The Other Life (6 page)

“What are you planning to do if you find him, Batgirl? You left your utility belt at home.”

“I’ll call the police.”

“He won’t be there anyway.”

“How do you know? Maybe he’s working the corner.”

“Fine,” Eugene said, signaling the waiter. “But I’m not leaving before I get my tiramisu. Nothing worse than a vigilante with a cranky sidekick.”

Of course, when they got to the scene of the crime, the thief was nowhere in sight. But Quinn still looked for his face every time she passed that corner.

Quinn made sure the house was in order by checking all the rooms. The master bedroom had long ago been cleared of all her mother’s things, but she worried what the criminals might do if they broke in and didn’t find jewelry, as she had heard that their modus operandi was to break in through a back door, go directly to the master bedroom where every woman kept her jewelry box, and dash out with it before the police had a chance to respond to the alarm.

Quinn decided that on her next visit she would bring a dummy jewelry box, fill it with pebbles, lock it, and leave it on the dresser. She smiled at the thought.

She went downstairs and into her mother’s art studio, an expansive room her father had built onto the back of the house so that Nan would have a sunny place to work. The room was bright with the kind of late-morning light Quinn’s mother would have described as bland. It was neither the high white light of summer nor the crisp shadowy light of winter, but a hybrid, lacking in drama. Outside, the woods tried to make up for it, with a smattering of autumn colors making their debut on a few random treetops.

The painting Quinn usually talked to was the one her mother had been working on when she died. It was still resting on the easel, covered with a white sheet that Quinn had recently laundered. She did small things to keep the room from falling into disrepair, but it was, for the most part, just as her mother had left it. Quinn didn’t think of it as a shrine, exactly, just a place where her mother’s energy lingered. Quinn inhaled. All she got was a faint whiff of Windex. She could smell none of her mother’s cologne. Even the paint fumes were gone. It had just been too long.

After the suicide, Quinn’s father couldn’t bear dealing with the studio and the calls from art dealers interested in buying Nan’s paintings, so he left Quinn in charge. In the aftermath of her mother’s death, it had been easy to brush off the callers, telling them no decisions to sell were being made “at the current time.” But that was seven years ago, and Quinn was still procrastinating. She felt as if she were waiting for something to happen, something that would change and make it feel right to sort through the paintings and decide which ones they could actually part with.

Every so often Quinn got a call from Ellis Everett, the art dealer who had managed Nan’s gallery showings, saying he had an interested buyer he wanted to bring to the studio. Again and again, Quinn blew him off. Ellis warned that she should, at the very least, be sure all the paintings were framed and mounted for preservation. The stretchers, he said, would eventually warp if she just left them leaning against the walls. He was right, of course, and Quinn knew she had to do something about them very soon. Seven years was just too long to go on ignoring that stack of unframed canvases.

Quinn pulled the cover off the easel and stared at the unfinished painting she’d been talking to all these years. It was a landscape in thickly layered acrylics, with a small hill in the foreground and a lush forest of green trees behind it. If one looked hard enough, one could see a figure amid the greenery. It was this tiny, dark image that Quinn spoke to as if it were her mother.

Today, though, it looked like just paint on a canvas. She simply couldn’t muster an emotional connection to Nan by focusing on it. Quinn wandered around the perimeter of the studio, stopping at the stack of unframed canvases that held the one painting she couldn’t bear to look at.

All the paintings in this group were family portraits. Hayden, her brother, stared out at her from the top canvas. Nan loved color and had painted him in warm sage and cool turquoise, with tiny pink accents pulling the eye to the ruby stud in his earlobe. She had captured something essential about Hayden in the eyes, which looked as if they were trying to charm the viewer.
Love me
, they said.
Just love me
.

Quinn didn’t have to move the portrait of Hayden to know what was behind it. First there was a portrait of her father in a van Gogh-like palette of golden wheat colors. Parts of his face were old and parts were young, and some people saw it as some kind of statement about Nan’s bipolar disorder. But Quinn disagreed. She thought her mother was trying to show that when she looked at him she saw the young man he was and the mature man he became.

