The Paternity Test (16 page)

Stu demurred. “It’s
your
surprise. It’s yours, Ree. Enjoy it.”

“Sure?” she said. “You’re more than welcome.”

“Enjoy it!” he commanded.

“I think this calls for a celebration,” I said. “Let me make up the guest room, and then, what do you say, maybe up to Chillingsworth for dinner? I bet they would take us if I groveled.”

Rina said, “No, no. I’m not staying.”

“What?” said Stu. “All this way, then ‘see ya’? That’s ridiculous.”

“Richard’ll be expecting me. In fact, I’d better go. I hate to drive too much after dark.”

Whenever they got together, a deadlock was inevitable: who could elicit the most favors, and who could most refuse? This time, though, I had hoped we might be spared. Not so.

We walked her to the driveway, Stu still urging “Stay,” and Rina saying, “Stop, stop, I can’t.” The Porsche—its brightness, it blatancy— now looked poignant. I pictured Richard waxing it for hours.

Rina, with precise birdlike pecks, kissed us both. Promises were passed around to keep in better touch; Rina said she’d e-mail pics of their parents’ gloating grins.

She got into the driver’s seat and gunned the snarly engine, but then, just as quickly, popped out. “Wait, wait—forgot! Brought you something.”

“Come on, Sis, you didn’t have to.”

“It’s tiny. Just a token.” She forced something into Stu’s palm.

I had to smile. She wins! Round to Rina!

Stu let the pendant, on its leather thong, dangle. The glass vial was sea-colored, fashioned like a song note. Backlit by the sun, it looked liquid.

“You don’t have to wear it around your neck,” she assured us. “Hang it by the sliding doors. The light will look great through it.”

“Sure,” I said. “We will, absolutely. What’s in it?”

“Holy Rose,” she said. “The Queen of Flowers.”

Stu squinted. “What’s the claim for that one?”

“Love, of course. Healing emotional wounds, restoring trust.”

“Wow, give me a gallon, then,” I said.

Smiling wanly, Rina poked the vial and made it sway, spilling blue-green light along the drive. “Also, it works—or so they say, but who are
they
, you know?—for fertility. But heck, I just sell them.”

Stu embraced her. “Another needler—the next in line,” he bragged. “My little sis, Ree, will have a baby!”

Rina kissed him again and drove off.

After the Porsche was out of sight, I asked him, “Stu, how could you? How could you not tell her what we’re planning?”

“Pat,” he said. “Think. How would she have felt? ‘Adopting, are you? Well, we’re going to have our
own
baby.’ It wouldn’t have been right to steal her thunder.”

Or maybe he’d kept silent, I thought, because his sister had already stolen
his
.

It’s her!” he called, the next night, shielding the phone’s mouthpiece. “It’s Debora. Get the other cordless.”

I dashed for it and back to him, the phone, like a hand-caught herring, silvery in my clutch. (My mom used to take me every April down to Mashpee, to watch the herring leaping so implausibly upstream, to touch their stubborn, coruscating luck.) Stu took my hand and we stood before the picture window, gazing at the open-ended view.

“Ready?” he whispered.

I nodded. I squeezed his sweaty palm.

“Not this time,” said Debora. “Not yet. I’m so sorry.”

Maybe she thought our silence meant she had to make things clearer. “My period,” she said.

A period, a period
.

I pelted Stu with pep talks. Normal, I said. Likely. Would have been sheer luck to hit the bull’s eye right away. I pointed to the heading in our book that said “Don’t Panic.” “‘Even the fittest couple,’ I read, ‘employing time-honored intercourse, is bound to fail four of five times.’ So see?” I said. “We knew this. Or would’ve if we’d let ourselves. You were right: much better that we didn’t tell your folks. Or Rina. Isn’t that relieving?”

I was trying mostly to persuade myself, of course. I felt weak-kneed but not especially, or only, in the knees. All of me: a creaky, cranky joint.

I wished Stu might notice this and try to comfort me. But he was all pulled inward, the opposite of attentive—not quite glum, but sleepy-headed, stalled.

Zack advised reminding him of Debora’s surro contract, which promised she would try for eight cycles. In other words, repeated attempts were not at all unusual. Focus on our seven cycles left.

Dutifully I gave the speech, one night as we undressed. I tried to give my voice the ring of reason.

Stu got stiff and stared at me, eyes like ripened blisters. “
Plan
to fail? Oh, right. That’s perfect, Pat. Good thought.” No, he said, he wouldn’t think of seven tries, or six; he would do this
once
more, and succeed.

