The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (22 page)

Charlotte offers a mild smile. She's familiar with being this person: the one they can all focus on, joke about, agree upon.

“Remember the time with the Christmas lights?” Joe addresses the table at large, as if a rapt gathering of students. “One year Emily's mother, God love her, brought Christmas lights to hang around our living room, get us in the holiday spirit. They were the white ones at least, not those tacky multicolored things. Tasteful. Char couldn't figure out how a toaster worked, but she had good taste.” He takes a swallow, gives Charlotte a wink.
“Problem was, she didn't know how to get the damn things on. She plugged them into an extension cord, attached it to the TV, and next thing you know we lost power on the whole first floor.” He reaches over to poke Emily in the side. “Somebody cried her eyes out because she couldn't watch
Electric Company.
”

“Hey,” Emily protests, smiling. “
Electric Company
was a cool show.”

“You remember that, don't you, Em? With the lights?”

“I think so.”

Charlotte bristles. Of course Emily would recall Joe's memory, or at least claim she did.

Joe studies Charlotte over the rim of his glass. His face is getting redder. “Poor Charlotte.” The smile is rubbery, the emotion in it hard to pin down. “She was trying to turn me into an upstanding Christian from the day we met.” He takes another swallow, jostling his glass. Three fat red droplets spill onto the table. “Never worked.”

Charlotte looks into Joe's face. His features, wine-warmed, are becoming vague, soft. Then she dares to look at Walter, expecting some combination of amusement and sympathy, but his face has gone hard. His jaw is set. She looks at the wooden cross around his neck; it occurs to her these stories are reflecting worse on Joe than on her.

“Anyway,” Joe concludes. “Sounds like you worked some kind of techno-magic, Wal.”

“Happy to help.”

“Wally and Mom are like, best buds,” Emily adds.

“So I've heard.”

Charlotte drops her eyes, embarrassed, but Walter speaks up. “We're just the only people around here who got their heads on straight.”

Charlotte feels a movement in her chest, a tiny, tentative fluttering. Never in this triangle of father-daughter-mother has she had an ally; it's always been some version of her against them. But now, she feels the weight in the room shifting. The energy bending. She's not alone this time. And her ex-husband, instead of his usual cool, is looking kind of, well, silly.

Walter picks up his glass. He leans his head back against the wall. “Sorry,” he says. “Didn't mean to start something. Just feels like we're getting a little off topic here.”

“Fair enough.” Joe nods. His tone is instantly formal, professorial.

Charlotte watches Emily watch Walter. Her face is arranged in something like a reprimand, but Charlotte detects a tremor of worry running through it. It must make her nervous to see Walter challenge her father. Or maybe, for Emily, being around Joe always carries some degree of worry—that her father, if made unhappy, will simply up and leave.

But accused of delaying the proceedings, Joe rises to the occasion. He sets his glass down, lets his face deepen into a frown of concern. Amazing how easily he can switch tempers. Like Emily, his personality contains such extremes—adult one moment, child the next—and careens from one to the other without a hitch. Charlotte expects him to step up now and steer the conversation, to recite all the perfect, parental things he said on the phone last week, but it is Emily who speaks first.

“So here's the deal,” she says. She picks up her water bottle and takes a swig, then plunks it bluntly on the table. “I know this is kind of abrupt, but I don't really feel like screwing around making small talk.”

Charlotte glances quickly at Walter. His eyes are closed.

“I've done a lot of thinking over the past two weeks. Wal and
I have done a lot of talking.” Her gaze sweeps the table and comes to rest on Walter, who opens his eyes and looks back at her. “And bottom line is, I've changed my mind. We're keeping it.”

Charlotte doesn't trust her own ears. Her eyes flit around the table like nervous moths, hunting for confirmation that she just heard what she thinks she heard.

“Honey,” Joe says. As if from a distance, Charlotte registers him stretching one arm across the table, taking Emily's hand. “That isn't why I came out here.” Joe's voice is soft. “You know that, don't you? I'm not here to convince you to keep it.”

“I don't think that.”