Behind the portrait of her father was the one Quinn couldn’t face. It was supposed to be a portrait of Quinn, but Nan had chosen to include the two of them—mother and daughter—in the painting. They were portrayed on opposite sides of a door. Nan was on a stool, facing the viewer head on. Quinn was in profile, her hand on the door, her head down.

“What do you see?” Nan had asked Quinn after she finished it.

“You’re locking me out,” Quinn had said, angry that her mother would paint such a thing. Days later Nan took her own life, and Quinn understood that the painting was a suicide note. Nan was envisioning herself on the other side. And even though she couldn’t bear to look at it, Quinn knew it was the one painting she would never sell. It represented an intimate message from mother to daughter. It was meant for Quinn alone.

Quinn walked back to the painting on the easel and covered it with the sheet. Today she wouldn’t talk to her mother. She couldn’t. She left the studio and shut the door, stopping to mimic her portrait self by pressing her palm against it.

She wanted to sense her mother’s presence, to get some reassurance that everything would be okay. But the house felt cold and empty.

IN THE CAR RIDE ON THE WAY TO HER APPOINTMENT FOR A targeted sonogram, Quinn silently prayed the whole thing had been a mistake and that this more sophisticated test would prove it. But the icy climate of the exam room, where she couldn’t make out a word of the carefully mumbled whispers among the medical staff, told her all she needed to know. By the time Quinn had put her clothes back on and sat across the desk from the specialist called in to review the results of the ultrasound, she had already lost hope.

Dr. Robert LeBrun, a pediatric geneticist, was sixtyish, gray haired, and imposingly large, even seated. As he spoke, he kept his meaty fingers entwined on his desk.

His appearance was in sharp contrast to that of Quinn’s obstetrician, Dr. Sally Bernard, a petite African American woman who sat to Quinn’s right. She was about Quinn’s age, and the two women had a relationship that bordered on personal. Dr. Bernard was a devoted reader, and so they made a habit of discussing books during Quinn’s appointments. (Quinn found this an especially useful distraction during internal exams.) Apparently, they’d had enough casual conversations for Dr. Bernard—
Sally
—to feel comfortable confiding in Quinn, who understood that her ob-gyn was not required to be at this meeting. Yet there she was, despite being in the midst of a messy divorce involving three young children, including one still in diapers. With Lewis holding her left hand and Sally holding her right, Quinn tried to imagine she could draw strength from the completed circuit.

“I understand this is a lot to take in,” Dr. LeBrun kept saying, and Quinn would nod solemnly, confused by the concern in his eyes. Why was everyone so worried about
her
? It was the baby they should have been upset about. The baby.

He went on to say something about there being no additional associated malformations, as if that were a piece of good news she could hang her hat on. He also said that the condition wasn’t genetic, and that it wasn’t caused by anything she had or hadn’t done. These, she supposed, were meant to be words of comfort but they were like feathers swatting at swords, and did nothing to protect her from such piercing words as “significant cosmetic abnormalities” and “cognitive and possibly lifethreatening issues.”

Dr. LeBrun explained that it was too early to tell if the sac protruding through the opening in the baby’s skull contained brain tissue or “just membrane.” Apparently, this was a key factor in the baby’s prognosis, though Quinn had drifted to such a disassociated place that it was hard to follow his point.

“If you decide to continue with the pregnancy,” he said, “we’ll do a follow-up three-dimensional ultrasound at twenty weeks, as well as an MRI.”

He unclasped his hands as he talked about termination options and how long they would have to make a decision. The computer screen beside him was turned to face Quinn and Lewis, and frozen on the monitor was an image of their baby girl’s skull in shades of gray. A small, jagged line appeared between her eye sockets, extending upward. It looked so insignificant, the kind of thing Quinn never would have noticed if it hadn’t been pointed out.

Occasionally Dr. Bernard interjected, asking Quinn and Lewis if they had any questions. Lewis asked for clarity on a few points, but Quinn kept floating further away until the words just bounced off the walls of the room, with no place to go.