I wasn’t hurt. I loved it! The rush of Stu’s revival! A man who almost every day unclenched the grip of gravity, launching tons of steel into the sky, wasn’t used to having his will bucked. What had seemed a lull had been the revving of his jets.

Now he grabbed his laptop and composed a Stu-ish chart: things that might have gone wrong, and remedies. “Time delay, for starters.” He stroked a few more keys. “Some of the sperm dies, you know, with every passing second. Better to do it at their place, on the spot.”

Wasn’t that the plan I’d made, the one he had rebuffed?

“And build-up,” he went on. “It’s better to have build-up.” Another flurry of typing on the laptop. “I promise, for a whole week before her ovulation . . .” Last time, he confessed, the tips of his ears blushing, Debora’s surge had caught him unprepared: only about six hours before his services were called upon, he’d “wasted himself ” in a men’s room at O’Hare. “A week, okay?” he said now. “Work those counts up higher.”

Hearing the way he coached himself—his gamer’s fighting drive—I sensed Rina’s visit had redoubled his competitiveness.

He put the laptop to sleep, and said he’d sleep now, too. I thought he’d nodded off—his breaths got thick as taffy—but then his hand reached out for me and cupped my hipbone’s cliff. His voice, in the darkness, was a wraith: “You know what’s a relief ? That I didn’t feel relief.”

To
not
be let down, he said—that had been his worry. To have to sell himself on feeling sad.

Now he did drift off, but I stayed wide awake, wondering when I’d ever been so pleased with someone’s sadness.

For two weeks, he nursed his lit candle of resolve, until, when he needed it, it guttered.

At Debora’s. In the bathroom.
Doing it on the spot
.

Or, more likely, considering the time he’d spent in there:
not
doing it. How long, so far? Fifteen, twenty minutes?

Debora and I were trying not to hover, in the guest room, where Paula played beside us with a doll. “Barbie has to pee,” she said—the

second time she’d told us.

“Barbie does, or you?” Debora asked.

“Maybe both?”

“Okay, well, you both will have to hold it.”

Danny could be heard from down the hall, in the bedroom, barking at the ballgame on TV. “Grapefruit league, Sox against the Twins,” he’d said when Stu and I arrived, not bothering to get up. Whether this showed his ease with us or the opposite, I couldn’t tell.

Now I noticed Paula heading over to the bathroom. Her two little fists took the knob.

“No!” I shouted. “Paula. Don’t go in there.” I figured Stu had locked it, but just in case.

“Have to,” Paula said. “Mãinha? I have to go.”

“
Filha
, please have patience,” Debora told her.

Paula stood there, scowling, despondent. I went to her and knelt, my eyes now at her level. “Sweetpea, he won’t be long. We have to let him finish, though, okay?”

She gazed at me with moist, trusting eyes.

But two more minutes passed. Another two. Five.

“Swing, you dunce,” called Danny. He banged or stomped on something. “Jesus Christ, you’ve got to swing the bat.”

Oh, how I hoped Stu couldn’t hear him.

I went to the door. I tapped. “Hon? You okay?”

Back came three crisp syllables: Go. A. Way.

Paula squirmed. “Mãinha?”

“Try, now. Be a big girl.”

But after another endless minute, the poor thing couldn’t contain herself. “I
have
to. It’s my turn. Not fair!”

Here came Danny, thumping in, swooping her up, a strongman. “For Christ’s sake, she’s four years old. You can’t ask her to hold it.” He carried her downstairs, with Debora scrambling after.

I followed, too: to watch a father—a practiced one—in action.

In the kitchen, Danny hoisted Paula into the sink. “Here?” she said, humiliation pounding thin her voice. But there was no alternative: she squatted and let go, her pee tinkling brightly in the basin. Soon her anxious grimace was replaced by pure relief, and then by what looked like lawless glee.

Danny swooped her up again. “Don’t get any ideas. This was just a one-time sort of deal.” He was smiling; his pose of sternness wasn’t fooling anyone. Paula’s glee had turned him into putty.

The girl said, “Oh, Daddy, don’t be silly.”

I thought of my own father: a blustery man, especially when befuddled. He would not have dared to let me see his strictness crack, not have let me tease and flirt like Paula. Fatherhood, for him, had been a kind of hammer, and I could only ever be a nail.

Turning to head upstairs, we all laid eyes on Stu, who waited in the hallway, cup in hand. Oh-thank-God-he-did-it was replaced by creeping shame: must he hold the cup like that, a blind man selling pencils?

