Then Came You (16 page)

“A little pinch now,” the nurse murmured. “Gorgeous,” said the doctor, and tilted the screen to show me the eggs, a cluster of grapes. I watched as he plucked them, two, four, six, eight, ten.

N
ow that the boys were older, if I planned it right, I could have a little time every afternoon to myself. Spencer took a nap after lunch. He’d stay down for at least an hour, more if I was lucky, longer, if he’d had school that morning, and Frank Junior could be counted on to entertain himself with Legos for a while, playing some complicated game he’d made up involving soldiers and rocket ships and Woody from
Toy Story
as either the captain or the king. One sunny Tuesday afternoon in June, with Frank at work and Spencer in his crib, and Frank Junior with his soldiers lined up on the empty living room’s floor, I pulled a pound of ground beef out of the freezer, loaded the dishwasher, and wiped down the kitchen counters, which were so constantly sticky that I sometimes wondered if the tiles oozed sap. A peek at the clock showed that I still had a half hour. I could sneak into the shower, maybe even blow my hair dry. I’d seen myself in the mirror that morning and my heart had sunk as I’d pictured my sister, ironed and combed and perfectly put together.

“Mommy?”

I turned around to see Frank Junior looking at me. “Hello, little man.”

“Snack?”

I cut up an apple and poured goldfish crackers into a blue plastic bowl. He pouted. “Cookie?”

“Growing foods first.” I made myself a cup of tea and sat down across from him as he picked up his goldfish one at a time and sent them swimming into his mouth. Watching him, I wondered: How would my sons feel, watching my belly get bigger, watching me go off to the hospital and then come home empty-handed? Spencer wouldn’t notice—Spencer didn’t notice much of anything except Elmo and his big brother—but Frank Junior would have questions, and I’d have to figure out how to answer them.

“You want to go to the sprayground?”

He chewed, frowning. “Do we have to bring baby Spencer?”

“Yes, we have to bring Spencer. I can’t leave him home by himself. You know why.”

He nodded, reciting the words that I’d taught him. “The authorities would frown.”

“Right you are. And you should be nice to Spencer. You were a baby once, too.”

He smiled, showing his perfect white teeth. “Tell me the story.”

“Once upon a time,” I began. Frank Junior hopped out of his chair, circled the table, and hoisted himself into my lap. I snuggled him close, cupping my hand over the less scabbed of his knees, inhaling his little-boy scent, graham crackers and salt and baby shampoo. “Once upon a time you were a tiny seed in my belly. And you grew and grew and grew and grew, until you were...”

He joined in, smiling. He knew what came next, because I’d told this story so often. “Ripe like a plum!”

“Ripe like a plum. I went to the hospital, and out you came. You had no teeth . . .” Frank Junior leaned his head against my
chest, his knees digging into my thigh, holding still for what I thought might be the first time all day. I closed my eyes, loving the feeling of his body against mine, the rapid beat of his heart. Our days for cuddling were numbered. Soon he’d be too big to sit on his mama’s lap. “And you had a tiny little cloud of fuzzy black hair, and you cried . . .” I stretched my mouth wide and did my best imitation of his peeps, “. . . like you wanted to go back in.”

He smiled, holding my hand, counting the fingers—one, two, three, four, five. “I liked it in there.”

“You remember it?”

He nodded. “It was dark, except when you were talking. Then I could see the light.” He tilted his head, regarding me seriously. “You talk a
lot,
Mama.”

“Huh.” I wondered whether this could possibly be true, whether he actually could remember being inside of me.

“Tell the rest,” Frank prompted, twining his fingers through mine.

“Well, I bundled you up in a blue-and-pink-striped blankie, and I gave you a little snack...”

His mouth curved up at the corners. “Goldfishie crackers?”

“Not goldfishie crackers!” I said, making an indignant face. “You had no teeth! What kind of mommy would give crackers to a boy with no teeth?”

He nodded—this, too, was part of the story.