“Because this is your decision. I'm not here to influence you in any way. I'm just here to support you, not to judge—”

“I know, Joe. Really.”

“It's not like that, Joe,” adds Walter.

Joe sits back, keeping his eyes on Emily. He's still wearing that unreadable smile, more a slackening of muscle than an expression of any specific feeling. If she had to, Charlotte would call it
bemused.
It's probably the same look he gives the rare student to offer a comment that throws him off guard.

“Well, I'll be goddamned,” he says, retracting his hand.

Emily squares her shoulders. She seems to grow taller in her chair. With one hand, she tucks her hair behind her ears, carefully, one ear and then the other. Her hand is so tiny, Charlotte thinks. The cuff of her sweater comes almost to her middle knuckle.

“At first,” she explains, “I wasn't even thinking of all this in terms of a real baby. It just wasn't ever how I saw my life going, and I didn't really consider it beyond that.” She runs one finger across the wrinkled label on her bottle. “It was all about the
choice—the right to
make
the choice. But then I realized, that's not a good enough reason to do it.”

“It's also not enough of a reason
not
to,” Joe interjects.

All three look over at him. He shrugs, feigning innocence, and picks up his glass. It's the professor persona again: the temptation to play devil's advocate, find gaps, poke holes. Charlotte wants to clamp a hand over his mouth and tell him, Watch what you say, she
listens
to you—but she can't. She promised herself she wouldn't bear any responsibility for this decision. She only wishes he'd be more careful. One misplaced word, one too many sips of wine, and Emily might change her mind.

“Emmy?” Joe says.

It's their old pet name.

“Yes?”

“One question?”

She is still toying with her water bottle, picking at the edges of the label like a scab. “Okay.”

“Why do you
want
to have the baby?” Joe says. He puts his glass down, folds his hands leisurely behind his head. Charlotte wants to knock his elbows down.

“The decision's made, Joe,” says Walter.

But Joe is looking at Emily. “Honey?” he says. “What made you change your mind?”

Emily stops fiddling with the bottle. She meets Joe's eye, holding it for a long moment. “Actually,” she says, then pauses. She looks nervous, Charlotte thinks, her eyes searching Joe's face. “It was Val.”

Charlotte feels a lump rise in her chest: a confused feeling, grateful and resentful and distrustful all at once.

Emily continues slowly, spooning each word from her mouth. “She told me about the abortion.”

Charlotte glances quickly at Joe, just in time to see a look of pain cross his face, like a shadow on a wall.

Emily waits a beat more, watching her father. Charlotte realizes now that her hesitation isn't for her own sake, but for his. “She told me how she did it when she was my age. And how much she regrets it now. And, how, you know”—she pauses again, waiting for a cue to stop, and getting none, says—“how she can't have children.”

For a moment Joe seems frozen. His eyes are glazed, legs crossed, arms still folded behind his head. Then, with a loopy, boneless flourish, he lets the arms drop to the table. He grabs for his glass, tilts it back to take a drink before realizing it's empty. Then he stares inside it, looking forlorn, as if this glass, like life, has deprived him of something.

Emily reaches out and takes his hand. “I'm sorry, Daddy.”

Charlotte looks away. She focuses on the spilled drops of wine on the table. She imagines how the three spots of color are, right now, seeping deeper into the wood, growing roots. She thinks about how, years from now, every time she looks at those three spots, every time she tries to scrub them off with a sponge or conceal them under a place mat or a bowl of fruit, she will remember this conversation.

“I'm so sorry,” Emily says.

“Yeah, Joe,” Walter says. “I'm sorry too.”

Charlotte doesn't speak. She knows no one expects her to. They are turned to Joe, leaned toward him, listening. She sees the three of them as if through a pane of glass. Emily picks up Joe's hand and lays her cheek against it. Joe's arms are limp, his eyes full. And Charlotte thinks: These are the mechanics of consolation. This is what a body does with sorrow. And these two young people, they respond to it without hesitation. They sense
pain and move toward it. For Charlotte, the emotion on her ex-husband's face gets only smaller, more contained, reduced to something tangible, quantifiable: a quiver of the lip, glistening in the eye.