More shame, then: shame for feeling ashamed of my sweet Stu.

Debora took the cup and went, with Danny, to their bedroom, leaving me and Stu to mind Paula. We sat her in the living room, before the huge TV, where Snow White was biting a tainted apple.

“Hon,” I said, “what happened?”

“It sucks,” he hissed. “I hate this.”

Paula jumped at the outburst, and I had to pet her neck, shushing her, telling her not to worry. Then, to Stu, I said, “Behave.”

“Sorry. I know. Sorry.” He damped his voice and spoke behind his hand: “I thought after a week I’d be ready to explode. But God,
you
try it—sitting there in someone else’s bathroom, the whole universe knowing what you’re doing. Plus, a girl banging on the door, wanting in. A four-year-old! I’m sorry. I just couldn’t.”

“It wasn’t Paula,” I said. “It was me. And I tapped.”

“Bang, tap, whatever. Couldn’t do it.”

“But you did, didn’t you?”

“Well, just barely.” He stopped, swallowed sharply. “I could only think about my dad.”

“It’s no wonder! Next time think of, I don’t know, Brad Pitt?”

Stu let my leaden joke go under. “The thought I had,” he said. “Kept having, as I tried? Was how much I would love, when we’re down there for the Seder . . .”

When Walter had phoned last week, from Rina and Richard’s house, to share the news that he would be an
opa
, he’d demanded an all-family Passover celebration: next month, at their place, in New York. According to Stu, he’d sounded . . . Stu didn’t know the word. His dad’s native German, he guessed, contained some wacky noun: sadness to be thrilled by what previously would have saddened; fatigue from the toll of willful joy; submission to cheer.

“. . . to tell them,” Stu said now. “When we’re down there, to be
able
—”

“But even if it works this time,” I said, “I thought we wouldn’t. Glenn said not to, till after the frst trimester.” (I’d called Glenn to say we’d be coming to the city—our frst return, together, since the move— and hoped to see him and Zack and Milo.) “Imagine,” I said, “we tell your folks too soon, and she miscarries.”

“There you go again,” said Stu. “Why do you plan for failure?”

Lest his voice spook Paula again, I simply tried to calm him. “Fine,” I said. I whispered it. “You’re right. It’s fine, it’s fine.”

“What is fine?” asked Paula, escaping her TV trance. She left Snow White snoozing in her coma and clambered up to us, claiming a spot between us on the couch.

“
Everything’s
fine,” I said. “Aren’t you fine?”

Paula considered the question, her dimpled brow making her look precociously philosophical. Grudgingly, it seemed, she said, “Guess so.”

“Right! Perfectly fine,” I said. “So go back to your movie?” I gave the slightest push in that direction.

But Stu said, “I bet you might be finer if I did
this
.” Teasingly he tugged her frizzy pigtails.

“No!” she cried.

“Are you sure?” He tugged again. “Toot toot.”

“No?” she said—this time as a question.

“Maybe this.” He raised her shirt and razzed her egg-pale belly. “Wouldya?” he sang. “Wouldya, Paula, be finer in Carolina?” He kissed a sloppy trail toward her sternum.

She giggled—a smidgen, a scant burping leak—but that led to a shriek, and then full-bodied writhing, a conniption of spectacular amusement.

Stu dove down and kissed her again. “Mine mine mine,” he said.

Up till now, I had really wanted a kid for
me
. I wanted Stu to want one, yes, but mostly so that my wish would come true. But watching him teasing Paula—so sweetly, so selflessly, setting aside his angst to keep her charmed—now I knew how much I also wanted a kid for
him
. Would go to whatever lengths to make it happen.

After the first round, our faith had been stubbornly naïve—we strove not to think of any outcome but the best—but this time, my certainty’s source was trusty: Debora, who said she had a feeling.

“You know how cats, falling,” she said, “always find their feet?” That was how she’d felt, she said, when Paula was conceived: balanced by a nimble feline sense of can’t-do-wrong. “And now,” she said, “it’s how I’m feeling too. My feet. They stick.”

At once I started to notice signs: five newborn fox kits—toothless, blind, gray—sleeping near an oak log in the yard; a tomato at the Stop & Shop with two distinctive halves (a valentine’s twin lobes, a cell dividing). And then, when a last-of-winter ice storm brought its gleam—power lines and trees encased in spotless crystal sheaths—I was sure it prophesied our with-a-baby future: not unfamiliar but magnified, more clear; our lives
plus
.