“And I looked at you all over,” I said, my eyes filling with tears, back in the moment again, the hospital smells, the bright morning light through the windows, Frank looking so puffed-up and proud as he held the baby for the first time. “From your toes to your knees to your sweet little belly to your neck to your chin to your forehead, and I gave you a kiss and I said to your daddy, ‘I guess we’ll bring him home, and name him . . .’”

“Frank Junior!” With that, he was up and out of my lap, dashing toward the door for his scooter and the helmet I insisted on, for the park and the sprayground and the promise of a warm afternoon with maybe even an ice-cream sandwich on the way home. “Wake up, baby!” he hollered, his footsteps shaking the floor, and, on cue, I heard Spencer whimpering from the second floor.
So much for my shower,
I thought, but I didn’t mind much as I went up the stairs and scooped Spencer’s warm, sleepy, soggy-bottomed weight into my arms.

“Wet,” Spencer informed me, then plugged his thumb back into his mouth. I laid him on the changing table, pulled down his miniature khakis (copies of his brother’s, which were themselves copies of his dad’s pants), and unfastened his soaked diaper.

“We have to start talking seriously about that potty,” I said, wiping his bottom and the creases of his thighs. He nodded, the way he’d been nodding for months every time I brought up the topic of toilet training. I thought, again, of my sons as infants, as newborns. I’d loved being in the hospital: the nurses fussing around me, bringing me meals that I didn’t have to prepare, on dishes I wouldn’t have to wash; having someone make my bed and mop the floor and clean the bathroom every day. I didn’t even mind being woken up every three hours to have my temperature and blood pressure taken. It had been so long since I’d been the center of attention that way, since people were taking care of me instead of the other way around. When Spencer had arrived, after a brief but grueling labor, and they’d handed him to me after his bath, I’d seriously considered asking the nurses to keep him for an hour or two so I could grab a nap and eat my lunch. It had horrified me then, but it comforted me now. Maybe I’d feel nothing but relief at the chance to pass a new baby into the eager arms of another woman . . . but would it really be that easy? Would I let go without a second thought, or would I hold the baby
close, turning my face away, thinking, or even saying,
No! Mine! Mine!

Spencer was staring at me. “Pants,” he prompted. I fastened a fresh diaper around his waist, pulled up his khakis, and swung him down to the floor. He took off at a run, pudgy legs pumping, calling for his brother. I watched him go, telling myself that it would be easy, wondering whether it was true.

K
ate Klein had told me not to expect to hear from her for two weeks, but I guess she was in the underpromise and overdeliver school, because a week after my visit to her office, she called and said she had some news.

“I could come on my lunch hour.”

I heard her hesitate before she answered, “This might take a little longer than an hour.”

I asked for a half day’s worth of personal time for the next afternoon. “A doctor’s appointment,” I told my boss, and she let me go without even asking me what was wrong, or when I’d be finished writing up estimates for the department’s latest set of acquisitions, a pair of brass vases from the Yuan Dynasty which would probably sell for a price as spectacular as they were ugly. At two o’clock the next afternoon, after a mostly sleepless night and an unproductive morning, I hurried through a steamy June afternoon to the midtown office and hit the elevator button that would carry me up to Kate’s floor.

The detective met me in the waiting room wearing a black cotton skirt (slightly wrinkled, and with an elastic waistband, but a definite step above the pajama pants), black sandals, and a white cotton T-shirt.

“This way.” Kate led me past her office into a conference
room, where a manila folder sat at the center of a table. India’s name was typed on its tab. Looking at the folder, I tasted old pennies in my mouth, and felt a strange mixture of excitement and regret ... except
regret
wasn’t exactly the right word.
Pregret
was more like it—the sadness you could feel over something that hasn’t happened yet.

There were six chairs around the table. Five of them were empty. The sixth was occupied by a guy about my age, wearing khakis and a button-down shirt and heavy-framed horn-rimmed glasses that looked like he’d swiped them off his grandpa’s bedside table. I distrusted him immediately. I think glasses should be glasses, worn to improve your vision, not as a statement, or a piece of installation art on the bridge of your nose.