“I just want to be clear about something,” Emily says.

They've relocated to the patio. No one wanted a real dinner, so Charlotte laid out her carefully planned appetizer trays: hummus with triangles of pita, cheese and crackers, baby carrots, celery stalks, jumbo shrimp. It's twilight, the sun burnishing the tops of the trees, separating the sky into bands of blue and violet. It's beautiful, Charlotte thinks. Its obliviousness makes it even more beautiful.

Emily and Walter have resumed their patio position, Emily snuggled in Walter's lap. The other chair belongs to Charlotte. Joe dragged the beige wing chair out from the living room, its wooden legs scraping boisterously across the patio stones. He's slouched low in it now, the engraved back rising high above his head like a throne. He's holding his sixth glass of wine. Charlotte is counting.

“I just want everyone to understand,” Emily is saying, “when I said Valerie changed my mind about the baby, I didn't mean I think now if I get an abortion I won't be able to ever have kids. She told me all about what happened and that pseudo-doctor who fucked it up.”

Charlotte's eyes flicker to Joe, but his face has become impassive. The wineglass tilts precariously in his hand.

“And this isn't some sort of freaky Freudian thing either, like I want to have my father's baby because he couldn't have his own or something. It just made me see the whole thing in a different way. It made me think seriously about what having a baby
would be like.” She draws a breath. “I mean, six years from right now I'll have a five-year-old.”

Walter puts his hand on her shoulder.

“There'll be this whole new incredible little person to get to know. And we'll have
made
her. How amazing is that?”

Walter starts to rub her arm. Emily leans forward. She has a shine about her: a glow in her face, eagerness in her voice. As ever, Charlotte notes this with a combination of gladness and worry.

“And I'm thinking, if I
did
have the abortion, would I always walk around wondering who this kid would have been? What she would have been like?”

“That one's easy,” Walter says. “She'll be fucking cool, that's what.”

Joe laughs, a kind of snort.

“Just look at her mom.” Walter ignores him, kissing Emily's shoulder. “We have an obligation to bring her into the world. Be a crime not to.”

Charlotte feels disappointed in Walter. For being so casual, so cavalier. Maybe she's been relying too much on his maturity. He's only twenty-two, after all.

“When I'm twenty-eight,” Emily says, “she'll be five. I think that's the perfect age difference. I'll still be young enough to play with her and really get involved with her life, but not so young so that we're too close in age and turn into some kind of weird friends instead of mother and daughter, you know?”

Where is she getting this? Charlotte marvels. Has she read some kind of holistic parenting manual already?

“She, huh?”

They turn to look at Joe. It's the first time he's spoken since they came outside.

“What's that, Joe?” from Walter.

“
She.
It's a
she.
You keep saying
she.
“ The
sh
s sound like hisses. Joe's chemically white teeth, Charlotte notices, are now stained light red.

“It's a girl,” Emily says. “I'm sure of it.”

Joe smiles a tiny, twisted smile. It looks knowing, the smile of experience bestowed upon innocence. “I hope you're right,” he says. “I hope that she is full of sugar and spice and everything—” “Hello?” A voice floats toward them, invisible, accompanied by the sound of uneven footsteps, high heels pricking stones.

“Hello? Anybody home?”

From the side of the house, Bea Morgan appears. She's standing in the yard, backed by the sunset, wearing what looks like a uniform: black pants, blue collared shirt. Her appearance is so incongruous, no one can speak.

“Oh—” she balks. “I'm interrupting something. I saw your car in the parking lot, so I just thought I'd—I'm sorry. I'm leaving. Bye.”

“No, hey.” Walter recovers as she's turning away. “No. Hell no, Bea. You didn't interrupt anything.”

She turns. “You sure?”

“Sure I'm sure. Get on over here.”

Bea steps tentatively onto the patio, glancing at the ornate living room chair containing Joe's slumped form.

“Actually,” Emily says. She swivels to look at Walter, then turns back to Bea, smiling. “Your timing is perfect. We have big news.”