Later, in the car on the way home, Quinn put her hand on her abdomen, trying to connect with her baby, as if this tiny fetus could tell her what the future held. One by one, Quinn played out each medical scenario, testing to see which one felt most likely. Her daughter could be born alive, with a correctible abnormality. She could have surgery that would leave her with a normal appearance and no brain damage. Or the surgery could be only partially successful, leaving the child with any combination of blindness, impairment, or disfigurement. Or she could die within her first days of life, after she’d already nursed at Quinn’s breast, her tiny fist wrapped around her mother’s finger. She could even die in utero, before she and Lewis got a chance to name her.

Naomi, Quinn thought, as she gently stroked her belly. It was the name she and Lewis had agreed on before she even found out what it meant. Now she couldn’t remember if she had ever told him that she’d discovered a definition.

“Do you know what Naomi means?” she asked.

Lewis remained quiet.

“It means ‘my delight,’ ” Quinn said. Delight. She felt the word dissolve on her tongue like cotton candy.

Lewis looked at her and then back at the road. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t want to have an abortion,” she said into her chest.

Lewis focused on the road. “I don’t think we need to talk about that now,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“They said we have time to decide that. We should at least wait for the results of the amnio, don’t you think?”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll hear what they say.”

“Do you think they’ll tell us something different? Dr. LeBrun even said he expects the amnio to be inconclusive.”

Her husband didn’t respond.

“Lewis?”

“I need time to think about this, okay? This is a lot. This is a lot to take in.”

“Why does everybody keep saying that?”

“What else am I supposed to say?” he asked. “Should I pretend nothing’s wrong?”

“That’s not what I meant. I just want to know what you’re thinking. I want to know how you feel about all this.”

“I feel like I can’t absorb this now, okay? I need some time, Quinn. I don’t process everything in a millisecond like you do.”

Is that what she normally did? Processed everything in a millisecond? She didn’t feel like that now. Didn’t feel like she was processing a thing. Some of the terms the doctor used were still floating around her consciousness like flotsam at sea. What was it he had said about surgical options? Something about “craniotomy” and “microplates”? Lewis had asked questions about the risks, and he said that many of these, such as hydrocephalus, were manageable.

“But brain damage,” Lewis had said. “What about brain damage?”

“We’ll have a better idea of that when we do the follow-up MRI,” the doctor had said.

“But you won’t know for sure?”

“Probably not.”

That was the point at which Quinn excused herself to the ladies’ room. She wanted only to splash cold water on her face, to try to wake herself up, pull herself into the present. But something happened in the bathroom that made her heart race with fear, and slammed her back into place with more force than she could handle.

After being bombarded with an overload of medical information, she had entered the ladies’ room in a daze and approached the sink without much thought. Eyes closed, Quinn splashed cold water on her face and reached for the faucet to turn it off. That’s when she sensed it. Before she made contact with the chrome knobs, she felt a mild sensation of solid air beneath her hands. It was almost like pushing against wind—nothing but a force, a mass of atmosphere giving resistance. She opened her eyes and saw it: a crack in the porcelain where it met the drain. This time, Quinn didn’t jump back. Instead, she brought her fingertips up to the jagged line. The layer of air between her skin and the solid surface remained constant, forcing the crack to widen. Quinn brought her face closer to see what was happening, but she saw nothing more than expanding darkness. She closed her hand into a fist and continued pushing. The fissure became a hole, and the harder she pressed, the deeper it became, until her hand had disappeared up to her elbow. She stuck her other hand inside and pressed her palms together. Quinn closed her eyes and sensed Eugene’s energy, feeling as if the scent of his aftershave were lingering around her nostrils. He seemed so close by that his nervousness was almost palpable, but so was something else—excitement. Quinn didn’t know what Eugene was happy about, but she sensed it wasn’t career related. No, this had to do with his personal life—with
their
personal life. Quinn tilted her head, wondering if she should dive in to find out. Just then the ladies’ room door opened and an old woman entered. Quinn withdrew her hands and stood there, trembling, as she realized what she had very nearly done.