“This is Darren Zucker, one of our associates,” Kate said.

I held out my hand. Darren got to his feet, lazily, like he had all the time in the world, and gave my hand a single limp pump. Then he sat down and flipped open the folder to display a photograph of a much younger India, with an unfortunately pouffy perm. It took me a second to realize that I was looking at a mug shot. My father’s new wife had been arrested in Los Angeles in 1991 . . . and I’d bet my trust fund that my dad didn’t have a clue.

I took a seat and pulled the folder toward me. “Is her name really India?”

Kate gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. Darren just appeared smug, with the light glinting off his ridiculous glasses.

“It’s not,” he said. “But there’s a lot you’ll want to look at here.” He flipped the folder open, and I started to read.

Two hours later I staggered out of the conference room, into the elevator, and into the coffee shop in the lobby of the building.

The manila folder was in my purse. Part of me wanted to tip it into a trash bin. Another part of me wanted to leave it somewhere obvious in my father’s apartment, where he and his
bride would be sure to see it. But what I mostly wanted to do was call my mother, my sensible, pre-ashram mother, and ask for her advice. This was impossible, insofar as my mother would no longer consent to speak on the telephone. “Bad energy,” she said. So I wrote her letters, and sometimes she’d write back, little notes in the cursive I remembered from a hundred to-do lists and school permission slips, on paper that smelled like sage and lavender, but sometimes it took weeks to get a reply, and I didn’t have weeks.

Through the plate-glass windows I could see people strolling, enjoying the warm weather after days of rain. There were women who’d swapped their heels for flip-flops, nannies chatting with each other as they pushed strollers, men in suits with loosened ties, tilting their faces up toward the sun. I sat, watching, the coffee I’d purchased untouched, feeling like I’d been beamed to a different planet and was observing all of this normal from very far away.

I pulled the folder out of my bag, set it on the counter beside me, and lifted up a corner, peeking, once more, at her mug shot. India’s pouffy bangs were flattened on one side of her forehead. Her eyeliner was smeared, and she looked like she’d been crying, which made me feel like crying myself. Her whole life was on these pages, her childhood in Toledo, the year she’d spent in New London, her move to Los Angeles, the addresses of every place she’d rented, first in California, then in New York. I felt a grudging respect beginning to mix with my anger and my pity. I wondered if she thought of my father like a winning lottery ticket, the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. I wondered, too, if this was what drew him to her—the painful things she’d endured. I studied her picture, trying to piece together the subtle transformation she’d undergone, the nose narrowed, the cheekbones more prominent, trying to guess at what she’d told my father about her past and what she’d kept secret. Had she been
honest with him about who she was and where she came from? Could she make him happy? Did she really love him, and was that love enough?

“Bettina?”

I turned around, and there was Darren Zucker, with his statement eyeglasses and his smarmy smile.

“You moving in?” he asked, setting down his own drink and taking a seat at the counter beside me.

“What?”

“You’ve been here for forty-five minutes.”

I gathered up my folder and my coffee. “I was just going.”

He gave a pompous little nod. “You’re in shock.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ve seen this before. You think you want answers. You think you can handle the truth.” He waggled his eyebrows in what he must have believed was a Jack Nicholson impression. “You know what you need?” He answered before I could ask him, politely, to please leave me alone. “Will Ferrell.”

“I believe he’s married.”

He smiled, causing his stupid glasses to bob up and down on his face. “Touché. I was thinking more of one of his movies. Something stupid, with fart jokes, where he takes off his clothes.”

I gathered my things and walked to the door, with Darren right behind me.

“Come on,” he said. “Flabby, hairy guy, running around with no pants . . . Do you have plans?”

“I do.” I’d told my father to expect me for dinner that night. I figured I’d go home, we’d have a conversation, and then he’d be in charge of the next step. I’d be there if he needed me for anything: to console him, to call his lawyer, to try, even, to get my mother on the phone if he wanted to talk to her. Now the sun was setting, people were streaming down the streets on their
way home for dinner, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d been expecting duplicity, slyness and lies, but not anything at this level.