn't been doing it for twenty-two years,” she hears herself saying. Her voice is shaking. “She's never once made her own decision. She believed in whatever looked right, whatever the trend was, whatever her teachers at college were doing, or her friends in the commune or—or you.”

“That's not true.”

“It is.”

“You're not giving her enough credit.”

“Maybe you just don't know her as well as I do.” Charlotte bites down on the inside of her cheek, tasting blood. She feels the buried tension on the line: layers and layers of unslung insults, unfought fights. She senses she is on the brink of venturing into a different realm entirely, about parenting and priorities and shirking responsibilities and moving to the West Coast and being seen as a hero regardless—but, she tells herself, that's not what this is about.

“Fine,” she concedes, still chewing on her cheek, trying to keep her anger in check. “Let's say she has been making her own
decisions. Let's say she's always thought them through. She's still never once had to take another person into account, or another person's feelings—she doesn't even know how!”

“Are you talking about Walter?”

“Of course I'm talking about Walter. Who else would I be talking about? Some strange man in New Hampshire? This is Walter's baby, Walter wants this baby, and—and it's like his opinion carries no weight at all!”

“Charlotte,” Joe says. His tone has softened into one of affection, even amusement. It feels demeaning:
Look, isn't it cute? Charlotte's getting angry!
“Are you listening to yourself?”

“Of course I'm listening to myself!”

“Do you think this is really about Walter?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, is this about Walter or is it about you?”

His words are overmeasured, overenunicated. He sounds so much like Emily, he may as well have been trained at the alternative learning environment.

“Is this about not wanting her to have the abortion or about wanting her to listen to you? To take your side?”

“What is this,” Charlotte sputters, “some kind of pop psychology? Do they teach you that on the West Coast? Did
Valerie
tell you to say that?” She feels her control slipping even further out of reach, words falling from her mouth before she can edit them, organize them. Joe is twisting this into
her
problem. It's so selfish! So unfair! Yet she feels like a novice trying to argue with him, a toddler trying to walk and leaving a trail of damage in her wake. “I don't know how you can accuse me of this being about me, when you—you're where she learned irresponsibility. You do whatever you want, whenever you want, you leave me, leave us, take up with a—”

“Charlotte,” Joe warns. “Watch it.”

Charlotte stops. Tries to breathe. She listens to the sound of the silence that stretches between them. She lets herself drift inside the quiet, be suspended in the nothing, like an air-filled sail. She doesn't want this pause to end. She can almost pretend it never will, that none of this is even happening, because look, look at the slanted blinds! The laptop! The magnet from Millville County Electric! All of it so ordinary, so oblivious—how could these things still exist if all of this were really happening? The kitchen where she heats her Lean Cuisines cannot be the same kitchen in which she and her ex-husband are fighting about their daughter being pregnant! Her daughter being pregnant cannot exist in the same world as the icemaker and the coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond!

“Listen,” Joe is saying. His tone has relaxed. “I know you want me to tell Emily what I think she should do, but I'm not going to. It just doesn't sit right. But maybe I should come out there so we can all talk about it.”

Charlotte pauses. “Fly out here?”

“No. Swim.” She can hear him smile.

“You would do that? Fly out?”

And just that quickly, the calm is shattered. “What do you mean, I would do that? I am her
father,
for Christ's sake. I do care about what happens to her. God, just because I'm not as controlling as you are doesn't mean I love her any less.”

Charlotte leans against the counter, holding the phone to her warm cheek. She looks at the thin slivers of night sky peeking through the blinds, the few faint stars visible through the slats of plastic. She looks for the moon, but it must be blocked; she can't find it. The window grows blurred with her tears. “Just tell me what to do.”

“Run my trip by Em,” Joe says. “Tell her I want to come out and talk all this through. Tell her we're not disappointed, there's no pressure—this is her decision to make. But it's a big decision, it's complicated, so we want to be there to help her make it. Because we support her and we love her.”

Listening to Joe speak, Charlotte feels tiny hairs prickle on the back of her neck. She thinks she might be glimpsing a side of Joe she's never seen. Not the fun dad, the hip dad, the fluent-in-pop culture dad, but a father who is sensible and loving. There's a quality about his words and tone that is
paternal
—there's no other way to describe it. And Charlotte is amazed. Not so much by the sentiments themselves, but the way he can articulate them, the words just easing off his tongue, feelings into flesh. Even when they were arguing, he seemed composed while Charlotte was rattled to the core. Where did he learn to be this way? Was he always, and she'd just never known?

Charlotte feels like she's been punched in the gut. For the first time since Emily's birth, she considers the possibility that Joe might be the better parent. That he was aware of the important things all along. And that she, as a mother—her purpose in life, her identity, her primary role in this world—falls short.

“Charlotte?” Joe says. “You there?”

“I'm here.” Her voice sounds small, detached, floating beside her.

“Sound like a plan?”

“Sounds fine.”

“You'll call and let me know what Em says?”